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Digital Campaigns to Influence Consumer Preferences

By The SHSMD Team posted 11-01-2017 08:04 AM

  
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Digital advertising—in the form of mobile marketing, search engine marketing, social media marketing, and more—is an inexpensive as well as effective way of marketing when compared to traditional methods. It’s important for healthcare organizations to keep pace with developments in digital marketing.

Our Digital Strategy
At UC Davis Health, a nationally recognized academic medical center in Northern California, we run two major, comprehensive media plans each year during our spring and fall open enrollment periods. These campaigns are designed to influence the preference of consumers to choose UC Davis Medical Group as their primary care provider, and to raise awareness of the reputation and services of UC Davis Health.

Our primary care ads focus on the convenience of our multiple locations, acceptance of most health plans, and easy access to our world-class specialists (i.e., the benefits of joining an academic medical center). Our brand ads highlight our top centers, such as our cancer center, children’s hospital, and vascular center.

We use a combination of general and niche media, including traditional broadcast, print, outdoor, digital, and social media. The digital portion of our media buy has more than doubled over the past five years from 25 percent then to approximately 55 percent of our advertising budget now.

For the digital portion of the plan we use a combination of online video, audio, display and paid social media.

Measuring Digital Campaign Performance
Here’s a summary of the key performance indicators that we find most useful. The important point here is that “less is more.” Don’t get overwhelmed by analysis paralysis. Keep it simple, especially when presenting to leadership.

For a call-to-action campaign like our open enrollment campaign, we look at total “website clicks,” such as to our find a doctor page. For an awareness-building campaign, we use “video views” of our 15-second spots, “impressions” and “engagements.” It’s really that simple as those are the bottom line outcomes that translate to tangible results.

Our spring open enrollment campaign generated over 43,000 website clicks through to our website pages during the two-month-long campaign. Our fall campaign saw over 2.6 million video views.

Of course, there are numerous other metrics that analysts’ use to measure the effectiveness of specific campaign tactics but that’s an entirely separate discussion. Those metrics include “click-through rate”, “cost per click”, “video view rate”, “engagement rate”, “cost per thousand impressions”, and several others. We review those rates carefully but don’t necessarily report them to leadership unless we can show a meaningful trend/comparison one way or the other.

By Doreen Pichotti | Posted November 1, 2017
Digital Advertising and Media Strategist
UC Davis Health
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