Do a little research and you’ll find a lot of reasons why your business should blog: acquire more customers, share your expertise and create a two-way conversation with your audience. When Dean, an integrated healthcare system in Madison, WI, was looking into ways to further engage its primary target audience, they turned to Geonetric to help them.

As we explored options, we could have taken a more traditional approach to this request. Instead, we found a unique solution that allowed Dean to put together a section of content that resembles a blog. Using a product called Disqus, we are able to add a commenting feature to any page the custom template is applied on. Dean wrote the content on these pages to resemble blog posts. Because the Disqus code has been added to a VitalSite template, Dean was also able to take advantage of VitalSite’s SmartPanels to cross-promote other meaningful content within these pages.

Dean did most of the heavy lifting in the discovery phase of this project. They researched the audience and topics they were most interested in. That’s where “Kate” came in. Kate represents women ages 35-55, who make the majority of healthcare decisions for their families and are often involved in the healthcare decisions of their parents. To determine the interests of this group, Dean surveyed 200 women in this age range and was able to successfully narrow in on topics of greatest interest to this group – parenting, wellness, local family activities and the future of healthcare. The blog features many articles on these topics from “Dr. Mom,” a group of 14 female physicians who are also moms.

Dean is promoting the blog through posts on the Dean Facebook page, which also focuses on Kate. Since going live with the blog and placing renewed focus on its Facebook page, Dean has increased the number of its Facebook fans by more than 40 percent.