To drive brand awareness in the Hospital vertical, Acsys Interactive successfully launched the first crowdsourced survey in the Hospital industry. To view the results and insights from the survey, please visit our interactive report.
Background
Acsys Interactive is a full service interactive agency focused on delivering quantifiable results for clients within targeted industry verticals including healthcare, financial services, higher ed and consumer products. Acsys desired to raise its profile within the healthcare vertical via an innovative thought leadership initiative.
In discussions with our clients and prospects in the healthcare provider segment, and through our own discussions with industry leaders, we identified a gap for insightful, statistically valid and relevant research on the evolution of emerging media within the niche hospital/provider market. Existing industry surveys did not cover topics that were most frequently on the minds of clients and prospects, particularly related to social media and mobile. Since Hospital Marketers had great questions on their minds, who better to provide the input for an industry survey than the 'crowd' of hospital marketers in the context of a social, or crowdsourced, survey. With this, Acsys launched the first ever peer-based, Crowdsourced survey of Hospital Marketers. This level of non-traditional transparency and open approach was also very aligned with Acsys core values and brand promise.How was it implemented?
Since only a handful of Crowdsourced surveys have ever been implemented, Acsys partnered with Equation Research, a firm that had experience in this realm. To help gather questions and distribute the results of the survey, Acsys Interactive used a multi-channel approach with social media at the core.
Survey Launch:
To launch the survey and gather questions from the crowd, Acsys used its blog Alluminate, as the central repository for communications. A post was created to introduce the survey and word was spread leveraging relationships with industry influencers who promoted the survey to their social networks. Over 100 peer questions were collected, synthesized and presented to the industry via an online questionnaire published on the blog.Survey Creation and Collection:
Acsys worked with Equation Research to synthesize the questions and make them "research-ready". Before launching the survey, Acsys reviewed it with a subset of the "crowd", including several industry influencers. Once the survey was ready, it was promoted again via multiple social channels including Twitter, Bloggers, LinkedIn, a social press release, targeted emails and via trade shows. More than 100 respondents completed the survey from a variety of hospitals and healthcare systems, including many of the nation's most renowned organizations.Survey Publishing and Promotion:
Survey results were tabulated with help from Equation Research and some stunning data and insights resulted about the massive rise in digital media predicted to occur by 2013. Survey takers were provided with a PowerPoint preview of results shortly after they were available. However, to publish the results and get the word out to the broader hospital marketing community, Acsys wanted to do something more innovative, impactful and social. To do so, Acsys utilized its GreenDocs publishing platform to create a sharable, rich, presentation of the data as well as a pass-along infographic. In the spirit of openness that encompassed the survey, Acsys provided the results without charge and without requiring any personal data or registration from the reader. The results were then publicized on our own website, in press releases and via various social media channels to help generate interest.What were the results?
Not only did the Crowdsourced survey fill important gaps in the minds of Hospital Marketers related to digital, social and mobile, but it also accomplished Acsys' goal to increase visibility and demonstrate innovation. Among the tangible results that Acsys achieved:
- Uncovered a massive industry shift from traditional communications to digital communications by 2013
- Initiated over 1000 targeted visits (and many thousands of page views) to the Acsys website from industry leading healthcare systems across the country, including 80% of the top 20 systems
- Sparked hundreds of tweets within influential healthcare and marketing communities
- Initiated roughly 20 new business leads
- Captured hundreds of opt-in emails
- Generated numerous features in influential healthcare blogs, newsletters, and offline media in addition to receiving
- Created base of engaged participants for future survey participation
- Achieved a bounce rate for survey readers of under 5%