This past September marked the five year anniversary of receiving my MBA. At a recent informal get-together to celebrate the occasion, it was a pleasure renewing acquaintances with former classmates and discussing the various paths we have taken. What a wild ride it has been! Career changes, relocations, layoffs, promotions – you name it. When we graduated, the Goizueta Business School Class of 2006 could not have possibly imagined the changes our country and our economy would go through over the next five years. Our trials and tribulations would make for a fascinating documentary.
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Free is good, especially when it comes to marketing your hospital or health system. So you jump in with free opportunities to display your brand through social media such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter; then you start a blog and then all of a sudden, it doesn’t feel so free anymore.
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What a great group we had for the Webmaster Workshop last week in Chicago! I thought the food and the service at the Sofitel was fantastic. The networking and the conversations seemed to be valuable to all and, as usual, it was like drinking through a fire hose as we were trying to take in all of the good ideas and case studies.
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The results of our recent research on internal reporting of external Web analytics data are in, and have been sent to all who participated in the study. According to the 40 organizations who participated in the research, it is clear that this is an area where many continue to struggle. Here are some of the major findings: Read more…
This week we went live with two new areas in our Greystone.Net Benchmarking database: traffic from referring sites, and mobile traffic. Both areas were added based on feedback from participants. After I had a chance to review the preliminary data, two interesting findings jumped out:
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The results of Greystone.Net’s recent research on intranets in hospitals and health systems are in. Thanks to all who participated! We received responses from nearly half (46%) of our 125-member panel of healthcare marketers. All respondents who completed the survey have received a complete copy of the results.
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Good internal reporting of Web data should document successes, illuminate failures, and serve as a key component in evaluating overall strategy. Yet for many healthcare Web marketers, the challenge of producing quality reports has proven to be extremely elusive and frustrating. In my experience, most organizations do not go much further than tracking basic Web analytics metrics like page views and visitors. It is not uncommon for me to come across a mishmash of numbers pasted onto an Excel spreadsheet, with a webmaster telling me, “I am embarrassed to be showing you this report.”
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“I don’t really pay attention to our top search terms,” says one of my customers, a marketing analyst at a prestigious academic medical center. “They are mostly just a variation of our hospital’s name.” For a lot of analysts at hospitals and health systems, especially those cursed with having an easily misspelled name, I can understand why they feel this way. Top keywords are frequently filled with various versions (both correct and misspelled) of the organization’s names and hometowns. Our research shows that across all hospitals, the average is about one in four visitors who arrive at a hospital or health system’s Web site from a search engine use some version of the organization’s name as a keyword.
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Health content is essential to the success of a hospital’s Web site. If a patient or user is searching for information on a particular diagnosis or treatment but are unable to find relevant information on your Web site, they will not only visit another site, but their experience may also leave a lasting negative impression of your organization. As a user, if I could not find relevant, in-depth information about bone cancer on a Web site, for example, I would assume that the hospital does not have the necessary services to treat me, or that it is simply not a very sophisticated hospital. Most purchase this type of content from a health information vendor and some even create their own content. Regardless of how it is obtained, the key is to provide some type of health content on the Web site; which can be evaluated using the following questions as a guideline:
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Greystone is pleased to announce the results of our recent survey on hospital/ health system Web budgets. We sent the survey invitation to more than 100 healthcare marketers, and received responses from 65. (please note: Greystone’s research panel is made up of hospitals or health care systems with at least one FTE dedicated to the Web, and members tend to be more “Web 2.0 savvy” than other hospitals and health systems)
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