How can you engender the perception of assurance or trust in your online healthcare marketing?
Assurance – the knowledge, skills, and credibility of staff; and their ability to use this expertise to inspire trust and confidence.
It is further broken down to the following
Assurance
- Do your Staff have the skills and knowledge needed to deliver a good service, across all channels?
- Do your Staff need any further training or development?
- Do your Staff inspire trust in Patients?
- Is your service clinically compliant, does your service engender ongoing feelings of security in your Patients?
So in its most basic form assurance is trust, trust in you and your business to do as you say. In healthcare, it is trust in you to cure or treat a medical problem. It is also trust in you to undertake this in the promptest and efficacious manner. I have discussed the engenderment of trust before on my blog. Shelly Caldwell of toolbox4healthcare wrote an excellent guest post on my blog in relation to engendering trust through website design.
But I would like to look deeper at the mechanics, the elements beyond good design that you can deploy to engender the perception of assurance. We need to look again at what people want, they want to know that they are being looked after people who know what they are doing. So how can we meet that need on a website.
The overall look, feel and design of a website will play a big part, but there are elements that if deployed can drive that feeling home. The first is membership of an association representative group. A group such as BSHAA or ISHAA in the UK and Ireland. A company cannot become a member of these organisations, but the hearing professionals working in that company can and should.
But how can we leverage that, a prominent splash on the home page with a link back to the association site would be a good start. Such as in the top right corner, bright and visible, “all of our Dispensing team are members of ***** and work under its’ code of conduct”. An element like that will give some assurance to prospective Patients.
Another element that gives assurance is qualification, the training and study undertaken to perform your function. Again in this case it is not a company element it is a staff element. We could go for another splash with the details changed. Alternatively, as part of your about us page, you can include bios of each staff member and the details of their qualification. You should really be doing this already and many do.
As an aside to about us pages, your main about us page can be about the overall company, its ethos, its history etc. You can even mention branch outlets if you have any. But you should consider sub pages as part of the structure for every branch. This gives you further SEO opportunities for local services. In other words, your sub pages can be titled “Our hearing services in Dublin” and “Our hearing services in Kilkenny”.
Fill these pages with branch details and Staff bios pertaining to the branch. Include a link to that branch’s website. In this way you are consistently giving yourself an opportunity to return on local searches. Hopefully you are also engendering the perception of assurance. The other thing that may help with assurance is social proof, testimonials. We have spoken of them before and I won’t harp on here. They help build assurance, they drive trust.
Another thing that may well drive the perception of assurance is content. In fact if you are including all of your members of staff in your content marketing it will help drive assurance. It will appear that all of your members of staff are competent and committed. So what other ideas do you have for driving assurance?
Regards
Geoff
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