The digital landscape is shifting. The use of ad-blocking software has risen 48 percent within a year so brands have begun to move resources to social media, native advertising and influencer campaigns. We are rethinking the role of digital display ads and their place in the purchase process.

Still, the larger challenge remains. How do we find authentic ways to fit brands into one-to-one messaging platforms without annoying your audiences? The explosive growth of messaging platforms continues to accelerate a warp speed and is expected to expand from 2.5 billion to 3.6 billion global users by 2018 – 25 percent greater than the audience for social media. While one-to-one messaging soars, Facebook has noted that its users are posting less and less ­– in fact, only 20 percent of millennials use broadcast social networks to post photos and videos at all.

However, diminishing returns are showing that using Snapchat as an organic social channel isn’t cost-effective. Nor should we think of it as the next Facebook or Instagram. We need to think of it as new TV. Think appointment-watching, awareness and buying eyeballs ­– not growing communities, editorial calendars and real-time marketing. Think of it as a newfangled TV spot, not regularly scheduled organic snaps to grow your audience.

The digital video space has become more complicated and has to be rethought. You can’t just post your brand’s video to YouTube and syndicate it across other social networks. Your video needs to be optimized for every platform it’s posted on. That is, if you want to bolster its chances of success. Post it on YouTube, but then it needs to be reshaped as a Facebook video, a Twitter video, an Instagram video and potentially a Vine or Tumblr video. That’s for starters. Video needs to be tailored for each platform, optimized for the audience and cultural norms of each. And with live-streaming gaining even more momentum, pushing out that branded content continues to get exponentially more difficult.

In 2015, Franciscan St. Francis Health not only expanded its physical footprint, but we led the efforts to greatly expand its digital footprint. For seven service lines and two of their hospital campuses, our digital advertising programs outperformed industry benchmarks.

By optimizing our secondary metrics, our digital media placements and creative work surpassed the industry benchmarks and our goals for Click-Thru Rate (CTR) and Cost-Per-Click (CPC). We achieved double and in many cases triple the CTR for display ads, mobile ads, native ads, pre-roll videos, Facebook video ads, and Pandora display and audio ads.

But our ultimate metric and objective is to maximize ROI. By including special call-to-actions and aligning them with operations, we know that our campaign for Women Services delivered even more. It generated over 5-times more in potential revenue than the media dollars invested.

In one year, market share for neonatal services at one hospital dropped by 13.8% because several OB physicians elected to change their hospital affiliations. This story is nothing new in the healthcare industry, but it demonstrates how marketing can play a significant role to regain market share caused by an operational issue.
In just two years, the hospital regained 8.1% in market share. And the trend line continues to point up.
How was this accomplished? A small investment was made in marketing to support outreach activities in the community along with a digital marketing and direct marketing campaign.
By executing unique, fun and direct ways to engage moms and mothers-to-be, we were able to deliver big smiles to their faces which translated into delivering more babies, and ultimately, delivering bigger smiles to the faces of the new OB doctors, nurses and hospital administrators.