UNDERSTANDING YOUR PATIENTS’ QUESTIONS WITH ANSWER THE PUBLIC
For healthcare providers, understanding patients’ perspectives and concerns is key to providing tailored care and designing impactful outreach. With limited time and resources, clinics need easy ways to gain insights into what information patients are seeking, what questions they have, and how to best meet their needs. This is where Answer the Public, a free online tool, can prove invaluable. By analyzing Google search data, Answer the Public reveals the healthcare-related questions on patients’ minds. This allows clinics to create more patient-centric marketing campaigns, targeted content, and data-driven strategies to boost engagement and build trust.
What is Answer the Public?
Answer the Public is a tool that provides a snapshot of the questions people are asking online. It scans Google’s autocomplete results, which display commonly searched terms, to showcase the search questions people are entering around a particular keyword or phrase.
For example, if you enter a term like “healthcare marketing,” Answer the Public will return various question formats like “What is healthcare marketing?”, “How to do healthcare marketing”, “Should I pursue a career in healthcare marketing?”, and more. It then organizes these questions into categories like “What is,” ”How to,” “Should I,” etc. This format gives you insight into the types of information patients are seeking.
The autocomplete data Answer the Public displays is frequently updated based on the latest search trends. So, it’s a useful way to stay on top of patient concerns and evolving healthcare information needs through real-time search data. Best of all, Answer the Public is free, although some clinics may choose to upgrade their account to access more advanced features and tools. Its free features allow healthcare organizations to access valuable marketing insights anytime.
Using Answer the Public for Healthcare Marketing
Let’s walk through a step-by-step example of how a healthcare clinic would use Answer the Public for healthcare marketing research and how this knowledge translates into a patient outreach strategy.
- Go to answerthepublic.com
- In the search bar, type in a relevant healthcare term like “healthcare”
- Answer The Public will produce results in a variety of categories: overview, questions, prepositions, comparisons, alphabetical, and related.
- Review each section to get an idea of the search environment of your key term.
Overview:
The overview section gives a general overview of cost per click and the search volume. Clinics should keep in mind that the cost per click may vary from their own due to geographics, specific terminology and platform. This section gives great general insight to the search climate for your chosen word or phrase.
Questions, Prepositions, Comparisons:
These sections organize the questions and phrases with the highest search volume. When it comes to answering patients’ questions, clinics can create website content, CTV advertisements, brochures, and display ads explaining key concepts directly related to the most common questions. Using website content with these words will boost your organization’s SEO, making it more likely your content will have a priority appearance when a patient makes their search.
Alphabetical:
The alphabetical section highlights the most frequently searched phrases from A-Z with your word included. Not only does it denote the most common words by each letter, but it also shows which phrases have the highest volume across the board. This section is key to developing ad copy and website content that increases SEO by using the right words and phrases.
This data provides insight into patients’ perspectives around accessing healthcare services, promoting telehealth programs, using digital advertising platforms, and more.
- Analyze each category of questions to identify potential gaps, opportunities, and topics to address through your clinic’s outreach efforts.
- Re-enter new search terms periodically to stay on top of the latest patient concerns and questions. Use these insights to shape engaging content and patient-focused marketing.
By reviewing Answer the Public regularly for terms relevant to your clinic, you can ensure your outreach aligns with patients’ evolving needs and interests.
Benefits for Community Health Clinics
For community health clinics and public health organizations, Answer the Public offers numerous benefits:
- It aligns with your mission of improving community health access and education. Outreach based on real patient questions and concerns can fill gaps in information needs.
- Patient-centric marketing meets patients where they are instead of generic messaging that may miss the mark. Answer the Public data helps you connect with patients’ actual concerns.
- You can create targeted content like landing pages, display ads, blog posts, brochures, and presentations to directly answer the top questions that patients are asking.
- Addressing common patient concerns and questions builds trust and satisfaction by demonstrating you understand patients’ perspectives.
- Answer the Public provides metrics to track which questions get the most searches over time. This allows you to measure what content best resonates with your audience.
- It is a free, low-barrier way to gain marketing insights without needing extensive expertise or budget. The tool is easy to use on an ongoing basis.
- You gain access to regularly updated search data for a data-driven approach to outreach.
- Improve Search Engine Optimization by not guessing which words, questions, and phrases are most common for your topic.
- Answer the Public has flexibility to research any healthcare topic to meet your specific marketing goals, whether for a service line, program, event, or broader organization branding.
In summary, by leveraging Answer the Public, community health clinics can tap into patient search insights to boost engagement and reputation.
Let Your Patients’ Questions Guide Your Outreach
Connecting with and educating the public is core to the mission of community health organizations. Tools like Answer the Public allow clinics to view healthcare topics through the patient’s lens. By entering relevant search terms, you can see the questions patients are asking and identify gaps your marketing content can fill. Checking Answer the Public periodically provides an easy way to create patient-focused outreach based on data-driven insights into evolving community needs. For clinics seeking free resources to better understand their audiences, Answer the Public is an invaluable tool to add to your marketing toolbox. Start using it today to inform your efforts to access, serve, and engage your community. Contact us today to learn more about building a strong patient outreach strategy and how we use behavioral economics to further your message and affect positive change in population health!
Answer the Public Walkthrough