This article was written by Jessica Levco, a freelance healthcare writer who covered the 26th Annual Healthcare Internet Conference (HCIC) 
Len Matty, corporate director of digital strategy and media at Universal Health Services, told attendees at the 26th Annual Healthcare Internet Conference that if they looked at the UHS website — “it doesn’t have much of a brand.” However, UHS operates 28 hospitals, 335 behavioral health facilities and 20 freestanding emergency departments — and all of these facilities have their own brand.
“Our team supports healthcare facilities from Florida to California,” Matty says. “Every facility has a different logo, brand strategy and creative concept work. We don’t need to involve the UHS brand because all of the healthcare facilities are already well-known by people living in the community.”
As marketers know, part of hospital branding involves blogging. And in 2017, UHS partnered with Baldwin Publishing to get a handle on creating content for each of its hospitals. The big challenge was to figure out how to advance the organization’s digital efforts, while still supporting its legacy initiatives.
For starters, every UHS facility got access to Baldwin’s Taste of Wellness. In this portal, UHS marketers can choose from 28 pieces of content each month (evidence-based articles, quizzes, recipes, videos, graphics and images). Then, in 2020, UHS purchased a licensing agreement to Baldwin’s Content Cart, where UHS marketers gained access to 5,000 medically-reviewed stories and videos to use for the blogs. Pictures accompany the content, too.
The copywriting/content team at UHS’s corporate marketing department is responsible for taking the content out of the Content Cart and uploading it to Drupal for each website. The corporate marketing department posts everything on behalf of the hospitals. The corporate team owns and manages all of the websites, and the access to them, and makes all the necessary updates, explains Matty.
A few sample stories from Content Cart:
- Do I still have to wear a mask in a hospital?
- Why it’s important to know your family’s health history
- Cold weather skin care tips
- Video: 5 tips for healthier to-go lunches
- How the pandemic is affecting cancer outcomes
“There’s no reason for 28 hospitals to write the same article about why a mammogram is important,” says Toni Donina, CEO of Baldwin Publishing. “They can use our mammogram article and customize it — with quotes from their own doctors, images and a CTA.”
Especially with Google frowning on duplicate content, the UHS team knows they can’t just copy and paste the same blog across all the sites. The content is customized for each facility, brand and audience.
In the future, Matty expects to do more patient-acquisition focused blogs.
“The content we’ve done so far is helpful information that we categorize as awareness,” Matty says. “We are working on figuring out a content strategy that specifically converts patients — so we’ll be adjusting content to physician information, linking to a physician profile or an online scheduling button.”
Has your marketing team created successful content? Your healthcare marketing colleagues would love to hear about it! Submit a speaking application for the 2023 Healthcare Internet Conference in Los Angeles next November! BOLO for the Call for Speakers to open in January, 2023 – announcements to come via email and social media.