Front Door, Back Door, Side Door, or Garage Door: Make Sure Patients Can Find You On or Off Your Website

// By Carrie Liken //

Personalization has been creeping into our lives over the past 5 to 10 years. It’s gotten even more intense with the release of the iPhone. No two smartphone home screens are the same.

Starbucks has personalized our coffee experience. Stand in line at Starbucks and you will never hear the same order repeated by two different customers.

Shopping on Amazon is unique to the individual, too. My Amazon home screen is far different from anyone else’s based on what I’ve purchased, what I’ve researched, read, and have an interest in.

Our lives are personalized, and we expect that personal experience to deliver the best experience to us at all times.

Patients are more digitally savvy today and jump between sites, checking health blogs, searching long-tail queries about their conditions, consulting reviews, or asking Alexa questions. These searches are personal to the patient and are not likely to be replicated by any other searcher patient.

Think with Google calls this out by saying that the “customer funnel” is outdated since the journey is no longer linear but convoluted and fragmented.

Many resources are available online, with information for each stage of the patient journey — from symptom searches to provider selection to online appointment booking.

As a healthcare marketer, you need to ensure you are delivering personalized experiences across as many touchpoints in this journey as possible. This means flipping your understanding of the website upside down. The focus should no longer be on just the website as a destination but as a digital entry point from the search engine results pages. Is your content accessible in “intelligent search” such as Google’s Knowledge Card or Amazon’s Alexa, even before a click happens?

Log in below to access this content: