To healthcare startups in need of content marketing examples to emulate: Look no further.
The hospitals, insurance providers, and healthcare retail companies below are at the top of the content marketing game. They provide valuable, evergreen information at consistent rates that keep their audiences engaged. They solve pain points for both consumers and physicians. And they’re easy to navigate, too, which is not always something you can say about healthcare in general.
Want to keep the 80 percent of Internet users who search for health-related topics online satisfied? Check out these five healthcare companies using content marketing in really cool ways:
1. Cleveland Clinic. Ohio’s leading academic center is home to 11,800 nurses and over 3,600 physicians, with campuses in Toronto and Abu Dhabi, and soon, London. It also houses a comprehensive content hub full of blog articles, how-to guides, and nutritional recipes for patients or anyone who wants to cook thai peanut spaghetti squash.
Or maybe you’re worried about getting a flu shot if you’re allergic to eggs? There’s information about that, too. There’s a lot to find out about on Cleveland Clinic’s blog, which is updated daily by groups such as the Brain and Spine Team (Emotional Hangover? Why Alcohol Can Give you Anxiety) and the Urinary and Kidney Team (I Just Found Out I have Prostate Cancer. Now What?).
Articles are full of relevant, actionable information and advice for patients looking for highly specific issues and symptoms. In each article, on the sidebar, there are options to book appointments, contact doctors, and subscribe to the newsletter—calls to action right alongside the content, an excellent content marketing best practice to follow.
Oh, and each simple, easy-to-follow recipe comes with nutritional information (how many calories, sugars, etc. per serving) and gets about 800 shares each time one is published according to the Ceralytics Healthcare Content Marketing Report. That’s a lot.
Another section of the Cleveland Clinic blog, the Consult QD section is meant for physicians. There, they can read about the first prostate surgery performed in the U.S. using a single port SP robot (complete with animated GIF!) or find out about the most important characteristics of a mentor-mentee relationship, where three physicians give their thoughts about interpersonal issues between doctors.
Finally, there’s a multitude of apps available from the Cleveland Clinic that help track your sleeping habits, search for clinical trials and support groups, view test results and future appointments, or even attend one-on-one virtual appointments via your mobile device.
Cleveland Clinic has all its bases covered, from consumer, to provider—to stakeholder. Its content targets its audience by segment (prospective patient, curious physician), engages them with relevant and fascinating information, and asks them to act in the same space. One of the major models of a successful healthcare content marketing hub.
2. Arkansas Children’s Hospital. Like Cleveland Clinic’s content hub, Arkansas Children’s Hospital provides a plethora of information. But this one specifically dedicates its resources to the health and wellbeing of kids, physical or mental. There’s a comprehensive blog about bullying, nutrition, and parenting; a wellspring of information about safety and injury prevention; and a long list of patient stories, articles about children who benefited from Arkansas Children’s Hospital’s care.
One of the patient stories details how the hospital partnered with a Japanese lab to develop a 3D heart model to aid during corrective surgery—and because the patient was of Spanish-speaking descent, they provided a Spanish language version of the same article, which is incredibly thoughtful and useful. Another patient story comes with a video about a girl’s party after a successful kidney transplant—in the text, the reader is reminded Arkansas Children’s Hospital is the only provider in the state to perform kidney transplants in children.
While consumer-focused, Arkansas Children’s Hospital’s content, with its mix of content types and subtle calls to action found all throughout the site, can be easily emulated by healthcare startups.
3. Nuffield Health. The largest not-for-profit in the United Kingdom has a solid array of educational content nestled under its Health Topics section. In addition to storing nearly everything you ever wanted to know about multiple conditions, each section, from Back and Neck to Women’s Health to Stomach, Bowel and Bladder, is backed with hi-res images and well-organized lists of symptoms, conditions, tests, and treatments prospective patients can pore through. The design’s great, and everything is easy to peruse.
There’s also genuinely interesting material to investigate. Want to know what it’s like to take an MRI? Or how those machines work? Here’s a video, accompanied by advice from people who went through the procedure. And here’s a 360-degree video viewable via VR. Need advice on how to talk to your boss about your mental health? Here’s that information, written by an expert clinical lead in cognitive behavioral therapy. You can also find many more articles in a blog updated several times per day.
What can we learn from Nuffield Health? Attractive design and high-quality photos catch the eye, while a variety of cutting-edge content types contribute to educate and engage patients. Content written by experts, like the above mental health article, go a long way to increase trustworthiness too. Leverage your subject matter experts to give your content an authoritative boost and to humanize your organization.
4. Bupa. This Australian health insurance provider features a content hub called The Blue Room. There are four main sections—Caring, Families, Healthier, Manage & Recover—that cover the breadth of the content available, which ranges from sleep advice to vegan recipes for meat eaters.
There’s a lot to uncover, including calculators, quizzes, and other tools, which add some variety to what patients visiting the site can do. Clearly, Bupa did its audience research to figure out what content matters most to their audience.
It’s similar to the examples above in terms of overall content, but what we love here is the color-coded design and how easy it is to find everything. The Blue Room stands out in an industry that’s usually buttoned-up, and well, clinical. Healthcare startups can strike out with their own stylish designs and create tailor-made content that their targeted audience will find valuable.
5. CVS Health. Besides pharmacy care, CVS has a robust thought leadership hub on its website, regularly updated with the latest in analysis, research, and medical news and advice.
You’ll see a variety of topics covered, including the opioid epidemic in America, which accounts for about 343 social shares per post, and prescription news costs. There’s also news related to CVS pharmacies, which signals to readers that the company is still active and engaged with users who provide feedback. Each piece ends with a powerful call to action, which directs readers to relevant landing pages or suggests they register for the newsletter.
The key takeaway is here is the amount of original, and valuable, analysis on hand. Thought leadership is a powerful way to get consumers and providers up to speed on the latest developments in industry developments. It raises authenticity, and it shows competitors you’re a major player in the field.
Healthcare startups looking to become the next CVS Health should get in touch with us. We’ll diagnose your pain points and prescribe the right solutions. To stay informed about more healthcare content marketing information, keep a lookout on this space or subscribe to our newsletter.