Healthspan supply vitamins and health supplements across the UK. They worked with Curated Digital to create ‘Menopause Advice’, a project to bring genuinely useful and tailored content around menopause to female users, in order to build authority and boost brand awareness. Curated Digital tell us more about the project
The Challenge
Our brief was to increase brand awareness and trust in women aged roughly over 40 by creating a complete informational hub on menopause. This would present Healthspan as a key authority on natural health and wellbeing that offers trusted advice and solutions, and provides genuinely useful content that perfectly addresses the audience’s knowledge gaps and concerns. This was broken down into the following goals: to establish brand authority and trust, and boost traffic to the site.
The Strategy
When it comes to healthcare, building trust is paramount when trying to engage an audience. Creating content that not only perfectly services knowledge needs and concerns, but is interesting and relevant, will draw people to and keep them on your site. Considering the spades of medical/healthcare content already out there, it’s important to have a unique tone and approach, otherwise your site won’t be seen to have any value.
In establishing this, we wanted to completely understand our audience’s headspace: what did they know; what didn’t they know; what were they concerned about; and what resources were already available.
We’d then create tailored content that, based on its relevance, would increase the time spent on the site as well as engagement levels with content, and develop rapport with the brand while generating shares and earning links organically. The content would also help the site rank for long-tail keywords—with content optimised by theme rather than keyword—which would in turn boost traffic to the site. Titles would indicate the premise of a solution, communicating immediately that the content addresses a specific need. This would then build trust and awareness of the Healthspan brand, and make the audience more likely to travel to the main site and consider their products.
Like the start of any good campaign, we began with research, taking into account results from a survey taken by Healthspan of 1,000 different women’s experiences of menopause across the UK. We identified the key symptoms, attitudes and concerns of these women, and used this as the base for a competitor/gap analysis of what was already being said on the topic. We found much of the literature to be impersonal and dry: often leaving articles open-ended, without offering practical advice or solutions.
This read as intimidating for women seeking help and advice for their symptoms, so we set out to create content that realistically addressed the sorts of questions they were asking. We offered accessible, practical advice they could apply to their own lives, as well as actually explaining the science at play so that they could understand what was actually going on inside their bodies.
Against keyword research, survey data and gap analysis, we were able to identify key themes that would later serve as content categories. We worked on the initial wireframes on the site, and worked with Healthspan on the site’s development to ensure it stayed as user-friendly and accessible as possible. Part of this was sourcing high-quality, large images that were unique and engaging. We took feedback from user testing into account in our final image decisions.
We made sure titles were focused and concise, and addressed the health concern while offering the premise of a solution, ie ‘Soothing menopausal stress with vitamin B’. Women would get more value from an article that offers advice rather than lists symptoms, and then suggests they seek help elsewhere for more information.
We researched influencers and experts in the area, and built up a rota of nutrition and healthcare experts to work with us in producing content. These experts broke down and explained the scientific aspects of the nutrition and symptoms discussed, which we then sub-edited to keep in line with the site’s editorial tone. We were careful to keep this consistent: authoritative and informative, but friendly and accessible.
The Results
Menopause Advice has been a huge success. Without extensive promotion, the site began to rank for terms based purely on the strength of the content itself, with some articles seeing significant engagement. It has also jumped in rankings for phrases with competitive terms such as ‘signs’ and ‘symptoms’, as well as attracting attention of major media outlets; we’ve received coverage in the Daily Mail, the Huffington Post, and The Mirror.