If you a marketing leader or a member of a marketing team that is beginning the process of tackling a website rebuild, this episode is for you! Jenny shares five essential steps to focus on before you dig into the desired design of the website:
- Centering your “why”: Understand why your website exists. Identify your primary, secondary, and tertiary audiences (e.g., patients, HR/recruiting, foundation) and define your calls to action.
- Get tech savvy: Explore how current technologies can help streamline processes. Brainstorm new opportunities, like embedding a scheduling tool into service pages.
- Design site architecture: Create a sitemap. Review current analytics to see what content works, what doesn’t, and identify content gaps.
- Layer on SEO strategy: Ensure your website is easy for search engines to index. Pay attention to technical requirements and make sure the content flows well to rank better.
- Develop a measurement plan: Decide how you will measure success, ensure compliance (e.g., patient privacy for analytics), and streamline reporting.
After these steps, you can move on to wireframing and designing, either with your internal team or a third-party vendor.
Connect with Jenny:
- Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
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Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi friends. Welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow. I am your host, and I am also the CEO at Hedy and hHopp. We are a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency, and we are very proud to bring you this content every Friday. Today’s episode is not necessarily for all of our listeners.
If you have redone a website recently, you might not need to tune in today, but if you are a marketing leader or a member of a marketing team that is in the process or talking about tackling a website redo, and you haven’t done one in quite some time, and you’re not quite sure where to start, this is a great episode for you.
Today, what we’re going to talk about is the five things you need to do when you’re starting to think about and are beginning to dig into a website redesign project before you even start thinking about what the website is going to look like, we’re going to start much [00:01:00] more upstream and focus much more heavily on the strategic part of your website redesign project.
So let’s dig in again. We have five core things we want to talk about. The first one is spend time centering on your why, why does your website exist? The two core questions you want to answer is who are the audiences and what are the call to actions or what are the things that you want them to do on your website?
Typically, most folks in healthcare are going to have multiple audiences. You want to identify who is your primary audience, your secondary, and then sometimes you’ll have a tertiary. A good example of this is if you are a hospital system, your first, most important audience is going to, of course, be your patients.
Second audience might be HR or careers from a staffing perspective, trying to make sure that you’re really talking about the benefits of working at your organization. And the third might be foundation or fundraising. It’s up to you and your own [00:02:00] organizational objectives to identify these audiences, and then identify what you want them to do.
So for example, for patients, perhaps the primary call to action is to book an appointment. And don’t think about technology yet and how you want them to do that. We’ll get to that in a later step, but you really want to think about for your primary audience, what are the core things you want them to do? And then make sure you document it.
Next we’re going to actually start getting tech savvy. Now we’re going to start thinking about technology. So now that you have your audiences and the core call to actions identified, how can technology help? You first really want to outline what are the current technologies that we’re leveraging that we want to keep either from a functionality or maybe it’s a particular vendor that you really like working with. The technologies work well so far.
Make sure and document that, but then brainstorm and say, you know, maybe we want to move to the point where patients can actually schedule appointments online, or if you’re a payer, perhaps you want to get to the point where they actually can compare plans or [00:03:00] perhaps request a quote or do the first step of signing up for a plan on the website.
Don’t let technology necessarily hamper your brainstorming here, really think about the bigger picture. And then you’re going to go and try to find technology solutions, either within your current technology ecosystem, or perhaps a partner that you want to bring in. But you definitely want to start with the big blue sky.
What do we want to accomplish? And then you can figure out the technicalities as the second step. Within this part of the process, once you’ve done that, we understand who we’re talking to, what we want them to do and what technologies are going to be required. Then we actually want to design the site architecture.
And this is a really fun step because it allows you to, again, completely reimagine things from the ground up. Maybe your current website was built 10 years ago, and maybe you’ve had acquisitions or added service lines or whatever, and it’s kind of been mish-mashed and just added on to since then.
This is an opportunity to rip off the band aid and really, [00:04:00] again, blue sky it. I strongly encourage you if you have additional micro sites or domains that live outside of your primary, this is a great time to consider if you want to consolidate. It’s really great from a user experience and domain credibility perspective to do that. May not always make sense for your brand, but now is the time to talk about it.
I also would recommend making sure that you look at your current analytics and understand what content are folks using on the site, what content is ranking well for SEO, what content is not being utilized. At all. And is that because of a lack of visibility or because perhaps it’s not relevant anymore?
And then also identify content gaps. What should we be providing perhaps at the service line level or the plan level? That’s information we’re not really offering right now that we think may result in a better, stronger user experience. So do that and spend the time mapping it out. This is a great activity to do on a whiteboard with sticky notes and really [00:05:00] understand how you want the user flow to layer in.
And then the next step is actually layering SEO strategy on top of it. So now that we have the site architecture structured out, we understand. You know, how the content is going to flow, what the main navigation and secondary navigation is going to look like. Now we’re going to layer SEO on top of that and make sure that from a technical perspective, we’re keeping in mind those technical requirements that will make sure our website is really easy for search engines to index make sure that the content flows in an anticipated way and that we’re going to rank well.
It’s important here ranking well, again, not only for a traditional search engine, but we just did an episode on generative AI and viewing that as an alternative version of a search engine for your users. So again, thinking about it through both of those lenses, as you’re kind of reviewing that site architecture for a second time.
And then the final step is developing a measurement plan. So we’ve talked so much about patient privacy here at Hedy [00:06:00] and Hopp, and you know, our perspective, even with you know, that little bit of a I don’t want to say pause, but potential reconsideration of the OCR bulletin because of the American Hospital Association court case, we still strongly recommend you move forward at this moment in time with a patient privacy forward analytic solution.
And redoing a website is a perfect time to do that because you’re removing all historic tags, all tracking that may be living on the site that maybe you forgot about. So spend time now figuring out what analytics solution are you going to use? What events need to be tracked and measured? How are we going to do reporting or dashboarding? And what technology do we have, or do we need to make that work?
You’ll see, as you’re start laying these things out, that the measurement plan rolls directly up to those call to actions that you identified in the first step. So all five of these pieces really layer upon each other to help lay out the roadmap [00:07:00] and the strategy for your website.
Once you’re done with these five steps, then you can begin moving on to wireframing design, start thinking about the imagery and your way that you’re going to represent your brand visually on your website. But you shouldn’t be doing any of that until these five steps are completed.
These five steps are steps that can be completed by your internal marketing team, or it’s a great process to have a third party vendor come in and be able to partner with you to walk you through the steps. But either one works well. I would only recommend doing it in house if you have a person in house that is tech savvy enough and has done a process like this recently enough that they can really speak in to the opportunities from a technology perspective.
Because the last thing you want to do is go through this process and then rebuild the website and realize, oh, there are these really cool technologies or integrations that were available, but our leader the person that led this project perhaps [00:08:00] didn’t know they existed because they hadn’t gone through this process recently enough.
So even if you just bring in an outside consultant to speak into it, I strongly recommend getting a second set of eyes to be able to help guide you and make sure you’re thinking big enough, because a lot of these technologies and integrations. aren’t necessarily budget breakers anymore. A lot of them can be done pretty cost effectively, or just, you know, are an easy thing to integrate if you’re thinking about it strategically upstream enough before you start actually building the website itself.
So again, hopefully this was a helpful episode. If you’re in the process of thinking about doing a website, redo for your organization, or if you’re in the beginning phases, strongly recommend you walk through these five steps. And as always, I would be happy to give you any advice or feedback or thoughts if you’re in this process and stumbling over steps, or would just like some guidance, feel free to reach out to me, jenny@hedyandhopp.com.
Thank you so much for tuning in today. As always, [00:09:00] please give us a like, and a follow share this episode with other members of your team. If you’re in the middle of this process, it can give you some joint shared vocabulary and processes to be able to collaborate on versus having to educate them from the ground up yourself.
As always, have a fabulous day. Thanks for tuning in for this week’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers!
