Project Overview
Netralayam is a tertiary-level eye care hospital based in Kolkata, West Bengal, committed to providing the highest standard of patient care by leveraging patient feedback. Being a locally known eye care hospital means most of their patient base came through referrals from other physicians and eye specialists (past patients of doctors who work at Netralayam).
When Netralayam approached us seeking to increase their patient base through channels other than referrals, we worked together to deploy a multichannel online marketing funnel for their hospital. This strategy was crafted with the intent of achieving two important end goals:
Increase patient footfalls in the hospital
Make Netralayam the go-to name for anyone out there looking for eye care treatment
Challenges and Our Approach
| Challenges | Goals |
|---|---|
| Inflated marketing costs with a stagnant ROI | Increase and maintain a consistent patient inflow |
| Low average daily footfall | Increase daily inquiry calls |
| Low patient retention because of the lack of a system to gauge patient experience & satisfaction | Improve patient experience by working on the feedback shared |
| Expensive offline marketing efforts with no measurable results | Decrease cost per lead (spend less on marketing) |
| Make Netralayam a popular ophthalmology brand locally |
The competition wasn't always this tough, but with the advancement of technology, the market has become somewhat aggressive, especially in the healthcare sector. People nowadays have easy access to handheld devices.
When Netralayam got in touch with us for their marketing needs, the very first step we took was to research the market and the current standing of their practice, and we found some serious black holes in their marketing strategy. They had absolutely no online presence whatsoever. So, there was no way patients could find them online.
Present-day patients are informed healthcare consumers. They tend to research and assess every bit of information about the doctor or hospital they can find online before selecting them. Therefore, after carefully analyzing the patient's mindset and the current market scenario, we devised the following strategies:
Developing and designing a patient-centric hospital website
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to help the website rank on the search engines for relevant keywords
Crafting an omnichannel digital marketing campaign to create awareness among patients about the brand
Retaining existing patients by leveraging the best practices of online reputation management
How Our Teamwork Made the Dream Work!
It wasn't that easy after all! We had to clear out some serious obstacles before the marketing funnel became fully functional and ROI-driven. From the beginning, we involved our most experienced and knowledgeable marketing professionals in implementing the strategy.
Here's whom we involved and the roles they played:
Project Managers:
Behind every successful project, there are skilled project managers who constantly monitor all moving parts. They are responsible for:
- Keeping track of each task and ensuring timely completion
- Regular status checks
- Eliminating bottlenecks
- Quality assurance
SEO Analysts and Executives:
SEO analysts and specialists are the heart and soul of any website and its performance. They make sure to take regular steps to improve the performance of marketing campaigns for their continued success. Our SEO analysts and executives were responsible for the analysis of the current situation of Netralayam. Since the client had no online presence, they had to devise each strategy from scratch.
Here is a quick checklist of actions performed by our SEO team:
- Competitor analysis
- In-depth keyword research
- Identify content opportunities
- Ensure the website has a sound technical SEO aspect
- Creation of a fluid site structure
The analysis helped us identify additional optimisation opportunities enabling Netralayam to dominate the local search results.
Content Managers & Writers:
There is a reason why we call content a King in the digital marketing world. Great content tells the user a story and compels them to take action. Our content team coordinated with our SEO team to produce exceptional lines of content for service pages, informative blogs, newsletters, press releases, etc. They worked in tandem with our SEO team to ensure every piece of content was well-researched, 100% original and properly optimized with relevant keywords.
Website Developers & Designers:
A strong foundation was needed for our website so that it could match the web standards. A great-looking & responsive site that loads quickly is more likely to attract patients' attention and drive consistent conversions. That's where our team of expert developers and designers came in. They worked with our project managers and SEO team to ensure we launched a user-friendly, SEO-optimized, mobile-responsive website for Netralayam.
Strategy Deployment:
Phase 1. Building SEO Optimized Site for Better Conversion and Rankings
A medical website is the first point of interaction between a patient and a doctor. That's why our team at Healthcare DMS collaborated with the client to understand their services to devise and develop a fluid design that is appealing to patients and follows Google's guidelines. We designed an effective, responsive, and user-friendly website to ensure it can be easily crawled and indexed by search engines while keeping the patients engaged.
How we built a performance-driven website for Netralayam
01
We developed a clean and easy-to-navigate site structure based on feedback from the client, our keyword research findings, and by studying the different aspects of our highest-performing competitor sites. It helped us make the website easy to find and index by Google and easy to navigate by prospective patients.
02
We worked on optimizing the site structure by placing the CTA (Call to Action) buttons in strategic positions. This strategic placement of CTAs helped direct user attention to action areas on the website and resulted in a good volume of inquiry calls and appointment form fills from the website.
03
We also ensured that the website was responsive and compatible across multiple devices so that users visiting the site from any device- desktop, laptop, or mobile- enjoy a smooth overall experience.
Phase 2. A Comprehensive & Robust SEO Strategy to Drive Users & Traffic to the Newly-built Website
The next step in our marketing plan was to develop a robust SEO strategy, and by robust, we mean one that would continue yielding results in the long run and help Netralayam's website attract consistent traffic and convert them into leads.
Our SEO team focused both on onsite and offsite activities with dedicated resources under the expert supervision of our able project managers.
Here's how we went about it:
| On- Page SEO | Off-Page SEO |
|---|---|
| Optimized meta titles and descriptions with “near me” keywords | Submitted Netralayam website to local directories and listed the same for quality backlink building |
| Ensured strategic use of primary keywords throughout the website content | Worked on enhancing the reach of Netralayam's brand on social media |
| Carefully crafted internal linking strategy to offer smooth navigation to the visitors | Got actively involved in local forums like Quora and Reddit and answered patients' questions there |
| Ensured the website is mobile responsive | Reached out to different authority websites within healthcare for guest blogging |
| Ensured the pages were loading fast on the web browser |
Apart from the abovementioned activities, we also ensured that whatever content we churned out was of top quality and answered the users' questions in simple and understandable language.
Results:
Our goal to make Netralayam a go-to name for every patient looking for eye care started on a positive note. After launching the marketing campaign in 2020, we saw some immediate traction on the website within a year after launch. The website traffic and conversion grew significantly, and it continued to show promising results in the following year (2021 - 2022).
Website traffic and conversion growth by numbers:
Traffic
Growth
323.42%
Blog Page
Traffic Growth
132.25%
Call From
Website
404.50%
Phase 3: Google Business Profile Optimization
Over the last few years, Google My Business (Now Google Business Profile) has become an essential tool for generating leads for every local business type, and healthcare is no exception. However, despite being a free service, many doctors and hospitals fail to take advantage of it. So, our next focus was getting the Google business profile up and running.
After creating a new listing on GBP, we began to optimize it by:
- Adding basic business information such as name, address, and phone number
- Adding keyword-rich business description
- Adding photos of the provider and practice
- Adding relevant primary and secondary categories
- Providing regular responses to patient reviews and questions
- Keeping the Google business profile updated by posting regular informational updates via Google posts.
This was just part of the initial work that needed to be done while setting up the profile. Meanwhile, it needed constant attention and nurturing to get where we are right now with Netralayam's GBP. We followed a strict schedule of posting regular updates and promptly responding to patient reviews, which helped enhance the local visibility of the practice. Our online reputation management tool helped us a great deal. It helped us gather reviews from different platforms like Google and Facebook and leverage the same for better online visibility, ultimately improving Netralayam's local pack rankings (which account for 42% of clicks of all local searches).
Results:
Total Calls from GBP profile: 5,407 in just 6 months.
Direction Requests Made by Patients: 4,875 in last 6 Months
Growth in average calls per month from online marketing YoY
July 2020 to June 2021355 / month
July 2021 to June 20221,304 / month
Phase 4. Building a Robust Online Reputation
A doctor's reputation is the key aspect of their marketability. When patients search for doctors or any specialty hospitals online, one of the very first things they will notice or look for is “reviews”. Reviews play an important role in boosting your visibility on search engines. The more positive reviews you have, the more likely your hospital will rank high on search engines.
So, as part of our marketing strategy, we started managing the online reputation of Netralayam. But we did not just focus our efforts on Netralayam; we also worked towards enhancing the online reputation of each of the doctors working at Netralayam. After all, patients remember doctors first and hospitals second.
In this journey of ensuring a stellar online reputation, our proprietary reputation management tool helped us a lot. With enhanced features like review tracking, sentiment analysis, etc., the tool empowered Netralayam to act promptly on both positive and negative reviews. Moreover, with data from sentiment analysis features, they were able to improve their service and practice, which resulted in higher patient satisfaction.
Since there was no online presence for Netralayam or the doctors in the beginning, like everything else, we had to implement everything from scratch. That included generating and managing an online reputation. But, it was not as easy as it sounds. So, how did we achieve such targets?
Here's where our online reputation management tool came in handy. Being more than a review collection and monitoring tool, it has many features that helped the practice fuel its growth. The tool automatically sends out patient surveys through email and text at your command with some basic feedback questions. The tool then automatically converts the feedback into easy and understandable patient sentiment data. This helped Netralayam and the doctors working with Netralayam understand the loopholes in their services, front desk management and more. They could now identify factors affecting their patient satisfaction levels and work on improving them.
Results:
1,141
1,099
42
Total reviews generated
93.27%
Happy responders
3.66%
Neutral responders
2.58%
Unhappy responders
Final Thoughts
Today, we consider ourselves as Netralayam's valuable partner, who helped them acquire constant, high-quality leads. When it comes to our key goal,i.e, to acquire consistent leads for our clients, the results speak for themselves.
