Healthcare systems are leaning into search and SEO—but it’s easier said than done

Two years ago, Ken Chaplin, then-chief marketing officer (CMO) of the Cancer Treatment Centers of America (CTCA), received a new assignment: overseeing the marketing department of City of Hope, the California-based cancer research center that acquired CTCA in 2021. It didn’t take long for him to realize how different the two hospitals’ marketing strategies were.

CTCA “had a model that was very dependent upon direct-to-consumer marketing,” while City of Hope wasn’t tracking “the causality of marketing on performance,” as it relied primarily on patient referrals, Chaplin said.

“The team, the work, and the intention was all there,” he said. “It just didn’t have the [data] underpinnings to inform the output.”

Since then, Chaplin, now the system CMO for City of Hope, has been bridging the gap as he looks to reintroduce City of Hope to national audiences and retire the CTCA brand. That rebranding has required a near-complete marketing strategy overhaul, one that is still underway, Chaplin said.

The evolution occuring at City of Hope is emblematic of a shift happening within many health systems around the country. They’re evolving their marketing strategies to account for audiences who are increasingly seeking out health information first through a Google search instead of a visit to a practitioner. But for health systems, there are several challenges along the way, including rules on patient privacy and online targeting.

“There’s an enormous amount of investment that goes into digital,” according to Devika Mathrani, chief marketing and communications officer at NewYork-Presbyterian. “That’s something that has changed dramatically for healthcare in the last 10 years.”

Starting with search

Some healthcare systems have found that digital search is a powerful place to start. “People are not going directly to a healthcare provider or their insurance website. They’re going into Google,” Mathrani explained. “What they’re putting in is usually some kind of a symptom.”

In an ideal world, healthcare systems want to appear in search results for common symptoms, Chaplin said. But the cost-per-click (aka the amount of money a system pays each time someone clicks on an ad) for those keywords can be high. “You’ve got a lot of people bidding on those terms,” Chaplin said.

To optimize NewYork-Presbyterian’s site for organic search, Mathrani’s team has included information like commonly searched symptoms and how to care for them, she told us. It’s also invested in building relationships with third-party healthcare aggregators, like Zocdoc, WebMD, or Healthgrades, as many people rely on those platforms for initial research.

“It’s important that you have investments in partnerships with those institutions to make sure that your doctors are well-represented and your expertise is searchable and findable in their environments,” Mathrani said. Sometimes, these partnerships can involve paid elements.

Due to federal HIPAA restrictions, healthcare systems can be limited in their retargeting abilities and use of third-party data, Chaplin said. One way to improve efficiencies is to refine paid search campaigns to the geographic regions where City of Hope-affiliated treatment centers are located, so that the hospital system can appear when potential patients search for terms like cancer treatment centers “near me,” Chaplin said.

Positive associations

Hospital systems are also focused on brand-building efforts. In the past, those efforts haven’t always been informed by data, admitted Ryan Robertson, group director of client engagement at marketing agency VMLY&R.

“Recently we were doing a brand campaign, and this hospital has always done out-of-home. [They said,] ‘We have to have billboards all over the city,’” Robertson told us. When the agency looked into why that channel was popular, “We actually realized that the reason why they wanted to do billboards was that their doctors like to see themselves on a billboard.”

Brand-building has since become increasingly digital, especially as health systems look to tie marketing investment to data points like revenue and patient growth, Robertson said. For instance, NewYork-Presbyterian has partnered with media outlets like theSkimm to increase brand awareness, Mathrani said.

It’s a careful line to walk. In healthcare, “there’s a lot of topic avoidance,” Mathrani said. “People don’t necessarily think about cardiology every day, but people do think about their general heart health, and they do think about wanting to be healthy,” Mathrani said. “How do I take the knowledge of those physicians and make it digestible, consumable for consumers, every single day?”

Know your limits

As healthcare systems push into digital, their central focus remains meeting potential patients where they are. Still, there are some limitations.

“Cancer is a very serious topic, and so it hasn’t really afforded itself to some of the emerging platforms,” Chaplin said, pointing to TikTok.

But that doesn’t mean some healthcare centers aren’t thinking about it.

“We’ve had doctors be like, ‘Should I be doing TikToks?’” Robertson said. For now, she said, the answer is usually simple. “Is that what your patients are?” she said. If not, then the answer is, “Well, no.”