Scott Linabarger and Amanda Todorovich are the dynamic Content Marketing duo behind one of the most recognized and respected medical centers: Cleveland Clinic. ClevelandClinic.org is currently No. 1 most visited hospital site in the country. In this episode we’ll talk about their most recent success of growing the Cleveland Clinic Content Hub from 200K visits per month to 3.2M visits per month in 18 months.

The show sheet for today’s podcast is available at: http://www.triblio.com/blog/scott-linabarger-amanda-todorovich-cleveland-clinic

BEGINNING OF TRANSCRIPT

Scott Linabarger: My name again is Scott Linabarger. I’m the Senior Director of Multichannel Content Marketing at Cleveland Clinic. My team is responsible for digital marketing, websites, social, search, mobile as well as offline creative services. My team produces very high end specialty clinical publications as well as other traditional offline collateral.

Amanda Todorovich: I’m Amanda Todorovich. I’m Manager of Visual Engagement. So I’m directly responsible for the Health Hub blog, our social media and email marketing.

Jeff Zelaya: Excellent. Now Scott, I’m going to start with you. Why is content so important to Cleveland Clinic?

Scott Linabarger: Well, content is a way for us to be – to remain engaged with consumers, healthcare consumers, on an everyday basis. We know a few things about healthcare consumers. I mean one of them is that healthcare is bought and not sold. We can’t entice users to – or consumers to purchase healthcare when they don’t necessarily need it. Sometimes they don’t need it. They don’t even know when they need it. The second thing that we know about healthcare consumers is they really don’t want healthcare. They don’t want to buy – nobody wants to have surgery. So with those two things in mind, content gives us a way to be useful and relevant and helpful to consumers on an everyday basis when they don’t necessarily need us and quite frankly don’t necessarily want us. It helps us build that brand awareness and that brand engagement on a regular everyday basis.

Jeff Zelaya: Now Scott, is this something that is new for Cleveland Clinic? I did read that your role at least is something that is new at the clinic. Prior to you starting, like what happened? What was the transition that you working there brought on for the hospital?

Scott Linabarger: I came to Cleveland Clinic as a digital person and we had a – the person who was the head of creative services left the organization and we decided to take a step back and look at where the industry – where marketing is going. It was quite clear at that point that content and the leveraging and the using of content within all facets of marketing was becoming more and more important. So it made perfect sense to us to combine the channel, the digital channel which is where content primarily is getting distributed or with the actual production of the content. So I think that has really been a great advantage for us is that we have the channel. We have the data – user behavior data associated with the channel that can drive decision-making. But I also have authority over the creation of the content. So I could take that data and make an impact with the content creation. Sometimes that’s hard to do when you’re in different silos.

Jeff Zelaya: Yes. Speaking of silos and different people coming together to work and collaborate, Amanda, I will ask you this question. How do you work with Scott and the other members of the marketing team to build a strategy, a cohesive strategy? What’s the process of doing that look like for you guys?

Amanda Todorovich: It’s definitely a big collaboration. There are a lot of different people across our entire marketing division that are involved in this. I mean we really truly have embraced this idea of creating useful, helpful and relevant content. So we brainstorm and bring in lots of different people to come up with different topic ideas that we want to cover, what the format of that content looks like, so involving writers and designers and our video team in the process. I think the key though to keeping everybody on the same page and really rallying around what we’re doing is the sharing of the data. It’s showing the success, showing the growth. But then also getting really granular with it, talking about which post performed better than others, which images we’re going to use, what types of content are performing well, or even what’s failing and not working as well for us.So there are lots of discussions, lots of meetings, really collaborating across the different parts of marketing and sharing insights consistently.

Jeff Zelaya: Excellent. So you mentioned that some of the metrics that you zoned in on are traffic and clickthroughs. What else do you – what are some of the other key metrics that you’re looking at, as a way of measuring overall performance for your content?

Amanda Todorovich: Sure. Traffic is definitely the number one but that is ultimately because we’re looking at brand awareness and the only way to move that brand awareness needle is really reaching more people. So it is about volume. But it’s also – looking at our social channels and reach and audience growth metrics, looking at our emails and clickthroughs and open rates, there’s so much data in the digital space that it makes it almost overwhelming. But we’re looking at every piece we possibly can. From a success metric, it’s definitely brand awareness and traffic at the top of the list.

Scott Linabarger: Yeah. So we look at it from an enterprise perspective. Purpose of our content marketing initiative, particularly what Amanda does, is brand awareness. It’s making sure that consumers are aware of who we are and what we do. We do measure that and digital and content and our social are definitely contributing significantly to national brand awareness. But we only measure that primarily on a quarterly basis and it’s hard to manage to that on a day to day basis, right? So the metrics that Amanda was going over are the things that her – the bread and butter that her team uses every day to ultimately determine relevance, right? Because that’s what this is all about. If I could go back, step one back to – take one step back to the content marketing question, the essence of good content strategy is that it’s a merging or a – the confluence really of business objectives and strategies. What are we trying to accomplish as a business and what do consumers want and need from us? If you’re not at that inflection point where both of those things meet and align with each other, you’re not going to be successful. If you’re not being relevant to consumers and useful to them, you can say whatever you want. But you’re going to be ignored.

If you’re not adhering to this business strategy and the objectives of your organization, it won’t matter what consumers do because you’re not furthering the cause. So I think the foundation of any content marketing strategy should be finding that sweet spot where the consumer need meets your business strategy.

Jeff Zelaya: Great point Scott. It actually brings me to my next question because I know that there are a lot of marketers in the health space who are trying to do just that, but they have this pesky obstacle of working in a regulated space, highly regulated at times. Has that impacted your mission and the way you carry out that mission of providing the most relevant and useful content to your audience? How do you deal with a regulated space?

Scott Linabarger: I mean we’ve heard about that. We’ve been asked that many times and to be perfectly honest, it really has not impacted us too much. The only constraints we have, and they are constraints that we think are proper and certainly honorable, are ensuring that our content is evidence-based, clinically accurate. Everything we do, everything we produce, it’s either written by an expert or reviewed by an expert, whether that’s a physician or a dietician or a diabetes educator or expert nurses. So we don’t release anything unless some clinical expert has written or reviewed.

Amanda Todorovich: I think too one of the questions I get a lot is from the social side of that and when people are sharing and commenting in how you handle health information on the social channels. That’s something we work really hard to implement policies and procedures where we’re taking a lot of those conversations offline and directing them to the right people internally, so that we are addressing the issues. But we’re not doing it in such a way that’s really that public. When people voluntarily share information, then we also are stepping in to make sure that we are directing them – again, take it to a private message or to contact us on the phone and really pushing to take those conversations off the platform itself.

Jeff Zelaya: That’s an excellent strategy, a great way to do it. Speaking of sharing content and social, especially through the social channels, retweeting and curation of content that is not produced by Cleveland Clinic, do you show any love to other hospitals and others in the health space? What are your thoughts on content curation?

Scott Linabarger: We create. We do not curate for the most part. We feel that every day our reputation is on the line, number one. Number two, we have a very engaged collection of physicians and other experts here who want to educate and want to provide information. I think that’s the great thing about being part of an academic medical center. One of the main missions of Cleveland Clinic, going back more than 90 years, is education. That’s not just educating future physicians. It’s educating consumers and so our physicians, it’s in their blood to share with other physicians, but also with consumers. So we …

Amanda Todorovich: We don’t and part of the reason for that, we’re publishing three to five blog posts every day on Health Hub and we’ve been doing that for well over two years now. So we have a lot of content to use and we’re creating more every single day. So we’re not in a situation where we need to curate either.

Jeff Zelaya: Exactly.

Amanda Todorovich: We pretty have so much coverage.

Jeff Zelaya: You guys got a lot to say that it’s very hard to curate. I mean that’s –

Amanda Todorovich: Yeah.

Scott Linabarger: We made a commitment. We made a commitment. We invested in it. Now, we do curate a little bit on the Twitter side. Mostly it’s articles that appear in major publications like Time or CNN that feature our own physicians.

Jeff Zelaya: And speaking …

Scott Linabarger: But for the most part, I would say 99 percent of what we do is creation. We’re the Cleveland Clinic. We’re experts in this field. We have the ability to do it. We have the desire to do it. So why would we want to let others speak for us?

Jeff Zelaya: Exactly. I think you guys are doing it in the best fashion possible, getting the people that are very educated, very – have the experience, expertise, the credentials to provide this, this great content. But how do you get them onboard? I know working with doctors could be – physicians, could be a little difficult at times. They’re very busy people. How do you coordinate with non-marketers to assist in your marketing, content marketing strategy?

Amanda Todorovich: It’s really easy now. We have them knocking down our doors. How do I get on Health Hub? But I think the reason for that is that we’ve been consistently communicating and sharing data all along the way. Early on, I know it was definitely a lot harder. But again, it’s constant communication, constant discussion, brainstorming. They’re a part of the process. It’s not us always coming to them with an assignment or with something we want them to do. It’s a discussion. It’s involving them every step of the way, sharing the numbers, showing that it’s worth their time, and then giving them the exposure on the site in a meaningful way. Some of them are contributing monthly so we have a series of almost 40 expert bloggers who are writing in first person and working with us on a regular basis. Then we use hundreds and hundreds of others. So it’s brainstorming. It’s communicating and it’s definitely showing the results.

Scott Linabarger: Yeah, the foundation of everything that we do.

Jeff Zelaya: Yeah.

Scott Linabarger: It’s the data, right? Collecting of the user behavior and using that data to influence future – influence decision-making. I bring that up because of something that Amanda astutely said and that is that when you share the data internally with people, it’s really addictive, right? It energizes people because for the most part in most marketing, you release something out into the wild and you have no idea whether or not – what impact it has made on anybody. But because we can share that data and we can tell a physician that the article that features her was seen by 45,000 people in the past week or two weeks or whatever it happens to be, that is really powerful. I think word has gotten around and Amanda is correct. We don’t have to recruit physicians anymore. Physicians are coming to us saying, “How can I be a part of this? How can I use this platform to share my expertise with healthcare consumers?†It’s really not that hard.

Jeff Zelaya: That’s a great position to be in and you guys have done a great job of building your content marketing and I think a big reason is the people. It shows on this call with Scott and Amanda. You guys are experts and amazing. Your passion for what you do shows and I know sometimes technology helps out, because as humans, we could only do so much. Are there certain tools that you count on in your day to day content marketing work? What are some of the stuff that you guys have in your toolbox?

Amanda Todorovich: I don’t think we could live without Google Analytics. As Scott said, data drives everything we’re doing. So the more of that we have, the better. We have a new tool that we’ve been using that helps us even before we’re making content live and that’s Atomic Reach. It’s a pre-amplification tool that’s pretty interesting. That’s actually pulling in data from our own social audiences and giving us insight into what changes we might want to make to the post to optimize it for the most digital, social engagement. Beyond that, we have Chartbeat that’s using – showing us real time what’s happening on the site. We’re in there all the time. We look at – I get asked quite often about how we organize our content or how we track production. We’re not super sophisticated there. It’s a collection of Google docs as well as a lovely multicolored Post-it note board that we stand around and talk about every day. But at the end of the day, we’re in every social channel looking at the data those channels provide themselves. We’re looking at Google Analytics constantly, Chartbeat and pretty much any other tool that we have available to us we’re using.

Scott Linabarger: I’m a big fan of tools and leveraging technology, right? But I’m also a big fan of human intervention and human management of those things. We for instance don’t use HootSuite or anything like that to manage our posting of content because I like the idea of having real, actual human beings physically doing these kinds of things and becoming intimately involved in the process and the evaluation of its success. I don’t want to get into a set-it-and-forget-it kind of situation. I want hands-on touching of information and that makes us a lot better at what we do.

Amanda Todorovich: I also think it’s important to know too. We don’t publish a post on Health Hub at 9:00 AM and all of a sudden it’s blasted out on every one of our social channels. We really look at each channel and develop a schedule and a strategy for those channels that’s taking into account the audiences we have on those platforms, the times people are engaging on those platforms and what kinds of content they’re looking for. So we definitely are in each channel building those posts every day. It’s definitely like stuff that’s not at HootSuite, not an automatic process by any means.

Jeff Zelaya: Wow. I’m amazed at how you guys combine the data-driven approach with that human element and I think that’s what makes you guys so successful with your content marketing. It’s a great balance of both and I will finish off with this one last question. Amanda, I want to hear your answer first and then Scott, I want to hear yours as well. Where do you see content marketing going? What are your predictions for things that would change or any emerging trends that will happen in the next year or two?

Amanda Todorovich: I think – it’s hard to look into the crystal ball and make any kind of prediction. I think content marketing is definitely here to stay, definitely growing, definitely becoming more and more of a factor for more and more brands, which means it’s also getting more competitive. From a social media perspective, I think people are starting to really invest more there. So it’s interesting to see that. It’s always a challenge to stay on top of Facebook algorithm changes and tweaks that the platforms are making to how users experience content on the different channels. So I think it’s always staying on top of that and it’s – for us, I don’t think it’s about more content as much as it’s smarter content and also thinking about how we continuously optimize every piece of content we’re producing.

Scott Linabarger: To date, our content marketing – we do offline content marketing and I don’t want to forget that because typically when people think about content marketing, they think about digital and I think that here [0:20:30] [Indiscernible] has been correct and a great way to evaluate. But what I see happening now is that content marketing is starting to essentially consume other parts of our marketing.

It is becoming part of our offline and online advertising. Our PR and media relations people are starting to embrace content marketing and their world is changing pretty dramatically. The media universe is changing pretty dramatically. There are so many more content outlets out there but their staffs and budgets are shrinking and therefore they’re looking for more sources of content and brands that practice good, solid, sound journalism offering useful, relevant content can fill that void in a meaningful way. So you’re starting to see shifts and changes in the media relations people.

So that’s what I see happening is that content marketing and this need to leverage content across all of our marketing channels and not just digital. I do want to add one more thing if I may. Earlier, you had mentioned one million. Our Health Hub blog, we have actually just surpassed three million visits.

Jeff Zelaya: Wow.

Scott Linabarger: In a month in October, right? Was it October?

Amanda Todorovich: It was October.

Scott Linabarger: And we came close to that again in November. So we’ve gone from 16,000 visits in a month in the first month back in 2012 to three million in – here in 2014. We’ve focused mostly on that – exclusively on the consumer until this year when we basically took that same model and started to apply it to the physician audience as well, because part of our objective when you’re trying to grow brand awareness or reputation, as another way to talk about it, is to reach those external physicians and have those physicians aware of our expertise in clinical areas. So we launched Consult QD, which is our physician blog. We’ve got 10, the 10 specialties that we’re blogging about, sharing our research and insights in a much more science and clinically-driven way. We’re doing the same thing with that in terms of leveraging our social – we’ve created Facebook and Twitter feeds to distribute that content and email newsletters as well.

So that has grown from basically 2000 visits a month earlier this year to more than 60,000 visits in November. So we see that really as an opportunity for great growth in 2015. So that to me is part of what’s on the horizon for –

Jeff Zelaya: That’s incredible, Scott and hats off to you and the team. You guys are truly content marketing leaders.

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