For any company offering online medical marketing and website design services, it’s critically important that your own website reflects the quality you are offering your clients. It should go without saying that in the eye of your potential clients your online presence directly relates to the aesthetics, technical skill, and quality you can offer their businesses.
Looking at the industry we find that many of our competitors appear to have spent more time on client sites than on their own.
The team at GrowthMed decided that it was time to refresh our website. With input from our writers, designers, and developers we put together a list of priorities, came up with a list of influences, and decided on a plan for ensuring that our web presence was compelling, contemporary, and effective.
We Know Medical Marketing
The field of medical marketing is different than other kinds of marketing for a number of reasons. While sharing most of the same basic priorities as any marketing, this field requires a more careful approach because the topic is our health and sense of well-being. And while our own site is not selling medical services, it still must reflect our ability to speak to medical professionals and demonstrate our ability to connect with their clients.
Positive Feelings
Some websites are solely hoping to leave visitors with a sense of professionality. Others are trying to enhance the attractiveness of a product. And many are hoping to highlight the status of a business as an industry leader. Medically focused websites are concerned with these same priorities but face the additional challenge of leaving visitors with a positive feeling about procedures that can be uncomfortable, have varied results, or are being performed to address emotional insecurities.
Effective websites make people feel comfortable with challenging topics.
In a similar way, many medical professionals are wary of medical marketing, website design, and SEO because most have experience with marketing companies who at best didn’t improve their results and at worst, tanked their business. For this reason, we felt that in addition to providing a good deal of trust assurance, that our new website needed to leave visitors feeling positive.
How do you make visitors to your website leave with a positive feeling? One strategy is to make them smile, and nothing does that better than seeing other people smile. We ensured that nearly every page on our site features someone smiling, specifically our clients. Another way to make people feel good is to make them feel relaxed. Natural settings accomplish this goal and so in keeping with our name we wanted the site to feature images of natural growth. Trees, flowers, and grass are on every page. This lends the entire site an organic feel that counters the dry technicality of much of what we do.
Trust Assurance
Few things are more important when designing a website for the medical industry than trust assurance.
Trust assurance is all about making visitors to your website feel that you are a trustworthy source for the information and services you are offering. This can be accomplished using many well-tested and also creative ways. The bottom line is that you want people to know and trust your expertise.
In order to enhance trust assurance on our website with an eye on medical professionals, we first ensured that our homepage and inner pages feature reviews by our satisfied clients along with their image. Nothing makes people trust your business more than good reviews and putting a face to the text greatly enhances that effect.
Another important way that we enhanced trust assurance on our site is by featuring links on our homepage to content that talks about how we are different than our competition and why we have a personal investment in getting results. While some believe that having a more professional and clinical tone will impress potential clients, we have found that our clients greatly value our personal approach.
You can view our Mission and Difference pages to see how GrowthMed builds trust with a personal approach.
Finally, quality control is essential. When people look at your website they are seeing exactly how closely you pay attention to details. If your site has broken elements, uneven spacing, or poor design choices, why would potential clients think you were going to be more careful with their website. For this reason, we spent a good deal of time working on reviewing and editing the site.
Professional Medical Marketing With Style
In website design, particularly in medical marketing, substance without style is simply ineffective.
If you are promoting design services, it’s clearly important that your own design reflects your approach and aesthetics. While many assume medical website design should be dry and professional, clients such as plastic surgeons require a bit more flare as their clients are very concerned with aesthetics.
In our case we were trying to maintain a similar appearance, only doing a refresh of the design, while making our website look more contemporary, sophisticated, and welcoming. To accomplish this we added more imagery, taking care to choose images that fit our theme of growth. We also limited the amount of text on the homepage, ensuring that design elements weren’t overwhelmed by copy. In addition, we also added more animation and interactivity to enhance the apparent sophistication of the design.
Website Development For Medical Marketing
While the appearance of the new GrowthMed website only reflects our intention to refresh the design, we made many changes under the hood to improve the website’s speed, utilize contemporary tools, enhance the sites sophistication, and make it easier to improve in the future.
Eliminating Cruft
One of the primary motivations for rebuilding the website was improving the website’s loading times by eliminating unused or bloated plugins and code. The original site had been built using an existing WordPress theme. Many WordPress themes provide features the user has no intention of utilizing. The best example would be Slider Revolution which we were previously using for our featured spot on the homepage. Few plugins have ever been this code heavy and the result is a slower website. While that plugin offers a huge array of options, they simply aren’t worth the negative impact on website speed that can cost you visitors and search rank.
Building our new website we began with our own base theme, free of any unneeded code, and created a site that loads incredibly fast. In contrast to Slider Revolution we utilize Slick Slider which has minimal code and accomplished all our needs.
Animation & Interactivity
At the crossroads of design and development is interactive animation. Even the simplest hover state or sliding element can lend a website a great deal of sophistication while also demonstrating features that are very popular with potential clients.
Interactive elements are critical for visitor engagement. Conversion elements are simply not as effective unless they have some kind of interactive motion. Buttons can get larger on hover. Information can reveal more detail on hover. Background parallax when you scroll can draw the eye to elements that otherwise might have been ignored.
Another very effective strategy to capture attention is elements on the page that are continuously moving. Scrolling backgrounds or images can draw the eye to conversion elements and also lend your website a dynamic and active feel that it would not have otherwise.
Faster Development
One of the primary benefits of rebuilding our site is our enhanced ability to modify and improve the site over time.
Starting fresh offers us the opportunity to use the latest technologies and make smart choices about future-proof plugins and code which ensure that our website will be easy to enhance over time. In addition, we utilized our base theme that we have been refining for over two years. This makes development faster and easier as we are very familiar with our theme’s features and options.
Medical Marketing Content
When it comes to content, text alone just doesn’t cut it. In the interest of SEO, time-on-site, and basic legibility, it’s important to format content and include elements that draw the visitors attention down the page. Statistics demonstrate that visitors are not likely to read large sections of text. Anything more than a couple sentences in a row leads to scrolling or navigating away from the current page.
In order to avoid this kind of disengagement, it’s important to format your written content, pages, and posts, so that no long sections of text exist without other kinds of elements added. For example, you can add blockquotes, images, and you can bold text. All of these options make your content more engaging in a way that leads people to spend more time with it. You can also add in-page promos that lead to other areas of your site and help keep people on your site for a longer period of time.
A Fresh Start
With our attention on all these elements of design, development, and content we are really happy with the result we’ve achieved. The new website much more strongly reflects our design aesthetics, technical ability, and attention to detail. And with that in mind, we’d love to help you achieve a similar result, enhancing your current website or starting fresh and providing you a new design.
If you have any questions about what we do and how we do it please feel free to contact us.