M-Powered Digital Marketing

Ashley Cadle

Although digital marketing can take a variety of forms – email, social media, paid advertising, website, blog and SEO / SEM to name a few – the common denominator to any good campaign is a well-thought-out strategic approach. At Merryman Communications, our proven, proprietary approach ensures we achieve our clients’ desired results and ultimately, empower the end user to take action. Merryman Communications’ M-Powered approach focuses on the three Ms in digital marketing – Message, Multichannel and Metrics.

Message

Nailing our messaging is the important first step of any of our strategic communications campaigns, including digital marketing. We make sure that we know key motivators of our audiences and how to break through to them. With healthcare digital communications, we also consider the added complexities and limitations of content and character counts balanced with FDA requirements for including safety information and fair balance.

We ensure that messaging communicates the value proposition and tells a story, is consistent throughout a multichannel campaign and has a clear call to action. We use effective and consistent creative for a cohesive experience, with attention-grabbing headlines and visuals. For example, when we have a display ad campaign with a distinct message, look and feel, we create a landing page with the same message, look and feel for when the user clicks on the ad.

At the onset of the campaign, we develop a clear customer journey with specific messaging and actions for each step of the way – from awareness to consideration to action. We use retargeting and remarketing as important tools for directly messaging to people who have shown interest in a campaign but have not followed through with the conversion.

• For paid ads or website visits, we use retargeting to follow someone who has demonstrated interest in our client’s brand. That way we can keep them in our funnel and continue to move them along the sales continuum. For example, for an ongoing SEM campaign, when users visit our client’s website but don’t take the desired action – locating a physician near them – we retarget them with ads on Facebook and Instagram.
• For email campaigns, we use remarketing to reach back out to those who already interacted with our client, allowing for the delivery of more specific messages based on the user’s response. For example, for a recent direct-to-patient email campaign, if the user clicked on the link in the email, they then received a follow-up email with more detailed information and a link to a physician locator. If they did not click on the link, then we followed up with another email with more information.

Multichannel

The old marketing adage where a prospect needs to see or hear an advertiser’s message at least seven times before they’ll take action to buy that product or service is debated today. At Merryman Communications, we still believe in the value of repetition – but through variety. We work with our clients to identify where our audiences are getting information and develop a plan to reach them strategically on multiple channels with a variety of media. For example, for one client looking to reach physicians, our campaign focused on reaching them via LinkedIn and Twitter, email, programmatic ads, trade publications and advertising around their medical meetings. And we created a variety of media for those channels, including video, static ads, animated ads, infographics, carousels, etc.

Inspirational author, Stefan Emunds, said, “Time is an illusion, timing is an art,” and that can’t be truer in multichannel digital marketing. Timing is a big consideration in optimizing our campaigns, especially for email campaigns and social media.

• We consider email open rates at various times of day. A study by GetResponse analyzed about 4 billion emails sent by their customers to gather information on the best time to send to individual email addresses in their local time zones. They discovered that:
  • Tuesday has the highest open and click-through rate, making it the most popular day to send emails.
  • Weekends were the least popular days to send emails, and they had the lowest open rates.
  • GetResponse also found that 1 p.m. is a great time to send emails, but offered 10 a.m. as another time slot with strong open and click rates. A HubSpot study had very similar results.
• For social media, we rely on channels such as Facebook to tell us when our followers are on social media and so we time our posts accordingly.

Metrics

One of the biggest benefits of digital marketing is that it’s not static. We can adjust our programs in real time to optimize results. We build in metrics and identify key performance indicators (KPIs) from the onset. This includes things like Urchin Tracking Modules (UTMs) that help track the source of website traffic, hashtags, social analytics, email open and click-through rates and of course, Google Analytics, all of which tells us the success of the campaign. Then, we check the progress of our campaigns against the KPIs regularly.

In one campaign, we discovered that YouTube wasn’t performing based on our target demographic, so we shifted our budgets to the channels that were. We also quickly stopped advertising on Twitter during some of that channel’s upheaval, because it struggled to reach our audience. Even after experimenting with our targeting, there was no improvement in click-through rates.

When budgets and time allow, we incorporate A/B testing into our campaigns. For emails, it can be subject lines. For programmatic or digital ads, it can test two different creative approaches or the type of media we are displaying (animated, video or static). We shift budget, creative or copy based on what’s working really well or not at all.

We love working with our clients on campaigns to M-Power their audiences and be Successful Together.

M-Powered Clients

We love working with our clients on campaigns to M-Power their audiences and be Successful Together. Check out our award-winning, multi-year, multichannel Physician’s Perspectives program we developed with the Urology and Pelvic Health team at Boston Scientific. It’s one of the many effective digital marketing campaigns we’ve done M-Powered by Merryman.

Let us know if you’d like to find out how our strategic M-Powered digital marketing approach can help you.