Every health system wants more referrals for key service lines. But referral marketing can be tricky, especially for marketing teams whose main expertise is B2C. That’s why we sat down with Erin Roberts Saul for tips on how to set referral marketing up for success. 

Erin anchors our B2B content marketing team and helped develop an innovative campaign that’s driving new referrals for WellSpan Health. 

The campaign isn’t your typical physician outreach push. Its centerpiece is a print “newspaper” that’s targeted at physicians but is designed more like a B2C publication – it even has a crossword puzzle! This publication feeds a physician-facing website and outreach via email, Doximity and social media. 

The campaign’s first phase generated more than 130 referrals and was so successful that it won the 2026 Gold excellence award from the Mid-Atlantic Society for Healthcare Strategy and Market Development. 

Q: What problem was WellSpan trying to solve? 

When WellSpan came to us, they had a really strong B2C brand and had done a great job telling their story to consumers. But their B2B marketing was falling short: It wasn’t engaging physicians and wasn’t driving referrals. They needed a new B2B content marketing strategy that would get physicians’ attention and get them to refer. 

Q: What was your first step in building that strategy?  

In our B2B healthcare content marketing work, building a strategy always starts with two big questions. First, what’s the central story about the client we need to tell the audience to get them to act? Second, what does that audience want to learn? Finding the intersection between these two answers sets the cornerstone of the content strategy.  

For the first question, we started by diving into WellSpan’s consumer brand platform. It does a great job mapping out their differentiators and key messages, which helped us quickly understand what sets them apart. Our challenge was to adapt that platform and make it come alive for physicians. 

We met with WellSpan’s marketing team to capture everything they knew about how physicians perceive WellSpan, about WellSpan’s strengths, weaknesses and referral drivers, and about why some physicians hesitate to refer. We used those findings to build a B2B brand narrative that reflects many of the B2C platform themes, but with goals and messaging geared toward our target physician audience and the goal of driving referrals. 

Q: Why is it important to also ask what the audience wants? 

Because value is memorable! If you want your marketing to be truly effective, you need to deliver something that’s interesting and useful to the people you’re trying to reach. That’s especially true for physicians.  

They’re inundated with information, their inboxes are overloaded and they have a stack of academic papers to read. The best way to break through is to create content they find valuable, and even enjoyable. To do that, you have to understand exactly who you’re trying to reach. 

With WellSpan, we winnowed their target audience down to specific subsets of physicians who are most likely to refer, or who are already referring and could benefit from information that would reinforce their decision to send patients to WellSpan.

We had a pretty good idea of what content would engage this audience, because we knew what had been successful for us with similar audiences for other clients. Overall, this means steering away from promotional content and instead leaning into articles that add value to the physician’s practice, in ways that intersect with where WellSpan stands out.

So instead of creating content about “here’s what makes our heart center great”, you create something about, say, tips on detecting cardiovascular disease earlier. Along the way, you explain how WellSpan offers personalized care and the latest heart treatments. 

It’s also important to remember that, just because you’re talking to doctors, your content doesn’t have to be like an academic journal. The WellSpan publication, called MacroScope, is a great example in that it leverages best practices from B2C publications. The articles are technical enough for physicians, but they’re written in a conversational style that makes them easy to digest and underscores WellSpan’s personable brand voice.

We also make the publication very scannable with short sections, bullets and design elements, like lots of white space, pull quotes, and key takeaway summaries. And we have a crossword puzzle to make it more fun to read.

The premise is that physicians have to read excessively to stay up to date, but MacroScope is a publication they want to read.  

Q: How did you decide which channels to use and how they would work together?  

WellSpan and one of our wonderful collaborators there, Loren Farquhar, wanted to put a print publication at the campaign’s center. They already had the name (MacroScope) and the idea of designing it like a newspaper, which is a really cool concept. What they needed was clarity on what should be in the print publication and how it would work with digital channels.

We outlined four key content themes that align with the B2B brand narrative and referral drivers. From there, we defined types of articles within those themes that would engage their audience — things like case studies of interesting or complex patients, tips on how to approach treatment dilemmas and Q&As on trending topics. Those articles are published in print, and then posted on the MacroScope website and promoted via email, Doximity and social media. 

The print publication has QR codes and CTAs that invite readers to visit the website, where there are more articles and also videos. Interestingly, a lot of physicians are using these bridges to jump to the digital content. That’s really exciting because it can be hard to get readers to make that leap — it shows they’re finding the content valuable and want to learn more. 

Q: How do WellSpan’s liaisons leverage this? 

We want everything we create to be useful to liaisons in the field. With MacroScope, the liaisons are using the print publication as a touch point – they’ll bring it to physicians, put it in their hands and point out articles they think will be interesting. 

The campaign can also help liaisons target their outreach. WellSpan uses NPI tracking to know which physicians are engaging with the content and who is making referrals. The liaisons can use this to follow up with those physicians and answer questions.

Q: What does this campaign tell us about the value of print publications? 

This campaign has been super successful, and I think that shows that print is actually getting more valuable in today’s crowded environment. I find myself picking up print publications to avoid all the distractions of being online. Physicians are just like the rest of us – they’re looking for a break from media overload. 

With MacroScope, we give them a print publication that’s easy to read and that they’ll learn something from. They can sit down with it and justify the time away from their computer and phone. It’s a relief. And I think it’s why print is making a comeback. 

Q: How is the campaign evolving? 

Now that we’ve proven the concept and the campaign is bringing in referrals, we’re going to expand the digital side. We’re going to publish more content, more frequently, so it lands between print publications. We’ll be doing more video and webinars, and hopefully a podcast. 

All of this will work together with the print publication, and also feed the email and Doximity pushes. Physicians will have a steady stream of content to engage with, all year long, which should continue driving referrals and also help WellSpan build its overall national reputation. 

Q: How has collaboration with the client contributed to this success? 

The whole project is a testament to how a shared vision and teamwork make a project successful. Our main collaborators – Rena Wilson Fox and Loren Farquhar – were engaged in every step of developing the strategy and have stayed committed to it. 

That’s really important because, when you have a successful campaign, there’s a very real risk it can get diluted over time as more people give input. Rena and Loren have been great at staying committed to the strategy and vision, and educating all their physicians and stakeholders about why this campaign is successful and how it needs to abide by the strategy to stay that way. 

So when someone at WellSpan proposes a change or has an idea for MacroScope, Rena and Loren are great at figuring out how to incorporate that within the guiding principles. 

That kind of strategic commitment is rare – we’re extremely lucky to have them as partners.

Learn more about building referral marketing campaigns 

Message Lab Media is the only healthcare content marketing agency with a dedicated B2B team, and we help health systems nationwide develop strategies that set referral marketing up for success. 

To learn more, see our blog post with tips on how to get started with referral marketing.

And don’t hesitate to contact us or schedule a call – we always love meeting new people and trading ideas!