Content continues to reign supreme in all industries, including health care. Over the last several years, engaging digital content has only increased in importance, not only for brand building, but also for establishing trust among health care professionals and patients. At Mayo Medical Laboratories, this led us to think about how we could proactively address these trends and create a new, dynamic digital communication hub that would act as a creative and educational platform for our organization.
Our Strategy
This initiative required producing compelling content and a great user experience, so we began the development of Insights, which would be an information hub for a wide range of subjects including product-specific content, online education, industry news, and profiles of our staff.
Our objectives for a new website included creating a featured-based blog, custom-designed user experience, and special sections to address trending or hot topics in the areas of neurology, gastroenterology, hematology, oncology, and other medical subspecialties. We also knew that accomplishing this would mean that both our website and infrastructure would need to be more robust to meet the demands of the health care market.
Another key part of our strategy involved reimagining a legacy print publication titled, the “Communiqué” as a long-form, journalism-style monthly feature to keep our clients up to date on the inside stories behind the people, research, and service offerings.
Finally, we saw our efforts as creating a marketing “solar system” with Insights at the center, with all other digital tools driving traffic to the platform. Additionally, this strategy was leveraged to improve the overall user experience across our digital platforms.
As a starting point for setting our goals, we examined the best-in-class marketing sites across all industries, not just health care, that had implemented similar initiatives. As part of this research, we studied and documented key features and technologies of dozens of sites, which included General Mills, Microsoft, Under Armour, and General Electric, whose digital communication strategies we admired.
Setting Our Goals
This research led us to defining our overall goals for the digital communication hub:
- Create a beautiful and responsive design.
- Commit to a simple layout.
- Ensure an intuitive user experience.
- Apply an editorial photography style.
- Integrate cinemagraphs and video on feature stories.
- Introduce a byline and new perspectives.
Putting the Plan in Place
We focused on the differences between the operational web and the editorial web, which allowed our team to focus on strategy and apply its expertise where it would have the most impact. One key part of our requirement gathering was the engagement of every functional area of our business to determine use cases and opportunities for enduring content. We also invited users to participate in content creation by opening up Insights as a platform for our colleagues to share their perspectives on a diverse array of subjects. These efforts made our communication hub more valuable, created a community around our content, and expand our contributors without adding to our budget for content creation.
To ensure our content hub continued to evolve with the shifting demands of the market, we continue to hold weekly editorial board meetings to set priorities and propose enhancements related to the development of our content and platform. Also, we prioritized content that amplified our key differentiators such as celebrating the contributions of our employees, highlighting the “little things” that demonstrated our attention to detail, curating knowledge, tackling common issues to deflect in-bound calls for our support teams, and investing in mission-driven content around patient care, education, and research.
The Results
Since launching our digital communication hub, we have had the pleasure of hearing members of our sales team, as well as colleagues throughout our organization, sharing comments such as, “Did you see the new Insights post?” and “How can we get something published from our area?” These comments are very encouraging and a sign that we succeeded in meeting our goals.
Our web analytics and social engagement data also confirmed that the strategy had been a success. We saw increased page views and referral traffic, time on site, and pages viewed per session as well as expanded global reach.
Three key takeaways from this initiative were:
- You know your business best, don’t let other departments or vendors steer you away from your vision.
- Partner to make it a platform for the whole company, not just the marketing team.
- Focus on content. A content hub needs continuous fuel and innovation.
By the Mayo Medical Laboratories Marketing Team | Posted May 23, 2018
For more information on designing a dynamic digital communication hub, please contact us:
A. Cousin, Jr., MBA, FACHE, Senior Director of Strategy, at cousin.andy@mayo.edu
Andrew Tofilon, MHA, Senior Marketing Manager, at tofilon.andrew@mayo.edu
Brent Westra, Senior Product Manager, at westra.brent1@mayo.edu