How to Reach and Engage the Right Audience at the Right Time on Digital and Social Media

Background:

Many of the world’s top brands use a “consumer decision journey” approach to reach target audiences at key touch points to create awareness, drive consideration, and ultimately result in a desired action such as purchasing a product or service. This is especially true for digital and social media. This tried-and-tested approach, originally developed by McKinsey & Company, can be applied effectively to public health campaigns and can significantly improve a campaign’s digital and social media efforts.

Program background:

Many of the world’s top brands use a “consumer decision journey” approach to reach target audiences at key touch points to create awareness, drive consideration, and ultimately result in a desired action such as purchasing a product or service. This is especially true for digital and social media. This tried-and-tested approach, originally developed by McKinsey & Company, can be applied effectively to public health campaigns and can significantly improve a campaign’s digital and social media efforts.

To measure social media campaigns accurately with the “consumer decision journey” in mind, TFF standardized analytics. Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) were aligned across social media channels allowing TFF to analyze performance and efficiently optimize campaigns to reach target audiences more effectively and utilize budgets more efficiently.

Evaluation Methods and Results:

On a monthly basis, TFF pulls robust metrics directly from the social media platforms’ analytics interfaces, including Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. The team thoroughly analyzes the data to report campaign performance, assess creative, and enhance upcoming social media posts.

There has been significant improvement across key metrics on all social media channels when comparing the first half of fiscal year 2018-2019 to fiscal year 2017-2018. For example:

• Total engagements across all channels quadrupled compared to FY 17-18, which is quite impressive considering we are comparing 6 months to 12 months.
• In FY 17-18, social media drove about 30,500 clicks to tobaccofreeflorida.com. In the first half of FY 18-19, social media has already driven more than 146,000 clicks to the website.
• In FY 17-18, there were 45.4 million total social media impressions. In the first half of FY 18-19, there have already been more than 34.2 million impressions.
• The average engagement rate, average video view rate, and average click-through rate have increased significantly across all social media channels. For example, the average video view rate for Instagram was 11.5% in FY 17-18 compared to 20.3% the first half of FY 18-19. Click-through rates on Twitter have almost doubled.

Conclusions:

When using the “consumer decision journey,” digital and social media can reach and engage audiences with extreme precision, based on the audience’s previous digital behavior. This strategy allows campaigns to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time. It can also improve the cost effectiveness of a campaign’s social media efforts.

Implications for research and/or practice:

Social media lessons learned and evidence-based strategies from TFF can benefit other health communication efforts across the country.