Sibley Heart Center
Pediatric Cardiology Center Finds New Inspiration and Growth with GreenMellen
Facing a lack of margin and inspiration, a children’s healthcare provider turned to GreenMellen for digital marketing help. Through a close collaboration, they’ve been able to grow an online community with their patient families and supporters.
The Client
Sibley Heart Center Cardiology is the outpatient pediatric cardiology division for Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta (CHOA)—one of the largest children’s health systems in the United States. For over 30 years Sibley has treated a wide range of children’s congenital heart defects (CHDs) at their 22 clinics across Georgia. Their award-winning medical team consists of more than 50 cardiologists, cardiothoracic surgeons, cardiac anesthesiologists, advanced practice providers, genetic counselors, nutritionist, and a social worker. All of this allows Sibley to handle one of the three largest patient volumes in the country.
Even though they’re owned by the CHOA network, Sibley is a subsidiary that operates independently—meaning that all of the marketing and promotions is handled in-house. As you can imagine, there’s a lot of work when it comes to marketing for such a prestigious medical organization.
The Challenge
Katina joined the marketing team for Sibley over five years ago. As the manager for marketing, public and physician outreach, she has a wide range of job responsibilities—including managing social media, coordinating with the community, responding to media requests, and handling website updates. As is the case with many nonprofit organizations, Katina started out as a team of one. She had to find the time to juggle all of those demands by herself. Which meant that not every responsibility got the time or attention she wanted to give it.
“With all of my priorities, I was often delayed in getting to blogging or social media,” said Katina. “We often got to things last minute and weren’t able to do everything we wanted with digital marketing. We had to scale things back a lot.”
Limited by time and personnel, there would always be some missed opportunities for Sibley’s marketing efforts. That’s why they decided to seek out help from a marketing agency.
Prior to working with GreenMellen, Sibley Heart Center had scattered and mostly reactive marketing efforts. Out of necessity, the focus was to get tasks done, which didn’t leave them much time for strategic thinking or creative brainstorming.
The team had just started a blog to showcase their online content, but developing new posts was time consuming. The team was collaborating with a freelance copywriter, but the results were inconsistent. They knew they could do better.
“We tried having other team members contribute or help manage some of this digital content, but the results weren’t great,” said Katina. “That meant I had to spend more time micromanaging all of these processes, which was frustrating.”
Social media was also something that had taken a backseat because of all the other work that needed to be done. Posts were being added, but it wasn’t enough to fully showcase the outstanding work being done by all of the Sibley physicians.
Getting found online was another challenge Sibley faced. With a wide range of clinics across the state, it was difficult to ensure that they all appeared in search engine results. It was important that the information for each clinic be updated and accurate so people could reliably find the right information when searching online.
The Solution
In 2018, Sibley began partnering with GreenMellen as a resolution to these various digital marketing challenges.
These ongoing efforts include creating weekly blog content, organizing photoshoots of patient families, and managing Sibley’s social media platforms—including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
The biggest advantage of this was freeing Katina up to focus on her other responsibilities.
“I don’t have to micromanage anymore,” she said. “I trust GreenMellen to do what we ask and the work gets done. We’ve been able to take our marketing to another level with this partnership.”
Services provided for Sibley Heart Center
- Copywriting and publishing of three blog posts per month
- Managing Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram content
- Keyword research to help optimize their content for search engines
- Quarterly content strategy meetings and data reporting
Each year, these marketing efforts culminate in the annual Heart Month campaign, which is celebrated every February. During this campaign, the GreenMellen team doubles the normal monthly content output and creates a dedicated marketing strategy.
The advantage of partnering with an external marketing agency has been the margin to start thinking strategically and creatively. Freed up from some of the daily grind, Sibley is able to start seeing meaningful results from their marketing efforts.
“We love working with the GreenMellen team because of the positive energy,” said Katina. “They also bring great ideas to the table that we wouldn’t otherwise have. This has been a great working relationship.”
The Results
Since taking on Sibley Heart Center as a client in September 2018, GreenMellen has helped write and publish over 120 blog posts and drive almost 60K unique visitors to their website. This has helped to drive their goals of local brand awareness and online community engagement.
The GreenMellen team has developed and published more than 2,300 social media posts, which have generated over 6 million impressions across three channels. This has attracted more than 4,200 new social media followers, which constitutes a growth of over 33%.
120
blog posts
60K
unique web visitors
2,300
social media posts
6 million
impressions
4,200
new social media followers
The annual Heart Month campaign has also been a major success over the past three years. Each year has seen steady growth in website traffic, social media followers added, and overall content reach. Heart Month has also an opportunity for Sibley to try out new types of content, like Facebook Live events and user-generated videos.
Most importantly, this has made Katina and her colleagues look good to the rest of the organization and their community.
“The physician relationships have become even better because they’re happy with the content we’re creating on their behalf,” said Katina. “We’re also able to educate and stay connected with our patient families online.”
