While most healthcare organizations are relatively good at using social media to build brand awareness, there’s still tremendous opportunity to use social media to promote physicians and fill their schedules. But doing this requires the active participation of your physicians. If you have physicians in your organization with a passion and commitment to use social media, it’s worth cultivating their skills to bring new patients in the door.

Not sure where to begin? Just want to make sure you’re on the right track? Check out our top ten tips for getting physicians involved and making sure their efforts deliver value.

Top Ten Social Media Tips for Physician Promotion

1. Don’t try to be on every social network. We all see it — that lengthy line-up of social media icons on a hospital website. Find the social media networks that work for your patients and physicians. Then focus on creating great content for that audience.
2. Provide useful content. Social media isn’t a vanity presence. It’s about your users and what they can use today. Can you provide content with quick health tips that demonstrates a physician’s expertise or personality? If you are a source of great information and project the type of warm personality that patients seek, your following will grow, and so will your potential patients.
3. Post frequently, but don’t flood users. Choose your content carefully and provide value with each post. If you have nothing to share, wait until you have a great post you know your patients and potential patients will love.
4. Reuse content across networks. Get the most value out of your efforts to create content. Whether it’s a video, a blog post, or some other content, cross-promoting on multiple social media
   channels and accounts is a great way to get more followers and more traction from that content.
5. Don’t fear negative criticism. Embrace the fact that users are engaging with you on social media and respond accordingly. Often a negative comment can be turned into a positive experience by listening to your commenter’s concerns and addressing them in a timely manner.
6. Remember, this is not just another “marketing channel.” While you need to keep your brand (both professional and organizational) in mind, social media is about direct contact with prospective patients. Keep it conversational and engaging.
7. Encourage physicians to separate private from personal accounts. The content shared socially by physicians as part of their professional identity is not the same content shared with close friends and family.
8. Encourage providers who use social media to be themselves. Consumers engage more readily when the account feels like a real person. A distinct professional account that’s separate from a personal account does not mean the content should be dry and uninviting.
9. Proactively educate your physicians on your organization’s social media policies, guidelines, and best practices. Not only can this improve the effectiveness of using social media for physician promotion, but it can avoid potential problems.
10. Stay committed! If you’re going to take the plunge and encourage physicians to become active on social media, be sure to remind them that there are no awards given for just having an account. In fact, having an account that has gone stagnant is almost worse that not having an account at all! Your doctors and your organization are unlikely to realize the full potential of social media without the committed involvement of physicians.

Online Physician Promotion

Want to learn more great tips for using social media to promote your doctors? Be sure to check out our webinar on How to Promote Your Physicians Online. You can also download our comprehensive Online Physician Promotion eBook. You’ll not only learn more about using social media effectively, you’ll also hear ideas to improve physician profiles and tips for driving qualified visitors to your website’s provider directory.

Whether you’re shopping for a new pair of shoes, streaming music or seeking healthcare services in your community, you’re often starting with a search engine. And so are your patients, visitors, donors and other target audiences. We’re all doing it – at a rate of about 40,000 searches per second.

So how do you stand out from the pack? It’s not as difficult as you probably think.

1. Keep the clutter out with a solid site organization

Organizing your content isn’t just having a great site structure. Auditing your content regularly for ROT – redundant, outdated or trivial – will ensure your content isn’t only fresh but that it’s relevant to your audience.

While you’re auditing content, consider microsites you have or want to have in the future. For existing microsites, analyze the traffic they’re getting and the freshness of the content. Before you decide to build a microsite, consider if they’re really necessary.

Whenever you tackle site organization, ask your audience about what is valuable to them. Through great tools like online surveys or stakeholder interviews, you can learn a lot about how your audience – internal and external – is using your website.

2. Write search-friendly content

You can learn oodles from Geonetric about how to write quality content that converts, and fortunately for you, those same principles apply to search engines. Quality content matters to your users, and it matters to Google, too.

But while you’re writing great content, don’t forget to write great page titles and descriptions. Page titles and descriptions are displayed in the Search Engine Results Page, or SERP. You’ve seen them plenty of times. They look like this:

Page titles (< 60 characters) are the words and phrases Google uses to index your site, while descriptions (< 155 characters) tell search users what the page is about, hopefully enticing them to click into your site. Each page title and description should be unique, just like every page of your website.

And while keyword frequency mattered much more five years ago, keyword strategy in 2015 is all about weaving keywords naturally throughout unique, user-focused content. With tools like Google’s Keyword Planner, Rank Tracker or Geonetric’s SEO Retainer, you can get the most common words your users are entering to find you and your competitors.

3. Spread your links and let them fly

Getting your links out to the world doesn’t have to be done with a megaphone on a mountain, or even a billboard. If your organization uses social media, welcome to your best platform.

Take a look at Mary Greeley Medical Center, based in Ames, Iowa, which recently celebrated the eighth anniversary of its pet therapy program. Sure, cute animals on Facebook are always a win, but why stop there? They decided to link back to the page of their site that describes what the program offers, and how local Ames citizens can get involved.

Backlinking to your website helps Google see traffic coming from other channels, boosting your relevance and your ranking results.

Other ways you can backlink? Claim your listings. This includes Google, Dex, Yellowbook and any others floating out there. Google and search engines appreciate correct, consistent information so if you find a listing with your organization’s name on it, claim it, correct it, and slap that website URL on it.

Take your website marketing to the next level

From search engine optimization and user-focused content to stunning designs for a responsive, multi-screen world, Geonetric is here to help. Get in touch with us today to learn more about services that will meet and surpass your organization’s web goals.

Flat design. Card design. Multimedia storytelling. The world of website design is evolving. New technology is changing the way site visitors interact with your site, creating endless design opportunities. Join us for this webinar and learn the latest in website design concepts, like flat design and card design. You’ll also learn about multimedia storytelling, an approach to combining design and content that will help you tell your organization’s story through stunning and interactive design. You’ll walk away with new ideas to engage site visitors with your design and stand out in a crowded market. Throughout the webinar, you’ll see examples that will provide inspiration for your next project.

Sometimes in our rush to do “stuff” or chase down the next great idea, we lose focus of the fact that we’re choosing the work we do based on how clever it sounds and not by how it supports the patient journey.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. One of the most important things we can do to promote our organization’s physicians is to take the time to understand how patients actually choose the physicians they do. It’s far from random. In fact, there’s a model and a process at work, and this has implications for your physician promotions tactics and strategies. So before you spend more time doing the things you’re already doing to bring new patients in the door, it’s worth taking a moment to understand how your activities actually intersect with how patients choose the physicians they do. Investing here can help you tighten your tactics and expose new opportunities.

In our work helping hospitals and health systems market their physicians, we’ve developed a working model that we use. It helps us focus and identify opportunities for improvement at client organizations. And now you can use it to help you with your own work.

The first thing to understand is this: Patients engage in two distinct but related activities when selecting a physician. The first activity is called Physician Qualification, and it reflects the assessment by the (prospective) patient of whether or not a given physician is even a potential option for consideration. Physicians that fail to qualify for one reason or another are dismissed from further consideration. Those who do qualify continue to be assessed, and may ultimately be selected for an appointment.

Based on our research and experience, for non-emergency, insured patients, the most important criteria patients use to qualify a physician is whether or not they accept their insurance. If not, patients will usually move in favor of physicians who they know they can work with.

After they’ve ascertained that the physician will accept their insurance, patients commonly seek to further qualify physicians based on the following criteria:

• Treats Relevant Conditions: Patients qualify physicians by whether or not they treat their conditions. For example, one generally wouldn’t consider a nephrologist when seeking treatment for a dermatological condition.
• Accepts New Patients: Most patients will not consider a physician if they learn that he or she is not accepting new patients.
• Accessible by Proximity: This is a subjective measure, but it is often important. Barring niche specialization, a physician who accepts a patient’s insurance but is seven hours away is likely not going to be considered against other physicians who practice closer. Don’t assume that only great distances preclude a physician from consideration. Certain demographics may not have access to reliable transportation, may be limited to physicians who are accessible by public transportation, or may not be able to leave their jobs for daytime appointments.

As you can see, patients use each of the qualifying criteria to quickly winnow the pool of potential physicians to a subset that’s worthy of further consideration. And this can have important implications for your physician promotion work. Ask yourself this: Can patients quickly discover what insurance programs your physicians work with? If not, are you losing patients? Can patients quickly identify whether or not the physician can treat their conditions? Sometimes health organizations assume specialty information alone conveys this, but often specialty titles don’t help consumers. Take a hard look at your physician promotion efforts, work through the considerations patients use to qualify physicians, and ask yourself if you’re actually leading patients down the path to conversion by helping them qualify relevant physicians. An honest evaluation here can pay dividends.

As mentioned previously, Physician Qualification is just the first step in the process of selecting a physician. The second step, Physician Selection, also has ramifications for what you do. To learn more about this and other ways to effectively promote your physicians online, watch our on-demand Physician Promotion webinar.

From a marketer’s perspective, good web content does two things:

First, it helps people find you. Google and other search engines rank only pages with valuable, relevant, high-quality content.

Then, it drives action. Or, in web speak, it converts. It turns your site visitors into patients, donors, job applicants — or whatever else fits your specific goals.

The benefits of good content are clear. But what is good content? How do you know what to include? Where do you start?

The good news is, when it comes to improving content, you don’t have to tackle your entire site at once. Pick a single section — or even a particular page — and start there. Follow these five steps to maximize the power of your content.

1 – Define a Purpose

You’re already setting goals for your website as a whole. That big picture strategy is important. But don’t stop there. Drill down to the page level. Know why you’re creating (or maintaining) each page of content. Maybe you want to boost registration in your pregnancy classes. Or recruit new physicians. Or ease patients’ anxiety by telling them what to expect at an upcoming medical appointment.

Before you type a single word, ask yourself: What am I trying to achieve by publishing this content?

2 – Focus, Focus, Focus

Once you’ve defined the goal for a page, consider what information needs to be included to reach that goal. Usually that means asking yourself:

• What does the user want to know?
• What do you want or need the user to know?
• What do you want the user to do next?

Write to answer those questions, and only those questions. Anything else clutters up the page and distracts from your main message. And that hurts your return on investment.

3 – Include a Call to Action

You know what you want your users to do after visiting your web page. How do you guide them to that action? Don’t leave them hanging. Tell them. Include a call to action. It’s the single most effective tactic to convert your website visitors into customers.

Make that conversion easy for your users by presenting just one call to action. You’ll avoid losing them to decision fatigue or confusion over what to do next.

4 – Explain Yourself

When you encounter health care terminology day after day, it’s easy to forget that not everyone understands the industry and its terminology the way you do. Always take time to tell your readers exactly what you want them to know.

Use language that’s easily understandable and add clear explanations to medical terms. When you highlight advanced technology, a new treatment option or a prestigious award, do it in a way that focuses on the benefit to your users. Tell them what’s in it for them.

One way to pinpoint the benefit is to put yourself in the user’s shoes and continually ask yourself: “So what?” Or “What’s in it for me?”

For example, let’s say your orthopedic surgeons offer minimally invasive knee replacement surgery.

So what? What does that mean?

“The surgeon doesn’t have to cut as much of the tissue surrounding your knee.”

So what? What’s in it for me?

“As a patient, you’ll experience less pain and scarring, and recover more quickly.”

Now you’ve hit on the user benefit. And you’ve changed your focus. You’re speaking directly to your users, writing about what’s important them.

If you can’t figure out a way to tell your users “so what,” it probably doesn’t belong on your web page.

5 – Write for the Web

Finally, if you want to create content that converts, you have to create content that people are going to read. That means following general best practices for writing for the web. Learn more in our eBook, Web Writing for Healthcare.

Or get in touch with our team of expert content writers and strategists for help creating content that engages and converts.

A witty (but honest) person once said, “Opinions are like bellybuttons: Everybody’s got one.” It’s true, and your organization has a lot of folks with bellybuttons – your patients, your C-suite, and everyone in-between.

Asking these stakeholders about their experience on your organization’s website is an important piece in any redesign. Understanding their opinions about what works on the current site, what doesn’t, and even what a successful redesign would mean to them is vital for understanding their opinions and creating a great user experience.

But talking to stakeholders isn’t something you can only do once. It’s something you should do regularly as you continue to maintain your web presence.

How to Talk to Stakeholders

At Confab 2015 in Minneapolis, a presentation by Anne Haines really hit home. As a reference librarian for Indiana University Libraries, she compared seeking out information from a library patron to seeking answers from your stakeholders.

“Stakeholders often can’t define what they want, but why they need it,” Haines said. And she’s right. It’s our jobs as marketers to discover the “what” and define the “why.”

Choose the Right Channels

When opening the door to those conversations, choose the right channel.

• In-person interviews – This is the most preferred method, and the best way to give and receive body language that shows a willingness to learn and hear someone’s opinions, thus building a better relationship with people inside and outside your organization. From focus groups to phone calls, in-person interviews allows for follow-up questions and the chance to explain project goals.
• Surveys – If time is of the essence, surveys can alleviate scheduling difficulties. If you want your web visitors’ points of view, check out survey tools like iPerceptions. The only disadvantage to surveys is you lose the opportunity to ask follow-up questions on the spot.

Asking the Right Questions

According to Haines, there are three things we should try to find out from stakeholders before we begin tackling their goals and requests:

1. The situation they’re in – what is driving their requests?
2. The gaps in their understanding – perhaps they aren’t sure what they need, or why it’s needed.
3. The intended uses – what is the end goal for their request?

Closed-ended questions (yes/no, or limited multiple choice) can steer the conversation and keep it focused if it’s running long or getting off track. They also give stakeholders a chance to consider the limited but viable options you have for them.

Open and more neutral questions allow stakeholders to expand on their thoughts, and these queries open up doors for conversations, future goal setting and follow-up questions to reiterate what you heard.

Start with Stakeholders

If you think it’s time to redesign, be sure to start the process by talking to your stakeholders. After all, it’s their experience that matters!

If you don’t think your team has the time to tackle interviews, let Geonetric give you a hand. Our team members are pros at stakeholder interviews and surveys, and we have an arsenal of other nifty tools like heat mapping. Plus, you’ll get access to loads of content strategy and content development resources – and of course, stellar web design.

In May 2015, Mary Meeker, a partner at Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, presented her annual “State of the Internet” report. Her epic deck of 196 slides covered a huge range of trends, but there are several key takeaways for healthcare marketers. Here’s what you need to know.

Think Mobile First

This is the one insight that drives everything else: Consumers now spend more time with mobile and tablet devices than with their desktops or laptops (slide 14).

We need to change our defaults. It’s time to start thinking about mobile first. If you’re talking about your site’s homepage layout, start by discussing the mobile experience. If you’re making edits to a service line page, preview the changes on your phone.

In doing that, what you experience may be a bit painful. As an industry, we’ve learned a lot in the last few years about creating responsive sites and working with mobile browsers. Even if you’re thinking “we already have a responsive site,” it may be time to think about how well that site is performing. There may be opportunities to improve everything from page load times to the hierarchy and readability of content on the page.

From a design perspective, touch user interfaces are now setting the standard for how we organize interactions. The flat design and outlined iconography of Apple’s iOS 7, Windows 7’s Metro design language, and, most recently, Google’s Material Design principles have all had a huge impact on the design of websites and online interactions beyond touch devices.

For more insight, as well as specific examples of mobile and social trends, watch Geonetric’s webinar on web design trends for healthcare.

Speak Where Others Listen

If you’re planning a marketing campaign, this shift toward mobile is even more critical. First off, Meeker reports that advertisers are still spending too much on print and TV, and not enough on internet and, especially, mobile (slide 16). Ad spend is still skewed to print media, while consumers are spending their time online.

If you want to put your ad money where the consumers are, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest would be happy to help. The increasing range of direct response advertising formats on these social platforms (slide 21) provides compelling options for getting actionable messages in front of the right audience.

But, before you rush in, the cross-channel campaigns we’re launching for our healthcare clients show traffic driven by social media and ads is skewed even more strongly toward touch-based devices. If you’re not paying close attention to the mobile experience on your landing pages, you’re wasting money and missing out on a large part of your audience.

Expect Disruption

According to Meeker, healthcare has only been 25% impacted by the Internet (slide 8), lagging other areas of business that have already had to adapt. That leaves a lot of change ahead of us. Some of the most immediate shifts are already underway in new care delivery models, from connected health to retail approaches (slide 185).

Trends in healthcare payment driven by the Affordable Care Act (slides 102, 185), along with increased costs (slide 186) are leading toward more consumer spending on healthcare. As a category of personal spending, in fact, healthcare experienced the highest percentage growth (11%) of any consumer spending category in 2014 when compared to 2013 (slide 76). This choice represents both an opportunity for current providers, as well as a risk for disruption.

As consumers choose how to spend that money, their expectations are being set by experiences with other industries. For example, user-generated reviews, while not new, are playing a growing role in how consumers make purchasing decisions. Meeker calls out a 140% year-over-year increase in user reviews for Airbnb (slide 64). Last year, a Bright Local survey indicated that “88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation.” It remains to be seen if that holds as true for a pediatrician as for a dry cleaner, but there is no doubt that the opinions and experiences shared by strangers are affecting consumers’ choices on a daily basis.

To learn more about promoting physicians in light of these trends, make sure to view our webinar on physician promotion.

Seize the Opportunity

This is really just the tip of the iceberg. These trends highlight not only opportunities to grow and expand, but also ways that we can better serve our patients and communities.

One small detail remains: How will you track your efforts and report on the success of your campaign?

The Case for Data-Driven Decision Making

Data should drive your marketing decisions. There are countless platforms to help you collect data and determine which of your tactics are delivering the best results.

Ultimately, your data will answer the perennial question your team will ask: “Did our campaign work?”

Let’s take a look at how to extract data from your tools to tell the story of how your marketing campaign is performing.

Digging into the Data

It’s important to look at the data collected from a variety of tools – don’t focus on just one source of data. And it’s important to do this each week (or daily!) during your campaign so you can adjust your tactics accordingly. The correlation between platforms is where you’ll find the story or the “Ah-Ha!” moments that drive action for your team.

Let’s walk through a few tools you might consider using and how they can help you determine the best course of action. We’ll evaluate a hypothetical landing page for our campaign.

Google Analytics

Starting with Google Analytics is a great way to get baseline data and a few insights into how users are interacting with your landing page. Pageviews, time on page, bounce rate and traffic sources are just a few of the metrics you’ll want to check out.

These all provide some great insights, but you need to dig deeper than Google Analytics.

CrazyEgg

The purpose of a landing page is to convert visitors on your website. CrazyEgg helps you gather heatmaps, scrollmaps and more to understand how visitors use the landing page you’ve created.

Do they convert on your call-to-action? Do they wander off through other links on the page? Gathering this information should help your team constantly tweak your landing page for the best results.

Use the data gathered from CrazyEgg alongside your Google Analytics data and you’ll begin to see trends.

A/B Testing

If you’ve found that your data isn’t conclusive, it may be time to add more data. You could consider launching an A/B test for the landing page.

You may want to test two different calls to action or the navigation to see how users react. Either way, testing ideas and gathering data is the best way to guide your decisions.

At Geonetric, we use Optimizely and/or Google Experiments to run our A/B tests. Either platform is a good way to get started.

Integrate Data into Your Processes

Ultimately, all of this data needs to become the bedrock of your marketing efforts.

Often, marketing teams make decisions based on past experiences or gut feelings. In today’s environment, data can—and should—be the catalyst for making decisions about your campaigns.
If your team isn’t looking at the data regularly, none of this matters. Be sure to bring these numbers to team meetings and discuss the good, the bad and the ugly.

With the right tools, a process for analyzing the numbers and a willingness to trust the data, your website and marketing campaigns can deliver the results you’re seeking.

If you’re looking to create effective digital strategies that use data to make decisions, let’s talk.

Your site visitors don’t have time to wade through copy filled with medical jargon or marketing-speak. Your current and prospective patients need content that gets to the point quickly, answers their questions, and highlights the benefits of working with your hospital or healthcare system. And they need that content to perform well – whether they access it from their desktops, phones, or tablets. Learn how to develop website copy that meets your site visitors’ goals and helps convert visitors into patients.

By connecting your CRM system to your hospital website, you gain better visibility, data and tracking. It helps you build more successful marketing campaigns, improve conversions, measure ROI, trigger customer interactions, and most importantly, make smarter marketing decisions. Join Jim Schleck, partner at Tea Leaves Health, a healthcare CRM provider, and Ben Dillon, chief strategy officer at Geonetric, a healthcare software and online marketing provider, for this webinar on how to use CRM and your website to improve consumer engagement.