American College of Physicians Case Study

group of medical students sitting at desk

Case Study

Appealing To A New Generation of Physicians

The American College of Physicians needed help generating new memberships and getting a younger audience of internal medicine physicians excited about joining ACP. They teamed up with Wpromote to develop and implement a strong paid media strategy to raise awareness and affinity with those new target audiences, increasing new sign-ups by 150% YoY.

Their Story

Educating & Advocating For Internal Medicine Physicians

ACP is a global organization of internists, as well as the largest medical-specialty organization and second-largest physician group in the United States. Their 159,000 members include internists, internal medicine subspecialists, medical students, residents, and fellows-in-training. They offer a variety of educational resources that help internal medicine physicians keep up with clinical knowledge and earn medical education credits; they publish a highly regarded medical journal; they provide support for practice management and career transitions; they offer opportunities for networking and idea exchange; and more. Their HQ is in Philadelphia and they have a large presence in DC where they advocate on behalf of internal medicine physicians.

group of medical students writing on wall

“The team at Wpromote has been an incredible extension of our team here at ACP. Over the past 10 years, we’ve improved our SEO and had incredible successes with both SEM and paid social campaigns. A perfect example is our membership acquisition campaign, which has grown exponentially thanks to their support, recommendations, and optimizations. Four years ago, these campaigns brought in 94 new members to our organization; last year, they brought in over 1,300 new members…with only a fraction more of the spend. They have taken the time to get to know our organization and our industry in order to provide the best advice, and perhaps more importantly, they are always a pleasure to work with. We can’t recommend them enough.”
Lynn Masino
Manager, Marketing, American College of Physicians

The Challenge

Expanding Membership

American College of Physicians came to Wpromote in 2017 looking for a way to engage and connect with internal medicine physicians and convert them into ACP members. In particular, they needed to grow their membership base and appeal to a younger, changing demographic of doctors.

hands holding ipad with facebook on screen

The Solution

Targeting Across Channels

Wpromote worked with ACP to build an omnichannel solution that would help the organization reach new potential members at every stage of the funnel. On the organic side, the Wpromote team supported migrating the membership section of ACP’s site from a subdomain back onto acponline.org. They also optimized the new membership pages to improve organic equity and SERP visibility.

At the same time, Wpromote and ACP built a full-funnel social media strategy to drive users to sign up for a membership using a phased approach:

Build awareness for the membership by targeting people with interests in Internal Medicine using a video asset highlighting the benefits of membership.
Leverage the video viewers from the first part of the sequence to create a custom audience that was used in the direct response portion of the campaign. Additionally, retarget web visitors who showed interest in ACP, but did not convert to a membership yet.
Serve direct response ads to the list of lead form individuals and most engaged audiences to convert them into ACP members.

Over the last three years, these campaigns have been run with different creatives for different target audiences simultaneously to drive awareness and positive affinity for ACP’s offering and continue to drive new prospective members into the funnel.

To make sure to capture the increased demand generated by social, ACP and Wpromote opened up paid search budgets to ensure the organization was showing up on search engine results pages. That included expanding coverage of non-brand keywords to reach new internal medicine audiences who may not have been familiar with ACP.

In addition, the team created display campaigns targeted to similar audiences to those reached by the social ads. Likewise, the ads for both paid search and display featured messaging tailored to users at each level of the funnel, mirroring the why join messaging from the social campaigns.

Channels + Services

Paid Social
Paid Search
SEO

Increasing Demand By Expanding Reach

Wpromote helped expand ACP’s reach on both Facebook and Instagram, which helped expose ACP to a broader audience. Investing in the new platforms helped generate demand and attract a new generation of physicians to ACP.

Ultimately, through a cross-channel strategy that included organic keyword optimization, expansion onto new social platforms, and effective budgeting through efficient creative and ad copy testing we helped to drive 5,000 new member sign-ups YoY 2018-2019.