For the last several years, internal CSA surveys have indicated that members want our state society to proactively promote our specialty to the public, policy makers and key decisionmakers. To respond to this input and recent concerns expressed by both residents and attending physicians about medical title misappropriation, the CSA Board of Directors authorized a non-budgeted expenditure to fund a communications campaign managed by KP Public Affairs.
The CSA launched a digital ad campaign this October to educate key audiences about the important role of physician anesthesiologists in patient care as well as their value in the overall delivery of efficient, cost-effective healthcare. By delivering impactful messages about the importance of physician-led care, this campaign not only promotes and defends the specialty, but it also helps lay the groundwork for CSA to engage proactively or reactively on legislative and regulatory issues that are ahead.
The key audiences for this ad campaign were grouped into three main segments:
- Group 1: Hospital administrators; Healthcare business leaders; Physicians; Healthcare workers
- Group 2: Policymakers/ policy influencers
- Group 3: Patients/ general public
The campaign was launched October 8 to align with the ASA Conference in San Diego and build up momentum amongst the core anesthesiologist community, and then broadened out from there to serve ads to audiences across California. Within the state of California, we are prioritizing ad delivery to several areas with a prominent hospital/residency program presence in Greater Los Angeles, Inland Empire, San Diego, Central California, and the Bay Area.
To effectively reach the desired groups, we used audience targeting based on keywords, website topics, audience search history, and location. We are serving ads on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Google Display. For all ads/platforms we set the campaign goal as impressions, with clicks as a secondary priority. This is intended to increase awareness and visibility of the physician anesthesiologist name and core campaign message.
Based on ad performance during the first four weeks of the three-month campaign, we can make several observations.
- CSA’s ads earned more than 177,000 impressions on Twitter, and about 341,000 impressions on Facebook. The video content performed extremely well across platforms, and on Facebook they received 11,750 video views in the first four weeks.
- On LinkedIn, CSA can target its ads to individuals who work in healthcare or in government. LinkedIn ads received 195,000 impressions in the first month.
- Google Display ads have allowed CSA to extend the campaign visibility across many different platforms and ad spaces – this resulted in 2.37 million impressions and 5,650 clicks in the first month.
- One of the campaign videos is being promoted through YouTube ads as well, which brought 100,921 impressions, 38,209 video views, and 180 clicks in the first four weeks.
CSA’s video content is performing very well. There are two videos being promoted through the digital ads:
Video 1: The critical role of physician anesthesiologists
Video 2: Physician anesthesiologists leading the way in the fight against COVID-19
The creative ad graphics can be viewed on CSA’s social media pages. We encourage you to like, share, and retweet the CSA ads as you see them in your social media feeds, or by visiting the CSA platforms at:
Facebook | Twitter | YouTube | LinkedIn
Throughout the ad campaign, CSA has been adjusting budget allocation, management, and delivery to maximize reach. We blocked ads on web locations not frequently visited by our target audience segments and redirected algorithms to have ads show on more relevant sites. We have been allocating more budget to LinkedIn where we can target by career/role, and to Google Display where we can target search history and web traffic behaviors. We’ve also been updating key words turning off lower performing word sets.
Looking ahead, each platform is performing well and has different strengths with different audience segments. CSA will continue to utilize all five ad platforms through the end of the year to ensure diversified reach. The Board of Directors will discuss next steps for continuing digital ad outreach next year at their January Strategic Planning Session.