When it comes to creating maximum impact with your healthcare website, you need to understand and implement all of the relevant trade tools. However a unique approach should be used for marketing in the healthcare industry.
1. Pay particular attention to the audience
There are often several very different audiences for your website. Each page or section of the site needs to be tailored to best engage with the specific audience. This may also require consideration of tone of voice, jargon and specific methods of communication. Consider working through the Information Architecture to best tailor each section and page of the healthcare website. Have sections for different audiences as required. This is particularly important when you work in a large healthcare organisation with many stakeholders.
- Clinicians and healthcare providers
- Media
- Researchers and students
- Patients
2. Treat each page as a home page
Engage and speak directly to the audience of your page early on. Before you construct the page and its contents consider the purpose of the page and the action that you want the user to take. This user journey should be obvious from the moment a user opens up the page.
3. Work on creating easy to use internal search functionality
This is particularly important when you’re building a large website. The vast tracts of content need to be easily findable using an internal search engine. This is where keyword tagging and accurate metadata are important. Also the website itself needs to have the functionality to allow tagging, so that the content is findable by visitors. Properly tagged content will also make it far easier for Google and other search engines to index the site. To this end you should always use SEO best practice for both on-site and back end SEO.
4. Always include a Call to Action
The implicit purpose of the page should lead you to creating a call to action for that particular page. In healthcare websites, this call to action is rarely a strong one like ‘Buy now’, but rather it could be a softer CTA’s such as:
- Register for the event
- Read more
- Learn more
- Subscribe now
- Register to receive information in the mail
5. Internal and external links
Position your healthcare brand as a leading authority in your healthcare discipline. This is done by linking to other healthcare resources that are optimally placed to provide the most up to date information for people.
Internal links also can provide a way to keep users engaged and to continue to browse the site and find related information after they’ve finished reading a particular page.
By linking to constantly updated information, your brand also doesn’t need to update and cache the information on their own site. This will therefore save you time and resources as the content creator for the site.
6. Include fresh content
This can be via RSS blog feeds appearing on your site from other reputable sites. This could also mean that you embed a Twitter feed or Facebook feed that contains user-relevant information. This boosts your subscribers to the social media in any case.
Total Medical Design have industry experts who understand the complex and competitive world of the healthcare industry and the various responsibilities of healthcare organisations to patients and communities. We have worked with SME and large organisations in the past and have helped to bring about positive results through marketing. Let us show you how!