Photo: James Lee, Chester, NH, USA

Welcome to Brilliance@Work, the first in a new series of profiles about stellar communication professionals and their best practices at work.

Stefanie Rathjen Kelly

Stefanie Rathjen Kelly, Director of Digital Marketing for Pathway Medical Staffing (soon will be Medical Staffing Network: Beyond the Bedside), shares her insights and best practices for digital marketing in the healthcare industry:

Peggy L. Bieniek: How did content marketing become a key driver of your digital marketing efforts?
Stefanie Rathjen Kelly: I got into content marketing because I realized that my digital marketing programs would go nowhere if I didn’t have any interesting, educational and thought-provoking content to fill all of our channels and campaigns. I started to curate and share content from sources interesting to our audience, and then I started to publish original content.

PLB: What is your process for creating original content?
SRK: At the end of the day your content is about your audience and being able to engage with them at a very basic emotional level. I’ve found that engaging our audience in the content creation process has been extremely successful. The audience is interested because they took part in the content. Here are some examples of content we created by reaching out and understanding our audience:

• Case Manager Career Resolution Survey
  http://bit.ly/ZrlJwO
  Here’s a link to this year’s survey that serves as a basis for collecting the information that is the bulk of the eBook content: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/pathwayholiday2013
• Over 100 Things Every Successful Nurse Case Manager Must Know
  Based on feedback from a contest that we ran during Case Management Week in October 2010: http://bit.ly/fFh2l3

PLB: What do you focus on when creating content for your audience?
SRK: You need to be specific with your content. We’re a staffing and recruiting firm for nurses. There’s a ton of information about staffing, recruiting, finding a job, career tips, etc. out there. There’s also a ton of information about nursing. However, there isn’t a lot of information about searching and crafting great career moves in Nurse Case Management, which is our specific niche of the healthcare world. When creating content you need to get down to a more granular level. If you have several different audiences, focus on your greatest revenue-producing audience first. This is the best place to start when you have limited resources.

PLB: How do you continue to create relevant content for your audience?
SRK: My advice is to get inspiration from organizations and thought leaders that have big resources to invest in content marketing. I’m a one-woman marketing show from creating the concepts and strategies for digital marketing and content marketing, conducting the surveys, writing the copy, creating the graphics, developing the landing pages and emails, and cutting up the content to feed it to our various marketing channels like blogs, social media, advertising and nurture campaigns. My philosophy is: don’t reinvent the wheel, just re-engineer it for your specific audience and business goals.

PLB: How do you “cut up your content” for your various media channels?
SRK: Creating great content is very labor intensive, especially for a one-person team like mine. I need to get the most out of each piece so I carve it up like a Thanksgiving turkey: http://cdn2.business2community.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/turkey.png

I cut up the information in each piece of content and push it out in small digestible bite-sized chunks of information using social media, nurture campaigns, etc. If our audience is engaged and wants more, they can respond to our call to action which is often an eBook download that feeds into our lead generation efforts. Here are a few examples:

• Discover the #1 Reason Nurses Change Jobs
  http://pathway-medical.com/blog/2012/07/chart-why-nurses-change-jobs/
• Nurse Case Manager Average Salary $89,303
  http://pathway-medical.com/blog/2012/04/nurse-case-manager-average-salary/
• Why 100% of Nurses Recommend Pathway Medical
  You can find content everywhere in your organization. Here’s an example of how we took the results of a satisfaction survey and turned it into a marketing/testimonial piece.
  http://pathway-medical.com/blog/2012/10/hedis-nurse-staffing-2/

PLB: Can you share an example of how you incorporate traditional marketing into your overall marketing efforts?
SRK: We participated in a trade show and gave away mouse pads printed with quotes from an eBook I created. The call to action was to download the rest of the eBook from a link. It’s a bit old school, but you’d be surprised how many people come looking for this thing. A nurse from a large managed care organization wanted 40 mouse pads for her entire team. The call to action on the mouse pad is www.Pathway-Medical.com/100quotes… and it works. We’ve received tremendous response from this.

PLB: What are some of your favorite resources for content and digital marketing inspiration?
SRK: Some of the resources I use on a regular basis are:

• Content Marketing Institute: http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/
• Marketing Profs: http://www.marketingprofs.com/
• Mashable: http://mashable.com/
• Marketing Experiments: http://www.marketingexperiments.com/

Two vendors that do a great job with their own content marketing:

• Hubspot: http://www.hubspot.com/
• Kinetix: http://www.kinetixhr.com/

Some individuals I watch for inspiration:

• Guy Kawasaki: http://www.guykawasaki.com/
• Jason Miller: www.linkedin.com/in/jsnmiller
• Robert Rose: www.linkedin.com/in/robrose
• Joe Pulizzi: www.linkedin.com/in/joepulizzi
• Rebecca Lieb: www.rebeccalieb.com

I recently attended a Content Marketing Master Class in NYC. Here’s a great summary of the event by Mary Montserrat-Howlett, which includes some of the ideas and tips I use on a regular basis:
http://blog.iprospect.ca/content-marketing-master-class-new-york-2013-summary/

“The 5 Whys” is a Six Sigma determining root cause best practice: http://www.isixsigma.com/tools-templates/cause-effect/determine-root-cause-5-whys/

Also, one of my favorite examples of phenomenal content marketing is Coca-Cola’s Content 2020 strategy: http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2012/01/coca-cola-content-marketing-20-20/

PLB: What is your contact information for questions, comments and ideas?
SRK: My LinkedIn profile is www.linkedin.com/in/srkelly and my Twitter handle is @srkellyonline. I appreciate being featured in the first Brilliance@Work profile and am happy to share this information. I look forward to hearing from your readers.

What communication best practices would you like to share in future Brilliance@Work profiles? What are your ideas for topics or people featured in upcoming profiles?