Converting leads to customers can be especially difficult if you’re targeting an audience that’s hard to reach. Here’s how we engaged a hard-to-reach audience, the campaign elements we used, how we promoted it and the results.
When you think of a digital marketing strategy, you’re probably thinking of an intensive effort to grow your traffic or capture leads. But in reality, a digital marketing strategy can be simplified. Think of it this way: What is your plan of action to achieve your desired goal? This can be helpful if your strategy has plenty of moving parts. Most digital marketing strategies have the following elements:
Ready to get started putting your strategy together? Here is a digital marketing strategy example for an unreachable audience from one of Kuno’s clients to inspire you.
This medical device manufacturer wanted to raise awareness of both its brand and its product for cardiothoracic surgeons. The target audience, cardiothoracic surgeons, posed a unique challenge for our team. Would the tactics we normally employed to reach audiences work with this highly specialized—and very busy—group?
After speaking to several medical professionals and creating our personas, we learned that because cardiothoracic surgeons are extremely busy, they’re likely checking emails on their phones during a free moment at the hospital. (Our data also later confirmed this).
And while they’re interested in clinical material, we also learned they would be interested in more high level content like salary statistics or the best places to practice medicine.
When you think about raising product awareness, you likely think about promoting said product, right? For this audience, we learned this tactic would probably be unsuccessful (they get bombarded with product marketing messages daily.) So how could we stand out?
First, we created a blog that featured content specific to cardiothoracic surgeons. However, the blog wasn’t full of the clinical content this audience was used to seeing. It featured more top of the funnel pieces about the business of medicine, specific issues surgeons faced, and more.
We took the understanding that this group of people would be interested in high level content—like the best and worst places to practice and salary information—and created an interactive cardiothoracic surgeon salary report.
We wanted to include much more than the standard salary statistics, though. To make an impact, we also included things that could affect salary, like place of work, different certifications and the best and worst places to practice. Then, each module of the report would be animated as the user scrolled through.
Because the reader didn’t have to fill out the form to view the report, we focused on lead capture by including a pop-up to download a different report once they got to a certain module. We also included an option to have a PDF of the report emailed to them if they didn’t have time to scroll through it when they opened their email.
From our research, we knew cardiothoracic surgeons checked their emails. We also knew they were active on Facebook. To promote the report, we created an email, a landing page and a series of Facebook ads.
The Results
Because we knew cardiothoracic surgeons were busy and likely checked their emails on their phones between cases, we kept the copy short and used bullet points. We also called out the fact that the reader could view the report instantly without filling out a form.
The email netted a 45 percent open rate and a click-through rate of 47 percent, highly successful metrics in any field, let alone a highly niche one like cardiothoracic surgery.
Overall, the campaign got the medical device manufacturer 91 new contacts and 7 customers.
Creating a winning digital marketing strategy may seem overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. Before you dive into creating your content or offer, step back and think about your audience. Who are they? What interests them? What are their pain points?
Then, use your data. Look at your data to see if your emails are being opened on mobile devices or desktops. This information can help inform your copy and design, making it much more likely your email will get clicks.
Now that you know your audience and where and when they like to interact with your brand, get creative. Sure, it seems easy and quick to throw together a blog post or email to promote your brand or product, but try something new.
Are there some industry statistics you can add a new twist to? Does your audience have a particular interest—like salary statistics or rankings of top performers—you could tap into? Do you have any original research to share?
In the example above, our cardiothoracic surgeons learned the latest information about the future of the field, and the medical device manufacturer received brand recognition. By taking the time to learn about your audience, where they get their information and think creatively about your marketing, you can reach what seems like an unreachable audience.
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