eHealth Articles & White Papers

Using the Web to Promote your Service Line Capabilities

Ben Dillon - Vice President & eHealth Evangelist

Hospitals and health systems are increasingly embracing a service line approach for organizing and marketing care. The next step is to understand how to best utilize eCommunications, such as the hospital's website or eNewsletters, as part of the service line marketing process.

Focused positioning

Service line marketing differs from traditional branding campaigns in several ways. Brand campaigns build awareness for the organization and share broad messages about the organization's position in the marketplace.

Service line marketing, in contrast, is more focused. It focuses on positioning an individual service line and driving service line volume. As a result, the messaging for a service line campaign is centered around differentiating the service line in a way that is meaningful to health consumers who may be in the market for such services.

Using eCommunications

Here are some of the most common tools of eCommunications and ways that they can make a positive contribution to your service line marketing efforts.

• Microsites - As previously mentioned, service line marketing campaigns are focused efforts. An increasingly popular online component of focused marketing efforts is a microsite. Microsites incorporate important components of the campaign and allow you to showcase your marketing messages that you're promoting in the market alongside greater depth of information.
• Landing pages - A landing age is an alternative to a microsite. Creating a landing page for the highlighted service line allows you to have one central point to house the various information and resources relevant to the campaign. Adding a vanity URL provides a conversion point for the campaign ads without the effort of a complete microsite.
• Email - If you're using email marketing efforts on a regular basis, it can be a good channel to add to your service line campaign. Using email allows you to promote services, screenings, and events related to the campaign through a channel that consumers may be receptive to receiving.

Integration with your main website

What about your main website? Does this work into the homepage?

For traditional brand campaigns, you want to drive traffic to your homepage directly, which should incorporate the brand message and visual elements. For a service line campaign, you want to direct traffic to a site that shares that focus - it's typically not your homepage Directing traffic to a vanity URL or landing page allows better tracking of campaign efficacy.

The homepage does have an important role to play in the service line marketing world. It should not be used as a conversion target for the campaign, but as another channel for sending messages. Aspects of the campaign should be reflected in a contained section of the homepage as another way to direct traffic toward the service line.

But that's not all

The website has another roll to play. Interactive capabilities on the site can also contribute to the campaign. Tools and calculators can enrich the overall experience on a microsite.

Transactional capabilities and greater levels of personalization through portals can, in fact, be part of the differentiation story that you're telling in the campaign, particularly for younger, highly Internet-savvy audiences targeted by such service lines like OB or bariatric.

The Web is an effective technique

The Web is an integral part of the marketing mix for almost any healthcare campaign. Just as service line campaigns require a change of approach in many ways; it requires some different techniques from the online toolbox to best leverage eCommunication capabilities.