Sometimes in our rush to do “stuff” or chase down the next great idea, we lose focus of the fact that we’re choosing the work we do based on how clever it sounds and not by how it supports the patient journey.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. One of the most important things we can do to promote our organization’s physicians is to take the time to understand how patients actually choose the physicians they do. It’s far from random. In fact, there’s a model and a process at work, and this has implications for your physician promotions tactics and strategies. So before you spend more time doing the things you’re already doing to bring new patients in the door, it’s worth taking a moment to understand how your activities actually intersect with how patients choose the physicians they do. Investing here can help you tighten your tactics and expose new opportunities.

In our work helping hospitals and health systems market their physicians, we’ve developed a working model that we use. It helps us focus and identify opportunities for improvement at client organizations. And now you can use it to help you with your own work.

The first thing to understand is this: Patients engage in two distinct but related activities when selecting a physician. The first activity is called Physician Qualification, and it reflects the assessment by the (prospective) patient of whether or not a given physician is even a potential option for consideration. Physicians that fail to qualify for one reason or another are dismissed from further consideration. Those who do qualify continue to be assessed, and may ultimately be selected for an appointment.

Based on our research and experience, for non-emergency, insured patients, the most important criteria patients use to qualify a physician is whether or not they accept their insurance. If not, patients will usually move in favor of physicians who they know they can work with.

After they’ve ascertained that the physician will accept their insurance, patients commonly seek to further qualify physicians based on the following criteria:

• Treats Relevant Conditions: Patients qualify physicians by whether or not they treat their conditions. For example, one generally wouldn’t consider a nephrologist when seeking treatment for a dermatological condition.
• Accepts New Patients: Most patients will not consider a physician if they learn that he or she is not accepting new patients.
• Accessible by Proximity: This is a subjective measure, but it is often important. Barring niche specialization, a physician who accepts a patient’s insurance but is seven hours away is likely not going to be considered against other physicians who practice closer. Don’t assume that only great distances preclude a physician from consideration. Certain demographics may not have access to reliable transportation, may be limited to physicians who are accessible by public transportation, or may not be able to leave their jobs for daytime appointments.

As you can see, patients use each of the qualifying criteria to quickly winnow the pool of potential physicians to a subset that’s worthy of further consideration. And this can have important implications for your physician promotion work. Ask yourself this: Can patients quickly discover what insurance programs your physicians work with? If not, are you losing patients? Can patients quickly identify whether or not the physician can treat their conditions? Sometimes health organizations assume specialty information alone conveys this, but often specialty titles don’t help consumers. Take a hard look at your physician promotion efforts, work through the considerations patients use to qualify physicians, and ask yourself if you’re actually leading patients down the path to conversion by helping them qualify relevant physicians. An honest evaluation here can pay dividends.

As mentioned previously, Physician Qualification is just the first step in the process of selecting a physician. The second step, Physician Selection, also has ramifications for what you do. To learn more about this and other ways to effectively promote your physicians online, watch our on-demand Physician Promotion webinar.

From a marketer’s perspective, good web content does two things:

First, it helps people find you. Google and other search engines rank only pages with valuable, relevant, high-quality content.

Then, it drives action. Or, in web speak, it converts. It turns your site visitors into patients, donors, job applicants — or whatever else fits your specific goals.

The benefits of good content are clear. But what is good content? How do you know what to include? Where do you start?

The good news is, when it comes to improving content, you don’t have to tackle your entire site at once. Pick a single section — or even a particular page — and start there. Follow these five steps to maximize the power of your content.

1 – Define a Purpose

You’re already setting goals for your website as a whole. That big picture strategy is important. But don’t stop there. Drill down to the page level. Know why you’re creating (or maintaining) each page of content. Maybe you want to boost registration in your pregnancy classes. Or recruit new physicians. Or ease patients’ anxiety by telling them what to expect at an upcoming medical appointment.

Before you type a single word, ask yourself: What am I trying to achieve by publishing this content?

2 – Focus, Focus, Focus

Once you’ve defined the goal for a page, consider what information needs to be included to reach that goal. Usually that means asking yourself:

• What does the user want to know?
• What do you want or need the user to know?
• What do you want the user to do next?

Write to answer those questions, and only those questions. Anything else clutters up the page and distracts from your main message. And that hurts your return on investment.

3 – Include a Call to Action

You know what you want your users to do after visiting your web page. How do you guide them to that action? Don’t leave them hanging. Tell them. Include a call to action. It’s the single most effective tactic to convert your website visitors into customers.

Make that conversion easy for your users by presenting just one call to action. You’ll avoid losing them to decision fatigue or confusion over what to do next.

4 – Explain Yourself

When you encounter health care terminology day after day, it’s easy to forget that not everyone understands the industry and its terminology the way you do. Always take time to tell your readers exactly what you want them to know.

Use language that’s easily understandable and add clear explanations to medical terms. When you highlight advanced technology, a new treatment option or a prestigious award, do it in a way that focuses on the benefit to your users. Tell them what’s in it for them.

One way to pinpoint the benefit is to put yourself in the user’s shoes and continually ask yourself: “So what?” Or “What’s in it for me?”

For example, let’s say your orthopedic surgeons offer minimally invasive knee replacement surgery.

So what? What does that mean?

“The surgeon doesn’t have to cut as much of the tissue surrounding your knee.”

So what? What’s in it for me?

“As a patient, you’ll experience less pain and scarring, and recover more quickly.”

Now you’ve hit on the user benefit. And you’ve changed your focus. You’re speaking directly to your users, writing about what’s important them.

If you can’t figure out a way to tell your users “so what,” it probably doesn’t belong on your web page.

5 – Write for the Web

Finally, if you want to create content that converts, you have to create content that people are going to read. That means following general best practices for writing for the web. Learn more in our eBook, Web Writing for Healthcare.

Or get in touch with our team of expert content writers and strategists for help creating content that engages and converts.

A witty (but honest) person once said, “Opinions are like bellybuttons: Everybody’s got one.” It’s true, and your organization has a lot of folks with bellybuttons – your patients, your C-suite, and everyone in-between.

Asking these stakeholders about their experience on your organization’s website is an important piece in any redesign. Understanding their opinions about what works on the current site, what doesn’t, and even what a successful redesign would mean to them is vital for understanding their opinions and creating a great user experience.

But talking to stakeholders isn’t something you can only do once. It’s something you should do regularly as you continue to maintain your web presence.

How to Talk to Stakeholders

At Confab 2015 in Minneapolis, a presentation by Anne Haines really hit home. As a reference librarian for Indiana University Libraries, she compared seeking out information from a library patron to seeking answers from your stakeholders.

“Stakeholders often can’t define what they want, but why they need it,” Haines said. And she’s right. It’s our jobs as marketers to discover the “what” and define the “why.”

Choose the Right Channels

When opening the door to those conversations, choose the right channel.

• In-person interviews – This is the most preferred method, and the best way to give and receive body language that shows a willingness to learn and hear someone’s opinions, thus building a better relationship with people inside and outside your organization. From focus groups to phone calls, in-person interviews allows for follow-up questions and the chance to explain project goals.
• Surveys – If time is of the essence, surveys can alleviate scheduling difficulties. If you want your web visitors’ points of view, check out survey tools like iPerceptions. The only disadvantage to surveys is you lose the opportunity to ask follow-up questions on the spot.

Asking the Right Questions

According to Haines, there are three things we should try to find out from stakeholders before we begin tackling their goals and requests:

1. The situation they’re in – what is driving their requests?
2. The gaps in their understanding – perhaps they aren’t sure what they need, or why it’s needed.
3. The intended uses – what is the end goal for their request?

Closed-ended questions (yes/no, or limited multiple choice) can steer the conversation and keep it focused if it’s running long or getting off track. They also give stakeholders a chance to consider the limited but viable options you have for them.

Open and more neutral questions allow stakeholders to expand on their thoughts, and these queries open up doors for conversations, future goal setting and follow-up questions to reiterate what you heard.

Start with Stakeholders

If you think it’s time to redesign, be sure to start the process by talking to your stakeholders. After all, it’s their experience that matters!

If you don’t think your team has the time to tackle interviews, let Geonetric give you a hand. Our team members are pros at stakeholder interviews and surveys, and we have an arsenal of other nifty tools like heat mapping. Plus, you’ll get access to loads of content strategy and content development resources – and of course, stellar web design.

In May 2015, Mary Meeker, a partner at Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, presented her annual “State of the Internet” report. Her epic deck of 196 slides covered a huge range of trends, but there are several key takeaways for healthcare marketers. Here’s what you need to know.

Think Mobile First

This is the one insight that drives everything else: Consumers now spend more time with mobile and tablet devices than with their desktops or laptops (slide 14).

We need to change our defaults. It’s time to start thinking about mobile first. If you’re talking about your site’s homepage layout, start by discussing the mobile experience. If you’re making edits to a service line page, preview the changes on your phone.

In doing that, what you experience may be a bit painful. As an industry, we’ve learned a lot in the last few years about creating responsive sites and working with mobile browsers. Even if you’re thinking “we already have a responsive site,” it may be time to think about how well that site is performing. There may be opportunities to improve everything from page load times to the hierarchy and readability of content on the page.

From a design perspective, touch user interfaces are now setting the standard for how we organize interactions. The flat design and outlined iconography of Apple’s iOS 7, Windows 7’s Metro design language, and, most recently, Google’s Material Design principles have all had a huge impact on the design of websites and online interactions beyond touch devices.

For more insight, as well as specific examples of mobile and social trends, watch Geonetric’s webinar on web design trends for healthcare.

Speak Where Others Listen

If you’re planning a marketing campaign, this shift toward mobile is even more critical. First off, Meeker reports that advertisers are still spending too much on print and TV, and not enough on internet and, especially, mobile (slide 16). Ad spend is still skewed to print media, while consumers are spending their time online.

If you want to put your ad money where the consumers are, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest would be happy to help. The increasing range of direct response advertising formats on these social platforms (slide 21) provides compelling options for getting actionable messages in front of the right audience.

But, before you rush in, the cross-channel campaigns we’re launching for our healthcare clients show traffic driven by social media and ads is skewed even more strongly toward touch-based devices. If you’re not paying close attention to the mobile experience on your landing pages, you’re wasting money and missing out on a large part of your audience.

Expect Disruption

According to Meeker, healthcare has only been 25% impacted by the Internet (slide 8), lagging other areas of business that have already had to adapt. That leaves a lot of change ahead of us. Some of the most immediate shifts are already underway in new care delivery models, from connected health to retail approaches (slide 185).

Trends in healthcare payment driven by the Affordable Care Act (slides 102, 185), along with increased costs (slide 186) are leading toward more consumer spending on healthcare. As a category of personal spending, in fact, healthcare experienced the highest percentage growth (11%) of any consumer spending category in 2014 when compared to 2013 (slide 76). This choice represents both an opportunity for current providers, as well as a risk for disruption.

As consumers choose how to spend that money, their expectations are being set by experiences with other industries. For example, user-generated reviews, while not new, are playing a growing role in how consumers make purchasing decisions. Meeker calls out a 140% year-over-year increase in user reviews for Airbnb (slide 64). Last year, a Bright Local survey indicated that “88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation.” It remains to be seen if that holds as true for a pediatrician as for a dry cleaner, but there is no doubt that the opinions and experiences shared by strangers are affecting consumers’ choices on a daily basis.

To learn more about promoting physicians in light of these trends, make sure to view our webinar on physician promotion.

Seize the Opportunity

This is really just the tip of the iceberg. These trends highlight not only opportunities to grow and expand, but also ways that we can better serve our patients and communities.

One small detail remains: How will you track your efforts and report on the success of your campaign?

The Case for Data-Driven Decision Making

Data should drive your marketing decisions. There are countless platforms to help you collect data and determine which of your tactics are delivering the best results.

Ultimately, your data will answer the perennial question your team will ask: “Did our campaign work?”

Let’s take a look at how to extract data from your tools to tell the story of how your marketing campaign is performing.

Digging into the Data

It’s important to look at the data collected from a variety of tools – don’t focus on just one source of data. And it’s important to do this each week (or daily!) during your campaign so you can adjust your tactics accordingly. The correlation between platforms is where you’ll find the story or the “Ah-Ha!” moments that drive action for your team.

Let’s walk through a few tools you might consider using and how they can help you determine the best course of action. We’ll evaluate a hypothetical landing page for our campaign.

Google Analytics

Starting with Google Analytics is a great way to get baseline data and a few insights into how users are interacting with your landing page. Pageviews, time on page, bounce rate and traffic sources are just a few of the metrics you’ll want to check out.

These all provide some great insights, but you need to dig deeper than Google Analytics.

CrazyEgg

The purpose of a landing page is to convert visitors on your website. CrazyEgg helps you gather heatmaps, scrollmaps and more to understand how visitors use the landing page you’ve created.

Do they convert on your call-to-action? Do they wander off through other links on the page? Gathering this information should help your team constantly tweak your landing page for the best results.

Use the data gathered from CrazyEgg alongside your Google Analytics data and you’ll begin to see trends.

A/B Testing

If you’ve found that your data isn’t conclusive, it may be time to add more data. You could consider launching an A/B test for the landing page.

You may want to test two different calls to action or the navigation to see how users react. Either way, testing ideas and gathering data is the best way to guide your decisions.

At Geonetric, we use Optimizely and/or Google Experiments to run our A/B tests. Either platform is a good way to get started.

Integrate Data into Your Processes

Ultimately, all of this data needs to become the bedrock of your marketing efforts.

Often, marketing teams make decisions based on past experiences or gut feelings. In today’s environment, data can—and should—be the catalyst for making decisions about your campaigns.
If your team isn’t looking at the data regularly, none of this matters. Be sure to bring these numbers to team meetings and discuss the good, the bad and the ugly.

With the right tools, a process for analyzing the numbers and a willingness to trust the data, your website and marketing campaigns can deliver the results you’re seeking.

If you’re looking to create effective digital strategies that use data to make decisions, let’s talk.

Your site visitors don’t have time to wade through copy filled with medical jargon or marketing-speak. Your current and prospective patients need content that gets to the point quickly, answers their questions, and highlights the benefits of working with your hospital or healthcare system. And they need that content to perform well – whether they access it from their desktops, phones, or tablets. Learn how to develop website copy that meets your site visitors’ goals and helps convert visitors into patients.

By connecting your CRM system to your hospital website, you gain better visibility, data and tracking. It helps you build more successful marketing campaigns, improve conversions, measure ROI, trigger customer interactions, and most importantly, make smarter marketing decisions. Join Jim Schleck, partner at Tea Leaves Health, a healthcare CRM provider, and Ben Dillon, chief strategy officer at Geonetric, a healthcare software and online marketing provider, for this webinar on how to use CRM and your website to improve consumer engagement.

Are you putting your health system’s website content to full use?

Maybe! But if you’re like most healthcare marketers, you’re always looking for more ways to tell the full story of your extensive services, expert doctors, satisfied patients and impressive facilities. What if you could do this without creating new content from scratch? Here’s how:

1 – Repurpose content across channels

Did you publish an inspiring patient story in the latest issue of your print magazine? Do you have a press release announcing your renovated birth suites?

To maximize the odds potential patients will find the information, add it to your relevant service-line web pages. Revise the content of brochures, magazines and news releases to match a web-writing style that’s concise, jargon-free and user-focused.

What if you post a video of an orthopedic surgeon talking about a new surgical technique he helped develop?

Write copy that highlights the most marketable information your surgeon shared on camera. Adding the text or even the full transcript to the page can give you an SEO boost—and communicate the doctor’s main message to visitors who might not be able to watch or listen to the video.

2 – Showcase your health library (if you have one)

After you’ve invested in a health library, don’t let it sit in a lonely corner of your website. Invite users to visit it by adding links to relevant library pages throughout your service-line content. When site visitors can find thorough, accurate, up-to-date health information with just one click, they’ll stay on your site rather than heading off to WebMD for details about their injury, illness or medical procedure.

If you integrate health library content through our VitalSite content management system, make sure you take advantage of SmartPanels that automatically link to related medical content from pages about your services, physicians and events. Using StayWell’s health library? Choose pages to display right in your website’s service-line sections, where they’re easy and intuitive for users to find.

3 – Cross-promote your services

Do visitors searching for treatments for a serious illness know your behavioral health department offers counseling to help families cope with a loved one’s diagnosis? Have the users researching your rehabilitation services heard about the warm-water therapy pool and gentle aquatic exercise classes at your health system’s fitness center?

Link to the pages about additional services that benefit your users. Show visitors they can stay within your health system to find most or all of the services they need.

4 – Ask an external content strategist to review your content

If a professional communicator—outside of your organization—understands what you’re saying, can locate information and finds your content engaging, it’s likely potential patients will, too. But if she sees room for improvement, you’ll get specific suggestions for making your site even more useful to visitors—and ultimately, to your health system. So ask a content strategist for help!

Already doing these things? Congratulations!

Need help getting started? Contact us.

It was with this in mind that I attended David Marlowe’s Healthcare Marketing and Physician Strategies Summit session on pricing transparency.

Marlowe reiterated that like so many trends in healthcare, our customers are driving us forward and healthcare organizations are fighting to catch up. Consider these stats:

• Research indicates that 12-20% of consumers report “price shopping” in the past year, up from 6-10% in 2004/2005.
• Younger consumers are more likely to shop, up to 25% of those under age 44.
• Amongst shoppers, 40-50% indicate that price is a key decision factor.

Given the number of patients that are truly in play to be influenced as to where they receive services, this has become a significant part of the audience. Certainly too big to be ignored.

How Provider Organizations Should Proceed

Obviously, actually sharing pricing is a good place to start. Diagnostic imaging in particular seems to be an area where consumers research and select a provider because they know exactly what the test will cost.

You can also look to insurers for inspiration, as they have long led in this space. They have the data and understand the plans best. A new collaborative effort by Aetna, Assurant Health, Humana and UnitedHealthcare offers a consolidated view.

Some providers are deploying pricing engines of their own. Past efforts in this area typically shared charge master data, which is often so disconnected from what consumers actually pay it’s often counter-productive. Newer iterations go beyond this, like the personal expense calculator NorthShore LIJ developed.

It’s important to tote that not all services are equally influenced by price comparisons. Diagnostic Imaging is the top service consumers shop for, along with physician office care, lab services and dental care.

In contrast, few consumers are price shopping from the back of an ambulance – trauma care isn’t a price sensitive service.

The future of Pricing in Healthcare

Pricing transparency is the beginning of a strategy, not the end-game. If we walk through the evolution we’re likely to see, it looks like this:

1. Pricing certainty – only player in the market able to answer the pricing question
2. Pricing comparison – multiple providers offering or health plan allows comparison
3. Pricing adaptation – pricing transparency leads to changing pricing strategies

As we move towards adaptation, pricing will either become a commodity pricing battle (he who becomes cheapest wins) or it becomes a strategic competitive tool.

I’ve been in this industry long enough to remember when marketing healthcare was very uncomfortable for many organizations. Over the years, it’s become a normal part of the business of healthcare.

Pricing, too, will need to go through this transition. We will need to understand that strategic pricing strategies like discriminatory pricing, discounts for pre-payment, set price service bundling, two-for one pricing, loss leader pricing strategies, introductory pricing to drive initial volumes, convenience pricing, and other strategies are acceptable in healthcare just like they are in other service industries.

Since our first post on mobilegeddon, we’ve had a many questions from healthcare marketers like you. And, we’ve even learned a few more things about the algorithm itself. Before we share this, let’s first recap our previous guidance for understanding the scope of your mobile traffic, and surfacing any problems you might have on your websites.

The Five Things You Need to Do To Prepare for April 21

1. Check your mobile traffic in Google Analytics
2. Using your smartphone, look for the “mobile-friendly” tag in search results
3. Check your pages with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test
4. Review the Mobile Usability Report in Google Webmaster Tools
5. Check the Mobile User Experience score on Google PageSpeed Insights

None of this has changed, and it’s as important today that you do this as it was when I originally wrote my blog post. So if you haven’t gotten to it yet, it’s time to get crackin’!

Now, let’s tackle some of the questions we’ve received…

When will the new algorithm actually affect my site?

Based on what we’ve heard from Google, here’s what you can expect: the new Mobile Algorithm update will “go live” on April 21, but it will take several weeks for it to have an effect across the entire index. This means that even if you have a decidedly mobile-UNfriendly site, you may not notice immediate penalties. Or, you could see change on the 21st. There’s simply no way for us to predict when a specific site will be affected. So, be patient and remember that if you have problems on your site, it may take a little time for you to feel the effects of the algorithm update.

I heard that Google already deployed the mobile algorithm update. Is this true?

If you visit the right forums and websites, or crawl through some of the darker corners of the Net where webmasters talk shop, you might see some individuals claiming they’ve already been penalized by the new mobile algorithm update.

Take such claims with a grain of salt.

While it’s certainly possible — especially given that Google has been much more circumspect and reluctant to officially announce their algorithm updates — the fact remains that they’ve been specific about the date of this one. April 21. Additionally, they have been going out of the way to help webmasters prepare for it (and they’ve been doing so for quite some time). Given this, I think it unlikely that the algorithm has actually been deployed.

But what to make of the claims that it has?

For every claim that a site has already been “hit” by the new algorithm, I consider the possibilities…and then use Occam’s Razor to cut away the unlikely ones.

When you hear someone claim their site is already affected by the April 21 update, here are three possibilities that could explain it:

1. False attribution: The website has seen an actual decrease in traffic from Google organic search, but this decrease has nothing to do with the mobile algorithm update. The sites in question are, in fact, suffering from algorithmic or manual penalties for other reasons.
2. Testing artifacts: It’s not unreasonable to expect that Google has been and will be testing the algorithm change. Perhaps this means that some sites are affected early…and this is what webmasters are actually seeing.
3. Google lied about the date: Google is mounting an elaborate campaign of deception by communicating one date, and then deploying the update much earlier than promised.

If you can’t tell, I tend to chalk up claims of an early release to the first possibility listed above. But not all webmasters share my conservative views.

Will my whole site be penalized because I have some pages that are not mobile optimized?

No. …or at least, not directly.

At SMX West, Gary Illyes (a Google employee) revealed that the algorithm operates on a per-page basis. This means that pages are evaluated and (possibly) penalized independently of each other.

While this might seem reassuring if you’re responsible for a site that has an obvious problem with mobile usability on many pages, don’t interpret this to mean your site as a whole won’t suffer. Remember, Google uses hundreds of ranking factors…and some even appear to influence others.

In my experience, sites with a superabundance of problems at the page level (broken links, bad experience, etc…) often experience site-wide ranking consequences. So I interpret Gary Illyes’ comments to mean that an entire website won’t be penalized because it has “some” problematic pages.

How long will a penalty last?

Well, if you do nothing to ever fix mobile usability problems on your site, any penalties you suffer from will likely be permanent. But that’s an extreme form of neglect that we don’t often see among professionally-maintained websites.

It’s more than likely that sites that are penalized will eventually fix the underlying mobile usability problems. And when they do, they should expect that any penalties they’ve suffered as a result of the new algorithm will be lifted.

How exactly will this work? Google hasn’t given explicit guidance on it, but my expectation is that penalized pages that are subsequently fixed will see positive changes the next time they are crawled and reindexed.

I have a separate mobile site. Am I safe?

You would have to work hard to misconstrue Google’s stance on this: “Responsive design is Google’s recommended design pattern.” It’s where all sites should be moving (if they aren’t there already).

With that said, if you have a separate mobile site that is passing the mobile-friendly test, it should do just fine.

And if your main website is configured to correctly detect mobile traffic and redirect to the appropriate page on the mobile site, things should be OK. But this is a notoriously troublesome way to accommodate mobile traffic, and such sites are often rife with configuration issues that may cause problems in a post #mobilegeddon world. So be careful.

The advice I give in this circumstance is check, test, and retest your configuration to make sure it follows Google’s guidance for separate mobile sites…then cross your fingers while you make plans for your responsive redesign.

Our site fails the mobile-friendly test. We know it has poor mobile usability…but there’s no way we can do a responsive redesign by April 21. What should we do?

Sadly, this is not an uncommon situation. It goes without saying that you should be talking with someone who can help. And this obviously means help you plan for your site redesign. But it also means, help you assess where you currently stand…and what you can do to mitigate your exposure.

Do some digging in Google Analytics. It may be that you can identify a small number of high-value pages that you can change to be mobile-friendly. Or, you can even implement a mobile site composed of your highest-value pages to get you through the update and buy you time while you work on your responsive redesign.