Case Love Clinic
💎 The Love Clinic service received an honourable mention in the Grand One 2021 competition’s category Best Digital Content Marketing. Grand One annually grants awards to the best Finnish digital marketing endeavours.
Background and aim
Tensions are running higher than usual in relationships and within families now that the coronavirus has shut people into their homes. Things weighing on our minds should be addressed before the situation escalates into a crisis. An outside professional could provide new angles to solving problems, but where could we find peer support and help with relationship challenges when we are stuck indoors?
The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland provides free, high-quality advice to couples and families. This promotes the wellbeing of families, and provides support with relationship problems and inspiration for building better relationships.
There is plenty of demand for help, which is why the Church wanted to offer its family counsellors’ expertise to an increasingly wide audience. The aim of the extensive content cooperation was:
- for the Church’s couples counselling to be made more visible and easy to access
- to provide a channel to the advice, with the audience’s participation threshold being as low as possible.
Strategy
As a result, the Love Clinic was born, a digital advice service of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland in which the Church’s family counselling experts answer the users’ anonymous questions about relationships.
It was by pure chance that the pandemic spring coincided with the launch of the service, but, at the same time, it demonstrated that there was – and still is – more demand than ever before for this type of service. An increasing amount of help is needed to resolve problems in relationships and families, but receiving help has become harder, as people have been unable to attend the Church’s family counselling appointments as normal due to the pandemic. Some people find it difficult to discuss their relationship challenges even without the pandemic, and many are left alone to cope with their worries.
The Love Clinic is content marketing at its best: extensive, well planned out and an important part of the communications of the Church and parishes. Above all, the content is useful to the target group and provides answers to problems during these challenging times.
Interaction with the target group ensures that the Love Clinic is responding to its users’ genuine concerns. At the same time, the Church is gaining valuable insight into the needs of its target group. In other words, the Love Clinic resolves two things: consumers’ problems and the Church’s challenges in making its family counselling services more widely known and easier to access.
Creative solution
The Love Clinic was designed to be a digital advice service so that it could make the Church’s family counselling services increasingly visible and give an ever wider audience access to these services.
The Love Clinic was launched in early April 2020 as part of an online health and wellbeing service, Terve.fi. Terve.fi is an A-lehdet website, and its content focuses on all aspects of health and wellbeing. More content on mental wellbeing is continuously being added, because of the high demand. Therefore, the Love Clinic also made a natural addition to Terve.fi’s content.
The concept is clear and simple: the readers can send questions to the Love Clinic anonymously, and the Church’s family counselling experts provide answers. These answers are then compiled into native articles to be published on terve.fi, which reaches more than 800,000 visitors every month.
Implementation
Everyone is free to send anonymous questions to the Love Clinic about their relationships. The questions feature a range of themes: everyday challenges, jealousy, unfaithfulness, thoughts of breaking up, problems in a reconstituted family, stonewalling and sex.
The situations described by people posing the questions touch on the basic elements that apply to many relationships, and the answers from the Church’s family counsellors offer help and food for thought for many people in similar circumstances.
New questions and answers have been published as native articles every Friday since the launch of Love Clinic. Readers are directed to this content from the A-lehdet network through display advertising, social media posts and smart recommendations.
Results
The Love Clinic has significantly widened the Church’s family counselling audience and has introduced new target group members to the service. It has also made the Church’s relationship advice more visible and has earned its stripes as a new form of family counselling.
The high number of questions shows that there is demand for this type of service. New questions came in weekly: in 2020, the Love Clinic received a total of 179 questions about relationship and family challenges. Based on these, a new question and its answer that would serve consumers were published weekly since the beginning of April. The total number of these content publications was 38.
The Love Clinic’s content reached over half a million unique users and was viewed 761,515 times. The average time that users spent reading the content was high, close to four minutes, which indicates that they were interested in it.
After its successful start, the Love Clinic will continue its operations seamlessly in 2021, based on the same concept.
