Website Engagement: Marketing Doublespeak or Reachable Goal?

// By Dagmara Scalise //

As the virtual front door to your organization, your website is perhaps the most important marketing platform outside of your onsite patient experience and actual physical environment. And yet, if you’re like most, there’s a good chance it’s outdated, unwieldly, or worst of all, underperforming on your marketing goals. (Assuming, of course, that you have goals. But that’s another topic.) And one likely reason for this is that the website, along with your other digital channels, doesn’t support engagement.

What exactly does that mean and how can you fix it?

There’s a trend in marketing to talk about “engagement”—that process of creating ongoing interactions with your audience to encourage them to develop an actual relationship with you, one where they buy your goods and services. In an ideal world, your digital channels, including your website, will build engagement with your audiences, meaning that they will drive your patients to read your content, attend your events, and, of course, make an appointment with your doctors.

But the trick with engagement is that it’s one of those goals that’s easy to talk about but much more difficult to achieve. You know what engagement is, but not how to get there. You’ve heard, or maybe have seen firsthand, that digital and social channels are particularly suited to creating engagement, but you haven’t figured out how to capitalize on them. Engagement ends up being more of a mirage than the real deal.

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