Your healthcare marketing team has likely been creating new content related to COVID-19 to educate and guide your communities. Here's guidance and a sample wireframe to help you build a resource hub to house all your crisis information in one, user-friendly place.
When your community faces a public health crisis like the COVID-19 virus, they’re likely to turn to you for information they can trust. Make it easy for them to access facts and advice, policy updates, related wellness tips, and more by creating a user-friendly resource hub.
What types of information should your resource hub include?
To start, ensure you’re answering common questions and the most important information everyone should know about the virus, such as:
While other organizations are likely providing this information, it’s still valuable to include it on your website for area residents who turn to your health system as their primary source of information.
Focus your crisis resource hub content on local concerns. People want to know:
Create individual pages for these topics that are easy to share on social platforms, in newsletters, and through your intranet with employees and staff.
Consider creating targeted content for people with distinct concerns and questions because they are:
Use resources in your hospital, such as doctors and clinical leaders, to explain how people in these groups can protect their health. Refer these audiences to services and resources within your system for help.
Geonetric’s expert content strategists and designers partnered to create this sample wireframe to help you build and organize a hub quickly and with all the right information.
Make information easy to understand by creating highly readable content:
People tend to scan web pages, rather than reading every word, so use techniques that help them quickly and easily find the information they want.
Create a space on your hub landing page for links to trustworthy, accurate sources of information outside your walls, such as:
These organizations are on the front line of the crisis and can provide the latest, most up-to-date information. Google recently launched a COVID-19 hub of its own, complete with trending keyword data, common search queries, the latest articles from reputable sources, and more.
If your organization uses content marketing, promote those assets in your crisis resource hub.
See examples of videos, blog articles, and other content healthcare marketing teams have created to guide their audience during the COVID-19 virus outbreak.
Don’t forget about older articles that are relevant to the current crisis. Review, update, and share articles on topics like:
Reach out to doctors, nurses, and front-line staff to provide input and insight into the content you’re creating. They are useful, trustworthy sources of information for your audience.
Public health crises are scary. Where you can, use images that evoke feelings of calmness, trust, and security. This can help reduce anxieties. Photos of your staff helping patients, or pictures of your waiting areas and amenities, can help convey empathy and familiarity.
When possible, avoid images that could fuel anxiety, like needles or people in hazmat suits.
Make sure people can get to your crisis resource hub, no matter where they are on your site. Likewise, ensure people can get to other related content and services if needed. These might include:
Use social media to share pages from your crisis resource hub, content marketing articles, videos, and more. In your email newsletters, create a special section for up-to-date crisis communication. When sharing links, use UTM codes so you can track the source of website traffic.
Update your business listings, and consider a Google post to provide fast updates to users on the search engine results page (SERP) for your organization’s locations.
As the crisis unfolds and news evolves, bring your team together to assess the content you’ve created. New questions from your social followers and front-line staff may come up that produce opportunities for your team to create new content.
And of course, as information becomes outdated, update, or archive your pages.
If you need guidance planning your crisis communication hub or creating content for your audience, contact Geonetric. We can serve as an extension of your team when your community is counting on you like never before.
Senior Content Strategist
Web Designer and Developer
The original version of this page was published at: https://www.geonetric.com/digital-strategy/how-to-build-effective-crisis-resource-hub/
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