Four Steps to Convince Leadership Your Healthcare Website Needs Improving

Looking to request more budget to get the website improvements you want? Let your vision for a new website flourish by using this clear, easy-to-follow plan. You’ll save time and increase your chances of approval for the website you need by following just four steps.

Step One: Dig into the Data

Before you go to your leadership team, know where you stand by creating a snapshot of the need for a change with your website. Start with research to define your website’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as what factors internally and externally affect it. There are a variety of tools that will help you extract the information you need to prepare your case for a website intervention. The four we recommend are:

• Website analysis – Use valuable data from your website. Analyze your metrics, such as traffic and performance to make decisions about your need for website improvements or a full redesign.
• SWOT – Asses your site’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Defining your successes as well as your challenges will help you create an improved vision of your site.
• Competitive analysis – Compare your current site to direct competitors or national healthcare leaders to drive home the message that your organization is overdue for some key digital investments. It’s ideal to consider competitors with similar models, competitive landscape, size and resources, as well as market leaders that drive digital trends.
• UX Assessment – Review every digital touchpoint to uncover usability gaps and opportunities to improve your visitor’s user experience (UX). Providing a good user experience is one of the most important factors to achieving digital success, conversion rates, and ROI.

When buy-in is critical to your success, make sure, regardless of which tools you use, your data is clear and visual.

Step Two: Build Your Vision for Your Site

When you build your vision for your new site, you’ll need to bridge the gap from where you are today to what your site could be. Use the data you collected to highlight improvements for your site.

Do you need iterative change or a complete redesign? Would you benefit from a new content strategy? Are there features your website lacks in the competitive analysis? Use the data to outline how you should improve your website.

When defining your vision for the new site:

• Engage key stakeholders – Understand their goals, as well as their vision and ideas. Not only will this help you build buy-in with important team members, but you’ll also ensure your efforts are aligned and focused in the right areas.
• Outline your goals – Clearly define goals on how your website improvements will benefit your organization, healthcare consumers and internal audiences.
• Define your vision – Create a short summary that captures what you “see” as the future of your new site. What might the site look and feel like? Why will it be better than what you have today? How will a new site improve conversions and ROI?

Step Three: Turn Data into Dollars

Once you’ve done your research and created your vision for the new site, it’s time to prepare to sell the value. Turn your data and plan into a picture that shows the value the organization gains with your suggested changes.

There are two parts to selling the value of the investment you’re asking leadership to make. First, show the value your digital efforts have delivered in the past. Then forecast the value the new site can deliver in the future.

For both elements of the value equation, the best answers are delivered by showcasing financial value. You can do this by highlighting your patient journey:

• Engagement metrics – Start with gathering metrics on site traffic along with other engagement metrics such as length of time on certain pages.
• Conversions – Conversions are great for showcasing value. Focus on the tangible conversions likely to result in a care encounter. These include click-to-call for scheduling, online appointments/requests, screenings scheduled, class registrations, etc.
• Return on Investment – Completion metrics are the most effective to showcase to your leadership team. How much revenue has the website delivered? What’s the patient acquisition cost? What’s the return on investment (ROI) for the website and key digital marketing initiatives?

The goal is to try to get to return on investment metrics. If you’re having trouble defining revenue earned from your digital initiatives, watch our webinar for tips to overcome hurdles to measuring ROI in healthcare.

Step Four: Prepare for the Presentation

When it’s time to present your case to leadership, revisit the steps above. Share your data findings, your vision for an improved site, how you plan on achieving your vision, and how your new site will benefit the organization.

Depending on your audience, you may concentrate on one of these items more than the others, but be sure to show your team how making proposed improvements to your site could:

• Reduce advertising investment and increase organic SEO
• Increase visitor engagement with an improved user experience
• Gain competitive advantage through superior digitally enabled experiences
• Improve brand awareness, making it easier to acquire new patients
• Increase brand loyalty
• Meet organizational goals

Once you’ve completed these steps, you’ll not only be ready to present to your leadership team, but you’ll have a greater chance of getting the budget you need to start your website project.

Plan with Geonetric

Ready to start your website redesign project? Or looking for more tips? Contact us – we can help every step of the way. And if you’d like to learn more about VitalSite®, our healthcare specific CMS, sign up for a demo.

Shannon Richter 
Sr. Content Manager & Writer

The original version of this page was published at:  https://www.geonetric.com/vitalsite/four-steps-to-convince-leadership-your-healthcare-website-needs-improving/