Work

With approximately 5,000 affiliated physicians and advanced practice providers, Banner Health is among the nation’s largest non-profit health systems. (If you’ve ever received health care in the American Southwest or Mountain West, there’s a good chance it was through Banner.)

Indeed, the provider has an enormous reach — and they wanted their health blogs to be just as robust. Prior to 2019, however, Banner only published a few articles a month.

Ideas Collide was tapped to build, supervise, and execute an ambitious expansion project, which has become a trusted juggernaut in the health blog space: approximately 400 articles a year, each written in collaboration with a real Banner medical expert.

Fine tuning a process to support that enormous, detailed scope isn’t easy. And it doesn’t happen overnight. Here’s how we did it.

Health blogs are a dime a dozen. To be truly useful (and reach the top of search engines), you need more than SEO. What sets Banner Health’s blog apart is how it involves health care professionals. From nurses to doctors to department heads, a trusted member of Banner’s vast health care network is always looped into each article’s production process. These experts work closely with a small team of blog authors to provide additional feedback, advice, and quotes. That way, each article isn’t just helpful — it’s medically accurate.

“From conversations with key Banner stakeholders, we didn’t want it to seem too much like medical journal,” explained Brynne Curran, Ideas Collide’s Senior Account Director over health and wellness brands. Respected blogs like Healthline provide useful medical informational that’s also accessible for everyday readers. We endeavored to create an even more conversational and human tone in our content.

Curran joined Ideas Collide in summer 2019 to lead this new project. She worked closely with Banner to develop granular guidelines for every component, not only for the blog articles, but for the entire production process. Monthly deliverables and support included:

• Copywriting: Expert outreach, topic research, writing, and editing of 30 long-form articles, with a la carte webpage technical writing.
• Content Strategy: Keywords and topics were naturally weaved into each article to make sure the content reaches the right audience with the message they’re seeking out.
• Account Management: Weekly updates, monthly timeline mapping and monitoring, coordination of writers, topic assignments, monthly image ideas review, design briefings/reviews for image options and infographics.
• Blog Image Sourcing: 6 – 10 image options for all 30 articles, final image re-sizing of 30 selected images.
• Social Graphics Design: Design and development of up to three social graphics per month, that correspond and drive to relevant blogs.

The essential guide of this project is its tracker — a vast, remarkably detailed spreadsheet that has been expanded and refined for years. Every part of the process is outlined and itemized, and every part of the tracker is regularly used. All parties in the production process — Banner, Ideas Collide, category-specific writers, and a medical editor — use this tracker.

Extensive writing instructions. Detailed contact lists of trusted medical professionals. Tracked timelines for each month’s content. It’s all there. And it’s constantly being referenced and refined. In a nutshell, the tracker is what makes it possible for such a relatively small team to deliver such enormous quantity while retaining expert quality.

In 2023 alone, these articles garnered more than 24 million page views — up 39% year over year. And with 89% of those page views coming from organic search, Banner’s blogs rank incredibly high. When people go online needing answers to health questions, they’re increasingly turning to Banner.

Building an effective, reliable, well-run content machine like this takes time. But with the right processes and teammates, long-term partnerships, like those between Ideas Collide and Banner Health, can yield truly special results.