Develop a working theory of why people bother coming to your website at all

Posted by Paul in Marketing, healthcare, hospital growth, speaking on 11 29th, 2007 | no responses

Recently, I gave a talk with our fabulous client, Cheryl Munn, about Microcasting. What’s Microcasting you may ask? Here was our working definition:

Electronic communication with your audience in the most customized way possible for the smallest, measurable segment possible.

Why does this matter for healthcare?

Because if you’re like any of our clients, you have some programs you have to grow, some you don’t want to grow, and some you could only grow by a handful of patients… or doctors for that matter. The scaling problems of healthcare, as a business, are related to cost of delivery. Adding another patient could cost you nothing… or make you unprofitable.

Most healthcare websites are only spoken of in terms of the past -- pageviews, visitors, the bizarrely misnamed “hits” — but measuring the past is only a start.

Most healthcare marketers have a far better handle of offline demographics than online, but only because the people who sold you the media told you so!

The good news is that it’s entirely possible to get a grip on your online audience. What you should be after is a working theory that can be tested and validated over time.

The key is to be curious and challenge assumptions whenever possible. More about that, next post.