So what are the best ways to “sell” your organization to physicians and entice them to choose your organization to call home? What are providers and physicians looking for when seeking changes in their careers? And how can your website help connect the two?

At Geonetric, we’ve shared lots of information about how to market physicians to your patients and community. From patient acquisition to referral opportunities, representing your providers in a way that speaks to what patients are seeking is vital to engaging and converting consumers and driving revenue.

But first you need to hire amazing doctors before you can start marketing them.

And, it’s important to note it’s not just doctors your organization is likely recruiting for. In fact, according to a 2016 Bureau of Labor Statistics report, the projected growth for non-physician clinicians will exceed the growth of physicians, surgeons, and other general professions within the next 10 years.

Because these roles – such as physical therapists, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants – are interacting more with patients in today’s healthcare environment, the need to recruit (and properly promote) is even more important.

Fortunately, some of the recommendations to promote your physicians to patients works to attract new doctors and providers to your organization. And just like provider promotion, digital is the key to success with today’s savvy audiences.

1. Make it easy to find employment opportunities on your website

Don’t hide essential elements of your organization.

In a 2011 HubSpot survey, 76% of respondents said the most important part of a website experience is the ease to find the information they’re seeking. When you hide essential tasks for your core audience, you’re leaving them behind.

Physician recruitment comfortably lives in HR-related career or “find a job” content, or it can live on its own if it’s a priority for your organization.

Check out how Sturdy Memorial Hospital in Attleboro, MA promotes phsyican recuriment in their careers section.

Jobs are frequently a popular search term on any organization’s website, so make sure that your physician recruitment page can be easily found on site search, and put effort into developing valuable page titles and meta descriptions so it can be quickly found on search engines.

2. Be transparent about opportunities and culture

If you’re looking for advanced practitioners, specialists, or surgeons, be truthful and up front about these openings. If possible, give specifics about the positions that are open, including the locations or clinics they’ll serve, and the size of the community they’ll work with as a provider.

Here Billings Clinic in Billings, MT shares what it’s like to practice medicine in Big Sky Country through a video.

According to the American Academy of Family Physicians, female providers expect more flexibility from their employers. Millennials – quickly on the rise in all professions – lean toward needing an independent voice in the workplace.

Consider, too, using social media to reach out to potential candidates. Facebook and LinkedIn are both great for showcasing your organization’s culture to entice new employees and doctors to your staff. Use these social posts as a link to a form, or opportunity for conversion on the website.

3. Share stories of your current providers

Videos, bios, and testimonials area great way to have patients “meet” your providers when patients are seeking care. It’s also a great way to introduce your current team to potential new employees and staff.

Tidelands Health in Geoergetown, SC uses pictures and testimonials of providers, giving them a place to share their thoughts about what it’s like to work at Tidelands Health and live in South Carolina.

You probably have charismatic providers on staff who’d be happy to share their story about why they work at your organization and what they love about the culture.

While an interview or testimonial is a better video than nothing, show examples of the doctors at work, in the halls with colleagues, interacting with patients (with the patient’s permission, of course). These videos can be equally helpful to patients and visitors looking for care. And, they’re easy to share on social networks.

If you’re lacking the time or budget for videos, consider adding a section on your blog where doctors can share their own articles, interviews, and experiences, or where you can share stories about the culture in your organization.

Check out how Altru Health System in Grand Forks, SD promotes their careers on their blog.

4. Make conversions easy to do

Websites are built to attract traffic, and ideally, every page of your website should have a purpose to drive action from your audience. It’s no different for physician recruitment.

Whether you create a form to fill out, a brochure to download, or a trackable phone number to call, make it easy for a candidate to convert and get in touch in a way that you can track. While your website is a great source of information, of course, it should be easy for a visitor to know what to do next: Contact your recruiters or human resources department.

In the digital world, we call these calls to action, or CTAs, and they should be everywhere that aligns with the user’s goals and makes sense within the content. If a prospective doctors finds your physician recruitment page, he or she is likely considering a career change – so make it easy for him or her to get more information or reach out. Let him or her get the process started as efficiently as possible.

Check out how Firelands Regional Medical Center in Sandusky, OH uses a form right on their physician recruitment page so interested providers can easily take the next step.

5. Connect your online and offline marketing efforts

Physicians are users of your website and brand just like your patients, and their user journey should connect the external branding to the digital. Connecting your website, direct mail, email marketing efforts, social networking, and other outreach – known as multichannel marketing – ensures your candidates’ brand journeys are consistent, easy to follow, and inspires conversion.

Campaign landing pages, for example, can be an effective way to connect direct mail or social ads with a page of useful content that inspires conversion and tracks it with a form.

As you’re building these experiences, whether on a billboard or a direct mailer, make sure your message, voice, tone, and style are consistent and reinforce your brand. A strong brand is an important foundation to attracting new employees and providers.

Don’t hesitate to ask for help

Taking on physician recruitment with an already growing to-do list of other marketing efforts can be tough. Reach out to Geonetric for opportunities to help use digital to bolster your physician recruitment efforts.

Seeing your site through the aides of heatmaps, scrollmaps, and clickmaps gives you the ability to be in the shoes of the users. These maps work similarly to an x-ray in that they give you an inside view of what is going on during a user’s visit. They allow you to sit in the user’s seat and understand what they experienced on your site. Let’s take a deeper look at each map type.

Heatmaps

Heatmaps are a visual understanding of where attention and focus are centered on a page. At a glance, you can better understand how the design of a page is either helping or hurting your conversions. It can be useful for A/B testing links when there is more than one link on a page that have the same landing page. In GA reporting, GA treats links to the same destination as the same link and displays only one data point. This makes it hard to decipher which of the links on the page received the most clicks. Using a heatmap will help you see what link received the most attention and had a higher click rate.

Scrollmaps

Scrollmaps show how far down on a page a user will scroll before losing interest. Any area highlighted blue on the page is being ignored by site visitors. They either scrolled past that section or exited the page entirely. If there are any important calls to action (CTAs) or content in those areas, they need to be moved to the sweet spot on the page. In this image, the sweet spot is the area between the two red bars and is where you would want to put your most pertinent information and CTAs. The white and red visual indicators illustrate where users spent time on page, and were marked as the more engaging parts of the page.

Clickmaps/Overlay

Clickmaps or the Overlay displays where users are clicking on a page and helps to determine if users are finding the content they were looking for. And, if your design placed that content appropriately. Blue indicates less clicks on the page and red indicates more clicks. You may find users are not registering for an event on a page they are visiting, but the button to sign up for an event is placed at the right side of the page where the heatmap indicates no one is spending time. Simply moving the button onto a left panel on the page may help to increase those conversions.

Helpful tools

There are several mapping tools available in the market. Below are three of the more popular tools marketers use to help evaluate their websites.

• Crazy Egg: One of the many tools our subject matter experts (SMEs) at Geonetric like to use to is Crazy Egg. Crazy Egg is one of the most popular heatmapping tools used by healthcare marketers today. Using the mapping tools explained, Crazy Egg gives you deeper insights into the behavior of your website visitors.
• Clicktale: In addition to heatmapping features, Clicktale allows you to play back a user’s browsing session using their Session Replays feature. Seeing how a visitor moves through your pages allows you to discover what caught their eye and led them to conversion on the page. You have the ability to watch multiple session recording of a particular page or follow a unique visitor’s session from start to finish.
• Lucky Orange: Lucky Orange allows you to watch in real-time what users are doing on a page. From toggling menus, opening popups, to moving through the completion of a form, you can co-browse with the user. They provide this data in Realtime Dashboards and Realtime Visitor Maps.

Get the complete picture

Using the information gathered from these three maps together, along with the data you’re uncovering from GA, gives you a complete picture and better understanding of your site visitors. It will confirm where users are looking on a page, whether they are reading the page or simply scrolling through, and how interested they are in your CTA offered. Knowing these answers allows you to make changes to your site that will only improve their user experience on their next visit to your site.

To find out even more information on how to use mapping tools along with GA tools to improve your healthcare website’s user experience, listen to our webinar!

The good news is: you probably already have access to the tools you need to gauge how people are interacting with your hospital or healthcare system online. In this webinar, we cover ways you can measure how well your website is meeting the needs of users and your organization.

Watch this webinar and learn how to:

• Build trust with your community through positive experiences with your brand
• Use bounce rate, site search, and page path data to find areas where your site may not be meeting users’ expectations
• Set up events and goals in Google Analytics to better track user experience and prove value to key stakeholders at your organization
• Effectively measure, experiment, and repeat to find success

Watch this webinar and learn the answers to your most pressing questions as we share the results of our much-anticipated 2018 Healthcare Digital Marketing Trends Survey. With a record 249 healthcare organizations responding, plus additional input from industry vendors, you’ll not only discover the data you need to benchmark your organization in terms of team and budget size, you’ll also uncover insights that will help you plan for the future of your digital operations.

You will learn:

• How your organization’s online strategies and investments compare to others.
• How leading organizations plan, budget, and execute differently from their counterparts.
• Insights on marketing trends that will reinforce your position as the go-to resource at your organization on digital.
• The biggest barriers to digital marketing success.
• What your agency and vendor partners are saying is really holding your efforts back.

Download the eBook today and learn the latest in marketing technology trends, including:

• WordPress is cited as the most used CMS.
• Half of all respondents are either in the planning stages for a redesign or have a redesign in progress.
• Improving the overall user experience (UX) is far and away the primary motivator for organizations to redesign their website, but the continuing influence of mobile and changes to organizations’ brands are also significant factors.
• While personalization of the web experience is gaining momentum, the average respondent is employing very few personalization methods today.

Download the eBook today and learn insights, such as:

• While teams average nearly 13 FTEs for leaders, more than six for average, and nearly four for laggards, the distribution of team size is more complicated. Median team sizes are only four for leaders, three for average, and two for laggards.
• Relative to their team sizes, leaders invest particularly heavily on staff for strategy and analytics and more lightly in social media, SEO, and copywriting.
• Across all organizations, content development and analytics/CRM administration are the highest predicted growth areas.
• The areas most often completely outsourced are web development, web design, and video production.

Download the eBook today and learn the latest trends in digital strategy, including:

• Across all organizations, increased new patient recruitment, increased consumer awareness and engagement, and delivering a positive return on investment (ROI) are the top digital goals.
• The three areas organizations are most able to demonstrate the impact of digital marketing efforts are through improved consumer awareness, improved consumer engagement, and improved community relations.
• Leaders clearly outpace average and laggard organizations in their use of real-time marketing dashboards.
• Leaders see the inability to support online transactions with offline operations as a much bigger concern than other organizations.

Download the eBook today and learn insights, such as:

• Median annual digital marketing investments are between $50,000 and $300,000, while a few outliers pull the average annual investments much higher.
• Leaders outspend their counterparts, with 13% of leaders spending more than $1 million on digital marketing annually.
• Overall, 59% of respondents expect their digital marketing budgets to increase in the next 12 months, with only 5% expecting a decrease in digital budgets.
• More than half (54%) of digital budgets are growing in organizations where overall budgets are remaining the same, continuing the trend from previous years of investments shifting from traditional to digital.

Watch this webinar and learn how to strike the right balance between system-wide content and content unique to certain services, locations, and providers. You’ll learn the latest in health consumer search trends – particularly around location-oriented queries – and why user behavior should drive your content decisions.

After viewing the presentation, you’ll be able to:

• Understand your users and match your content to their needs
• Develop a user-focused content strategy that still works within your unique organizational framework
• Integrate an all-important location strategy into your overarching content strategy
• Use content strategy guidelines for long-term maintenance and governance

Why Location Strategy Matters

According to the Local Search Association, 63% of local searches are made by people who are undecided about a provider or retailer.

Meanwhile, Google has found that nearly two-thirds of smartphone users are more likely to purchase from companies whose mobile sites or apps customize to their location. This is especially telling as local searches – without the qualifier “near me” – have grown by over 150%.

While search engines and smartphones get better about pinpointing where users are so they can deliver the most relevant, local results, you can do your part to help both end users and search engines by adding thoughtful, location-based content.

When You Need a Location Strategy

Where are you putting content like this today?

• What parking lot visitors should use when visiting someone at Hospital A
• Which door to enter if a patient is visiting for a lab draw
• The hours for ICU, maternity, and general surgery visitors at Hospital B

Should this information live in the location profile? Maybe it should live in the service line? Maybe it lives in visitor information?

If your health system – like many growing health systems – has many locations, different types of facilities (hospitals, doctor offices, service-specific clinics, etc.), as well as unique services and amenities across locations, you need a location strategy.

Some Content Belongs, and Some Content Doesn’t

Location strategy is meant to answer questions about what information to include in a location profile, and how to structure that content in a user-friends (and search engine friendly) way.

Google Analytics data, keyword research, and your internal stakeholders can help guide the conversation about what content location profiles really need.

While the must-have information always includes address, hours, phone number, and a map for directions, unique services or patient experiences offered at that location are equally valuable to a user. This could include amenities, visiting hours, wayfinding, and other helpful, location-specific information.

Search Trends and User Behavior Drive Location Strategy

User-focused keyword research and user behavior are paramount in location strategy. User research may indicate that website visitors in one region search for localized information a certain way. Those locations in that region, then, need to emulate that behavior with optimized content.

How someone finds information regarding a location where they are having surgery next week (parking options, which door to enter, etc.) is a much different experience than someone seeking an urgent care closest to home (directions and after hours).

Similarly, keyword research can be used to help you differentiate one location from one region to another based on the types of keywords used in search. For example, if patients know your downtown neighborhood as “the Village,” this may dictate how you describe your “village” clinic location compared to other terms, like your city name or “downtown.” Not only will this improve your SEO, but it also provides a more accurate and seamless experience for site visitors who are looking for you.

What Do You Want Users to Know?

Cone Health Medical Group recently worked with us on a location strategy project which included content development and a custom design from their location profiles.

Our expert content strategists and writers helped the medical group with everything from the impactful welcome statement to the eye-catching call-to-action to the location-specific content, creating an experience that helps patients seeking care at each location.

The location profiles list the specific providers patients can expect to meet there, along with biographies of each provider – beyond their education and professional background. Patients can learn about their communication style, personal interests, and family life to gain a deeper knowledge of their potential doctor.

Each location, too, lists the specific services available at that location, from chronic health conditions treated, to preventive care and immunizations. Many of the services link back to service-level content that talks, in depth, how Cone Health Medical Group will manage your care or condition.

Meanwhile, the Patient Resources section on the Cone Health Medical Group location profiles provides specific information for each clinic, such as appointment guidelines, business hours (as they vary from clinic to clinic), and anything else that’s specific for visiting patients. Users can also access system-wide patient information through crosslinks.

The result? Cone Health Medical Groups location profiles have seen a 274% increase in page views and a nearly 40% decrease in bounce rate.

Start Planning Your Next Move

If you’re juggling multiple locations, patient questions, and location-specific needs let Geonetric help structure a location strategy that meets the needs of your organization, stakeholders, and most importantly, your site visitors and patients.