How ‘distinctive destinations’ online can transform health campaign success

Anyone keeping up (or trying to) with the ever-changing information and media landscape will likely be aware that AI prioritises earned media coverage as a source of information in its answers.

However, along with earned media, owned content also plays a significant role in shaping how AI synthesises and creates information. 

Generative AI engines use owned content to validate, cross-reference, and verify earned media coverage. Research suggests that investing in high-quality owned content is a powerful way for health communicators to enhance their AI visibility. 

Owned content can also, just as importantly, help convert attention into action. It provides a mechanism for people who are exposed to a campaign or message via earned media to engage more deeply, and these visitors can then be encouraged to take a desired action, such as enquiring after a new product or accessing a new educational resource.

One powerful strategy for creating high-quality, authoritative owned content that can influence generative AI and support priority audiences to act, is to create what I call ‘distinctive destinations’. This is an online channel or platform which a healthcare organisation, charity, or business can create to offer its target audience something of unique value and encourage a deeper level of engagement.

Distinctive destinations can act as the anchor point for a health PR campaign. Outputs like press releases, social content and even messages delivered verbally in podcasts or in broadcast interviews can all link back to the destination, providing your audience with a consistent, single end-point for them to arrive at.

When looking to create distinctive destinations, there are some key strategic, content and structure considerations to take into account, especially in the age of AI.

Does it provide a solution or address an issue your audience cares about?

An effective distinctive destination establishes immediate credibility and relevance by directly addressing a critical, documented issue that your target audience faces. By anchoring a health PR campaign around a legitimate solution, organisations can seamlessly guide audiences from initial media awareness to high-value, long-term educational engagement and trust.

We helped our client, the Personalised Care Institute (PCI), to achieve that with the ‘Money Talk Toolkit’. With the cost-of-living crisis impacting people’s health as much as their pockets, the PCI wanted to ensure that health and care professionals were equipped and confident to have financial wellbeing conversations with their patients. 

Data suggested that while many healthcare professionals reported seeing an increase in health problems caused by money worries, nine out of 10 didn’t feel confident about discussing money matters with people.

Developed with the PCI and campaign partner, the Money and Pensions Service (MaPS), the ‘Money Talk Toolkit’ was an online resource to give healthcare professionals the skills and tools to support patients experiencing money worries.

This ‘distinctive destination’ positioned the PCI as an organisation that was supporting frontline healthcare staff to improve their care for patients who had money worries, through helpful and effective educational materials and guidance.

4,000 healthcare professionals would go on to access the Money Talk Toolkit, and a number of healthcare professional associations have given the resource a permanent home on their website.

Does it provide unique data and insights?

Integrating proprietary data and expert commentary transforms an online platform into a high-authority trust signal. Because AI retrieval algorithms and human readers both prioritise verifiable proof over generic summaries, content that is rich in unique statistics generates significantly higher audience engagement, search visibility and AI-retrieval.

Unique data, when coupled with expert commentary or quotes from health and care experts, can underpin a truly authoritative and credible ‘distinctive destination’. This approach is also incredibly useful for maximising owned content’s AI visibility (check out our previous insight blog on how to generate data through audience surveys).

As AI search engines don’t just summarise text, but hunt for verifiable proof, their retrieval algorithms prioritise high-credibility trust signals like proprietary data, concrete statistics, and authoritative expert quotes. If your content is rich in data and expertise signals, it experiences a significant lift in AI visibility because you are giving the model exactly what it needs to validate its answers.

Proprietary data and authoritative expert voices were combined on the distinctive destination for our campaign with the Sleep Charity, ‘Dreaming of Change’. Dreaming of Change aimed to make the issue of insomnia impossible for the Government to ignore by revealing the true scale and impact of the condition and what practical policies could be introduced to tackle the UK’s ‘sleep crisis’.

Compelling data, published in a white paper by the charity, which suggested that there could be up to 14 million undiagnosed insomnia conditions in the UK, featured on a campaign homepage, alongside a supportive statement from The British Sleep Society. The campaign would result in coverage on BBC Breakfast, Channel 5 News, Daily Mail and The Lancet, and the campaign’s policy calls were backed by two Government health ministers.

AI housekeeping

To ensure your distinctive destination ranks effectively within modern AI search features there are a few technical ‘AI housekeeping’ elements that are important to keep in mind when designing and maintaining these platforms. 

• Keep it fresh: Firstly, it should not be "set-and-forget". AI models have a distinct bias toward what is current, so having a strategy of keeping the destination regularly updated with new content is essential for maintaining visibility. Fortunately, having the distinctive destination in place, and anchoring it around an issue you are leading on, provides a springboard for future campaigns and activity.

• Lead with the punchline: Your distinctive destination can also be made extractable by using an inverted pyramid structure and a machine-readable architecture. Because AI engines heavily favour the top portion of a webpage - often pulling their primary citations from just the first 30% of a page - you need to front-load a concise, 40-to-60-word "atomic answer" directly below your subheadings. As we have done in this very blog (see italics)!

Conclusion 

Distinctive destinations can be transformative for health campaigns by helping to establish authority and credibility, generating outputs like earned media coverage, influencing AI retrieval and, ultimately, driving outcomes like sales leads, stakeholder backing for policy calls or healthcare professionals accessing educational resources. 

But, designing and launching distinct destinations requires careful planning and design around content, structure and how it fits into your overall communications and PR strategy.