2018 Healthcare Digital Marketing Trends Survey

Download this eBook and:

  • Learn what healthcare marketing leaders said were their top goals and challenges in 2018
  • Better understand the state of digital marketing in healthcare in 2018, and how it’s shaping today’s landscape
  • Benchmark your organization – where you were in 2018 and where you are today

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Access the 2019 Report

See the data from over 300 organizations — more than 260 hospitals and health systems and more than 40 agency partners — who responded to the 2019 edition of the survey, the largest ever.

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5 Tips to Help Healthcare Marketers Overcome Objections and Implement Provider Ratings & Reviews

How to get internal buy-in for physician ratings & reviews

Even though you’re armed with the latest data and all the right talking points – like the fact health consumers are using ratings and reviews today to make decisions – you’re either worried it might not be enough or your pitch is already falling flat. In our experience, you’re right to be concerned. This type of initiative – one in which your own organization opens the door to a transparent view of a doctor’s practice and bedside manner for all to see – is bound to elicit an emotional response.

Knowing that emotions can often play a role in how doctors and other key stakeholders react will help you adjust your sales pitch in a way that can increase your likelihood of success.

Tip #1: Start with empathy

Physicians are apt to be concerned about their own health system or hospital posting potentially negative reviews about them on organization-owned digital properties. It does seem counter-intuitive …. “Why in the world would marketing put negative information about our own doctors on our organization’s website? Are you out of your mind?” …. is an actual question I’ve heard. It’s a valid concern, and one that requires not just data but a serious dose of empathy to overcome. After all, no one likes to have negative information shared about them, especially in a public forum.

When you talk with doctors, acknowledge all of the stress they’re already under and just how thinly stretched they are (EMRs, patient satisfaction goals, RVUs, spend reduction plans, and on and on). They may see ratings and reviews as just one more thing on an already long list of stressors that are taking the joy out of medicine for many. Start by acknowledging this reality, and show how what you’re proposing will help improve their business, not detract from it. Proactively showing empathy can help to temper initial negative knee-jerk reactions, and set the stage to share critical data that will have a better chance of being well-received.

Tip #2: Use data to your advantage

Being a late adopter does have its benefits – and one of them is that there’s a lot more data at your fingertips! Use it to your advantage.

Once you’ve shown empathy for your doctor’s overflowing plates and acknowledged their concerns, proactively highlight data that proves that despite initial internal concerns, and even while posting negative reviews, other organizations have had success. Reach out to a few colleagues whose health systems already have a ratings and reviews program in place, and ask them for insight and advice – as well as their approval to use a testimonial or two that will help your case.

Point to as many success examples as you can. Show how this initiative is resulting in more new patients, improved satisfaction, and/or in more repeat patient visits at other organizations.

You can also share how critical it is to own your own story. Provider reviews are out there and they’re not going away. Instead of letting the conversation happen around you, you can take control by publishing this information on your own site. Most third-party review sites have a relatively low numbers of reviews, but your organization already has thousands of patient satisfaction surveys from real patients that, when combined, are statistically significant. Publishing that data will help you own and manage the story by presenting an accurate picture.

You’ll also want to underscore and clearly articulate the tie-in with Patient Experience initiatives, which leads to tip number three.

Tip #3: Partner with patient experience

In many organizations, pitching your ratings and reviews program as a marketing-only initiative can doom you to failure before you take your first step – especially if marketing isn’t getting the respect it deserves. Get your Patient Experience team on board first, and then sell the ratings and reviews initiative together, in partnership. If doctors see ratings and reviews as a marketing “ploy,” (and some will, however far from the truth that is) they will be far less likely to buy in.

Tying ratings and reviews to patient experience goals and initiatives is a natural fit – it’s something they’re already being held accountable for and may even hit them directly in their pocketbooks.

Go into your internal sales efforts as partners, focused on helping your doctors and organization achieve goals they’re already being held accountable to, and you’re already on the path to success.

Tip #4: Find a physician ally

While some doctors aren’t going to get in the ratings and reviews boat with you no matter how hard you try, there’s likely to be several who are excited about the initiative. Identify a few – especially those who are already official leaders or key influencers – who’ve been supportive of marketing and who respect the Patient Experience team, and meet with them first to get their input and try out your pitch.

Getting even just one influential physician ally on your side will be incredibly helpful as you sell the initiative to the larger organization, particularly in clinical or division meetings when tough questions are raised, emotions are raw, and you’re on the spot. A physician ally is always likely to jump in and help answer questions from their peers. And having a peer who’s already on board can go a long way to quell other doctors’ fears and objections.

The same is true for executives. If there’s an executive you can get on board early, you’ll benefit from that alliance.

Tip #5: Go in with logistics figured out

One thing leaders and doctors will surely ask you right away is how you will determine which patient comments get posted and which ones won’t. Make sure you know what criteria you’re going to use and be prepared to share it.

Additionally, it’s important to know what your plan is if a doctor disagrees with a comment that’s been posted. What recourse do they have? Make sure you’ve worked with your Patient Experience, Legal, and/or Compliance teams to draft an initial escalation plan. Who is the final decision maker? How do physicians submit a complaint? Bring the plan with you to your meetings and ask your leaders and doctors for their feedback.

You may also hear concerns about not knowing what the data looks like before it goes live. To help quell fears, you can test the addition of ratings and reviews first on your staging site, letting doctors and staff have the opportunity for review and testing first before it rolls out to the public.

Doing all of this up-front work will show that you’ve thought through potential concerns proactively, you’re respecting their time, and it may also save you from having another round of meetings.

Expect some resistance!

As a former healthcare marketer who sold this exact project to a system with more than 300 employed providers, here’s my biggest tip: Don’t expect immediate buy-in. In fact, anticipating a negative response and acknowledging the validity of it will help set you up for the greatest chance of success. While prep work will take a lot of time and up-front effort, planning and anticipating effectively will be well worth it. And don’t underestimate the value of physician and executive allies. After all, the best defense is a great offense.

At Geonetric, we’re all about helping our clients develop and execute on their digital strategies. If you need help selling the value of online physician ratings and reviews at your organization contact us today!

How UTM Codes Help Healthcare Marketing Campaign Success

What are UTM parameters?

Also known as UTM codes, UTM parameters are snippets of code that are appended to URLs in order to track different sources of traffic to your website from various advertising and marketing channels and tactics. They are extremely useful for tracking the success of campaigns and the various elements that comprise them.

When should I use UTMs?

Google Analytics automatically categorizes different types of traffic to your site into broad categories such as organic, paid, social, email, direct, referral and others. This is helpful information overall.

But often you need to get a granular understanding of which mediums and sources are driving traffic to your campaign landing pages or other pages on your site to understand your campaign’s success. UTM parameters can help!

Using UTMs for each of your various campaign components lets you see how much traffic each one of them is generating, and how valuable that traffic is.

This means that if you have Google Analytics Goals set up on your site, using UTM codes lets you see what rate traffic from different campaign sources is converting on your site. For example, you can see how much traffic your radio ad is generating vs. a display ad for the same campaign, and of those two, which one is generating the most conversions (i.e., a specific campaign goal, or high-level site goals such as online appointment requests).

What else can UTM codes do for you?

For purposes of example, the fictional Benefit Health heart care team wants to track the various traffic they’re sending to their heart campaign landing page (www.benefithealth.org/heart). Our campaign elements include:

  • Facebook ads
  • Display ads
  • Direct mail
  • Radio

Creating a UTM code for each ad type allows us to understand which ones are generating traffic for the website, as well as the most conversions. How? We’ll need to add UTM code to the end of each landing page URL.

For things like direct mail or on-air radio ads, a vanity URL will redirect to a specific UTM code so they can be appropriately tracked. Vanity URLs are simiple, easy-to-remember, and brand-friendly URLs that redirect to a specific page, like a campaign landing page, of your website.

Here’s how it breaks down using our heart campaign example:

Facebook

benefithealth.org/heart?utm_source=Facebook%20Ad%20&utm_medium=Social%20Media

Display ads (local newspaper)

benefithealth.org/heart?utm_source=Gazette%20Daily%20News&utm_medium=Display%20Ad

Direct mail Vanity: benefithealth.org/beatinghearts

benefithealth.org/beatinghearts?utm_source=Beating%20Hearts%20Mailer&utm_medium=Direct%20Mail

Radio (local station) Vanity: benefithealth.org/hearts

www.benefithealth.org/beatinghearts?utm_source=KZIA&utm_medium=Radio&utm_campaign=Beating%20Hearts

How do I create a UTM code?

It’s easy! Google offers a free UTM code generator, which they call a Campaign URL Builder. Here’s an example we built with our fictional Benefit Health heart campaign:

Where do I find UTM code data in Google Analytics?

In Google Analytics, you’ll find traffic that’s tracked with UTM codes under the Acquisition > Campaigns > All Campaigns section. You can track UTM codes with social, emails, advertisements, and more.

Learn more about how to view UTM code data in Google Analytics.

Tips for using UTM codes

When establishing UTM codes for your campaign tracking, it’s a good idea to keep the following tips in mind:

  • Always use a consistent naming convention for your campaign mediums, ie, “radio,” “display,” etc. This allows you to view all traffic from those mediums in totality, instead of just by campaign.
  • Capitalization matters. If you have one campaign medium of ‘PPC’ and another one of ‘ppc’, that data will not aggregate but instead will be two separate data sets.
  • When generating your UTM code, make sure you’re using the URL (or the vanity URL for offline traffic) of the landing page your traffic will be directed to.
  • Make sure to give your UTM codes to agencies, media companies and others who are placing display advertising on your behalf, producing and sending email, etc. so they can attach the UTM link to your ad(s) or email campaigns.
  • Avoid using UTM parameters as a way to track clicks on links on your website. This is because clicking on the UTM parameter will start a new session in analytics, resulting in inaccurate data, such as inflated sessions, increased bounce rate, etc. Instead, use event tracking in Google Analytics to track clicks on links.
  • Don’t add UTM parameters to URLs that redirect, such as a 301 redirect. Redirects will strip out UTM parameters.
  • Keep in mind the purpose of your campaign when evaluating shifts in spending based on UTM data. If your campaign goal is to drive awareness, then focusing less on conversions, and more on the amount of traffic generated by different campaign elements may be better metrics to help you evaluate effectiveness.

Need help? We’ve got your back

If you have questions about tracking and reporting on campaign results, Geonetric’s expert team of digital marketers is here to help. Contact Geonetric today to learn more about our digital services, including website redesigns, content strategy and development, SEO services, and more.

Technical SEO: Overlooked But Crucial to Your Hospital’s Digital Strategy

In this helpful whitepaper, you’ll learn easy-to-fix, mid-level, and advanced technical SEO elements that you can tackle to improve your site’s performance in search, including:

  • Page titles and meta descriptions
  • Page headers or H1s
  • Duplicate content
  • Schema.org markup
  • Image optimization
  • Canonical tags
  • Redirects, and more

 

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Four Keys to Creating a Winning SEO Strategy for Healthcare

SEO is like whack-a-mole. As soon as you apply pressure to one area, another pops up vying for your attention. Sometimes it’s hard to know which tactics are the most valuable – and which ones, if ignored, will cause the most harm. In this no-nonsense webinar you’ll learn the optimization areas you need to focus on – technical, on-page, and external – and discover what’s holding your site back and what to do about it. You’ll also get a deep dive into why measurement is critical to ongoing optimization success, as long as you make small adjustments, measure, and repeat.

Watch now and learn how to:

  • Identify the most common technical SEO errors and how to fix them
  • Use keyword research to really impact your optimization efforts
  • Focus on long-tail and localized keywords
  • Write page titles that encourage click-through rates
  • Recognize external sites and applications that could be affecting your SEO
  • Implement measurement and iterative changes to achieve long-term success

Five Ways Technical SEO Impacts Your Hospital Website

What is technical SEO?

Technical search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of optimizing features of your site aside from the on-page content. It comes in many shapes and sizes, which you can learn more about in our technical SEO whitepaper.

As a healthcare marketer, it’s important to know five vital ways technical SEO can impact your hospital or health system website.

1. It impacts search engines finding, indexing, and ranking your website

Most importantly, technical SEO can either help or inhibit search engines from finding and indexing your site. For example, tags in your code containing “nofollow” and “noindex” could mean your site won’t be found or crawled by search engines at all, meaning users may never find you from organic search.

Likewise, not properly redirecting broken or unavailable links, or providing canonical tags, means you’re not only stopping users in their tracks from getting to content they need but preventing search engines from indexing the right pages. Failure to solidify redirects can be especially confusing for search engine crawlers.

2. It influences users entering your website

Did you know that page titles and meta descriptions are part of technical SEO? They are, and like the rest of the content on your website, they’re integral to your users’ (and search engines’) experiences.

The page title and meta description are most commonly seen on the search engine results page (SERP). Page titles have a limit of around 65 to 70 characters and are a crucial element for search engines to read and understand your site. Your page titles should be unique and specific, just like the content on each page.

Page descriptions are also an important element for users. With a new limit of around 300 characters, this copy should serve as “storefront” text, giving a transparent, accurate description of what the page is about to encourage users to click. And the click-through rate impacts your search rankings.

3. It helps search engines understand what your site and its pages are all about

Schema.org is a popular phrase these days, and for good reason. Schema markup is optional text you can add to the backend of your pages to help search engines understand the content (and context) of your hospital’s website. It’s especially helpful for content like locations, provider profiles, and service pages.

4. It can impact your page speed – which affects everyone

We’ve all seen them: The pop-up boxes or pages that give us a “countdown” to redirect us to another page. These are called “meta refresh” and they can hurt your load speed, which impacts user experience and search engine indexing.

Photo sizes, too, can drastically reduce page speed, which search engines take note of when ranking your site. In the era of mobile devices and accelerated mobile pages (AMP), users want content fast and aren’t willing to stick around for a photo to load.

5. It can affect the accessibility of your website on all devices

Like the page load speed above and the redirect issues we mentioned previously, all of these elements can affect the accessibility of your website on devices of all sizes.

As the mobile-only user base grows, making sure your site is findable on search, indexed appropriately for your market, and easy to use and understand for potential patients and families is integral to your hospital’s digital strategy.

Don’t be afraid to ask for help

If managing all of the nitty-gritty details of technical SEO is a tough to-do item to tackle, ask for help. Technical SEO is something any marketing team could share, and certainly something you can ask your partner vendor or agency to assist you in accomplishing.

If you’re looking for a vendor to help your hospital or healthcare website meet and exceed technical SEO expectations, contact Geonetric today.

How to Optimize the Metadata on Your Healthcare Website

Download this helpful white paper today and learn how to:

  • Use keyword research to write smart metadata
  • Organize your keywords by user intent, including how to best use long-tail and localized keywords, and apply those findings to your metadata
  • Follow best practices when writing page titles and meta descriptions
  • Monitor your efforts and make improvements

 

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How to Align Digital and Organizational Goals in Healthcare Marketing

Small Tasks Add Up to Big Impacts

“You’ve got to think about big things while you’re doing small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction.”

This quote from American author Alvin Toffler couldn’t be more true.

Small things can add up to positive big impacts – or, they can add up to the wrong big impacts, to nothing at all. That’s why it’s critical to take the time to consider whether the day-to-day tasks you and your team are doing are the right ones. They should be purposeful and should stem directly from your digital strategy.

But first, you need to ensure your digital strategy aligns with your organization’s goals. Here’s why.

Strategic Alignment Automatically Sets You Up to Do Work that Creates Value

It sounds simple, but in practice many organizations don’t take the step to align digital and organizational strategy. While it does require up-front work, purposeful alignment is the most effective way to ensure your daily digital tasks are creating value for your organization and your end users.

Your plan should outline the top organizational goals, then outline your digital strategies and clearly show how they align with your organization’s objectives. Your tactics should directly support each of your digital strategies (and ideally should be measurable), which then form your daily work.

For example: If one of your organization’s key initiatives is to grow primary care volume, that could translate into a digital goal of increasing online promotion of primary care doctors. Specific tactics could include things like: adding ratings and reviews to physician website profiles; running a PPC campaign; expanding provider profiles with additional user-focused content, such as video; or implementing online appointment scheduling.

If you feel like you’re constantly spinning your wheels and aren’t sure why, taking the time to assess whether what you’re doing on a daily basis aligns with your digital plan, and in turn your organizational initiatives, will help you start to omit the things that aren’t adding value.

Use Your (Aligned) Digital Plan to Discern the Value of New Requests & Technologies

Once aligned, everything you and your team does will become more purposeful by virtue of that alignment. And it becomes much easier to assess the value (or lack thereof) of new requests and new digital trends and technologies.

As new requests for projects come in, and as you’re evaluating whether new technologies and trends are worth pursuing use your aligned digital plan as your guide, and ask these questions:

  • What organizational strategy(ies) does this support?
  • How does this fit into my digital plan?
  • Will it create value for our customers? Can I measure the impact? If so, how?
  • If I/we don’t do this, what will happen?

While it’s certainly not realistic to move all non-strategic work off of your plate, having a digital plan that’s aligned to organizational strategy is the most effective way to ensure the work you do have control over is making the biggest positive impact. And that’s a big win for your organization and your customers!

At Geonetric, we’re all about helping our clients develop and execute on their digital strategies. If you need help aligning your digital strategy with your organization’s goals and objectives to create maximum value, contact us today!

WordPress Survival Skills for Healthcare Marketers

You’ll learn best practices on how to:

  • Approch the project from a strategic perspective
  • Think about future goals and how to ensure the platform will work for you down the road
  • Navigate page builders
  • Choose plug-ins
  • Secure your site
  • Manage URLs responsibly

 

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Three Physician SEO Tactics to Boost Your Providers’ Rankings

Build Rich, Engaging Provider Profiles

There is no single, step-by-step recipe for creating the right provider profile. From the goals of your organization to your competition to your physicians themselves, many components influence how you market your care team.

Regardless of your unique situation, there are a few foundational pieces that will help connect those potential patients searching for new providers with your profiles.

1. Write User-first On-page Content

Seventy-seven percent of patients start their search for care online, and search engines rank content that best matches their queries. Original, user-focused, high-quality content is the foundation to successful search ranking for web pages, blogs, and more. The same goes for provider profiles.

Choosing a physician is an important experience in your patients’ journey, so a profile is a chance for patients to connect with someone who can meet their primary needs. Patients often choose doctors by asking:

  • Do they accept my insurance?
  • Do they treat my conditions?
  • Do they accept new patients?
  • Are they accessible? (Addresses help people know how close the office is for walking, public transportation, or driving. Hours let patients know if they can make appointments that fit their work/life schedule.)

But patients also take that search to another level, known as the “selection phase.” While fundamental information like insurance, accessibility, and new patients are important, patients are also looking for someone they can connect with. Likeability, referrals and ratings, and bedside manner are important factors.

Your provider profiles do more than just tell patients what insurances are welcome, or what hours the doctor is in his or her office. Your profiles are building a connection with someone on the other side of the screen.

When considering on-page profile content, consider helpful elements such as:

  • Provider ratings and reviews, or other patient recommendations
  • “Get to know me” videos from the provider
  • Philosophy of care
  • Hobbies and outside-the-office activities
  • Personal biography
  • Published works or blog posts

These are all important factors for patients seeking a new provider for themselves or a loved one and can greatly influence their decision to pick up the phone and schedule an appointment. See how Bryan Health in Nebraska did exactly this, increasing traffic and engagement with their provider profiles.

2. Cement a Strong Technical SEO

Well-written, engaging profiles carry significant value to search engines, but you’ll also want to make sure your technical elements are in place.

At the end of the day, Google, Bing, and other search engines are still computing machines, relying on certain pieces to deliver a full experience to the human searcher. Alongside building great content, build a great organic SEO experience with:

  • Structuring simple, friendly URLs. Don’t let jargon and keywords throw you off. Users (and search engines) like simplicity in URL structure.
  • Writing unique, complete page titles and descriptions. Your page title and meta description drive a lot of traffic from the search engine results page (SERP), so invest in unique copy for each.
  • Implementing Schema.org semantic markup. Ideally, you’re either including your profile with “person” markup or your CMS includes this automatically, like VitalSite Provider Directory.
  • Canonical meta tags. This is critical if a given physician profile can appear at more than one URL.
  • Ensuring your profiles aren’t blocked by robots.txt. Make sure you’re not prohibiting your profiles from being crawled.
  • Optimizing images, CSS, and JavaScript (if applicable). Page speed matters in today’s search world, so make sure your profiles load quickly and are easy to reach on all devices.

Most of these elements are easy to check and correct, but others might need more specialized knowledge. If you’re having a hard time getting your provider profiles cleaned up for great SEO returns, consider engaging an SEO professional to keep your team focused on day-to-day priorities.

3. Strategize Off-page Tactics

Despite the evolution and algorithms by search engines over the years, high-quality backlinks to your provider profiles is still an important factor in ranking results. If your organization is blogging, consider linking to provider profiles where relevant. Better yet, interview your providers and include those interviews in the blog, to make the link and context even stronger.

And if your organization hasn’t already, be sure to optimize business listings for doctors and office locations. Claimed and accurate listings have a major influence on your patients, and voice search relies on accurate, claimed listings for local searches like directions and phone numbers.

Likewise, don’t ignore your Google Reviews or Yelp, where patients and visitors may leave comments to your hospital or office. Responding to these promptly and thoughtfully have a great influence on your brand awareness in the community.

Social media marketing, too, can be influential for your providers’ rankings. Some organizations encourage their doctors and providers to manage their own professional social media profiles, such as Facebook, to engage with patients off-site. Their Facebook backlinks to their provider profile, adding another referral traffic path.

Bonus tip: Measure it all

As you incorporate these elements to your provider profiles, measure how things are going. Keep an eye on organic traffic, mobile use, page load speeds, and session duration. More importantly, keep event tracking connected to each profile’s call-to-action to monitor your return on investment (ROI).

Help Their Patient Journey

Your provider profiles are a great place to not only showcase your incredible care team, but deliver content to patients that support and inspire their journey and improves their association with your brand and organization.

If you’re looking for more tips on promoting your physicians, check out our Physician Marketing eBook.