Last year’s predictions included consumerism and transparency. What’s in store for 2017? Get ready with a high-level look at the trends that will directly impact healthcare marketing in the coming year.

You’ll learn:

• The important “macro” trends and how they relate to healthcare marketing
• Where the latest marketing technology intersects
• How to weave these trends into your plan for 2017 and beyond

Whether you’re part of the group that’s currently on Drupal and are looking to redesign, or you’re considering Drupal for your upcoming platform change, there’s a lot to keep in mind when choosing the right partner.

Experience in Healthcare and Strategy are Keys To Success

There are many Drupal developers out there. In fact, the Drupal community is one of the largest in the world, boasting over 1M members. But not all are created equal – especially when it comes to building a website for a hospital, health system, or medical clinic. Here are five qualities to look for in your next partner that will help sure your redesign success.

1. Healthcare experience. Prospective patients expect very specific functionality on hospital websites, from provider directories to event calendars. It’s important to find a partner that can build the modules you need, and keep them up to date. You can’t afford to take risks when it comes to HIPAA and PCI compliance – one missed encryption could put you in violation, which is bad for your brand and your bottom line.
2. Object-oriented PHP developers. When interviewing developers or agencies, be sure to ask about PHP experience, particularly object-oriented PHP experience. There has been a big shift in the development world toward object-oriented programming, and it’s not a skillset every developer has. This is of particular importance if you are planning to build on Drupal 8, which has embraced object orientation.
3. Sophisticated content strategy expertise. Content strategy is important to all healthcare websites, regardless of what CMS they’re built on. You need to partner with an agency that will help you organize your site content in a way that clearly reflects your site visitor’s objectives, and build out the information architecture in Drupal. In our experience, Drupal’s content model can be confusing if you’re not familiar with the platform. If you work with an experienced strategist that can help you see the long-term vision before you start adding content into Drupal, it will help in the long run.
4. Structured content experience. One of Drupal’s greatest assets is the way it manages with structured content, the concept of organizing and treating digital content like modular data. Structured content becomes especially important for healthcare websites that want to optimize user experience through personalization. But structured content gets complicated quickly. Be sure to ask potential partners about their experience with metadata, taxonomy, dynamic content, microdata, and Schema.org.
5. Long-term partnership. There are Drupal implementers, and there are Drupal partners. We often hear from healthcare marketers who inherited a Drupal site and just can’t maintain it – even with a Drupal developer on staff. Drupal sites can be quite amazing, but they are also big and complex. Make sure you pick an agency that will be there to support you after go-live, especially if you’ve had custom modules built that will require updates and security patches.

Choosy Healthcare Marketers Choose Proven Healthcare Experience

Since the platform is open source, you’ll find many agencies around the country that have developers familiar with Drupal on staff. Just remember having a developer who is familiar with Drupal isn’t the same as having a team that understands the inherent complexity of healthcare websites.

In our experience, the most successful Drupal sites not only have an external, healthcare-experienced partner, they also have at least one team member in-house with Drupal experience that can assist with day-to-day changes.

Regardless of what direction you decide to go, don’t take chances. Hire – or partner with – developers who have proven experience in healthcare.

But does the prediction hold for healthcare marketing? Are we really going to see a hospital CMO’s technology budget outpace the CIO’s technology budget?

I don’t think so. Nor should it. After all, in the healthcare space technology budgets are also responsible for clinical care, operations and more. Given this, it’s difficult to imagine a future in healthcare where marketing spends more dollars on tech than IT does.

Even so, we’re still experiencing a sea change in healthcare marketing. Digital’s share of the marketing budget is growing (see table above), and part of this is clearly due to increasing investments in technology. From fancy new features (like personalization and predictive analytics), to whole new technology stacks that facilitate cohesive and contextual digital experiences, there’s no doubt that martech is putting pressure on marketing budgets across the industry. And as we dig into the healthcare-specific data we’ve gathered, we can understand this larger shift by looking at CRM adoption and using it as a lens through which we can see the bigger trends shaping marketing in healthcare.

CRM As Proxy For Martech Budget Increases

Our new research reveals that across the spectrum of industry-lagging, leading and average organizations, many have begun to embrace CRM systems. ~40% – ~50% already use one, and ~30% of respondents plan to implement CRM in the coming year.

But just having the technology available does little to ensure success. In order to see the promised results, healthcare organizations understand that these complex and technical marketing systems often need dedicated employees with specialized skillsets. Today only 11% of organizations report having a marketing FTE dedicated to CRM, but nearly 20% plan to hire in the upcoming year.

Clearly we’re investing more in the technologies that can move the needle, and expect to see the type of returns we can talk to our CFO about. To help drive this, we need to put the right people behind the systems. The pattern is familiar: implementation of the new marketing technology precedes increased specialist staffing. And both of these drive budget. If you haven’t yet encountered this, you will. And understand that this pattern repeats itself with other technology stacks. CRM is just a proxy for a whole range of sophisticated marketing technologies that require dedicated personnel and significant budget. And budget is what healthcare marketers increasingly cite as the biggest barrier to their marketing success. (For ‘leading’ organizations, budget is a close but notable second to ‘lack of time’.)

Again, this trend largely reflects what’s happening outside of healthcare. There’s plenty of research that speaks to it. For example, new B2B and B2C marketing research by Conductor (a marketing software vendor and agency) reveals that marketers identify ‘budget’ and ‘personnel’ as their top challenges. Furthermore, 70% of marketing executives plan to spend more on marketing technology in 2017 than they did in 2016. One quarter of them expect to spend 26%-50% more.

Interpreting “No Interest” In CRM

But what about organizations that are not yet investing in CRM? A casual glance at the data might lead you to conclude that 30% of healthcare organizations don’t even have CRM on their radars. Here’s my read on this.

A fair percentage of these organizations are cautious adopters. They see the potential in CRM and expect it to play a role in their future marketing strategy, but recognize that they are not currently ready for it. In many cases, they have internal retooling to do before tackling an integrated CRM system. Based on my conversations, I expect that in 2017 many of these organizations will begin developing their plans for adopting CRM in 2018.

For other organizations, CRM is already on the agenda…but the initiative is being driven by groups outside the marketing team. As such, there is a reporting bias in the survey data.

And lastly there are a few organizations out there for whom CRM is truly not part of any discernable future strategy. Many of these organizations likely struggle to keep pace with competitors who are able to successfully capitalize on their CRM and other marketing technology investments. They will rush to embrace CRM (or any new technology) only when it’s clear that they are losing market share. Unfortunately, martech like CRM is complex. Rushed and reactionary implementations seldom meet with success.

This Is Just The Beginning

Understanding that we’re in the midst of enormous change in marketing is certainly important and has a very real impact on your work and plans in 2017. We’ve discussed CRM as just one example of a number of new marketing technologies that are shaping marketing budgets in the new year. If you’re not investing in them and they aren’t part of your strategy, you’re likely going to face increased competition from organizations who are.

But the takeaway is not to rush out and adopt sophisticated new martech just because you want to keep pace. And neither is it to sit back and congratulate yourself for already having a few new tools in your martech stack.

Instead, understand that we’re just in the beginning of a huge marketing shift that’s going to shape the future of all our work. Along the way marketing teams will need to fundamentally change. Not just once, but again and again, ad infinitum. Yesterday’s media buyer is today’s programmatic advertiser. And tomorrow he or she will be something different again. The key will be to develop a marketing strategy that helps you identify opportunities and adapt as necessary in a space being constantly redefined by technology.

While your marketing technology budget may never actually outgrow your CIO’s technology budget, expect major and continued investments in martech infrastructure and capabilities going forward. And this will mean that marketing teams will increasingly look like IT teams in skills and specializations. In order to help the healthcare brand succeed through it all, the CMO will need to either drive the required change, or s/he will be driven over by it.

About The Research

Geonetric reached out to 217 healthcare organizations, agencies and vendors to identify the current trends in digital marketing. The full 2017 Digital Marketing Trends in Healthcare research report is freely available to all healthcare marketing professionals.

Healthcare Organizations Get Bigger

Healthcare providers continue to grow. They see the benefits of scaling their operations and the strategic advantages of aligning incentives by pulling more services under the same ownership. The challenge for marketers is to tell an increasingly complicated, ever-changing story in a way that helps consumers connect to the resources they need. Nowhere is that challenge more apparent than in the content strategy for the organization’s website(s).

Hospital Leaders Grapple with Uncertainty

The last few years have introduced more uncertainty to healthcare organizations than at any time in recent memory. A new administration means that we’ll see more uncertainty before we get any sort of long-term clarity. The reengineering of Obamacare will likely include themes such as improving services while reducing costs, increasing transparency to empower patients, and reducing regulation to foster more competition. All this places greater importance on consumer-focused marketing to build awareness, improve brand preference, and sell services.

Consumers Expect More Transparency

Transparency will grow considerably, but healthcare still has a long way to go. In our recent survey of digital marketing trends in healthcare, we learned that 42 percent of respondents plan to add star ratings and reviews to their websites in 2017. Providing this information rounds out a host of health system and government-driven efforts at transparency regarding quality of care (along with being a great vehicle for promoting providers). On the other hand, pricing transparency will have minimal growth due to the complexity of making this information relevant for consumers, but we will likely see more pressure for forward motion on this topic.

Consumers Rely on Mobile

Growth in mobile has been a hot topic for years now. Consumers are more sophisticated and expect more than just a responsive design. Google continues to make changes, including the separation of its search index for desktop and mobile. Great desktop experiences will no longer help your mobile search rankings.

Search Results Pages Keep Shifting

Search engines were once the card catalogs for the internet, but now they’re becoming encyclopedias by offering answers to everyday questions without sending users to the source material. In part, this comes from the adoption of personal assistants like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa, where searchers ask questions to get quick answers. While we still like organic search traffic to our websites, health consumers need accurate information from search engines about your providers, locations, and services. This is where the addition of microdata like Schema.org becomes essential to your SEO strategy.

Budgets Increase for Digital Marketers

Digital marketing budgets continue to surge. Current predictions show digital marketing spend will exceed TV ad revenues in 2017. Causes include an increase in time spent online, a growth of mobile advertising, and a cost increase for online ads. But online ads might not be enough as ad blockers become more common. Corporations across industries are considering other techniques, like native advertising and permission marketing, to cut through the clutter.

Consumers Control their Content

We’ve seen a massive shift to on-demand digital media. Getting in front of consumers requires engaging content, and storytelling is a common tactic among effective marketers. Podcasts, videos, and even Snapchat stories are proving to be valuable ways to connect with tech-savvy consumers, especially younger generations. Instead of generating lots of content, healthcare organizations will need to get strategic about the channels they use.

Marketers Expand their Technology Stack

Healthcare marketing organizations are starting to embrace the growing role and complexity of technology, although we haven’t seen the same movement toward Chief Marketing Technologists that is happening in other industries. Marketing automation and CRM platforms are top priorities for 2017. These technology solutions are catalysts of massive change for marketing operations, but far too many health systems look at them as new tools to execute on business as usual.

Listen to Our On-demand Webinar to Learn More

Ready to take a deeper dive into these trends and see what’s worthy of your time and money? Listen to our on-demand webinar to learn more and see where they could impact your plan for 2017 and beyond.

If your organization is like most hospitals and health systems, you need to redesign your website every three to four years. Sometimes redesign projects are just an update to the look and feel of the site; other times they require an upgrade to another CMS platform.

Either way, finding the right partner for your project is essential for creating a site you, your site visitors and your stakeholders love.

Before you start writing the RFP and contacting potential partners, read this whitepaper to make the process as smooth as possible.

In this white paper, you’ll learn how to:

• Get started by understanding your web goals, current web presence, stakeholders, and resources available.
• Write an effective RFP (we even include a sample RFP outline)
• Create a short-list of RFP agency recipients
• Evaluate RFP responses and review proposals
• Set up an on-site presentation
• Find a partner who delivers value