Baxter Regional Case Study - Content Marketing
We first began working with Baxter Regional in January of 2018. When they approached us they wanted to utilize their social media channels, especially Facebook, to engage with the local community. They needed a strategy that would build a local audience, compliment public relations, and create engagement. All of which leads to more visits, preventative care, and a healthier community.
Baxter Regional Medical Center is the largest employer in Baxter County, this makes Baxter Regional the cornerstone of the Mountain Home community in many ways. Because of this, our goal was to launch campaigns introducing the community back to itself. We created various video series to highlight the people within the organization that can go unnoticed a lot of times. We made an effort to focus more on support staff and departments like food service, volunteers, construction, maintenance, and environmental services. These videos consisted of an interview with each individual, and in the process of learning more about their role in the Hospital, we recorded them on the job. This campaign allowed us to create consistent content and turn employees into brand advocates. Many in the community knew these individuals, so it was a consistent win for our engagement metrics.
On top of this series, we layered in different levels of social media ads that focused on culture, recruiting, and brand awareness. Because of Baxter Regional Medical Center’s geographic location, the track record of success, and rural surroundings, the organization treats patients from a surrounding 14 to 17 country area at any given time. This period of growth saw the launch of many hometown clinics, internal departments were expanded, new services offered, and they even launched a new app.
Baxter Regional does assume some ownership in marketing the entire area to visitors as well.
A work where you vacation campaign was launched to show potential applicants the beauty of the Mountain Home area. It’s not everywhere that you can clock out and be on a wakeboard at the lake, a kayak in the river, on a golf course, hiking a trail, and many other things all within 15 minutes. Baxter Regional is a nonprofit hospital and with the support, the community also hosts various events throughout the year that are a blast and also help to raise a lot of money for support services.
January 2017 to November 2019. All ads ran generated a cost per click of 0.33 cents on average.
After becoming a retainer client, Baxter Regional has experienced tremendous growth online. In a one year period, the size of their online audience doubled moving from 4,446 to 9,389 and in the months following has since risen to 10,282. While this is impressive, more importantly for us is the increase of engagement that we’ve seen from this. When looking at the actual interaction from our social media stats, we’ve seen comments, shares, likes, and reactions skyrocket. For example in 2017 the average amount of shares per month was 561, in 2018 this rose to 677 and in 2019 to 799. The average amount of video views in 2017 averaged 5,703 per month, in 2018 that number rose to 35,298, and in 2019 to 46,575. All of this was done in 2019 while achieving a cost per click of only .36/per month on average.
We talk about this with clients all the time — social media can be thought of as the top layer in your sales funnel. Just like with retail or any other business, at the end of the day, you need consistent touches. The average consumer needs to come in contact with your brand 10 times or more to become familiar enough with it to try it out. When you price the cost of attention between radio, television, print, to social media, there is no comparison. The bang for your buck is content marketing.
In social media reporting, we use the metric “reach” to determine how many individuals we are reaching. In 2017 the average reach was 190,461 a month. In 2019 we reached on average 446,273 individuals all within our service area or an area we were recruiting from. When looking at data across the bigger picture you can determine the correlation between engagement online and offline. The cost of social media marketing is still underpriced, so organizations like Baxter Regional, who are brave enough to jump into social, find that often their budgets remain the same, but they redistribute to content marketing from traditional advertising. How would you like to double all your metrics for the same advertising budget?
To include everything in this case study would be to write a book. The key takeaways are that small, medium, and large businesses alike need to get over the fear of posting organic content — don’t worry about being perfect. Just worry about the message and getting it out there to the public. If you are interested in learning more about the kind of reporting, content, and advertising that we do, simply fill out the form below to schedule a consultation. We would love to meet with you to share more details and to see how content marketing could be a fit for your brand.