Brand Journalism: Best-in-Class Storytelling Builds Trust and Loyalty
This article is part of Focus on Content Marketing: A Spotlight on Content Marketing Trends for Healthcare Marketers, an exclusive member report from eHealthcare Strategy & Trends.
// By Wendy Margolin //
How to win hearts and minds with stories that matter.
The internet is inundated with blogs on every medical ailment known to man. Content from medical experts matters — especially in a climate of healthcare misinformation and disinformation. It is a key component of SEO strategy.
But it may not win over hearts and minds.
Content that showcases a clinician’s passion and motivation or a patient’s lifechanging experience forges an emotional connection between your audience and your organization. These stories do more than demonstrate expertise. They turn doctors into real people whose passion is the very heart of your organization’s success. Real people put their head down and cry after delivering a devastating diagnosis. Real people celebrate milestones as much and even more than their patients.
Brand journalism is “about humanizing a company and presenting it as someone customers can trust. Also, it’s essential to tell those stories in such a compelling manner that users will feel the urge to share,” according to rockcontent.com.
Read on to learn why people prefer custom content, how brand journalism supports marketing goals, and to see examples of outstanding brand journalism from top organizations such as University of Michigan Health, Mass General, and Mayo Clinic.
“Brand journalism consists of a brand using its own media to publish stories about itself and engage readers. It’s pretty much like a company thinking of itself as a newspaper,” according to rockcontent.com.
Healthcare organizations that produce multimedia brand journalism stories on par with national journalism publications are connecting with audiences in unparalleled ways. This form of content helps healthcare organizations stand out among peers.
Consumers as well as business decision-makers show a strong preference for brand journalism. Consider these statistics gathered by Prowly:
- 80 percent of business decision-makers prefer to get company information in a series of articles versus an advertisement
- 70 percent say content marketing makes them feel closer to the sponsoring company
- 82 percent of consumers feel more positive about a company after reading custom content
- 90 percent of consumers find custom content useful, and 78 percent believe that organizations providing custom content are interested in building good relationships with them.
How Brand Journalism Supports Healthcare Marketing Goals
Brand journalism stands in the gray area between marketing and actual journalism. The articles tell the story of your brand without overtly selling. They take a story-first approach and can be supported by videos and sidebars that promote services or answer frequently asked questions.
While marketing is more sales focused, helping your audience take action, brand journalism is focused on building a relationship with your audience.
Large healthcare organizations with deeper pockets use brand journalism to:
- Share powerful stories
- Showcase thought leadership
- Share research
- Build trust.
Brand journalism also supports other marketing efforts. One chief marketing officer of a small hospital network sends out four to five press releases a month. News items range from new services and new research to patient recovery stories and corporate gifts. These press releases would tend to all sound the same year after year if it weren’t for the stories behind them. By looking for the human side of the hospital stories, brand journalists can find a new, meaningful angle for every press release.
Top Organizations Create Best-in-Class Brand Journalism
Last May, branding agency Monigle, in partnership with the American Hospital Association (AHA) and the Society for Health Care Strategy and Market Development (SHSMD), surveyed more than 28,000 consumers about health systems’ performance in delivering a humanized experience. The top 20 are listed here. It should come as no surprise that most of them include robust brand journalism in their marketing strategy.
Here are examples of five healthcare organizations creating best-in-class brand journalism in the healthcare sector.
1. University of Michigan Health
University of Michigan Health’s brand journalism is producing in-depth blogs and videos each week. The hospital’s Health Lab blog features all the typical healthcare blogs, along with stories of patient success and physician research and advocacy. The homepage looks like a news media outlet. And an October article “Overcoming obstacles to advance neurology research, mentor next generation of female scientists,” reads more like a magazine feature than typical hospital content. The site also features videos and a podcast to share healthcare information and stories.
2. GE Healthcare
GE has become synonymous with brand journalism, as one of the first corporate brands to embrace the medium.
In 2022, GE Healthcare took healthcare brand journalism to new levels with multimedia presentations and even docuseries by award-winning filmmakers, like this one on sparing a diabetes patient from amputation. An accompanying article on the featured doctor shares his riveting, albeit heartbreaking, story of attempting to save the life of a 10-year-old child in war-torn Syria. It’s the kind of journalism a reader might expect from The Atlantic.
Stories of clinicians who enter medicine because of a childhood experience with healthcare are common. Brand journalism that tells these stories as well as the team at GE Healthcare is harder to find.
3. University of Miami Health System
The content team at University of Miami Health System put just as much thought into the blog’s design as they did its content. The website, on desktop and mobile, looks more like a magazine.
Like many hospital sites, blogs feature SEO-optimized health news to answer questions frequently asked on Google. What’s different, besides the cutting-edge design, is the way they focus on the physician researchers’ stories and motivation as well. Check out this one on endometriosis that highlights one gynecologic oncologist’s research and advocacy in public health.
4. Mass General
As home to the largest hospital-based research enterprise in the U.S., Mass General Research Institute brings research to a mass audience with the site, Bench Press. The blogs like this one on strokes feature typical answers to frequently asked medical questions, together with research, data, and videos directly from the physician researchers.
5. Mayo Clinic
It’s no surprise given its budget, staff size, and reputation that Mayo Clinic would create a top brand journalism healthcare site. The News Network site is independent from Mayo Clinic’s hospital website and features news articles, SEO medical blogs, and feature stories about patients and physicians. The site mixes podcasts, videos, and feature articles to reach its audience in multiple ways they consume content.
Start Small
Building a robust brand journalism blog requires staff and budget that can be out of reach for smaller healthcare organizations. But that doesn’t mean creating a handful of solid brand journalism articles a year is an out-of-reach goal, even for small marketing communications teams. A modest goal of showcasing one feature story a month in 2023, or even once a quarter, is a worthwhile goal for even a small hospital marcoms team.
These articles go a long way toward building trust and loyalty, as well as reaching the hearts and minds of your target audience. And that is priceless.
This article is part of Focus on Content Marketing: A Spotlight on Content Marketing Trends for Healthcare Marketers, an exclusive member report from eHealthcare Strategy & Trends.
As owner of Sparkr Marketing, Wendy Margolin helps busy healthcare marketing communications teams create more content so that they can stand out in a crowded online space. She’s on a mission to build a better medical web, one article at a time. Her favorite form of content is hospital brand journalism, which ties together her 20-year career in journalism, marketing, and healthcare.