How empathy content took Cleveland Clinic from zero to 60,000,000 Sessions in 6 Years

It's happened to all of us. We all have experienced the pain of a new abdominal pain. So we search the Internet for answers. A good content marketing campaign answers our questions. Great content marketing campaigns understand the emotions and provide answers.

Amanda Todorovich, Cleveland Clinic's Senior Director for Content Marketing, is perhaps the best example of a great content-marketing program. Her team released an initial internal video and made it public. This viral video is part of the story that led to the launch of Health Essentials, an award-winning website and one of the most effective examples of content marketing you'll ever see.

Quick Takeaways

• 
  Your content marketing strategy should be based on the needs of your customers and your commitment to meeting them.
  
• 
  Consider topics that are of interest to a larger audience but aren't discussed much or require clarification
  
• 
  Empathy can be the key to connecting with your content consumers.
  

Patients first

Amanda was a Cleveland Clinic patient and had positive experiences before she was hired to their marketing team. With their dedication to patients and their “caregivers” approach, the worldwide clinic has been patient-focused for a while.

Amanda arrived in the hospital as a patient. The leadership wanted to go one step further with their commitment to the patients and encourage the 40,000+ employees to use the power of empathy.

The Patient Experience Team and an in-house media production team produced a video called Empathy: The Human Connection to Patient Care.

The video's premise was simple: “If I could be in the shoes of someone else, would you treat them differently?”

This video captures many of the experiences that we, if possible, all, have had:

• Unchecked man who waited too long
• A mother whose 19-year-old son is on Life Support
• Patient who is waiting for a transplant
• A husband whose wife had a successful surgery
• A woman who does not understand the diagnosis that a doctor gives
• Three hours waiting in the waiting room for a man.
• Mother and son visit the terminally ill father.

Every scene shows that you can put yourself in the shoes of another person and treat them differently. This video showcased the power and empathy of Cleveland Clinic. Each patient is treated as they should be.

This is the same philosophy they used to create their content-marketing strategy. This is why Amanda is one the heroes of my book Mean people Suck. Because she understands how empathy can help build growth in business as well as meaning and impact in peoples' lives.

Only the beginning

Amanda discovered that patients resonated with the video and that this was the key to its success. She used her knowledge to transform the clinic's blog, Health Essentials. It aims to provide hyper-relevant content that addresses the concerns of over six million visitors each month.

The topics covered range from diet and heart disease. One of the most memorable articles is an entire article on the impact of color on your health. It also discusses whether you can eat bacon (please answer “yes !”),) and whether or not having a broken heart really is a real condition. This video confirms that this is a real condition.

Amanda and her team didn't choose these topics randomly. Each article was chosen based on the data that they had collected.

They actually took a close look at the image to determine whether they should use the words “pee” or “urine” in the infographic “What The Color of Your Urine Tells About You?”

The data analysis showed that “urine”, as used in the title of the article, was not effective. However, “pee,” resonated with more people in the image.

The website was launched in 2012 when she started the process. Six years later, the website has seen a huge increase in traffic. It now hosts 67 million visits per month and is the most popular hospital blog in the country.

Create Relevant Content Consistently

The success of Cleveland Clinic was not an accident. Amanda and her team created it by creating the right content that is relevant and helpful to the right audience.

Instead of focusing only on the end result, they asked why content was important. They put the patient at the heart of their work and use it to touch more lives each day.

It pays off. Although the team publishes only three to five articles per day, they publish articles that have as many as 65,000 social media shares. The website also has many other articles that have tens to thousands of shares.

Todorovich decided in 2015 to monetize Cleveland Clinic Health Essentials. The ads have been a profit center for the company and generated enough revenue to cover their content costs.

How to be a Content Marketing Expert

What is the secret to Cleveland Clinic's success with its content strategy? Amanda's team is able to produce the right content and put it in front the right audience. They also make sure that the content is useful, helpful and relevant in a unique way for Cleveland Clinic.

Although it publishes three to five articles per day, its editorial team has articles that have as many as 65,000 social media shares. Your entire website might not get 65,000 social shares. This is a lot more than the average. Amanda's team also has many articles that have tens of thousand of shares.

Knowing your audience is key to success. This includes knowing their needs and how you can help them lose weight, manage their pain, and treating their diabetes. Another lesson? It is impossible to start with the desired results. Instead, you must start by understanding why the results are important. Cleveland Clinic's editorial staff puts patients at the heart of their work and makes use of its content to touch more people every day. This approach has a higher ROI than any advertisement.

The amazing story of the Cleveland Clinic demonstrates that empathy is an ingenious secret to success. Cleveland Clinic could have hired a creative agency and spent a lot of money on ads that spoke about how amazing it is.

Cleveland Clinic created and continues to create content that is empathic. Empathy is the ability to understand the feelings and thoughts of others. Amanda and her team share their stories with empathy.

What can you do?

We help clients achieve the success they only dream of every day. We follow Amanda's example and help clients create 2-4 customer-focused posts every week. You can grow your traffic, leads and sales for less than the cost of an event sponsorship. If you're interested in our Content Builder Service please give us a call!

This story is an excerpt from my new book Mean people Suck. It was published October 25, 2019.