Case Study
Integrated Marketing
The Opportunity
After a change in ownership, Neighbors Emergency Center was looking to refresh and expand their marketing efforts in the communities in which they maintained locations, increasing awareness and interest in their centers as an ER of choice within the community. Neighbors engaged with Red Thread in a year-long integrated marketing contract that included:
A Brand
Refresh
Paid Advertising
Campaigns
Organic Social Media Management
Website
Management
The Goals
The primary goal was to bring awareness of Neighbors as the best option for local emergency care. In order to establish Neighbors as an emergency center of choice, we also have to educate consumers and build their trust and belief that Neighbors cares for the community and provides the highest quality emergency care. Ultimately, Neighbors Emergency Center wanted to measure an increase in patient visits to their locations.
The Challenges
Neighbors came to Red Thread with a few challenges. First, during their ownership transition, Neighbors did very minimal advertising. Second, emergency care isn’t sold online, nor is trust in a company built easily. Trust, coupled with top-of-mind awareness, is needed to keep Neighbors foremost in potential patients’ minds. Finally, emergency situations can’t be predicted or tracked, so we had to establish what qualifies as a conversion and how to determine success.
The Strategy
Red Thread worked in conjunction with Neighbors to create an integrated strategy that included
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Brand Refresh
Included an in-depth historical review of the brand and visual identity. Since the brand is well-established in the communities in which centers exist, we decided on a color palette expansion which allowed us to better meld the visual identity with the experience in the centers.
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Integrated Media Plan
Since Neighbors had an extended period with very limited advertising in the markets around their locations in the months leading up to engaging with Red Thread, our goal was to raise awareness about Neighbors’ services through a variety of different channels as quickly and efficiently as possible.
- Implementation of a regular, comprehensive organic social media strategy
- Reduction of overall billboard spend through a selection of strategic boards near each location
- Targeted OTT & CTV buys to extend awareness messaging through video media in a strategic, targeted, and trackable manner
- Implementing device-ID targeting to track actual foot traffic to the centers
- Re-implementation of google ads strategy
- Re-implementation of a paid social strategy
- Utilization of traditional media strategy, targeting hyper-local media outlets to avoid waste in the central Houston area, where Neighbors has no locations
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Revised Messaging
In addition, the messaging was updated in order to establish Neighbors as a resource for health information while telling the story of the patient experience at a Neighbors Emergency Center. Neighbors implemented a review request technology and was receiving amazing reviews. Rtb recommended we use those reviews to tell the Neighbors story - both educational about services and offerings, as well as a true representation of the extraordinary care patients receive at Neighbors Emergency Centers.
We developed a testimonial video shoot to capture some of the more compelling patient stories to use throughout various channels as engaging video. Rtb revised the remainder of the Neighbors messaging to use stories to educate patients and the community.
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Optimize the Website
The Neighbors website had recently been redeveloped, but still had some areas for improvement for both user experience and search engine optimization. We started with a full SEO audit, focusing on the areas we could create the largest impact - the individual center locations pages. In addition, we added a blog to establish Neighbors as a resource for health information and provide additional opportunities for search optimization.
Results
Because healthcare isn’t a trackable purchase on the website, we used calls and direction link clicks as the measurement of intent to utilize Neighbors’ services when needed, as well as using device ID tracking to record in-person foot traffic.
Over the course of 10 months, we saw growth in every metric tracked - traffic to the website, calls to centers, clicks for directions, ad clicks, conversion rates, and more. In addition, we saw a reduction in cost per conversion in google ads of $1, and a 3x reduction in the cost per click, while growing the conversion rate to 60%.
But the most telling successes came in the results Neighbors Emergency Center saw on a business level - a year-over-year increase of 2.3 average daily patient visits and 815 tracked patient visits over 2 months (people we know were served an ad and then made a visit to a location).
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