Talstone Group Increases Webinar Attendees with Strategic Online Campaign

The Situation

NotifyMD needed to increase awareness of their new communication solutions for hospital service lines and deliver warm leads to their sales force. They asked an existing client – Saint Thomas Health Services, a four-hospital ministry that is a part of Ascension Health, the nation's largest non-profit hospital system – to present a case study Webinar. This Webinar would demonstrate how NotifyMD's solutions increased service line referrals and revenue for Women's Health at Saint Thomas Health Services.

The Challenge

Although NotifyMD is well known across the physician practice sector as a call management provider, brand penetration in the enterprise segment, such as hospitals and health systems, was minimal. The target for this Webinar would be hospital marketing leaders who were busy and had a high intolerance for sales pitches that did not deliver value.

As well, due to scheduling constraints, the Webinar was scheduled to be presented a few days after New Year's, a historically difficult time during which to build momentum for the Webinar.

The Strategy

Talstone Group interviewed the STHS presenter and developed an outline for the Webinar that wove NotifyMD's solutions into an educational format, offering hospital marketing leaders valuable strategies for increasing their service line referrals and revenue, backed up with a case study that proved their solutions worked.

The outline was then developed visually into the Webinar slides. One of the key features was to let the audience listen to a recording of two of the actual calls NotifyMD handled for STHS so they could understand the professionalism and seamlessness of their call management solutions.

Next, Talstone Group developed a four-pronged online strategy to promote the event. First, we created an e-mail campaign using an internal list supplied by NotifyMD.

[CALL-OUT BOX: The e-mail campaign to NotifyMD's internal list consisted of three hits to a list of only 234 recipients. Of that number, 148 opened the e-mail and 23 clicked through, delivering a 63% open rate. This far exceeded the industry benchmark of a 20% open rate for an average campaign.]

Then, Talstone Group implemented a newsletter sponsorship campaign through FierceHealthcare that carried a banner advertisement as well as an e-mail campaign.

Finally, another part of the online strategy was to build momentum using microblogging site Twitter. Talstone employees as well as NotifyMD's vice president of strategy "tweeted" about the upcoming Webinar to increase awareness.

The online campaign resulted in 161 registrants, of which 102 (63%) attended, breaking the industry benchmark Webinar average of 30-35% of those who register actually attending. Attendees included vice presidents, marketing directors, and marketing strategists for some of the biggest hospital and health systems in the nation. This delivered warm leads for NotifyMD's sales team follow-up as well as increasing NotifyMD's market penetration in hospitals and health systems.