Investment in Content Marketing Helps Community Live Well

Maryland-based Adventist HealthCare is dedicated to improving the health and well-being of people and communities through a ministry of physical and spiritual healing. The 114-year-old health system and integrated health delivering network offers a continuum of care and is the largest provider of healthcare in the Montgomery County region.

With deep roots focused on community wellness, Adventist HealthCare was an early mover in the content marketing space, creating a WordPress blog in more than a decade ago as a way to share expertise around health and wellness topics. The organization quickly outgrew that platform and turned to long-time partner Geonetric to build a content marketing hub in their main site, delivering a better experience for site visitors and administrators.

Moving from a blog to a content marketing hub

As an organization, Adventist HealthCare invests understanding their keys audiences and their journeys, so the team’s content marketing efforts focus on answering top question and promoting healthy habits and helpful advice. While WordPress was an effective solution for a while, Adventist HealthCare wanted to integrate the blog content more seamlessly into their main website, allowing the content to support more sophisticated journeys and ensure site visitors felt informed and connected at every step before and after treatment.

As a foundation, the Geonetric team created an overarching content strategy for site structure and taxonomy recommendations, ensuring content marketing assets shared the same categorization strategy as the rest of the website.

The content hub, named Living Well, boasts a new custom landing page design with large images, a card-like design, and the ability to filter results by certain topics. Custom interior pages have eye-catching call-outs to put readers on the path to top conversion points, like health assessments.

Cross-promoting with key providers and locations

Building the content marketing hub within the main website’s structure and domain gives Adventist HealthCare more opportunities to connect related content and build domain authority.

Using Geonetric’s taxonomy recommendations, articles in the content marketing hub are connected on provider profiles, service line pages and location pages, putting site visitors on a path to helpful content regardless of how they enter or access the site. Conversely, service line pages link back to health and wellness articles, putting site visitors on a path to helpful content regardless of how they enter or access the site.

screenshot of Adventist HealthCare's Surviving Cancer Page

This also means content marketing assets are part of the integrated site search, allowing site visitors to find article content alongside searches for doctors and services.

Improving optimization and overall engagement

Since launch in September 2020, the content marketing hub has delivered over 34,000 clicks from organic search engine results pages and 2.5 million organic search impressions. Other notable results:

Total organic clicks from organic SERP to website increased by over 255,000 or 62%.
Total search impressions increased by over 5.1 million (52.5%) since the content marketing hub was launched.
The average position of the site in organic search results improved by 1.2 positions, or 4.2%.

With a goal of using the content in Living Well as part of the patient journey, using cross-promotion strategically was an important part of the project.

Traffic to the locations section has increased by 34%, to the services section by 21%, and to the doctor section by 21% when compared to the previous period.
Users who viewed a Living Well page at some point during their visit also viewed 50,144 service line pages, 38,348 location pages, and 18,917 doctor pages.
Of the 58,382 times a user entered the site on one of the new Living Well pages, 3,377 then viewed a service line page, 3,269 viewed a Location page, and 1,761 viewed a Doctor page.
Living Well viewers completed 6,999 calls-to-action (including phone calls), viewed a video 3,296 times, downloaded files 1,120 times, emailed the organization 298 times, and had 54 other conversions.

When it comes to website engagement, overall website sessions increased by 140% when compared to the same timeframe one year ago. There was an 18% increase in pages per session, a 42% increase in average session duration, and 23% decrease in bounce rate on the website overall since the Living Well was launched. Other statistics:

Overall website sessions increased by 140% when compared to the same timeframe one year ago.
Overall website users increased by 153% when compared to the same timeframe one year ago.
Overall website page views increased by 174% when compared to the same timeframe one year ago.

Man in front of building looking at his phone

Patient Journey Mapping & Data-Driven Content Strategy

Adventist HealthCare, a Maryland-based system, had big goals for their new website, from representing their services from a system-wide perspective to anticipating and meeting the needs of their consumers with user-focused, location-optimized content.

To accomplish those goals, the Adventist HealthCare team partnered with their long-time agency, Geonetric, to ensure the new site made significant strides in engagement and conversion rates.

Adventist HealthCare and Geonetric’s expert content strategists, designers, developers, writers, and digital marketers worked collaboratively to deliver a comprehensive user experience (UX) that met Adventist HealthCare’s patients and consumers when they needed it most — when they were making choices related to their health and the health of their loved ones.

An alignment of cross-team objectives also ensured freshly written content:

Met readability and health literacy goals
Streamlined and communicated the online patient journey every step of the way
Supported the organization’s compassionate ethos across the continuum of care

Content Strategy that Aligns Brand Goals

To get the redesign project started on the right foot, Adventist HealthCare and Geonetric teamed up for two rounds of qualitative and quantitative usability testing on their website navigation and functionality. Geonetric and Adventist HealthCare completed several types of tests including tree testing, in-person testing, heatmap testing, and scroll map testing to get a complete look at user behavior.

Since testing happened throughout the redesign, Geonetric was able to tailor recommendations as new data came in.

Applying the Findings

With an in-depth understanding of their users and how they interact with different aspects of the site, the teams knew they needed to focus on a cross-linking strategy throughout the site to guide users to relevant content on services, locations, and providers at Adventist HealthCare. The data-driven content strategy helped:

Build brand loyalty and boost patient retention
Demonstrate Adventist HealthCare’s mission to make their community healthier
Find opportunities and gaps to improve the patient experience
Make calls to action (CTAs) clearer and drive desired user behavior
Stay ahead of an evolving market by prioritizing customer experience

The site’s new information architecture, section structures, and shift to streamlined content created a seamless online experience for site visitors.

Patient Journey Mapping

The Geonetric content team built user-focused service-line and non-service line structures that follow an order that’s logical to the reader and helps them understand typical experiences so they can better navigate what can sometimes be a confusing or intimidating industry. Care was taken to allow readers to enter service-line content related to where they are in their own personal healthcare journey, whether it was in the prevention, diagnosis, treatment, or follow-up care stages, in order to:

Develop a personalized experience across the continuum of care
Help consumers cope with treatment and manage expectations
Identify non-clinical and clinical interactions between the consumer and their healthcare providers at all stages, creating digital solutions when possible if gaps were present

Geonetric wrote engaging, actionable language to help site visitors quickly find paths to different care options when they enter the site on popular pages, such as service-line landing pages or the homepage. Geonetric’s design team developed icons that are easy to understand and offer patient-journey-focused clickable circles that easily show the way.

Patient-centric Content Development

Through the content development portion of the project, Geonetric put patients first by:

Ensuring active voice throughout to acknowledge the readers as people, not medical conditions
Meeting the goal of an 8th-grade readability level or lower, improving accessibility
Using patient-centered language to create more engaging and empathetic content

Patient Engagement

With the goal to create a more accessible entry into care and to help users find the information, they need faster. In a month, Adventist HealthCare saw a 31 percent increase in users who enter the site on one of the service-line pages and a 40 percent decrease in bounce rate in this section.

Online Calendar Promotes Healthy Living and Drives Event Registration

At Adventist HealthCare, health is the focus. The healthcare delivery network, which includes four nationally accredited acute-care and specialty hospitals, has been bringing health to the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area it serves for more than a century.

To promote its many educational events for the community, Adventist HealthCare needed a sophisticated online calendar on its website. Adventist HealthCare turned to agency Geonetric and its VitalSite content management system (CMS). VitalSite’s Calendar and Events Directory makes it easy for Adventist HealthCare’s site visitors to discover and register for events — and easy for administrators to create and manage hundreds of classes across the integrated health system.

Promote Wellness Events Automatically

VitalSite’s calendar provides many ways for Adventist HealthCare’s site visitors to discover events — driving more registrations and contributing to the bottom line. Visitors can browse and search for events by keyword, category, date and/or location. Integration into site search means events and classes will appear when site visitors search related terms.

The calendar also leverages VitalSite’s SmartPanel technology, allowing Adventist HealthCare to promote its events on related provider and service-line pages throughout its site. For example, when a site visitor is reading up on Shady Grove Medical Center’s comprehensive Level III-B neonatal intensive care unit, he or she will automatically see related events like the Childbirth & Baby Care Course.

Offer a Retail-Like Experience

Site visitors expect a certain type of experience when shopping online, thanks to retail giants like Amazon. And with Adventist HealthCare’s online calendar, users get exactly what they’re accustomed to. With a sophisticated shopping cart, the calendar lets visitors pay for multiple events at once. Adventist HealthCare can also offer promotions on events through online and offline marketing channels, and site visitors can easily enter those promotional codes online to receive discounts. The calendar also recommends additional classes based on a site visitor’s interests, so when a visitor registers for Discovering Motherhood, the site recommends other classes, such as Breastfeeding Class, that the visitor may be interested in attending.

Manage Event Data with Simple Administration

For Adventist HealthCare’s team, managing classes and events has never been easier. With other content management systems, it can be difficult to keep track of different classes held at different facilities. With VitalSite’s calendar, Adventist HealthCare can maintain all class and event content in one central repository and easily control where it appears on the site. In addition, staff can print class rosters and participant information, export payment sheets, and run queries to find out how many seats are remaining.