GoodRx launches digital medical hub in just two weeks with Contentful

Introduction

GoodRx already had a history of creating authoritative medical information hubs for different medical conditions when Covid-19 grew to be a major public health issue, slowing the pace at which many businesses operated. GoodRx differed from the norm, however. Having implemented Contentful a year earlier, the company was able to create and publish new content at pace to attract customers — a huge benefit with high traffic being critically important to GoodRx’s success. The company’s business model relies on visitors discovering and using digital products, such as discount coupons, for prescription drug purchases and telehealth consultations.

In addition to using Contentful to support the above digital assets, GoodRx used the platform to rapidly build a coronavirus information hub. This digital space provided the company with a new channel to rapidly communicate with customers on. “Anything we can do to cut down our time to market is obviously a competitive advantage,” shared Erin Neff, Director of Product.

The new Covid-19 hub is just one of several products the team launched early in the pandemic with Contentful. GoodRx also built an initial version of its telehealth marketplace in weeks. This listing of telehealth services even features GoodRx’s telehealth business, HeyDoctor. At a time when many people didn’t feel comfortable venturing out, even for healthcare, HeyDoctor visits soared.

Contentful speeds time to market and enables experimentation

GoodRx develops content hubs for various health conditions including diabetes, acne, and allergies. The company also assists with insurance. Being able to build targeted hubs quickly, as the company was able to do during Covid-19, means that GoodRx can reach new visitors and provide important information in an instance.

Doctors, nurses, and pharmacists write much of the content that GoodRx produces. Some of these professionals are internal, others external. Contentful supports the configuration of custom roles and permissions that make it easy for these contributors to edit and update content as needed, without fear of breaking anything.

GoodRx’s marketing team is now able to create landing pages that are segmented and personalized for different parts of their target audiences. The team is also able to experiment more readily. “Contentful allows us to iterate on top-of-the-funnel content extensively and test what is effective and what isn’t, and also to add personalization for different targetable segments,” said Neff.

A modern stack enables marketers to do more

As it implemented Contentful, GoodRx decided to build a completely new tech stack to enable rapid content creation with lots of flexibility. The team integrated its new design system with reusable content models, which are the heart of Contentful’s content platform.

The combination of flexibility, consistency, reliability, and testability was difficult to find in other solutions, much less build. “It’s easy to design a system that’s well-tested and has a consistent look and feel by sacrificing flexibility. It’s also easy to design a system that’s flexible by sacrificing consistency and stability,” shared Jack Lenehan, Engineering Lead at GoodRx. “Accomplishing both objectives without those downsides was a challenging problem to solve, but I feel like we were able to do a good job with it.”

With coding and design built into every reusable content model, content creators don’t need to tap developers or designers — they just choose the modules they need to build each page. Updates are fast and easy, and a change to any given module on a page immediately propagates to that module wherever it appears.

A structured blog format improves search rankings

Contentful has been helpful for GoodRx’s site traffic and search rankings. Organic traffic has increased, and the site ranks high for the company’s target keywords. An important next step will be migrating the blog to the new platform. “Our blog is one of our biggest organic traffic drivers. So converting that from a WordPress blog to a Contentful blog is the direction we’re moving to next,” shared Neff.