MEDICINENET onlne healthcare | Branding | Positioning | Marketing | Strategy | Look & Feel

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We helped MedicineNet.com become an internationally recognized, trusted source for online health and medical information - in a very competitive environment - and then it was sold to WebMD.

Aspects:

  • Branding and logo design
  • Positioning and positioning statement
  • Information reorganization and improved Site navigation
  • Re-purposing
  • Membership program


MedicineNet, Inc., now a WebMD company, is an online, healthcare media publishing company. It provides easy-to-read, in-depth, authoritative medical information for consumers via its robust, user-friendly, interactive web site. Medicinenet.com is involved in the highly competitive healthcare information arena. The content for the Site is provided by a network of over 70 U.S. Board Certified Physicians. Previous competitors included webmd.com, drkoop.com, and numerous others.

Though Medicinenet.com had over 5,000 pages of content, and the content was excellent, Medicinenet.com pages were not being found in the most coveted non-paid search engine results. Medicinenet.com was paying a great deal for pay-per-click.

Search engine optimization training and consulting.
Medicinenet.com's Doctors wanted to continue to write the articles and information yet needed training on how to write for the search engines and get top search results. Cummings Design helped with a two day intensive search engine optimization training course for the Doctors of MedicineNet, editors, web designers and programmers. 

Following Cummings Design's  recommendations, Medicinenet.com dramatically improved its rankings in the search engine results. This enabled Medicinenet.com's Doctors to continue to write the text while it decreased Medicinenet.com's dependence on costly pay-per-click traffic solutions.

Logo design and positioning.
MedicineNet also needed branding, repositioning, and re-purposing.

Rob Cummings created the MedicineNet logo and provided the positioning line 'Smart Medicine'. He then applied this to a redesign of the home page along with recommendations on improvements to the Medicinenet.com Site navigation.

Reorganization and re-purposing.
The information on the Medicinenet.com Site was thorough and comprehensive, yet, written by Doctors, it was not presented in a 'patient friendly' manner easily understood by the layman yet comprehensive for the health care professional.

Rob Cummings explained to the Doctors that too much detail was presented all at once, and the logical way to present information could be in an order similar to a typical patient interview.

By showing examples, Rob convinced the Doctors to reorganize the Site's content in a manner where a visitor gets the most easily understood information first, and then is able to 'drill down' in a logical progression to get more detail. This mimicked the way users seek information, making the Site much more useful and popular for patients as well as medical professionals.

Paid Membership Program.
To increase revenues and loyalty, Rob Cummings helped create a paid membership program, helping create and coordinate the processes, procedures, and elements.

The initial thought was to try to get consumers to pay for the information presented at Medicinenet.com, however, paid membership was not successful for similar healthcare information Sites. Rob suggested a way to enhance the value of the paid membership and provide greater incentive by offering a free gift package that would cost MedicineNet little or nothing yet be of value to the consumer.

To obtain the free products for the gift package, Rob first researched and developed a list of target companies most likely to offer free product samples.

Rob then trained key staff at Medicinenet.com on how to get the names of the key individuals at the target companies, how to make personal contact with them, and how to pitch this offer to them.

Under Rob's guidance, staff at Medicinenet.com followed up phone calls to target companies with a query letter (drafted by Rob).

Medicinenet.com was able to obtain numerous no-cost product samples that were ultimately included in the free gift package used as an incentive for users to become paid members. Rob named the membership program Premier Privileges, wrote the membership program for consumers for the Medicinenet.com web Site, and the program met with significant success.

In 2005, MedicineNet became a WebMD company.

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