This article was written by Jessica Levco, a healthcare writer who covered HCIC18 for Greystone.Net.
As healthcare marketers, we’re constantly churning out content. Whether it’s a new PPC ad campaign, rewriting website content or sending out tweets about a new name change, the words don’t stop. 
But at the 22nd Annual Greystone.Net Healthcare Internet Conference in Scottsdale, two speakers presenting the concurrent session, “Are You Losing the Person Among the Page Views?” wanted to remind attendees of one thing: Every person who clicks on your copy is a real person.
“As marketers, we need to identify the people in the crowd who want to connect with us,” says Dan Miers, chief strategy officer at SPM Marketing & Communications. “If we understand more about the people who are clicking on our material, we can discover a better way to reach them.”
Every two years, SPM conducts a survey where they ask 4,000 consumers a variety of questions about healthcare. There’s no magic answer, but the survey results showed some interesting data points on the people who tend to click on healthcare information.
Here’s how they broke down the data:
Of the people surveyed, 21% stayed in a hospital at least one night. Then, of those 21%, 69% had used some type of online resource to find more information about the hospital.
It turns out, those clickers (the 69%) are more engaged in a variety of healthcare needs over the past year than the total population. For example, they were significantly more likely to go to a primary care physician, take their child to the hospital or go to the ER or urgent care.
These are exactly the kind of people hospital marketers are trying to reach.
What followed next in the presentation was a series of slides, with more nitty-gritty questions that tried to figure out the behavior of these clickers. Here’s how they suggest marketers reach this group:
- Invest in brand journalism. A survey from Edelman showed that healthcare companies are more trusted than the media by about 9%. In addition, 57% of clickers found a hospital newsletter to be a “most trusted” source of information, which far surpassed social media sites (such as Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat). “People are looking at you to be a trusted source of news,” Miers says. Knowing this, now might be a good time to strengthen your commitment to brand journalism and telling the stories you know best.
- Put a variety of content on your hospital website. Edelman’s survey found out that people are looking for a mix of content: videos, text and data. “What should you put on your website? Everything!” Jerry Bowden, executive vice president at Edelman says.
- Understand the personalities of people reading your content. For the clickers, they tended to be more iconoclastic, free thinkers and unafraid of change. Does your content speak to this crowd? “These people don’t want drab, boring content,” Miers says. “You have to match your content to their view of how they see themselves in a universe. If you’re launching 75 campaigns in a year, how many of those actually inspire people?”
- Everyone is stressed out. Clickers said that they were more stressed than the average population. They overwhelmingly said they wished they knew how to relax and had high blood pressure — correlation, perhaps? In addition, they were more likely to say it was more difficult to find a good doctor or a good hospital. “Are you feeling their pain?” Miers asked. “Make it easy for people to find you and show them how you can help them.”
You can hear this HCIC18 concurrent session, complete with slides, in its entirety with Rewind! Rewind – audio recordings of all concurrent and keynote sessions, synced with the slide decks - will be available in December, 2018. Click here to sign up for Rewind.