Strategic Storytelling: Unleashing the Power of Clever Content to Elevate Hospital Marketing Communications

One smaller academic hospital shares how it delivers content its target demographic craves.

// By Wendy Margolin //

What if you had to reach only one audience with your hospital content? Your communications would be more targeted and powerful. You’d know your audience better and deliver content they’re more likely to read.

That’s exactly what the team at MU Health Care in Columbia, Missouri, does with its “Live Healthy” blog and related wellness newsletter. The target audience is women aged 25-50, who tend to be the healthcare decision-makers in most households. It’s estimated that women make 80 percent of healthcare decisions in the U.S., so reaching them supports whole families and communities.

Amanda Oleiro, manager of creative and content strategy at MU Health Care

The strategy is led by Amanda Oleiro, who first came to healthcare as a consumer and has fought to keep that mindset even as she immerses herself deeper into academic medicine and its jargon that sits comfortably in a peer-reviewed journal paper but has no place in patient-facing education content. “When I first read hospital content, it sounded like jargon that didn’t mean anything. But when you get desensitized and hear ‘comprehensive care’ enough times, you start to think it’s not that bad,” she says.

Oleiro knew from her own reaction and from the data that academic medical jargon doesn’t speak to consumers.

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