Dodgeball Marketing Podcast #16: Healthcare Marketing: Managing Your Online Presence

Chris Raines: Welcome to episode. . .

Michael Utley: Episode 16.

Chris Raines: I feel like my voice goes way up at the beginning.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: I apologize to that for anyone listening with earbuds on. Welcome. Welcome to episode 16...

Michael Utley: 16.

Chris Raines: ...of the Dodgeball Marketing Podcast. My name is Chris.

Michael Utley: I'm Michael.

Chris Raines: And today, thank you for watching by the way. If you haven't subscribed already, if you're watching on YouTube, go ahead and hit subscribe. If you're watching on audio, subscribe to the podcast on whatever player you're listening on, we've got a ton of content coming up. We're in a spot right now. We're doing a lot of the healthcare topics.

Michael Utley: Yeah. We're talking about some healthcare marketing.

Chris Raines: And today we're going to talk about healthcare marketing and the title we're giving this episode is, having a website is just a start or you might say, going beyond the website.

Michael Utley: Yeah. Managing your online presence is more than just a website.

Chris Raines: Oh yeah. I like online presence. You know Michael, a few years ago, whereby say a few, I mean like maybe 15 years ago. People thought. . . Healthcare practitioners, when they wanted to check off the digital marketing box, they would say, oh we got a website. We've got some, we had somebody build us a website. Now we have a website.

Michael Utley: Internet is done.

Chris Raines: Internet done checked off the box.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: A lot has changed since then, consumer behaviors have changed since then and what websites people go to, how people buy and how people evaluate has changed since then. So it's no longer adequate to say, to have that, just check off your box with your website. It's so important now to think of your entire online presence of which your website is a part of.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: And that's what we're going to talk about. So let's get right into it, Michael.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: The first thing is kind of a preamble here is, healthcare is a business. Practitioners think about it as care and as doing good in the world. Really, it is that. But it's also a business, [and] you need to make money. And more importantly you need to be findable wherever people that need your services, need your healthcare, want to find you, right?

Michael Utley: That's right.

Chris Raines: And [wherever they're] trying to get information from you, you need to show up there. So that's what we mean about online presence.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: People don't just go to the Yellow Pages and look for "dermatologists near me" anymore. They're going to go, they're going to Google top rated dermatologists in Charlotte.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: And then they're going to go to a site like Healthgrades.

Michael Utley: Or MRI near me.

Chris Raines: Right. And they're going to assign health grades and they're going to read other people's reviews. So they're kind of behaving in that way now. So Michael, let's talk first about [the] website. I know we said we want to go beyond the website. It's important to go beyond the website but let's talk about website basics. What does it mean to have a competent website if you are a healthcare provider?

Michael Utley: Yeah. And we've seen this, there are a lot of companies that are really big established have a real strategic approach to the customer experience or the patient experience. But for a lot of one, two, three location shops and MRI scanning center or any of these sort of specialties where people are trying to find you. Sometimes a website is real hassle. But yeah, some basics to kind of keep in mind are, is it usable? Does it work well? Is it easy for people to find a phone number?

Michael Utley: Here's a big one, the mobile experience. If somebody is looking it up on their phone, are they able to find you? And if they can, is it a responsive website design that works on any size screen? Another one is thinking about that navigation, that top nav, what are the things that you need to have in the top nav and not having too many things there? What are the main three to five things people would ever try to find you to be able to do? Are those in your top nav? Another one is an informative. Do you have the kind of information that people need? Another big one is site speed, how long does it take to load? Google since October, of what? 2018?

Michael Utley: Mobile first indexing really killed a lot of websites in one fell swoop because they weren't mobile friendly. And a lot of that wasn't just the design and the layout working on different sized screens. It was page speed. So are you thinking about your page speed? And then, what are you doing to kind of host and maintain your website? Are you on fast hosting? Do you have somebody who's paying attention, making sure that stuff's not broken?

Michael Utley: We're actually a lot of people when they get to us, they have things that are just completely broken. Broken plugins that are not loading, forms that are collecting and giving the experience of being a patient inquiry that are dead. That are not generating an email, that's going to a good email address that's monitored. So is all that stepping maintained? You really can't tolerate any of that for even a day. So what is your process for maintaining your website? Yeah.

Chris Raines: Yeah. And I would add on to that, things like usability. So think about the number one thing that people want to do on your website. So it might be, find out what sort of services you offer, what sort of diseases or malfunctions in the body that you can address, right? That's one thing, but the other thing is to contact you. So here's a good example. Are you making people fill out their entire medical history and their social security number and all that, just to contact you? It should be really easy for someone to say, hey, here's my name. Here's my email. Here's my phone number. I'm interested in acne treatments sent.

Michael Utley: Yeah. Or I just need a new patient consult.

Chris Raines: Exactly. And they shouldn't be made to start a username and password to log in.

Michael Utley: Yeah. To do a contact, right. That's right.

Chris Raines: They shouldn't have to give you their birth ... you can collect all that stuff later. So this is what we call removing as much friction as possible. So anything, can they find the form? Is the form easy to use? And are you asking them the bare minimum to be able to contact them? Because you're going to be able to get birthday, you're going to be able to get what insurance provider they have, you're going to be able to get all that.

Michael Utley: Yeah. And for mobile users in particular, a big feature that people are using the website for, so you get a street address. So they may know the name of the organization, the company they're trying to get to, the location and they're putting in a street address and they may be in a web search instead of Google maps. They may not be opening Google maps. They may be opening a browser and doing a search for you. And then let them scroll to the footer and check your own mobile experience. See if that street address is clickable, the pop-up on a Map app.

Chris Raines: And to that same thing, make sure your phone number is clickable.

Michael Utley: Make sure that phone number is clickable and it's opening a phone. Use the TEL tag in the HTML.

Chris Raines: Think about how much friction it is to go in and get your little selector, select the phone number, hit copy and then move to your phone. Just make it clickable.

Michael Utley: And how hard is it to remember 10 digits for five seconds? It's kind of hard, it's kind of hard to get it right. And so you want to remove all of these barriers to entry. Yeah.

Chris Raines: Yeah. So anything people can do on your website, make sure it's very easy for them to do with as little friction as possible.

Michael Utley: That's right. And then next step, get familiar. Okay, so we talked about the website as not being adequate to kind of check things off the list. So some of these other things that are in the ring of connectedness to your new patients. They are outside of your website are pages on the internet that you can influence because it's your page or that you can control or influence.

Michael Utley: So this is going to include maps and directory listings. This is going to include reviews platforms. This is going to include your social media channels and making sure you don't have zombie channels that were started and not maintained. And if you have a profile on YouTube and you've created a video that you loaded once and maybe it's not branded. You want to make sure all these are branded and connected and maintained.

Michael Utley: So let's talk about Google My Business. If you've got one or two or three locations, your multi location, you need to have all of those locations claimed and populated with complete and correct data and things like image assets. Let people know on those profiles for every location. This is the storefront you're looking for. This is the awning. This is what we look like. This is what you're looking for when you're trying to land and get your grandmother into here for an MRI.

Michael Utley: People are trying to remove stress. They're trying to understand, where am I going? What am I going to see? What am I going to experience? How can I remove some strain from this situation? And so get those images out there and be present, be available.

Chris Raines: Right. Yeah, that just predicts friendliness. Nobody wants to go to Google My Business profile that doesn't have any pictures of... You can put the pictures of your team in there, put pictures of all your doctors -

Michael Utley: Smiling faces, clean buildings and spaces.

Chris Raines: Exactly. That's all very important. The other thing we need to talk about is reviews. So we may alluded this before but there's a consumer vacation of healthcare that's happening. And that means that people are no longer, if you're in a specialty field, which most doctors are. You will know people are more and more likely to go out on their own. Do a search, look at reviews on sites like Healthgrades on Google My Business and less likely to go to their primary care and ask for the golden Rolodex that no one knows about.

Michael Utley: Yes.

Chris Raines: And oh, here's the dermatologist.

Michael Utley: Oh thank you. People are not behaving that way anymore. So that means they're looking to peer reviews [inaudible 00:09:34] review sites. So you need to have a very intentional strategy for claiming those sites you mentioned, going to get a Healthgrades review site and having a strategy to push your customers over to those places that advocate for you and leave reviews.

Michael Utley: What you don't want to happen, so let's say, five years from now, we're more and more down to that line of that's how people consume healthcare and evaluate users. If you don't start now, you don't want to be a point where suddenly you're in direct competition with all the other specialty providers and they started now and you started five years from now while they've got a hundred, the dermatologist across town has a hundred reviews.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: Where everybody's saying how awesome they were and how they cleared up my acne and whatever...

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: ...on the review sites. And if you're starting five years from now, you're starting from 0 and they're at a hundred. This is where it's going, you need to have your review sites active and you need to be pushing content to them.

Chris Raines: Yes. Yeah. And we set up a lot of processes so that we have a patient comes in, has their experience and then they are contacted with the contact information they provided during their service delivery with just a friendly email that says, hey, have you had a great experience?

Chris Raines: Now for a few years, this is interesting. We've kind of evolved on this. For a few years, we were essentially trying to stack the deck. We were doing an initial inquiry and then say now, for the four and five star sending a follow-up, what we've actually gone to about a year, a year or two ago is just asking everyone for review. But we're plugging that review data back into the operations manager of the practice so that it's a cycle of service delivery improvement.

Michael Utley: Because you want the negative reviews too.

Chris Raines: Yeah. So we're opening [stuff] wide open. And the reason we've been doing this for such a long time is we think that Google is going to lock down and it's going to create [inaudible 00:11:38] and Yelp has tried to do this with policing the reviews processes. But we think things are going to move in a direction of not shying away from sort of a reputation stacking [inaudible 00:11:53]

Michael Utley: Yeah. If I see 200 reviews and they're all five stars -

Chris Raines: All five stars, yeah, come on. So yeah.

Michael Utley: That's a good point. And I'm kind of not up to speed on that but yeah, you're right. It's good to get both. You need to know both and ...

Chris Raines: And use it as a path to excellence.

Michael Utley: Yeah. Awesome. Those reviews are a gift, they're accountability for your organization. If you're a doc and you don't know how to do this, you can go ahead and get a reviews process in place. And whoever's responsible for running the office, they're going to have a really great data source going forward of where the problems are.

Chris Raines: Yeah. Point is people are looking to peer review sites as a greater source of authority.

Michael Utley: Yep. Or as Bill Saver would say the deer have guns now.

Chris Raines: The deer have guns, right?

Michael Utley: So yeah. Next step. So we talked about the website as a hub and there being this ring of sites and pages that you either control or can influence. I'm surprised at how many zombie pages we still find. And I'm surprised at how many have inconsistent or incoherent or broken branding. Do an audit, do a search for your brand name online and go through and find all the pages that are trying to refer to you as a company. You're going to find 10 to 20 different pages that have you as a company mentioned specifically. These are going to be sites like Yelp and Yellow Pages and little local directories, like a little community directories that people have created. In the major markets, you're going to find lots of things where people have scraped data from older and outdated sources and they may have things like your office hours that are just totally wrong.

Michael Utley: They may have special offers and promotions language associated with you for stuff that you maybe did or ran years ago. You're going to find in your social media channels, inconsistent use of images or unpopulated header and supporting images. You're going to find a lot of pages that an admin assistant or someone who is in your organization is no longer there, created and was passionate about or excited about for some reason. But when that person left, that effort died. So you really need to just start afresh, open a spreadsheet or a document and just do a Google Search for your name and then start doing service searches in your area and just start capturing all the problems that you find out there. And then you can task someone or get an agency like us and just go through and clean them all up.

Michael Utley: So yeah, if you need help with that, let us know. But it's a really eye-opening exercise. And when people find us and this includes Chris, really established practices that are sometimes they're actually already working with a patient acquisition or a patient experience marketing platform but those groups don't really go and cover a lot of these details because it's just kind of, not part of their easy software-based approach.

Chris Raines: Right.

Michael Utley: And so, yeah. But there's a lot of clutter out there that you need to clean up with your brand.

Chris Raines: Yeah. And I'd spend all time we have today for that. Bottom line, Michael, is the consumer is changing in their relationships to healthcare, how they want to consume it, how they want to learn about providers. And so it's important for healthcare providers to change with them or get left behind and run out of patients.

Michael Utley: Yeah. That's right.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: That's right.

Chris Raines: So -

Michael Utley: Thanks for inviting me.