In this article, we look at the various ways you can optimise your online presence and how to decide where to start and what to build towards.
Why get online?
So what does this mean if you are a bricks and mortar pharmacy without a web presence? Well, first you will be missing out on customers who don’t know how to find you. And even customers who do know your pharmacy exists might not risk making a journey if they don’t know your opening hours.
Having even the most basic web presence can drive more people through the doors of your
pharmacy by letting them know:
- Where you are
- How to get to you
- Opening hours
- Services you provide
- Products you sell
- Special offers they might be interested in
Amir Bhogal from Pyramid Pharmacy tells us about their experience of the upsell achieved through advertising their services online:
“Having an online presence and directing people to it through social media brings in more patients to our stores, and we have seen our patient nominations for repeat prescriptions increase considerably, especially by offering especially niche services such as full health checks that are not often offered in other pharmacies. It means people who want those services and want them regularly will come back to us and they’ll be happy to get their prescriptions from us as well.
There’s a monetary gain to be realised. More people coming to your pharmacy means more people to spend money in your pharmacy, essentially. And obviously, with those nominations and prescriptions, you are increasing your NHS reimbursements. Once people are in the door, there’s no reason why they won’t pick up that analgesic or their other toiletries from you. Take our Covid-19 vaccine service, for example. We do about 140 vaccines a day and our pharmacy analgesic sales have increased massively in that period because each time we vaccinate someone we recommend they take appropriate medication for any side effects.”
The good news is that you don’t need to design a sophisticated, multifunctional website to realise these benefits. They are all achievable with a few easy steps.
Building a web presence: Where to start?
1. Conduct an online audit of your business
Think you don’t already have an online presence? Think again. Most businesses will already be listed on online
directories and search engines such as Google. One quick and easy way to improve your online presence is to ensure this information is up-to-date and accurate. Start by searching your browser for ‘pharmacy near me’. The results should look something like this.
Is your business listed? If so, you may need to claim your business and edit your Business Profile to ensure it is correct.
Next, compare your business’s online profile with other local pharmacies within your catchment area.
Ask yourself:
- Where do they rank on Google?
- How does your business look next to theirs?
- What information are they sharing?
- What services do they offer?
If your business is not listed, try searching for your company name and look at what information comes up.
Ask yourself:
- How does my business look?
- Can people find me?
- Are my opening hours up-to-date?
- Are the services listed correct?
- If I already have a website, is it listed?
Optimising the information in Google Business Profiles is a quick and easy way to use digital channels to drive customers to your business. But conducting this analysis of your local competitors’ digital landscape also serves as a useful benchmark for you to work out how far you want to develop your own online presence. Now let’s look at other steps you can take to further build your profile on the web.
2. How far do you want to go with your online presence?
There are several stages of building a digital presence online that you could choose to work through. The key is not to try and do everything at once. It’s much better to give small steps a try and see how they add value to your business rather than to develop something more complicated from the start. Think about how you use digital tools yourself; chances are you would prefer to use a slick, useful basic website than an overly engineered platform that’s clunky or slow to navigate. There is always the option to add further functions to a website later.
In product development plans this is usually called developing a minimal viable product (MVP).
When considering what meets the MVP for your business, there are three general levels of online presence that you could build towards.
Each has their own pros and cons and will require different skillsets and investment of your time and money.
Let’s look at what is required for each of these options in more detail.
As you can see, some of these options can be complicated, time-consuming and costly and there are many large-scale businesses doing them well already. When thinking about your online presence, consider:
- What is my primary objective, e.g. is it reaching new customers or offering new services?
- What is the minimum viable product I need to develop to achieve that objective and add value to my business?
When deciding what type of online presence you need, keep these top tips in mind:
- Look at your own shop– understand what already works well for you locally in terms of how your customers like to interact with you.
- Develop an online presence that reflects your shop, rather than one that sells a concept of what you think an online pharmacy should be.
3. Using your customer base to influence what you do
The people who already walk through your pharmacy door are an invaluable source of consumer insight about what is already working for your business. But it might be that you are looking to engage new customers within your local catchment area too. Here are three ways you can:
- Speak to your customers while they are picking up prescriptions to understand what online services they would use or other products they would like or ask for their permission to send them an email survey at a later date. If people ask for products or services you haven’t got, consider whether this is something you could start to offer if more people knew about it.
- Look at what there is appetite for in the local area – you could join local Facebook groups to see what people are asking questions about or piggyback on the communities of other healthcare providers, e.g. local GP or patient participation groups.
- Who walks through your door? Do you want someone different? If you want more younger people to visit your shop – what type or products or services advertised online are going to bring them in? Consider setting up your own business Facebook page and ask people.
As a smaller pharmacy chain remember that you have the advantage that you can respond more flexibly and innovatively to customer needs than larger chains.
“With larger chains they have tiers of management and they can’t just order one-off stock from suppliers or use different suppliers whenever they want. If a patient comes in and asks us for a product and it’s available as one-off supply, we can order it in, and then it’s a fairly quick development of knowing how often patients are looking to pick up these items. All it takes is one person to ask for it. Then you start stocking it and more people see that you have it and they come to buy it too.”
Amir Bhogal, Pyramid Pharmacy.
This is a great principle to think about when you are focusing on how to replicate your shop experience. Are there similar USPs you have over the bigger players? Focusing on the niche requirements of your local community and then using your digital presence to communicate what is available to more of your catchment area will give you the best chance of competing with local and national competitors alike.
4. Getting online
Choosing a domain name
Once you’ve decided that you want to build a website, it’s time to turn those plans into action. The first step is to choose a domain name for your website. This is the address that people type in the browser URL bar to visit your website.
There are many different companies that act as domain registrars – this means they lease domains to users. Some companies you may have heard of include GoDaddy or Google Domains.
Find out what to look for in a domain provider.
To choose the most effective domain name for your business, ensure it is memorable and tells people what you do. For example, if you were looking for a pharmacy, which of these would you click first?
http://www.froststreet.co.uk/
www.froststreetpharmacy.co.uk
The ideal domain tells people who you are and what you do, but also clearly categorises you as a business and as a pharmacy for search engines.
It’s important to note that you never own your domain, you are only leasing it from the registrar by paying a subscription. The cost can vary considerably ranging from £20-70 a year, depending on the name you choose and the company you lease it from.
Find out more about domain name costs.
Building your website
There are plenty of tools and templates now available to help with building your own website. Options for DIY websites include SquareSpace, Weeble, Wix, GoDaddy and WordPress. Each of them varies on how much initial and ongoing support they provide. There are comparisons of suppliers available online, but be careful when using these sites, because many are company sponsored. The best way to decide which website builder is best for you is probably to chat to other business owners who have websites you like.
Although this can seem daunting, it is much simpler than you might imagine. You could have a new website up and running within hours. And by spending just two evenings a week, you can quickly learn how to use and improve on it.
One of the most important things to remember when developing a website is to ensure it works well on mobile devices. This is the way that most customers will access your website so it’s essential to ensure it looks good and is user-friendly for mobile formats. Most of the well-known website platforms use templates that are already mobile-ready.
Developing your content
“People who go to Boots and Lloyds don’t really mind about the fact that we’re a local independent pharmacy that’s run by a family. It does nothing for them. But for those people who it does, they come to us because we offer a better service than the other local independent family owned pharmacy. We are able to use our own brand and niche to offer something entirely different to what they can offer.”
The first rule of designing a user-centric website is not to think about what you want to showcase, think about what the customer is looking for. This is where you should use your customer insight and your environmental analysis of your local competitors that you conducted at the start to influence what information you include.
In terms of what you write, make sure that you highlight specialist services or any USPs that give you a competitive advantage over other local businesses. It is also helpful to understand key search terms for your business and then use them in your homepage content so that search engines pick them up easily.
The way you structure content can impact on your google ranking – your homepage should have all the need-to-know information about who you are, where you are and what you offer.
From a technical perspective, you can create an attractive, compelling website really easily just by selecting some appropriate images and keeping the text short and succinct. It’s really important for websites that you keep information concise and simply get the basics out there.
There are several image banks available online where you can source images for your website such as Shutterstock and www.istockphoto.com. Try to choose images that are informative and communicate what you want to say about your business and services – for example, if personal service is important to you then you could choose images that reflect this.
Find out more about choosing an image bank.
Finally, make sure you include any/all logos that communicate your accreditation – such as your Pharmacy GPHC logo – or any that are required by the CQC (we’ll be covering this more in our article on Providing pharmacy services ‘at a distance’ made simple).
5. Go live and track your progress
Don’t spend too many days or weeks on your first website, it’s important to make it live as soon as possible and then see how it lands. It’s a good idea to set up Google Analytics for your website. These are free tools that allow you to see how many people are finding, looking at and clicking through to content on your website (website traffic) and also how they found you (e.g. from a Google search or from social media).
Keep looking at these numbers to ascertain: where are your customers? What are they looking for? Where did they come from (track from social media)?
You will want to see your website traffic increasing, especially before you invest in developing any further functionality. This is why it is sensible to build your online presence slowly, because if no one is using your website then adding in more functions won’t do anything to drive traffic.
Now we’ve covered the first steps to building a web presence for your pharmacy, you’re ready to move on to our next article that will help you increase traffic to your website: Understanding search, leveraging social and doing it safely.
References
Further reading and resources
Wpbeginner, March 2021. How to choose the best domain registrar.
Wpbeginner, March 2021. How much does a domain name really cost?
TechRadar, July 2021. Best website builder of 2021: In-depth reviews of 50+ services
