Case Study
Generating Event Interest with Social Media and Press Releases: Twitter and e-news distribution drives awareness
Client
A healthcare market research company.
Products
Newly launched oncology syndicated research product
Market Challenge
- This research company was a relatively unknown entity in its marketplace and needed to generate awareness for its new oncology research product.
- They decided to participate in an industry oncology conference to generate awareness for the new oncology research product but had limited resources and time to reach the target audience.
Objectives
- To build audience awareness both for the event and the new oncology service in a short two-week timeframe prior to the event and continue momentum during a two-week period after the event.
- Track impact of awareness generation to determine a post-event nurturing strategy
- Accomplish goals for low cost.
Strategy/Solution
- Created press release and distributed through 5 high-traffic, free online PR services. An enhanced version was created for social media news release sites that allow downloads and other enhanced content
- Established Twitter presence to disseminate relevant information & engage with target audience;
- Developed a Twitter audience-building strategy centered around the business development team’s target list as well as media and industry Twitter users; maintained posting schedule of several times daily
- Leveraged LinkedIn Network to reach potential audience of 2,045 business-to-business oncology professionals
- Utilized social bookmarking and shared services such as StumbleUpon, Delicious and Reddit to spread the word and increase opportunities for search engine indexing
Results
The pre- and post-conference strategy was considered a resounding success at raising awareness for the new research service with its target audience and on the Web in general:
After only 7 days…
- The combined press release outreach plus Twitter launch/daily postings resulted in Google hits for the release using the company name appearing on page 1 and 2 of results (#5, 8, 11, 19)
- Searches on the more generic “oncology market research” phrase found the release on page 1 (#9)
- Searches on the term “oncology syndicated research” found the release on page 1 (#4, 6)
- The version of the release sent via Twitter received over 1,400 clicks with a potential audience reach of over 4,500 Twitter users [1]
- During the two-week pre-conference period The potential audience for the client’s Tweets increased from 4,505 to 50,043 users.
After 19 days…
- The news release received 277 unique clippings of the release across two of the PR sites
- Google searches on the company name showed the release’s presence relatively stable at #7, 8, 10, 16 positions (page 1 & 2)
- Google results for the terms “oncology market intelligence” and “oncology syndicated research” remained stable at #9 and #5, respectively
- 18 contacts had subscribed to or “followed” the Twitter account, three of which were key targets the client wanted to break into
- From Twitter postings there were 17 click-throughs to the online press release or back to the company website itself [2]
- The Potential audience for the company's Tweets grew to more than 50,000 other Twitter users as the number of followers quadrupled
- At the end of the post-conference period the client’s Tweets had the potential to reach 66,927 other Twitter users through its 31 followers [3]
