Think back to pre-COVID-19 days, or in fact way back to pre-Amazon days. Let’s say you were looking for the perfect pink scarf. You got in your car and drove to every store within a 30-mile radius, looking and looking until finally, frustrated, you settled on a fuschia-colored scarf which is not want you had in mind, and it had that ugly fringe, but whatever! Now you just type “pink scarf” into your Google or Amazon search bar, get hundreds of choices, read a few reviews to make sure it is as soft and sheer as they claim it is, and order with one click. All from the comfort of your couch! For more and more people, finding health care services is fast becoming like finding that pink scarf.
As executives have moved their organizations to virtual service delivery and virtual operations, did their referral and marketing operations keep up? As my colleague, OPEN MINDS Executive Vice President Tim Snyder explains, “Consumer choices are no longer determined by what they see on the shelves or the packaging but by how they find a product or service online and what they hear.”
In the past, referrals for services came from an array of in-person tactics. You networked at local meetings of consumers or civic groups. You had a community relations representative who met with potential referral sources—physicians, ministers, treatment center managers, probation officers, guidance counselors, and other influencers. You mailed a newsletter to stakeholders and community members. You had a booth or table at local community events, hosted public education sessions, and coached alumni groups to be ambassadors for you. You may have even rented billboards and ordered calendars and wristbands that proudly featured your brand with motivational messages.
But what do you do now, in the era of lockdowns and social distancing? There are no local events or townhalls. Your community relations staff can’t go and meet with potential referral sources in person. And anything you mass mail—even if you can mail at this time—probably goes straight from the mailbox into the trash.
Just as you made the pivot—literally overnight—to telehealth and to enabling most of your staff to work from home, you need to make the pivot to virtual marketing, and make it quickly. Your outreach to potential referral sources and clients needs to follow the way of life and commerce in the pandemic era—and shift to online.
Mr. Snyder, who is one of our go-to team members on all things online, points out that 84% of Americans researched health care treatment options online last year. Most of them used health care provider organization websites, social media comments, rating and review websites, and Google. “Your audience expects to learn a lot about you online—cost, quality, safety, consumer reviews, etc. And if you don’t manage your information and your brand, someone else will, and it won’t be to your advantage,” he says.
Let me give you an example. As someone who travels a lot on my time off, I always plan my trips—online—ahead of time. I select flights and hotels but I also develop my restaurant list and make reservations; put together an itinerary for my time there and buy tickets ahead of time; hire tour guides; rent boats for snorkeling/dive trips, and hire fishing captains (we are big water people). What I select is usually done without talking to anyone. I search the location and my favorite activities on Google. I visit dozens of web sites that I find. I read reviews on Zagat, TripAdvisor, OpenTable, and more. There are negative reviews for every organization but I’m likely to think more of the organizations whose managers take the time to respond to the comments and explain both the problem and their solution. I make a large proportion of my spending decisions based on what I find online. And this process applies to how I look for health care services—and is gradually being adopted by millions of others.
Going virtual demands a different and more focused plan for your ‘virtual organization’—your web site, your social media, and your responses to online ratings and reviews. Your team needs to be hyper focused on your virtual accessibility and reputation. Your virtual presence needs to make it easy for new consumers to find you, understand the advantages your organization offers, and connect with someone online, instantly. The five questions executives should ask their marketing teams:
- Are the people searching online for the services we offer able to find us?
- How well do we know our audience? Who is looking for us online, what do they want to know, and are we clearly inviting them to take the next step after they learn about us?
- Are our website and social media channels user-friendly and designed to generate referrals and revenue? (It’s not about how many visitors or followers you have but about how many are acting on the information and contacting you for an appointment.)
- Are we monitoring who’s talking about us, who’s rating us and where, and addressing any negative comments immediately?
- Who is our competition, and what are they doing virtually that we are not?
If the answers to the five questions above are less than satisfactory, you need to develop a plan to enhance your online presence. The resulting investments in virtual presence need to be thought of not as one additional expense, but an investment in getting new revenue. You can phase the investment and scale up quickly with the OPEN MINDS six-point plan to design your online blueprint—know your audience; become mobile friendly; embrace all areas of search engine optimization; manage your online reputation; focus your social efforts; and measure, learn, adjust, and repeat. If executed right, the ROI from your virtual marketing investment will be immediate—in the form of new referrals, new inquiries, and preventing your competitors from taking away your business.
For more on why and how to implement this six-point plan to enhance your virtual brand, I hope you’ll join our team for the April 30 web briefing led by Tim Snyder, Going ‘Virtual’ For Revenue Generation: Assuring Consumers & Referral Sources Can Find You – An Overview. The briefing is free to all OPEN MINDS Circle members with Elite-level access as part of our Executive Blueprint For Crisis Management series.