Trent:
Welcome to episode number ten of the Groove Digital Marketing podcast. I am your host, Trent Dyrsmid, and this is the podcast where we help entrepreneurs and business owners to discover ways to use digital marketing and marketing automation to drastically increase the growth of their business.

So if that is you and you are looking for proven tactics to help you increase traffic to your website, to capture more leads, to attract more clients or patients or customers well you are in the right place.

And the way that we do that is I bring on proven experts on to the show with me to share with you exactly what is working for them in their businesses.

And in this episode my guest is a fellow by the name of Shawn Gross. Shawn is an expert at hospital marketing having spent a considerable amount of time with both Nash General Hospital and Tufts Medical Center.

In this episode we are going to dive pretty deep into what hospitals need to be doing to embrace what is now known as inbound marketing which is a form of online marketing. How can you get more traffic to your site? How can you create a website experience that matches the thinking patterns of your prospective patients?

What are some things that you can offer on the site so as to capture the information of those prospective patients so that you can begin to nurture a relationship with them? How do you nurture the relationship? What do you put in those emails? How often do you send them?

Does video play a role? Where is content marketing going as it fits into the health care business? All of these things are going to be things that Shawn and I are going to discuss in this particular episode, so in just a moment we are going to welcome Shawn to the show.

A quick little announcement of course before that: If you want to learn more about inbound marketing we have all sorts of reports that available for free and you can get to them all at GrooveDigitalMarketing.com/resources and of course it would also be a good idea to visit our blog.

As we are publishing very helpful articles on an ongoing basis addressing a number of topics from social media to websites to inbound marketing to nurturing to email marketing, you name it we have articles that cover it. So with that said please join me in welcoming Shawn to the show.

Hey Shawn, welcome to the show.

Shawn:
Hi Trent, thanks so much for having me here.

Trent:
Yeah, no problem at all I’ve been looking forward to this interview because you are someone who has a background who is a little bit different vis a vis the world of marketing than anyone I have ever had on the show before and that is that you have a very strong background in healthcare marketing which is something that I’ve become increasingly interested in.

As I have mentioned to you when we spoke, I think it was the first time. So we are going to talk all about health care marketing in this particular episode and what you should be doing at a minimum.

And maybe even more importantly where you think healthcare marketing is going. But before we get into any of that, so that people know who it is that they are listening to let’s have you if you would just introduce yourself, who you are and what do you do?

Shawn:
Sure, well thanks again for having me Trent, I am always impressed with your website’s content and the podcasts that you’ve had on in the past have always been enlightening for me so I’m honoured and hoping I can add to the knowledge that you have up on the website. My background did not begin in healthcare marketing, it began in dotcom start-ups.

And I think my appreciation for small nimble start-up type marketing has now really carried over into healthcare marketing, which sounds strange, because I have worked at a few large organizations which you wouldn’t think of as nimble start-ups.

But I worked in Boston and New York City at dotcom start-ups and then found my way as a marketing person, a marketing manager and a web designer to Mass General Hospital. Where I had two different roles at Mass General in Boston, one was as a web designer, I went to work at an agency for a little while and Mass General actually pulled me back in.

I tried to run but I couldn’t. They pulled me back in which was wonderful, a great experience. And I helped lead the charge in redesigning MassGeneral.org. This was about in 2007/08 and lead the organization through a five year digital marketing plan.

And most recently I spent two and a half years at Tufts Medical Center doing some very similar work as director of service line marketing and web strategy.

I also took the organization through a website redesign only focussing on its content, the user experience and tying the marketing end to the operational end and connecting that for the patient so they can have meaningful transactional experiences on the website.

And six months ago I joined White Rhino just outside of Boston in Burlington Massachusetts. White Rhino is a strategic marketing agency and they are very interested in growing their health care practice and that is what I do here now as the chief digital strategist for the healthcare practice.

I take my experiences that I had at Mass General and at Tufts Medical Center and working with other healthcare organizations to build their digital strategies. And help them pave the way for digital marketing success; it sounds very cheery and very sunny; as they adapt for 21st century marketing and really adapt for changing times in healthcare.

Trent:
Okay, let’s start with this one. Why do you feel that most hospital websites aren’t set up with the patient in mind?

Shawn:
That is a really great question. So many hospitals I feel like, especially after being in a place like Mass General with 20,000 employees and 200 years of history. And I think the supply is probably to technology companies. We work with a lot of B2B tech companies as well at White Rhino.

They have their own internal speak, there are acronyms, and there are different business units and so many different departments and so many layers to the organization that, what happens in my experience and what I have seen is that a hospital web design experience begins when you are doing the initial site map or the wire frames.

And many people throw out just by habit often times, these projects are staffed with internal stakeholder committees. And the stakeholder committees can be quite large and you start with the org chart of the organization.

And by putting that org chart front and center for an online audience to then try to navigate to their care options, they just don’t gel.

I remember an experience where my wife had broken her finger and as sort of a case study I asked her to pull up the Mass General old website. And of course we made sure that she got care first and that her broken finger wasn’t hurting.

That was the first line of duty, get some ice on that. But a couple of days later I remember her on the website and she is typing with her broken finger and she is navigating and we saw this in some research that we conducted at National, she is navigating by her diagnoses and she is never thinking about what department she needs to go to.

And she is never even thinking about things like orthopaedics and she would never go to D for departments and services and she would never go to O looking for orthopaedics, she just knows that she has a condition or disease or in this case she is seeking a procedure. And oftentimes hospital websites are set up to mirror their organization and not the mental model of how their patient is navigating for care.

Trent:
Yeah and you’re right, hospitals are not the only organizations that are guilty of doing that. They often time think it is all about us, “we we we, I I I,” and that is not the way customers and patients think.

Let’s say there is a CMO of a healthcare organization listening to this interview and they realise that they need a new site. What advice would you give them to ensure that they don’t make this mistake that so many other companies do?

Shawn:
I think the first part is in a large organization or even in a small regional hospital there is always going to be politics and processes. I find that it is best to have both scenarios; there is an audience that comes to a hospital website that does know the nomenclature, they do know to search for departments or services and having that on the website you can never go wrong.

If in the case of say Tufts Medical Center’s hospital website we designed there is this second section where you can navigate by what you have and even labelling it as rudimentary as diseases and conditions you have or “I have been recently diagnosed with.”

Large website redesign projects typically these days begin with defining your personas, certainly getting a sense of who you are trying to attract to come to your website and defining those audiences. We typically see that can be prospective patients, current patients, let’s not forget about the care givers of patients.

And making sure that the navigation, sitting down with your information architect, at the beginning of these processes and the CMO has to go through this almost, I don’t want to say it is metaphysical but they have to give away their website.

They have to realise the website is not for them and it is not for the staff of the hospital and certainly it can be. It can be an overlap in some content that feels internet lag or links to the internet.

But I think a real successful hospital CMO is going to be someone who feels really good about relinquishing control of the design and the architecture and really basing it on the needs of their target audiences. And that is tough at organisations that are typically very process and very bureaucratically driven.

Trent:
So in a typical B2B business, for my clients in particular, we are very very focused on ways to ensure that we can convert the visitors to the site into leads. And that we nurture those leads and move them along the path from being just interested in information to actually being interested in talking to someone from the sales department.

What does that look like in the healthcare world?

Shawn:
Yeah I like to think of that and this media comes from my tech background and start-up days. What can hospital websites learn from Amazon.com? And sometimes it sounds a little silly but the buy now button or the add to cart button on your hospital website is typically going to be the request an appointment.

And if it is not request an appointment it is going to be refer a patient. Because the refer a patient button might be something that a referring physician and or her office and say a referring physician coordinator might be clicking to send their patient into the hospital system.

So the key here is to decorate the site in a very tasteful way, not to obtrusive, but with request an appointment buttons. And I think the Holy Grail, where some companies like Zocdoc are coming online and helping hospitals empower themselves to not only request an appointment but of course to make an appointment in real time.

So I see that as the Holy Grail and there is only a few folks out there who have done that operationally on their own. There are others, that’s a growing number that are using sites like Zocdoc to power that transaction.
Zocdoc wants to be the open table so to speak for hospitals. And in my experience like in say Tufts Medical Center we got as far to use the request an appointment and we took the operation team through a process, even though it felt rudimentary and very static.

Where operations and marketing sort of made a handshake and said we will put these buttons on all the clinical department pages of the clinical center pages and as forms come in on either the paediatric side that was in a giant call center; we’ll train the call center staff on how to administer these online appointment request forms.

We even help prototype things like live call chat so again it is like a customer experience you would see on an e-commerce website where it is a live chat experience.

Or we will make the sale a little more complicated and we will tweak the content management system but we’ll make sure that if the patient were to click a request an appointment button on the website and they were in orthopaedics it goes to the orthopaedic person who is in charge of accepting appointments.

And if it is a heart or cancer related appointment request that is going to go get channelled off to the right people. You asked the question also about how this inbound marketing process works because this is assuming you are tweaking your content management system.

You’re making agreements with the operational and the inventorial clinic teams on how to change some of their work flow to accept online appointment requests. But we have found that the real attractor for inbound marketing is to create content, not so much like what WebMD and what sites like Mayo where they discuss what the condition means, what Cardiomyopathy is.

I have found that at both Tuft and Mass General Medical Center the real attractor content, the stuff that is going to bring traffic in from Google is really the treatment content. And talking about what Cardiomyopathy is, or what Chromes disease is and why your treatment options are unique and special, what makes your program shine and makes the patient experience be very different than if they were to go to one of your competitors.

That simple piece of content is really wonderful at bringing traffic into the site and the process to create it however does not always turn out to be so simple. But it begins with patient interviews and it begins with doctor interviews and getting doctors to talk about what they do that can be of benefit for the patient to hear when they are in decision making mode on where to go for care.

Trent:
So, in B2B the type of content that you are talking about is problem solving content. People are looking for information, they want to get educated. And in B2B, the way that you often times convert or most often times convert those visitors into leads is to offer them premium content that white paper or attend for a webinar or any number of other types of additional free pieces of high value information that they would exchange for their name and email

Or maybe it’s their email and phone number, whatever the marketing team decides they want to collect. Does the same approach work well in health care or is it always just the request an appointment button that is the next step?

Shawn:
Another great question, what else can we learn from that marketplace? Well I think that anything that provides the patient with a sort of step up level of service and that might be a live consultation on the phone with a doctor. I think content in the past that we have created at the hospital level around not just text content or photographic content or video content or sort of those white paper type content items.

We never gated them and we never put them behind a wall that says please first sign up. We typically make that stuff available because we want to be the patient education resource. But I know in the past we got a few community bloggers and some press to come on site and take a tour of an OBGYN labor & care delivery center and giving folks access to behind the scenes tours and giving them access to doctors.

That is more the PR and media side to get people to talk about the services that the hospital offers. But wow, you bring up a great idea and I would love to think about and maybe even look at what other marketers are doing where maybe there is a white paper or some type of content you first have to fill out your name, your email.

And now you are going to be put into our marketing funnel and we are going to build a relationship with you. I haven’t done anything like that before but I have a feeling that others are doing it and they are learning from great B2B marketers out there.

Trent:
Because I know how many people, they are not ready for that conversation yet. They don’t want to be convinced or persuaded to do something that they’re not ready to do. They want to remain invisible so if you are able to offer a premium piece of content and then maybe follow that up with a nurturing campaign and then included a series of high quality videos.

Human nature is human nature whether the product is healthcare or whether it is widgets. That is going to go a long long long way to building a relationship, trust and credibility and really making that person much more receptive to the ultimate, “do you want to make an appointment?” do you “want to talk to a doctor?”. Don’t you think?

Shawn:
I agree, yeah and there are certain service lines where as I am thinking about this we didn’t think of it ever in that classic inbound marketing funnel approach. But it does apply, there are going to be service lines to your point “I’m not in my need of care at this very moment so going to say a website or calling my doctor’s office, isn’t in the case of say eating healthy or long term benefits around where to get primary care. Or if I think of having a baby and it is not in the moment”, it is a long term relationship building processes.

I think digital marketers at a hospital now have an opportunity to use their email marketing databases to reach out and build relationships. And we are using something at White Rhino that I think about.
Mobile plays a big role in this; we are calling these things addictive experiences. These addictive experiences might apply to hospital marketers who are looking to build long term relationships. So this might be part of that inbound marketing flow.

If I was a GI doctor and I was trying to build a long term relationship with my patients or maybe I was a dermatologist. I am now just picking a few ideas off the top of my head. “I wish that my patients would drink more water, water has a hundred different medical benefits.” In the case of say great skin, or better digestion, if I was a GI doctor or dermatologist maybe I would want some sort of small invisible almost dare I say a companion app.

That could sit invisibly behind my Smart Phone and help modify my behaviours as a patient. Change the way I acted and these behaviour modifications; things like push notifications. Urging me to drink more water throughout the day and then as a user, using the app to identify that I have had sixteen ounces or thirty two ounces and if I haven’t had enough during the day, the app is reminding me; it is shuttling me along to reach my goal.

And we are seeing this in fitness apps of course. But I am wondering if there are companion apps that can be introduced at the hospital service line levels with more patient as consumer focus than others, where this type of content can begin that inbound marketing funnel process. “Wow this is a really valuable cool piece of content. It is only something that I don’t think the hospital offering me this feels more like a game.”

And there might be some game mechanics behind that. I think it is that type of content more so than just doctor interviews or special e-news letters that go out in my inbox, because hospitals are doing that already. But maybe it is a more memorable lasting digital experiences in the palm of your hand that builds a relationship, modifies my behaviours.

And especially in the changing times of healthcare, the payoff is it keeps me healthy and out of the hospital; if I don’t have to go to the hospital, all the better because I am receiving care in this new way.

Trent:
I had another guest on my show, a Dr Burleson who is a dentist and his specialty is orthodontics. And he was very surprised to find out that because of the nature of the research that proceeds that parents are doing before their kids actually need braces.

People would be in his marketing funnel for as long as eleven months receiving his drip emails which used video extensively. He wanted people to see what his office was like and what his staff was like.

And he wanted them to see smiles on the patients and the interaction, and once every two weeks or so drip drip drip. And this keeps people, nurtured for lack of a better term and worked exceedingly well for him.

If you are listening to this and you are in a business like that you the URL to get to that interview is BrightIdeas.co/56. And that is just the number 56.

So he had taken many of the principles that apply to B2B and applied them into healthcare and it has been extraordinarily successful with that particular approach.

Shawn:
That is really great, yeah. Sometimes small practices like dental practices they can be more nimble. I find that marketers at a hospital are staffed in the central marketing departments. And they have twenty; sometimes thirty sometimes even forty business units.

Different service lines that they have to manage and I think the real breakthrough is when you can focus to build a twelve month plan for individual quote unquote clients.

Make those service lines your clients and then there is the way to break through playing out editorial calendars and meaningful inbound marketing content.

That is really cool. You know as I am also thinking about other things that I’ve helped at the hospital level. Departments plan through their digital strategies. Google AdWords plays a huge role in getting people into that funnel. You mentioned like that drip email campaign getting people to actually come through.

I think at Tuft Medical Center it was 80 percent of traffic came from Google and at Mass General 78 percent came from Google. And something tells me that is not unique to healthcare.

I have a feeling Google is probably the homepage for all of our large corporate websites and doing primary research to understand how patients are navigating for their care. We found much more success and conversion when people were doing long tail keyword searches. I’ll use that Cardiomyopathy example again.

So rather than just going to Google and having ads for the keyword Cardiomyopathy you would find that the person at that point in time, they are just looking for information on the symptoms and the causes and the risk factors. And they are not in, I hesitate to use that term, they are not in buy mode.

Then we looked at our research and we saw that coming in through the site traffic logs were long tail keyword searches where it was the condition framed with a longer tail keyword search. And it was more about treatment finding.

So this might be “Cardiomyopathy best hospitals” or “Cardiomyopathy top doctors” because people were now going to
hospital websites and comparing apples to apples and reading their content.

About what options where available for treatment and so here I am saying I haven’t seen a lot of inbound marketing best practices put in place. But if you have a successful blog and you are blogging about your treatment options.

And you’re doing so for search, not only for the patients reading benefit but you are backing into a smart search and SEO strategy. And you are typing out the keywords, listing out the treatments; and you are doing this successfully in an editorial calendar where each one of those service lines, every month is getting highlighted.

You’ll hit your forty to fifty departments over the course of a year or two just by simply by putting out great blog content and having those treatment program pages housed within their sections of the corporate site.

That traffic is going to be at Google. They are going to be coming in and that is a great attractive way to get folks in. It is a balance of SEO with social media properties and your own corporate website. And augmenting this with Google paid Adwords.

Even though hospital marketers might not be referring to it as your classical inbound marketing approach, I guess it is happening in a way. And hospital marketers might just be the last to jump on board using the Marketos and the Hubspots of the world but it is happening.

Trent:
So for our clients, one of the things that we encourage them to do is not think about how do I get traffic directly from Google to my website which obviously is important. But we encourage them to think about what I call the new model where there are all sorts of web properties. Social media, LinkedIn groups, online communities, discussion forums, Twitter searches, the list is endless.

So there is all these peripheral places were your content can be placed and then when people are hanging out in those places because they are looking for answers to relevant questions and they see your content or they see a tweet about your content or they see an opportunity for a webinar they end up just kind of finding you in all those peripheral communities.

So your website is like the center, the nucleus, but there are all these other areas where you can initially be found and then that traffic is then referred from those places to you. Do you see that working for healthcare also?

Shawn:
Yeah I think it does as well. So I think that there are websites that I see it used really well. One is called SocMetrics. SocMetrics will allow you to take your influencers trying to reach not only bloggers. You can go to SocMetrics and you can get a chance to see there who the top influencers are in that category and so this applies for Mommybloggers now to cancer treatment centers.

So folks like Kevin MD is a very well know healthcare physician and healthcare blogger. SocMetrics is going to give you this list of the top influencers and allow you to reach out, build relationships with those folks and get them talking about your organization.

You mentioned LinkedIn groups as well there is a group called Health 2.0. There is also a wonderful content strategy group on LinkedIn. And these aren’t health 2.0 obviously. It is featured around healthcare marketing. But content strategy, that group I imagine has a whole cross section of folks not just from the healthcare field.

It is groups like that on LinkedIn including things like a more granular for healthcare one is the Shoos med organisation, the strategic healthcare group. There definitely are a few where, if you hang out, build relationships, participate with blog posts, with LinkedIn posts, you are able to find some really great meaningful interactions there.

It is typically with other folks in the space, probably the way to reach patients is to use sites like SocMetrics, outside of LinkedIn. Where you can find the patients are looking for, the target audiences you are looking for.

They are not typically hanging out at hospital websites. That is the reality. And they are also not typically hanging out in B2B LinkedIn networks.

I think about MommyBlogger as a great example because this is the type of meaningful content that your prospective patients are seeking out and going to. And if you can build relationships with those publishers, give them inside tours say of your new labour and delivery suite.

The content they create, the editorial content is going to be so much more meaningful. It will not feel advertising like at all. And to me that is where you want to be as a healthcare marketer. Get others to create that content for you and that falls into that earned content category bucket that I am sure many of your listeners are familiar with.

Trent:
So one of the things that a lot of people who are not experienced in content marketing think about or get stumbled with is the question: “what do I right about?” And I think of another fellow I had on my show who is in the fibre glass pool business.

And he just decided that he was going to make a list of every question that a customer had ever asked any one of his team before they became a customer. So called these presale question and he just wrote them all out and made this one blog post to answer every single one of them. So every question got an answer and that was a blog post.

So over time obviously, hundreds of questions, hundreds of blogposts, now his traffic in his category is pretty much the top of the heap. He gets a ton of traffic and does a lot of business as a result of it.

It is not particularly complicated but wouldn’t that work incredibly well for a hospital as well? There is endless numbers of questions to answer.

Shawn:
It’s a really great point. This has been going on for quite some time now. I’m seeing two different roads in social media marketing using web properties like Facebook. Even just your own corporate site to figure out, now that we have this platform, we have redesigned our website, we’ve rebuilt our content management system we have our base table stakes content, our treatment programs.

What do we create next? We got our doctor bios and if it is a large academic medical center, we’ve got educational content, residency programs, fellowships and of course research content with research labs and centers

Well what do I do next, how do I continue to keep the site ticking? How do I keep it alive and give it a pulse?

So content strategies vary and I see Cleveland Clinic to be such a gold standard. And I would love to help other organisations get to where they’re going with this. And that is they have really spun it all on its head. We are following a lot of healthcare organisations in my Facebook feed on my smartphone and as I am thumbing through my feed I see a lot of things like the staff have just been recognised for this award.

Or the staff are here, come meet them they are wonderful. I think if you pepper in content like that every once in a while it is great. It gives us a sense of what is happening behind the scenes and introduces us to the faces of the organisation.

But what Cleveland Clinic really excels at doing is they push all this wonderful content out about how you can live a healthier life and there is this disconnect. They don’t go around doing a lot of chest thumping saying, “come here, visit here, these docs are great” but instead they are giving you five healthy eating tips on how to live gluten free.

If you are living with a gluten free diet or someone in your house is gluten free, how to cook for those family members. Or they are telling you about sun prevention or sunburn prevention and skin safety tips. There the list is endless, so when you sit down with a dermatology department and you are a hospital marketer and you have got your editorial calendar open and you are planning through which departments to feature.

But the hope is that you can feature every department in a given year just like the example you talked about Trent and you turn on its head what a pulmonologist typically wants to talk about into the context for how a pulmonologist can tell me relatable content around activities that my family and I might be interested in. And really that is the way to build the long term relationship.

So to your point, when I am in that moment of need I have read this content, I have seen it in my Facebook feed and I think to myself oh yes it was Mass General or Tufts Medical Center that over the years really helped educate me.
Making it less about the organisation and all about your audience is never going to hurt you in the long run.

Trent:
And you said something too that is really important; you said that when you find it in your Facebook feed people don’t promote a company’s promotional content they don’t help companies sell their stuff.

But people will promote highly educational content. We talked about MommyBlogger, so some mom is reading this super-duper helpful article about how to deal with gluten, whatever it is, if it is highly educational in nature she is very likely to share that because she’s got other moms, who she is thinking they are going to like reading this.

But if it is all about, “we are number one, we are the best, come to us,” nobody is going to share that stuff.

Shawn:
Yeah so well said and again that is why I have seen so many organisations do it. And all these health organisations do it, all these wonderful academic medical centers. They are getting recognised for great awards and I think the trick is to lead who you are as an organisation into the benefits of what that means for your end user.

Because to your point oh boy the sharing capabilities, whether it is on Facebook, whether it is with a tweet, that is where things get really exciting.

So yeah I agree, turning it into content that doesn’t feel like an add, it makes it feel like valuable content. I have a feeling your audience is very aware of that. In the healthcare space we just have to be better at thinking about the end user and some of the actions they are going to take.

What is their desire with this content that we are publishing? What do we want them to do with that, what do we want for our target audiences to do with that and what is eventually the call to action that is going to lead from helpful educational content and then peppering those audiences finally with a strong call to action to either to invite them in for an appointment or to talk live with the care coordinator.

Trent:
I am now thinking B2B and segmentation is so incredibly important, because there are all these people coming to your site, they all have different issues and challenges and in a hospital this would be even greater because I think you said there are some 40 to 50 different departments so obviously person A is going to be interested in very very different content than person B.

I am talking in terms of someone coming to your site, they find you on social networks or they find you via a long tail search they can send a piece of content, it is of interest to them they want to get more.

Or maybe they’ve entered their name and email and now you can create a sequence that says, “hey if you are interested in this, fill out this form and we’ll send you some more and if you are interested in this other thing over here fill out this form and choose a different option and a different button on the form before you hit the submit button and we will send you some more stuff there.

Because for our own agency and for our clients obviously we make use of asking questions and paying attention to the user’s click path a great deal to create a path of future content that is sent to them that is as relevant as possible. Is that something that you see hospitals doing at all?

Shawn:
Absolutely and I think it is in that architecture stage where you’re going through a website redesign or you are making renovation updates to your current website you don’t have to scrap and start over certainly.

Thinking about what we discussed earlier, the audience, their needs. At both of my experiences at a hospital level; creating personas and then matching those personas to what we think of as segmentation menus on a hospital’s website and for most part in the provider community I think hospital website 1.0 in the late nineties or maybe even just a decade ago you had a lot of buttons that were labelled “for patients” or “for physicians”. We definitely saw a lot of that and I think it is evolving now.

If you punch up say TuftsMedicalCenter.org, those come to mind and it is not a plug, but it is the only one I can think off the top of my head that does this really nicely. There is this nice section called what can we help you with right on the homepage. And it has some nomenclature around “I am: A.”

And we have seen this used in online banking and their industries so by no means am I suggesting that this is inventive in any way but for healthcare it is really patient centric.

So I am A, and that can be I am a patient, I am a prospective patient, I am a family member of a patient, I am a potential donor, I am a job seeker, I am a healthcare professional.

So this could be like, I am a nurse and the menu, as you make your selections gives you a secondary menu.

And so if it said I am a patient the secondary menu begins to segment even more and offer you content around, I am looking for cancer information; I am looking for heart information.

The way to prioritise those 50 services that a hospital might offer is to first focus on which are the largest business drivers for the organisation. So in segmentation menus maybe not everyone is treated equally but certainly you are going to provide a way to get them to a landing page where at least they can see all hospital services.

But the segmentation menu might also offer things like, “I am looking for ways to make a donation” or “I have a family member in the hospital and I want to send them flowers, how do I do so?”

And through the segmentation menu and those secondary menus that are more dynamic might match the user’s navigation style than putting this in clunky global menus across the top of the sight and asking them to guess that making a donation or sending flowers is in a section called patient care and services.

It is just not how audiences think. I think the Holy Grail, going even the third step down, once you identify who you are and what you are looking for or then to be in the future to type in “I am five miles away” or” here is my zip code.” Then hitting go.

And to find the care, if it is a large health system that knows based on your zip code where you are and then within five miles or ten miles or within fifteen miles to where the service is offered is probably the next step of where that segmentation is going.

And we could look to sites like The Gap or Crate and Barrel. They do a wonderful job at that location based segmentation marketing. And I think healthcare can certainly learn from them.

Trent:
Absolutely brilliant, alright Shawn we have come up on the end of our time. So I want to thank you very much for making some time and coming on and chatting here with me about healthcare marketing. I hope that the people who are listening to this have learned a great deal and it has been a pleasure to have you on the show.

Shawn:
Well thanks so much Trent, it has been great as well. I have really enjoyed it and I would love to work with you in the future. And I can’t wait to see what more you have in store on the BrightIdeas website.

Trent:
Alright thanks very much. Take care, have a wonderful day.

Shawn:
Thanks you too. Bye.

Trent:
So that is it for this episode. You can get to the show notes by going to GrooveDigitalMarketing.com/10. And that is just the number 10. If you enjoyed this episode, please do me a small favour and help me spread the word by going to GrooveDigitalMarketing.com/love where there is a prepopulated tweet awaiting the click of your mouse.

So that is it for this episode, I am your host Trent Dyrsmid. Thank you so much for tuning in I look forward to having you back again soon. Take care. Bye-bye.

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