Posted on July 27, 2015

10 Steps For Better Website Financing Engagement

We know that PRICE and FEAR are the biggest barriers for elective medical procedures. So why do we hide the financing offers on websites or make it difficult for the users to get this information? For years it has been commonplace for elective medical practices to feature financing someplace on their website. With recent technology advancements and government regulation of financing offers, there has been a substantial decrease in focus related financing placement on a website. Glacial Multimedia Inc., recently embarked on a study with CareCredit and 60 ophthalmology practices to try and understand what putting the best foot forward could do to traffic. Our findings were astonishing. Oftentimes financing was not even there, hard to find or involving a sentence with very little information. In most cases it was easy to see how this could be improved. The question then became…what type of modality would we use and would this make a difference in traffic? For the purpose of this task we assumed that if we get more qualified traffic that we would inevitably attract more patients.

What did we learn?

If the financing offer has a homepage callout, place in the slideshow, and a detailed, engaging secondary page, then traffic could be increased. If we get more traffic we will get more interest. Nothing needs to even change with the marketing spend. All we actually did was make this a focus and try to work off the existing natural traffic and what we found was an across the board traffic improvement.

It’s not rocket science that this simple equation works very well. The issue becomes how do you prioritize this with a website designer challenged on creating a modern minimal design?

By not giving financing proper emphasis your practice will significantly decrease your pool of candidates and competitors will pick them up. We believe there is a way that appropriate engagement can be achieved even with a flat, minimalist design concept. If you are serious about marketing and serious about making your elective procedure more affordable this is an exercise that must be given some attention.

10 Steps to Increase Your Website Financing Traffic

Creating website traffic is often about marketing mix. By using financing awareness in your marketing you are hitting the most important hot button, which is also the biggest objection to elective medical procedures. If you help them solve this problem you have a new potential patient. So why are removing this engagement from website home pages?

On Page Engagement Objectives

1. Create a visible callout or navigation item either in header or other visible place above the fold. Make sure to evaluate this on computers of all resolution types. This should be visible on a small laptop or large screen computer. Make sure to answer this question on your mobile website as well.

2. Create an SLIDE on homepage slideshow dedicated to Financing and helping patients afford your elective procedures. Make sure you have a link going directly to you financing page

3. Optimize your financing page. To optimize your financing page you should have the following:

• Custom application link provided by care credit
• Unique text on page discussing your goals for helping patients with financing
• Inclusion of care credit consumer friendly video to help patients see the reality
• Bold financing offer if possible

4. Secondary page callout pointed at Financing page. On every secondary page you should include an engaging call to action for Financing.

5. Perform Search Optimization related to financing and cost of electives procedures. Include these keywords in your tags, images and Meta description parts on the financing page or related blog article. Point internal links from procedures pages to your robust financing page.

Marketing Initiatives

6. Maintain a blog that contributes cost and affordability articles on a monthly basis. These articles may also include other offer oriented affordability promotions

7. Release regular commentary in your newsletter regarding financing and promotions. Use the suite of tools that your financing company provides to make this process engaging. There are payment calculators, videos, images, custom application links, power point presentations and more. More often than not your financing company even has these materials pre-developed for you so you can download them and use them in your direct to consumer marketing efforts.

8. Make financing, cost and price a part of your (SEM) search engine marketing ad groups. By addressing affordability directly in the advertisement, we are seizing the moment to grab a searchers attention.

9. Acquire a link from your financing provider. Many companies that you work with offer physician directories. Take advantage of the FREE link and get listed as soon as possible. Work with your website company to make sure this link is done properly and passes along some page rank to you.

10. Use promoted posts and financing offers with your social media promotions. If you are trying to attract the younger demographic you should know by know it’s easier to interrupt them via social media than the newspaper. Have you ever inquired as to the cost of a promoted post of Facebook? I can tell you its a lot less expensive than a newspaper advertising campaign and requires far less production time.

Bonus Point #11

11. For those that use CRM or leading tracking mechanisms it is extremely important to include affordability and financing messaging and conversion items in the on-going communication with elective surgery leads. These are typically called responders and are designed in a very nice way to answer price objections. From studying the lead to surgery conversion cycle it has become apparent to me that the biggest challenge is the lead to consult conversion. Typically practices are very good at taking the interested patient, handling any objections and booking a surgery. The lead to consult point is a clear breakdown place and the wreckage is severe. In order to nurture the lead properly education and responders need to be routinely sent to assist in moving this person to the next level or an in person consultation.

About The Author:

Michael Dobkowski is a Sr. Partner, Managing Director of Search Strategy and Internet Marketing at Glacial Multimedia Inc. He is a digital veteran with over 17 years of experience in digital marketing. For the past 15 years, he has led the Internet marketing division across Glacial and its network of medical practice clients since its origin. As a much sought-after speaker at the medical conferences, he has been instrumental in proving education related to appropriate digital medical marketing concepts. Prior to starting Glacial, Michael completed an undergraduate BA at University of New Hampshire and an MBA at New York Institute of Technology. (With a specialty of Internet Marketing).