The Challenge
HHS Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) needed to launch a nationwide federal communications campaign to speed the adoption of electronic health records.
The Strategy
Katherine (while at Ketchum) wrote the 360 digital strategy for the campaign as well as recruited, trained and managed the team that implemented the campaign.
The strategy included launching HealthIT.gov that targeted patients, consumers, patient support organizations, national doctor directories, local and national health advocates, and policy makers online via SEO, social media, PPC, display ads, content marketing, web and blog properties, and email marketing.
www.HealthIT.gov houses resources to help in health IT adoption and listing local contacts for Regional Extension Centers so providers don’t have to walk this tough road alone, and a mobile-optimized Health IT Buzz blog to reach providers on their mobile devices.
Katherine led the content creation and optimization for both properties as well as the supportive link building, guest blogging, social media and email promotion campaigns for those properties.
Katherine also led the team that launched and managed their social media presences which supported the overall SEO strategy: LinkedIn; Google+, SlideShare, YouTube; Twitter, Flickr, and Scribd.
Throughout the contract (especially as the contract was winding down) we provided online marketing, social media, and web analytics training to ONC staff and grant recipients at their National Conferences. In all, we provided over a dozen different trainings on:
- SEO 101
- C-Suite SEO Overview/the Future of SEO
- SEO Copywriting and Writing for the Web
- Local SEO and promotion
- Link building 101
- Twitter Overview
- LinkedIn for users
- LinkedIn for businesses
- YouTube
- Scribd Overview
- SlideShare Overview
- Google+ (which included how to conduct Hangouts)
- Google Analytics (101-103)
- How to use Buzzstream for Link building
Our team also managed the online reporting for ONC. We created a fully integrated campaign metrics tracking report to show data and trends in social/shared media, earned media, paid media, and owned media as well as new electronic health records content creation statistics.
Reporting showed month-to-month and quarter-to-quarter shifts in impressions, tweets and retweets, social media followings, referrals to websites from social, paid media circulation, and online/offline content created – while at all times showed how those metrics moved the larger KPIs for the entire campaign and web properties.
The Results
We achieved top 10 rankings for almost 5K highly qualified keywords by the end of the campaign.
Most importantly, we changed the US Google search volume for EMR (electronic medical record) vs. EHR (electronic health record) and changed the tide – with more people searching for the correct term (EHR) at the end of the campaign.
The campaign also won Ketchum over 24 different awards including: PR Week’s Public Sector Campaign of the Year, Silver & Gold SABRE Awards, Bronze AMEC Global Communications Effectiveness Award, Silver Web Health Award, Thoth Blog Award, Bronze PRSA Anvil Award, Jack Felton Golden Ruler Award for Excellence in Public Relations Measurement and Evaluation, and Gold Quill Award of Merit.
Testimonial
“I worked with Katherine when she was at Ketchum leading the digital strategy behind our “Putting the I in Health IT” campaign, and training ONC staff on SEO, social media, and web analytics. Attending Katherine’s Google Analytics trainings were enjoyable and extremely useful as I was getting my feet wet in how Google Analytics works and how to use the data to adjust ONC’s digital strategy. Her enthusiasm for using data to make marketing decisions is infectious and I hope to work with her again in the future.”
– Peter Keesey, Program Analyst, at US Department of Health and Human Services
