Hopefully you have seen the Accu-Chek (ABCD) Working Group Community Playbook. It’s available in Accu-Chek BrandBox. If you haven’t seen it yet, I would encourage you to check this amazing playbook as it covers the Why Communities are needed, External Conditions affecting communities, Internal Foundations, and an Implementation Guide.
In the playbook, it says “As part of our digital strategy, we must engage our customers online and help enable them to have open, honest conversations with other people as well as diabetes companies and organizations. Our customers need a safe place to ask questions, get reliable answers and share suggestions for improvements."
The Problem
However, with any community building effort we will run into a problem. In today’s crowded digital arena and increasing competition for customers, we cannot just build a community and rely on people to find it on their own and join.
As an example, Facebook is now the largest community platform in the world. This is where many of our potential community members are having conversations about their health. However, non-paid visibility is practically nonexistent. Even with good content and good community management, less than 2% of your Facebook audience (these are the people who have "liked" your page) will see your content.
Just because we build it, doesn't mean our community will grow. Building a great community space is only half the battle. If you want to recruit new customers we have to work on two fronts!
- Preparation, meaning to build the community – giving the community a proper place to interact.
- Promotion, this is the second half of the community building – what I mean by that specifically is paid media investment.
The Question
So, the Global Marketing Strategy & Services team decided to ask some questions and test our assertions. We asked if paid media investment would actually work within an existing community? What kind of investment amount would return what kind of results? And how would we know if it worked?
The Test
We partnered with Brazil, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Norway. We chose these affiliates because they had put in a lot of work in the first phase of community building (preparation) and they wanted to see what paid media could do to improve their community goals. 3 different communities, with different audiences and different goals.
We wanted to ensure that this test was unambiguous in its results. So, we determined the key measures that we would track. We saw that a short run of paid media investment benefited each one in clear and significant ways.
The Results
Investing in paid media for a defined period (just 30 days), demonstrated a significant and definitive improvement in the relevant community key performance measures (KPI’s).
We saw a marked improvement in the growth of new community members or followers. We saw improvements in community engagement – interactions. And we saw improvements in driving community actions.
There are many aspects of the results that we can share. Here are just some highlights.
In addition, improvements were not limited to the KPI’s that were most relevant to community. We saw improvements in non-paid awareness, more traffic from site to site, more direct traffic to Accu-Chek sites, and more e-Commerce volume.
The Path Forward
Paid media investment is an essential element to community building. It broadens community exposure, deepens community engagement and drives community actions. Media, especially in digital form, is interspersed throughout the modern patient journey. Media can play a crucial role in building online communities, and in a cost-effective and time-efficient manner.
As the worldwide #1 in glucose devices, our investment must be in a dominating position to give us visibility for customer decisions and community growth.
Want to Know More?
See the post, watch the video and comment in Yammer. Or, if you would like to have a full presentation of these results, feel free to contact Marcus Dennis.
