Creating a Safe Space for India’s Most Invisible Patients: How Coloplast Built a Social Community Around Ostomy Care

Social Media Marketing

CONTENT MARKETING

Some Context First

Coloplast is a Danish medical device company with a founding story unlike most. In the 1950s, Elise Sorensen’s sister underwent a stoma surgery, an operation in which an opening is created in the abdomen to reroute bodily waste into an external pouch, typically following cancer treatment or intestinal disease. Her sister was too embarrassed to leave the house. Elise, a nurse, designed an adhesive ostomy bag so her sister could live normally again. That act of love became the company.

Today, Coloplast is a global leader in ostomy care products – the bags, base plates, barrier seals, protective creams, and accessories that allow people who have had stoma surgery to live full, active lives.

In India, their SEO work in partnership with Justwords had already produced strong organic results with over 9,500 monthly visits, 4,294% traffic growth, and 90 keywords ranking in the top 3. But their social media presence was essentially inactive. The pages existed, but the community didn’t.

We came on board to change that.

Understanding What We Were Actually Building

Before creating content, we spent 15 days inside the product world. We understood Coloplast’s brand portal, product training modules, and the HCP (healthcare professional) education curriculum. These are the same materials their clinical teams use to train nurses and stoma care nurses. We went through all of it.

This wasn’t optional because ostomy content cannot be approximate. A post that incorrectly describes how to apply a base plate, or misrepresents when to use a barrier cream versus a protective seal, could cause a patient to use a product incorrectly and experience leakage. That is not just uncomfortable but physically harmful due to the highly acidic nature of stoma output, which burns skin on contact. The margin for error in this category is zero.

But the deeper education was about the patient, not the product.

An ostomate (the term for someone living with a stoma) has often been through one of the most disorienting experiences of their life. Surgery that was meant to save them has left them with a pouch on their abdomen that collects bodily waste. They face leakage anxiety that makes them afraid to go out. They face skin rashes from repeated application and removal of the adhesive base plate. They face the very real fear of what happens if the pouch fails in public. And they face something harder to quantify but just as debilitating: the silence of a society that doesn’t talk about this.

In India, the stigma around bodily functions is significant. A person with a stoma is not just managing a medical condition; they are managing it in a cultural environment that offers very little openness, very little community, and very little reassurance that life after this surgery can be ordinary again.

That understanding was the foundation of everything we built.

The Strategy

Build a Community, Not an Audience

The goal was never “grow followers.” Follower counts in this category are small and will remain small because the patient population is a niche. The goal was different: to create a space online where ostomates and their caregivers in India felt seen, supported, and equipped to live well. Every content decision flowed from this.

SOLUTION 1

Map Content to the Patient Journey

We built the content architecture around the three phases an ostomate moves through:

Before surgery: Fear, confusion, lack of information. Content here is preparatory and reassuring. For example, what to expect, how to think about the change, and how people live full lives after this surgery. For many patients in India, social media is the first place they encounter anyone who has been through what they are facing.
After surgery (early phase): The hardest period. Managing the stoma, learning the products, dealing with skin issues, calibrating daily life. Content here is practical and empathetic. For example, how-to guides, care checklists, leakage solutions, and skin protection. Content was educational without being clinical and supportive without being patronising.
Living with a stoma (long-term): Diet, exercise, travel, intimacy, returning to work. Proof that normal life continues. Reassurance through real stories. The small wins that only another ostomate understands – a full day without a leak, a return to the gym, a meal out with friends.

This architecture meant that at any point in their journey, someone finding Coloplast’s pages would find content that spoke directly to where they were.

SOLUTION 2

Product Education as Patient Support

Coloplast’s products are genuinely superior. But in a category where many patients don’t know what the right products are or how to use them, product content serves as patient support. The Brava Protective Seal, which creates an additional barrier between the pouch and the base plate to prevent leakage, is a product that meaningfully changes a patient’s daily anxiety level. Educating patients about when and how to use it is a clinical value delivered through a social post.

We aligned content launches with the sales team’s priorities, ensuring the products being highlighted on social were the same ones being pushed commercially, so that community-building and the commercial objective moved in the same direction.

SOLUTION 3

UGC: Real Voices Break the Taboo

The single most important content insight from this engagement: authentic patient voices outperform every piece of branded content.

When Aakash shared his story as a UGC reel (a real ostomate speaking honestly about his experience), it received more interactions than any branded post we had produced – 66 interactions, 46 likes, 14 comments. In a category where commenting on a post means publicly acknowledging a connection to ostomy care, 14 comments are significant. It means 14 people were moved enough to speak.

In a society where this condition is rarely discussed, a real person saying “I have a stoma, and I am living my life” acts as an inspiration for others to exist without shame.

The Results

4,800% Growth in Instagram Interactions
From a near-dormant account, interactions grew 4,800% in the November 2025 to April 2026 period – all organic, zero paid spend. This is the accumulated effect of content that consistently serves the community it’s built for.
3,200% Growth in Instagram Views
Content views grew 3,200% during campaign periods, driven most sharply by the Core 4 Exercise Guide (the sharpest single reach spike of the entire campaign), the Brava Protective Seal education reel, and the “Your Body, Your Rights” daily campaign series in January 2026.
1,400% Peak Facebook Interactions
In the October to December 2025 period, Facebook interactions grew 1,400% anchored by the World Ostomy Day awareness campaign, which generated the highest reach spike on the platform to date.

Content That Mattered Most

Every significant spike in the data maps to a specific piece of content

Exercise After Stoma Surgery – Core 4 Rehab Guide: Sharpest reach spike of the entire 8 months.
Patient Testimonial (Aakash’s Story): Highest interaction rate of any content produced.
Brava Protective Seal Education Reel: Consistent reach spikes across both platforms.
Your Body, Your Rights Campaign: Largest views and reach spike of January 2026.
World Ostomy Day Campaign: Highest Facebook reach of October 2025.

Social Amplifying an Already-Strong SEO Foundation

Coloplast’s SEO work had already established them as India’s dominant ostomy authority with 9,534 monthly organic sessions, 90 top-3 keywords, 50 AI Overview appearances, and DA growing from 1 to 17. Social media is now the layer that converts that search authority into brand loyalty: patients who find Coloplast on Google and then follow on Instagram stay in the relationship in a way that a single search visit never creates.

Key Insights for Healthcare Social Media

Building social media for a medical brand dealing with taboo health conditions in India requires a particular kind of discipline. The temptation to default to safe, generic health awareness content is strong. The pressure to “keep it positive” can flatten the emotional reality of what patients are actually going through.
We took a different approach. The content acknowledged the difficulty (fear, skin pain, social anxiety) because patients don’t trust brands that only show the good parts. Trust is built by meeting people where they actually are. And in a category this sensitive, trust is the only currency that matters.
What Coloplast’s Indian social presence is building, post by post, is what Elise Sorensen built for her sister in 1954: the knowledge that you are not alone, and that living normally is possible.

Want this for your brand?

Want to build social media presence in a sensitive, regulated, or deeply niche category that requires real expertise? Call us at 9910203445 or write to sales@justwords.in.

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