Children’s Health

Building and executing a physician-focused content marketing strategy

Increasing physician referrals and reputation scores

Roles: Led client workshops, built content strategy, interviewed SMEs and wrote content

Position: Content director at Message Lab Media, a healthcare marketing agency

Children’s Health houses Children’s Medical Center Dallas and is the nation’s 8th largest pediatric health system. They turned to Message Lab Media, where I was a content director, to build a physician marketing program from the ground up.

Skip down to find links to my published articles

Challenge

Physicians are busy people with full schedules. They don’t read marketing fluff. If we wanted high open rates and engagement, we had to share new insights and write at an academic level from the start.

While Children’s Health had been creating physician-facing content, an audit we performed found that the unique insights and stories of their physicians wasn’t being shared. It sounded too much like press releases, which wouldn’t move the needle with a physician audience.

Instead, we wanted to bring the voices of Children’s Health physicians to the forefront.

Audience goals

  • Read useful stories about clinical trials, medical devices, new treatment options, etc.

  • Learn how physicians in their field are tackling specific issues

Business goals

  • Increase physician referrals

  • Build brand awareness with physicians in North Texas and nationwide

  • Increase U.S. News rankings across 10 core service lines

  • Highlight Children’s Health physicians as experts in their fields

Approach

The Message Lab Media founder and I went to Dallas and led a 2-day workshop. We helped the Children’s Health marketing team define their goals, develop personas, and, most importantly, identify the goals and needs of their target audiences.

We then met with the physicians that led their service lines to understand their differentiators and brainstorm content ideas. During these sessions, I pushed the team to ask themselves, “What would a busy physician want to read?” And to focus less on, “What do we want to promote?”

From this workshop, I built out a 6-page content strategy and a year-long editorial calendar.

I and the Message Lab writing team then began writing content that balanced storytelling with business goals. Every story included a physician interview, which was key to writing something that wasn’t at a basic anatomy 101 level. (Though I love medical research, I was a Comms major, not Pre-Med.)

Results

This marketing campaign became a core engine for reputation building. The stories were published on the Children’s Health website and shared via Doximity, a networking platform for medical professionals.

  • The vast majority of Doximity content outperformed benchmarks. For example, a pediatric gastroenterology campaign had a view rate of 65%, well above Doximity’s benchmark of 19 to 29%.

  • The emailed Children’s Health content typically sees open rates of above 13% and click rates of above 7%, significantly higher than the average.