MARKETING

Driving Consumer Engagement Via a Digital Content Hub 

There’s an old saying in journalism that “the shortest distance between two people is a story.”

“That’s been the guiding principle of my career,” says Amy Stevens, vice president of marketing and communications for Tidelands Health in coastal South Carolina, who got her start in media as a writer and reporter for newspapers in Tennessee. “We try to build our marketing programs around connecting through story and information that’s meaningful to people.”

That idea was the driving force behind the development of MyCarolinaLife.com, the four-hospital community health system’s digital content hub for residents of the region, which first launched in 2018. The approach is simple: Create entertaining and educational content to engage community members in their own health and wellness.

The lively, photo-heavy site features articles on everything from coping with the ongoing baby formula shortage to preventing falls, helping teens navigate social media, and how a Tidelands Health pediatrician lost 80 pounds by embracing healthy habits. That content is then used to fuel the health system’s communication channels, including its corporate website, social media pages and media relations program—and those communication channels in turn funnel traffic back to MyCarolinaLife.

 

At first glance, MyCarolinaLife looks like it must have been costly to develop and maintain, but looks can be deceiving. As a small community health system with a total of 350 beds among its four hospitals, “we are not a Cleveland Clinic that has tons of resources available,” Stevens says. “But you don’t have to be one of the big boys to do amazing work. You just have to be creative in how you develop a site and how you fund it, to make it affordable and sustainable.”

Big Bang for Little Bucks

MyCarolinaLife costs Tidelands Health approximately $85,000 a year to operate — a figure that includes site maintenance, social media expenditure, salary expenses (for 0.25 full-time equivalent) to supervise it, and a panel of stringers who serve as its freelance reporters.

“We try to run the site like a newsroom, with an editor who manages our pool of reporters who are paid on a per-story basis,” Stevens says. “These stringers are based all over the country, and at any given point we might have half a dozen to a dozen working for us. Of course, we’re not using them all at one time. If we have a new story that we’d like to assign — like managing jellyfish stings, because now it’s summer and we’re located near the beach — we’ll ask who wants to take it, someone grabs it, and we hook them up with a Tidelands Health expert to serve as the primary source. The stringer writes it, we review it and then it’s good to go.”

Tidelands Health also saved costs on building the platform by working with a team of web developers with which it had a longstanding relationship. “Years ago, when I was in a different job, these guys were young and just starting out. They pitched me a web project and I took a chance on them,” Stevens says. “Now they’ve gotten much bigger and I’m probably one of their smallest clients, but we’ve maintained that relationship because I was there when they were just getting started. That’s a key lesson: Nurture those relationships.”

A Trusted Source in a Time of Need

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, MyCarolinaLife was less than two years old, and the site had a steady, respectable traffic of about 4,200 pageviews per month. As consumers faced the biggest health threat in decades, they sought reliable information from trusted sources, and MyCarolinaLife was there for them. In March 2020, the site’s monthly pageviews surged to 84,839—a 361% increase in site visits and a 299% increase in unique visitors, with top-performing content pieces viewed as frequently as 30,000 times each.

On Facebook, one of the primary channels for distributing the site’s content, MyCarolinaLife content had 613 reactions, 195 shares and 105,000 impressions in December 2019. During the March 2020 surge of COVID-19 interest, that spiked to 7,600 reactions, 4,400 shares and 1.3 million impressions for the month. “People were desperately searching for COVID-19 information, and we were churning it out because we had the mechanism to do it with all these stringers,” Stevens says. “It really elevated our program.”

Over the next 18 months, traffic remained strong. Although the peak levels of interest gradually began to subside as the immediate crisis of the pandemic waned, MyCarolinaLife continues to benefit from a sustained bump in traffic more than two years after the pandemic began. In December 2021, with interest in COVID-19 subsiding, the site recorded 10,340 pageviews for the month, while on Facebook, there were 1,600 reactions, 440 shares and 426,000 impressions for the month, according to Stevens.

Measuring Return on Investment

Beyond those strong numbers on engagement, how do you measure the return you’re getting on content creation? For Stevens, a key indicator is conversion metrics. “We want to convert that engagement into business for our clinicians,” she says. “Part of that requires thinking ahead when you’re sourcing your stories. Feature experts who have availability and capacity, not the physician who has a three-month waiting list for new patients.”

MyCarolinaLife embeds conversion-friendly links throughout its content that direct patients to the experts they’ve come to trust while reading the site’s stories. “When we originally launched the site, we’d call doctors and nurses to ask them to serve as experts and they just didn’t have time,” Stevens says. Then one doctor would take the time to do a story, and within a week, the practice manager would call us to say that they’d received 15 calls from new patients who had clicked in from the story. Pretty soon we had other doctors saying, ‘Hey, can I be featured on the site?’”

From January to May 2022, more than 1,000 users were converted from MyCarolinaLife to tidelandshealth.org, primarily through its practice and provider profile pages. In addition, approximately 1,200 users converted from the hospital’s website to MyCarolinaLife over the same period, reflecting the effectiveness of embedding MyCarolinaLife content in provider profiles on tidelandshealth.org, according to Stevens.

“We recently published a MyCarolinaLife.com story highlighting a new treatment for knee pain,” Stevens says. “After it went up, we received this message from our director of pain management: ‘Wanted to send a quick thank you. Our practice has received a large influx of calls after community members read the article on Dr. Galica. Thank you for your work in getting it out there!’”

Stevens has some advice for other smaller hospitals and health systems seeking to build a similar program: “Be deliberate in building your channels first. You have to have places to push out information, like good social media channels, a corporate website, internal communications and relationships with the media,” she says. “Take content where people are engaging with you; don’t expect them to come to you. You don’t have to break the bank. Start small and grow your program. Don’t let your size be a barrier.”

Learning More

• To hear a preview from Amy Stevens about her presentation topic at this year’s SHSMD Connections conference, click here to listen to her recent SHSMD Rapid Insights podcast episode.
• Register for SHSMD Connections 2022 in-person conference this September in DC to attend Amy’s breakout session “Content is King; Long Live the King: Driving Consumer Engagement Via a Digital Content Hub.”

This article features interview with:

Amy Stevens
Chief Marketing Officer
Tidelands Health

image credit: istock.com/franckreporter