Your Healthcare Website: It’s the Beginning of the Journey
For most medical organizations, a website is a key platform for connecting with and growing your audience. No matter what the healthcare website trends might be, you’re creating a destination designed to inform them, create familiarity with the way you offer products and services, and encourage them to take some form of action.
But that action, whatever it might be, isn’t the end of your relationship. More often than not, it’s only the beginning. And how you follow up with this person will determine whether or not they’re being nurtured into a delighted customer who will advocate for you, or they seek similar services elsewhere.
You have more control over this than you might think. Your follow-up strategy is critical, and so are the ways in which you set up your website for continued engagement, the sort of engagement that can lead to loyalty, advocacy, and even word of mouth referrals.
But when it comes to website trends, how do you know what’s actually of value vs. a fleeting misfire? Mobile and desktop website features are evolving at a rapid pace. What do you include in your site? What should you ignore?
One general rule of thumb we stand by when building new medical and healthcare websites is this:
Does this new feature support your business’s mission, or does it distract from it? Sure, it might be clever, but does it help your clients solve their problems?
This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t take chances with your website, but they need to be employed strategically. How your organization supports its customers — the why, what, how, and where of things — needs to supersede gimmicks, even if you think they’re cool. Remember:
You get a greater benefit when the site is designed for them, not you.
Choosing New Site Features? Address Their Needs To Achieve Your Goals.
When it comes to building a website, your design choices are endless. Unless, that is, you stay focused on your website’s core purpose: To create awareness, inform your visitors, and create new customers.
This will help create design and features guardrails that many businesses overlook in place of purposeless aesthetics. To put it another way, I want your website to perform, not put on a performance.
I’m not suggesting that you abandon creative design, I’m simply saying that you should never forget who your audience is and what they need. Give them an enjoyable experience that solves their problems while also supporting your business objectives.
Not too long ago, a common healthcare website trend we saw was a homepage carousel, where different images would rotate with different messages and calls to action.
It was a trend that was quickly embraced. Though the intent was noble — getting more information to the visitor, quicker — they didn’t necessarily work, in practice.
- They assumed visitors would sit through the carousel cycle
- Carousels created timing issues — typically too fast or two slow
- Page loading times were slowed down
- Customer journeys were disrupted
- On-site conversions declined
If someone has landed on your site, then they have done so with intention. You want to push them deeper into the marketing funnel.
Each page on your site — home, services, about us, or a blog, for example — comes with its own unique strategy, in terms of copy and layout. They’re uniquely structured to nurture a conversion.
Avoid any site features that disrupt conversion and push your audience off of your website and into the arms of your competition.
Healthcare Website Trends To Consider
New Engagement Pathways
In an ideal marketing world, your website has become a destination. But this can only happen if your audience has a reason to keep coming back.
Luckily, and likely due to GA4’s continued focus on event and engagement metrics, adding features like event calendars, social media feeds, subscriptions, and e-commerce to your website is easier than ever. But remember, you need to incorporate these elements into your site strategically.
Adding a social media feed? Do you have a social media strategy to support it?
Adding a call to action for newsletter subscribers? Make sure that you’re regularly publishing useful and relevant content!
If you’re not, you run the risk of sabotaging your website and people’s perception of your organization.
Make Design Choices That Support, Not Dilute, Your Business’ Brand
Website design moves in trends, and just like anything else, those trends move quickly.
Modern web design tools make it pretty simple to make a big mess. Mismatched fonts, gradient overlays, rounded corners on everything. If you can dream it, you can edit it.
These elements all serve their purpose, but again, it’s about intent. Just because you can, it doesn’t mean that you should. Ask yourself:
- Does my website design reflect our organization’s mission?
- Will it help our clients learn what they need to know about us?
- Is it accessible and legible?
- Does it look and feel like our brand?
- Is it compatible across a variety of mobile and desktop devices?
Creating a trusted, recognizable business is hard work. Tarnishing that image is unfortunately pretty simple. Without the right strategy in place, you can unwittingly cause confusion and lose clients.
Making small adjustments to your brand identity over time is one way to approach adding features and aesthetics to your website without causing confusion. Consider this refinement.
The second is to launch a full-blown brand update, which requires a long-term strategy, including a PR campaign and internal education in order to be successful.
Whichever approach you might take, all roads lead to doing what is best for your clients.
Focus On User Experience Above All
Web tools and technology are in a constant state of development. Healthcare website trends never seem t stop. Sometimes this leads to great, useful features, and other times it feels like development for development’s sake.
Not every business’s website needs video that takes over the homepage or AI integration. Many add these features because they’re being promoted as the next, most important thing, and no one wants to be left behind.
Unfortunately, many of these features confuse your audience, and devalue your message instead of highlighting. There’s also a technical reason to avoid many of these unnecessary features: they can overwhelm data plans and web browsers. This will cause slow load times, penalize your search placement, and decrease time spent on your site.
Your site visitors want a fast load time. They want to find what they’re looking for. And then they want to move on. Balance technical features with user experience, and keep your focus on the latter.
Launching A New Healthcare Website? Remember These 3 Things.
1. Your website is a tool — Wow visitors with your ability to solve their problems, and focus on creating a website experience that informs and converts
2. Every website feature should lead to a conversion — The newest unvetted website features will often lead to lower engagement, fewer leads, and less revenue. Incorporate features that support, and not detract from, your mission
3. Focus on user experience — Ingratiate your website visitors with simple navigation, informative content, and meaningful reasons to come back to your site. Remember, this is often the beginning of your relationship — make the most of this opportunity!
Formada creates great healthcare websites. We’re not beholden to healthcare website trends, we’re committed to creating marketing strategies that support your goals and accelerate your growth.
To learn more about how we can help your organization grow, contact me today!