How to successfully sell your website or CMS project

The best defense is a strong offense. It’s an overused phrase, perhaps, but it’s often quoted because it’s typically true about most things in life – including sports and tough sells at the office.

The number one thing you can do to ensure success in selling your project internally is to be prepared.

Now, you’re probably thinking, “Well, that’s a given!” But the reality is, preparation doesn’t always happen effectively. It’s really easy to get excited about a project and expect that others will share your enthusiasm.

Passion alone – while very helpful! – isn’t likely to garner approval. You’re going to have to roll up your sleeves and get others on board through good old-fashioned planning and hard work.

Here are some tips based on my 20 years of experience managing digital projects at hospitals and health systems.

Tip #1: Anticipate objections and questions

Start by identifying the primary questions and objections you’re likely to encounter, then weave answers and counter-points to those questions and objections thoughtfully into your pitch so you can address them proactively.

For example:

• If cost is going to be a primary objection (and when isn’t it?!), be prepared to discuss how your new CMS or redesign will help save the organization money in the long-term. The initial investment is likely to be significant, so off-setting any sticker shock with a longer-term view is helpful.
  • If the new CMS will allow for integration with your CRM system or to more easily calculate ROI so you can prove return, be sure to share that and speak to how. Your organization also likely invested a lot in the CRM system, so showing how you can get more and better value out of an already purchased platform can help too.
  • Show that you considered less expensive options or other vendors – if you did – for all or parts of your project (writing, design, hosting, support, etc.). In other words, show that you did your due diligence. If you didn’t select the least expensive option or didn’t go out to RFP, be prepared to discuss why and explain the value the more expensive option offers over the alternatives. If you already have a relationship with the vendor you want to work with, point to their reliability, partnership, and strengths that will continue to benefit your organization.
• If resource constraints are a concern, talk about what your internal team will be tasked with doing, what your vendor will do, and how much time you anticipate needing from Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), I.T., and others. Get as specific as you can and clearly articulate what role you’ll need them to play in the project and, if you can, quantify the amount of time, as well. If your vendor will be doing a lot of the heavy lifting, talk about how, by being an extension to your team, that will free you up to work on other projects – particularly ones that are important to your executives but that you just haven’t had time for. If your vendor will be doing work your I.T. team might normally do – thus creating capacity for other I.T. priorities – make sure to share that, too.

Proactively anticipating key stakeholders’ questions and potential objections will result in your project having a far greater chance of approval and funding.

Tip #2: Show a direct tie to organizational strategy

Executives and high-level leaders have a duty to ensure an organization meets its goals and objectives, and showing them exactly how your project will help meet one or more of them is a must. (Bonus points if you can show how your project will also make their lives easier or help them look good!)

Clearly articulating how a new website or a new CMS supports your health system’s goals and objectives not only proves to decision makers that you’re a strategic thinker, but that you understand the big picture.

For example, if one of your organization’s goals is to increase primary care patient acquisition, highlight how a new CMS or redesign will help to drive new business into your doctors’ offices, or how a new CMS will allow you to better integrate a third-party scheduling platform. If reducing ED usage and getting patients with non-life threatening issues to the right care setting is an organizational objective, show how a redesign will allow you to better leverage content marketing efforts, launch or better position UC or ED wait times, or more effectively support marketing campaigns.

You may even want to consider not labeling or referring to your project as a “marketing” or “digital marketing” initiative, but as an organizational initiative that will bring everyone closer to achieving system-wide goals.

Tip #3: “Show me the money” … and the data

Your project is no doubt competing with countless others for funding and support. And many of those other projects are just as needed and beneficial as yours. Put yourself in the best position by leveraging data to your advantage.

Collecting and sharing the following data can help you more effectively make your case:

• Industry/Peer Data – There are several sources of benchmarking data for healthcare marketing and digital marketing teams and budgets. Things such as department size, average time-to-redesign, total budget, budget spend breakdown, vendor outsourcing, CMS usage, and much more is available through SHSMD’s By the Numbers as well as our 2020 Healthcare Digital Marketing Trends Survey results.
• ROI/ROMI – If you’re already tracking and are able to show digital ROI or ROMI, be sure to share that data and explain how you expect your project to help improve upon the results or further track or quantify them. If you’re not currently measuring ROI/ROMI, will your project position you to do so?
• Cost of Doing Nothing – This is often an overlooked point, but there can be a very high cost – not just in actual dollars, but in brand awareness or long-term competitiveness – to your organization of either doing nothing or waiting. This could be in the form of not improving your physician directory and therefore not maximizing the opportunity for revenue from new patient appointments, or not redesigning your site for accessibility or responsiveness that may lead patients to choose your competition over you. If you can quantify the cost of doing nothing in any way or show if and how you’re behind the market or your competition, do so. Sometimes highlighting the cost of doing nothing speaks louder than the actual project cost alone and can help push it toward approval.

To help you get started, here are a few key statistics from our 2020 Healthcare Digital Marketing Trends Survey:

• In years past we’ve seen redesign cycle times range around three to five years. Respondents in 2020 indicate that 20% of organizations recently completed a redesign, suggesting that health systems are redesigning closer to every five years.
• The average overall digital marketing budget across all respondents is $700,000 with leaders reporting a budget of over $1,200,000 — which is more than twice the average and nearly three times what laggards spend.
• Overall, the majority of organizations dedicate 25-30% of their overall marketing budget to digital.
• Email and marketing automation and video production have the highest planned net increase in staffing.

Be prepared

By anticipating questions and objections, tying your project to organizational goals, and sharing applicable data you can help increase your chances of gaining internal approval for your next big digital initiative. You’ll do a lot of hard work up-front, but the pay-off in the end will be well worth it.

At Geonetric, we’re all about helping our healthcare clients develop and execute on their digital strategies. We also help our clients sell the value of them to internal stakeholders. If you’re looking for a new CMS, pursuing a website redesign project, or need exceptional digital marketing support contact us today!

According to IBM, data breaches in healthcare were the most expensive of any industry at $9.23 million on average. And HIPAA Journal reports 2020 saw more healthcare data breaches than in any other year since reporting started. Breaches are happening more often and cost millions — not to mention that the average time to identify and contain a breach is 287 days. Non-compliance is simply not an option. So, how do you ensure your website is prepared?

Seven best practices to follow

Decreasing risks while protecting your patients’ data and your hospital brand must be a top priority. Evaluate your site on these seven areas to ensure your security and hosting environments are meeting required standards.

Protect user data.

Healthcare organizations must follow HIPAA guidelines, meaning you must comply with requirements to protect the privacy and security of health information. Your website should use secure sockets layer (SSL) technology to securely encrypt necessary page, form, transactional data, and protected health information (PHI) from the web browser to the server. PHI should be encrypted in transit and at rest. That means when it’s being transmitted between systems, such as data sent when a user submits a form, as well as when that data is stored for future use, often in a database. Online forms that accept user data should be managed using specific protocols to comply with HIPAA. Protecting the submitted data in forms is critical. Compliant content management systems (CMS) like VitalSite through form builders like Formulate capture and store specific information when your users view a form submission and creates an audit trail. It logs the user ID, date and time stamp, IP address, and location and state of the data at the time it was accessed.

If you accept online bill payment or online donations, you must also be payment card industry (PCI) compliant and ensure debit and credit card information remains secure throughout the transaction process. Once submitted, payment data should be transmitted immediately to the payment processor and never stored.

Protect administrative accounts.

As part of staying in compliance with HIPAA, and to prevent unauthorized changes on your website, administrative accounts in the CMS must be monitored and protected. With VitalSite, passwords are encrypted and stored using SQL Server encryption. All of this ensures that it’s difficult for an attacker to access and use someone’s password. In addition, other safeguards, such as requiring strong passwords and periodic passwords changes, as well as locking inactive accounts, are also considered industry best practices for account protection.

Stay up to date.

One of the primary ways hospital websites fall out of compliance is by falling behind with CMS upgrades, updates, and security patches to the software administrators don’t see, including web servers, databases, programming languages and framework. Falling behind on updates and upgrades are common ways organizations that run on a platform like WordPress find themselves vulnerable with multiple plug-ins requiring their own updates and patches. Ensure you’re on the latest version of your CMS and look to partner with an agency that provides upgrades as part of the licensing, as Geonetric does with VitalSite.

Review your network architecture.

Whether you manage web hosting yourself or use an agency or third party, ensuring there are tools and processes in place to minimize the risk of a breach is essential. Especially today, where cyber-attacks are all too common. Areas to look for include redundant web application firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and systems to protect from common web attacks like distributed denial of service (D/DoS) and SQL injection.

Ensure 24/7 uptime monitoring and support.

Your web partner should know before you do that your site is down and respond around the clock with a team who can fix the problem regardless of whether it’s a server, network, software, or content issue.

Protect from downtime with scalability.

Reliable networks are more important than ever, which means having scalability in your network is essential – especially when you consider you never know when a surge in traffic will arise. Case in point: healthcare websites saw huge traffic surges as critical COVID-19 communications, testing, and vaccine announcements were released. These traffic spikes need to be considered before they happen. Without auto-scaling in place, availability can be disrupted from unexpected traffic surges or a failure in one part of the system, bringing down the entire site. With proper auto-scaling cloud infrastructure, your site will remain available without missing a beat.

Require backups.

If the worst happens, how much would you lose and how quickly can you be up and running again? These are the questions you should ask. At Geonetric, we perform a full backup of your entire site and database each day. Every 15 minutes we perform transaction log backups and save these for two days. In addition, daily backups are saved for a week; weekly backups are saved for four weeks; and monthly backups are saved for a year. We also perform database consistency checks nightly. It’s also important to ensure there is proper redundancy for quick recovery purposes.

Take security seriously

For many healthcare organizations, especially community hospitals and medical clinics, it’s hard for marketing and I.T. departments to get the privacy and security resources they need to comply with healthcare’s stringent regulations, making it harder for you to prevent and detect security incidents. And cyber-criminals know this – a 2018 report by The American Journal of Managed Care®, found that 37%of small and 36 percent of medium-sized hospitals had suffered at least one data breach from 2009 to 2016. While many executives at smaller organizations feel they are less likely to be targeted because of their size the opposite may very well be true – security gaps amongst this group make them more likely to be a target.

Some smaller healthcare organizations try to solve potential PHI vulnerabilities by removing functionality, but in the end, this hurts user experience and your ability to connect with patients at key moments. With the right partner you can have all the functionality you want plus the security you need.

Don’t take chances with your patients’ data or your brand – partner with an agency like Geonetric that takes security seriously. We’ll take that extra monitoring off your I.T. team’s plate and help ensure compliance with regulations. Contact us today to learn more about our security protocols and to see a demo of our VitalSite CMS or Formulate form builder.

Bonus: Security Questions

Now that you understand more about security best practices, here is a helpful list of questions you can download or reference to help you have more valuable conversations with potential partners.

You know a new website and supporting digital marketing initiatives will have a substantial role in driving business for your organization — but whenever budget dollars get involved, the questions can get hard to answer. The best way to get buy-in from stakeholders for your redesign or re-platform is by demonstrating the value you’ll get back.

Although there is tremendous value in improving brand awareness and the consumer experience, having more tangible financial metrics can help gain the approval you need to move forward. Download this white paper and get examples of the types of return on investment (ROI) you can expect when you have the right partner.

You’ll get advice on how to:

• Take a different approach to investing in digital
• Deliver ROI on your website investment using different examples, thinking strategically about how web traffic, user engagement, conversions and efficiency translate into value
• Uncover aspects of a web CMS platform that will help you improve key metrics

These are just a few of the insights you’ll learn in the 2021 Digital Healthcare Marketing Trends Survey results. As you navigate digital marketing post-pandemic, the results of this survey will shed light on how COVID-19 impacted everything from digital transformation efforts to telehealth adoption to digital ad spend. Plus, it has all the key staffing, budgeting, and website benchmarking data you’ve come to rely on.

If your Find-a-doctor functionality isn’t easy to search, engaging and focused on conversions, you are missing a big opportunity. Watch now to learn if your directory is underperforming and how to make changes that will ensure this critical functionality is improving patient acquisition.

If so, use these helpful tips to communicate expectations, benefits, and next steps internally while managing your organization’s reputation.

Managing the Mandate

Every state and health system are going to have people that oppose a COVID-19 vaccine mandate. When you prepare for the mandate, you’ll position yourself to have constructive and consistent conversations that help reduce protest in your area and raise vaccination rates. During a vaccine mandate, you need to:

• Use internal communications effectively so everyone knows what to expect
• Appreciate current efforts and safety measures already in place
• Manage morale by creating cohesion and avoiding shame
• Put local faces and stories to the statistics
• Make vaccines convenient and accessible
• Anticipate questions and create a safe place for them

Keep the Momentum

You’ve likely been communicating to your internal health care team about COVID-19 vaccinations and know what to address internally during a crisis. Continue making the most of your internal communication platforms to reduce vaccine hesitancy.

Getting internal buy-in is not always an easy task. Your team looks to you for guidance and information that applies to them. During a mandate, your team will want to hear directly from you on:

• Reasons for the mandate — Educate your team on why the mandate is happening. Emphasize the importance of the vaccine and how it is vital to ending the pandemic and protecting both staff and patients.
• Employee expectations — Address who is required to have the vaccine and why. Mention dates individuals need to be vaccinated by and what happens if they don’t meet the deadline.
• Who are the exceptions? — Be transparent about who doesn’t have to get the vaccine and why. Present the process that staff and employees will need to follow to apply for an exception waiver.
• What is the cost of non-compliance? — What are the implications if an employee does not get the vaccine? Can they continue to work for the organization? Explain what procedures nonvaccinated employees will need to follow.
• The facts — Ask your managers what common questions or concerns they’re hearing from their team and address them head-on by email or on the intranet.
• Community messaging — Manage your reputation as a local employer and health system by shaping the message you want to be heard. Share this message with your staff so that they know what to say if someone asks them about the mandate.
• Next steps — Share what your plan is during the mandate and beyond to help people process the complete picture of your organization’s plan.

Address Current Safety Measures

While a vaccine mandate might be the crucial next step, it’s essential to acknowledge that everyone is doing their best to keep the staff and community safe.

Celebrate the ways they’re helping prevent the spread of the coronavirus, such as:

• Adjusting visitor guidelines
• Cleaning and disinfecting objects and surfaces
• Getting the vaccine
• Offering virtual appointments when possible
• Practicing social distancing
• Washing hands
• Wearing masks

In your message about your organization’s current shield against COVID-19, inform people how requiring the vaccination will further your efforts.

Use Stories Instead of Statistics

When factual data isn’t driving change, try sharing your employees’ stories. Conveying emotion through storytelling is often a successful tactic to encourage someone to take action. When people hear how their coworkers have been affected, it hits close to home and humanizes the numbers.

Find employees who are willing to share their stories and help them be heard through your intranet, newsletter, social media, and content marketing hub.

Be the Example

Who are the people within your organization who hold a high level of trust? Who are highly visible or highly respected faces? Identify and use these influencers to help echo the importance of getting your health system’s vaccination rates up.

Train your influencers to be a person of trust and inspiration during the mandate. Take their picture and have them share their reason they chose to get vaccinated.

Create Cohesion

Consider offering an incentive to your team by setting a goal with a deadline. Display a pie chart in a common area or an easily accessible resource, like the intranet, that shows the total number of employees with vaccinations. Let people know if they hit your organizational goal by a specific date, they’ll earn a delicious treat or a small gift.

Like you do during the flu season, set clear expectations around who needs to be vaccinated and who is exempt. This will allow space for empathy and support rather than create peer pressure and division.

Avoid Shame

Retain your staff by providing a safe and convenient place to get vaccinated. Now that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine for 16 years of age and older, you may find more people are willing to step up and get vaccinated.

Spread awareness of the FDA approval and encourage people who haven’t yet to get their vaccination. Provide insight on where they can receive the vaccination and who they need to notify once they have it.

Allow Questions

Encourage people to go to their managers or human resource team if they have questions about how the mandate impacts them. When you invite employees to come to you, you’ll help ensure that your staff gets timely and accurate information.