Role
Co-Content Designer & Strategist, SEO Strategist, Writer
Timeline
2 months
Tools
Google Analytics, SEMRush, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Suite
Burnout for physicians are at critical level 🩺
Background
Physicians have a difficult job: caring for patients, playing office politics, filing paperwork, and performing complicated medical procedures. These high achievers often love their career, but they’re burnt out and feel they have nowhere to turn.
So what’s going on?
Problem
Create a repository of resources and articles for physicians to reference for issues related to burnout from meditation classes to organization-wide reform.
Research goals 🥅
What issues related to burnout are most relevant to our users?
How do we best structure a large repository of information without overwhelming users?
How will users, particularly association members, interact with these resources?
Research
As part of a new wellness initiative, the marketing team at the American Association for Physician Leadership wanted to create a repository of articles discussing issues related to physician burnout while cross-promoting new wellness courses.
The team first analyzed what topics related to burnout were most frequently mentioned on the site’s daily newsletter.
The ten most frequently mentioned topics were then sent out to a list of 1000 members and they voted on the three topics they were most interested in. The top six were included as overarching navigation and topics for the final repository.
Writing style guide
While the graphic designer crafted a layout for this repository, I created a writing style guide to achieve a consistent tone for the articles and subsequent marketing materials from emails to social media posts. This way there’d be something for future writers to refer to if the repository is expanded in the future.
The tone should be professional, but welcoming and friendly as if speaking to a trusted mentor or colleague.
An empathetic voice is also paramount when discussing such emotional issues like burnout.
Organizations and medical conditions with long names should be spelled out with the abbreviation at the end the first instance and then referred to by the abbreviation for the rest of the article. “The American Association for Physician Leadership (AAPL) is…” would then be “The AAPL is…”
At this point I’d been working at this association for almost two years, so the articles only needed minor edits for grammar and awkward wording. This is also why I decided to create a writing style guide during this initiative to ensure consistency if the repository is one day expanded.
I created unique link names, added applicable metadata, and coordinated with the rest of the marketing team to include related links to additional resources and courses.
We had the topics we were going to focus on so I used SEMRush and Google Analytics to create a keyword strategy that would help elevate the SERP stats. Targeting short keywords with high traffic like “burnout” combined with long-form keywords like “burnout in healthcare industry” were used throughout each article.
Initial results
Two weeks after the initial emails and social media posts went out, we checked the site’s traffic and sales for promoted courses. Traffic was highest to pages that discussed stress management and mindfulness.
624
$40,500
in sales for promoted wellness courses.
17
visitors to the new wellness repository.
Emails/messages sent to the association complimenting the new wellness resources.
Final numbers
For two and a half months, we continued to send emails promoting the wellness repository every two weeks and three times a week on each social media channel. The results at the end of these two months included:
1,332
$193,500
in sales for promoted wellness courses.
45
visitors to the new wellness repository.
Emails/messages sent to the association complimenting the new wellness resources.
624
$40,500
17
What did association members say? 👂
“It’s exciting to see AAPL really focus on wellness and burnout, not too many places are talking about it.”
— Member #42
“I feel happy knowing my membership dues are focusing on these new initiatives and would like to see these written pieces expanded upon in the near future.
— Tester #6
“I signed up for the newest wellness courses for the Arizona conference, I’m looking forward to it!
— Member #4
“I didn’t consider the links that burnout had to issues related to diversity. Interesting read. Well done.”
— Member #37
Final work
Takeaways
This was not only a great intitiative, but a great opportunity to formalize content strategies and writing guidelines for future employees. I came into the company as the first writer in decades and the first ever SEO specialist, so I often learned on the go. There are, of course, many things I’d want to do differently or do in the future:
Test navigability of the repository with users.
Continually to test and audit pages to make sure articles are still relevant and clear while linking to appropriate sources and new relevant classes.
