Healthcare Digital Marketing Campaign Lifts National MS Society

Healthcare Digital Marketing Campaign Lifts National MS Society to Greater Awareness and Conversions

The world’s understanding of the impact of multiple sclerosis (MS) changed overnight when a new key study revealed that the actual number of people in the United States living with MS was twice the previously estimated amount — a staggering 1 million people.

That study was funded by the National MS Society, a nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering those living with MS, and ultimately, creating a world free of the disease. With a renewed perspective on the scale of the need for their resources, expertise and community building, the team at the National MS Society reached out to Communications Strategy Group (CSG®) to develop a healthcare digital marketing campaign to find and engage people living with MS and their support systems.

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Solving for National MS Society’s Why

CSG set to work developing resources, planning digital engagement tactics and testing messaging to ensure the Society could engage as many potential constituents as possible as quickly as possible.

The result was a brief, but ambitious campaign that spanned two months, garnered millions of impressions, generated essential resources and launched the Society’s first foray into developing a digital strategy for healthcare marketing.

A Digital Marketing Healthcare Strategy That Converts

There are few things in life more overwhelming than a major diagnosis. The National MS Society represents a lifeline and beacon of hope to people learning how to navigate life with MS. Helping those folks find the resources and community that the Society has to offer was a crucial initiative in the Prevalence Campaign. The CSG team leveraged a robust digital healthcare marketing plan to find members of key audiences — newly diagnosed people and their support groups — and meet them where they were with the information they needed. Paid and organic social media, a landing page, emails, paid search and native ads united to bring audience members to a variety of resources designed to provide essential information, increase access to the community and ease the anxiety of navigating a diagnosis.

Though the healthcare web marketing campaign was brief, CSG created and tested variations on all paid digital tactics to ensure the messaging and resources resonated and helped bring new constituents into the National MS Society fold. Across the board, the messages that rang with empowerment and images that displayed people living with MS and living well proved to be the best use of digital marketing in healthcare. With swaps made to put the campaign’s best messaging foot forward on inbound tactics, the Prevalence Campaign landing page was able to capture more than 4,000 leads, converting an impressive 11.8% of visitors, as compared to cross-industry averages ranging from 3-5.5%.

Curated Resources for Every Stage

Importantly, the National MS Society noted the lack of touchpoints many people experience after their initial diagnosis and sought to engage people who had been living with MS for years with curated resources that go beyond the content common to standard post-diagnosis resources. To that end, CSG worked with the Society to compile the best and most requested content into a single resource spanning from the point of diagnosis to living well with MS in the long term.

Digital marketing and healthcare don’t always go together, but in demonstrating ongoing value and a breadth of topical expertise to the audience, the campaign was able to capture leads via a downloadable content offer and encourage browsing with on-site content. Three supporting content pieces developed specifically for the campaign earned more than 15,000 page views and kept readers on the site for an average of 2 minutes and 35 seconds.

National Multiple Sclerosis Society Ad Examples

Chart a Course for Content Strategy

In addition to creating significant short-term wins for the National MS Society and connecting its audience members to invaluable resources, the Prevalence Campaign set the stage for the Society’s entrance into healthcare digital marketing solutions and content strategy.

In parallel to and as part of the creation of the campaign, CSG worked with the Society’s marketing team to establish an ongoing strategy that leveraged the best of digital marketing in healthcare, including multi-channel content strategy and replicable processes to bring efficiency to all future campaigns.

One of the cool things that came out of it was a mindset shift. People started to realize not just on the marketing team, but across the organization, that stories are powerful. And when you can empower people to tell their story and give them the platform to tell their story effectively and efficiently, then you can really start moving the needle … on a world free of MS.
Ron Zwerin, Executive Vice President of Marketing Communications and Brand Strategy, The National MS Society

NATIONAL MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS SOCIETY

Case Study