Take Two: Team Size Does Not Limit Digital Marketing Success at Georgia’s Memorial Health

By Ed Lamb

Memorial University Medical Center appears to have answered the question of how few full-time employees a large regional health system needs to maintain a comprehensive website, active accounts on all major social media platforms and a digital marketing program that produces impressive returns on investments.

The number is two, with neither working at the main hospital in Savannah, Ga.

Dawnn Henderson spends her workdays in Atlanta, taking the lead on writing original copy, ensuring each site has up-to-date and coordinated content, and planning and implementing marketing campaigns. Beth Lakey handles most Web design issues and technical matters from her own office in Denver, Colo. Both split responsibilities for social media strategy and messaging.

“The rest of our team is on the Memorial Health campus,” Henderson says. “If you were to walk out of the main office door in Savannah, swing by my office, head over to Beth’s office, and then go back to the main office, you would travel 3,317 miles! We manage to make it work with the help of a forward-thinking team, technology, and flexibility.”

The referenced team actually represents a work group of PR professionals, healthcare providers, and IT staffers whose primary responsibilities lie far from marketing. Intranet forms that request input on needed website updates; conference calls; and a host of daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly phone conversations, texts, emails and meetings keep the system operating. Tech tools used include the Ektron CMS for the nearly 900 pages of the www.memorialhealth.com website and Hootsuite for Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Instagram. Clinical content that cannot be written in-house is purchased through a contract with StayWell.

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