Banner Health Shifts to Consumer-First Zero-Click Strategy

Chris Pace, chief digital marketing officer, Banner Health

2020 marked the end of a decade-long period in which MarTech teams focused their time on learning the rules of engagement for channels such as social media, mobile apps, and responsive websites. But a single platform or tool doesn’t meet complex consumer needs.

Hospitals and health systems won’t be prepared to meet the changing needs of consumers without a shift in their digital focus.

To meet consumers where they are, our digital focus in 2021 needs to be on creating quality digital experiences. This means thinking with more empathy and connecting platforms and data points. Doing so will give organizations competitive advantage in the post-pandemic world.

Organizations that design around the consumer mindset are benefiting in numerous ways. While this sometimes runs counter to traditional marketing KPIs such as clicks (at least at first), focusing exclusively on the consumer’s perspective can create a competitive advantage.

For Banner Health, that meant shifting its acquisition strategy to focus on a large-scale “zero-click” experience. Zero-click refers to search engine queries that do not result in a click-through to a website because the inquiry is answered directly on the search engine results page (SERP). That more than half of all searches now have a zero-click result indicates that it is a consumer preference.

“Zero-click drives digital marketers crazy because there’s no call to action,” explains Chris Pace, chief digital marketing officer at Banner Health. “There’s nothing to measure. And click-throughs decrease.”

Creating a consumer-first experience for zero-click searches meant a highly complex strategy of taking all the data about Banner Health’s physicians, locations, and service lines, putting them in context, and syndicating them to dozens of sites and directories that populate SERPs.

“How do we capitalize on all that information and leverage it as a growth driver?” Pace asks. “If your primary goal is driving people, zero-click is going to work against that. So you have to think the way the consumer does, and then anticipate how they’re going to find you.”

Learn more: Reducing Friction for Consumers Creates Value for Baystate Health and Banner Health

Best regards,
Matt Humphrey
President