Across Ellis Jones’ health and ageing practice there are often fundamental improvements that health and aged care providers can make to revolutionise their online presence.
A key part of the process to successfully revamping your website presence is to first suss out your current activity and compare it with that of your competitors. Without research, any subsequent marketing and/or communications strategy will likely be lacking in focus and impact.
In addition to analysing the usual back end data (in your Google Analytics dashboard) such as bounce rates, top content, number of unique visitors/page views, time spent and exit pages – a benchmarking exercise should take place to analyse the messaging on the front end of your site.
Benchmarking your website against your top competitors’ websites will put your organisation’s value proposition, differentiators and key messages at the front of your online presence and draw your stakeholders in.
Step 1 – Review your website
Go through your website page by page and consider the below elements. Note down your comments on these elements by evaluating the presence of information and how clearly it has been articulated. This is an example of a useful framework we use here at Ellis Jones to assess the strengths and weaknesses of a website in articulating organisational key messages and points of differentiation across key product or service areas.
- Operations – staff; services; rooms; residents; location; establish; parent company
- Products and services offered – special needs groups; dementia care needs; social and financial disadvantage; cultural and linguistic diversity; organisation market share; community needs and service gaps; pricing
- Marketing – value proposition; key messages; reputation; links to community; research programs; publicity; branding; visual identity; logo; colour scheme; quality of design; typography
- Assessment of marketing materials – the effectiveness of competitors’ marketing to their target audiences
- Online marketing – competitors’ use of Google and links with other prominent health and ageing websites
- Appearance, function, organisation and usability.
Step 2 – Review your competitors’ websites
Using the exact same framework, review the websites of your top 5-10 competitors. Keep all data in one handy spreadsheet with all measures listed in the left ‘A’ column; and all the competitor website addresses along the top ‘A’ row, like so:
The above table is only a small snippet of the overall set of measures used to review website presence to give you the idea. Keep going with all the measures listed in step 1 until you have covered them all for your own and each competitor’s website.
Step 3 – Keep score!
The one thing that really ties all this analysis together is a scoreboard. It gives some indication of how your website measures up against its competitors and how big the gap is between your website and an exemplar website. We like to score from 1-5 (5 being the highest) and then give a total average score.
Use the insights gained from this benchmarking activity to shape your own website improvements and formulate your brief for agency and/or development partner. What gaps did you identify? How can you differentiate yourself from your competitors better? How well do you articulate your value proposition to stakeholders? Are all your products and services clear?
These 3 steps will get you started on the best possible pathway to standing out from the crowd online. Give it a go and let us know how your website measured up. You can also contact us, or check out our current website portfolio.
