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By Paul Griffiths, CEO, Medtouch
Here’s a crazy idea: next quarter, when you take a new service line to market, update your homepage. Put the service line front and center and, much to the chagrin of the Director of the Wound Care “Center of Excellence” and the doctors who wield the latest CyberUtensils set, you will see traffic to the service line jump at least 20%.
Want to bump it to 30%? Update the content on that service line’s landing page, tying it back to the exact language in the offline campaign and resubmit to Google.
It’s classic marketing 101, but the average hospital website is so focused on representing the institutional identity, it has little relationship with offline marketing efforts. I’ve heard plenty of excuses for this ranging from the political – we’d have to get the CIO involved, to the technical – our website software is so lousy, no one uses it, to the sublime – we might get more admissions than we could handle for that program. Heaven forbid!
None of these excuses matter to patients, who struggle to make a health care decision in a marketing landscape full of noise and who are increasingly lured by genuinely helpful websites, such as RevolutionHealth.com, with advertising budgets that begin to approach your institution’s payroll. These social healthcare sites have quintupled in the last year – from five to thirty-one at last count – and they are all seeking to monetize patient choice, driving your marketing costs up, up, up.
Every hospital in America is competing for the same five DRGs (heart, ortho, neuro, cancer, and women’s health/peds) and by and large, patients who go online are well-educated, willing to travel, and take their concerns to the Internet before their own primary care doctor. They’re hyper-aware they have options, thanks to all your offline marketing efforts. In fact, hospital brand building is so effective, I’ll bet 90%+ of your website traffic comes from two sources: folks typing in the address directly or from search engine searches that contain your hospital’s name.
What patients don’t have when they show up at your homepage is why you are the best option. No radio spot or print piece can properly address those concerns because they require the kinds of give and take that used to only happen in physician-patient conversations.
If you want to engage patients, talk up to them, not down. Explain in clear language success rates, the uniqueness of the program, why your doctors are fantastic, how friendly your nursing staff is, the fact the new rooms are designed “green” – all the stuff you wish you could say in a :30 spot, but can’t. Go on as long as you want, write twenty pages, put up video of your most handsome OB doc, interview patients who loved the experience, and so on. The richer and deeper and more institution-specific the content, the more likely patients will stay and the longer they stay, the more likely they’ll be to select your institution.
So this fall, when you take your new Cardiac Cath lab ads out in the local paper, update your homepage. Make the Lab front and center. Then six months later, do it all over again.
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