How do you help make sure your target audience can find out about it through search engines? You know there’s more to it than posting a press release on your website.

Equally important, how do you write the story in a way that’s meaningful and engaging for the people who want and need your information?

Achieving both those goals might seem like a tall order. But you don’t have to choose between optimizing content for search engines or people. You can – and should – craft natural-sounding copy that speaks to users AND pleases Google.

Doing this successfully takes a bit of planning and research before you start writing. Your key task: understand how what your organization is offering lines up with what patients are looking for when they’re online. What questions are they asking about a specific type of medical care? In what geographic areas do people most often search Google for the type of specialist who joined your medical group? What specific terms do people use to describe the health care information they’re seeking?

Keyword research can provide answers. With the information you gather from tools like SEMrush, Moz’s Keyword Explorer, or KWFinder, you get a better idea of:

• What to address in your content
• Service locations to target your message to
• Specific words to use in strategic places to make sure your audience understands your topic

Maybe you’ll discover – as Geonetric teams have – that users in one city search much more often for a particular treatment than users in a similar-sized city not far away. Or maybe users who search for your topic also often look for a related term you hadn’t thought to add information about to your webpage.

You can improve your site’s SEO by using the information you find from keyword research to create content that’s as clear, relevant, and valuable as possible to your target audience.

What you don’t want to do is focus exclusively on search-engine rankings to the detriment of user experience. If you cram in too many keywords, use awkwardly phrased search terms, or create uninformative pages just for the sake of adding keywords, your content may end up turning users off (and ultimately hurting SEO). As a health care organization, you communicate in a way that conveys professionalism and inspires trust – not in a way that reads like overeager marketing.

As Google has advised, “base your optimization decisions first and foremost on what’s best for the visitors of your site. … Search engine optimization is about putting your site’s best foot forward when it comes to visibility in search engines, but your ultimate consumers are your users, not search engines.”

You’ll learn

• How budgets and teams are shifting
• Which tactics and techniques are producing results
• How the most effective healthcare marketers plan and track activities
• The biggest barriers to success (and how to address them)

Budgets Shifting to Digital

It’s no surprise, really, to see digital account for an increasingly large percentage of the overall healthcare marketing budget. Even when overall marketing budgets are staying the same or diminishing we’re seeing the percentage of marketing budget allocated to digital continue to grow (see Table 1 below).

In addition, external vendors who provide healthcare brands with marketing services share this outlook. 76% of them expect the digital marketing budgets of their clients to increase (see Chart 1 below).

From a strategy standpoint, investments in digital certainly aren’t going away. In fact, I’m bullish on digital marketing in healthcare and expect it to grow dramatically. Here’s why.

Digital Budgets Continue Growing

There are a few factors driving the growth in digital marketing across industries, and these can’t help but have an impact on healthcare marketing. The major driver is that consumers are increasingly leading digital lives. Not only is their total time spent online increasing, but one in five Americans reports being online “almost constantly.” This number grows to nearly 40% for 18–29 year olds.1 In order to be effective, marketing must meet consumers where they are. And increasingly this means digital.

But there’s another reason to expect dramatic growth in how healthcare marketers invest in digital: we’re behind other B2C industries in how we allocate budget between traditional marketing and digital marketing. While healthcare marketing leaders may report spending nearly 30% of budget on digital, that’s still a far cry from the 70% total marketing budget reported by other B2C marketers.

For example, 2016 benchmark B2C research from Salesforce reveals that today, nearly 70% of marketing budget is devoted to digital. This is expected to grow to 75% by 2021 (see Chart 2 above).2 And it’s not just technology vendors reporting these kind of numbers. Other research points to the same trend. Even AdWeek reveals that over a third of CMOs expect digital marketing to account for more than 75% of their budgets within five years.3

Why then are healthcare marketers still investing so much in traditional marketing?

Perhaps we’ve yet to catch up. One of the most common laments I hear from healthcare digital marketers is the difficulty they have convincing their managers of the importance of digital marketing in organizations defined by traditional marketing. Often they recount feeling like “second class citizens” on their marketing teams, and have to advocate and prove their worth in ways that their colleagues do not. Certainly this explains part of the disparity we see between healthcare marketing and the broader world of B2C marketing, but there’s also an increasingly vocal segment that insists that healthcare marketing is fundamentally different than traditional B2C marketing.

And they have a point. In healthcare marketing we are bound by laws, legislation and certain ethical standards that other B2C marketing teams don’t have to deal with. But even though this is part of the context of our marketing work, we can’t use it to insist on a rearward facing marketing agenda. There’s too much at stake for our brands—and ultimately the health of our patients—to continue without change. Because of this, we’ll continue to see healthcare brands bet big on digital, even at the expense of their traditional marketing budgets. The potential of a winning digital strategy is simply too great to ignore.

Well, let’s take the mystery out of website governance, look at what a governance framework might include, and see how we can benefit from using governance to help us manage our healthcare websites long term.

Governance Defined

Like content strategy, the concept of online governance covers a lot of territory, carries a lot of meanings and takes a lot of forms. In fact, uniqueness to each organization is a key characteristic.

Lisa Welchman, author of Managing Chaos: Digital Governance by Design, offers a useful way to get a handle on the topic. She describes governance as a “discipline that focuses on establishing clear accountability for digital strategy, policy, and standards.”

How You Benefit from Implementing a Governance Framework

The whole idea is to help everyone involved in the website at your healthcare organization function more effectively. A governance framework may cover:

• Editorial style guides
• Procedures for what’s included in your publication calendars
• Standards of all types, including design parameters, content writing templates, how to determine where a particular piece of content should appear on the site, and more
• CMS functionality and operations guidelines
• Service-line naming conventions
• Domain strategy approaches
• Guidelines for team roles, responsibilities and decision authority
• How to set up discussion forums where you can resolve competing organizational interests

Governance lets your team stay focused on the work at hand by offering guidance and instructions about what needs to be done—and how and when and why—and who’s able to make decisions about each piece. With such a framework in place, we can avoid creating unmanageable websites that wander off in all directions or having work come to a screeching halt because decision-making responsibility is unclear or nonexistent.

Governance Supports Collaboration

When developing websites, we often think of governance simply as a way to capture the activity surrounding a piece of content—dates and people who created, updated and archived it. Taking on and tracking those specific activities and related issues are important parts of content governance. But content governance is only one aspect of the larger website or digital governance picture.

Primarily, digital governance establishes a workable structure to support collaboration across the many teams and types of work required to maintain an effective, long-term online presence for your hospital or health system. A governance framework identifies various decision-making requirements and processes that ensure requests are handled and tasks that move you toward your goals actually can be accomplished.

Potential Governance Components

A governance framework offers a larger and more strategic way to think about the activities, roles and responsibilities your current web team members already handle. In addition, your plan can help you identify emerging needs, understand how to remain effective and keep your website relevant as your hospital or health system grows. Among the typical components of website governance, you’ll find:

• People – Appropriate skills, numbers, teams, groups, roles, responsibilities
• Processes – Procedures, systems, structures, standards, policies, workflows, guidelines
• Documentation – Written instructions in a central repository to support consistent use
• Training – Regular opportunities to keep people up-to-date on relevant issues and topics
• Tools – Resources, infrastructure and other items required to carry out governance activities
• Budget – Financial support for governance activities and people

Because actual governance systems combine these components in ways that are unique to each organization or website project, we won’t find a one-size-fits-all, out-of-the-box solution. We need to do our homework and research, mix and match options from among several alternatives, run some experiments and expect to make adjustments along the way. But if we don’t start, life will never get better. And that’s the main reason to develop and use a digital governance framework.

Just Start Where You Are

Most of the time, we’re already in the middle of working on a website before we think about governance. No problem. Just start where you are.

Pick the issue that’s generating the most pain—maybe something like figuring out a process for delivering content to reviewers in a consistent way so they can quickly provide useful feedback. Pull together a team that both understands the content development process and recognizes what reviewers need to see (and what they don’t). Hash out a procedure the team and the potential reviewers can support—which might include setting up a writing template—and write down the instructions for using it.

Voilà! You’ve taken the first step toward creating a long-term governance system for your hospital or health system. Rinse and repeat for everything involved in setting up and maintaining your website or the activity you want to govern. Accumulate documentation as you go and keep it in a central repository. Then, organize, review and update it regularly. Over time, you’ll have this governance thing nailed. Insert satisfied grin here.

When it comes to your healthcare brand, it’s not always easy to know where to focus your digital marketing dollars. Learn how to prioritize content marketing, SEO, local listings, social media and reputation monitoring in a constantly evolving marketing puzzle.

You’ll learn:

• Which targeting techniques are most effective
• How to track campaign effectiveness (without driving yourself crazy)
• Which tactics will take your social media and reputation management to the next level
• How to rethink content creation and focus efforts on consumer engagement
• Where SEO fits into the puzzle (spoiler: everywhere)

Content Marketing and the Seismic Shift in Consumer Expectations

Love it or hate it, it’s clear that content marketing represents a seismic shift for both brands and marketers. Seth Godin famously said “content marketing is the only marketing left,” and there’s a reason it’s become so important: consumers have changed. They’re savvier and more averse to traditional marketing tactics than ever before.

What healthcare consumers expect is information that helps them make important decisions, understand their health conditions, evaluate their care options, live well and even occasionally be entertained. This means your brand won’t be given a second thought if your content stays rooted in yesterday’s promotional tactics. In fact, research shows that being overly self-promotional is the most common reason brands lose the attention of consumers.2 And with that attention goes revenue, growth, success in competitive markets and the respect of your C-Suite.

Clearly, attention is what matters in the new economy. And your job as a healthcare marketing leader is to earn it and monetize it. This often means shifting internal budgets, changing tactics and even retooling skill sets as you launch and refine your content marketing efforts.

If it seems like a lot to take on or you’re not sure where to begin, start with a simple power question you can ask yourself or your content teams: “Can you tell me how we’re doing, what’s working, and what we need to change for better results?” The answers can reveal the difference between just publishing content that’s not connected to results, and a functioning content marketing program that’s either right on track or in need of adjustment.

Be cautious of replies that are strictly about how busy people are without connecting the dots to the revenue pipeline. You want to hear hard numbers about how content is contributing to new patient acquisition, how it’s working to grow relevant audiences, contributing to brand health and even driving organic traffic for high-value keywords you’d otherwise have to buy. If you can describe the value of your content in terms of actual dollars, you’re in a good spot. There are several acceptable ways to do this, and they are critical to helping you understand and communicate your content’s performance and value. Alternatively, if you don’t know where to begin with assessing this in terms of revenue, it may be time for some help.

Social Media, Content, and Pay-to-Play Distribution

Social media is still a major distribution channel for most content marketing, so your investments in it are here to stay. That’s not to say they won’t need to change, however. Recently Amanda Todorovich, Director of Content Marketing at Cleveland Clinic, reminded us all how ephemeral free reach is on social media platforms. Speaking at Content Marketing World 2016, she revealed:

The Facebook algorithm killed us. A couple years ago, 50% of our traffic [to Health Essentials, the Cleveland Clinic health hub] was from social media. Today, it’s not even our number one channel. Organic search is.
– Amanda Todorovich, Content Marketing World 2016

Social media platforms are increasingly attempting to monetize by charging for content promotion. What this means is that you’re now likely in a pay-to-play position. Either you pay to get your traffic in front of the eyeballs you want, or suffer greatly diminished reach of the content you share.

The lesson to take away is this: your strategy needs to accommodate the reality of paid social media reach while maximizing tactics that can drive traffic organically. This includes taking an SEO-first mindset to everything you do, sharing content organically in relevant communities, and taking a data-driven approach to your paid content promotion.

Social media is also a tremendously rich source of value for your content marketing, but not just as a promotion channel. Some of the most active communities for health conditions are found in the social realm. Are you keeping an eye on them? These are rich sources for story mining and will help you identify prime topics for your content marketing.

Reputation Monitoring in a Social World

Letting a negative story shape the conversation about the quality of your brand’s healthcare is not only irresponsible, but it can quickly undo your best marketing efforts and negatively impact your bottom line. A reputation monitoring program that measures sentiment and identifies problems provides you opportunities to both address problems before they fester and celebrate your fans in a timely fashion.

Once impractical (if not impossible) to implement effectively for most organizations, reputation monitoring technologies and services have matured to the point where they are now within reach of most marketing budgets. They cover most social networks and physician review sites. It’s worth shifting dollars and reprioritizing budgets to add these tools to your marketing mix.

We know that patients use reviews, recommendations and the advice of others as strong criteria for selecting physicians, caregivers and providers. Because of this, you need to be listening to what stories people who have interacted with your brand share publicly. You’ll also want to develop a plan for reaching out to individuals who report negative experiences, and figure out how to fold what you learn from your monitoring into the operational changes that positively shape the experiences of your patients. Over time, this will also positively change the tone and tenor of the stories your patients share, improve how they rate and review your physicians and contribute to your brand health.

Lastly, reputation monitoring can also be a valuable story mining source for your content marketing efforts. Inspirational stories and positive health outcomes are the obvious examples, but many times patients also reveal content opportunities in other ways: lack of understanding about their conditions, lack of awareness of treatment options and more. If your reputation monitoring isn’t plugged into your content marketing story mining efforts, you’re likely missing great topic opportunities.

Leading Your Healthcare Brand in Changing Times

It’s clear that new technologies, changing consumers and an evolving competitive landscape are fundamentally changing the way many healthcare marketers approach their work. On top of this, there is a growing trend across industries that is being felt acutely in healthcare marketing: senior officers want to see in unambiguous terms what positive impact marketing is making on the bottom line.

For many this may feel like we’re being asked to throw the traditional work we’ve always done out the window, but nothing could be further from the truth. Brand, experience and traditional promotional work are still vital. But many healthcare marketers may need to reprioritize, retool and rethink how they approach marketing so that they can connect it to revenue in ways that the C-Suite understands. Typically this starts with a meaningful content marketing program, readjusting social media strategies, and investing in reputation monitoring to identify and address lingering issues with the brand experience that need to be improved.

In healthcare marketing, staying competitive takes many different forms. Keeping ahead of the organization across town. Adjusting to acquisitions and changing alliances. Keeping up to date with ever-changing technology and search algorithms. Exceeding consumers’ ever-increasing expectations.

So while you’ve been cranking away at the day to day, it may feel like your website is drifting behind. But is it time to act? Recent advances and the maturation of several marketing technologies mean that now is the time to shift gears, find your energy and put your site back in the lead.

For many organizations, that sense of “lagging the competition” is centered on website features and functionality. You’re looking to boost the online user experience while simultaneously increasing its alignment with organizational strategy. Where to begin? Let’s look at where one of the most visible areas of your website is headed.

A Five-Star Experience

It’s not uncommon for provider profiles and search functions to make up 25% or more of pageviews for a healthcare website. For a prospective patient, selecting a provider is an important and complicated task. It’s nearly impossible to have too much information.

Provider ratings and reviews are an increasingly important part of patients′ evaluation process. Studies show 60% of patients consult online reviews and 44% would consider going out-of-network for a better-reviewed provider. Why is it so critical to patients? Reviews provide evidence that supports all of the qualitative aspects of choosing providers — how well they listen, how compassionate they seem — that are central to decision making.

Beyond the benefit to patients, there are a number of other reasons to publish provider ratings. This includes promoting a culture of transparency and boosting search engine traffic.

Smart organizations are repurposing the hundreds of responses they receive from existing patient surveys. Not sure your organization is ready to take the leap? It’s still worth putting the legal groundwork in place now so you can publish the survey responses you are already collecting when your organization is ready.

If this is a feature you’re passionate about, identify ways that it supports your organization’s strategic framework and start looking for physician allies to help you make the case. Most organizations that are successfully implementing provider ratings have buy-in from top-level executives and physician leaders.

Online Appointment Scheduling

If you want to learn more about creating a five-star experience, Intuit Health reports that 81% of patients indicate they would schedule online if they could. In fact, 40% of all patients would consider switching providers for the ability to schedule appointments online.

While most of the focus has been on providing scheduling for current patients, typically through patient portals, it’s also important to offer this convenience to new patients. According to SureScripts, 44% of patients will select the doctor who offers online scheduling when presented with two similar physicians.

The drive toward increasing patient acquisition, combined with trends in health consumerism, is leading many organizations to launch real-time scheduling for new patients. To do this, organizations are turning to third-party tools like Zocdoc or The Advisory Board Company’s HealthPost, or going directly through EMRs such as Epic’s MyChart Open Scheduling.

If you’re interested in offering new patient scheduling, start by looking at the functionality available to you through your current technology partners. You may discover that it’s necessary to add a third party to the mix, or that you already have a solution available to you. Just remember, failure to act can mean a significant problem for patient acquisition, while being the first mover in your market can provide you with a definitive advantage.

A Personal Connection

While about half of health systems have a CRM (customer relationship management) system in place, relatively few (around 1 in 4 according to a 2015 survey) have it integrated with their website. This is a missed opportunity to capture critical interactions happening on your site. Interactions with particular content, campaign elements, provider directories — there are so many online touchpoints that you could be capturing and using to help you better target the right individuals on an ongoing basis.

It’s one thing to capture and coalesce data about your audience. It’s another to make effective use of that data to communicate in a personal, scalable and timely manner. Healthcare has significantly lagged other industries in the use of marketing automation and personalization, but this is changing. We appear to have reached a tipping point, and the historic rate of change is not a predictor of the future. More and more health systems, hospitals and clinics are racing to implement robust CRM and marketing automation solutions to help them better connect patients with the care and services they need while staying ahead of the competition.

Keeping the Foundation Solid

No matter where your strategy leads you next, it pays to make sure your website serves as a solid and effective foundation.

The place to start is to make sure you have a design that supports a range of current devices. Not every site is there yet. Even those that have been responsive for a while should take a look at how their design is implemented. Consider the screen size of an iPhone 4, popular just a few years ago, and compare it to the iPhone 7 or 7 Plus. Things have changed a lot.

To keep the user experience current, making small updates and tweaks to responsive breakpoints, font sizes and image resolutions can result in a huge difference. Similarly, updating your site’s markup and code to use the latest best practices can keep sites fast and reliable in the ever-advancing world of browser technology.

Is It Time to Lead the Pack?

With so many different directions (not to mention all of your everyday commitments) how do you choose where to focus?

Check out our webinar on engaging users and delivering results to explore all these trends and identify where the opportunities are for your organization. We’ll also talk about how to build success with small wins that can help you create the momentum needed to regain the lead in your market.

Afraid your healthcare website is falling behind? Learn the five key features that leading healthcare organizations are launching next.

Watch this webinar, and learn how to:

• Create a road map of features to implement that will set your site up for success
• Prioritize which features are a good fit for your digital strategy
• Build momentum for your web efforts
• And more…

For people with a range of abilities different from your own, you must take usability a step further and address accessibility.

In May, the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) released the final rule for Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), commonly known as Obamacare. Section 1557 builds on a host of existing legislation to ensure access to health services by prohibiting discrimination on a wide range of factors including race, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, or disability.

So what does this mean for your organization’s website?

There are a two sections that are particularly important when it comes to healthcare web operations:

1. Meaningful Access for Individuals with Limited English Proficiency Section 1557 requires healthcare organizations to provide language assistance to those with Limited English Proficiency (LEP). Organizations must offer some form of real-time translation services for patient encounters today but, at a minimum, Section 1557 also requires a tagline (their term, not mine) alerting LEPs to the availability of language assistance services and a notice of individuals’ rights to communication assistance in the top 15 languages spoken in that state. The Department of Health & Human Services has been nice enough to provide samples in a wide range of languages. Action: While the legislation doesn’t specifically refer to posting these notices and taglines on your organization’s website, it’s a good starting point. Also, consider how to make more of your website available to LEPs through translated content or automated translation services such as Google translate.
2. Effective Communication with and Accessibility for Individuals with Disabilities Section 1557 requires healthcare organizations to take steps to ensure that communications with individuals with disabilities are as effective as those with anyone else. It incorporates existing federal guidance on these topics including the American’s With Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (home of the Web Accessibility requirements commonly referred to by their placement in Section 504 of that act). Action: While many organizations are interested in accessibility, few actively invest in expertise to verify their websites’ accessibility, train content contributors or monitor accessibility over time. It’s time to either invest in accessibility yourself or partner with an organization that does.

Accessibility Audits

An accessibility audit by an agency like Geonetric that understands accessibility in healthcare is a great place to start. Our certified specialists can help you uncover opportunities to improve the user experience for people of all abilities.

Contact Us today to learn how a Geonetric Accessibility Audit can help you avoid a costly lawsuit while ensuring your website is accessible to all visitors.

An understanding of the market context is also essential when deciding where — and where not to — invest our marketing dollars. These decisions are at the heart of strategy, and can result in growth for your healthcare brand (and patient census) or stagnation while your competition eats away at your market share.

And this is why I look forward to the comprehensive Digital Marketing Survey we conduct every few years. Not only does it collect strategic insights from across the healthcare marketing industry, but we invest in making sure all healthcare marketers have access to the resulting analysis.

I’d like to share a couple examples with you. If these hold when the full results are in, they will be important to you as you plan and adjust your marketing strategy going forward.

Let’s start with budget.

Your Competition Is About To Invest More In Digital Marketing

Take a look at the graph above. In some cases, overall marketing budgets are increasing. But even when they are not, the share devoted to digital marketing is expected to rise. To be clear: a full 60% of healthcare organizations are expecting to invest more in digital marketing initiatives in the coming year. And it’s a much needed change. As consumers look to interact digitally with healthcare brands, brands are increasingly shifting some of their focus from billboards to bits.

We’re seeing some tantalizing hints that healthcare organizations will be spending some of this new budget on direct hires for their digital marketing teams. The survey suggests they are looking to buy expertise in some key areas and in new digital experiences designed to improve patient acquisition and retention. The precise details of each of these will have to wait until the survey concludes, but suffice it to say that many organizations appear to be growing their digital repertoire in ways predicted by other industries with a consumer focus.

This means that you can expect your competition to invest more in digital marketing than they have in the past, and they will be building new digital experiences to help recruit patients. The question before you is: will you be a leader or a laggard in this space?

What Limits Your Success?

Take a moment to review the above chart. Anything stand out?

There are a few things to note, but the thing I find staggering is this: agencies clearly think the single biggest impediment to marketing success for healthcare brands is the lack of [effective] strategy.

Meanwhile, healthcare marketers say, “No. Our strategy is fine. We just don’t have the budget we need [to execute].”

Since we know from the previous questions that healthcare marketing teams are going to be increasing budget and some specific areas in which they want to spend, it appears we may be about to see which side is right.

If it’s merely a matter of budget, we’ll see improvement concurrent with the increases in investment the survey predicts. But if it’s really a strategy problem, then healthcare brands won’t get the return on investment (ROI) bigger budgets should bring.

The survey is now closed and we’re busy analyzing data. Request early access to our 2016 Digital Marketing Trends in Healthcare eBook and get the data you need to compete.