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Server Side Tag Management & HIPAA Compliance

Posted on February 27, 2024 - 4:35 PM by

A recent statement issued by the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) at the Department of Health & Human Services, significantly expanded what’s considered Protected health Information (PHI). 

Most importantly, this directive puts direct onus on a covered entity under HIPAA to take measures to protect PHI from getting shared with third-party analytics and marketing platforms by way of on-line tracking codes commonly added to healthcare websites.

What are these expanded PHIs and how does server side tag management help support compliance while simultaneously making useful data available to marketing platforms that are essential for healthcare organizations’ growth?

Simply put, according to the new directive:

  • OCR now extends HIPAA protections to any online visitor who visits a healthcare website, not just a patient or a person known to your healthcare organization. 
  • If this visitor conducts any website pages that contain healthcare conditions, treatments or provider research, that signal could be included in the website’s URL.
  • The URL with health specific data along with the visitors’ IP address could now point to a past, current or future health concern of a potentially identifiable individual.

So any data that may link an individual with a past, present or future health or healthcare or health payment is now PHI. Importantly, this PHI is most likely being shared unencrypted with your third party analytics or marketing providers, such as Google, Meta, LinkedIn, DoubleClick and more, unless measures are taken to prevent it.

Server-Side Tag Management as a Solution to HIPAA Requirements

Server side tag management has emerged as a robust solution that can create a HIPAA compliant solution when implemented correctly. 

To reiterate this important point, server side tag management is not HIPAA compliant out-of-the box. It needs customizations to make it compliant while also passing on useful data events to third party analytics and marketing platforms.

What is server side tag management?

To explain in simple terms, most data collected by your healthcare website is sent directly to analytics and marketing platforms via online tracking code installed on your website. For instance, ePHI is probably being sent directly to Google Analytics servers or Meta servers or any other analytics or marketing platforms you are currently using.

By setting up an a server side container on your cloud provider of choice, you now become an intermediary between your website (often referred to as a client) and your third party analytics and marketing platforms.

Since you own this container and the server, you can now to three things to keep your ePHI data out of unwanted places:

  1. You control all data streams that originate from your website.
  2. You can cleanse and de-identify any ePHI that originates from your website
  3. You can send clean data to third party analytics and marketing platforms while keeping it useful enough to allow for campaigns and attributions to continue being useful.

Customizations in Server Side Tag Management to Allow for HIPAA Compliance

First-Party Data Collection & Data Control – Data collected by your server side setup allows for “first-party” data collection, making it more secure and efficient. 

Since your website visitors’ sessions-specific data is now sent to your own server, as opposed to third-party vendors’ servers, it provides more protection against data leaks, compared to client side tracking.

With the phasing out of third-party cookies by most major browsers, data collection will need to be rearchitected to depend on first party data collection. Server-side tagging provisions for more secure first-party data collection by enabling server-managed cookies and client identification that are less prone to hacks.

Finally, because all data streams are not collected by your server endpoint, you can have total control over data tracking, transformations and enrichment before it is sent to your analytics and marketing vendors.

Data Transformations & Enrichments – Let’s consider the HIPAA identifiers that are the greatest causes of concern for HIPAA compliance purposes. 

There are two types of identifiers, when mapped together, have the potential to connect an individual website visitor with a past, current or future health condition:

  1. A personal identifier, such as an IP address which technically can map to a specific network (it is not a device identifier but for HIPAA compliance purposes, IP is considered an identifier). Other personal identifiers could be a user id (if your website allows for patients to login, for instance, and you have enabled the collection of logged in users via ‘user_id’), device ID, especially when paired with an IP address, and sometimes geographical location, including city, state, latitude and longitude.
  2. Health information – The second type of identifiers are URLs that may contain static components of healthcare condition, treatment or payment for healthcare. As an example, if the url has the following structure: https://www.domainname.com/type2-diabetes-treatment-plans, technically, the URL has health information attached and when linked with a personally identifiable information, such as an IP address, violates HIPAA as it links a health condition (past, present or future) with a potentially identifiable individual.

In addition to static components of URLs, there may be dynamic components that may be passed from your web browser to your server container (in a server side setup) that may contain very transparent individual identifiable information, such as email addresses, names, etc. 

A server side setup allows for encryption for both components of PHI identifiers. However, complete encryption of this data may make your analytics and marketing campaigns unattributable and useless.

For instance, if you hash (a type of data encryption) the IP address of your website visitor, you lose all tracking of city or regional level data. Thus, you will be unable to analyze where your website visits, events and conversions are coming from – and that’s a big hit when it comes to geo-specific marketing campaigns.

Similarly, if you are running a retargeting campaign based on an audience profile that shows interest in a specific healthcare service, by hashing the page location, page path and page title of the page visited, you have rendered the retargeting campaign useless.

Server-side tagging however, allows for data transformations and enrichments that extend beyond simple hashing. 

Custom Activations – We create advanced custom audience insights based on PHI data streams received from web browsers. The custom data insights are then stripped of PHI and activated to be sent to third party vendors that allow us to continue marketing campaigns as envisioned but still keep ePHI out of outbound data streams.

For instance, to enable Facebook conversions tracking in a compliant fashion, we create custom conversion events on our client server container with non health specific conversion names. These conversion data events are sent to our secure server container, where we strip the event data of any ePHI by hashing all health information identifiers, such as page location, page title and page path. We then forward this stream to Facebook with a Facebook id, ip address and the conversion event but without any associated health information.

Similar solutions can be designed for other commonly-used marketing platforms, including Google Ads, and analytics platforms such as Google Analytics 4. 

Based on need, server side containers also allow for parsing information into database warehousing tools, such as Big Query, where data can be cleansed of PHI and sent as outward streams to third party platforms for marketing purposes.

A data warehouse can also be utilized for internal retention of data for custom data insights and enrichments. 

Conclusion

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) along with the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) at the Department of Health & Human Services has issued warnings to several health care systems over the use of online tracking technologies in 2023. The healthcare analytics & compliance community expects the first set of enforcement actions related to online tracking to begin in 2024. This will intensify a series of class action lawsuits and settlements around sharing of protected health information with advertising platforms, such as Meta & Google, by at least 21 hospital, health systems and technology companies.

In light of rising concerns about privacy, in general, and protection of health information, in particular, server-side tagging offers a robust solution.

Contact our analytics team at Webtage to start a conversation about making your MarTech HIPAA compliant.

How to Make GA4 Web Analytics HIPAA Compliant

Posted on February 22, 2024 - 3:17 PM by

How to Make GA4 Web Analytics HIPAA Compliant 

In today’s digital landscape, privacy and data protection are of utmost importance. Covered entities under HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) need to ensure that they are taking the necessary steps to protect electronic protected health information (ePHI) while still gaining valuable insights from analytics. 

What are these identifiable ePHIs that may be collected from your website that may be introduced by third-party tracking code and may implicate you of HIPAA violations, according to the new HIPAA guidelines?

“When consumers visit a hospital’s website or seek telehealth services, they should not have to worry that their most private and sensitive health information may be disclosed to advertisers and other unnamed, hidden third parties,” said Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. 

This article will deal specifically with ePHIs that may now make you non-compliant based on new risks introduced by online tracking technologies, as the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) at the Department of Human & Health Services (HHS).  In this article we will discuss ways to make Google Analytics 4 (GA4) compliant, considering that GA4 commands close to 89% of web analytics platform market share. 

After covering how to make analytics platforms HIPAA compliant, we will then move to HIPAA compliance for third-party marketing platforms, such as Facebook Ads and Google Ads in our next blog post.

Google Analytics 4 Settings

GA4 collects a vast range of user data to provide insights into user behavior on your website or app. Web URLs and IP addresses, for instance, contain valuable information about an individual’s online activities, including their browsing history and potentially sensitive healthcare searches that may link individuals with past, current or future health conditions, now considered protected health information.

While GA4, a positive upgrade for privacy concerns, compared to the earlier Google’s Universal Analytics (UA), makes it closer to being HIPAA compliant, there are additional steps that you need to take to ensure full compliance. 

We are mostly concerned with two identifiers recently added to the new list of 18 HIPAA identifiers: unique identifiers (such as IP address and client ids) and page URLs (such as page location, page path, page title, and query parameters that may contain health specific queris and/or unique identifiers). When the latter is combined with a unique identifier, it has the potential to link individuals to a health condition, treatment or payment.

There are a few steps you need to take to ensure compliance:

  • Redact email & query parameters – GA4 allows you to prevent sending email and any personally identifiable information (PII) to Google. This is a good practice in general because you do not want to send any personally identifiable information that can easily be mapped to their health-specific page visits and clearly violate HIPAA. Once you redact any PII that you might be collecting via query parameters, make sure you preview redacted data to ensure, GA4 does not contain any PII in the URLs tracked and stored by GA4.
  • Turn off user-id and user-provided data collection – If your website visitors can login to your website, you may be generating user IDs that may then be a personal identifier that can again be linked to health-specific services, conditions, treatment or payment pages to violate HIPAA.

If you do have the ability for visitors to login to your website, ensure user-ID and user provided data collection is turned off for your website. 

Note: Interested to learn more about user IDs? Here’s a great article that walks through ways to enable user-IDs so you learn how to disable it for your healthcare website.

  • Turn off Google Signals – If user data is not available, Google will map signed-in Google customers who have opted in for ad personalization with third-party data for rich user, cross-device and cross-browser tracking. This allows reporting identities to be linked to individuals and will therefore result in a HIPAA violation. 

 

  • IP anonymization – We know that Google Analytics collects IP information (though temporarily now under the revamped Google Analytics 4 (GA4)) when a visitor visits your website. The good news? GA4 automatically truncates the last 4 octets of your IP address so if your ip can not really be traced back to your network location. The bad news? Well even though your IP address is never really logged or stored, it is transmitted to allow for location data before it is discarded. To redact IP addresses completely, you will have to rely on server side Google Tag Manager setup. 

However, if you do not want to go through a server side setup, but want to be extra cautious, you may want to mask city-level data by turning off granular location and device data collection for regions you want to be compliant in. For HIPAA, it would make sense to turn off granular location off for all US states in order to make users’ locations even less identifiable. 

Note – As an aside, remember that IP addresses cannot track an individual device, only a network connection. However, other device specific data (referred to as a ‘user-agent’   variable, collected by GA4 may allow you to connect IP and ‘user-agent’ data to a specific device though.

  • Minimum Period for Data Retention – Ensure your data retention for events and users is set to its minimum possible of 2 months. This allows for your GA4 data collection to adhere to the HIPAA minimum necessary rule, which states that under “the HIPAA minimum necessary rule, HIPAA-covered entities are required to make reasonable efforts to ensure that uses and disclosures of PHI is limited to the minimum necessary information to accomplish the intended purpose of a particular uses or disclosure.”

  • Reporting Identity – Finally, for reporting identity under data display settings in your GA4 admin panel, ensure that you select device ID as the reporting identity, instead of the default Blended or Observed. 

Note that device ID combined with IP can still be a personal identifier, which when linked to health conditions, treatments or payment page location can lead to a HIPAA violation. However, with granular location turned off and IP addresses automatically truncated, this is less of a concern unless your legal department advises a stricter adherence to HIPAA, in which case, you should consider a server-side tag management setup (see below).

Server Side Tag Management

While the above settings will allow for some safeguarding against HIPAA violations, these measures are not absolute and fool proof in protecting your against non-compliance. More importantly, redacting data means that you might lose important elements from your attribution analysis or reporting. 

Instead, we strongly recommend a server-side tag management setup to provide you with greater control over your data streams, while also allowing you to safely navigate the third-party cookie free era that we are now entering. Most importantly, server side tag management can help you balance data anonymization (which inevitably leads to data being made less usable for marketing purposes) with usefulness of data. 

Learn more about server-side tag management security and control for HIPAA-compliance in our next blog post.

Alternatives to Server-Side Tag Management

A final word on alternatives for server side tag management. There are HIPAA-compliant analytics platforms, such as those provided by Adobe or Matomo that can be configured for HIPAA compliance. However, migrations to these platforms will require a cost assessment and additionally will require some ongoing management to keep your web & app data analytics HIPAA compliant.

There are also customer data protection (CDP) platforms, such as Freshpaint, Rudderstock, and PikWikPro, that allow for secure data storage, custom audience insights, customer data exports and custom activations and other advanced integrations that are required to keep customer data useful for marketing while keeping ePHI safe from third-party (and presumably HIPAA non compliant) platforms. While most offer a freemium service, HIPAA compliance usually comes with a price tag.

Conclusion

GA4 Settings adjustments, server side tag management, HIPAA-compliant analytics platforms and CDPs are all viable options for healthcare organizations and price points will differ based on number of applications or websites being managed, integrations with third-party marketing platforms, need for data warehousing, analysis & visualization capabilities, hosting provider, privacy & security needs, consent management needs and management.

At the end of the day, the difference between the solutions will depend on your risk tolerance and resulting comfort level with the tradeoff between anonymizing ePHI and usefulness of customer data for marketing purposes.

At Webtage, we take HIPAA requirements, along with technology stack, into account to determine the best HIPAA-compliant MarkTech solutions for your organization. Talk to us to discuss your healthcare MarTech compliance needs. 

Is Your Healthcare Marketing HIPAA Compliant – What to Know in 2024?

Posted on February 21, 2024 - 2:34 PM by

As medical practice owners, you understand the significance of protecting patient data and maintaining legal compliance while providing top-notch care. In this digital era, where information flows seamlessly across platforms, ensuring HIPAA compliance is paramount. 

HIPAA is not just limited to your IT and office operations. It also applies to your healthcare marketing operations. As HIPAA requirements evolve, so must your marketing efforts.

Most recently, the Office of Civil rights (OCR) at the US Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) issued a statement that warned of HIPAA violations with regards to online tracking technologies that are commonly used by healthcare websites & apps. According to the new HIPAA guidelines, identifiable electronic protected health information (ePHIs) may be collected from your website that are introduced by third-party tracking code and may implicate you of HIPAA violations. 

Online tracking may not be the only technology that may be exposing you to HIPAA violations. Here is a list of things your marketing team should be doing to keep your digital tech stack compliant in 2024.

HIPAA Checklist for Marketing in 2024

Website & HTTPS Protocol – The use of HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) protocol strengthens your website’s security by encrypting data transmitted between the client and the web server by using Secure Sockets Layer or Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) convention. This ensures that patient information  submitted on your website browser remains confidential during online transmissions. 

However, it’s important to understand that while an https protocol protects data transmission from the client (your web browser or email client, for instance) to your web server, it does not provide end-to-end security for email transmission (more on this later). For that reason, you will need to enable a separate email security protocol to make data transmission from client to web server and back is secure and HIPAA-compliant.

Compliant ePHI Data Encryption & Transmission – Many medical websites have contact forms that allow patients & potential patients to contact them, set up appointments, complete patient registration, release or request medical records, and others. 

This contact form is typically emailed to your staff upon submission. It may also be stored in a database on your web server. You may also send a reply e-mail or SMS to the individual who filled out the form. So there are several data communication streams that are enabled when a contact form is filled and submitted on your healthcare website.

Even with an HTTPS site with SSL/TLS certificates in place, when this data is either stored in a database (at rest) or emailed to a recipient email address in your organization (in transit), protected health information (PHI or ePHI) may not be secure and expose you to a HIPAA violation.

To make it easier to understand, think of SSL/TLS as encrypting the communication channel. However, it does not encrypt the message. So when the email reaches the receiver’s email server, it can be hacked into and PHI can be retrieved. 

In order to be truly HIPAA compliant, you should either enable end-to-end email encryption by integrating S/MIME or a PGP Network, which should be built into your website or applications, along with SSL/TLS. Alternatively, you could set up a custom HIPAA-compliant application that encrypts data at-rest and in-transit while allowing for secure links that can then be shared via email or SMS with the desired audience.

Analytics Tracking – A red hot topic in healthcare marketing in 2024 is whether website analytics that you may have set up for your website and your marketing campaigns is HIPAA compliant. On July 21, 2023, the office of Civil Rights (OCR) at Department of Health & Human Services issued a warning to all hospitals and healthcare providers to guard against “impermissible disclosures of health information to third parties.”

What are these identifiable ePHIs that may be collected from your website that may be introduced by third-party tracking code and may implicate you of HIPAA violations?

Let’s consider Google Analytics 4 (GA4) as a reference point here to understand how Google Analytics tracking code could link a patient with a past, present, or future medical condition, considered protected health information. We know that Google Analytics collects IP information (though temporarily now under the revamped Google Analytics 4 (GA4)) when a visitor visits your website. They may visit treatment or disease specific pages on your website that may connect the individual with the regulated entity, i.e., your healthcare organization. As per the OCR, this “relates to the individual’s past, present, or future health or health care or payment for care” thus making impermissible PHI available to third party technology vendors, such as GA4.

As a healthcare technology & marketing company, we are erring on the side of caution while we set up GA4 for our healthcare clients. While GA4, a positive upgrade for privacy concerns, compared to the earlier Google’s Universal Analytics (UA), makes it closer to being HIPAA compliant, there are additional steps that you need to take to ensure full compliance. 

Server-side tag managers, customer data protection (CDP) platforms, and recommended analytics platform settings are some options available to make analytics tracking HIPAA-compliant. 

We are strong proponents of server side tag management setup that allows you control of your data and what is shared with third-party marketing platforms, thus meeting compliance requirements. And that’s not all, a server side setup also creates a first-party cookie context, improves your data collection, and allows you to circumvent ad blockers (although in the world of privacy-first world, we do NOT recommend circumvention).

Talk to us to see how we can customize your tag management setup to make your analytics and marketing pixels HIPAA compliant. 

Retargeting & Other Marketing Pixels – Another aspect of third-party tracking includes pixel codes, such as Meta Pixels or Google Ad codes that allow for retargeting of your top funnel audience to lead them closer to making an appointment or completing a purchase, is no longer HIPAA compliant. 

Just like web analytics code can relay and store impermissible & identifiable PHI, so can other marketing and retargeting pixels, such as Meta. Furthermore, like Go ogle, Facebook is not willing to sign a Business Associate Addendum (BAA), which is required to keep the covered entity and all its all business associates HIPAA compliant.

This unfortunately means that retargeting ads are currently out of bounds for healthcare organizations, unless PHI identifiers are transformed into anonymized data points before it reaches a third-party tracking or marketing platform. These PHI could be anything from IP addresses, page URLs that contain health information, including health conditions

This solution creates an obvious dilemma – the more anonymized the data that you send over to marketing platforms, the less useful that data becomes. For instance, a simple solution of redacting or encrypting HIPAA identifiers, such as IP addresses and page location/path/referrers that can connect an individual to a  past, present, or future health condition, treatment or payment plan also removes important data points that are needed to optimize or initiate targeted campaigns.

At Webtage, we are implementing server side tag management solutions that allow for creation of PHI-free custom audiences that are then sent to third-party marketing platforms, keeping marketing campaigns free of any HIPAA identifiers.

Social Media Compliance – Social media channels can be a landmine of non compliance covered entities under HIPAA, unless the channels are navigated carefully and cautiously. There are plenty of cautionary tales about healthcare social media marketing gone awry. 

Bottom line – you never want to post testimonials, pictures, before & afters, or any other information that may link a patient or even a prospective patient with their past, current, or even future health condition. 

If you plan to use user generated content (UGC) or your own content that contains identifiable PHI, do request a media waiver form to be signed by them prior to any social media posting.

Beware that even private messaging to your colleagues on social media will violate HIPAA unless you know for certain that those messages are encrypted end-to-end. Even acknowledging a social post from a patient by stating that your organization treated them or is going to treat them for a condition is a violation of HIPAA.

Some common precautions we take at Webtage is we require our healthcare clients to always have a Media Waiver form signed by patients before their faces, names or other forms of identity is released on social media or on the website. We also never add names of patients to testimonial posts or imagery. Rather, we simply add their initials, thereby removing any identifiers.

Remember that deliberate or thoughtless disclosures of PHI are both HIPAA violations and can result in distress, citations, fines & punitive actions. Work with a marketing team that understands the tightrope of protecting PHI while building trust and marketing your organization.

Review Management – When it comes to review management and HIPAA compliance, businesses in the healthcare industry face unique challenges. With the rise of online platforms and social media, publicly-posted reviews can have a significant impact on a healthcare provider’s reputation. However, it is crucial for these organizations to navigate this landscape while ensuring compliance with HIPAA regulations. This includes any information that could potentially identify an individual’s health condition or treatment.

Negative reviews can be particularly problematic in terms of HIPAA compliance. While businesses need to address customer concerns and feedback, they must do so without violating patient privacy rights. This requires careful monitoring and response strategies that prioritize both reputation management and adherence to HIPAA regulations.

Here’s the golden rule for maintaining HIPAA compliance on publicly-posted reviews. Even if the patient acknowledges that they are your patient, your response should not indicate a patient-provider relationship. In case of a negative review, Aledade.com, a healthcare accountable care organization (ACO) suggests the following:

  • Use neutral, professional language
  • Thank the reviewer for providing feedback
  • Stress that a great experience and patient satisfaction is of importance
  • Detail any changes implemented within the practice, if appropriate
  • Request that the reviewer contact the office if they have questions; however, do not acknowledge if the reviewer was or was not a patient
  • Never post information about a patient or their condition without their authorization

Business Associate Agreement (BAA) – A final word of recommendation. When working with a marketing technology (MarTech) or marketing agency, signing a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with them is crucial for ensuring HIPAA compliance when handling protected health information (PHI). By entering into a BAA, your marketing providers agree to safeguard ePHI and adhere to HIPAA regulations. This agreement outlines the responsibilities and obligations of the provider, such as maintaining data security measures, reporting breaches, and ensuring compliance with HIPAA rules. 

For instance, while choosing an email marketing automation platform, look for those that offer BAAs to healthcare organizations to help them securely manage PHI within their email campaigns. By partnering with BAA-compliant marketing providers, healthcare businesses can confidently navigate the complexities of HIPAA regulations and protect sensitive patient data.

Conclusion

At Webtage, we are committed to helping medical businesses create compliant marketing and web technologies solutions that provide peace of mind while enhancing patient care.

Talk to us about our HIPAA-compliant web technologies, marketing analytics and digital marketing protocols that provide an end-to-end solutions for your healthcare business. 

Solutions we offer:

  1. Custom server-side tag management solutions for HIPAA-compliant analytics & marketing tracking  
  2. HIPAA-compliant applications that encrypt data at-rest and in-transit 
  3. HIPAA-compliant communication protocols for social media and review management platforms
HIPAA Compliant Marketing Solutions

Generative AI-Led Search in 2024: How Healthcare Organizations Should Refine Their Strategies for Improved Search Visibility

Posted on December 14, 2023 - 10:30 AM by
generative AI led healthcare

We are a lead generation company with specialized expertise in organic search and paid search for healthcare and B2B verticals.

We are seeing some significant changes in search results, especially for healthcare, led by generative AI, propelling search engines, such as Google & Bing, to improve their search results in order to be more meaningful and personalized for their users. 

In this article, we focus on competitive search strategies for healthcare organizations in the age of generative AI.

What are some of these search trends and how will they affect your ability to attract patients?

Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) – Google (and Bing) are working to bring generative AI capabilities into their search engines. Generative AI is poised to change the way search engines work and is the biggest search technology breakthrough in 25 years! 

Google says: “With new breakthroughs in generative AI, we’re again reimagining what a search engine can do. With this powerful new technology, we can unlock entirely new types of questions you never thought Search could answer, and transform the way information is organized, to help you sort through and make sense of what’s out there.”

Google is not the only search engine experimenting with gen AI in search models. The new Bing, powered by ChatGPT, is already in business.

What does Gen AI-led Search mean for you as a healthcare business?

Earlier, if you typed in ‘how do I find a doctor who truly cares in Santa Clara, CA’ Google would provide you with the ten best sites and would expect you to sift through the websites to find the best doctor for you.

Gen AI-led search

With SGE, Google will save you the trouble of sifting through results. Instead, it will rely on real-time information and Large Language Model-led AI analysis to provide search results so “you’ll be able to understand a topic faster, uncover new viewpoints and insights, and get things done more easily.”

Let’s see what an SGE will produce for the same search: ‘how do I find a doctor who truly cares in Santa Clara, CA.’

SGE

As you can see, Google’s SGE has done an analysis of content and produced a compilation of results to provide you with guidance on:

  1. Ways to find a doctor who truly cares in your location. There are websites that Google considers important and lists them. You want to appear here!
  2. A carousel of the top 3 websites that provide specific guidance on this topic, with the ability to click right on the carousel to see more websites. Another real estate on SGE that you would want to target.
  3. Google SGE also offers ‘Perspectives’ which allows user-generated content (UGC) from forums and discussions, including social media,  to appear on SGE results. This, interestingly, is also a growing feature Google search currently. We expect perspectives to gain more importance in the coming months. 
  4. Finally, with SGE, you can have a follow-up conversation with generative AI by typing in a follow-up question.

How do you go about appearing in Google’s SGE? 

If you truly consider the impact of Google’s SGE, it is a paradigm shift in search. With generative AI capabilities, powered by Med-Palm 2, Google’s large language model trained to provide high-quality answers to medical questions, Google search for healthcare will be positioned to provide many healthcare-related informational questions on Google search itself, without the need to directly visit your website.

However, this does not mean that you cannot attract high-quality transactional search-led traffic to your website. Here are steps you can take to position your website high on generative AI-led search engines in the near future:

  1. A good foundational SEO strategy – First of all, you need to ensure that you appear high on organic search results currently. In that sense, a good current SEO base is your defensive strategy. This means authoritative content  and the E.A.T. strategy should still be your foundational strategy!

Let’s talk about your offensive strategy next.

    2. Clear content that is easy to read – SGE favors readability. Look at your readability score and summarize your page info into simple sentence structures followed by a clear call to action. This means presenting your information in a clear and easy-to-understand language.

    3. Well-researched, current, and well-sourced content – Additionally, since healthcare websites fall in the ‘ Your Life, Your Money’ (YLYM) category, it becomes acutely important to put forward well-researched and well-sourced content on your website. This is because search engines are particularly demanding of the trustworthiness of your content if you provide advice regarding money or health. The more current, well-sourced, and trustworthy the content (as in quoted by a reliable healthcare site), the more likely it is to appear on SGE results.

    4. Featured Snippets – A related offensive strategy, that is relevant not only for SGE but also current organic search results, is the creation of deep content and developing high authority backlinks to appear as a featured snippet on search.

This begs the question – What are featured snippets? 

Featured snippets are valuable answers to search queries that are displayed at the top of search results. Featured snippets aim to provide quick and direct answers to questions being asked. SGE, in that sense, is an extended featured snippet with a summary of the most important information taken from a variety of sources, as opposed to a single source, as in the current featured snippet.

So, how do you go about being featured in the current Featured Snippet or the extended SGE of tomorrow?

 Create deep content. What do I mean by deep content? In short, I mean content that meets professional compliance requirements and is medically vetted, so readers get valuable, up-to-date, and factually correct  information. It also means creating dynamic and real-time content as far as possible. This is because Google favors “fresh and recent information sources.”

  • Further steps include getting valuable links from reliable sources in the healthcare industry. To this end, a few things we do for our clients is to have a digital PR strategy for them by getting their content published in high authority industry sites, joining sites like HARO and Qwoted to get them published in reputed journalistic pieces, and building backlinks from local organizations, such as the Chambers of Commerce, professional associations, and local media. 
  • Focus on adding structured data that enables Google to easily parse markup data on your site & brand authority. For healthcare sites, make sure you include frequently asked questions (FAQs) related to healthcare services, article bylines & author schema markups.  

  5. Digital Reputation – As early versions of SGE become available for personal use, our experience shows that your digital reputation will be paramount in getting links within SGE. 

While most healthcare practices think this means getting high ratings and laudatory reviews on Google Business Profile, Healthgrades, Yelp etc. digital reputation is a bigger goal than just getting good reviews. 

Digital reputation can be built by combining good reviews with authorship. Ensure your practitioners are authoring articles, appearing on podcasts, and being quoted by reputable local and industry sites.

What Hasn’t Changed

As generative AI-led search becomes prevalent, foundational search strategies remain the same. 

  1. E.A.T. Still reigns Supreme – Use content to build brand authority and authorship. Gen AI is even more likely to look at expertise, authority, and trustworthiness to decide which content links to include in its SGE search results.
  1. Local SEO Remains Important – Most healthcare organizations have a local focus. They tend to serve individuals in a certain locality. Building a strong local SEO strategy that includes building high authority local citations, will continue to be important for your business.
  1. Good technical SEO Still Matters – Using a crisp site structure that follows a clean and intuitive navigation structure. Use structured data to mark up the content of your website. For healthcare organizations, we strongly recommend healthcare service FAQs, medical organizations, and authorship markups. Maintain easy readability scores and summarize the information on your pages at the top in clear and concise language, followed by a call to action.

In conclusion, make sure you work with a forward-thinking marketing team that stays ahead of their domain curve, so you don’t have to. 

Here are two examples of strong digital reputation management for our clients that have led them to appear prominently in Google’s SGE:

google reputation management

reputation management

In that sense, some things never change. Search engine optimization (SEO) has never been about tricking Google through paid links or keeping up with algorithm changes. It is about improving user experience (UX) and providing value to your users – if users and influencers find your website relevant and useful they will keep coming back and Google will notice! And that’s the reason we don’t lose page rankings to algorithm changes.

Learn more about our healthcare patient generation services and our other digital solutions for healthcare organizations.

Healthcare Digital Agency

Does Content Gating Still Work for B2B Lead Generation in 2023?

Posted on January 20, 2023 - 4:03 AM by
b2b lead generation

In the ever-evolving world of B2B lead generation, marketers are always looking for the best strategies to capture qualified leads. One of the most popular strategies is content gating, which involves requiring visitors to fill out a form in order to access a piece of content. 

White papers, e-Books, and other long-form content pieces have been popular lead-generation tools for B2B marketing agencies for many years. But with the plethora of gated content, it has become increasingly difficult to stand out and make an impact with gated content.

The question is: in 2023, are white papers and other long-form content pieces as lead generators dead? The answer is not entirely straightforward. 

While it’s true that gated content pieces are no longer as effective as they used to be, the creation of high-quality, premium content should still remain an important part of any B2B company’s lead generation strategy. High-quality content can and should be used to provide valuable insights into a product or service and help build trust with potential customers. 

In addition, the gating of the content may need to be done in more creative ways and possibly further down the buyer’s journey to better qualify the user’s purchase intent.

Should Content be Gated or Ungated?

Generating qualified leads is a key part of any successful B2B marketing strategy. Both gated and ungated long-form content, such as whitepapers, can be used for different purposes in the marketing process and in the buyer’s journey. 

While gated whitepapers have traditionally been used as a lead qualifier and lead contact information generator, the average landing page conversion rate is only 2.35%. This means that 97.65% of your landing page traffic leaves the page without ever engaging with your content or with your brand, leaving a tremendous opportunity to cultivate that initial interest.

One effective way to engage your audience is by “ungating” the content, which allows potential customers to access your content without having to provide any personal information. This approach helps to build trust and relationships with prospects, while also providing valuable insights into their interests and preferences.

Setting your whitepaper free, i.e., ungated and free to download without a form gate, is a perfect strategy to follow when you are seeking to build brand awareness in the industry. Allowing free access builds goodwill while promoting your brand as a knowledge source and a thought leader. 

This does not mean that ungated content cannot be used for lead-generation purposes. This also does not mean that the gating of white papers and other content pieces is dead.

How you can use Ungated Content for Lead Generation

Ungated content can be used in conjunction with other lead-generation tactics such as SEO, retargeting, lead nurturing, and marketing automation. 

Bottom line – create content that is useful for and resonates with your target audience. 

If you produce high-quality, premium content, even if you “ungate” the content,  you can nurture leads through the sales funnel and generate more qualified leads for your business.

  • Search Engine Optimization Wins – Ungated content, when optimized for search engine optimization purposes, can be indexed by search engines and give you high visibility on search engines. 

Gated content, by virtue of not being visible to the public and search engine bots, cannot be indexed for search visibility.

So if you are still building your SEO profile and your credibility in your audiences’ minds, ungated content may be your best friend.

  • Retargeting Ads & Remarketing Campaigns – Just because you allow ungated access to your premium content does not mean you have lost all lead-generation opportunities. 

Enable cookies on your site and create retargeting audiences for your email, paid, organic, and social media visitors. Segment the audiences by their level of engagement with the ungated content that you provided for free. 

Re-engage with the audience through paid ads (retargeting) and email drip campaigns (remarketing). 

Use gated content once your audience is further down the funnel as your target audience is better acquainted with your brand and is more likely to share their contact information with you at that point. 

Retargeting and remarketing campaigns also help keep your brand top of mind as your audience. 

  • A Larger Audience Reach – Ungated content creates a much bigger audience for your content and is also more likely to be shared within their individual networks. As marketers, you can still keep track of the consumption of your content, which in itself is a micro-conversion. As your target audience consumes more and more quality content from you, you build top-of-mind awareness for your brand, and that in turn, is likely to generate more inquiries from your audience when they have the intent to purchase.
  • Direct Sharing with Your Most Valuable Audience – Finally, use automation tools on LinkedIn to share your most valuable content. In fact, go even further and share it with your targeted list of accounts. That way, you are using a valuable, usable, and relevant piece of content as a conversation starter rather than a cold prospecting message.  

When & How You Should Gate Your Content

Despite the low conversion rates of gated content and the ways in which ungated long-form content, such as whitepapers, can be used in more creative ways for lead generation, gated white papers are one of the most effective B2B lead generation strategies. 

By gating content, businesses can capture qualified leads that are generally genuinely interested in their products or services. This is an important step in the lead nurturing process and helps companies to identify potential customers who have a higher likelihood of making a purchase.

Gating white papers also help companies to track leads more effectively and set up the foundations for marketing automation. Through this process, businesses can target and segment leads based on their interests and preferences. This way, they can ensure that their marketing messages are reaching the right people at the right time.

So when should you gate your white papers or other long-form premium content?

According to a survey conducted by Referral Rock, 59% of the surveyed marketers said they are most likely to gate a piece of content when it is more in-depth than a typical content piece they produce. 50% of those surveyed also said they gate content to qualify a lead as genuinely interested.

In our experience, here are the best practices for gating and promoting content:

1. Provide a solution to a specific and urgent problem – Unless a piece of content is seen as really valuable by your prospects, they are hesitant to share their contact information, even if you have spent hundreds of research hours and content creation time to create perfect, in-depth content.

Make sure your content piece is specific enough to help the reader find solutions to an urgent problem. Remember painkillers sell better than vitamins!

2. Use titles and keywords that actually speak to your audience – Sometimes, there are various ways to speak to a problem in the industry and not everyone may be using the same terminology to speak about the same issue.

Make sure you spend enough time researching keyword search volume, hashtags, and buzzwords being used in the industry to really match your content piece to user queries.

3. Provide content that they cannot otherwise find online –  Examples of content types that work well behind a form include information that is not easily available online, such as proprietary industry reports, toolkits to help with a specific problem area, product demos, white papers (as long as it meets criteria 1, 2 & 3), data sheets, webinars on new technologies or topics, how-to guides, templates for downloads, etc.

4. Ensure Gated Form Best Practices to minimize the chances of getting spammed. If the contact information that is shared is not genuine or linked to a business, it can dilute the lead qualification process. 

Best practices include emailing the content to the email address shared instead of allowing for a direct download and requiring a business email address instead of a generic one. There is also some evidence that progressive profiling improves conversion rates by reducing user friction.

5. Acknowledge that not all downloads have the intent to purchase – Sometimes readers may be top of the funnel and may only be looking for educational material to improve their understanding of the subject, i.e., not likely to become an SQL anytime in the near future. 

We are all guilty of this. We are looking for information for educational purposes and have no intention of reaching out to the company that authored the content for any commercial purposes.

6. Gate content lowers down in the funnel. At the top of the funnel, many prospects are still learning and exploring and are more likely to want to stay anonymous. By gating content in the middle of the funnel, marketers can ensure that they are getting leads who have already shown interest in their product or service and are more likely to convert. 

This strategy is perfectly aligned with the idea of ungating your premium content and then targeting the viewers with retargeting ads and/or remarketing drip campaigns. They are more likely to share their information once they are in the consideration or decision phase.

What does this mean for B2B lead generation?

Content still reigns supreme. Great content that helps your users with a specific pain point will always work in generating leads with the right amount of marketing. The point is that not all high-quality, premium content needs to be gated. In fact, if you are still building brand awareness, it may be best for you to make your content pieces, even the more in-depth ones, free for all.

However, if you really have something unique that’s not available online, your gating strategy may work really well in generating leads provided you promote the piece of content well. 

In 2023, with form fatigue building up, introduce other lead generation strategies into your mix, especially retargeting strategies, automated and personalized chatbots, and gating your content lower in your funnel to truly deliver leads that have a high intent to purchase.

B2B Lead Generation Services in Chicago

Why Top Quality Content is Essential for Healthcare Practice Marketing

Posted on November 15, 2022 - 11:30 AM by
healthcare marketing

Healthcare marketing is one of our favorite niches at Webtage. We get to tell beautiful stories of miracles and the resilience of the human spirit. But this is the easy part of our jobs.  

What we find challenging, and thus, more exciting, is building a solid foundation for our client’s content marketing. It begins with laying out a well-thought-out content strategy.

Good healthcare content can help:

  1. Generate trust in your expertise as a trusted healthcare provider, thereby helping with your reputation management
  2. Drive search traffic by helping your quality content rank higher on search engines
  3. Help your patients answer questions regarding health conditions.

Why would any healthcare practice not want to include content in its marketing toolkit? Even though quality content should be a part of any healthcare practice, a recent survey by SEMRush on State of Content Marketing 2022, found that only 26% of healthcare organizations use content marketing very successfully.

 We’ll be exploring healthcare content marketing in this article, the challenges, opportunities, and some actionable tips you can implement for your healthcare practice. 

Where Are Healthcare Marketers Going Wrong And What Can They Do About It?  

What truly matters is delivering value for your customers through your content. Unfortunately, that’s missing from healthcare marketing. Most of the focus is inward, and content marketing is merely another tool to hard sell their practice and its offerings. We also commonly see click-bait, low-quality SEO articles with keyword stuffing to drive search traffic. 

Another challenge is that healthcare marketing is a different beast from the other kinds of marketing because of HIPAA laws and high (read life-and-death) stakes. 

At Webtage, we believe that challenges are hidden gems of opportunity. It’s a chance to wipe the slate clean, present fresh ideas, and carve new pathways that are unique for healthcare marketing. 

7 Tips For Your Healthcare Practice To Ace at High-Quality Content Marketing 

Here’s how you can use high-quality content marketing to partake in your patients’ conversations and make a difference in their lives. 

  1. Step Into Your Customers’ Shoes 

 The internet is a gold mine for healthcare marketers. Your patients are looking at it as a reliable source for answers on their health and solutions. It’s their first go-to source which can lead them to stumble upon your website. 

Relevant and high-quality content is what will pull them to your website, browse for answers to their challenges, and reach out to you for solutions. 

 Your content must be empathetic, and that can happen if you think and feel like your patients. What your patient is looking for is a trusted partner that can solve their ailing issues. 

Your message should have your target audience and their needs at the heart of all conversations. 

 You must know your audience before creating material for them. Ask yourself: 

What is your patient experience like when they come to your website and when they visit your competitors’ sites? 

A strong content marketing program identifies and defines its target audience. Some tools that can help you are focus groups, one-on-one interviews, and qualitative and quantitative research. You should now have a strategic foundation to construct your content marketing program thanks to that analysis. 

 A firm grasp of your patient’s needs and experiences is key to building a winning content marketing plan and relevant engagement material.  

  1. Plan Well And In Advance

Content marketing must be strategic, like any other marketing element. 

A documented content strategy, in our opinion, is essential to any healthcare marketing strategy. Not more content, exactly. Intelligent content is the key. It’s a tedious procedure, but essential to your success. A strategy is now essential, not just nice to have. 

We engage your consumers and drive business growth with our differentiated content marketing approach which requires us to plan, create, distribute, measure, and optimize all content around the target audience.

At Webtage, we employ a Google Sheets content calendar that enables us to collaborate with our healthcare clients to manage their monthly content editorial plan. In order to make writing content less stressful and more focused, our editorial calendar concentrates on specific key areas and goals. Our top content marketing goals are: 

  • Consumer engagement 
  • Brand building
  • Lead generation and conversion 
  • Patient loyalty
  • Physician engagement 

Our editorial calendar is set up in two-month intervals. This enables us to prepare ahead of time and delegate tasks to our content creators.

  1. Content Creation 

Once you have the content strategy and editorial calendar ready, decide how you will ensure quality content that meets professional compliance requirements and is medically vetted, so readers get valuable, up-to-date information. 

Quality, up-to-date and accurate healthcare content is also important for search engine visibility. In 2018 Google unveiled its “medic update” which had strong implications for businesses in the YMYL (short for ‘Your Money or Your Life’) or in other words websites that provide any information that affects people’s health, wellness, or money. Put simply, it means that Google does not want to recommend “uneducated advice, opinions, or potentially fraudulent websites.” Google wants to be certain that the sites that they recommend display a high level of expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. algorithms place. 

That’s the reason that we follow the E.A.T. principle when creating and marketing content for our healthcare clients.

At Webtage, our content team comprises medical writers with experience in creating content that meets professional healthcare writing standards. This means some of the  specialized skills they bring to the table include:

  1. Ability to present information that is scientifically accurate
  2. Deep understanding of medical terms & conditions
  3. Ability to provide a logical structure, including logical presentation of ideas
  4. Ability to simplify complex medical information into simple, easily digestible pieces, without losing factual accuracy
  5. Ability to search reliable references from non-reliable sources
  6. Be able to combine factual information with compelling writing to appeal to readers and search engines.
  7. A clear understanding of statistical research, data presentation, as well as ethical and legal issues
  1. Content Delivery & Mobile Searches

It’s crucial that we present the content in an engaging way. Those who optimize for mobile platforms and present snackable content in text and video formats will reap the benefits of content marketing. Therefore, your content marketing must not only show relevance to the end user but also deliver it in easily digestible chunks while on the go.

  1. Pay Attention To Online Reputation Management 

Healthcare marketers must convince prospective patients that they are reliable considering the abundance of options for customers to get health information, both reliable and dubious.

Reputation management means more than generating and managing reviews (although that’s an important part of the puzzle). 

So how should you go about building a transparent & authentic brand while driving action & advocacy that goes beyond managing your reviews on Yelp and other public review sites? Remember, the approach is to push up positive content higher and higher in search engine results and bury the negative content. We offer several services to build a solid reputation for you.

Creating original content, such as thought articles, white papers, videos, Q&A, and other long-form content pieces and publishing them on your website and high-quality third-party sites helps to display your thought leadership high on search engines, thus boosting your reputation. Similarly, social media marketing, when done well, can not only increase your brand reach, but it also allows you to build your reputation through local community marketing.

  1. Collaborate With Influencers 

Even if a doctor may be the one writing prescriptions and advising treatments, if a patient is well-informed, she is more likely to follow the doctor’s advice or even inquire about it in the first place.

Online influencers are now a part of these doctor-patient discussions because of the expansion of digital healthcare research, and they have a significant impact on the possibilities that patients inquire about.

Think of the quality above number when choosing your influencers to work with in order to maximize your impact. Instead of only looking for influencers with the greatest following, when conducting audience research, look for specialty publications and websites that cater to your core audience and consider methods to collaborate with them.

Your own work will benefit from paying greater attention to these trends and how they change over time. 

  1. Content Analytics and Measurement

In order to maximize the efficacy of the program, you need to examine your content marketing endeavor to determine what is effective and what is not. You’ll discover the tactical move that most appeals to your target market through trial and error. 

Key performance metrics we use to understand content marketing success include:

  1. Acceptance of content pieces on high-quality and relevant third-party sites.
  2. Ability to produce medically compliant content pieces that attract traffic consistently.
  3. Reader engagement with the content. This could include social shares, likes, and comments on owned social channels.
  4. Website traffic to your content pieces, whether we publish them on your website or third-party sites.
  5. Reach of your content, calculated as impression share

 It should be clear that developing a successful content marketing strategy takes time. It needs nurturing and requires patience. But in the end, your firm might benefit from all of your efforts, strategic focus, tracking data, and meticulousness. 

Final Thoughts 

The key to enhancing your reputation as an expert in your field and drawing new patients to your health system’s website and online channels is timely, pertinent, and consistent quality information.

Marketers in any industry may position themselves for success by creating great content for audiences that are becoming more knowledgeable, prioritizing mobile, and spending money on influencer marketing. This is even more important for healthcare organizations as the content you create can have serious implications on lives if not created and vetted extremely carefully

Google has clearly stated that “medical advice needs to be written by people with high medical E-A-T to be considered high quality.”

Creating regular, excellent healthcare material is not easy—but it doesn’t have to be an insurmountable endeavor. We hope you find our advice on developing a master editorial content calendar and skills to create high-quality, up-to-date, and medically sourced content helpful. 

Finally, you might want to consider asking for support from a professional healthcare digital marketing agency in Chicago to help handle this challenging task with ease and comfort.

Healthcare Marketing Agency in Naperville

How Branding Can Make Your B2B Company Not Just Stay Alive But Also Thrive

Posted on October 2, 2022 - 5:14 AM by
b2b branding

There is plenty of brand preaching in the marketing world. Every company is looking to build its brand, be “top of the mind” of its consumers, and improve its ROI.

But how does branding exactly help you achieve your marketing goals, especially increasing sales and growing your B2B business? 

Does branding match up to all the hype? 

More importantly, does your B2B business really need it even if there’s truth in the hype? 

While the ‘noise’ around branding is certainly valid, it has, somewhere, diluted its meaning, and hence, power. 

We explore branding for B2B businesses in particular in this article so that you can find clarity, purpose, and meaning in it. We will look at it from the lens of both the company and the consumers. 

Why Does Branding Matter For Your B2B Company?

B2B companies had traditionally favored R&D and sales over brand marketing. This approach served the purpose for many years until the marketing landscape changed forever with the advent of digital technologies. With the target audiences now predominantly online, B2B companies can engage with them on multiple digital channels. In the digital world, marketplaces are continually changing and traditional barriers to entry are no longer as relevant. 

In this world of digital behavior, branding is more important than ever for B2B companies. One of the chief reasons branding is still relevant today is that brand loyalty still makes a difference between engagement and non-engagement. Consider these statistics by the International Council of Shopping Centers’ (ICSC) survey in the B2C markets:

82% of Americans are loyal to a product brand. 

While this might be the case in B2C markets, it is no different in the B2B marketplace. In fact, the only difference is that the brand loyalists in the B2B industry are the key decision-makers in your targeted clientele. 

A powerful brand messaging can help to: 

  • Keep your customers engaged 
  • Align with your customer’s values and beliefs
  • Differentiate your offerings
  • Amplify demand
  • Lower the cost of sales
  • Command a price premium
  • Improve stakeholder confidence 
  • Provide insulation from intermediate setbacks 

While these are some of the many benefits that brand marketing brings to your B2B business, the question remains: How does branding correlate to conversions and sales?

Decoding Brand Dynamics For B2B Companies

We will get to the bottom of this question by understanding the evolution of branding, its impact on consumer psychology, and how brand marketing directly affects your sales and ROI.

At the outset, people perceive branding as the creation of an image around your company. But branding runs deeper than perception. In fact, branding is not even about the creation of a perception or an image. Branding today is all about authenticity.

It explains why the old rules of creating a brand image no longer work. It’s not enough to be on top of the consumer’s mind.

Branding, today, is about authenticity, alleviating if not solving problems, and being an intrinsic part of the consumer community. Let’s dig deeper! 

  1. Authenticity

B2B consumers aren’t listening to your sales teams or believing every claim you make on your website or social platforms. Today’s consumers are astute to look for more details at the click of a button. 

Your consumers are listening to your brand as much as you stay attuned to social listening. They are forming wholesome opinions and images about your brand even after you’ve sketched it for them. 

They are actively listening to what their peers are talking about your brand. They are reading your online testimonials, not on your website alone, but on other consumer review websites. 

If there is a match between what you’re promising and what other consumers claim that you’re offering, then your target clientele will approach you to learn more. 

But if there is a mismatch between your claims and their findings, they will look elsewhere and switch to another brand. 

Here are some questions for you to introspect: 

  • Is there an alignment in what your brand is conveying, what it is being perceived as, and what it truly is?
  • Maybe it’s time to look at what others are saying about your brand. Are there certain negative reviews you need to look into? 
  • Maybe it’s time to look into your content marketing efforts and check if it’s in alignment with your branding. Perhaps you need to re-evaluate your brand messaging.  

The brand marketing dynamics have changed as now, the consumer is in the driver’s seat of all your branding efforts. 

  1. Empathy 

Branding allows you to help identify and reduce, if not solve, people’s problems. Fully engaged and loyal customers are more likely to refer your brand to others. Branding can turn your customers into advocates, leading to better ROI and business growth. 

Branding inspires your customers to pay attention and take action. And that can only happen when you are listening to them and delivering relevant and targeted content. Improving your current engagement levels with your customers leads to increased ROI. That’s the pure essence of branding. It inspires action.

According to the Content Marketing Institute, you can not only track ROI but also attribute ROI to the various phases of your sales funnel. They shared the following statistics:

  • 71% of B2B marketers felt that their content marketing is sophisticated/ mature.
  • 74% of B2B marketers felt the value their content provided was a top factor.

One respondent in the CMI 2022 B2B Research shared,

“We increased our empathy toward our audience and found them to be more receptive.”

Branded content tailored to specific phases of your buyer’s journey improves engagement and sales. You can even see how providing actionable, curated content directly affects your branding at every phase of your sales funnel. 

At Webtage, we track and measure our branding efforts with the below metrics to name a few:

  1. Branded Keyword searches 
  2. Social Media Mentions
  3. Social media Engagements
  4. Social Media Reach
  5. Branded Paid searches Engagement (CTR, Conversions)

Branding, content, and actions share an intimate relationship that’s successful when it’s based on empathy for your customers. Effective tailored content taps into empathy, helping you fix your customers’ pain points, offer value, build relationships, and earn trust, which propels action.

  1. Connections 

Today, branding calls for being an intrinsic part of the consumer community. This is backed by research studies as well. 49% report better ROI by investing in relationships over acquisition marketing as per the second annual Cross-Channel Marketing Report.

B2B Branding matters because companies act just like people when it comes to evaluating a purchase decision. That means, alongside their logical reasons for buying your products and services, they are also overcome with powerful emotional impulses that can influence their purchase decision. An effective branding strategy will tap into the totality of their buyers’ reasons and motivations. 

Brands drive B2B business by triggering their emotions and forming meaningful relationships. Emotional messages are more likely to create memorable bonds with your customers. 

Apart from tapping into the power of emotions, there’s also a need for smart B2B branding that is value, purpose, and sustainability-driven. 

A case in point is Yvon Chouinard giving up the ownership of his company, Patagonia to the Holdfast Collective (98%) and the Patagonia Purpose Trust (2%). Patagonia is still a for-profit business, as it stands committed to creating the best quality products and preserving its financial health to support its biggest stakeholder – The Earth and its people, including its employees and customers. 

A Strong Brand Can Prove To Be Your Business’ Biggest Insulation 

A strong B2B brand can solve many problems before and when they occur. A well-respected and liked brand can be the only thing keeping your biggest client. As this article elucidates, the efforts into B2B brand marketing will eventually prove to be valuable and help ease those occasional low, bumpy transitions in your business.

B2B Marketing Services in Naperville

Top 5 Reasons Your B2B Company Should Consider LinkedIn Marketing

Posted on July 15, 2022 - 2:52 AM by

LinkedIn has come a long way from being just a portal for job seekers. LinkedIn started as a job search engine. But it has now grown into a powerful and integral tool for B2B marketing. 

B2B marketing or Business-to-Business marketing, like the name suggests, refers to marketing products and services to another business, instead of consumers.

Why Is LinkedIn A Crucial Platform for B2B Marketing? 

Let’s explore LinkedIn marketing for B2B businesses and what makes it the perfect social platform for B2B marketing. 

We explore LinkedIn marketing for B2B businesses, and also share our top reasons why you must consider LinkedIn for your B2B marketing. 

  1. LinkedIn Is A Gold Mine Of Business Professionals 

If your B2B company is not on LinkedIn, you’re missing out on enormous opportunities. 

What makes LinkedIn different from the other social platforms is the context. While platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have social leanings towards family, friends, and casual connections, LinkedIn is built for business connections only.

Consider this! There are 750+ million users on LinkedIn across 200 countries at the rate of 3 new members every second and counting. 

As per LinkedIn, 71% of professionals use the platform to convey their business decisions. That should convince you how active business professionals are on the platform, promoting their brands. 

It is smart marketing to meet up with other businesses on the platform where they are the most active. If you’re a B2B company, LinkedIn is the place to be. 

So, if you’re not on LinkedIn yet, we strongly suggest you set up your company page at the earliest. You could meet your next business client, partner, employees, influencers and whoever you want to target for your business.  

  1. Social Media For B2B Is Unlike B2C companies 

Unlike B2C or Business-to-Consumer businesses that are aimed at attracting a wider audience of consumers, B2B businesses have a niche audience of other businesses. 

A typical B2C marketing requires a lot of visibility, where the emphasis is geared towards the awareness phase of the buyer’s journey. We measure B2C marketing success more in terms of metrics, such as followers, likes, comments, shares, etc. 

However, B2B marketing runs deeper than just being known to your target audience. There is emphasis on not just brand building, but also on business networking because: 

  • B2B audience spans multiple departments: strategic, financial and operational decision 
  • B2B sales cycles are much longer, so regular communication to provide value for decision makers is critical.

Building a powerful brand gives your B2B business a competitive advantage. Brand building should be a strategic priority to speed up business growth. 

B2B Marketing should be distinct and authentic since there is a demand for purpose-driven brands that fosters trust in the long run among the target audience. Any brand that’s inauthentic and skewed more towards commercialization instead of purpose may not sustain for long. 

Competition is out, and collaboration is in. Brands that are authentic, purposeful, and collaborative are on the right track. 

However, this is easier than done, as most B2B businesses today are blindly following the B2C marketing template. This lack of creativity is damaging to your B2B brand’s success. At Webtage, our approach is to balance brand building and business networking. We carve our clients’ distinct brand personality, and convey it creatively to their audience, building trust, empathy, differentiation, and loyalty.

LinkedIn provides many useful business networking and lead generation tools, including LinkedIn Sales Navigator and LinkedIn Advertising that allow for deep targeting of your audience for best business networking opportunities.

When you’re on LinkedIn, think of the relationships as less as connections and more like collaborative business partnerships. LinkedIn B2B marketing is about building long-lasting partnerships with your relevant target customers.

  1. LinkedIn Is The Most Effective Platform For B2B Marketing 

There are several substantial reasons LinkedIn is so popular with B2B marketers. 

LinkedIn is an excellent place for businesses to promote their products and services and gain relevant business leads. Research has backed the claim of LinkedIn being an effective lead generation platform. An overwhelming 97% of business leads from social media platforms come from LinkedIn. 

Clearly, LinkedIn out beats other social platforms and works for B2B lead generation. When you dig further and look at the reasons backed by research findings, you’ll find that it all makes perfect sense. 

It’s highly likely that you will be in direct contact with high-level decision-makers of the companies you are targeting on LinkedIn. LinkedIn B2B marketing is a faster way to reach your targeted audiences and gain high-quality leads. 

Another reason that makes LinkedIn a popular choice for B2B marketers is that it is viewed as a trusted platform. 

  1. LinkedIn B2B Marketing Helps In Building Thought Leadership

As per a recent study by the Content Marketing Institute, 

  • 97% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn for their content marketing. 
  • 78% of B2B marketers say LinkedIn is an effective tool for content marketing.

So, LinkedIn is not just a networking place for business professionals, it’s also an active community that’s sharing relevant content. Consider these statistics by LinkedIn internal data:

  • There are nine billion content impressions on LinkedIn each week (LinkedIn study). 
  • Around 45% of LinkedIn article readers are in upper-level positions, such as managers, VPs, Directors, and C-level positions. 

So, as a business brand, you can build thought leadership with your LinkedIn short form posts, videos, and long form articles. There are high chances that the decision makers of your target audience will read them, and even approach you if they are original, high-quality, and well-written. 

  1. LinkedIn is A B2B Centric Platform 

While this might come across as stating the obvious, what most people don’t realize is how LinkedIn is built for B2B marketing. Whether it’s building business relationships, developing your brand, or doing business, LinkedIn is the place to be.

We can use precise and virtually limitless targeting tools and options provided by LinkedIn to reach your audiences. We also use strategic testing to determine which of your audiences and targeting parameter combinations can generate the optimal results.

There are several strategic actions we can take to improve your LinkedIn B2B marketing efforts. For example, we add the LinkedIn Insight Tag to our client’s website so that we can re-target the website visitors with relevant content in the future. 

We Can Help You Gain Leads With Our LinkedIn B2B2 Marketing Services 

LinkedIn is the platform to be on if you have a B2B business. Whether it is to attract relevant, high-quality leads, influencers to promote your products and services, or employees to join your workforce, LinkedIn is the strong dark horse of social media platforms. 

Our article has you covered all the benefits that LinkedIn offers for your B2B business. If you want to know more about how we can help leverage LinkedIn for your business, get in touch with Best Marketing Agency in Naperville & Chicago area.

B2B Marketing Services in Naperville

How B2B Social Media Marketing Can Take Your Business To The Next Level

Posted on June 2, 2022 - 11:36 AM by

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is typically seen as beneficial for B2C companies. But this couldn’t be far from the truth. 

If you don’t have a social media plan for your B2B business, you are missing out on huge benefits. Social media is the top distribution method for B2B marketers, with 89% using social tools.

We break down how social media is a fantastic platform to promote your B2B company and when done right, it can have multifold benefits. 

What is B2B Social Media Marketing And How Is It Different? 

While B2C companies use social media marketing to reach out to their audience and influence purchases,  the social media marketing goals for B2B is to sell their products and services to other businesses. 

B2B social media marketing entails strategizing, drafting, promoting, and analyzing content to engage your target audience on social platforms. 

While it might look simple at the outset, there are several nuanced factors including staying abreast of rapidly evolving social platforms and features that make it both challenging and exciting.  

The social media marketing approach for B2B differs from B2C companies. Typically, B2B social media marketing tends to be more strategic to influence business founders and decision makers. It involves relatively more nurturing of business relationships to influence large order purchases. Even the nature of content mix will look different for B2B social media marketing. For example, insightful, and informational videos, case studies, reports, white papers. 

Also, consider these statistics to understand how different the B2B buyer from the B2C customer: 

  • B2B customers spend 27% of their purchase consideration time conducting independent research online.
  • 44% of millennial B2B customers prefer not to interact with a sales rep at all.

B2B buyers are more proactive in their research and enjoy more autonomy in their purchasing decisions. It’s vital that your digital presence and social media marketing are strong for astute B2B buyers.  

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~ Richard Branson” clr=”#000000″ bgclr=”#66cccc” hoverbg=”#aac3c0″][mk_padding_divider size=”100″]

Top 3 Ways  Your B2B company should utilize social media marketing for maximum benefits

B2B social media marketing is one of the best ways to build a strong brand presence and customer loyalty. 

Here are the top benefits of B2B social media marketing. 

  1. Build And Boost Brand Awareness And Repute 

Leverage your company’s social profiles to provide useful information about what your B2B company has to offer for your clients.

Publishing relevant and high-quality content consistently on social media and engaging with your audience via comments and messages helps in improving brand awareness and trust with your customers. 

Sharing your industry expertise and insights by leveraging social platforms establishes you as a thought-leader and helps you stand out from your competition by attracting qualified partners. We are already seeing the benefits of employee branding, especially the increasing digital presence of C-suite leaders, such as the improved trustworthiness of your B2B company. 

  1. Create An Engaged Community And Improve Customer Experience 

Social platforms help you tap into a ‘mostly online’ audience to gain their trust and improve customer experience.  

Your business clients are on social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, making it easier for you to build connections and collaborations with them. 

You can interact and help answer your clients’ queries, solve their problems, or thank them for their reviews online whenever possible. It shows them that you’re paying attention to them and are invested in their growth. It makes your brand more humane, approachable and authentic. 

  1. Drive Traffic, Generates Leads, And Increases Sales 

Social media marketing helps achieve your search engine optimization (SEO) goals. Being active on social platforms can improve your company’s positioning in Google’s organic search results, and can help in improving your ranking indirectly. 

“Social platforms are no longer add-ons to a business’s communication budget; they should be central to its marketing strategy, and used in coordination with other marketing efforts.” 

– Richard Branson 

Social media marketing helps drive the relevant traffic to your website, generate qualified leads and increase sales. 

The ultimate goal of all marketing efforts is to promote sales. Social media marketing entails identifying potential clients, positioning their products and services to the targeted prospects, building relationships and trust with them, and nurturing leads. 

It’s Time To Get Social

Social media marketing is a powerful marketing channel for enabling brand authenticity, trust, community and sales. 

As much as it presents a massive opportunity, it is also getting increasingly competitive. 

Looking to improve or initiate social media strategy for your B2B organization? Follow the streamlined 1-2-3-4-5 foundational steps to start your social media marketing on a solid footing!

Contact us to learn more about how Webtage can help you with our innovative and focused approach to social media marketing that can help you stand out from a sea of competitors. 

Social Media Marketing Company in Naperville

Are you a Healthcare Provider That’s Offering Telehealth Services? This is What You Need to do Right Now!

Posted on April 14, 2020 - 6:26 PM by

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic and shelter-in place orders in many areas of the country, many healthcare providers, including hospitals, doctors, and mental healthcare providers, are now providing virtual care. Google has recently rolled out tow new features in Google Search and Maps to allow users to conveniently find telehealth options, “whether it’s to a doctor’s office down the street, the hospital across town, or a national telehealth platform.” You can also clearly communicate your COVID-19 information with your intended audience.

So how do you, as a provider, access these features? Let’s talk about Google Maps first (if you are not familiar with the significance of Google Maps for your healthcare business or have not claimed your Google My Business listing , learn why it’s critical that you do so now and while you’re at it, also learn foolproof tips on optimizing your GMB listing):

      • Google My Business now offers URLs dedicated to COVID-19 and telehealth services. Make sure you add the URL links to your Google My Business Page listing. After your edits have been reviewed and approved, it’ll appear in Google Maps listing and your detailed Google Maps listing as well. Here’s how you can add the URLs: Sign in to your GMB listing by visiting business.google.com. Next click on ‘Info’ on the left-hand side panel. If you are a healthcare organization, you will see two additional URL options for COVID-19 info link and virtual care link. Add the links as applicable and click Save.
      • List Telemedicine Services on your Business Profile on Google. Google adds that “you can choose what to offer from suggested types of services. If the type of service isn’t listed, you can add your own custom services, like “telemedicine,” “telehealth,” “video visits,” or “house calls.” Once the services edit has saved, patients will be able to see the services you have listed, including online visits or telemedicine.
      • Finally, in the Attributes section, add video visits to the offerings, if you do provide video visits. This will also help display your telemedicine option to your patients when they search for your services in Google.

I’d be amiss if I didn’t mention that Google is also helping healthcare providers with technology infrastructure and support via “HIPAA-compliant G Suite products (including using Google Meet for telehealth or virtual visits), deploying virtual agents to field questions related to COVID-19, and helping with capacity-planning and demand forecasting of key medical supplies to better manage their supply chains.”

If you need help planning your transition to virtual care, contact us at Webtage where we have facilitated the transition to online visits for healthcare providers, developed the capacity to communicate high quality and credible information in the midst of the health crisis, and marketed online visits to continue solid revenue generation for our client. 

[mk_page_title_box page_title=”Healthcare Digital Marketing Done Right” page_subtitle=”Grow Quickly & Effectively” section_height=”150″ font_size=”24″ title_force_font_size=”true” sub_font_size=”16″ subtitle_force_font_size=”true”]
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Healthcare Marketing Agency in Naperville