In 2022, MDLIVE had enjoyed tremendous growth due to two factors, the COVID-19 pandemic and more than a million dollars in annual pay-per-click advertising. As COVID became a lesser driver of organic business growth, their sizeable marketing costs became more painful. Patrick’s task was to strategize how to organically increase the site’s value as one of their primary marketing tools.
Information architecture is a marketing pathway
Your information architecture (IA) is the path users take to your intended outcome. If the one goal of a house is to provide a place for you rest at night, consider all the pathways you can take to enter your house and reach your bed. There may be direct and indirect paths, each with their own benefits. But if no path brings you to your bed, what’s the point of the house? Your website is the same.
The pathways from the point someone enters your site until they take your desired action is all a part of that marketing IA. You can have direct paths and indirect paths, as long as each is purposeful and provides value. MDLIVE’s website made sense to everyone on the backend, but many people who visited the site ended up calling in for basic information. Frustration finding important information was driving up their bounce rates and wasting ad dollars.
Before the IA Audit
Before, the marketing information architecture provided a top navigation that was very lateral. It provided organization based on audience with only one dropdown being relevant to anyone.
Meaning if someone came to the website and didn’t immediately find what they needed in a single category, they were more likely to bounce, and far less likely to convert.
The footer reflected this, as well. This IA was the informational equivalent of playing “52 pick up”. Services were hard to find.
After the IA Audit
Patrick began with a hypothesis for an improved marketing IA that would provide value to either a B2B or B2C audience. It’s short lateral structure provides a quick path to “Contact us”, which is a sure way to increase your NPS score, but theorethically prevented unnecessary calls by connecting the right audience to the right information.
Before unilaterally reorganizing the website, it was important to do a bit of research to find how the end-user may expect the information to be organized. Patrick broke the website down into its elements.
He compared their language to Google trends for a natural language review. The would lace the marketing information architecture with good SEO practices and current language.
With more natural language, this information was fed into a card sort study. Here study participants from MDLIVE’s marketing persona demographic were asked to organize the information as it made sense to them. These results, seen above, created a vary lateral navigation.
This not only countered Patrick’s hypothesis, it pushed the “Contact us” button in the far end of the navigation, out of view on mobile experiences. This required further testing.
Testing an Effective Marketing IA
A tree test study is used to measure how effectively an IA creates pathways to success. By asking study participants to perform simple tasks, like “find the cost of services” or “locate the dermatology page”, the efficacy of the IA could be quantified. MDLIVE’s existing IA was used a control, comparing the performance of Patrick’s hypothesis and the results of the card sort study.
The card sort study results, on the left, beat out Patrick’s marketing information architecture by a few fractions of a point. In order to draw from what made the card sort result so successful, Patrick branched his IA out by one category “Learn More”.
This category not only resolved performance issues for all three IA’s, but it signficantly increased the website’s connectivity as seen above. This increased the likelihood users could find relevant information without having to navigate to the top or the bottom of the page. Increased session duration and decreased volume to call centers was the result of the improved marketing information architecture.
Portfolio overiew
Beyond the Marketing IA
Creating a more marketing-friendly IA was only part of the work MDLIVE needed. The website was built reactively, adding pieces over time as they came up. There was no SEO strategy. If you were a potential new account, it was hard to discover the information you were looking for, namely cost and accepted insurances.
Patrick helped address areas where the website could better attract or drive traffic to their intended goal, creating an account or signing in.
Reducing Cognitive Load
Reducing the amount of visual elements, whether they’re copy or design, eases the amount of stimulus the audience receives. This makes it easier to process what they can comfortably process.
The design featured too much messaging and the top navigation increased the visual chaos. This increases frustration and willingness to explore, leading to higher bounce rates. Further, the imagery certainly connected to the target audience but it was not welcoming or inspiring. The face is turned away, reducing the amount of connection the viewer feels.
By minimizing excess messaging, CTA’s were easier to see and the top navigation made finding information easier. The marketing team’s most desired action, that the end-user be able to easily create an acount or set an appointment, was easily achieved both in the hero and at the top of the page. The increased space allowed for higher quality facial imagery, creating more human connections as soon as the audience reaches the page.
Testimonials are highly valuable, but sometimes less is more. There were so many featured in their carousel the font was illegible. The eye was overwhelmed, seeing nothing more than that they all had five stars. The marketing value was virtually zero.
By reducing the amount of testimonials, we made everything more visible. This allows the value to stand out more clearly instead of chasing the eye towards a less stress screen.
Simple concepts were overexplained considering the marketing persona’s focus was on audience members 25-44. This content above was targeted for an older demographic, less native to the online experience.
By reducing the excess verbiage, we kept high-level information while reducing the cognitive load, a common nudge technique. By retaining this core information on the homepage keeps its accessibility open to a wider audience. Much like the work done around the marketing IA, the key was to maximize simplicity for the user.
Connecting to Humanity
Teleheath has been more widely embraced since 2019, but many people are still reluctant to let go of the human experience healthcare provides. Above, the slider allows you to compare areas where we cater to that reluctant population.
By placing a photgraph of Dr. Weil, MDLIVE’s Chief Medical Officer next to the “Reliable health care” section, we not only add a personal of personal accountability, we demonstrate the human experience will continue even in teleheath.
Enhancing Searchability
Few people find a telehealth site for the first time ready for immediate action. Supporting their quest for informaiton is the most value you can offer this audience.
Before we renovated the website’s marketing IA, the design was very flat leaving no room for exploration. If you were a potential Urgent Care patient, you might see one of your symtpoms listed above. But if you wanted to learn much more about even the most common maladies MDLIVE treated, you would have to leave the website to do it. This meant the most incentivized to act demographic they had, those who needed urgent care, were likely to leave the site before ever taking an action.
In this new design, we see unclickable symptoms are replaced with links to content hubs for the Urgent Care audience. By creating content hubs for the most common health conditions MDLIVE treated, we were increased points of entry into the site, session duration, and conversion to new accounts. This solution also increased the SEO value of the website, alleviating some of the burden on the pay-per-click marketing budget.
Increasing Organic Traffic
Providing value-driven content is a fast means to establish your status as “thought leaders”. It also encourages organic exploration of the website and increases visibility for other services.
Content hubs brought new traffic to the site and allowed for more strategic placement of information. These pages created more specific audiences which allowed for more valuable messaging.
They also presented opportunities to link to other content hubs. This informs not only the end-user, but the human resource decision makers and health plans leader of the B2B audience. We see information is now readily available and easily found.
Marketing outcome
MDLIVE’s new website went live in summer of 2023. The site has already seen growth in traffic, including for their lower profile pages like “dermatology”, which quickly saw a 21% rise in traffic and time on page. The marketing director was so pleased with the initial results, they immediately began expanding points of interconnectivity of the site, doubling down on the new practice.
