“Engagement” Is Not Enough

Jeffrey Stewart, assistant vice president of digital communications at VITAS Healthcare

Healthcare marketing is all about continuous learning. It’s a little like climbing a mountain. Just when you think you’ve reached the summit, you find there’s another crest, and then another.

But unlike mountain climbing, there is no final destination in healthcare marketing, and that’s what makes it interesting, at least for those who aren’t content to rest on their laurels.

When Jeffrey Stewart, assistant vice president of digital communications at VITAS Healthcare, came on board in 2014, his initial challenge was to improve organic traffic. And he did. Organic traffic grew 1.3 percent, and VITAS gained about 4,200 monthly users during Stewart’s first year. “We were driving incremental gains — but is that really enough?” he asked.

Stewart attributes the initial positive results to a more rigorous approach to search engine optimization (SEO), focused on local SEO and technical SEO. But he wasn’t satisfied with modest growth.

“We knew that real growth and aggressive growth [were] going to come through increased content,” he says. Adding content did drive more traffic. But volume alone isn’t a content strategy. If the people landing on your content pages can’t find what they’re looking for, and the traffic isn’t driving your top business priorities, what’s the point?

VITAS Healthcare’s content journey followed a path similar to other healthcare organizations looking back a few years, that is, ramping up activity on social media. “We started our Facebook strategy in 2015,” Stewart says. But he believed that social media had to have a goal beyond engagement. “Engagement is not a goal,” he says. “My team is not allowed to use the word ‘engagement’ in relation to social media. We talk about it in terms of things that matter, like traffic.”

Learn how the VITAS strategy evolved to focus on the true wins: Fine-Tuning Content for Conversions

Best regards,
Matt Humphrey
President