Not everyone is convinced that they need a website. Whether for their business or for their brand, web presence in 2021 may be a sum game rather than a definitive strategy. Having the pieces of an online presence, whether it be review websites for your business, social media accounts, or favorable press pieces, can help ensure you’re popping up where you should be digitally without having to pay for or set up a website yourself.
Relying on this strategy may not be the lead-getter that you had envisioned for your business, and entering a new decade, most businesses are aware that engagements or views aren’t the same thing as creating a manageable client funnel to your medical practice, small business, or brick-and-mortar store. Creating a single-page website, or microsite, is likely the best way to highlight the bare-bones necessary information about yourself, with the benefit of control your customer flow, collect information on your audience, and incorporate in necessary tools for your visitors.
We’ve outlined why a single-page or minimalist website may be the best practice for your business, and if you’d like to learn more, reach out to us at cliff@kubisinteractive.com.
What Is A Minimalist Website, or Microsite?
Minimalist websites, or microsites, are often single page websites specifically designed for customers who are looking to complete a certain action. The purpose of these pages isn’t to demonstrate the ins and outs of your practice, but provide users a direct, mobile-optimized resource that will help them figure out what they need to do next to visit your practice.
Everything from sending a message and getting an address, to booking an appointment for your practice or signing up for a newsletter, can be added to these sites, will a goal-oriented approach to collecting new business or providing that necessary information to local prospects.
Going with this approach means you’ve got less of an ability to customize your website and add in things like articles or blogs, but it is a more cost-effective way to provide customers the tool they need, including ensuring that they find your site and take the correct actions to visit you.
Control The Customer Flow
The piecemeal approach of relying on third-party websites leaves you with one big problem: you ultimately don’t get to choose where people end up first when they are searching for your business, and you won’t have a say in determining that pathway if you’re reliant on businesses and applications that are designed for a different purpose.
For example, for a small medical clinic, your pathway will depend entirely on the customer. If they are a prospective patient, a recent patient who is hoping to get a prescription refill, or a longtime visitor who you are hoping completes a survey or fills out a recommendation, you’ll want these people to start at different places and use different tools. If they are googling a doctor’s name, and the first page they find is a partner review sign, you’ll only fill one of the three objectives.
This also leads to the conversation around SEO. If your page is properly tagged, lists all of the relevant clinicians or specialists, and provides an address, you can ensure you’ll rank high organically for the users searching for this information. If they don’t start with your site, who knows if they’ll end up there at all.
Collect Information On Your Audience
Trackable analytics play an important role in the customer journey because you want to have an idea of who is doing what on your website. A microsite is designed specifically to get people in and out, but tracking what they do next is the most important piece of information your site will collect. If they move on to your appointment scheduler or email tool, visit your social links, or simply click the phone number on your website from their mobile device, basic analytics information will be able to break down this information and give you an on-demand report.
Collecting this information in the form of cookies can also give you actionable intelligence on your audience, including where they are visiting from (location and device-wise) and their demographics. It may not seem like overly exciting information at a glance, but getting an idea where your customers are coming from, how they found your website, and what they are doing next provides an attribution model that will help you understand how new customers come to find you.
Adding Necessary Tools
Patients can’t book appointments on most third-party websites, and you don’t want emergency messages finding their way into Facebook messenger. Including the added tools of booking software, message forms, or links to other valuable information such as accepted insurance, click to call, or mapping functionality, ensure that they have everything they need in one easy to view area.
Making sure that these functions, especially when it comes to bringing on new patients and having them take care of some of the patient paperwork online, is what has been found to be most helpful to practices hoping to minimalize wait times and paperwork.