Think about how you search online during moments of need. Most likely, you pull out your smartphone, tap out a quick sentence or question, and expect immediate answers from reputable sources.
Signs of a broken tailbone?
1 in 3 smartphone users have purchased from a company or brand other than the one they intended to because of the information provided in the moment of need.
This quick spurt of research to answer an immediate need has been coined “a micro-moment” by Google and is a huge opportunity for health-care marketers along with the key to attracting and earning a savvy patient’s consideration. As you might expect, during these searches, 90 percent of smartphone users say they are not loyal to a specific brand when they begin looking for information online.
It’s during these micro-moments that consumers are more open to the influence of medical and health-care brands than ever before, and marketers able to display quick, useful content during these moments have a distinct advantage over competitors.
At this stage, most potential patients are bouncing around a variety of websites as they seek answers to their questions. As they begin to learn about conditions related to their symptoms or situation, an inventory begins to form (often subconsciously) of brands, clinics, and physician names they’ve encountered in their journey. Common health-care marketing tactics to “be there” for consumers during the awareness and consideration stage include PPC, targeting/retargeting, and keyword/search on-page optimization. These allow marketers to pinpoint target patient personas by age, gender, location, interests, and even preferred social platform and to serve up compelling content built specifically for them.
Now that you have the fleeting attention of your potential new patient, how do you seal the deal?
The answer is to engage your audience with quality content. Quick hit ads and brand recognition can only take your practice’s digital marketing so far. When patients take the bait and ultimately come to visit your website or targeted vertical, the value of the content should further the conversation and continue to build trust. The most common tactic to boost your engagement ad brand authority is content marketing. Content could include physician profiles, symptom checkers, resource guides, white papers, how-to blogs, emergency protocol tips, and specialty service pages to name a few.
Being in the right place at the right time—with the right content—doesn’t count for much if your potential patients aren’t able to load the information quickly. In fact, over half of your traffic will leave if the content doesn’t load within three seconds. Waiting for a website to load is no different from waiting in line at the bank—if it takes too long, we’ll go somewhere else.
Here are a few solutions to cut down on loading times.