A Strategic Approach to Digital Marketing
A digital marketing campaign was developed for Hospice & Palliative Care of Buffalo, showing our digital marketing agency’s strategic balance of awareness and conversion tactics.
Our goal was to keep the services provided by our client top of mind for families and support persons who may one day advocate for patients, but we also needed to be present in their time of need. Though this was an integrated campaign (paid and organic social media, broadcast television, terrestrial radio, digital display ads, and print advertising), the tactic with the highest visibility was paid social media, run on Facebook and Instagram (Meta). Using custom video helped further the message in ways static images could not.
A Look Inside Our Digital Marketing Strategy Process
In deciding what social media platform to use, we considered the critical factors outlined below.
- Greater Reach. Meta has the highest user base (over 3B subscribers) of all social media platforms, making it optimal for reaching a large audience. This was important when considering which platform could deliver on Hospice’s goal of brand awareness.
- Target Demographic. Meta’s age demographics skew older, making it an easy choice for capturing users where they already are. For this campaign, we were looking to capture children of elderly adults and patients themselves, often over the age of 60 years.
- Achieving Multiple Goals: Meta is an appropriate channel for capturing users in multiple stages of the marketing funnel, meaning individuals in the awareness, consideration, and conversion stages would see our ads.
Using video for the creative collateral was an obvious choice for this social media marketing campaign. We’ve outlined the rationale below.
- Ability to Test. Launching with video collateral allowed us to test video assets and static images, giving us a better idea of what resonated with our audience and yielded the best results.
- Showcasing the Client’s Strengths. HPBC’s people-centered services invoke a sense of security and comfort among patients and families. We knew that video would most effectively show the facilities and staff and portray an optimistic picture.
- Feeding the Algorithm. Meta and many other platforms prioritize video assets over static images, meaning we’d have a better chance of breaking through the noise if we incorporated video.
See the results of this digital advertising campaign for Hospice & Palliative Care for Buffalo here.
How We Did It
Using Iteration in Social Media Marketing Strategy
Iteration is a strategy for which our team is uniquely equipped. Our strategic digital process means we’re continually goal-setting, analyzing, and iterating to ensure digital and social media campaigns meet their full potential. Our departments are intentionally collaborative, ensuring client goals match our digital strategy which also matches the creative we ideate and design. Frequent client touchpoints and transparent, up-front reporting ensure we are meeting the goals we set out to achieve.
Creative Optimizations Support Strategic Digital Advertising
Below are insights we gathered over the years and how we iterated on our campaign creative:
Increasing Engagement with Custom Cover Photos. We observed videos that included custom cover images outperformed videos that were “optimized by Facebook.” Switching to custom cover images allowed us to control what a user was seeing as they scrolled by our ad, improving engagement and clicks.
Utilizing Longer Descriptions. We tested longer text descriptions and saw that, on average, longer descriptions performed better than shorter ones. By incorporating longer descriptions, we improved CTRs and lowered costs.
We’re Your Partner
If you are looking for strategic marketing support for your next digital and social media campaign or want to leverage specific platforms and messaging to pull your desired audiences into your marketing funnel, let’s connect and discuss your options.