Case Study

HealthWorld Online Launch

Initially presented as a case study

Michigan State University Graduate School of Business

1996-97

The Challenge:

In the summer of 1995, HealthWorld Online, a start-up online resource company, received the multi-million dollar capitalization needed to launch the most comprehensive natural and alternative health website on the Internet.  The goal was to open with 25,000 pages of integrated content, presented in a fashion that would be “user-friendly” and would attract public and media interest. 

HealthWorld Online was charting new ground.  To that time, most successful commercial websites were sponsored offshoots of larger, successful and profitable corporations.  Their websites were expected to generate awareness and interest, but not necessarily to directly generate profitable activity – that was reserved for the parent companies.  However, that option was not available to HealthWorld Online – the website was their only business.

The HealthWorld Online website included 25,000-plus pages of authoritative content covering all aspects of natural and alternative health care.  As part of this mega-site, HealthWorld Online played host to more than two-dozen professional and consumer association websites, as well as texts, documents and audio tapes found nowhere else, on or off the Internet.  The goal of HealthWorld Online was to provide users with sufficient information on their healthcare options to let them take control of their own health – a concept that Barnett Marketing Communications dubbed “Self-Managed Care.”

For commercial purposes, HealthWorld Online had both a natural health food store and an online bookstore, and hoped to both attract advertisers and corporate sponsors to help underwrite the effort.  However, to succeed, the website would first need a regular audience – a huge audience numbering in the hundreds of thousands – to make it a viable commercial and advertising site.

This business was attempting to penetrate a market that was already crowded – and growing more-so every day.  At the time HealthWorld Online projected to launch its website, in the first quarter of 1996, there would be 14,000 competing health-related websites on the Internet.  In this situation, it would be easy for even a superior website such as HealthWorld Online to be lost in the crowd.  However, the client budget did not permit the kinds of extensive advertising that major corporate-sponsored websites were using to generate traffic.

Knowing that significant press coverage and online promotion would be necessary to generate the kinds of traffic HealthWorld Online would need to prosper, the partners – two leading natural health experts – turned to Barnett Marketing Communications to create and implement an effective, public relations-related launch plan.

The Barnett Marketing Communications Solution:

Barnett Marketing Communications began by conducting an extensive review of both competing websites and the expectations of then-current users of the Internet.

Next, we assessed the marketing communications and promotions tactics used by other successful websites.  These tended to be driven by big-budget advertising, and while effective, these marketing approaches were inappropriate for HealthWorld Online.  Realizing that there were alternatives – ones not used by other websites – Barnett Marketing Communications developed a detailed launch plan, focusing on public relations rather than advertising.

With these assessments in hand, we created comprehensive strategic business plans.  From that plan, Barnett Marketing Communications then created a 187-page (all bullet-pointed action steps) six-to-18 month tactical public relations-driven marketing communications plan.  This was designed to generate an average one million hits per month (a large number in 1995) within six months of launch – and to do this by building media, public and online awareness of the website and its features.

Once this plan was accepted by the client – just more than five months prior to the anticipated launch date – Barnett Marketing Communications went to work. The first step was to ensure that the website was “user-friendly” and designed to support the marketing communications plan.  Using the information gathered in the market assessment, Barnett Marketing Communications coached HealthWorld’s crack website design team to redesign the site to enhance user (i.e., consumer) satisfaction – and to make the site more accessible, interesting and useful to members of the press.  

Specifics of this redesign included a much faster download time, especially for the all-important home page – the gateway to the site – and the development of a press center that would feature online press releases, post favorable coverage and include kudos from satisfied users.  The press center also offered valuable links to press-worthy sites within HealthWorld Online’s 25,000 pages, making HealthWorld Online a key research resource for reporters doing stories on natural and alternative healthcare.

Barnett Marketing Communications then began working on press pre-launch and launch plan.  We developed a “Marquee Media” strategy for this launch.  Faced with the huge clutter in the online health market and an overall media saturation in coverage of the Internet, Barnett Marketing Communications decided to strive for early coverage by a few key “national” media markets.  The press often functions as a “pack animal” – the media herd tends to follow the leaders.  Therefore, if a few of the leaders would “vet” the website, that legitimacy would open a floodgate of favorable coverage.  We proceeded on this basis – focusing on the media leaders.

The key element of the pre-launch plan included the development of a demo disk that would illustrate HealthWorld Online’s features to reporters.

This was designed to tweak their interest during the four-week beta-test period before HealthWorld Online launched.  More than 1,000 sets of diskettes were distributed to reporters covering both natural health and the Internet.  Right from the start, these diskettes generated favorable interest and pre-launch coverage from newspapers such as Denver’s Rocky Mountain News, the Miami Herald, the Roanoke Times, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the St. Paul Pioneer Press and many other regional newspapers. 

These demo diskettes also generated interest – but not pre-launch coverage - from the LA Times, the Orange County Register and dozens of other local and regional newspapers.  More important, these diskettes were used to generate interest at USA Today.  As expected, the media leaders waited until the formal launch before covering the site – but they were poised to provide that coverage from day-one.

Other pre-launch activities included distributing a series of releases to targeted media on the central features of the website – as well as on the underlying philosophy of “Self-Managed Care” that was the central purpose of the website.  These releases, like the diskettes, were followed up with phone calls – relationships were built, and anticipation for the site was nurtured among key reporters and editors.

Barnett Marketing Communications also identified sites throughout the Internet that covered, reported on or invited comment on natural healthcare issues.  With our detailed understanding of “netiquette” – the non-commercial bias of the regular online users in the Internet community – Barnett Marketing Communications then designed a “guerrilla marketing” campaign designed to enhance the website’s recognition among health-oriented users without inviting an anti-commercial backlash – known on the net as a “flame war.”

Finally, Barnett Marketing Communications used industry trade shows in the months before HealthWorld Online debuted to pitch reporters at these shows – to tweak their interest and to develop relationships that would be worked after the website launched.

After a four-week beta test, which HealthWorld Online used to refine its site – and which Barnett Marketing Communications used to generate favorable user endorsements from organizations such as the National Institutes of Health (and their Canadian equivalent) and the Centers of Disease Control – HealthWorld Online went online on April 23, 1996.

The Results

After months of focused hard work, Barnett Marketing Communications – and HealthWorld Online – began seeing results immediately.  On the day the site was launched, the Los Angeles Times – one of the target national “marquee” media – published a favorable review of the site.  Two days later, USA Today featured the site as its “Hot Site of the Day” – an award that was echoed on the high-traffic USA Today Online website. 

That same day, HealthWorld Online debuted as #30 on the well-regarded “Internet Top 40” website – a ranking that put HealthWorld Online in the same league as the CNN website, the White House website and other highly-credible, high-traffic sites.

More coverage followed – as anticipated – from local and regional publications throughout the country.  This culminated in a favorable review in Newsweek Magazine (May 27, ‘96) – it noted that there were 10,000 healthcare websites, but only five that were worth serious attention. Among natural health sites, only HealthWorld Online made this list.

That kind of favorable, mainstream coverage set the stage for the next round of coverage – focusing on Internet and natural health media.  In addition to receiving releases that touted the sites’ features, these media received clips of the USA Today, LA Times and Newsweek coverage. 

The results, as anticipated, was a flood of favorable coverage in both natural health and Internet media – including published endorsements from natural health gurus Dr. Andrew Weil, M.D., and Dr. Tom Ferguson, M.D.  It was the favorable “marquee media” coverage that elevated HealthWorld Online above the competition.

At the same time, the guerrilla online promotion campaign was underway.  Users with non-commercial e-mail addresses posted carefully non-commercial messages on online forums and newsgroups, favorably describing features of HealthWorld Online and inviting fellow members of the forums and newsgroups to visit the site.  The results were dramatic – after a single post to an America Online natural health forum, HealthWorld Online received 20,000 hits from users with AOL addresses.  This guerrilla effort – which was sustained over the first six months after the site launch – was a critical and measurable factor in the promotion of the site.

During the entire six months of the roll-out period, the drumbeat of favorable mainstream press coverage continued – driven by regular outreach by Barnett Marketing Communications via phone, FAX and nationally-distributed press releases.  The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times each covered HealthWorld Online on three separate occasions – Newsweek covered the site twice – and the site became the focus of major features in the San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle (Sunday), the Chicago Sun Times and the New York Daily News.  Hundreds of other local and regional newspapers, natural health publications and technical journals, and Internet publications all jumped on the bandwagon.

However, the bottom line of all this activity was measured by the numbers – after six months online, HealthWorld Online was receiving 1.2 million hits per month, 20% above the target number.  This reflected 330,000 discreet users – the equivalent of the subscriber base of either the best-selling Internet magazine or the best-selling natural health magazine.  In short, HealthWorld Online had, as a medium, matured into a powerful, well-regarded and regularly used resource for the media and the public.