Performance Redesign: When Your Strategy Isn’t Working, How Do You Pivot?

A few years ago, I helped a healthcare organization to relaunch its flagship publication as a fully integrated content brand. With the quarterly magazine leading the way, we debuted an online content hub, an e-newsletter and a podcast, all under the same brand umbrella. When developing the content that would define the brand, we relied on the sources that years of experience had told us would engage a healthcare audience: patient success stories.

A year of mixed results demonstrated that conventional wisdom had failed us in this case. Because of the publication brand’s online presence, we were able to track readers’ engagement with content between the print edition and the same topics (rewritten for the web) online. While the patient stories didn’t perform terribly, they lagged the real drawing power of both media channels: tips for healthy living.

It turned out that, unless readers happened to need life-saving treatment, they were much happier to consume stories that told them how to stay out of the hospital altogether, rather than read someone else’s story of survival. It seems obvious in retrospect; at the time, it confounded our expectations and sent us back to the editorial drawing board. A redesign was clearly in order.

A mid-course correction shouldn’t be an occasion for panic. If anything, it’s a great opportunity to prove to your audience that you’re not passively distributing content, heedless of its relevance to their needs. And it illustrates the value of response metrics: web traffic (including unique clicks from custom magazine URLs) and reader surveys.

In our case, it meant a total reversal of our storytelling priorities. We couldn’t totally dispense with patient stories — patients relied on them to identify specialists and doctors needed them to generate referrals — but they ceased to drive the feature well. Instead, they acted as sidebars to articles about healthy living related to the specific body part that had been the cause of their affliction. The doctors retained their calls to action and the refocused content meant that we’d be directing more eyeballs to their contact information.

The results were stunning. The organization’s call center reported a 97% increase in traffic. Overall, the organization enjoyed a 61% increase in service referrals, while the physicians saw their referrals jump by a staggering 169%. We were able to trace more than 1,300 new patient accounts back to the magazine brand, accounting for nearly $7 Million in revenue.

The moral: Don’t assume you know what your audience wants based on what it used to want. The best media evolves with its readers. Don’t be afraid to peek under the hood; a minor tweak can infuse your engine with renewed power.

Find out how to ask the right questions. Reach out to Quarto Creative at contact@quartocreative.com for a complimentary publication audit to start the process.