Hospitals, unleash your data

For many hospitals, being good at local marketing means attracting patients to their physician profiles or location pages. Being findable means creating compelling content, optimizing location pages for search, and making sure their name, address, and phone (NAP) data is accurate.

But being found on location pages, while important, is not sufficient. To succeed with local marketing, hospitals need to stop thinking "Build it, and they will come." Hospitals need to unleash their location data across the digital world.

For any business, location data is the foundation of local marketing. Hospitals are no different. To help patients make informed choices, hospitals need compelling content ranging from patient reviews to information about insurance carriers covered. None of that content matters, though, if a patient cannot find a hospital or doctor, which is why hospitals need to get their location data right.

But health systems also need to treat their location data as a scalable asset that is both accessible and actionable. Data is more than a way to protect your brand via clean, accurate local listings, but is also a means to expand your digital footprint. Brands now need to ensure that they possess clean and consistent location data continually distributed across the ecosystem (especially the mobile ecosystem given that mobile searches have overtaken desktop searches). Consider some of the ways a consumer can find a hospital:

· A voice search on an Apple Watch.

· Any number of apps on a mobile phone, such as Apple Maps, Facebook Places, Foursquare, Google, Google Maps, or Yelp.

· An in-car navigation system.

Being findable means sharing your location data across the network of publishers (such as Bing and Google) and aggregators (such as Localeze and Factual) that regularly update publishers with location data.

Publishers include the heavyweights of the digital world, such as Facebook and Google, which share your location data with their audience (and yours) through platforms such as Google Maps. But publishers also need help from outside parties to efficiently keep their databases up to date, which is where data aggregators come into play. For example, Both Apple and Facebook rely on Factual to supply vetted location data for U.S. businesses.

Together, aggregators and publisher amplify your data. Amplifiers are so important that hospitals need a strategy to share their data with them regularly, either directly or with the help of an outside party. On the other hand, if data amplifiers lack accurate information about you, your hospital and network of physicians might not be found (or conflicting information will be listed) when someone uses Apple Maps or Google Maps to find you.

To unleash your data, I suggest you take the following steps:

1. Organize All Your Location Data

Large health systems don't have it easy. Typically a hospital has dozens of unique and related services dispersed across different buildings with their own distinct name, address, and phone numbers. For example, the oncology ward of a major hospital might be located in a separate building and possess its own name. The ward needs to make sure that its location is clearly shown and its affiliation with the main hospital understood. You need to organize and identify all the distinct names, address, phone numbers, and their associated latitudinal/longitudinal coordinates, to make it easy for your patients to find you.

2. Share Your Location Data with the Amplifiers

Focus your energies on the Top Tier aggregators (Acxiom, Factual, Infogroup, and Localeze) and publishers (Apple, Bing, Facebook, Foursquare, and Google). Avoid treating data amplification as a paid inclusion tactic with Tier Two search engines. By focusing on the big players, you get the most out of your effort. Note that you will need to format your data to meet the conventions of each data amplifier. For instance, a medical center with a physician named John Smith would share his information with Localeze as "John Smith MD" and with Factual and Google as "Dr. John A. Smith MD." The variances are subtle but significant.

3. Manage Your Data

I recommend that on a monthly basis my clients review the state of their "local data health," or the accuracy of their foundational data. Everyone has their own approach for managing data. We have a process for measuring and monitoring local data health across two dimensions: local listings and the data ecosystem.

With local listings, we use an algorithm to assign a health score for the core attributes of a business across all your local listings, including (but not limited to) NAP data. A low health score is a sign that your data has become out of date. With your ecosystem, we assign a health score to assess the soundness of your basic business data across all the places where customers find your brand across the digital world. Monitoring your data health ensures that you keep your foundational data accurate and visible. When your foundational assets are healthy, you will reap rewards for years to come, especially as local and mobile continue to thrive.

Your Foundation

When you get your data in order and unleash it, you not only make it easier for patients to find you, but you also lay a foundation for great content. Consider data to be crucial for visibility. Great content helps patients make a decision about you. For instance, what insurance plans do you accept? How do your patients rate your cardiology specialists? Data surfaces content. Content assists your patients. Together, data and content support your brand.

Amanda Bury: Director of Enterprise Sales for SIM Partners. Amanda is a digital marketing professional who has over 10 years of experience in business development & sales strategies within the healthcare industry. She currently leads the health & wellness division at SIM Partners based in Chicago, IL.

The views, opinions and positions expressed within these guest posts are those of the author alone and do not represent those of Becker's Hospital Review/Becker's Healthcare. The accuracy, completeness and validity of any statements made within this article are not guaranteed. We accept no liability for any errors, omissions or representations. The copyright of this content belongs to the author and any liability with regards to infringement of intellectual property rights remains with them.​

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