True enough, one of the most important innovations in digital marketing is personalization and how it helps patient engagement and provides a more satisfying user experience.

A Dassault Systèmes and CITE Research study shows 83% of modern consumers expect personalized products, services, and experiences. As such, when visitors come to your healthcare website, they hope to see information relevant to their needs, questions, and concerns. They’re used to the “one-click” digital experience (thanks to end-to-end personalization from e-commerce websites like Amazon), where they have instant access to information relevant to them.

Website personalization is one of the best ways to provide user-centric experiences and curate a more dynamic digital experience for patients. This guide includes everything you need about website personalization and how to leverage it to improve patient satisfaction.

What is Web Experience Personalization?

Personalized web experiences aren’t exactly a brand-new concept–even in the field of healthcare, which has typically trailed behind other industries in digital adoption. Website personalization encourages providers to present different information to patients based on historical data (i.e., previous interactions). For healthcare providers, it starts with identifying the patient’s health needs and providing outreach based on those insights. Incorporating key patient information, such as lifestyles, behaviors, and preferences, will enable providers to deliver the right message at the right time and to the right audience. Plus, it also allows physicians to choose and select the most effective communication channels.

Personalized web experiences start with data collection. Your marketing team must collect essential information about your ideal patients, including health needs, preferences, interests, and demographics. Information is generally collected by explicitly asking visitors (e.g., requesting to disclose their location) or through various healthcare systems like a CRM (customer relationship management). A CRM is a system that collects guest data which you can turn into patient insights to understand your customer base and create targeted campaigns.

However, personalization isn’t just used for outreach. Personalized marketing can also improve patient outcomes. Because you’re anticipating individual needs and emphasizing relevant healthcare items, personalization helps ensure patients get the treatment they need.

What’s the Importance of Website Personalization in Healthcare?

There are various ways website personalization can help improve overall patient satisfaction.

Improve Patient Engagement

Since you have a more holistic picture of your patient’s needs and lifestyle, you can develop a highly targeted digital marketing campaign to deliver personalized experiences. Consumers appreciate personalization because it makes them feel like they’re their person with unique needs and preferences. Tailor-made experiences help patients feel valued and empowered, establishing a connection and brand loyalty. Remember, engagement is a crucial factor in converting more visitors into patients.

Speed and Relevance

A personalized website can improve the patient experience with speed and relevance. With patient insights, you can determine the usual paths visitors usually take and map personalized pathway links to the information they want. As a result, visitors will find the information they want quickly, which may lead to a conversion down the line. If patients cannot find what they’re looking for on your website, they’ll leave swiftly and likely toward your competitors.

Better Patient Outcomes

Personalized marketing isn’t just about messaging. Providers who have collected a wealth of insights regarding patient lifestyle, health requirements, and socioeconomic challenges will be better positioned to forecast their changing needs and wants. For example, personalization will enable healthcare groups to segment patients based on their financial situations, allowing you to craft custom payment plans and send payment reminders via personalized communication channels.

Best Practices to Personalize Your Website for Patient Satisfaction

Website personalization is not a straightforward and one-and-done marketing strategy. Below are the best practices to kickstart your personalization strategy:

1. Optimize Your Website’s UX

User experience or UX is a set of practices that focuses on the user’s needs and experience and is often used when designing websites and digital experiences such as patient portals, apps, etc. Simply put, well-designed UX is synonymous with user-friendliness. When potential patients visit your website, they’ll evaluate their experience based on the following factors:

• The website’s ability and speed to provide the information they need
• Easily accessible website features and functions: physician introductions, video tours, location information, appointment scheduling, etc.
• The site and page load speeds (more on this later)
• Quality of customer support.

The goal is to provide frictionless and comfortable digital experiences while acknowledging the patient’s needs and values. At a basic level, best practices like easy-to-read fonts, intuitive layout and navigation, professional images, and prominent call-to-actions (CTAs) must be implemented. In addition, when optimizing UX, ensure the digital experience you offer answers the following questions:

• Will patients accomplish their goals while on my website?
• Do I currently provide the best experience possible? 

If you can’t answer these questions with a resounding “yes,” you’ll likely lose potential new patients to your competing practices.

2. Improve Page Load Speeds

Slow-loading pages are a hallmark characteristic of poor web design and are the antithesis of user satisfaction. In fact, according to a 2017 Google study, an increase in page load speeds from 1 to 3 seconds equals a 32% increase in bounce rate. Google’s Page Speed Insights is one of the best tools to evaluate your website’s page speed–aim for a score greater than 80.

Having said that, below are several optimization steps to improve page speed:

• Compress and optimize images
• Avoid multimedia clutter
• Minimize 404s and redirects
• Remote or deactivate unnecessary WordPress plugins
• Enable browser and web page caching
• Use a content delivery network (CDN)

I highly recommend checking out our guide on How to Increase Page Speed and Get More Traffic to learn more.

3. Develop a Mobile-Friendly Website

Did you know that more than 60% of worldwide web traffic comes from mobile devices like smartphones? With that said, mobile technology doesn’t display your healthcare website on a smartphone or tablet the same way it looks on a desktop system. If your healthcare website is not mobile-friendly, it will not display correctly on mobile devices—with limitations like stretched interface, unreadable text, and slow loading speeds.

With a mobile-optimized medical website with responsive design, your website will be displayed correctly regardless of which system it’s being viewed. Mobile-friendliness enables visitors to interact and engage with your brand with zero friction, enhancing patient satisfaction.

4. Provide Dynamic Custom Content

The core pillar of website personalization is sharing relevant content with the target audience. In the consumers’ eyes, if the website content isn’t personalized, it’s irrelevant to them. Custom content solves the problem of relevance and thereby helps boost conversion rates.

Tailor-made content forges an emotional bond with patients. Since the information they see on your website is in tune with their needs, you’re forming a stronger bond with patients. They’ll feel they can trust your practice to solve their unique issues and help them accomplish their healthcare goals. Through this connection, you can build trust and credibility for your brand, which is critical for marketing results.

Outlined below are several strategies to personalize your website with dynamic content:

• CTA personalization: CTAs attract people’s attention and compel users to take specific actions like signing up on email lists or downloading an app/patient portal. CTAs present an excellent opportunity to personalize your website and show a clear path to visitors based on where they are on their journey. Personalize your CTAs based on behavioral and psychographic data. An excellent example is customizing CTAs for current and potential new patients.
• Relevant dynamic content: Visitors coming to your website have healthcare-related questions and concerns. Thus, your website can be designed to show custom content and present recommendations based on specific criteria, including search terms, geographic location, lead attribution, medical history, etc. As a result, patients will be provided with custom content relevant to their needs, from patient stories to medical services to health screenings.
• Content recommendation: This system suggests relevant content to patients who have already engaged in your website in one way or another. You’re offering them more information that they might be interested in. Typically, recommendation sections are labeled “You Might Also Like,” “Suggested Reads,” or “Just for You.” The result? The visitor consumes more relevant content and stays on your website longer.

5. Create Patient Personas

With the significant shift towards the consumerization of healthcare, marketers are finding more ways to understand their target audience–leveraging patient personas is one of the best ways to achieve this feat. Patient personas are essentially semi-fictional representations of ideal patients based on your research and data collected from previous visitors.

Patient personas help you determine the type of patients you want–aka people who are more likely to engage with your brand and, hopefully, result in an appointment. As you create these personas, you’ll run into positive and negative personas. Negative personas are low-quality leads with less appealing attributes. They could be visitors looking for treatments or technology you don’t have and one-time visitors.

Detailed patient personas can do wonders for website personalization, and use them for your marketing advantage. With a wealth of consumer data on hand, you’ll be on track to make informed marketing decisions and leverage it for your other marketing pieces, including:

• Market segmentation
• Content creation
• Marketing messages

Invest in creating patient personas so you can personalize many aspects of your marketing efforts.

6. Implement Patient Portals

The accelerating adoption of digital solutions among consumers has proven one thing: patients want to take a more active role in their healthcare journey. On top of being able to research their healthcare options, patients wish to have direct access to their medical records. In the past, people needed in-person visits to get a copy of their documents. With patient portals, consumers can access their medical information at their fingertips.

Benefits of Patient Portals

Patient portals are growing in popularity and are a robust solution for patient-centric experiences. How can patient portals benefit your practice? Here are the ways:

• Access to digitized medical records: The best benefit of portals is that it enables patients to access their medical records through a website or app, including test results and upcoming appointments. Plus, they take the load off your staff members because patients have everything they need to know about their health via the portal.
• Serving targeted content: Patient portals are excellent places for marketers to offer targeted content to their audience. The portal provides quick access to educational information about their conditions, medications, and procedures in one convenient place. Relevant content through the portal helps with engagement and better patient outcomes.
• Appointment scheduling: One of the most time-consuming tasks for your staff is scheduling and following up on appointments. With patient portals, you don’t have to deal with this headache anymore. You can integrate a patient scheduling system within the portal where people can set up appointments and receive reminders.
• CRM integration: Patient portals can integrate with your CRM system. When done right, you can automate specific tasks like patient scheduling for a more streamlined operation.

Encourage visitors and patients to use your patient portal by giving it a prominent place within your website. For example, you can add high-profile links to the portal on your home and location pages. The idea is to eliminate as many barriers as possible for a more intuitive user experience.

7. Legal and Ethical Considerations

Before you start your website personalization campaign, remember to mind your campaign’s legal and ethical guidelines.

One of the trickiest parts of healthcare marketing is HIPAA compliance. To illustrate, marketers can only leverage patient information for marketing initiatives under specific circumstances. Furthermore, appropriate security measures are a must to protect sensitive patient information. This is why many physicians and healthcare practitioners are apprehensive about website personalization.

There are also concerns surrounding the collection and usage of consumer data. While many visitors will happily provide their information, asking for too much sensitive information may be seen as a red flag. People are more alert when it comes to their privacy and safety.

Thankfully, partnering with a digital marketing agency will ensure that patient privacy and other legal considerations are correctly approached.

Embrace Website Personalization to Satisfy Patients

That wraps up the strategies you can use to personalize your website and healthcare marketing campaign. More than ever, medical providers should embrace the concept of personalized digital experiences to improve patient satisfaction and grow their practice in general. In this hyper-competitive healthcare landscape, personalization allows your brand to stand out from the crowd.

The post Top Ways To Personalize Your Website For Patient Satisfaction appeared first on Cardinal Digital Marketing.

Thankfully, search engine optimization or SEO for doctors is more accessible than ever. With the proper fine-tuning and optimization of an SEO campaign, even small or brand-new practices can compete with more prominent, consolidated brands–especially with the tremendous shift towards local SEO.

Below, I have outlined the most effective SEO strategies doctors and medical practices can use to take your SEO efforts to new heights, increase patient volume, and support scalable growth.

Why SEO for Doctors?

SEO is a multi-faceted, relatively long, and ongoing process that involves various strategies that will help optimize your healthcare website and improve search engine rankings. There are still disturbingly many doctors and healthcare practitioners who believe that a website, social media account, and word of mouth are enough to grow their patient base. Many of them are in for a rude awakening.

Don’t believe us? Let’s take a look at some statistics.

For starters, 66% of online experiences start with search engines. And today, consumers come to search engines like Google for health-related questions and concerns. Google, in particular, processes hundreds of millions of healthcare queries on a daily basis. Breaking it further down, 66% of users have looked for a specific illness or issue, while 55% of people went online for a certain medical procedure or treatment. Another critical set of facts that marketers should know is that 77% of potential patients have used a search engine before booking their first appointment. Furthermore, search drives three times more traffic to hospitals and healthcare websites than non-search traffic

Another noteworthy consumer trend doctors should know is that 90% of patients use online reviews when evaluating a physician or healthcare provider. And 80% of healthcare consumers trust online reviews as much as referrals and personal recommendations. While these trends highlight the importance of online reputation for healthcare professionals, they also reinforce several tried-and-true marketing strategies, including SEO.

A properly search-optimized website will have a higher rank in the SERPs. This is critical because the top 5 organic search results on the first page account for 67.6% of all clicks. In other words, if your healthcare website is on the front page, you’ll more likely attract patients explicitly looking for your services and treatments.

Ultimately, a robust full-funnel SEO strategy will help drive organic traffic and highly qualified leads to your healthcare brand. Plus, modern SEO best practices encourage marketers to adopt a patient-first approach which will help strengthen and cement your brand as a trusted provider in the community.

SEO Tips and Strategies for Doctors

As mentioned, SEO is a multi-tiered process consisting of various strategies that work in unison to improve your website’s search rankings. Below are several proven best SEO practices every physician should apply to their practice.

1. Create a User-Centric Medical Website

Your SEO efforts will start with your healthcare website. You may be able to drive traffic to your website via SEO, but your hopes of converting visitors will quickly dissipate with poor web design. It makes sense; your website is your digital front door and will be the first touchpoint for most of your patients. With that said, your website acts as a vital touchpoint because it’s a golden opportunity for your practice to make an excellent first impression.

With great website design complete with professional layouts, images, and design elements, you’re presenting your practice as a reputable, trustworthy provider. Conversely, 40% of users will quickly abandon a poorly-designed website. Outlined below are quick tips for a more user-centric medical website:

Optimize for UX, Speed, and Mobile

A must-have element of your web design strategy is frictionless user experience. To put it simply, your healthcare website must be well-designed, easy to navigate, loads fast, and works like a charm on all devices. For starters, ensure you incorporate intuitive web design elements such as readable and clean fonts, sensible menus and layouts, and professional images.

Page speed is also crucial since a mere 1 to 3 seconds slower in page load speeds will increase bounce rates by as much as 32%. I highly recommend using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to check the load speeds of your pages. Some ways to increase page load speeds include:

• Use a performance-optimized hosting solution
• Compress and optimize your site images
• Eliminate or minimize redirects
• Enable web page caching
• Enable browser caching
• Remove unnecessary plugins
• Utilize a content delivery network (CDN)

Last but not least, ensure your healthcare website is optimized for mobile users. Websites that are not optimized for mobile users are considered bad UX websites. In fact, almost 75% of users will not return to a website not optimized for mobile, so you can’t afford to overlook mobile-friendliness. Your website should employ responsive design so it displays correctly, regardless of whether it’s viewed from a desktop computer or mobile. 

Conduct On-Site Optimization for Websites

Certain things should happen before your website ranks in search engines:

• Your website must be discoverable by search engines
• The search crawlers must understand your topics and identify keywords
• The search engine indexes your website so it can be displayed for relevant queries

Therefore, your website must have a strong SEO foundation by addressing the technical side of things, aka on-site optimization. It ensures that your healthcare website and pages will help Google scan and index your content without issues. The most important factors in on-site optimization include the following:

• Simple URL structure – Make your URLs simple and short, and include as little beyond your primary keywords.
• Navigation and links – Search engine crawlers follow your links to navigate and find other content on your website.
• Sitemap and robots.txt  – These are crucial files that enable Google to do its job: crawl pages and content to index. Having both files will significantly accelerate the crawling and indexing of your website.
• Dead links and redirects – People clicking links and ending up on non-existent pages results in a horrible user experience. Plus, they prevent Google from indexing your content.
• Duplicate content – If similar content pieces appear in more than one place on your website, you’ll get a penalty from Google.

2. Claim Google Business Profile

In many ways, search engines have become user destinations rather than a map for accessing information. The increasing percentages of “zero-click” searches indicate that users can find what they’re looking for from the Google search results–thanks to various SERP features. Arguably one of the most essential SERP features is the Google Business Profile or GBP.

Google has been expanding the features of GBP, giving healthcare marketers more opportunities to provide valuable information to potential patients. One of the simplest ways healthcare brands can improve their organic search presence (especially locally) is to claim their GBP. This SERP feature represents a listing for your physical location tied in with Google Search and Maps, and it’s the first thing potential patients see when they search for a local healthcare provider.

To optimize your GBP, make sure that you provide accurate and timely information, including:

• Practice name
• Address
• Phone number
• Business hours
• URL
• Email address
• Links to booking appointments
• User reviews
• Photo of facility and staff

In addition, you can provide more value to your GBP by adding helpful content like frequently asked questions (FAQs) about common patient inquiries such as pricing and insurance information. Overall, ensure you update your GBP listing to be relevant to your target audience and Google. Check out our GBP optimization guide for more detailed optimization strategies.

3. Develop Geo-Optimized Websites and Landing Pages

For the majority of healthcare practices, the main arena is local. Out of roughly 89 billion searches a month, 1.5 billion are “Near Me” searches. One of the best ways to leverage the rise of Near Me or local searches, in general, is by creating geo-optimized websites and landing pages–and they’re a must if you’re a multi-location organization.

Geo-optimized or geo-targeted websites and landing pages are custom pages dedicated to a single physical location, with the URLs, metadata, and content optimized by location. However, simply including the location and a few generic paragraphs in a static landing page just won’t cut it because you’re not providing real-world value to visitors.

To optimize these location pages, you must treat them as unique landing pages that answer what users want: information about a specific healthcare location. This means you should publish about 500 words of content per page while incorporating relevant local keywords. Ensure you also include custom content to personalize the page further, including: 

• Physician bios
• Photos of the location and staff
• FAQs (preferably in video format)
• Patient reviews
• Press and news section
• Hospital video tours
• Call to action (CTAs)

Personalization is the key ingredient to successful location websites and pages. The more you connect with the consumer by offering personalized experiences, the more likely they’ll convert.

4. Produce Patient-Centric Content

In the neverending pursuit of excellent user experiences, Google launched the Helpful Content Update, which may have changed the SEO landscape forever. With this update, marketers can say goodbye to content produced to appeal to search algorithms. Questionable practices like thin content, keyword stuffing, AMP content mismatch, cloaked images and links, and duplicate content are getting the boot.

With the new Google content update, healthcare marketers must produce robust, in-depth content that provides real-world value to users. It reinforces a stricter requirement for content quality and authenticity. Thus, you can’t just publish articles and blog posts with optimized word count and keyword density and expect your SEO efforts to flourish. In other words, your content strategy should focus on patient-centricity.

Don’t get me wrong. Keyword research and competitor analysis still play a significant role in long-term search rankings, but you can’t get away with practices like keyword stuffing anymore. With patient-centric content, you aim to provide helpful information where patients can feel like their questions have been answered or learned enough about the topic. In addition, ensure you stick to healthcare topics you specialize in and create in-depth content instead of putting out thin content about general medical topics.

5. Leverage Video Marketing

For the average consumer, the world of healthcare may seem like a cold and intimidating subject filled with unknowns–highlighting the importance of building trust and credibility for your brand. When it comes to engaging content types, videos are hard to beat. A recent study shows that as many as 91% of consumers want to see more video content from brands.

The video format is a top-notch marketing tactic for personalizing your content. With well-made videos, your healthcare brand suddenly has a face and helps patients feel connected and catered to regarding the care they’ll receive. Below are some video marketing ideas for supercharging your SEO efforts:

• Video tours of a facility or hospital – If you invested a lot in the looks of your facility or clinic, there’s no better way to showcase it than video tours. By seeing your facility, patients will know what to expect and eliminate a lot of unknowns.
• Meet the physician and staff videos – Create videos introducing physicians and staff members. These videos will make patients feel more welcome and enable you to nurture trust and credibility with patients before they even set foot in your building.
• Patient reviews and testimonials – Reviews and testimonials are powerful social proof that enhances your brand’s trustworthiness. Let patients tell their experiences and what they went through before and after treatment.
• Educational videos – These informative videos can educate patients about your treatments and services. However, ensure you adopt a more personable and relatable approach when making educational videos, like conversing with a patient.

Video marketing doesn’t just help improve your SEO by getting more eyes on your website and location pages. Still, it will also carry the ball further down the field by building patient trust and helping them convert.

6. Build High-Quality Backlinks

Although backlinks’ importance in SEO has waned over the years, they still remain a strong ranking signal for search engines like Google, especially when you earn them through organic, high-quality content. Link building has come a long way since the days of spamming links in directories and social media channels. However, in recent years, Google has changed how it evaluates backlinks. Now, it’s less about the number of backlinks the number of backlinks a website has and more about the quality of the links.

Google uses several factors when evaluating backlinks, such as:

• The relevance of the linked website
• The relevance of the anchor text to the link
• The overall authority of the linked domain

In other words, the number of backlinks you have doesn’t matter. What matters is that your links must be of the highest quality and from authoritative sources. This aligns with the historical value of backlinks as votes of confidence for your healthcare website.

Best Practices for Building Backlinks in SEO

First and foremost, your marketing team should focus on producing high-quality and relevant healthcare content. You’re hoping for the best case scenario where your content is so great that high-authority websites will want to link your content–these organically earned links are the best type of backlinks.

In addition, you should consider collaborating with local and national organizations. You can earn links from professional organizations by being active in the medical community and organizations relevant to your practice. Consider publishing research and case studies that showcase your expertise in the topic. Press releases are also worth considering, especially if they get picked up by the local media and publishing organizations.

Conclusion

Although the things we do are different now, SEO remains a crucial digital marketing strategy, most especially for doctors and healthcare providers. Invest time and resources in SEO because it’s more than worth it. Or you can work with a digital marketing partner like Cardinal to direct your SEO efforts in the right direction. Following these strategies will help boost your SEO, increase your patient base, and achieve new growth heights.

The post SEO for Doctors appeared first on Cardinal Digital Marketing.

This is where healthcare marketing comes into play. Physicians and other healthcare providers must step up their digital marketing game to increase patient volume and remain competitive. Join me as we discuss the importance of healthcare marketing and its impacts and benefits for your practice.

What Exactly is Healthcare Marketing?

Like other businesses, healthcare providers need multiple means to spread the word about their facilities, services, and treatments. The healthcare system is complex, with many different components, treatments, and procedures, which can overwhelm the average consumer. Healthcare marketing aims to bridge this gap by utilizing creative strategies to engage and educate patients.

This is especially critical since consumer behavior has changed in the digital age. People no longer rely on referrals, word of mouth, and traditional marketing when searching for a physician. Modern consumers have taken ownership of their healthcare journey and will research and evaluate practitioners through the Internet. In fact, 69% of millennial patients would turn to the web for medical advice instead of their primary care physician.

Healthcare marketing aims to increase brand awareness, build trust and credibility with patients, and guide them through their healthcare journey. With that said, healthcare marketing is a multi-tiered approach involving various strategies such as search engine optimization (SEO), paid search, web design, social media, reputation management, and more.

The Importance of Healthcare Marketing

As more private equity companies seek to consolidate practices within the healthcare system, smaller practices need all the help they can get to compete. This is where healthcare marketing comes into play. In today’s consumer-driven care landscape, healthcare organizations must employ a targeted, data-driven healthcare marketing campaign if they’re hoping to be more competitive.

With the right strategies and tools, medical providers can have the upper hand by attracting new patients and retaining old ones. For instance, you can engage and educate patients with relevant, personalized, and timely healthcare content. Not only will your practice be poised to attract new patients with a proper marketing playbook, but you’re also fostering brand loyalty and encouraging repeat business.

Ultimately, the goal of healthcare digital marketing is to drive high-quality leads, increase revenue, and maintain healthy profit margins. However, suppose you want to achieve these feats with good results. In that case, you need a robust marketing strategy using multiple channels to reach more potential patients and utilize comprehensive analytics to measure your campaign and adjust accordingly.

What Makes for Effective Healthcare Marketing?

Whether you’re a single or multi-location healthcare organization, you should know that brand positioning can influence patient decisions regarding health systems, providers, and services to pursue. Effective healthcare marketing takes a patient-first approach that will empower prospective patients as well as form stronger patient-physician relationships.

So what does an effective marketing strategy look like? Below are the characteristics of a successful healthcare marketing campaign:

Patient-Centric and Personalized

If you’re still using cookie-cutter strategies targeting the “average” consumer, your campaign will fall flat on its face. For example, blasting outreach messages via your email list will miss the mark for some patients (e.g., those who prefer text messages). In the same vein, if your options for reaching out are within fixed hours and channels, you’re not providing a personalized experience. With the industry leaning more into a more consumer-driven landscape, the ball is in the marketers’ court.

Based on a Dassault Systèmes and CITE Research survey, 83% of consumers prefer a tailored experience relevant to their unique needs and circumstances. On a related note, younger consumers are taking their healthcare journeys into their own hands and are leading the push for personalized experiences. Moreover, the survey states consumers are more interested in personalized health-related items such as customized preventative health plans.

All signs point to only one thing: personalized and patient-centered marketing.

Whether your goal is to attract new patients or retain your current ones, personalization must be a core pillar of your campaign. Tailored messaging appeals to an individual’s unique interests and needs, allowing your brand to form stronger relationships based on trust and credibility. By leveraging analytics, consumer data, and various tools, you can create custom messages that will resonate with patients most likely to convert.

As a result, your brand becomes a trusted resource and partner as they navigate the healthcare system. Therefore, all your healthcare marketing content should be personalized, accurate, and actionable.

Data-Driven Marketing

In digital marketing, if you’re not measuring, you’re guessing. To stay ahead of the curve in today’s ever-changing market, businesses must employ data-driven marketing–meaning they have to generate, analyze, and apply data to their strategies. According to a 2023 survey by HubSpot, 36% of marketers said data is crucial for understanding consumer behavior and reaching their target audience. Without data and proper analytics, how will you know which of your marketing pieces are producing results and which areas need improvement?

Therefore, healthcare organizations should have business intelligence solutions in place, including flexible reporting options, multi-location dashboards, value-based tracking, monthly reporting, and more. By using data and applying it to their strategies, healthcare marketers can expect the following benefits:

• Reach target consumers more effectively
• Understand which marketing tactics are most effective
• Create a more patient-centric content strategy
• Increase ROI of marketing campaigns
• Receive proof of value of marketing efforts

Effective healthcare marketing goes beyond demographic information. With data-driven marketing, you’ll have a more intimate knowledge of your ideal patients, how they like to shop for healthcare items, where they consume information and media, the challenges or pain points they face, etc.

Empowered by Digital Marketing Technologies

Historically, the healthcare sector has been slow to adopt digital technologies, and many physicians have relied on traditional marketing methods like referrals, TVs, and word of mouth to grow patient volume. If the pandemic has taught us anything, every industry has accelerated the adoption of digital solutions–especially healthcare.

Despite concerns about cyberattacks and the privacy of sensitive medical data, experts remain optimistic about the potential of digital solutions not just for marketing initiatives but also for improving patient access.

With that said, digital marketing solutions will lead to higher ROI than traditional marketing methods. Plus, digital marketing is measurable, which means you can track the performance of your campaigns, optimize them, and develop more integrated strategies. Otherwise, if you don’t accelerate the adoption of digital solutions for your practice, you’ll lose potential patients and play catch up to your competitors.

Digital Marketing Strategies for Healthcare Websites

Below are proven digital marketing strategies for growing your healthcare practice:

• Build a scalable website platform: A website will be the core of your marketing efforts, but you must ensure a scalable website for future growth and patient acquisition goals. Consider how your healthcare website will fit as you put out more locations and expand to new regions. Also, ensure you have a coherent website design and function across all locations and brands.

• Develop strong SEO foundations: Consumers now turn to search engines for healthcare information. As such, your website not only needs to look good, but it should have solid foundations for SEO. Multi-location healthcare groups must ensure that their website has a solid technical SEO foundation and adheres to current best practices, especially on a local level.
• Optimize Google Ads campaigns: PPC remains one of the best paid means for healthcare groups to boost their patient pipelines. With a well-optimized paid search campaign, you can attract high-quality leads to your doorsteps and turn your website into a patient-generating machine. The keys to optimizing your PPC campaign are the proper account structure, a funnel-based strategy, and an optimized bidding strategy.
• Measure performance with reporting and analytics: A centralized marketing strategy is necessary for any multi-location healthcare organization. The ability to monitor performance metrics such as cost per acquisition (CPA), retention rate, and search engine rankings will allow you to streamline operations and save on costs by getting rid of underperforming systems. I wrote an extensive guide about this topic on How to Measure Healthcare Marketing Performance.
• Optimize conversion rates: Conversion rate optimization or CRO is the process of improving the effectiveness of your website in converting visitors into loyal patients. CRO is about understanding what motivates your ideal patient to create custom ads, landing pages, and content that appeal to these motivations. Some steps to improve conversion rates in a healthcare website include providing complete information, leveraging social proof, streamlining the appointment process, and mobile optimization.

What are the Benefits of Healthcare Marketing?

If you want to take your campaign to new heights, you should learn about the benefits of digital marketing for healthcare.

1. Increase Patient Retention

Between the evolving healthcare landscape and changing consumer behaviors, patient loyalty is more critical than ever. In general, attracting and converting new patients costs more than retaining your current ones. Patient retention is a worthy pursuit because of repeat business and the referrals they may give to others.

A fully-realized marketing campaign with proper communication channels can help retain current patients. For instance, patient feedback is an incredible source of truth from channels like surveys, in-visit interviews, review platforms, social media, etc. As such, every data collected will steer your marketing campaign in the right direction.

Marketing automation (MA) is another great tool to empower your customer retention program. MA provides the ability to automate touchpoints and operational efficiencies so your brand is always top-of-mind for your patients.

2. Cover Each Step of the Patient’s Journey

Healthcare marketers who are worth their salt know the importance of the patient journey. Before healthcare marketing, only a few people know about the patient journey. Now, with the oversight provided by digital marketing, marketers can track every step of the patient journey–from searching for information about symptoms to setting up an appointment.

Digital healthcare marketing involves mapping out the patient journey and identifying key touchpoints. Each stage presents a unique opportunity to engage patients and provide information relevant to their needs. This enables your brand to build a long-lasting relationship with patients, which equals patient satisfaction and retention.

3. Generate a Consistent Lead Pipeline

One of your ultimate goals in healthcare marketing is to create your “marketing funnel” where you can generate high-quality leads and sales from website traffic. The idea is to differentiate the “window shoppers” from visitors searching for the services and treatments you offer.

Succeed in developing your marketing funnel, and your campaign will be in the best position to consistently generate leads. As a result, your practice doesn’t have to rely solely on traditional marketing methods to create walk-in leads.

4. Target the Ideal Audience

As mentioned earlier, generating high-quality leads is the primary purpose of healthcare marketing. Having said that, many digital marketing systems allow you to target specific audience groups via tools that help you track consumer behavior and demographic information. With enough data, marketers can present marketing offers highly relevant to the ideal patient.

This ties back to personalization in marketing. If a visitor receives content based on their needs and online behavior, it creates positive reinforcement and more satisfying customer experiences. Healthcare marketing also lets you target patients depending on where they are in their healthcare journey.

5. Stay on Top of Your Campaign

Under digital marketing, you can measure just about every relevant healthcare metric you want, including:

• Patient acquisition cost
• Marketing originated patient percentage
• Patient lifetime value
• Patient retention rate
• Patient satisfaction scores
• Paid advertising metrics
• SEO metrics
• Lead source attribution
• And many more…

As you collect more data, you can optimize each of your marketing strategies appropriately. However, just because you can measure everything doesn’t mean you should. Remember not to lose sight of your goals and determine the most critical data that support your marketing objectives.

Ultimately, monitoring your campaign will provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of your marketing pursuits. Simply put, you’ll know which of your strategies are working, which have room for improvement, and which should be scrapped.

6. Build Trust and Credibility for Your Brand

Building trust and credibility with your patients is one of the most important things you can do for your practice. Apart from boosting revenue, trust can be an excellent growth barometer. Healthcare marketing puts you in a stronger position to develop stronger patient-physician relationships.

For example, you can leverage content strategies to connect with patients and address their concerns and questions. You can establish yourself as a reliable healthcare resource by providing real-world value through your content. Thus, aim to create high-impact content that serves the patient’s needs to build trust and credibility for your brand.

Meanwhile, make sure that you have a sound online reputation because it dramatically affects your credibility as a healthcare provider. This is important because almost all potential patients read online reviews of providers before booking an appointment. In this regard, ensure you have a proactive reputation management strategy and a scalable review collection system.

Healthcare Marketing Puts Patients First

Private practices and multi-location groups can’t afford to overlook the importance of a robust healthcare marketing strategy. As you can see, healthcare marketing provides a multitude of benefits, like improved patient retention, consistent lead generation, and building brand trust and credibility. As healthcare shifts into a consumer-driven industry, digital healthcare marketing ultimately helps improve patient outcomes.

The post Why is Healthcare Marketing Important? appeared first on Cardinal Digital Marketing.

What is Healthcare Marketing?

Healthcare marketing is a multifaceted discipline that includes the processes of communicating, creating, and providing healthcare information. For healthcare marketers, the primary goal is to increase awareness of various medical conditions, illnesses, and treatments, establish relationships with potential patients, and guide them through their journey.

Healthcare practitioners and institutions can achieve such feats by demonstrating thought leadership, implementing coherent marketing strategies, promoting patient-first digital experiences, and strengthening brand trust via social proof. With patient-physician discovery and interaction significantly transformed, healthcare marketing has become an invaluable tool of modern healthcare.

1. Leverage Local SEO to Attract New Patients in Your Geographical Area

If your practice has a physical location, you have likely relied on conventional methods like referrals and word of mouth to attract new patients. That’s hardly the case anymore since patients are becoming more tech-savvy by the minute and will use digital solutions like search engines for researching health-related issues and providers. Therefore, if you’re one of the many healthcare practices with physical locations, you should enhance your digital footprint with local SEO.

Outlined below are some proven strategies to increase your local SEO presence.

Optimize Google Business Profile

Consider this: Google Search is the most popular website globally, with billions of searches daily. Even more eye-opening is that a staggering 46% of all Google search queries have local intent. Therefore, your practice must show up consistently for these local searches. One of the most straightforward ways to optimize your local SEO is to claim and populate your Google Business Profile listing or GBP.

GBP is a free tool that allows small businesses and healthcare practices to promote their business information via Google Search. On top of claiming your GBP listing, you should optimize it by providing critical information such as:

• Practice name
• Website URL and appointment links
• Directions/map
• Business hours
• Phone number
• Email address
• Customer reviews
• A short description of your practice
• Photos of facility/clinic and staff

Ensure this information is accurate and up-to-date, particularly with your business hours. For instance, if your GBP listing says open and your front desk can’t be reached, that’s a big problem.

In addition, you may also create FAQs or frequently asked questions about common patient inquiries, including services and treatments and accepted insurance. Ultimately, GBP is a critical local SEO tool, providing potential patients with information to help them convert.

Use Local Citations

According to Brightlocal’s 2023 Local Consumer Review Survey, 98% of consumers used the web to research information about local businesses. As such, local citations and listings can help bolster your local SEO strategy because these are some of the many ways search engines can validate your healthcare practice. Citations make it easy for Google to understand the nature of your service and connect you to your target audience.

Types of Local Citations

There are a few types of local citations that could work for your local clinic or health center:

• Structured Citations: A structured citation is when your name, address, and phone number (NAP) are listed on relevant directories such as Yelp, WebMD, Healthgrades, and ZocDoc. These structured directories generally have massive databases of reliable information, so search engines like Google prefer them.
• Unstructured Citations: These citations also include essential information about your healthcare business but in a less organized manner. They’re generally found in more traditional websites and apps and aren’t designed as directories or business listings. Good examples of these are local news articles, blog posts, social media, and reviews.

Acquiring structured local citations is simple enough: finding relevant large directories known as “primary data aggregators” and submitting your NAP. Meanwhile, getting unstructured citation opportunities is a more involved process. For example, you can look for the “big fish” in your local area (a prominent local publisher or influencer) for potential collaborations and PR ideas.

Reach Local Leads with Geo-Targeted Pages

Multi-location healthcare groups must create geo-targeted websites and landing pages to not only increase traffic but also convert more local patients. Geo-targeted websites and landing pages are optimized based on the geographical areas you serve. When you have multiple locations, patients will visit the location closest to them. By building geo-optimized websites and landing pages, you’re increasing the probability of local patients finding your practice–plus, you’re offering a more personalized experience to them and increasing their likelihood to convert.

Create geo-targeted websites and landing pages for each of your locations. Ensure each page has accurate and reliable information, including your NAP, URLs, maps, business hours, etc. You may also add custom content for each location page for further personalization, such as clinic tour videos, FAQ videos, patient reviews, facility, and staff photos, etc. Lastly, ensure you provide call-to-actions to help patients convert with actionable steps.

2. Provide Patient-First Digital Experiences via Your Website

Any healthcare marketing team should prioritize the ability to provide the best user experiences through its website. Why? Your healthcare website is a core pillar of your marketing efforts and is the first touchpoint for most patients. Thus, your web design and user interface (UX) must be purposeful and offer high-quality digital experiences. Below are some ways to improve your healthcare website’s user experience.

Check Your Site Speed, UX, and Mobile Performance

When more than 80% of users jump ship from a website following a poor experience and close to 40% will outright quit a poorly-designed one, marketers can’t afford to have a non-optimized website. Remember that your website is one of the best ways to make a good first impression among potential patients. Therefore, all messaging and design elements should align with how you want to be perceived by patients.

For starters, your website should implement basic web design practices like readable fonts, easy-to-navigate menus and layouts, high-quality professional images, and prominent call-to-actions (CTAs). In addition, you should also prioritize page speed since it can affect your bounce rates. Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to effectively gauge your site’s performance and make proper adjustments.

Lastly, you must ensure your website works correctly on all mobile devices, including smartphones, tablets, etc. Mobile traffic accounts for 56% of global website traffic, so the last thing you want is your website to not display correctly for mobile users. The key is to implement responsive design, which helps your website to display properly across all devices, including desktop and mobile.

Create and Leverage High-Value Content

Content marketing remains king, and it’s not just a buzzword.

Patients and their loved ones will visit your website with health-related concerns and questions. On top of providing a comfortable user experience, your website must have valuable content targeting ideal patient personas. This means high-value content that answers the visitors’ questions and concerns, and they can walk away with real-world value. 

When done right, high-value content will help establish your practice as a thought leader and trustworthy brand within the community. True enough, high-quality content does more than just sell your practice; it builds trust. Through content and overall messaging, demonstrate that you understand the patients’ pain points and are capable of providing solutions to their health concerns. Think of engaging articles, blog posts, video content, and website copy that resonates with your target audience.

Furthermore, providing valuable content gets you on the good side of Google, thanks to the recent Helpful Content Update.

Eliminate Conversion Barriers

If you want people to choose your practice, make sure you make it easy for them by removing potential barriers to conversion. Eliminating unnecessary barriers will provide patients with a more seamless experience. For instance, streamline the process of contacting your business office through AI chatbots, live chat apps, and click-to-call phone numbers.

In addition, you can invest in patient scheduling software such as AthenaONE and DrChrono for a more efficient appointment process. As a result, you are making it easier for patients to book an appointment and decreasing the burden on your staff due to lower phone call volumes.

3. Run a Proficient Google Ads Campaign

Google Ads or PPC advertising remains one of the paid digital marketing solutions for growing patient volume. For the uninitiated, PPC puts your practice in front of consumers by placing your ads at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs). PPC puts you in front of your ideal patient personas and provides opportunities to capture bottom of funnel (BOF) leads–aka people ready to see a healthcare provider.

In the post-pandemic era, healthcare organizations face unprecedented pressure to cut down patient acquisition costs while growing their patient base. However, any marketer will tell you that a healthy balance of both spectrums is a fine line to walk. In other words, success in PPC means you have to do it right. Otherwise, you’ll overspend for glorified traffic volume and clicks with no conversion.

Below are some best practices for a more proficient Google Ads campaign.

Choose a Suitable Account Structure

Campaign segmentation has changed over the years. Modern PPC dictates that there are three spectrums comprising three different approaches depending on the level of control you need.

• Segmented: PPC marketers wishing maximum control over their accounts should capitalize on the segmented approach. Segmentation excels in controlling budgets and other business objectives. However, it’s not very effective in increasing performance since segmented accounts restrict algorithm learning and leave little room for improvement in messaging, tracking, and post-click experience.
• Consolidated: Meanwhile, consolidated account structures work best for achieving maximum efficiency. In this account structure, your ads will be grouped in a way to maximize the number of impressions, and algorithmic solutions like responsive search ads can deliver better performance. ThinkWithGoogle recommends marketers to consolidate their accounts for better reach and performance.
• Hybrid: A hybrid account structure makes the most sense for multi-location healthcare organizations that want to focus or un-focus on specific locations. Your campaign benefits from consolidation with maximized ad impressions and better Smart Bidding performance, along with tighter budget control and more precise targeting with segmentation. Hybrid brings the best of both spectrums.

Develop a Funnel-Based PPC Strategy

A funnel-based PPC strategy aims to align your ads and campaigns with keyword intent along the funnel, i.e., covering each step of the patient journey. As such, you’re sending the right message at the right time to the right audience. Your conversion funnel should look something like this:

Lower Funnel “Product Aware” Leads

These are BOF or “provider aware” healthcare leads. They’ve gone through the prior funnel stages (problem-aware and solution aware) and may be familiar with your clinic or health center via your ads targeting prior funnels. These leads have decided that they need to see a healthcare provider. Direct the algorithm to show ads with high-intent, product-aware keywords at this stage.

Mid-Funnel “Solution Aware” Leads

Many high-intent leads will fall into the mid and upper funnels. Solution aware leads are already looking for solutions because they know they need something but are still determining what type of treatment they should get. Leads in this funnel are prime targets for nurturing and education. Use solution aware keywords that educate patients about your services and treatments.

Upper Funnel “Problem Aware” Leads

Upper funnel leads are people who aren’t ready to become patients yet. This is the research and solution discovery phase, so these are lower-intent leads. This person knows they have a healthcare concern and are asking questions. For the upper funnel, use problem aware keywords like “signs of diabetes in your 40s.”

4. Use Social Proof So Patients Advocate for You

As I’ve mentioned earlier, patients are more tech-savvy, which means they rely on the Internet when looking up healthcare providers. This closely ties in with your digital reputation. With that said, 72% of healthcare consumers count on online reviews when evaluating doctors and other medical professionals.

What does this mean for your practice?

This means you should have a solid reputation management strategy and use your social proof to build trust and credibility within your community.

Best Practices for Managing Your Digital Reputation

Social proof may come in different forms, social media profiles, user reviews, and testimonials. For instance, if you have a healthy following on social media, you’ll want to showcase that on your websites and landing pages to build trust and credibility for your brand.

For healthcare practices, the most important social proof is patient reviews. As mentioned, healthcare consumer behaviors have changed, and they no longer rely on referrals, word of mouth, and traditional advertising (e.g., TV, radio, print, etc.) when searching for providers. Instead, they will evaluate providers by reading patient reviews.

To generate patient reviews, the quickest and most reliable way is to encourage patients to leave reviews–and this is where a proper review collection strategy comes into play. You can train your front-facing staff to ask patients for reviews following an appointment. Thankfully, satisfied patients will be more than happy to leave their feedback. Ensure you provide multiple, accessible ways to leave reviews, including short review forms and follow-up emails.

Investing in reputation management platforms like Birdeye and Podium is also worth considering. These systems can seamlessly integrate with your CRMs, and help automate the review collection process.

5. Develop an Engaging Video Marketing Campaign

When it comes to engagement, video content is hard to beat. As such, consider investing resources in creating video content for your brand. If you haven’t been paying attention, social media is quickly becoming a go-to source for healthcare advice and information, especially for the younger population.

For instance, many healthcare marketers are missing out on TikTok advertising because it targets younger audience groups. However, Gen-Z patients are aging, and many of them can make decisions for their health. TikTok is an excellent platform for building brand awareness because it’s a more user-centric network with a strong sense of community.

TikTok is also an excellent resource for healthcare marketers because you can use the platform to collect patient insights, refine brand messaging, and source content ideas and trending topics. However, TikTok marketing isn’t the right approach for all healthcare practices. For your reference, some specialties with the most engagement on TikTok include mental health, pediatrics, addiction treatment, cosmetic surgery, women’s health, and more.

The post Top Healthcare Marketing Strategies & Guide appeared first on Cardinal Digital Marketing.

The answer for many PE firms? A strong marketing partner and integrator. Many PE firms today look to marketing as a way to fuel growth. For these efforts to succeed, however, you need an experienced marketing integrator. 

The right partner can guide the process, helping firms build strong brands, integrate technologies, and refine the digital patient experience.

Develop Your Brand Architecture Strategy

Your first and most significant action during integrations? Developing your brand architecture. Everything flows from this essential starting point. Developing your strategy as soon as possible should be your top priority—failing to do so or delaying it to a future date can result in more work and lost returns for your organization.

In developing your brand architecture strategy, you must evaluate the brand equity of each company, consumer affinity, competition, as well as patient demographics in each market. Some brands may have a loyal patient base that you don’t want to lose, while others may have a negative reputation. If the founding doctor is retiring, it may be time to sunset the brand. 

Careful consideration is necessary as your brand architecture decision will impact:

• Visual identity
• Website
• Marketing technologies, with a particular eye on integrations, licensing, and cost efficiencies
• Agency retainer and marketing management fees
• Your marketing team structure (master brand vs. regional brands and field teams)

Finally, consider how you will approach analytics and tracking. You want cohesion in your approach, with methods to aggregate and unify data effectively for the most concise analyses. As Rich Briddock, SVP of Media & Analytics, puts it, “Tracking is a huge challenge if you have a ton of disparate brands, and in particular, if they have different websites that are built in different ways. We’ve definitely had situations where we’ll have 50 Google Analytics accounts that we are putting in, and every single analytics goal within those accounts are set up differently. They don’t marry to each other, but then the client will want to see the data aggregated across all of them.”  

Consider a Hybrid Brand Architecture Approach

Taking a hybrid approach can often be the best answer. Lauren Leone, SVP of Healthcare Marketing, certainly thinks so. “Reputation is something that, in certain cases where it is really strong, there is no replacement for it. It may be that your acquisition strategy is reliant on a message that the local brand remains. There are a lot of challenges there, and we don’t claim to prescribe one or the other, we work with clients in both. I think one thing that we’ve seen a good bit of is a bit of a hybrid model.”

It’s important to remember that there is not a black-or-white solution for every platform. Things can get complicated, of course. 

What you need above all else is a marketing integrator that understands the pros and cons of different brand architecture strategies and how that rolls down into marketing execution.

The decisions made in these early days will impact marketing efficiency and performance well into the future. You need a partner that can think at scale and is able to communicate how these decisions impact the brand’s goals writ large and small. “The idea that it’s a binary house of brands or all under one brand, is not correct,” according to Rich Briddock. “It’s more of a spectrum.”

Audit & Unify the Tech Stack

As you begin to assess the status of tech across your acquisitions, more often than not, the case will be that each healthcare group has its own legacy systems. One location uses EPIC, another uses Phreesia, and so on, until you are looking at an entire array of siloed stacks with no way to bring them together.

Integrating tech in any sector is complex, but it can be particularly difficult in healthcare. One reason for this is how mired in the analog many healthcare brands still are. As you look across your ecosystem, you may find, for example, that one brand is utilizing online booking, while another is still booking appointments on the telephone.  

Too often, marketing gets lost in this mix. To address this, you need a marketing partner that understands patient workflows and how to integrate marketing technologies with online booking systems and EHR and patient management systems.

A good integrator has deep experience in healthcare and will help bring clarity to your tech stack. One way in which they can do that is by conducting an audit. Most healthcare companies, despite their growing suites of technologies, are surprised to learn that they don’t have a clear, documented understanding of their tech stack. More importantly, they have no clear view across their acquisitions of the data available to them.

An audit can provide a kind of roadmap, one that helps your organization identify:

• Where you need to drive better technology adoption to boost efficiency across the organization
• Opportunities for strategic data integrations (through APIs) that can bolster and enhance data management
• Which technologies your organization no longer needs and are ready to be phased out

Remember, healthcare is particular—any integrator you choose must have a deep understanding of each part of the digital patient journey and how patient data is stored. This is essential for accurate and thorough data analysis and reporting. A disparate tech stack where technologies and marketing platforms don’t integrate will make it difficult to extract the performance insights you need to grow your brand.

Translate Growth Goals into Action

As you continue through the process of platform development, make sure to maintain focus on a strong, shared mission. As McKinsey recently noted, “A shared mission focused on a deal’s full potential is the glue that will make partnerships sustainable across the PE firm and the portfolio company’s management team. Lack of this core alignment often sits at the heart of disrupted mergers, and it manifests as lost momentum, missed targets, and talent attrition.”  

Defining a shared mission is one thing—translating it into action across your platform (and functional departments) is more difficult. Flat, one-dimensional growth goals just won’t cut it. To drive dynamic growth goals, it’s essential to work with a marketing partner that gets the complexities of multi-site healthcare. What should you look for? A marketing partner that understands:

• Your Total Addressable Market (TAM) — What are the demographic nuances that impact patient acquisition strategies in your particular healthcare niche? Where exactly can you win?
• Service Lines— Nuances between low vs. high acuity patient acquisition marketing strategies. What are the steps of your unique patient journey, and how do your patients buy?
• Industry Benchmarks — How exactly is success defined in your healthcare niche?
  

Capacity is key in this, as well. Your marketing partner also needs to be aligned with your operational teams and know operational capacity limits, asking:

• Which locations need more patients?
• Which are maxed out with long wait times?
• Which service lines and patient segments are most profitable?

Then— and only then—can you develop real, attainable marketing goals that drive value creation and translate across your marketing program and channels. Remember, ambiguity never helps. As Rich Briddock phrased it, “If one thing has been evident again and again, it’s that ambiguous media goals lead to failure and wasteful spending for multi-location healthcare groups. In contrast, robust goal setting brings tangible direction to your pay-per-click (PPC) advertising plan and its performance.”  

Conclusion

Successful M&A stems from operational readiness, strong goals, and competent integrators. Across these efforts, marketing can be a real driver of value creation, provided it is part of the discussion during the post-deal phase as you develop your platform strategy. Turning to a strong marketing integrator can ensure alignment between your executives and PE firm investors, and help you capitalize on real growth opportunities, pulling you out of the mire of ambiguity and keeping your strategy on track.

The post Getting Post-deal Integrations Right: How a Strong Marketing Partner Increases Value Creation appeared first on Cardinal Digital Marketing.

In addition, the introduction of technologies for vision loss treatments, such as laser eye surgery, will also bolster market growth. That predicted growth of the eye care market means it will also attract more providers, thus, tightening the competition. Moreover, private equity consolidations continue ramping up, especially with high-value procedures like cataract surgeries.

What does this mean for eye care providers?

Optometrists and ophthalmologists who want to keep their competitive edge and increase patient volume will need a solid digital marketing campaign–this means investing in high-level strategies like SEO, PPC advertising, Facebook Ads, conversion rate optimization (CRO), reputation management, and marketing analytics.

Providers who want to take their digital marketing for optometrists/ophthalmologists should consider the following best practices:

Boost Your Local SEO

When 46% of Google searches have local intent, you can’t afford to overlook your local SEO campaign. Local visibility is even more critical for healthcare providers since you rely on attracting patients in your geographical area. On a related note, patients also prefer nearby providers due to convenience and ease of access. Thus, eye care specialists must invest in boosting their local SEO campaign.

Below are some strategies that will help boost your practice’s local visibility and attract more patients in your area:

Use Citations & Listings

If you haven’t already, claim local citations and listings for your practice. These directories are typically free to claim and can help Google validate your business and enhance the credibility of your practice. Look for structured directories like the following and populate your listing:

• Yelp
• RateMDs
• WebMD
• Healthgrades
• ZocDoc

Niche-specific local directories, including the American Optometric Association (AOA) and the American Academy of Ophthalmology, are also worth looking into.

Optimize Google Business Profile (GBP)

Another quick and surefire way to improve your local digital presence is by claiming and optimizing your Google Business Profile or GBP (formerly Google My Business). When almost half of 8 billion searches daily have local intent, it would be a big mistake not to claim and optimize your GBP listing. It’s free, and all you need is to supply the following information:

• Name of practice
• Website
• Address
• Working hours
• Phone number
• Email address
• A brief description of your practice
• Photos of practice and staff

In addition, make sure you populate your GBP listing with frequently asked questions or FAQs that answer the patients’ most common inquiries–including accepted insurance, details about your services, and whether you’re accepting new patients.

Build a Location-Based Keyword Strategy

It would be best if you honed in on the local keywords you wish to rank for your local SEO strategy because your sitewide keywords won’t cut it. Therefore, optometry and ophthalmology providers must develop a geographical keyword strategy to compete and dominate the local market.

When doing local keyword research, go for high-intent, low-competition keywords instead of broader phrases that are nearly impossible to rank for. Remember to create your keyword list based on your unique selling propositions (USPs), geographical area, and how patients search for your services. In general, local keywords are:

• High-intent, solution-aware: People who know about their vision problems and are looking for an eye care specialist will use these keywords. 
• Location-based: These are keywords with location identifiers (e.g., best optometrist in houston tx).

Use solution-aware and location-based keywords that align with specific services you offer, like “older adult eye care seattle,” for example. Be more detailed and granular as you want because it will help you attract the right patients and deal with less competition.

Create Geo-Personalized Landing Pages

Eye care brands with multiple locations and service areas should have local landing pages for each location. A local landing page is designed to capture patients in a geographical area using location-specific SEO strategies. So when a user searches for a local optometrist or ophthalmologist, they’ll find your eye specialist landing page, where they’ll receive location-optimized content that will answer their questions and eventually convert.

Furthermore, landing pages provide you the opportunity to present unique local content about your location. Besides location-specific content, you can also highlight staff members and physicians at that location, photos of your clinic, and specific patient reviews.

Build a Patient-Centric Website

A vital piece of your digital marketing is your eye care website. Many of your patients will interact with your brand through your website, essentially making it your digital front door. This is why you need to optimize your website and make it more patient-centric. Patient-centricity means delivering personalized services, solutions, and experiences throughout the patient journey.

Optimize For Speed, UX, and Mobile

Start your eye care website design by optimizing for speed, user interface (UX), and mobile-friendliness. The goal is to provide a comfortable and intuitive user experience for website visitors with design elements like high-quality professional images, sensible menus and layouts, easy-to-read fonts, and prominent call-to-actions (CTAs).

In addition, your ophthalmology website should be quick and easy to navigate. You’re turning away potential patients with a slow-loading website. This is further emphasized by the bounce rate increasing by 32% as page load time goes from one to three seconds. 

More importantly, your eye care website must support responsive design and mobile-friendliness. For starters, 59% of the world’s website traffic is from mobile devices, so many of your visitors are on mobile devices. A responsive design means your website will adapt and display correctly whether viewed on a desktop computer or smartphone. Otherwise, you’ll risk providing poor experiences to potential patients.

Essential Content Should Be Discoverable

A good percentage of eye care website visitors have eye-related problems and are looking for answers. In this case, you can establish your website as an authoritative resource for optometry and ophthalmology topics with high-quality, helpful content. This way, you’re aligning your content library with Google’s Helpful Content Update, which aims to promote websites that offer valuable information and answer people’s questions.

Furthermore, your website’s key content should be searchable and easily discovered. This means you should avoid practices preventing users from getting solutions quickly, including burying key content in poorly-designed interfaces, convoluted links, and too many web pages.

Make It Easy for Patients to Convert

When you’ve successfully engaged the patient, ensure you make it easy for them to contact your clinic for questions and set an appointment. Use prominent CTA buttons, chatbots, live chat software, and tap-to-call functions to make it easy for visitors to contact your office.

Moreover, consider investing in patient scheduling programs like RXNT, AthenaONE, and DrChrono to coordinate physician availability with patient appointment requests and confirm available time slots. A patient scheduling system will drastically lower the volume of phone calls, giving your staff more time to deliver better care.

Optimize Your Google Ads Campaign

Google Ads or PPC marketing remains one of the fastest ways to build brand awareness and attract bottom of funnel (BOF) leads–people ready to book an appointment with an eye care doctor. With a fully-realized Google Ads campaign, eye care specialists can reach a wider audience and put their practice in front of high-value patients through the SERPs.

Below are several best practices for optimizing your PPC marketing campaign:

Revisit Your Account Structure

How you structure your Google Ads will enable you to control how you want your PPC ads to be displayed and when and where you want them to show up–which can help improve your Quality Score. The proper account structure will get you organized and able to optimize.

You can benefit the most from a hybrid account structure if you have multi-location optometry or ophthalmology practice. It’s a structure in the middle of the modern Google Ads account spectrum, giving you the best qualities of consolidated and segmented accounts.

On one end, your account benefits from tighter budget control and granular targeting, often by location with segmented accounts (e.g., best corrective eye surgery myrtle beach, oculoplastic surgeon washington dc area). Meanwhile, the consolidated account spectrum helps maximize ad impressions and leverage Google’s smart bidding feature.

PPC Best Practices

After determining the account structure that works for you, you may launch your campaign and let it run to collect data for optimization. As that goes on, you should create landing pages for each location with custom content personalized for eye care patients.

Eye care doctors can benefit from running a full-funnel paid media campaign to capture leads from all stages of the patient journey. However, the primary focus of your campaign is to capture high-quality BOF leads before moving up the funnel.

In addition, keep in mind that PPC requires ongoing maintenance and constant optimization. To ensure long-term success, keep your ads fresh and compelling by refreshing ad copies, CTAs, creatives, and offers. For instance, you can switch and try a different ad image or a more intensive approach like overhauling your ad copy and offers.

Leverage Facebook Ad Marketing

Eye care service providers must have a robust Facebook Ads campaign to improve patient engagement, enhance local reputation, and develop brand awareness.

For starters, your Facebook Ads marketing campaign should start with building full-funnel strategies. This means having an intimate understanding of a consumer’s typical journey to become a patient and how to attract leads during each stage. For Facebook Ads marketing, traffic falls into three categories: awareness, consideration, and decision.

For example, to capture the top of funnel (TOF) leads in the awareness phase, you can use social media carousel infographics about common eye disorders and diseases or a downloadable PDF about vision loss.

Meanwhile, you can convert patients in the decision-making stage with call-to-action ads. This is where Facebook’s Instant Experiences shine, by engaging patients with multimedia content like photos and Fullscreen videos. Regardless of your approach, start your optimization with BOF leads and work your way up the funnel.

Manage Your Online Reputation

Did you know 95% of consumers read reviews before buying a product or service? What about that over 81% of customers will check Google Reviews first before engaging with the brand? These statistics emphasize the importance of having a positive online reputation, which is even more relevant for healthcare providers and doctors.

Online Reputation Management Best Practices

The best way to get more reviews is to ask patients directly after every appointment. Train your front-facing staff members about the best practices for collecting patient reviews. Explain to patients how their feedback and thoughts will improve the quality of care and also help enhance your online reputation. Satisfied patients and regulars will happily help you out following a good experience.

Next, ensure your patients have multiple channels to leave their reviews. You can offer easy-to-complete methods like short patient surveys and follow-up emails. The more streamlined your review collection process is, the more likely patients will leave their reviews. Lastly, consider investing in a patient review generation system like Birdeye or Podium.

Conclusion

Ultimately, long-term success in digital marketing for optometrists and ophthalmologists comes down to patient-centricity and how you can offer first-rate digital experiences. In summary, ensure you have a patient-centric website optimized for mobile devices. In addition, leverage Google Ads and Facebook ads to build brand awareness and capture high-quality BOF leads. Lastly, boost your digital footprint with local SEO and online reputation management, and dominate the local eye care market.

The post Optometry & Ophthalmology Marketing Guide: Strategies for Increased Patient Volume appeared first on Cardinal Digital Marketing.

According to market research, the occupational and physical therapy industry is projected to grow from $50.26 billion in 2022 to $72.70 billion by 2029, a CAGR of 5.4% during the broadcast period. The country has witnessed a steep increase in demand for PT solutions as they’re critical for improving the quality of life of individuals suffering from chronic pain, injuries, and cognitive disabilities. In addition, favorable reimbursement policies and increasing awareness about the benefits of therapy services are also major growth drivers.

As a result, the OT and PT arenas are also expected to become more competitive. Therefore, OT and PT providers should ensure their digital marketing strategy is on-point and involves high-level strategies like SEO, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, conversion rate optimization (CRO), web design, and reputation management.

Below are several practices that will help take your digital marketing strategy to new heights, increase your patient base, and gain that much-needed competitive edge.

Build a User-Friendly PT Website

Any digital marketing strategy starts with a website. Your physical therapy website is your digital front door and will likely be the first touchpoint for many of your patients. If your website cannot provide a user-friendly and comfortable digital experience, you will lose prospective patients that will choose your competitors instead. Thus, ensure your OT or PT website offers first-rate digital experiences to engage visitors and guide them to your conversion funnels.

Optimize for Speed, User Interface, and Mobile

A slow, poorly-designed website is a silent assassin of conversion rates. With that said, revisit your basics on web design, and make sure you can provide a comfortable, intuitive user experience with easy-to-read fonts, sensible layouts and menus, professional images, and clear call-to-actions (CTAs).

Moreover, your website should have fast loading speeds because 70% of consumers admitted that the speed of a website impacts their willingness to engage with the brand. Page speed is also a major ranking factor due to Google’s mobile-first indexing. Use tools like PageSpeed Insights to evaluate your website’s loading speeds and make optimal changes if needed.

Finally, your website should be mobile-friendly and has a responsive design. This is a must since half of the global website traffic comes from mobile devices, and most people browse your website on mobile. Responsive design ensures your website adapts to the screen it’s being viewed on, whether it’s on a desktop computer, laptop, tablet, or smartphone,

Implement Discoverability to Your Key Content

If you’re still worried about keyword density and word count, it’s time to revisit your content strategy. Google’s Helpful Content Update has completely changed the nature of content strategy. Now, you need to provide high-quality content that actually provides value to readers, not just optimized for search engines.

With that said, it’s not enough to publish top-notch healthcare content; you have to ensure they’re actually searchable and discoverable. Ensure your high-quality articles, blog posts, and service pages are correctly loaded on your site via your content management system (CMS). Don’t bury your content in hard-to-reach places, tons of linking, and poorly-designed menus.

Optimize Your Local Presence

Like many healthcare practices, occupational and physical therapy are predominantly local services. Therapists rely on attracting patients in their geographic area, while patients look for nearby rehabilitation centers and outpatient clinics for time and convenience. Outlined below are several best practices to help optimize your brand’s local presence:

Citations & Listings

One of the easiest ways to supercharge your local SEO is to claim local citations and listings. These are structured directories where you can supply complete and accurate information about your PT practice. Look for relevant local and national directories and claim them, including Yelp, Yellow Pages, Vitals, RateMDs, Healthgrades, and ZocDoc. Local citations and listings help search engines validate and add more credibility to your practice.

Claim and Optimize Google Business Profile

Google Business Profile or GBP (formerly Google My Business) is another critical tool for improving local SEO. Google is easily the most popular website, and most people use the search engine for information about local businesses. With an optimized GBP, you’ll have a stronger local presence and are 70% more likely to receive in-store visits than practices that don’t have the profile.

Optimize your GBP listing by providing the following information:

• Name of practice
• Address
• Website URL
• Contact information (phone number, email)
• Working hours
• Clinic and staff photos
• A short description of your rehab center

You can further optimize your profile by adding more content like photos, videos, and frequently asked questions (FAQs). FAQs are particularly significant since you’re supplying answers to the patients’ most common inquiries, removing several barriers to conversion.

Create Location-Optimized Web Pages

For multi-location occupational and physical therapy brands, one of the best practices is creating dedicated landing pages for each location. Make sure you’re using location-specific keywords to optimize your landing pages. These location-optimized landing pages will help increase your chances of ranking for location-based searches. Plus, these pages will also help you provide personalized user experiences, which many visitors appreciate. 

Offering personalized experiences will allow users to feel like unique individuals with specific medical needs and circumstances. This is crucial because 76% of users expect personalized experiences when browsing.

Develop a Local Keyword Strategy

Obviously, you have to optimize keywords based on the areas you operate. Best practice dictates that you should build a local keyword list based on your unique selling proposition or USP (i.e., specialties or unique service lines), target local area, and how patients search for your PT or OT services. Below are the two main types of local SEO keywords:

• High-intent, solution-aware keywords: This user knows that they need the services of an occupational or physical therapist.
• Location-based keywords: These long-tail keywords and phrases have geographical identifiers, such as “physical therapy in atlanta” or “sports physical therapy boston.”

When developing your local SEO keyword list, be more specific and granular by honing in on your USPs, so you’ll have less competition and more patients coming in.

Attract High-Quality Patients With Google Ads

Google Ads or PPC marketing is one of the most important strategies for healthcare marketers to grow their practice. Paid search allows you to capture patients as they’re about to make a decision (i.e., people already looking for a therapist). For instance, if a searcher uses a high-intent keyword like “kinesiology taping near me,” they know the problem and the potential solution. With an optimized PPC campaign, your ads will show up at the top of the Google SERPs, essentially putting your rehab center or outpatient clinic in front of someone actively looking for a therapist.

Below are some best practices for optimizing your Google Ads campaign:

Choosing an Account Structure

PPC has evolved and is now leaning towards automation. Although automation has made the lives of marketers simple, it’s hard not to feel the loss of autonomy. To regain that sense of control and not just leave your account on auto-pilot (definitely not recommended), you should revisit your PPC account structure to get the most out of Google Ads.

Having said that, we always recommend that our multi-group clients use hybrid accounts. While it’s not a perfect structure, hybrid allows multi-location healthcare groups to benefit from the best qualities of segmented and consolidated accounts. This means you’re maximizing ad impressions from consolidated accounts and having better budget control and tighter targeting metrics with segmented account structures.

Once you’ve decided on your account structure, optimizing your campaign to leverage Google’s smart bidding algorithm is next. At this point, feel free to experiment with bidding strategies for optimal results.

Aligning Paid Ads with Search Intent

Successful PPC marketers know the importance of aligning PPC ads with search intent along the buyer’s funnel. This encourages keyword diversity to cover the entirety of the funnel, including:

• Lower funnel “product aware” leads: These people are on the cusp of conversion and know they need a therapist. Use high-intent, product-aware keywords to capture these prospective patients.
• Mid-funnel “solution aware” leads: These people may have mobility issues or injuries but are unsure which medical treatments to get. Use educational keywords designed to highlight OT and PT treatments and services such as aerobic activities, gait training, rehabilitative therapies, etc.
• Upper funnel “problem aware” leads: These people know there’s a problem and are actively looking for the solution. At this stage, optimize for lower-intent keywords like “what does a physical therapist do.”

Leverage Your Online Reputation

Consumer behavior has significantly changed over the last decade. Gone are the days when healthcare practitioners rely on referrals and word of mouth to get patients. Nowadays, 90% of prospective patients will read online reviews when searching for healthcare providers. If your practice mainly has negative or too few reviews, most patients will likely skip you in favor of your competitors. Conversely, a positive online reputation will help you attract more patients and referrals, provided you can leverage it.

Reputation Management Best Practices

Directly asking patients for reviews is your best strategy to enhance your online reputation. Train your front-facing staff members to collect, manage, and respond to online reviews of your practice. Most patients will not voluntarily leave reviews on their own, but most will happily oblige if you simply ask them, especially following a good experience.

In addition, provide numerous ways for patients to leave feedback, but ensure all of them are quick and easy to complete. Some suitable methods include short patient surveys, SMS requests, and follow-up emails. If they’re ever so inclined, ask patients to leave reviews on your Google profile and social media accounts because you can showcase them for the best results.

Alternatively, you may invest in review solicitation programs like Birdeye, Podium, and Weave. These programs will streamline your review management process and can seamlessly integrate with your CRMs. Finally, ensure you showcase positive patient reviews on your website (About Us and dedicated review pages), landing pages, and social media accounts.

Use Video Marketing for Therapists

Like many digital solutions, the healthcare industry is slow to adopt video marketing, including physical therapy. Many therapists simply don’t consider video marketing to be a viable strategy to market themselves–don’t make the same mistake. Video marketing is beneficial for growing your practice and expanding your patient base.

As demonstrated by platforms like YouTube and TikTok, video content is more engaging, and leveraging videos will instantly give you an edge over your competitors. Plus, video marketing gives a face to your rehab or clinic, humanizes it, and establishes your PT/OT brand before prospective patients.

For physical therapists, you can produce demonstration videos of stretches and exercises that patients can perform in their homes or your clinic or a quick Q&A about your services. In addition, you can also create clinic tour videos where you can showcase your facility and company culture. Lastly, see if you can onboard current and previous patients to produce a video about reviews and testimonials. 

Conclusion

Physical therapy practices will remain in high demand, but there will always be a great deal of competition. Not only are you competing with major hospitals and private equity organizations, but you’ll also be competing with private practices. Fully-realized digital marketing for physical therapists will not only help enhance patient acquisition but also help your practice stay competitive.

The post Physical Therapy Marketing Guide: Proven Strategies for Growing Your Practice appeared first on Cardinal Digital Marketing.

1. Economic Uncertainty Impacts Marketing Strategy & Investments

As we continue through 2023, the tumultuous economic climate is beginning to impact some healthcare providers. With uncertainty still in the air, marketers are holding their breath and remain hesitant to change the status quo.  

The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank didn’t help things and impacted healthcare as much as it did any space. The future of digital health funding remains in limbo as things settle in the aftermath. While a recent report showed that digital health companies in the US garnered $3.4 billion in the first quarter of 2023, topping activity in the last half of ’22, 2023 is still on track to experience the lowest rates of digital health funding since 2019. 

While inflation has cooled, many Americans still feel the burden of increased living costs. High deductibles will continue to impact patient decision-making when it comes to receiving care, reducing some of the protections organizations typically have when consumer spending decreases. If and when we enter a recession, decreasing employment numbers will naturally lead to more uninsured patients. All of this means that consumer sensitivity to costs may increase, with many patients even deferring care.

As a result, some healthcare groups are reining in their marketing budgets. In our conversations with clients and contacts across the industry, we continue to see a good deal of caution when it comes to 2023 planning. While many are still investing in growth, caution demands that they keep a close eye on budget and marketing performance over the next several months.

If you want more from your advertising budget, read our article 6 Easy Google Ads Optimizations to Maximize Your Healthcare Budget.

2. FTC Ruling, HIPAA Compliance & the Implications for Digital Marketing

Recent changes at the regulatory level have triggered industry-wide adjustments with regards to compliance in 2023. What happened? At the end of 2023, the Department of Health and Human Services released a Bulletin clarifying what is considered healthcare information and how it is shared. According to the HHS bulletin:

“Regulated entities are not permitted to use tracking technologies in a manner that would result in impermissible disclosures of PHI to tracking technology vendors or any other violations of the HIPAA Rules.”

As a result, many healthcare marketers are reevaluating their ad strategies and leveraging increased scrutiny to their methodologies. There are safe routes forward, of course. As Rich Briddock, SVP of Strategy & Analytics at Cardinal, put it, “If you want to engage effectively with prospective patients and you can’t use first-party patient lists anymore, one way you can do that is through what we call a full-funnel strategy. Essentially, what that means is you would utilize broad targeted video campaigns at the top of the funnel. Just to let them know about your business and drive some awareness. You might use 15-second to 30-second video clips to just explain the business to those consumers.” From there, ad engagers move through the funnel toward conversion.

Want to dive into more detail? We’ve compiled a list of recommendations in this article and our podcast.

3. Patient-centric Content Is a Must

Google rolled out its latest helpful content update in August 2022. It has had a big impact on several industries, including healthcare. While previous updates have focused on useless, dangerous, or spam content, this recent update placed a far stricter requirement on content quality and authenticity, with the goal being to make digital content more relevant and helpful to humans. This is a sitewide update, meaning if one page is spammy, it can impact your site at large. 

In the months since the rollout, we’ve already seen an impact on healthcare groups as a result of these new priorities from Google. The good news is that healthcare groups could significantly benefit from this update if they follow Google’s recommendations. But what does this mean exactly in practice?

Healthcare service providers need a robust full-funnel content strategy to answer consumers’ questions at the top (TOF) and middle of the funnel (MOF). To optimize their approach, healthcare groups can do the following:

1. Develop content that directly answers the core questions that patients are asking at each stage of the patient journey.
2. Build a comfortable UI and prioritize the mobile experience so it’s easy for users to scan and find answers quickly.
3. Create thorough content that answers as many relevant questions in one piece as possible.
4. Focus on evergreen content that follows the fundamentals of SEO. This strategy tends to be algo-proof and provides the best user experience.

Again, while this is a significant change that will continue to impact healthcare entities into 2023, taking the right, patient-centric approach to content should result in gains for the space in the long term. One tool that may serve you well in the years to come? Artificial Intelligence.

4. AI-Powered Tech Changing Marketing

It’s one of the most popular topics of conversation out there right now—chatbots are redefining everything from schoolwork to research and, yes, healthcare marketing. These AI-driven chat interfaces are positioned to have a real impact on marketing efforts moving forward, affecting SEO, patient engagement, and more.  

One particularly relevant chatbot is Bard, Google’s response to ChatGPT. Although Bard is still working out its kinks, it seems it will act as a companion to search, not a replacement. Understanding how it will integrate with search is essential to any organization doing SEO or publishing content online.

And how about ChatGPT, the other hugely popular chatbot out there right now? It will be gradually rolling out plugins that will give its system deeper and more recent knowledge. In the long term, this will create a wide array of use cases that could impact the way and ease with which healthcare consumers get information online.

As these technologies grow in quality and impact, marketers are examining initial use cases, including how AI-technology can be used to improve efficiency. While a chatbot’s facility with language is still evolving, it is ready to help with certain workflows at healthcare practices. For example, chatbots can pick up some of the “small” work in day-to-day workflows, including helping patients answer questions or schedule appointments. This, in turn, can allow healthcare teams to focus more on work that humans are well suited for, including generating new ideas and jumpstarting projects. 

In terms of generating content, AI-driven language tools will continue to need to human touch. As Jacquelyn Green, Director of SEO, phrases it, “When using AI for writing content, we are outlining it, determining what keywords and headings are in it. We’re doing the strategy and using the tool to create the answers to some of the questions. It’s more than just letting a tool spit out 500 words and then us going in and adding keywords. It’s a lot more of a hands-on strategy.” 

5. Website User Experience Remains Paramount

We said it last year, and we’ll say it again—website UX should be at the top of your list of priorities for 2023. Why? Google wants good user experiences , and so do your patients. Google’s requirements and your patients’ needs are closely aligned, too. Both want to find information quickly, and part and parcel of that is: a) getting your site architecture right and b) making sure that your site includes robust, in-depth content that answers patient questions directly.

Always adhere to the Google mantra for content: E-A-T, or Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.

That means generating original, up-to-date, and highly relevant content. Remember, too, that your IRL interactions have an impact via third-party rating sites. Always be transparent in your content, as well, making sure to disclose how it’s created and from where you are sourcing it.  

How can you optimize your website UX? We recently shared our 7 Essential Principles for Optimizing Your Website for Search, which you can use for a deep dive into the topic. The following are just some of the best practices you’ll want to adhere to with your website UX:

• Keep things organized. Neither Google nor your patient wants to spend a lot of time searching for what they need. Keep the menus and structure of your site clean and in order.
•  Keep key content discoverable. Clicking 4 or 5 times to get to what you want is almost a perfect formula for encouraging a visitor to drop off. Make sure that all of your recent and relevant content is discoverable and within easy reach.
• Keep your site unique. You want your site visitors to have a differentiated experience when visiting your site. Consider what distinguishes you from competitors and weave this into messaging, voice, tone, etc.
•  Keep a site linkable. If you are generating top-grade content, you’ve completed step one. You will also want to evaluate links on your pages and undertake link-building campaigns if you haven’t already.

As we pointed out last year, healthcare organizations need to view a website as the digital face of their organization. As 2023 approaches, organizations should recommit to retooling their sites to focus on patient needs:

Remember that your homepage is your first impression. All messaging and design elements should align with the impression you want to make on patients. Clearly communicate your unique value proposition and provide UX components that funnel your visitors toward conversion. 

Create buyer personas and use these to map patient journeys. Unfortunately, there is no way to create a completely customized digital experience for every visitor. What you can do is use data to identify high-volume journeys and optimize your site to ensure they meet patients’ complete needs.

Leverage SEO metrics on your landing pages. Google offers great resources for identifying which pages and keywords are driving the most organic traffic to your site. Use this data to optimize the target URL to cater to the people using that search language, zero in on the intent behind a search, and answer that need with your landing page.

6. Personalization Will Be the Gold Standard

This is another trend with staying power in 2023. Personalization continues to be the gold standard. As Salesforce highlighted in a recent report, 92 percent of marketers believe their customers and prospects expect personalized experiences. With expectations that high, it’s not hard to imagine that patients will go elsewhere if they don’t get that bespoke experience.

What steps can you take to leverage personalization in 2023? While healthcare privacy laws always create some constrictions, there are still two approaches you can take to make this happen:

Use Geo-Personalization

Geo-personalization is an easy way to personalize landing pages so that all the information a user sees is relevant to the location closest to them. People who are on the lookout for a new doctor are typically motivated by one thing— convenience. When you provide a page that is personalized to a patient’s location, they get immediate access to everything they need to convert, including:

• What providers are nearby
• Which providers are accepting new patients
• Services offered at that location
• Specifics on insurance, etc. 

The added benefit is that geo-personalization does not violate HIPAA or patient privacy— always a key issue (and delicate balancing act) in healthcare marketing. It also reduces the number of steps to conversion, giving users all the information they need early on in their customer journey. With geo-personalization in the mix, you should see an increase in new patient acquisition. After all, with geo-personalization, you are removing some serious roadblocks to conversion.

Launch and Refine Your Patient Portals and/or Mobile Apps. 

It’s one thing to build an email list based on protected personal health information. Once a person logs into a portal or mobile app, however, your options broaden considerably. Within those interfaces, you can display condition- or treatment-specific content or recommend certain services or appointments. You can also give patients direct access to their medical information and physicians. That must be part of the reason that more patients use patient portals than ever before. Personalize the patient experience by building patient portals that give direct access to their medical information and customized content resources.

Let Patients Choose Their Journey. 

You don’t need personal health information to adapt content journeys to what specific patients want. For example, if you know that one of your web pages is getting a lot of organic search traffic for the keyword “breast augmentation in san diego,” you can tailor it to that particular journey. What kind of information would a person who used that search term and clicked through to your website need? How can you adapt the page to be a bit more personalized to this particular journey?

7. Recruitment Marketing Captures Greater Budget Share

National staffing shortages continue to have a significant impact on the healthcare industry. According to a survey conducted recently by consulting firm WittKieffer  93% of healthcare executives reported that burnout is having a negative impact on their organizations. With burnout escalating, it’s clear that staffing shortages will continue to plague the healthcare industry in 2023. In this climate, healthcare groups won’t be able to expand their capacity or grow without a strong recruitment pipeline.

Patient experience and quality of care will suffer if you don’t build a culture of collaborative care. Healthcare brands must manage their brand reputation and develop a supportive employee culture if they want recruitment campaigns to work. Remember, providers and affiliated brands are as important as your patients.

Marketing is increasingly being tasked with supporting recruitment efforts and with good causes. Marketing initiatives can make some real headway in support of shaping your brand and communicating your company’s culture and employment perks. 

One way in which marketing can impact recruiting is via digital PR. Well-positioned public relations in the digital space is one of the easiest ways to share the best aspects of your employee culture, spreading the word about just how much you value employee achievements, new hires, and programs that support your employees. 

Lauren Leone, Cardinal’s SVP of Healthcare Marketing, offered some tips, as guidance.

 “First and foremost is getting your messaging strategy right. You should be thinking about your story, your audiences, and the assets for them just as significantly as you think about your patient recruitment. What are the stories I’m trying to tell? What are the value propositions of my organization? What makes me different? How do those translate into your website, your careers section of your website and how do those translate into video or text ads?”

Promoting your charitable giving and philanthropic activities, too, will add another layer of depth to your organization’s culture and make it that much more appealing to potential recruits.

Healthcare organizations in 2023 can also optimize the digital experience to support recruitment efforts. Here are a few ways marketing can help:

• Developing employee-centric recruitment pages on the website
• Conducting running conversion rate optimization testing to improve application rates
• Creating recruitment-specific media campaigns
• Managing reputation on platforms like LinkedIn, Glassdoor, and Indeed
• Sharing your culture on social platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook

8. Google Ads Embrace AI

Another AI-related issue to keep an eye on? Google’s growing push toward broad match keywords, triggered by the search giant’s increasing use of AI to match search queries to ads.

As Google continues to phase out traditional exact match, keyword match types will have more and more limitations on the types of data signals they can pull from. As a result, advertisers are being pushed to embrace broad match type, which is now the only match type that uses all of the signals available to understand the intent of each query and a target audience.

There are, of course, some serious benefits to broad match, including scalability and Increased efficiency.

As Evan Ilgenfritz, Director of Paid Media Strategy, put it,

“Essentially, what’s happening is broad match now has increased functionality that the other match types do not. This is a big one because right now, broad match can leverage a variety of things such as previous user search history… Ultimately, this means we’re evolving our own understanding of the importance of broad match, and Cardinal, in particular, is now testing and looking forward to the future for what this improved broad match could offer.”  

9. Organic Search Becomes More  Helpful to Healthcare Consumers

Google has gone through some recent updates as well, as it continues to work on improving accessibility to helpful healthcare information. High-level goals in these updates include making it easier to find Medicaid re-enrollment information, implementing AI technology to verify provider details, and connecting individuals with crisis support hotlines through search. 

As a result, “helpful content” is more important than ever when it comes to your SEO strategy. That’s why your healthcare content must be comprehensive and answer as many patient questions as possible.

Google also made some changes recently to how it identifies and filters out spam. Search’s most recent SEO algorithm update focuses on low-quality spam links. What does that mean for your marketing efforts? If you’re not focused on building top-tier backlinks right now for SEO, you will get left behind in the SERPS.

Finally, Apple Maps’ business listings are about to get more detailed. Taking a page from the Google playbook, Apple is developing its own listings platform visible on Apple Maps, Siri, and iPhone messages. With Google Business Profiles also introducing several new features, it is more important than ever for healthcare organizations to manage their profiles directly on Google, create compelling posts, and address FAQs from patients. 

10. Healthcare’s Digital Transformation Continues

It seems like ‘digital transformation’ has been the main topic of conversation for a while now in multiple industries— except for healthcare, that is. Let’s be honest; healthcare is an industry that has lagged behind in terms of digital advancements. Whether this stems from concerns around patient privacy or entrenched analog workflows, technological adoption in healthcare has historically been low compared to other sectors. 

Consider this takeaway on the status of marketing technology from our recent healthcare marketing survey:

“… 47% still do not use a customer relationship management (CRM) solution. The same was true last year (46% did not use a CRM then). The complexities of integrating CRMs with EHRs and across multiple locations can be daunting, and it looks like many organizations still aren’t ready for the challenge.”

A one percent increase year-over-year could be described as a snail’s pace, but momentum is increasing, and it isn’t a moment too soon. Digital is not only the key to improving operational efficiency and producing outsized returns for investors but also the key to improving the quality of patient care and access.

Private equity investment and consolidation are fueling technology adoption. To improve efficiency and reduce redundancy, healthcare groups are investing in marketing and patient experience/access technologies, including:

•  Centralized call centers
•  Online appointment booking
• Centralized CRMs
• Live chat and chatbots
• Call tracking
• Review generation technology

These technologies can have a real impact on operations. Online booking via a website, for one, is one of the biggest ways that you can streamline operations. Administrative staff will be free from the phones for the first time, allowing them to focus on more critical goals and tasks. 

For multi-location brands, centralized call centers provide an easier way to answer routine patient questions about insurance, hours of operation, etc. And, yes, the CRM referenced above can do a lot for operations, making it easier for stakeholders to access patient information, share information between patients and send reminder information as needed. An added bonus? The right CRM improves efficiency and allows a marketing team to personalize patient experiences and improve patient retention.

Speaking of patients, healthcare consumers expect a digital experience, and that will continue in 2023. They are looking for transparent, proactive communication that helps them do what they need to do and do it quickly. According to a 2019 Patient Access Journey Report from Kyruus, 40 percent of people switched providers just to get an appointment sooner, while 46 percent of patients at urgent care cited “speed of access” as a trigger in their choice of care. With these numbers, it’s clear that digital transformation will continue to be essential in 2023.

Fortunately, the unbundling of EPIC is also making it easier for organizations to implement transformative technologies. Historically, EPIC implementation has meant a commitment of years, making it a lengthy and cost-prohibitive endeavor. With the increasing number of vendors targeting the EHR market and unbundling EPIC, healthcare groups can now more readily adopt technology that improves patient experience, access, and clinical workflow.

Conclusion: A Better Web for Healthcare Consumers

With healthcare slowly but surely engaging in digital transformation as we continue through 2023, marketers should remain focused on the creation of an enhanced patient experience online and on mobile. Patients will feel empowered with more information available to make more informed choices, increasing loyalty and reducing instances of care aversion. 

A commitment to prioritize patients is inherent in all of the 2023 healthcare marketing trends listed above. Healthcare marketers who pursue patient-centric marketing strategies and build empathetic patient experiences will outperform their competitors in an evolving and (still) unstable economic environment.

The post 10 Healthcare Marketing Trends for 2023 appeared first on Cardinal Digital Marketing.

Given the momentum behind value-based care, healthcare organizations are looking for more ways to improve outcomes. 

So what tools should healthcare providers and organizations consider to drive better patient outcomes? Operational and marketing technologies, like the ones we will dive into below. Everything from AI-driven tech to marketing automation solutions can be key to reaching the high benchmarks expected by value-based care. 

How Can Technology Help Improve Patient Outcomes?

Improving patient outcomes is not just about improving the quality of care. It also touches on improving other factors that impact the patient experience, including process and equity. How can technology impact all of these and more? Let’s take a look at some of the most powerful options out there today. 

AI-powered Diagnostic Tools

While AI may have yet to conquer the written language, it has been making a big impact in diagnostics. Several recent studies have shown how AI can support both clinical decisions and the judgment of doctors. 

In 2020, global tech company, Babylon, began utilizing machine learning in the diagnosis of a range of diseases, developing an AI symptom checker which they believe will help to reduce errors in diagnoses in the long term. 

More recently, in Hungary, research demonstrated that AI was able to meet and even exceed success rates in the diagnosis of breast cancer by radiologists. Over in the world of dermatology, an AI tool used as a decision support system demonstrated 95% sensitivity and 86% specificity in diagnosing melanoma in a study conducted in primary care settings.

While this field is evolving, the message is clear—AI-driven tools will be a real differentiator in medical diagnoses in the years to come. 

AI-driven, Centralized EHR System

AI’s impact is proving just as dynamic when it comes to Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems. AI has been shown to drive more efficient data discovery and the extraction of complex findings, allowing doctors to generate more personalized recommendations for treatment. Heavy hitters such as IBM, Microsoft, and Alphabet are all investing a good deal in this area of research, meaning that the future looks promising for yet another way in which AI can improve patient outcomes. 

Patient Engagement & Communication Software

While AI and automation may seem like an easy fit in the world of diagnosis and data analysis, it may seem a more nuanced fit in the world of patient engagement and communication. The truth is, however, that AI is just as relevant here and can significantly impact patient outcomes. 

So, let’s dig in and show how marketing automation can support better patient outcomes.

How Marketing Automation Supports Value-based Care & Patient Outcomes

Across the board, marketing automation makes it easy to remind patients of their care needs and increase patient engagement. Who hasn’t missed an appointment before or neglected their physical therapy, right? 

To implement a robust patient communication strategy, you need an EHR or practice management system that either has marketing automation capabilities or can integrate with external technology providers.

Marketing automation technology allows healthcare providers to engage patients consistently and guide them toward the best quality of care. By leveraging automation, you’ll be that much closer to fulfilling the mandate for value-based care. 

Let’s look at two ways in which automation can improve patient outcomes.

Automated Appointment Alerts

Anyone in healthcare can confirm that ongoing and routine care is critical to better patient outcomes. Patients will frequently miss appointments or neglect routine and preventive care, such as mammograms, for example, or annual physicals. 

Why does this matter? Non-attendance is prolific right now in U.S. healthcare. Patient “no shows” in the past occurred at a rate of over 21 percent; more recently, studies have shown that no-show rates can be as high as 23 to 34 percent in outpatient clinical environments. 

Whether you look at these high numbers of no shows from the patient side or the clinician side, one thing is clear: no shows reduce the efficiency with which healthcare professionals can deliver care. 

When implementing automation solutions to reduce no show rates, remember—preferences can vary from one population to the next. What works for your patients? Ask them how they want to be reminded of appointments, then implement automated reminders based on those preferences. These can include but are not limited to:

• appointment alerts via text;
• email reminders; or, 
• automated yearly, bi-annual, etc. reminders 

Providing Continuing Education and Information Access

Healthcare doesn’t start and stop at a patient’s appointment. For many patients, care is an ongoing process that may require continuing education. With automation technologies, healthcare practices can engage more effectively in ongoing care management and provide patients with the information they need to get the best quality of care. 

Patient Portal Onboarding

Another way automation can streamline processes to improve the patient experience is via patient portals. Patient portals are a valuable tool that allows patients to access their health information, communicate with doctors, schedule and confirm appointments, and more.

In and of itself, this is a dynamic tool that can help educate patients. However, it is not always the easiest tool for some patients to use. To view it from another angle, a portal has no value if your patients can’t get into it. 

Marketing automation can help guide your patients through the onboarding process, sending step-by-step instructions on how to create an account, along with guided tours of available features. If a patient has failed to set up a patient portal account, automation software can send out a reminder to the patient or to a staff member, who can then call the patient and walk them through the process. All in, your patients will have an easier experience and feel potentially attended to by your staff from their first point of contact. An effective patient portal can then serve as a way to provide ongoing education throughout treatment. 

Post-discharge Follow-up Care

Automated reminders are a theme here throughout, and they have use cases again in post-discharge follow-up care. Many patients are vulnerable after surgery or treatments—as you know—they can relapse, get infections, or even not follow through with the recommended post-op care. Ensuring patients don’t miss appointments is vital for early detection post-surgical care. 

Automated SMS and emails can help keep the process on track. These alerts can also remind patients of certain critical factors, including:

• Symptoms to watch for 
• Post-surgical care recommendations 
• Next steps in the treatment plan 
• Physical therapy reminders  

These automated reminders foment real change in the post-op process, as evidenced by a recent study done at the University of Pennsylvania. Researchers there used automated texts with patients discharged from the hospital. These efforts resulted in a 55% reduction in re-admissions. Another recent study showed that SMS alerts could potentially make a significant difference for patients engaging in rehabilitation after a stroke, including patients in low-income or underserved communities. While research continues, it’s clear that automation could have a real and lasting impact on post-op care, thus improving the value of care, overall. 

Lifestyle and Health Recommendations

Healthcare groups can share effective and up-to-date treatment information and even make lifestyle recommendations to patients via automation in other ways, as well. What are just a few of the use cases? 

For patients whose doctors have made dietary recommendations, marketing automation solutions can serve as a helpful way to send patients suggestions that keep them on track. The same goes for patients engaged in exercise programs or physical therapy. A recent systematic review of reminder systems used in physical therapy, showed that these reminders could have a positive effect on improving patient adherence to recommended exercise programs. 

Even mental health care has a use case—doctors and therapists can use these solutions to check in with patients, make lifestyle recommendations, and ensure consistency of care for those long periods when patients are not in a clinical setting. 

At the end of the day, patients will not only receive a higher quality of care but also feel more supported by their providers and practitioners. 

Conclusion

It’s an exciting time to be in the healthcare field as technologies continue to transform the space and improve care. While the adoption of new technologies may have been slow going in the past, it is clear that these innovations are poised to change the way practitioners and organizations deliver care in 2023 and beyond. Whether related to diagnostics or patient engagement efforts, AI and automation can and will continue to help healthcare professionals provide the best care possible. 

The post Marketing Value-based Care and Improving Patient Health Outcomes appeared first on Cardinal Digital Marketing.

Often, it’s not procuring the data that is a problem but managing it and deriving actionable insights. Within the healthcare industry, we’ve found that big data doesn’t always equal smart data. This is especially true of multi-site healthcare groups, where the abundance of data tends to create problems.

To help your organization or portfolio company strategize how to harness and use data to fuel growth, we’ve compiled a comprehensive guide to healthcare data management. Let’s dig in. 

Strategy 1: Build a Foundational Marketing Analytics Team

Marketers within most healthcare organizations have access to an incredible amount of data. This is common. Less common are mature data management strategies that help these marketers accurately identify, measure, and act on KPIs.

Because data for the sake of data isn’t much help, there’s a growing demand for data acquisition specialists, scientists, analysts, and interpreters within healthcare marketing teams. Members of this team must be able to analyze data findings and relate them to strategic objectives and then communicate those insights to executives.

Beyond personnel, data analysis itself should now be built into marketing plans to ensure that they more closely align with real-time consumer needs. This means a close connection between an organization’s operational model, goals, and data stack. 

In practice, this can look like closer alignment between campaigns and practice capacity. For example, if a practice is at max capacity, you’ll want to shift the marketing budget and campaigns to other locations that have a need for new patients. Instead of patients being told they must wait months for an appointment, they’re connected to the location that can serve them soonest. 

The most savvy, forward-thinking medical groups are aligning their strategies quite closely—and quite intentionally—with their data.

Strategy 2: Eliminate Organizational Silos

Too often, we find that various marketing functions are decentralized across various departments and locations within a healthcare organization. While these kinds of “silos” can easily become accepted as status quo, they present real hindrances to data sharing and overall growth. These include:

• Incomplete, inefficient, or non-existing communication channels between various teams
• Inability to disseminate data insights and collaborate on “big” ideas
• Lack of alignment around broader organizational strategies, including competing interests
• Patchwork patient management and data systems scattered across various locations, creating inaccuracies, incongruencies, and incomplete data

Organizational silos represent a systemic issue with consequences that extend beyond just data management. Patients are impacted, too, as these disparate systems make it difficult for providers to identify health-related patterns, track trends, and communicate information to patients with continuity. All of this ultimately translates to degraded quality of care.

Our tips?

• Tear down silos and encourage collaboration across departments
• Structure your marketing program and data platforms around the needs of your healthcare consumer
• Consider how digital tools can connect different operational units, improve communication, and facilitate data transmittance

 Learn more about marketing centralization best practices. 

Strategy 3: Leverage APIs to Accelerate Digital Transformation

Let’s dig into the technical side of things because the way your organization leverages your technology integrations can make all the difference. Through custom application programming interfaces (API), it’s possible to connect disparate technology systems across your organization, including your sources of data and data management.

Specifically, you might consider strategic APIs to connect your electronic health record (EHR) platform with other tools, such as databases, health tracking apps, customer relationship management (CRM) software, web services, and even marketing automation software. These kinds of connections can enhance your ability to pool and derive value from all sources of data.

Of course, these kinds of integrations and development don’t happen overnight, and they can require considerable resources and budget. One place to start is with what Gartner calls a thorough audit of your marketing technologies and systems.

Most healthcare companies, despite their growing suites of technologies, are surprised to learn that they don’t have a clear, documented understanding of their tech stack, nor what data is available to them (and how). An audit can provide a kind of roadmap, one that helps your organization identify:

• Where you need to drive better technology adoption to boost efficiency across the organization
• Opportunities for strategic data integrations (through APIs) that can bolster and enhance data management
• Which technologies your organization no longer needs and are ready to be phased out

 Lastly, when integrating marketing platforms, you must protect patient health information (PHI) to remain HIPAA compliant. Learn more about HIPAA marketing best practices here. 

Strategy 4: Listen to Your Stakeholders (that Includes Patients)

Speaking of data, your organizational stakeholders and patients represent one of the richest sources you have. The question is, are you listening to what these important people are telling you?

Along each “journey” or essential process at your medical practice, there are key stakeholders that have insights that can improve the delivery of care and, in doing so, impact your bottom line. These are the “people doing the work,” and their experiences, friction points, and frustrations should not be overlooked.

Consider this: a physician survey by Deloitte reported that many physicians feel as if they’re not part of the EHR solution. These physicians reported feeling like they were just “passive participants in EHR optimization efforts.”

What a lost opportunity!

Physicians, nurses, and other frontline staff members can provide critical insights that would improve data collection efficiency and quality. Their adoption of technologies like EHR solutions is crucial, yet it will be difficult to achieve if you don’t listen to their feedback.

In the same Deloitte survey, 58% of physicians said there is room for improvement in clinical documentation. They complained of having to manually enter data from hand-written forms (versus having the patient enter the data through an integrated technology). Again, this stakeholder feedback can help organizations consider new ways to improve clinical documentation and unlock the critical insights hidden in physicians’ notes, reports, and other narrative documents.

Finally, and most importantly, listen to the patient. Successful healthcare organizations always have a patient-first mindset. Use technology to capture their feedback and seek ways to integrate it with marketing systems—center the patient when developing new marketing strategies, especially as they relate to data acquisition, management, and insights.

Strategy 5: Understand the Marketing Strategies that Drive Growth

Growth-oriented strategies are usually data-driven strategies. At their core, these strategies are centered around evaluating your marketing strategy and identifying where data could be used—or better used—to enable and realize growth opportunities.

Here are a few ways to go about that:

Maximize advertising ROI using capacity data

One strategy for improving marketing ROI is to use capacity data in your media planning to maximize every cent of your advertising budget. Instead of spending the same budget for every location, adjust your budget based on practice capacity limits. If a provider is booked solid for the next three months, stop ads that send patients to that location. It wastes your ad dollars, as the patient likely won’t wait for an appointment. You’ll see better conversion rates if you send them to another nearby location accepting patients. 

We recommend you analyze each location’s performance to determine where to allocate more or less advertising dollars. Determine the:

• locations with low patient volume;
• new practices opening that require special attention;
• locations with maxed capacity or long wait times.

By understanding the capacity challenges and goals at each location and your customer acquisition costs targets, you can strategically allocate marketing dollars to optimize your spend allocation.

Implement end-to-end marketing measurement

Yet another benefit of connecting your technology systems, platforms, and data sources is the ability to attribute leads more accurately. 

Lead attribution helps you understand where new patients come from. Organic website traffic? Social media advertising campaigns? With this data, you can get quite serious and efficient about where you direct your marketing spend.

For a long time, so-called “last click” attribution models have been the norm, but we’ve found that these models don’t tell the complete story. Instead, we recommend more sophisticated lead attribution models.

Multi-touch attribution models, in which you can assign partial conversion credit to a variety of marketing channels and touchpoints. While the healthcare patient journey is more complex, it’s still possible to develop a better attribution model that helps you understand the effectiveness of various marketing activities. As system integrations increase, healthcare marketers should explore how they can adopt similar models.

Accurate and reliable lead attribution data is not always easy. It requires that your marketing analytics software is connected to your CRM or patient management system, Google Analytics, PPC advertising platform, and marketing automation software. Working with an agency well-versed in building integrated HIPAA-compliant tech stacks can help remove the headache by seamlessly connecting all these systems and managing them from a central interface.

PPC advertising platform, and marketing automation software. Working with an agency well-versed in building integrated HIPAA-compliant tech stacks can help remove the headache by seamlessly connecting all these systems and managing them from a central interface.

Gain deeper insight with call analytics

As the healthcare journey has become more sophisticated, so has call tracking and analytics software. Call tracking software, like CallRail, Invoca, and Liine can provide valuable insights into the patient journey and consumer behavior. By collecting and analyzing phone call data from potential patients, call tracking can help you refine your marketing strategy. It integrates with Google Analytics, Google Ads, and popular marketing automation software systems like Marketo and HubSpot. 

You’ll get data about which keywords, for example, are driving phone calls to help you close the loop between PPC campaigns, leads, and new patients. You’ll also uncover the information prospects need and conversion barriers. Are leads asking the same questions repeatedly? Is your online scheduling app difficult to use? Use these insights to refine your website content, messaging, and ads. 

Call analytics can also improve intake and operational efficiency by identifying bottlenecks in the patient journey. By analyzing call data, you can uncover operational issues that may be preventing someone from booking an appointment, such as long call wait times or difficulty reaching the right department. Addressing these issues can improve the patient experience, increase patient satisfaction, and ultimately drive growth for your healthcare organization.

Important Considerations When Taking Control of Your Own Data

Let’s start here: if your organization has been grappling with how to derive more value from your data, you’re certainly not alone. Within the healthcare industry, it is common for medical practices—especially larger groups with many different locations under their broader umbrella—to lack suitable strategies around data management.

Yet the goal remains the same: How to harness this data to both propel growth and consistently improve patient outcomes?

As you consider your own data infrastructure, keep the following questions in mind:

Who owns the data and where does it reside?

When conducting your technology audit, map out where data exists and who owns it? Data locations might include:

• Electronic health record (EHR) technology
• Revenue cycle management (RCM) software
• Customer relationship management (CRM) software
• Marketing automation platforms
• Content management systems (CMS)

How are your disparate systems connected?

How do you get the data to the people who need it? What APIs are needed? What vendors need to be involved? And who, finally, interprets the data?

How do you ensure customer privacy is protected?

Compliance cannot be overlooked in any medical practice, especially when it comes to consumer data. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) have strict requirements for the use of personally identifiable information (PII). Indeed, data collaboration needs to be approached carefully, and cybersecurity risks should be part of any discussion involving technology integration.

These three high-level questions are good starting points for the data management conversation. A thorough audit centered around your patients first, then your broader marketing objectives can pay massive dividends within the healthcare vertical. Increasingly, it all starts with how we use data.

Learn more about HIPAA-compliant marketing best practices.

The post 5 Healthcare Data Management Strategies Marketers Can Use to Drive Growth appeared first on Cardinal Digital Marketing.