Winning Patients After the Click with Better Landing Pages

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, Cardinals experts explore innovative ways to build your digital presence and attract more patients. Buckle up for another episode of Ignite.

Lauren Leone: Hello, everybody. Welcome back to Ignite Healthcare Marketing Podcast. I’m Lauren Leone, hosting today’s episode with our wonderful Senior Creative Director, Jean Zhang. Jean, it’s so good to have you back talking about landing pages with us today.

Jean Zhang: My favorite topic.

Lauren: I know it is. Jean’s heart lies with UX. If you ever get to meet her, that’s her baby. We’ve talked a lot about what we consider the halo of success in running a really great media campaign. We talk about performance, creative, audience research, the patient journey, and a lot of that applies to what we’re doing in the buying space. What I really want to focus in on today is what happens once a user clicks.

We’ve said the right thing. We’ve served them the right combination of sequential messages, got them all the way down. They’re like, “Yes, I’m ready to engage with you.” We haven’t quite won them yet. There’s a whole other component to getting them over the finish line. We can touch on today a little bit around how AI is affecting this, some of Google’s AI products, what’s going on with AI buying, the organic zero-click experience, and overall, what’s going on with some of Google’s algorithm updates.

Jean, I want to start with, it’s always great to learn from mistakes of the past. I think understanding where people go wrong will help us really then figure out where to go from here. I know you’ve seen every experience under the sun. You build landing pages. We send people straight to home pages, probably the worst thing you could do. What are some of the common mistakes that you think are the grounds for what we need to do about it?

Jean: One of the main issues that we see, especially when you see how crafted and curated the campaigns are with grabbing a target audience and sending a specific message, if the endpoint doesn’t feel similar or congruent to the previous assets, that’s a huge missed opportunity. It presents a few issues. One, you spent all this time telling a story only to land them in a different spot afterwards. Two, from a branding perspective, if it feels incongruent, people may trust it a little bit less.

All of those pieces are huge detriments to that final conversion point. Other things that we might see in relation to landing pages as a major issue is not getting to the point fast enough, not showing the value proposition up front, not prioritizing, for instance, key important pieces that a user might want to know, like is my insurance covered for this potential service, and also not having the true trust points spelled out for a user based on exactly what they’re looking for.

Lauren: You spend all this extra money, and money in the form of time and resources, but also actual working dollars, on breaking out this really cool niche segment based on their health conditions and their claims history. Then to do all that work to drop someone on a standard page feels like, “Gosh, did I just flush all that down the toilet?” I think that’s a really good point, really starting with the goal and who you’re trying to reach, what you need to say to them, and really just anchoring that on whatever they need to get them over the finish line.

I saw a really interesting case of this with a client who was looking to focus on driving appointments to certain providers, providers that had open schedules, more capacity. We were doing all this work to really hone in on the providers. On meta, we were serving images and stories of those specific providers. Then the user clicked through to a scheduling experience where it just showed first available appointment with anyone in the system, and you just undid all that really hard work.

We wasted a lot of money doing that. We had to build a separate experience to really make sure we funneled them until the end. Thinking about some of the practical tips and guidance, and I know a lot of talk of landing pages in the past has definitely been around, you’ve got to play the game with Google. It affects our quality scores. That’s known. That hasn’t changed.

We know Google is launching their AI Max products, where they’re claiming to, and this is all in beta, but they are going to take a bit more liberty with maybe what they pull from your landing page and pull into the ad serving experience, and also potentially even how that affects the landing page experience. I know we haven’t really seen that in practice yet, but anything interesting you’ve read about in that space that you would share?

Jean: I think the most interesting thing is getting at the core of that consistency. They’re trying to literally make it so that the thing we just talked about, that consistency from initial touchpoint all the way through, is something that is automatically placed on behalf of the people spending on Google. That really indicates to me the strength of that consistency and really tells me that it’s data-proven, science-backed, if we can say that, and a clear method for how you should be structuring your campaigns all the way through your landing pages.

Lauren: Yes, absolutely. More to come on that topic, I’m sure we’ll get into it. In the world that we’re living in today, what we do know is that a poor landing page experience or poor quality or consistency can definitely lead to higher costs or potentially as extreme as ads not serving because they don’t understand contextually that this is the right service offering for the individual. Getting into some practical guidance and tips. We talked about don’t go to the homepage, don’t be generic, make sure the USPs are top of mind. Any design principles. I think that’s what needs to be there, but from what looks best and what’s going to grab attention.

Jean: There are a few major ones. There are absolutely user studies out there that indicate that the contrast, for instance, of a CTA button, the higher the contrast, the higher clicks truly are for that. UI patterns like that should be leveraged across the landing page to make sure that we are driving people to what we really want them to do in terms of conversion on a said page. We also want to make sure that we are accessible.

That’s more of a baseline best practice, but it’s something we see as commonplace across the industry where landing pages are designed in a way that are not actually ADA compliant, which doesn’t necessarily have direct impacts for things like Google, but certainly have a user experience impact across the broader scale. Other major design principles that I think are really important for us to keep in mind with landing pages, simplicity is key. You’re capturing people. Everyone has the attention span of a goldfish now.

How do we make sure that the major three things we want people to understand are immediately clear, that we’re drawing their eye accordingly using design principles, and that we’re ultimately able to pull them to that CTA button that I talked about?

Lauren: I think mobile-first approach to that, sticky CTAs, some of the things that not only follow those design principles, but then keep that top of mind for the individual. Sometimes it can be as simple as using an alternate nav that doesn’t offer 18 click fields for a goldfish to get distracted and decide to go over here. I think there are a lot of basics, and these principles themselves, they haven’t changed. It’s just that they’re growing, I think, in significance with how diverse and where people are finding us in the different products.

Anchor yourself on a really strong conversion rate to get a little bit more consistency in your performance.

Jean: Absolutely.

Lauren: When it comes to the trust-building side of things, I think a lot of people struggle with that, the show-don’t-tell concept. What have you seen work really well there?

Jean: The idea of trust-builder is, first and foremost, critical. I think a lot of people now are trying to cut through the clutter and immediately understand, “Can I trust this brand, and what are the things that really allow me to want to buy in?” Along those lines, I actually think it’s very much dependent on the patient journey.

For instance, someone seeking Botox treatment versus someone seeking treatment for a skin check, they’re going to be looking at very, very different types of credibility boosters. In the case of Botox, as an easy example, they’re probably looking for more before and afters. What does this look like for other people? What is the volume of patients that this clinic has seen? That probably will drive them forward more so than with the skin checks, where they’re probably looking at professional accreditation type of proof.

The point of me saying that is there are a lot of credibility boosters that we like to bring to the table, testimonials, patient stories, accolades, US News, best-ranked entity or clinic, but we have to be selective with what we show. I think the patient journey itself is going to be critical in how you feature this.

Lauren: I think that journey is really interesting. When we talk about landing pages, we tend to always talk about conversion, conversion, conversion, and not to say you shouldn’t always have an option for the user to convert if they’re maybe ready at what you believe is an ubnormally early part of their journey. We have a number of clients where we run really effective mid-funnel tactics, and the goal is something else, but it’s still landing page objective. Can you talk a little bit about what some of that might look like if you were running, say, Meta or programmatic or video initiative that had still maybe a click to learn more objective, but maybe wasn’t quite as book-now-focused?

Jean: That is a great call. I think the mid-funnel is a very interesting point for us to look at, especially if it is more of a resource-based landing page, which oftentimes is what top and mid-funnel calls for. In those cases, I think it’s most important to tie that organic resource or subject point to the actual brand itself. For example, in the case of something that is more resource-based for a potential patient that’s seeking that service offering but still in that research journey, I think it’s utterly critical to provide the information that they are seeking to help make that decision while at the very bottom tying that back to the actual brand or service.

It’s that connectivity that allows us to tell that fuller story, and then, of course, on the other end, making sure that we can then retarget that person down the road if possible, with more bottom-of-funnel assets to then drive to a conversion page that we really want to make sure we built that connected before.

Lauren: User experience could potentially, in a mid-funnel capacity– You could be designing a page that’s really meant to compare, or show a bit of information, but what you want to make sure that they do when they leave that page, where they were really, truly just consuming content, that’s what you wanted them to do, that there is a brand recognition tied to it, and your page is not just any other page that they could have possibly visited.

Jean: Yes. It’s like that bow at the end that just ties it together and reminds them of the actual brand. In the case of mid-funnel as well, one last thing to mention, where we tend to see more dedicated paid media-focused landing pages is at that bottom-of-funnel. When you’re looking at top and mid, it is more appropriate in a lot of cases to sometimes send them to more of an informational page that may exist on a broader website, versus, again, that standing-alone media page experience.

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Lauren: When you think about creating pages for the algorithm versus creating them for the end user, how do you feel about that?

Jean: It’s a hard question to ask because, in theory, algorithms are meant to mimic what a user is truly seeking. If you think of what Google is trying to accomplish with a lot of their algorithm updates, it’s trying to predict, more so, what does a true user want and how can we make sure our algorithm reflects that. I think that is very much more so hand-in-hand. I will say, though, there is some gaming of the system. Quality score is something that we are always worried about from a landing page perspective.

It has broader impacts even to, of course, paid search and their broader quality scores there. Along those lines, though, making sure that major keywords are spelled out clearly, that we’re featuring them in headlines, that they’re skimmable and easy to see. Those are pieces that Google takes into account as well. We want to make sure we’re reflecting back whatever Google is looking for or any search algorithms we’re looking for. Then you can build on that foundation for the consumer and other things that they want to know.

Lauren: One of the things I get asked all the time, and I’ll ask this and then we can look ahead to the future, but doing landing pages that scale is the bane of every marketer’s existence. Anyone listening to this is like, “Yes, that all sounds great, Lauren and Jean, but I have 150 locations. How am I supposed to do this? You’re talking multiple pages per location, per service line. To make it as specific as you guys say it should be, what are we supposed to do? Where do we draw the line, and what is worth investing in versus making it more general?”

Jean: There’s not a right or a wrong to this question, which is why people talk about it all the time. There are pros and cons to both approaches. We’ve had clients come to us and say, “Hey, we just have these location pages that already exist on a website. Should we just drive people there?” Because the alternative is, as to your point, building out 150 custom landing pages. I think campaign objective has a lot to do with it as well.

Say, for instance, this client is really interested in only driving traffic for their clinics that have a certain capacity percentage, and not worrying about the rest. In that case, there’s more of a case, certainly, to be hyper-specific.

Lauren: I think the scale, to your point, is if you have a great clinic page that may not be a landing page, but it follows the principles, is it worth creating 150 more to fix one small thing that would have been nice, or is it oftentimes with super-bottom-funnel location-based general service pages, you can accomplish it on your core page? Then I think things like, where you have an objective to funnel people in a certain direction, or you’re really focusing in on a core service line, and you want to feature it without detracting from everything else. Give a few examples.

Jean: The idea of volume certainly is a concern. Oftentimes, in those cases, depending on the sheer volume and level of effort, it is better to just leverage existing location pages. There are a few tools that you can access to make things easier. We have certainly played around with tools that allow us to, for instance, stand up a template, duplicate the template, and then rely on the variants to do a lot of that for us. I imagine, as AI gets a little bit smarter, that there will be a dynamic component to it as well.

That’s something where we’re looking forward to piloting because I think that could alleviate a lot of these issues. [crosstalk] Exactly. Without that fully vetted right at this current point in time, the way I would approach it is also to ask yourself, if you have 150 locations, is the best approach truly to send it to a hyper-specific location landing page? What we have dabbled with and played with in the past as well is the idea of taking more of a service offering approach.

In the case of Botox, we offer Botox across all of these clients. We instead create a campaign dedicated to Botox as a broader topic and then have an actual scheduler on the landing page that allows you to understand where they are from a location standpoint. Then the ideal state is then to connect you to an actual scheduler link that allows you to book directly through that landing page with the location. It is the best of both worlds in that case.

In some campaign structures, that is not feasible, but when it is possible, that is a good way to get around that issue.

Lauren: I think if you could call out, because I always like to leave people with tips. You mentioned some tools you use to make it easier. Can you name a few? What do you like building pages in just if anybody’s out there at the start of their journey?

Jean: We love to use Unbounce. That’s one of our favorites for iterative creation. It allows us to bypass a lot of the development pieces, which sometimes can be a holdup to the broader timeline when you stand up landing pages. It allows for us to essentially quickly iterate A-B tests and look at all of the data together, which is super helpful.

Lauren: Plugs into any CMS, so you don’t have to be super concerned that it’s a WordPress template or a Drupal template or anything like that?

Jean: Absolutely. There’s also a lot of native integrations that we’ve played with as well, including direct integrations into Salesforce, for instance, that allow us to bridge the gap. It’s really nice from a development standpoint.

Lauren: Jean, you started going down the path of talking a little bit about the future. We’ll lean into that and wrap our episode on that topic. You talked a little bit about the hope and the wish, and the reality that AI tools will enable quicker development of pages. How do you think the expectations of the end user are going to continue to change as AI and information at your fingertips is just growing in our daily use?

Jean: One area we’ve seen a lot of progress in with AI is support for scheduling, for instance, or these AI bots that can walk you through more of that scheduling process, but also offer you support at each point in the way. I imagine over time that is something that could be adopted more readily by brands and clients, of course, within the healthcare space. On the other hand of things from a consumer perspective, as AI is more prevalent, as we start to see advertising and landing pages being created based primarily on AI, maybe not even necessarily leveraging real people, real stories, et cetera, I do think that there will be a little bit of a pushback in regards to trust.

I think the current consumer may adopt new metrics to measure, “Hey, is this service offering relevant for me, and is it credible because is it even real?” In that case, what is going to start to win out more so than anything else is true voice of consumer. Real patient stories, something to indicate that this is real. [crosstalk] I know. I think that as consumers get smarter, there is going to be this new analysis where if you had asked anyone two years ago and showed them an AI picture and said, “Hey, is this AI?” no way would they have said yes.

Now the typical discerning consumer can look at that and say, “Yes, that is AI.” Now we’re at a point where some people are letting that impact their decision-making processes. Just making sure that we have true data, true patient stories, and reality to back up what we’re stating as claims for our brand, I think, will be really a way forward.

Lauren: Just staying true to the brand voice, cutting through the noise. I like those tips. Jean, that was super helpful. I learn something from you every time we talk. I always think about how is our service going to change, how is Cardinal going to change, and you’re over here like the whole consumer’s point of view on everything they see is going to change. I think that’s really interesting insight. I have no doubt we will probably be back here every few months, offering updates on what’s changing because it’s changing so much.

I will see you soon, I’m sure, on the podcast. For everybody listening, this is Ignite Healthcare Marketing Podcast. You can like, subscribe, share this episode with a friend wherever you listen. Thank you to all of our listeners, and we’ll see you next time. See you, Jean.

Jean: Bye. Thank you.

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