How to Maximize Your Healthcare Content Calendar for Efficiency

If you’re a content manager, you likely know that a content calendar can be massively helpful—essential, really—as an organizational tool. But it’s also a key governance tool for healthcare websites that is only as effective as it is utilized. If you want your team to work smarter, not harder, this is one of the best tools to help you get there on a daily basis.

Invest in Your Strategy Now for High Returns Later

While arguably the most important part of your job, sometimes planning ahead for the upcoming year or content cycle and implementing the strategy to succeed can be the most challenging part of your to-do list to prioritize. After all, you have daily and weekly deadlines you can’t miss. If you’re in charge of managing content within the digital strategy, communications, or marketing teams in a hospital or health system setting, this strategic work will pay off in bounds of efficiency later, so now is the time to do it.

Healthcare websites in particular require a great deal of governance. There’s the need to keep information constantly up to date and reflective of your offerings, to archive fresh content such as blog posts when they are out of date, and to keep up with the SEO game. To be proactive about these needs without losing your sanity, you must be as planful as possible and create boundaries for the influx of internal requests you likely receive for changes to website content.

How to Create an Efficient Content Calendar

Here’s how to approach this project and ensure that your editorial calendar accounts for prioritization of your service lines and other areas of the website, includes the necessary people, reflects your workflow steps, and delivers a manageable but consistent flow of new content.

1. Audit What Already Exists

Before you start populating your calendar, make sure you have a solid list of every category of content on your site. This step may be more challenging if you don’t already have documentation of your existing content.

To create this documentation, use a spreadsheet to list out every service line, as well as the major groupings of content within them. For instance, ENT may be one of your largest sections of the website, but it might be managed by multiple people, so you’ll want to break it into sub-sections such as Otology, Sinus, Pediatrics, etc. Each of those sections will ultimately become a separate task in your content calendar. Consider other sections of your site that require upkeep, such as Patients, About Us, or Physicians.

Finally, assign levels of effort to each of your delineated segments. This will help later when you assign date ranges in your calendar. GI Surgery might be a high-effort section to maintain (based on number of pages, page length, and/or how much that content needs review) versus, say, Urology. Assign each section a level (one through three is a solid approach), or try to right-size your sections so they’re all similar by bunching smaller, related sub-sections together.

2. Governance Greases the Wheels

This is also a good time to consider a realistic lifecycle for your calendar. Given your resources, will it take your team a year to get through evaluating and updating each section of the site, or perhaps 24 months? We’re not talking about the spur-of-the-moment requests that come in each week (or day, or hour), but the planned evaluation, strategy, and optimization of each content section. Don’t worry, the requests will get their own space in the calendar.

A well-managed content calendar will give you a governance framework that can reduce friction from those content requests for changes, removals, new pages, and optimizations. You may want to build in a reserved space in your calendar for responding to requests—maybe once a week, or once a month, depending on how many unplanned requests you get.

Make sure to build out evergreen content updates in a way that reflects how you want the process to occur, even if that’s different from how it is now. For instance, if you want all requests to be submitted through a specific form, reviewed on Mondays for the previous week, and changes made within 10 business days, build it that way in your calendar, and document the process to help communicate expectations and maintain governance moving forward.

3. Document Roles & Responsibilities

Now that you’ve identified all of the sections of the site to be maintained and how you’ll handle additional requests, assign roles and responsibilities to each step of the content process for each section (or department). Perhaps you follow the OCA model, which we use at Primacy (Owner, Contributor, Approver), or perhaps a full RASCI (Responsible, Accountable, Supportive, Consulted, Informed), or another model that works well for your organization. Be sure to include the following roles:

• An owner who oversees the workflow for each section/service line
• A subject matter expert who will be consulted
• Content creators/contributors such as writers, designers, editors, SEO consultants, technical experts, etc.
• These roles will come into play when you assign tasks and dependencies in your content calendar.

4. Build Out Your Workflows

Each type of site content may have a slightly different workflow. Include each step in your content workflow and account for how they could differ for service lines versus, say, a Patients and Visitors section.

Your calendar will likely have a workflow with dependent tasks that follows something like this:

1. Evaluate
2. Strategize (includes SEO)
3. Create/Update
4. Edit/Optimize
5. Publish
6. Promote

When it comes to service line content, you will likely have a task for one or more subject matter experts/stakeholders reviewing the content that you might not have for another section. Ensure that you outline all the workflow tasks that accurately reflect the process needed for each section, and then assign roles accordingly.

5. Blog Content Is Special

It goes without saying that you’ll probably need a robust calendar to account for all of your different teams and cover each area of the site. If you also manage a blog that produces original content, it may need its own calendar or a different treatment within your global calendar. After all, you’re likely tending to your blog more frequently than other site sections. You may have content published multiple times per month, or even per week (well done!).

Your workflow may also look different. You may spend more time on evaluation and strategy to ensure that you’re creating content your users want and that has high SEO value, before you invest the time to produce it. Hopefully, this strategic thinking is happening in depth at different checkpoints (i.e., annually, quarterly). Your editing process may also take longer for long-form content, and you may be creating infographics, videos, custom graphics, or sourcing photos to support it. All of this must be built into your calendar to give you a realistic view of your publishing cadence.

6. The Fun Part: Build (and Color Code) Your Calendar!

It’s so satisfying—in the nerdiest way (IYKYK)—to take all your strategic thinking, your workflow, and your defined roles and start creating tasks in your calendar. You’ll want a platform that allows you to include dependent subtasks for each workflow step and allows access for your contributors across teams. Asana, Trello, and Monday.com are great for this, and platforms like StoryChief and Airtable allow for easy integration with your social media. You can also use apps like Google Sheets or Smartsheet.

Go big with color coding if possible, so that when you step back from the monthly calendar view, you can easily see what’s happening when, and determine if your calendar is balanced from month to month.

As you determine where to place different sections of the site on your calendar, consider not only the urgency of the content (for example, Dermatology hasn’t been updated in years and must be at the top of the list!) but also the timing with other campaigns you’re running. Ensure that your Women’s Oncology section is looking its best in time for Breast Cancer Awareness Month and that your blog content aligns with those milestones, too.

Everything Won’t Go According to Plan—But You’ve Planned for That

As much as you’re carefully accounting for every piece of content and part of the process you can think of, you can’t anticipate everything. A service line will need to be moved up in the timeline, or you’ll find that your carefully curated calendar doesn’t match the realistic amount of time it takes certain stakeholders to contribute.

Whatever the case, you’ll need to be prepared to make changes to your calendar on the fly to reflect the realities of your organization and the people you work with. This is another reason to choose a platform that’s shareable and easy to update. You might love Airtable, but if the other folks who need access to this calendar are using Google Sheets, consider going with the majority. Your calendar needs to be accessible and adopted by all participants.

You’ve done the hard work—now take a deep breath, and get cracking on your strategy for improving Neurology’s specialty pages.