With humble beginnings traced back over a century ago to a seven-bed hospital, Holzer Health System has grown into a multi-facility system that serves 21 locations throughout southeastern Ohio and western West Virginia. The number of providers and staff have grown over the years, too, and the system now has over 160 providers and over 2,400 total staff.

That growing team depends on the health system’s intranet to access important documents, get timely updates, and access third-party tools needed to deliver patient care. Their SharePoint site wasn’t performing as needed. Like many intranets, the information architecture and homepage content organization had grown unruly, making it hard for users to find tools and documents they need. Plus, the backend was difficult to navigate and update, making it hard to improve that frontend user experience. Employees’ growing reliance on different devices also created a challenge, as the current intranet wasn’t responsive.

Holzer Health System’s marketing and I.T. teams decided it was time for a change.

Leveraging a CMS system they know and love

For a quick fix, Holzer Health System turned to their digital partner, Geonetric, to develop an employee home page on the public site so team members could get information and event updates quickly from their mobile devices.

Building on the success of this page, Holzer Health System began building an entirely new intranet on VitalSite – the same content management system (CMS) used for their public site. The marketing team was familiar with VitalSite and knew it was easy to use, giving them confidence it would be easier to maintain the new intranet.

Plus, the CMS came with all the modules and integration the health system needed – including forms and documents, calendar and events, site search, SmartPanels, eCards, a newsfeed, and active directory integration – which allows the system to deliver personalized experiences on the site based on users’ roles.

Depending on content strategy and design expertise

By partnering with Geonetric, Holzer Health System was also able to rely on the agency’s designers and content strategists to design an intuitive user experience for their employees.

As part of the content strategy, Geonetric performed an employee-wide survey to help prioritize what content and functionality users really needed. The survey focused on what was or wasn’t working with the previous intranet.

The results of this survey helped guide information architecture and labeling, based on the needs of the users and using terms they understood and used. The survey results guided information architecture recommendations that included a primary navigation dedicated to organization information, documents and resources, education and training, and benefits and HR and a secondary navigation that puts quick links like phone book, the on-call list, and the cafeteria menu at users’ fingertips. It also helped to relabel navigation items to match the words employees used in their survey to make it easier to understand where to find the tools they need.

The survey also helped to provide priorities the content strategists used to deliver homepage recommendations to help make the homepage of the new intranet as effective as possible for all users. Users mentioned roadblocks and points of frustrations in their comments in the survey, which was leveraged to make recommendations for an easier to use, redesigned intranet. One of those roadblocks was confusion and frustration with multiple forms and outdated documents, something that could be streamlined with an easier to manage intranet CMS moving forward.

The design builds off of the public website templates as well as the employee-facing page on the public site and also included some updates to the design for easier use on the intranet. It features a customizable rotating banner and also has a custom drop down menu. The new intranet is responsive, delving an optimal user experience on all devices and it also met all WCAG 2.0 accessibility guidelines at launch. It also provides a much more visually appealing and friendly opportunity to access the materials that employees need every day for their work.

Launching at critical time

The new intranet went live in early April, just as the COVID-19 pandemic was sweeping the country. The new banner was quickly updated with critical employee information, and was easy to update as the pandemic unfolded.

Holzer Health System’s previous intranet didn’t have analytics so there aren’t any year-over-year comparisons. Since July 2020, the new site has had over 6,800 users and 41,263 sessions, for an average of 5.98 sessions per user showing adoption of the platform. There have been 79,000 pageviews with an average session duration of 2:45. There have been over 2,000 total file downloads.

When Holzer Health System launched a fresh redesign at the end of 2015, their goal was to provide a responsive, user-friendly experience to their growing patient base in Gallipolis, OH the southeastern Ohio Valley.

The organization was evolving, one step at a time. But in 2017, the focus on building a stronger, more competitive orthopedic department and roster of physicians became a key focus, and the Holzer team wanted to support those investments with thoughtful digital marketing.

Aligning Clear Goals to Drive Conversion

Holzer partnered with Geonetric’s digital marketing experts to set a paid search campaign in motion for November 2017 to February 2018. Competition had shifted market share for orthopedic services, and the goal of the campaign was to drive volume specifically around joint replacement and sports medicine, bringing new patients through Holzer’s doors.

The Holzer and Geonetric teams worked together to identify the core audience for these campaigns: Joint replacement ads were specifically targeted for adults ages 35 and above, as well as older adults; sports medicine ads were targeted toward active adults. The campaigns would drive users to a landing page where they could either complete a form, which would be the primary conversion or call the system through a trackable phone number. Geonetric also set up phone call ad extensions as another option for people to convert.

With Google AdWords, keyword planners, and regional research on their side, the Geonetric digital marketing team set out to build successful, conversion-inspiring campaigns.

Building and Measuring Campaign Efforts

Holzer’s competitive differences were their local access to exceptional orthopedic care (less traveling for patients in their area), and cross-collaborative care under one system, letting patients have a more fulfilling recovery time with all the specialists they need at their side.

The Geonetric digital marketing team set up search and display ads on Google, targeting the Ohio Valley and some parts of West Virginia, as well as video ads on YouTube to drive traffic to an orthopedic landing page, which was built and monitored by the Holzer marketing team. Geonetric provided guidance around industry-proven best practices for landing page design and conversion to Holzer, too, helping to set them up for success. Tips included keeping the form near the top of the page for easy conversion, and adding a video to the page to make it more engaging.

Aside from the work with Geonetric, Holzer also had TV and radio commercials and Pandora advertisements running to build awareness of their new orthopedic doctors and surgeons.

The teams met every month to discuss the progress of digital campaigns, determine any changes or adjustments that need to be made, and reviewed the status of conversions.

Results: Stellar Conversions and New Appointments

After three months of paid search campaign work with video and display ads, the efforts paid off. Traffic from mobile devices was extremely high, with nearly 76% of the Google display ads coming from mobile devices with full browsers.

Altogether, the campaign performed miles ahead of expectations, with over 640,000 impressions and nearly 1,400 clicks. The team brought in 22 conversions during the three-month campaign and tripled the healthcare industry average click-through-rate (2%) with a 7.28% CTR.

The trending keywords for orthopedic services in their area (such as “Orthopedics Gallipolis”) brought in more impressions, more clicks, and higher conversions, too – giving Holzer’s orthopedic services and impressive team of doctors the attention they deserve.