Launched in October 2009, Carestream’s blog, “EverythingRad,” was initially built as a platform to serve multiple purposes for the organization. These included providing a voice for the company’s subject matter experts, inserting the company as being a thought leader in the medical imaging and healthcare IT space, providing helpful information to customers and prospects, and improving search rankings through the development of a consistent stream of new content.
What started as a way to push communication outside the United States, now in 2013, EverythingRad has evolved into the company’s major global platform for new product/service announcements, op-ed pieces related to industry trends, contributor program from industry reporters and editors, Carestream customer testimonials, and a platform to promote content such as infographics, white papers, and eBooks. EverythingRad now registers between 3,000-4,000 page visits per month, and has even served as a way to track readership across the different global regions in which Carestream is present. Compared to 2011, which saw 98 posts published on EverythingRad, 2012 saw 129 posts published on the blog—an increase of 31 posts. This steady stream of valuable, useable content resulted in the largest readership and unique visitor numbers—both domestic and globally—that the blog has seen in its existence.
To increase global readership, Carestream needed its regional managers to deliver content focused on their specific area. A communication plan was developed to motivate the regions to deliver customer referrals, as well as assign specific local thought leaders. These thought leaders would be able to contribute their own blog posts that were about localized trends. It was planned that global readership outside of the United States and Canada (US&C) would increase by focusing on topics that were of the most importance to the regions.
In regards to increasing the number of page views and unique visitors, the Global Marketing Team launched a project to increase the volume of content published, improve on the quality of content, and increase the amount of blog promotion across Carestream social media channels and marketing initiatives, such as email marketing campaigns.
Organization is the key to success in the blogging and content creation world. To keep the Global Marketing Team on task, we developed an editorial calendar which outlined future posts, topics, the author of each post, due dates, and what stage of the approval process the post(s) were in. This was kept in accordance with trade shows that were coming up, product launches, and other marketing initiatives so that content across different mediums could be kept in-synch with one another.
To bring in content from regions outside of the US&C, we conducted an employee outreach strategy which encouraged regional managers to conduct outreach to their customers in order to gauge who would be interested in submitting a blog post. This outreach also resulted in several regions contributing blog posts about particular industry trends, as well as soliciting post contributions for regional industry thought leaders and trade publication editors/reporters. Because of this outreach, Carestream was able to greatly increase the volume of contributed content from outside the US&C, resulting in a larger readership from these regions.
Here’s a selection of our most read blogs:
We increased our global readership of EverythingRad to 57% in 2012, increased page views by 19% to a total of 45,713, and increased unique visitors to the blog by 30%, to a total of 28,688 in 2012.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Carestream Health was a 2013 Pinnacle Award winner in the Element category #8: blog. For a full list of the 2013 winners, read the News Release. Rochester Business Journal’s article following the event is available here. A full photo album from the event is posted here.
By Rich Pulvino, Social Media/Digital Media Specialist, Carestream Health
