VIDEO: Websites Are Dying. Here’s What You Can Do to Revive Your Digital Brand
[Video transcript below]
Hey everybody, it’s Braden from Smith & Jones, and I’m excited today because we just released our 2019 Healthcare Marketing Trends Playbook.
This year we’re covering 13 important trends that are going to affect everybody in healthcare marketing in the next couple years. If you want your copy of the playbook, you can download it at the link in the video above.
In this video, I’m gonna talk about one trend in particular, and that’s this: Websites are kinda dying. That’s hard for me to say; I got my start in marketing by building websites, but I’ve seen evidence of this across every major platform on the web. They all seem to be keeping more and more traffic to themselves. Let me show you what I mean.
Here’s a slide from our recent trends report, this is a Google search result for the word “flu.” You can see right in the search results there’re symptoms, there’re treatment options, all kinds of stuff.
This kind of information is great for users who maybe have the flu or maybe are wondering if they have the flu, but it’s not so good for providers who ultimately would like somebody who thinks they have the flu to click onto their website and find out.
Google, by building all the information right in to the search result, makes the click unnecessary. And this is just one example. Facebook is doing something similar. For evidence of that, you can look at your own website traffic. Check out the amount of traffic you’ve gotten from Facebook in the last two years and just look, and I bet if you’re like most of our clients, you’ll see that it’s gone down and down and down over time.
There’s lots of other examples, LinkedIn is doing this, Instagram is doing this, Pinterest is doing it, they’re all finding their own ways to keep web traffic to themselves.
Big picture: This is a monumental shift, and it’s gonna require us to make some huge changes to the way we approach our strategy. Ultimately over the long term, we’re gonna have to figure out what it means to compete in a post-website world. But in the short term, really our play is to optimize our presences. We have to make sure that our Google presence and our Facebook presence are full, complete and have as much information as patients would want on them.
Beyond that, we should be leveraging these platforms for all that they’re worth. Google has some interesting ad extensions that can help booking appointments be a lot easier for patients. And Facebook has a lot of new, engaging formats that can help bring what a patient needs into the application, eliminating the need for the click.
We’ve all been measuring website traffic as a KPI for a long time, and I know this causes you to rethink that. But the sooner we can get used to this new idea, the sooner we’re able to really leverage those platforms like Google and Facebook to build our brand in the way our patients expect us to.
Thanks for listening today, we’d love to hear what kind of trends you’re seeing out in the healthcare marketing world. Hit us up on Twitter, our handle is @smithandjones1. Thanks again!
About the Author | Braden Russom
Braden Russom is an account planner for Smith & Jones. He ensures the advertising Smith & Jones creates for clients gets a great first start by delivering strategies that consider the client’s broader business goals, the feelings and biases of consumers and what’s working best in marketing (i.e. media or delivery formats).
Smith & Jones is where health care brands come to get better. We help our clients create meaningful and desirable health care brands, align their internal teams, engage new and existing patients and drive downstream revenue.
