A study conducted by Google and Complete, Inc. found that 77% of patients used search prior to booking an appointment, and 83% of them used the hospital's website during the process. When patients go online to look at a hospital's website, they do so primarily to learn about symptoms and conditions and find doctors. Many people treat shopping for healthcare no differently than shopping for anything else, making it vital to have the best content possible on any site they may visit.
Who Do Patients Trust, and What Should Marketers Do?
Because of the one-on-one experience, patients are much more apt to trust their respective doctors than they will a hospital, health insurance company, or drug company. With the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, many more patients are researching healthcare. These newcomers to the healthcare system will generally look for primary care physicians instead of specialists. Web content is the key to making a hospital stand out and that content
should showcase primary care physicians. However, a problem can exist for effectively pushing curated content to where new patients are looking.
Developing a Brand Recognition Strategy
As in any industry, every hospital and healthcare facility should try to differentiate themselves from their competition. In order to do so, it’s necessary to focus on producing content across many different web channels.
Cleveland Clinic Health Hub is a great example. They've had great success building their brand and growing traffic through online educational content from their doctors and sharing it across various mediums.
Six Feet Up's Solution for Healthcare Networks
What Cleveland Clinic Health Hub has done, and what every other healthcare network needs to do, is publish great information and share it. PushHub makes this easier by allowing you to grow a pool of educational content and sync it across multiple hospital and physician sites. You get the benefits of centrally managing your content while also delivering it to physician-specific pages where patients are looking in relation to the physician they are growing to trust. PushHub connects your existing sites and keeps whole pages or snippets in sync while avoiding search engine optimization (SEO) issues.
Next Steps
