Strategy, Discipline, Resourcefulness Drive 14% Increase in Impressions Despite Budget Cut

We applied strategy, discipline and resourcefulness in approaching our 2012 online media plan. Not only did we capitalize on past successes, but we also evolved our tactics to meet current business objectives, optimized placements

based on previous campaign results and rigorously tested new opportunities to ensure effectiveness. Moreover, doing all this required us to overcome two significant challenges: a year-over-year (YOY) budget reduction and a shift toward creating custom content for various placements.

Objectives

1. Sustain the current number of impressions with our core target audience to continue to build awareness for Carestream’s product and solution offerings.
2. Drive overall CTR that is on par with industry standards (.1% – .15%).
3. Improve eblast CTR to increase target audience exposure to our full line of products and solutions.
4. Elevate exposure in the healthcare C-Suite and IT audience for our offerings. DRX- REVOLUTION eBlast
5. Build awareness for new products (i.e. DRX-Revolution, MyVue).

Content generation required a higher investment (in both funding and bandwidth) than traditional media placements.  Therefore, given our tight budget, we focused our digital placements on cost-effective, high- reach tactics. We eliminated higher cost, high-impact tactics (like certain interstitials and eblasts), and focused on establishing consistency and frequency with a select group of key publishers.  Additionally, to attain maximum impact with our placements, we:

• Tested various email templates and refined layout based on results in order to maximize click thru rates.
• Implemented A/B testing on eblasts to identify better performing subject lines that would drive up open rates.
• Tested new media placements to drive an increase in reach and overall awareness.

Tactics

We placed online units with the same number of publishers as in 2011, but used fewer tactics: buys were limited to the best performing tactics determined by past successes.  We also reserved multiple placements with the most cost-effective publishers, and executed a variety of digital placements, including eNewsletter banners, publisher website banners, high-impact units (interstitial, side-kick and wallpaper), eblasts and rich media.  Creative for static banner units was changed either quarterly or as needed to avoid message wear.

Results

Despite a 5% YOY reduction in budget, specific results include:

1. Increased overall impressions YOY by 14%.
2. Overall click thru rate for all banner activity was .22% which far exceeds industry standards of .1%-.15%.
3. Click thru rates for eblast activity has improved 51% from 4.30% in 2011 to 6.29% in 2012.  The increase is attributed to learnings from A/B subject line testing. Rich Media Unit
4. Obtained exposure to C-Suite and IT audience due to strategic placements in Healthcare Informatics, Healthcare IT News and Health Data Management.
5. Generated exposure to key target audience for new product offerings with consistent messaging and unique placements for our DRX-Revolution Mobile X-ray System and MyVue Patient Portal.

EDITOR’S NOTE:  Carestream Health was a 2013 Pinnacle Award winner in the Element category #20 Trade Show Promotion. A complete summary of those recognized for excellence in both Campaign and Element categories can be found here in the news release, and in an RBJ article here.

By Jill Hamman, WW Marketing Communications Manager, Carestream Health

The Carestream Health advertising placements were arranged by Butler/Till.