DON'T WRITE ANYTHING IN THIS FIELD

Increase Traffic 800% To Your Hospital’s Blog

Executive Summary

The LiveWell team at Henry Ford Health System (Henry Ford) came to Aha Media Group (Aha Media) with an exciting goal and a solid foundation: Target a wider audience for its existing online wellness gateway. At that time, the website hosted 90+ wellness programs and served more than 23,000 employees within the Henry Ford.

Creating a content strategy and custom content with Aha Media resulted in a 800% spike in their traffic within 1 year.

The Challenge

The LiveWell site was not originally intended to be a blog. Rather, it was a publication designed to host syndicated content. Topics directed users to information about Henry Ford’s wellness programs.

There was also a business concern, since traffic was mostly coming from employees who were directed to the site as the source for wellness programs. The LiveWell team wanted to see traffic coming from a variety of external sources.

The team needed to clearly define their audiences, as well as establish clear business priorities. They were not using a structure designed to host a blog, the preferred solution. And the LiveWell team found the syndicated content boring and bland. It didn’t align with the goal they had for the publication, which was to create relevant, engaging and personalized healthcare content for their target audiences. Low traffic plus zero engagement resulted in unhappy marketers and executives

Aha Media’s Approach

Aha Media began discovery in the summer of 2013, interviewing stakeholders, conducting a content audit and completing a social media analysis

Workshop

During a day-long workshop, we created personas, messaging and voice and tone guidelines.

Repurpose Content

The LiveWell team made a business decision to repurpose its website into a blog, where external audiences could read about wellness topics.

User Engagement

From those blog posts, readers would be directed to wellness program content within the Henry Ford Health System.

My colleagues and I appreciate Aha Media’s organized process for managing projects and their writers’ professionalism. We are confident that when they interview our physicians, they are prepared, respectful of their time and a positive reflection on our marketing and web department. Most of all, though, I really value the quality of their writing. A major pet peeve of mine is spending time rewriting copy that I have paid a professional writer to produce for me. With Aha Media, it is rare that we have more than minor edits. When we do, they are open to feedback and willing to make the adjustments needed to make it right. We are grateful to have such a reliable partner for our web content needs.

Brooke Hess

Marketing Manager, Content Strategy & Promotions

The Results

Working closely with the LiveWell team, Aha Media began writing content for the new LiveWell site in the spring of 2015.

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An analysis in November 2015 showed that blog traffic had risen 800%. The content was also directing almost 100 users per month to Henry Ford’s wellness programs.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The syndicated, vanilla content that the team didn’t like became custom content that spoke directly to the strategic personas. Now users can find blog posts like:

Are digital devices harming your vision?
Is your fitness tracker making you fat?
Are you experiencing caregiver burnout?

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Traffic was also nicely split between organic, posts and referrals, showing that it was coming from a variety of sources – one of the business goals.

Lessons Learned

Use data and research to clearly define your audiences, messaging, and voice and tone.
Create a content strategy that directly addresses business goals.
Track your success through data and analytics so you can convince your executives to fund more content strategy and content marketing efforts.