Health-related content helps to educate and support consumers-patients throughout various touchpoints in their journey. Whether it be to research symptoms/self-diagnose, understand what a condition is and its causes, or identify how to prepare for a diagnostic procedure or treatment, etc., there are many digital interactions that can occur. Proving, the importance of increasing web traffic and patient acquisition.
Offering this type of content enables healthcare providers to not only raise awareness of their organization by sharing relevant information that has the potential to improve health but also offers an opportunity for providers to highlight expertise and services offered. Leveraging this type of content can result in increased website traffic from search engine providers, and depending on the content you include, can offer an opportunity for additional calls to action that can assist with increasing the acquisition and retention conversion rates across your website to by mapping health-related content to relevant services that are offered.
So what types of health-related information, resources and tools should providers offer across their flagship websites?
With a wide range of content types available to choose from, it is advisable to offer a number variety of options where your organization feels adds the most value for your healthcare consumers-patients.
Some of these may include:
- Health condition encyclopedia
- Video library
- Detailed resources/guides by condition that cover before/during/after patient journey
- Medical tests information
- Procedure information
- Drug information
- Quizzes to evaluate health risks
- Risk assessments
- Symptom checker tool
- Frequently asked questions
- Prevention guidelines by gender and age
Offering a number of the above offers a variety of health-related content to be represented across your organization’s website and will support multiple touchpoints for consumers-patients offering a path that educates and improves health. In addition to this, healthcare providers can benefit from seeing an increase in web traffic, engagement, satisfaction, and acquisition conversion.
Once your organization had decided on focusing on health information as a strategic website priority, there are a number of additional items to consider that can further improve website traffic and acquisition conversion rates to ensure maximum success.
When leveraging third party content for health-related information, resources, and tools, you should consider the level of customization your organization wants to make. For example, do you want to personalize any diagnostic or treatment-related content to be specific to your organization? This way any innovations or unique services you offer patients are listed and explained. In addition to this consider creating your own video content to cover what makes your organization unique as a healthcare provider for diagnosing and treating particular conditions that you specialize in. The more effort is spent on customizing this website area so it is unique as possible to your organization, the more likely website users will only get the information they are looking for but also understand how your organization can offer support for the next step.
Another key item to consider is exactly how you intend to leverage clinical subject matter experts at your organization to review any out of the box content you may be using from a third party vendor in order to check for accuracy and determine which resources should be included.
Examples of resources may include risk assessments or health calculators that are made available for each clinical area. In addition to this ensure clinical subject matter experts provide a mapping of conditions, results of quizzes, etc. to the services you offer, this is a critical step in assisting with relevant calls to action to increase acquisition funnel conversion once users are on your organization’s website. This will further allow for rich content that is relevant and geared towards the services offered. If a competitor is using the same third-party vendor for their content, this will assist you in differentiating the content you present and ensure its engaging for your audience.
As part of the health-related content that is offered, it is imperative to ensure there is an effort to highlight relevant healthcare provider services offered. Consider also including relevant news stories that align with the clinical area or condition or patient success stories to highlight patient outcomes as a result of diagnosis and treatment.
Offer calls to action that make it easy to find a doctor, locate the nearest medical office or facility, as well as request an appointment. Allowing for opportunities to convert on the website, makes next steps for consumers easy to find. This step will allow you to directly track the performance of health-related content in terms of acquisition and retention conversion funnels.
With return on investment as a popular measure of success, what is your organization doing to ensure conversion of web traffic users that are accessing the health-related content offered on your organization’s flagship website?
