The Anatomy of a Digital Makeover: Websites, Reviews, & Integration in Healthcare

Announcer: Welcome to the Ignite Podcast, the only healthcare marketing podcast that digs into the digital strategies and tactics that help you accelerate growth. Each week, Cardinal’s experts explore innovative ways to build your digital presence and attract more patients. Buckle up for another episode of Ignite.

Alex: All right, you guys, today we’re going to actually talk about how the stuff actually gets done. James is in there making the sauce because I can’t wait to have him on here. This is going to be fun. He’s not only working at a health system, he’ll tell you all about that, but he’s worked in the dark side. This is the guest you were looking for, all of my three listeners. We’re going to have a lot of fun today. James, welcome to crazy town. How are you doing?

James: I’m good. Thanks for having me, Alex. How are you?

Alex: Yes, a loaded question this morning. James, tell us where you hail from. Where do you work? What do you do there?

James: I am born and raised here in the great city of Fayetteville, North Carolina, where I am currently working. It’s a little bit of a full-circle moment for me, if you will. I was actually born in the hospital I’m working at. A little bit of a weird full-circle moment. I’m giving back, I guess, to the place that brought me into the world. That’s what I like to tell people. Like you said, been on the dark side prior to this and balancing my time, been here at Cape Fear Valley Health for the last almost four years now, working as their digital marketing manager.

Alex: Got it. What is Cape Fear? How big?

James: Cape Fear Valley is over 1,000-bed. Our health care system in Southeast North Carolina. We service seven counties in the southeastern region, HQ here in Fayetteville with their medical center, but have six other hospitals. We’re approaching 90 clinics now and getting to the triple-digit number very quickly. We’re supposed to hit that this year in 2025. So we are rapidly expanding across the southeastern region. There’s plenty to see and do around here. No question.

Alex: I love it. Could they have not come up with a different name for a hospital system, Cape Fear Valley? I’m already scared.

James: Yes, there’s a little bit of that plays into it, for sure, from a branding standpoint, absolutely.

Alex: First thing to address. All right. You’re a digital marketing manager. Are you all service lines? Are you over digital media, SEO? What’s the purview? We’ll know what to hone in on.

James: Yes. The answer basically is yes. I definitely speak with all of our different service lines, mostly at a high level. One of my main responsibilities here is our website. We did go through a very intensive from-the-ground-up up website rebuild and launched that in December of last year. We’ve been live for about six months on our new site, again, from the studs up. That’s been great. Obviously, websites are never done. One of the main components, like I said, of my day is really making sure content that we got propped up is accurate, stays accurate, and it’s as useful for patients as it can be. Always talking to all the service lines for our website for that.

SEO is another large component of my job. No question, Alex, about that. Then I would say another large focal point is online reputation management. That’s another big one that falls in my lap, as it does with most people in digital marketing. I would say those are the three main big focal points on my side.

Alex: So like everything. I love it. This is a fun thing. When you’re not at that one of the huge, huge health systems, you get to do everything. That’s the upside of a smaller regional thing is you’re going to get to touch everything and have way more impact, way more faster. That’s what James is doing. This is fun. Let’s get to reviews and all that fun stuff later. I want to talk first about the website. How long did it take? Why did you guys do it? New functionality. What’s the number one KPI you looked at when you launched to say yes, it works?

James: Really, we started this journey right when I got there, like I said, almost four years ago, we really started the strategy development for that. Really pitching that to C-suite, why we needed a new website. The case study for that was pretty easy. Our website at the time was not updated or had a meaningful update for over 10 years, which is obviously quite old for a website.

Another main emphasis for our website was moving from an HTML-coded website into a content management system, a CMS. Our team, like you said, is fairly small, and that helps take some of the emphasis and the cue off of web development, where they’re solely tasked with dotting I’s and crossing T’s. Everything that we have to upload into larger, more difficult projects, we can really take some of that workload off of them. Really they can focus on more technical aspects of the site build, and we can really keep up with the day-to-day function and upkeep of that. That was another huge swing, was really giving the marketing team more onus and accountability over website updates, especially the small things. That’s helped us stay more nimble and keep the content more accurate.

Alex: Yes, it makes sense. The website is mostly for marketing purposes, and the marketers need to be able to edit and control it. That seemed to be the big onus. Did you introduce new functionality? Do you have online scheduling? Do you have more provider, patient, testimonial, video? What kinds of fun stuff is going on now?

James: Great question. We do. We have online scheduling. I will say that’s something we’re working on rolling out more of. We definitely need to do that for more of our providers. Even taking a step back from physician profile cards and pages, we didn’t even have that on our old website. Having a meaningful, dedicated space just for someone to see where that person works, what their contact information is.

Yes, I know, right? Bare bones stuff here. I said, the last time we had an update was quite a while ago. Substantial changes that we’ve made. We’ve done a lot of integrations with software elsewhere, too, from an Epic standpoint to make sure patients can get those touch points that they need to with health care providers, not from a content, from a design standpoint. Really making sure the user experience is a lot more seamless, taking 7 to 10-click journeys to a page, getting those down to 2, 3-click journeys, getting us updated for 2025 standards.

Alex: How did you do that?

James: We worked intensely with a website building partner of ours that happened across over a two-year span to really get that. Really, we had to make sure the architecture was built first. That’s a very intensive internal project, knowing that a lot of our information was very dated and how we talked about services. We really needed to right-size that first before we understood what the design side of that was. Even bare bones things like how many conditions and treatments should be included in this service line? Should all of those have pages? What does that taxonomy look like for all of those? Is there a cross reference from a general surgery to a breast reconstruction page?

Obviously, there’s a lot of overlap with those types of things, really making sure you have the layout of the pages. I know it’s not rocket science, it doesn’t sound like that, but it’s very easy to move too quick on that stage, and just think we can smooth that out later. If you don’t have that laid out, it becomes a nightmare for you later on. The information architecture is vital to start with. Then you can start with what typically called and we call two sprints based on that information architecture and how we want it laid out. Our website partner worked with us on various sprints from a design standpoint. We looked at several different options from menu layouts to how we wanted headers to look like on initial page load. It’s just a lot of communication, a lot of collaboration between teams to make sure you’re getting to a agreed-upon solution. That’s how we got there, Ales. It’s just a lot of weekly meetings over a two-year time period.

Alex: I love it. The big theme is consolidate the content so people don’t go to 10 pages to find what they could have found on 1 service line page. Cardio. Okay, we treat all of these things, and this is the surgeries we have. If you want to learn more, you can go to this page. Consolidating all of that stuff and then obviously reorganizing the site so the headers and stuff have all of the relevant contact information. People get to the end point faster.

Guys, this is what the robots can’t replace for the foreseeable years. It’s like it’s the thinking and the strategy and all of that stuff. It can’t do that. Get as strategic as you can, as quickly as you can. I know you also believe that one of the biggest things marketing needs to evolve into is more so the integration with EMR, Epic, if you will, stuff like that. Right? Is that what you’re hoping happens in the near term?

James: 100%. Yes, we have surveys running on our site. We get a lot of different data points. I’ve heard you say it too, Alex. A lot of people, what they’re coming for on websites, health care websites is transactional-based. They want to pay a bill. They want to be seen by a doctor. If they want to read more content about service, that’s great. That’s somewhat secondarily a lot of the times, though, from what we’ve seen. They want to apply for a job, pay a bill or get to a doctor quickly. It’s providing those touchpoints. Again, that’s why the setup is so important when you’re doing that, making sure CTAs are in the right spots, little things like that again, it’s very easy to cut a corner on. That’s why that data and that stuff is so important so your patients can get where they need to as quickly as possible.

Alex: Yes. Then get the right content afterwards. The EMR is integrated with marketing automation and software and stuff like that. They get the right journeys and all that fun stuff. Your LTV increases, and the patient gets better care. That’s right. We’ll see if that ever happens. Epic, open it up. Is it Epic who’s doing some kind of health craze?

James: Epic?

Alex: Epic. Epic. It’s that they’re doing some pseudo marketing CRM thing right now, I think. Aren’t they? I don’t know. I heard about. We don’t have a ton.

James: I actually just had a call with them yesterday, Alex. You’re right. At least that’s the first time I’ve heard about it. It seems like they’re making more intentional moves into the marketing space and integration. Yes, it sounds like they have a lot coming down the pipeline.

Alex: Glad they’re finally paying attention to us. All right. I get all of that. Very useful. By the way, did you like your web design partner? If you want to give him a shout-out, that’s fine. We’re not competitive. I want everybody to get the help they need.

James: Yes, absolutely. We work with Unlock Health. When we started with them, they were actually still called CenterTek. They are Unlock Health now. A very tried and trusted name in the space. Absolutely.

Alex: Good, good. We know Unlock well. That’s fun. I’m glad they took good care of you. At the end of the day, it’s all about connecting the patients with care. Who can do that? That’s what’s most important. Tell us a little bit about reputation management. You got over a thousand providers. What program are you running? What’s your philosophy there?

James: We work with a software called ReviewTrackers. Really helps, first of all, aggregate all those reviews in one spot so I’m not funding those on individual sites like Google, Healthgrades, Yelp. Everyone, I would say, well over 90% of our reviews are Google-based. It’s very Google-heavy where we’re receiving the vast majority of our reviews. That’s becoming more and more of a focus, I would say, for our health care system overall over the last couple of years, and a lot of that is really having more meaningful headway in that space, really making sure we have all the little things done on those profiles like everyone’s pretty much aware of. Photos, descriptions, and all those little things that are annoying and very easy to put off. We know Google loves to see those, and they absolutely affect your rating on those local searches, no question about it.

The other part of this is really automating that process. What we’ve seen is when you ask for more reviews, more times than not, you’re going to get higher-quality reviews. I think you mentioned at the beginning, Alex, with the KFIR branding, we’ve seen that play through in some reviews. They almost tag onto that when they do have a not optimal experience, they latch onto the name there almost as just a gut punch. We have to deal with that, certainly, but I think that played into some of the hesitation with turning on review automation was we’re not in the best place to start with. Is this almost going to get us in a worse place than if we didn’t do something? We’ve proven that that’s not the case, which was interesting. Our partner certainly reassured us that wasn’t going to be the case, but you never know. You ultimately don’t know, but we’ve really proven that out the last couple months that when you automate that review process, you’re going to get that average star rating up.

Alex: Because no one that has a great experience wants to go leave a review. We had a good experience moving on with our life. If you’re not asking, you’re just getting the negative nancies, unless the health care organization actually really sucks. Then you’re going to ask everybody and they’re all going to say terrible things. I’ve not run into that case yet. That’s good. I’m glad that worked for you guys are scaling that up. Also helps the reviews and positive sentiment on that stuff.

The LLMs look at that, whereas Google really didn’t that much. You can ask chat to BT and Gemini. Hey, why am I not ranking when I search for this thing in your LLM and be like, well, we noticed that your reviews are not that great for that service line or this or this location. You’re like, whoa, it’s crazy. I actually look at the sentiment. Reviews are even more important. It’s getting press. So as still as all the technical SEO stuff. All right. You’re also over the media. I want to touch on this. What would you do if we gave you 20% more budget? What would you do with it?

James: Sure. I would say a lot of this plays into the fact that we are starting to stretch thin in terms of clinics, and really growing very rapidly. Everyone, sometimes the marketing budget, it tails along behind that a little bit. You have to get creative in the short term when you’re really onboarding a lot of clinics, services with existing dollars. I would say that’s one area for us specifically where we could do some further reinforcement on the FDM side of things, really making sure these clinics are getting the support, especially ones that are in fairly isolated areas where the care is really needed. If it’s a new clinic in that area, that’s a big focal point for us.

Another one, I would say, Alex, is the AI portion of that. There’s multiple things a day where I see AI is creeping in and taking more of that share from traditional search rankings. In addition to SCM, I would say we really need to get a better grasp on AI and where we’re starting to rank on that. We’re starting to do some of that, but we really need to make sure we’re understanding that from a holistic standpoint and staying in front of that so we can start getting in those search rankings and AI results. No question.

Alex: That’s crazy. Google got replaced. Search is getting replaced. Basically, it’s just a different form of the same thing. Now we have to check rankings in another place. There are jewels in SCM [unintelligible 00:13:29]. We’re testing all these things that enable you to track certain phrases or questions, and then you’ll find out that way. That’s fine. Your agency will help you through that. Yes, so making sure that you rank there and then reviews and press and all these other things matter more to them than Google. Google was simpler, and we are going to miss those simpler times, I think.

That was interesting comment you made of we’ve onboarded all these new clinics and providers, but we still have the same budget because the P&Ls haven’t been absorbed and we have to do more with less. What is the most effective media you have running, and what do you do with those new clinics? Do you run that same playbook or do you do something different?

James: We have a little bit of a boilerplate campaign to start with to just get them out of the gate. That’s something that’s very time-efficient thing as well that we’ve seen success with. We’re always optimizing, of course, where we end in one campaign, we’ll start that with the next for a clinic. We always tweak a little bit depending on the geographic region. We always have takeaways.

Some media in our area is because some of our counties are very rural, we do have some inventory issues in some places. So there are some caveats, some factors into that most definitely. Given some of the counties that we are serving in southeastern of North Carolina are some of the poorest in the state. There’s definitely some emphasis on that from a digital standpoint. We definitely have a boilerplate campaign we start with and then adjust depending on what the data is telling us.

Alex: That’s good. Looking at the data, and data is hard to read sometimes in healthcare marketing because you’ve got all kinds of gaps. You guys have CRM, CDP. What do you guys use to try to figure out what’s working?

James: We use a couple of different things. We have a data analytics platform. We’ve moved away from Google Analytics. That’s always the great denominator, of course, to start with, and get everyone on the same page. Then we have some on-page analytics as well through a partner called Mouseflow that helps bring some color to it. A common competitor is Hotjar that again, gives you some color to the black and white that the data analytics provide.

Starting to get into some journeys. Touch points are where then we’re prior to page and where they’re going post page, which is helpful to map that journey and where we can really spend our time more so on pages for website optimizations. That certainly helps. Then I would say SEO is also a really large component of that. From a website perspective, from a paid media side, where are opportunities that we’re missing on that? Not potentially gathering enough traffic that we should be based on the content that we wrote for our new site.

Yes, always making sure that we’re in front of those keywords because not only is that important just from a strictly SEO standpoint, sometimes service lines will ask us, where do we need to focus next? Sometimes page-level data will give you that, but SEO really provides that more holistic look across the board, what the appetite for keywords and different treatments conditions are.

Alex: Yes. Shows you the business demand better than anything else can, because it’s telling you how many people are looking. It’s so funny everybody’s been calling for the end of SEO since I started this thing 16 years ago. Now it might be more relevant than ever because ChatGPT, et cetera, they don’t even have ads yet. It’s all SEO. It matters even more now. Oh, I love it. It’s never going to die. One last thing, James, leave us with a tidbit of information. If you could give healthcare marketers one piece of advice that they don’t usually hear, someone on the come up, what would you tell them?

James: This is something, like you said, coming from the dark side, I was definitely not well-versed on the client side of healthcare marketing. I had worked on some healthcare clients on the agency side, but this was a breath of fresh air, a new air for me. I would say for someone, your inexperience in this space is really your superpower. It’s the best tool that you could possibly have. The reason I say that is in marketing, the number one thing you have to keep in mind is your customer, who your customer is. If you don’t know that, and it’s not making sense to you, and you’re calm and thinking through the patient mindset, because you’ll work with doctors who will throw acronyms out and talk very, very smart to you, but if it doesn’t make sense to you, it’s probably not going to make sense to a patient.

Never hesitate to ask that extra why question or, “Hey, can you break that down for me?” Because again, if it’s not making sense to you, probably not going to make sense to a patient. We always want to make sure we’re conveying that tough healthcare kind of information to patients easily so they can digest it. Use that superpower. If you don’t know it and it doesn’t make sense, it’s probably not going to make sense to patients either.

Alex: Yes, I love it. I love it. The more time we spend in healthcare, the more time, you’re right, we see things as obvious, and that’s the way they are. We don’t accept that they should change. I think it was one medical, the Amazon thing they did. I thought that was really smart, is they recruited the whole exec team. None of them were allowed to be from healthcare. They came with a different opinion of how healthcare should work. I don’t know how well that panned out for them. I think it’s not really hit its stride yet, but there are a lot of things we take for granted that other marketers come in and they’re like, no, that’s really dumb. We’ll work around the compliance stuff, and we’ll figure it out. The compliance stuff being the one thing that ticks everybody off that comes into this industry.

I think healthcare, there’s a lot of great marketers because of compliance and lack of data really ticks people off. James said it best. If it don’t make sense to you, it ain’t going to make sense to the patient. James, this was awesome. We got to talk about the things that are actually happening in campaigns. It’s been a nice change. I enjoyed it, man. Thank you for that.

James: Absolutely. I appreciate the time. It’s been fun.

Alex: All right. We’ll let you get back to making the magic work. Congrats on your new website. I bet that was stressful. Took forever, and now you can move on with your life and do the fun marketing stuff. Congrats on, hey, Fear Valley Health System. Y’all need a better acronym for that one. Congrats on the growth because a lot of regionals are having a lot of trouble. You guys are fighting a good fight. Well done, sir.

James: I appreciate that. Thanks for having me on, Al.

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