| May 03, 2010
Mention “Website content” to a hospital marketer, and the first topics they’ll likely think of are “SEO,” “conversions,” “online videos,” “social media,” and so on.
Although all of these concepts are critical for a hospital’s Website to attract, engage and retain patients, their friends and families, or their referring physicians, these concepts also speak to the “emotional” side of hospital Website content. They are also the subjects that are most frequently discussed by healthcare marketers in blogs, trade articles, conferences and forums, etc.
However, they are only half of the equation for a Website content strategy that fully identifies and promotes what a hospital is primarily there to do: make sick and injured people healthy via the safest, fastest and most successful surgeries, procedures and techniques that the hospital can provide.
The other half of the equation—which focuses on the “intellectual” side of a customer’s sensibilities—mostly involves more technical information about a hospital’s treatments, procedures and services. These are often validated with supporting information that defends the explicit and implicit claims in the “emotional” content, most often by addressing quality of care (QOC) questions and data.
Top Three Challenges for Writing “Intellectual” Hospital Website Content
Writing copy that satisfies “emotional” sensibilities is arguably the easier part of developing Website content, especially since it is an opportunity for a copywriter to work independently and use their creativity and writing chops, much as they would for an offline advertising collateral piece.
On the other hand, writing accurate and useful content for the “intellectual” side (particularly for QOC) is not quite as easy to achieve. Namely, this is due to:
- Unqualified authors: Hospital marketers and copywriters may understand some basic medical concepts, but they are usually not formally trained or educated in healthcare and medicine. Thus, even with the best research, they might still not be able to discern which information is valid—in general, or specifically for their hospital.
- Finding and scheduling qualified collaborators: Writing content that is accurate and well-informed often requires collaboration with physicians, nurses and other qualified staff. Along with finding qualified staff that is inclined to collaborate, the challenge is further increased with scheduling staff that rarely have time to spare.
- Ensuring accuracy and validity: Once a copywriter’s interviews and research have been completed, the final drafts need to be carefully reviewed by qualified proofreaders (quite possibly the same staff that participated in the interviews and research) to ensure that information is indeed accurate.
For these reasons and others, a hospital marketer will often deprioritize supporting “intellectual” content—or if it’s not deprioritized, it’s often presented in overly simplistic language that presents only the most basic and salient concepts. This prevents the risk of delivering content that is not accurate or requires further validation or verification.
Smarten Up: How to Write Balanced Quality of Care Website Content
Like many copywriters, most visitors to a hospital Website—in particular, potential patients and their families and friends—are not formally trained in medicine or healthcare. However, unlike copywriters that at least have some kind of regular exposure to healthcare content, many hospital Website visitors are often viewing healthcare content for the first time.
If the aforementioned obstacles aren’t already yielding diluted content, the recognition of a need to put complex and sophisticated medical concepts in digestible, “laymen’s” terms is producing content that is easy to understand but ultimately of little value. So how can a copywriter or marketer find that precarious line between “dumbing it down” and “talking over people’s heads”?
This was precisely the kind of question that inspired Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) to conduct a study about preparing and deploying quality information on its Website (the results were featured in the February 2010 edition eHealthcare Strategy & Trends.
The study concluded that there are two general types of quality-of-care information that customers look for on a hospital’s Website:
- How Will I Fare?: These questions examine metrics such as mortality/survival rates, length of stay, infection rates, readmission rates, etc.
- How Do I Know You are Good at What You Do?: These questions examined patient satisfaction scores, third-party ratings, etc.
Similar to the “emotional/intellectual” paradigm, the study’s conclusions can also be perceived in a similar paradigm of “internal” (How Will I Fare?) vs. “external” (How Do I Know What You are Good At?). Moreover, within this paradigm, the report suggested that readers best responded to “internal” content that was simpler and easier to digest, while the more effective “external” content tended to be written with more detail.
Thus, a recommended process for planning “intellectual” content that address quality of care should include:
1. Determine Content Value: Is the information an answer to a known customer question, or is it information that you think customers should know?
2. Categorize Content as “Internal” or “External”: Is the information something that relates more to the patient (“internal”) or to your hospital or healthcare system (“external”)?
3. Use the Appropriate Writing Techniques and Tone: As the study suggested, use a more personable, casual tone when writing about “internal” subjects. Presumably, these readers are “scoping” your hospital more than they are actually researching it. Use this opportunity to empower them with information. This will build confidence in your hospital and hopefully encourage deeper research into your organization.
On the contrary, your “external” information is where you should be more detailed and nuanced with your content. Again, readers of this type of content are not looking for broad strokes of information—they are looking at the finer details and likely comparing those results to your competitors.
4. Schedule Interviews and Proofreaders: Since your “internal” content will likely be written in a more casual tone, your copywriters will only need general information, but presented in a manner that encourages excellent SEO, swift navigation to other related topics, and of course, truthfulness and legitimacy. It should also be relatively brief so that it doesn’t overwhelm readers. Therefore, interview and research timing will also be minimal, as will proofreading.
“External” content, however, is going to require a more concentrated and collaborative effort between your copywriter and participating, qualified staff. Although SEO should also be given careful attention, it should not defer to how detailed and accurate your information is delivered.
Likewise, SEO best practices for writing in “bite-size chunks” may also be diminished in exchange for being confident that you are giving your readers all that they can possibly need to make an independent decision.
5. Integrate Conversions and Calls to Action: No matter what type of content you provide, it’s imperative that all of your content recognize opportunities to keep your readers engaged. For “internal” content, that most likely means directing your readers to simpler forms that get the basics (e.g., e-mail) so that you can stay in touch.
But for “external” content—and considering the assumptions about readers’ pursuits for detail—conversion areas and calls-to-action should not resist engaging on a more detailed manner (e.g., asking for phone numbers to make follow-up calls, checkboxes for the types of conditions or treatments that are of interest).
PPC and Healthcare Quality of Care Content
After you’ve determined whether your content is “emotional” or “intellectual”—or “internal” or “external”—use the final output to more carefully setup, budget and monitor your PPC campaigns. Not only will performance metrics let you make wiser choices for adjusting bid rates, but it can also inform you of where you may need to add or modify Website content.
Furthermore, if used in conjunction with analytics for organic searches and conversions, PPC performance data can further inform whether the process of segregating content categories, styles and tones is working for you. If it’s not, a properly established PPC campaign can position you to use miscellaneous landing pages to test variations on style and tone.
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