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Healthcare Marketing Advisor
 
Healthcare Marketing Advisor provides concise, time-saving strategies for branding, promoting, and advertising your healthcare organization.

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July 2008   (Volume 9, Issue 7) view entire issue
 
Striving to turn searchers into patients

Elizabeth Scott, associate vice president of marketing and e-business at Norton Healthcare in Louisville, KY, throws around phrases such as "meta tagging," "bread crumbing," and "content matrix" as if she were an information technology analyst. Although she has a background in Web site content strategy, it is in marketing that Scott has become so familiar with such techie terms. She recently implemented the process of search engine optimization (SEO) for Norton's Web site. SEO is the process of assessing and altering a Web site's content, keywords, and tags so that the site is listed among the top search results on Internet search engines, such as Yahoo! and Google.

 
Why is healthcare so behind in Web 2.0?
Editor's note: In each edition of Healthcare Marketing Advisor, we ask our advisory board members to answer a question about hospital and health system marketing. This month, we asked the board: "There's a lot of talk in the general marketing industry of marketing being ready to move out of Web 2.0 (the use of blogs, wikis, and social networking sites) and into the next phase. Yet many in healthcare are still struggling to implement these Web 2.0 tools into their Web sites. Why do you think this is? Do you think healthcare will ever catch up?"
 
International hospitals win patients with quality, experience
It used to be that hospitals had to worry only about the competition across town, but as healthcare costs rise and world travel gets easier, international hospitals are marketing to your patients, and their promises of low cost and high quality may take away some of your market share. It's called medical tourism, which you may have heard about in the news or on Internet ads. Hospitals in developing countries promise top-notch healthcare in tourist destinations-often at a cost much lower than the patient would pay at a U.S. hospital.
 
In a sea of controversy, blogs can be life rafts
"I have always lived on the edge because the view is better from there," says Nick Jacobs, president and CEO of Windber (PA) Medical Center. "I also find life to bea lot more challenging when I'm driving a little bit ahead of my headlights." But in this instance, Jacobs isn't referring to his hospital's latest expansion effort or its trial vaccination program-he's talking about blogging. Although many hospitals avoid starting a blog for fear of sparking bad publicity, Jacobs has found in many cases that the opposite is true. When used appropriately, blogs can be an effective means of damage control for hospitals.
 
Does your marketing have the energy of lightning?
CEOs count the number of patient beds filled, pharmacists calculate the correct dose of prescriptions, and nurses verify patient satisfaction and other vital statistics-but, as much as I hate to admit it, the marketing of medical services is the soft science of the healthcare business. Although most people fundamentally agree that marketing is a necessity when it comes to competing for dollars, the often unmeasurable aspects of marketing rarely fare well on the chief financial officer's (CFO) balance sheet. I would like to blame the CFO or CEO for not seeing past the numbers, but I can't because the marketing professionals have presented the information to them.
 

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