The Greystone.Net Blog

Have the days of the huge clinical enterprise Web site come to an end? Has the “everything about our hospital/health system” site strategy finally lost its usefulness? Is general health library content no longer of value? Will targeted clinical service micro-sites and landing pages tied to online ads replace the CMS-driven content monsters we now serve? Are organic search optimization techniques losing out to search engine marketing and adwords? It’s Marketing 2.0 There’s a compelling logic to moving our energies away from our current broad based – dare I say, shotgun – marketing strategies toward more focused, performance driven, interactive marketing campaigns with the Internet at the center rather than as an afterthought. These coordinated campaigns are laser-like in focus, highly flexible, tightly budgeted, locked into analytical tools, and exquisitely measurable. The logic of this flows from clear marketing objectives tied to performance goals: new appointments in profitable services, cost-effectively increasing consumer mind share in new markets, increasing awareness and referrals among in physicians regionally and nationally, and new hires of physicians and nurses in profitable services that lack the capacity to take increase patient loads. In future blogs I will be talking about the mechanics of these campaigns and their components: 

1. Traditional advertising, online advertising, and search engine marketing pulls prospects to landing pages that are tightly coordinated with the advertising message (we will talk about online ad placement and effectiveness, new media in advertising, and the art/science of online ad and adword buying)
2. Landing pages compel the visitor, through a variety of interactive techniques, to perform a desired action, one of which is seeking more specific actionable information on the highly engaging micro-site (in coming blogs we will review interactive tools, such as surveys, quizzes, assessments, and decision support algorithms)
3. The micro-site informs, engages, intrigues, and converts this new prospect into an online community member. (I plan to get into persuasive site design in detail)
4. Finally, the prospect registers in a prospect management portal that captures information to be used in ongoing communications.
5. Part of the effectiveness of this approach is in the analytical feedback loop designed into the campaigns. New evaluation tools – some from the online media buyers, some from online visitor analysis, and some from server-based site analysis tools – provide the opportunity to make daily, even hourly adjustments, to the campaign execution.

 I look forward to sharing my thought, opinions, and experiences with you. And reading your comments. Quoting R.E.M. “It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.”