The birth of a child. The need for a scan. A visit to a sick loved one. Each person enters and engages with a hospital for different reasons. But as a brand, how does a hospital stay relevant before and after those moments? With this question in mind, the Memorial Hermann team spent 2018 building and launching a data-informed content strategy designed to engage consumers, facilitate long-term relationships, build trust and drive revenue for the brand.
As we rolled out each piece of content, we listened and learned from our audience. We found they were most likely to engage with us on five key topics: healthy eating, fitness, family relationships, wellness and staying healthy within the city we serve, Houston.
Resolution was a campaign built out of these learnings. As a free, five-week challenge, Resolution was designed to provide solution-oriented support for common new year's resolutions—and goals we knew our audience was interested in because of their engagement with our content throughout 2018. Each week had a different focus:
Week One: Refresh your diet
Week Two: Recharge your workout
Week Three: Rekindle your relationships
Week Four: Renew your mind
Week Five: Rediscover your city
Armed with content and weekly challenges we knew would entice, the objective of Resolution was to activate our digital channels, capture leads, build relationships and drive value for the brand. Upon signing up, participants were offered five weeks' worth of weeknight meal plans and shopping lists, at-home workouts, weekly challenges, articles and videos, digital support and enticing giveaways.
This campaign capitalized on a key "moment that matters" for healthcare brands: people's desire to improve their health at the start of a new year. While our audience had resolutions, our team had the experts and knowledge to provide solutions. With this as our base, the campaign was built around the following qualities:
Data driven | Using internal metrics, we identified our ideal customer. This allowed us to outline the sex, age, income, interests and life phase we needed to target and engage with our campaign.
Conversion focused | This campaign was designed to capture consumer leads who we could nurture and ultimately convert to patients. Therefore, to participate in Resolution, individuals gave Memorial Hermann their names and email addresses.
Content based | In addition to demographic and psychographic information, we also relied on content performance and the types of articles and videos we produced to shape the themes of each week. Knowing our ideal customer and their digital consumption habits, we identified the intersections between their interests and our expertise. With this background, we created content focused on healthy eating (Week One: Refresh your diet), fitness (Week Two: Recharge your workout), family relationships (Week Three: Rekindle your relationships), wellness (Week Four: Renew your mind) and staying healthy within Houston (Week Five: Rediscover your city).
The content came in various forms:
1) Weekly, digital PDFs sent via email with a meal plan and shopping list, detailed recipes, nutritional information and at-home workout guide.
2) Videos on how to cook various recipes, information on healthy grocery shopping, GIFs of each workout and curated content featuring health and wellness topics.
3) Weekly articles that related to the challenge and focus of each week, all of which featured a doctor or expert within our healthcare system.
4) Weekly Facebook Live events that expanded on the various challenges and offered in depth conversations with our expert practitioners.
Community oriented | Resolution featured numerous partners including:
1) H-E-B, a Texas-based grocery store with hundreds of locations throughout the state. Each week, we provided a customized landing page on H-E-B's website that featured all the ingredients needed to make the weekly meals. Participants could easily purchase the ingredients, pick their order up curb-side or have it delivered directly to their home.
2) A local influencer, @SmartInTheKitchen, who's known for her family-friendly meal plans in Houston. This influencer created 25 weeknight dinner recipes that our dietitians then reviewed and optimized for nutritional purposes. Our in-house media team also photographed and created videos of the recipes. Lastly, the influencer promoted the campaign on her own social channels.
3) The Houston Rockets, Westin Hotels, Lemon Laine (a natural beauty and wellness shop created by a former GOOP employee) and other vendors provided enticing giveaways like personalized workouts, weekend getaways and shopping sprees that our participants competed to win.
We also created a closed Facebook group where participants could find digital support, ask questions and stay engaged.
Digitally integrated | Resolution was oriented around the channels our targeted customers use daily: social media and email. All content was designed specifically with the channel and digital journey in mind.
In less than three weeks, we were able to attract 20,760 people to sign up for Resolution. This not only exceeded our goal of 10,000 participants, but also set the record for the most successful lead-generation campaign in the company's history. Of the more than 20,000 participants, 76% fit within our "ideal customer" persona. 20% of those leads were completely new to the Memorial Hermann Health System and the average cost per lead was $1.03, which is 99% less than the healthcare average. Throughout the campaign, we deployed six emails to participants with an average open rate of 50%, 42% higher than the healthcare average. From the campaign, we were also able to drive appointments to our primary care and specialty physicians, the value of which is still being calculated. Moreover, the response from consumers was overly positive: 82% said they were more likely to choose Memorial Hermann because of Resolution, 55% said they were more active as a result of the campaign and 52% said they lost weight. There was also an overwhelming request for us to continue offering meal plans and workouts. Based on the tremendous response, we're now building Resolution Refresh, which will offer seasonal meal plans from vendors throughout Houston, including local farmers markets, acclaimed restaurants and well-known chefs.
