Having a solid digital foundation is essential for any healthcare marketing strategy. But the real magic happens when you take those fundamentals and amplify them to reach a larger audience, build a more robust digital presence, and reach your marketing goals faster.
In this post, we’ll break down the fundamentals of digital healthcare marketing and explore how your organization can supercharge them with advanced techniques and tools to stay ahead of the competition.
What are the fundamentals?
1. Website information architecture (IA)
It all starts with ensuring your high-level website information architecture aligns with user expectations. How your website and IA is structured impacts everything your organization does online — from your content marketing to design and even social media strategies.
A successful high-level website architecture boils down to which pages, sections, and features exist on your website, how they relate to each other in terms of page nesting or parent-child relationships, and whether they have a consistent, predictable URL structure. Think easy-to-navigate menus, straightforward internal linking, and sitemaps that meet user expectations and help them find the answers they need.
2. On-page content structure
The way content is arranged on your web pages is another fundamental you’ll want to nail down. Content should be scannable, not only so the user can glance at the page and get a good idea of what it’s about, but also so it’s easily scanned by search engines.
Aside from general content layout, successful on-page content structure means properly using header tags and ensuring your H1, H2, and H3s are sequentially ordered on the page. It also means formatting your text in bulleted or numbered lists, tables, accordion menus, etc., so your content is easy to read, and both people and search engines can find what they need on the page quickly.
3. User-centric content
Beyond how you display content, a major fundamental of digital marketing — especially for healthcare organizations — is that the content you create puts the user first.
Content must consider the users’ needs and answer their questions before it ever addresses your organization’s business needs. To accomplish this, use user-friendly and easy-to-read language, have crystal clear calls to action on every page, and distinctly show what the next logical step is in the users’ path through your website.
4. Images and multimedia
A frequently overlooked and powerful fundamental for digital marketing success are images and multimedia. Making seemingly small changes to the images on your website can lead to huge gains, both in the load speed of your pages and how you rank in Google Image search results.
The most important factor to nail here is file size for load speed reasons, but it’s also essential to consider the overall image quality, the alt text description, and keyword-rich file names.
All of these factors contribute to page load speed and reliability but also help your site reach more users through search engines. (If you’re a VitalSite® user, you won’t have to worry about image file size — the Image Manager takes care of it for you.)
5. SEO metadata and an internet mindset
Metadata includes your page titles, meta descriptions, header tags, and descriptive URLs, along with organically using SEO and localized keywords in your content. Making sure your pages include this data will help boost your search engine performance and ensure prospective patients will see your organization when they search for care.
It’s also crucial to adopt an “internet mindset” to understand that all of the content and SEO metadata on your site needs to be continuously updated, assessed, and optimized to keep it current and effective for your marketing goals.
Time to supercharge!
Once you’ve mastered these fundamentals, it’s time to supercharge them to maximize your marketing ROI! Here are a few ways you can take these building blocks of marketing success to the next level.
1. Invest in advanced metadata like Schema.org markup
Schema.org markup helps search engines understand the content on your pages beyond basic metadata. Implementing it can result in rich snippets and enhanced search results, helping your content stand out.
For healthcare organizations, Schema markup can be used to display things like facility images, maps, provider ratings, and business hours on the search results page, giving users the information they need and showcasing your organization before they even get to your website.
2. Track content performance
Content shouldn’t be a “one-and-done” endeavor. Knowing what’s working (and what isn’t) is key to refining your strategy. Use tools like Google Analytics to monitor how users interact with your site, what pages are keeping them engaged, and where they’re dropping off.
Reframing your digital marketing tracking and reporting efforts as content performance tracking is a fantastic way to help you better understand how well your content is, or isn’t, serving users. Using that data to continuously make improvements to your site will keep your digital presence dynamic and ensure it meets consumers’ preferences and pain points.
3. Implement workflow or governance standards
Creating great content is only part of the equation. Workflow and governance standards ensure that it stays relevant, up-to-date, and aligned with your business goals. Establish standards for regular audits and analysis of your website content to help your entire team understand how to keep your website content fresh, accurate, and aligned with changing user needs and expectations.
You can also set day-to-day workflow standards to support your daily content creation as well as your ongoing content strategy.
Ask your team questions like:
- How often does content need to be reviewed, republished, or archived?
- Who has the power to say “yes” or “no” to content requests for the website?
- What happens when there are competing priorities or requests?
- What happens when content goes stale or is underperforming?
4. Leverage generative AI tools
One more way to power up your marketing efforts is by utilizing everyone’s favorite hot tech topic: generative artificial intelligence. You can use tools like Chat GPT and Jasper to streamline your content writing and production tasks, including generating campaign ideas, developing outlines for service pages, identifying common patient questions, writing short-form copy like headlines and UI text, and more.
By building on these fundamentals and investing in advanced techniques, you can supercharge your digital marketing efforts to improve your ROI and reach your long-term marketing goals. The digital healthcare marketing landscape is always evolving, and staying ahead means being willing to take your strategies to the next level to stand out in a crowded marketplace.
Looking for ideas to supercharge your strategies?
Geonetric has been helping healthcare organizations stay ahead of the curve for more than 25 years, and we can help your team as well!
Whether you’re looking for SEO, content marketing, or web design help, we have the solutions you need to supercharge your digital healthcare marketing efforts and see incredible results. Contact us today to get started!