Adopting a comprehensive approach to your events marketing strategy that includes event listing and promotion on your flagship website as well as marketing efforts will ensure a holistic approach in creating awareness, engagement, and loyalty for your healthcare events.
In this series, we have reviewed the importance of creating a holistic digital experience for healthcare events across your website, shared a market overview and identified top tools that are available, as well as, shared tool assessment criteria to assist you in making a final decision.
In this final post, I offer guidance on features to include when designing/redesigning the digital experience for healthcare events and offer suggestions on creating personalized experiences for your website users including healthcare consumers, the local community and medical professionals.
The features you include within your newly designed or redesigned digital experience for listing events, event registration and event promotion will largely vary depending on what the organizational needs are. However, there are some key users needs and actions that a wide range of healthcare users expect to see when searching for healthcare events through to registration.
The below features will get you started and ensure you haven’t missed the essentials as part of your project scope.
- Create awareness
- Offer multiple paths to locating events on your website whether via a master events calendar or also by each specific clinical or administrative area. This will allow you to meet users via the path they are navigating.
- Promote featured events in key areas throughout your website to enable you to strategically prioritize events that offer the same prominence you apply to other key messages.
- Search and filter functionality
- Include multiple filters and search to assist users with finding relevant events instead of having to scroll through pages of events. Maybe you decide the department, location, type of event and keyword search should at a minimum be included.
- Depending on how many events you have and who the key audiences are, consider the audience type as a filter. A great quick way to help users find events specific to their needs.
- Transparent and comprehensive information
- For all-day events, be sure to share agenda details,
- Ensure each event has a description and offers answers to commonly asked questions.
- Irrespective of whether you host free or paid events, be explicit if the event is free or at a cost.
- Contact information should be made available on who to contact to learn more about the specific event.
- Help users understand the location with a way to find directions and explore a map location with the location pinned.
- Make any event-specific flyers or pamphlets accessible on the event listing webpage.
- Share details regarding speakers including as a way to entice users to attend the event.
- If a jointly hosted event, ensure details are shared of additional organizations involved in the event.
- If not all your events require registration, apply additional creative design treatment to any events that do so they attract attention and action is anticipated.
- Sharing
- Integrate social sharing so you can expand reach for the events you host.
- Allow forwarding to a friend.
- Enable saving events to a calendar.
- Event confirmation
- Ensure the branded confirmation email offers a way to add the event to a calendar.
- Include location details and directions on the email for convenience.
- Offer answers to frequently asked questions about the event as well as a way to cancel attendance.
Once the digital experience is launched for your healthcare events, it doesn’t end there – create loyalty and delight amongst healthcare consumers, local community and medical professionals by personalizing the digital experience to each persona. Having these core groups at the heart of your healthcare event digital strategy will not only enhance the experience but make it more meaningful. The key to personalization is to create targeted messaging and content that engages those visiting your healthcare website in a meaningful, timely and nonintrusive way.
Start with some initial small steps and progress depending on where you’re finding success. These suggestions will get you started.
- Offer related events that users might also be interested in. this can be done on an event detail webpage and also as a follow-up email post-event attendance if they have signed up for email communication.
- If users have visited a particular clinical area on your website and then go to your master events calendar, ensure it has the right clinical area filters applied so they are viewing relevant events without having to click around.
- If particular pages such as medical professional website section have been accessed before going to the master calendar, ensure it is filtered by the relevant audience type.
Having the right technology in place will help you deliver personalization to the preferences of each persona. This can be done with anonymous website data maintaining privacy and consent. To make personalization measurable ensure it’s actionable for your users. Used correctly, it can improve the patient experience and empower healthcare consumers to take greater control of their health.
I hope you found this blog series insightful and assisted you in creating a holistic end-to-end digital experience for your healthcare events. I would love to hear about the successes and challenges you’ve experienced in developing your digital experience with regards to events, leave a comment or question below.
