There are basic healthcare marketing questions that everyone who works on promoting medical facilities need to be asking. For our purposes, we’ll restrict the conversation to those marketing questions that specifically deal with the digital sphere.
What type of website traffic actually matters?
Those who run marketing departments will talk to and may even contract with any number of digital consultants who then promptly work on increasing traffic to the website. Reports are generated showing how many more clicks the website is getting. However, what separates the good digital consultant from the crowd is traffic that matters.
There’s a phrase in digital marketing called “vanity metrics.” It means a number that looks good and maybe even makes you feel good about your website, but it doesn’t move the needle for your business. And specialized fields—like healthcare—have to be on particular alert for this.
For example, if you run a medical clinic in upstate New York, website clicks from Texas might be nice. Yet these aren’t from people who are ever going to walk into your clinic nor are they going to refer anyone. They’ll read your article and move on. There’s certainly nothing wrong with that and it’s a part of life in modern digital marketing. But it isn’t traffic that matters.
The traffic that matters are the users who take the steps on your website that you desire them to take.
So the first question to ask yourself is this: what action do I want people to take on my website? A medical facility might have calling the office, filling out a form and signing up for a free newsletter as actionable goals that count as a “win” for the marketer.
The natural follow-up question is: how do you intend to measure success on these goals?
A good digital marketer might answer that they’ll set up Event Tracking in Google Analytics (GA). Through this tool, they can tell how many people are calling the office directly by clicking on the phone number that will presumably be put in the upper menu bar. They’ll also work with you to set up the office staff to ask those who call in separately how they learned about the office.
Another strategy that might be employed is to set up a marketing funnel in GA. From there, you can tell how many people are jumping to the “Contact Us” page (or any other relevant page) from the articles that you might have posted.
For example, if you wrote content about COVID-19, that page might well get a large degree of traffic. But if it’s coming from around the world, the number of people that don’t go any further might also be high. Conversely, if you wrote content about a local flu bug, the traffic might be much lower, but there may be more people that actually take an actionable goal.
Which leads to the final question: how do you intend to get truly valuable traffic to the website? Maybe it will be localized content. It might be better optimization of your listing in local directories. Even better, it might be all of the above.
Digital marketing in a field like healthcare has to be done with a great deal of precision. Unlike a generic news site, you aren’t rewarded by the raw volume of clicks you get. You need a certain type of visitor from a specific geographic area.
Your healthcare marketing questions in the digital sphere should be geared towards learning how to get them.