A 5-Day LinkedIn Campaign for a Rare Disease News Giant
The Challenge
How do you help a digital health company stand out in a crowded space on #RareDiseaseDay, a can’t-miss day of activism and advocacy for the rare disease community.
The Approach
Partner with a world-renowned rare disease therapist to put together a 5-day video campaign that answers questions from real patients and caregivers.
Keepin’ It Rare
Bionews is one of the premier voices in the rare disease space and a major source of trusted news for a wide range of rare disease communities. The company manages and owns more than 50 individual rare disease websites, each with their own engaged communities, news hubs, and both patient and caregivers columnists–this means that they have actual people living with these diseases contributing. This has created a level of authenticity and built a strong web of trust with the rare disease community, fostering an environment wherein organic engagement thrives.
Since 2024, we have had the pleasure of managing Bionews’ full-scale marketing efforts for their corporate side of the operation. This includes weekly posting on the corporate LinkedIn account. At the beginning of 2024 Q1, we immediately addressed the Rare Disease Day, which was fast approaching on February 28.
We didn’t want to just make a post and walk away from it, only for it to get lost in a sea of similar posts that ultimately lead to nothing more. We wanted to make an impact. We wanted to create something that would far outlive the fleeting nature of a single day. We went to the drawing board.
View the campaign landing page here.
While we established that we wanted to do something special for Rare Disease Day, we didn’t know what that looked like right away. Initially, we dove into the analytics side of things to see what was performing best on their corporate LinkedIn account. Time and time again, we noted that videos that featured real patients far outperformed any other content we were creating.
But we wanted to take things a step further than just simply creating a video. What if we created a 5-part video series that we released leading up to Rare Disease Day? What if that same video series answered questions that were sourced directly from the rare disease community? Lastly, what if those patients and caregivers were actually featured in the videos? We decided to do just that, giving it the appropriate name ‘Keepin’ It Rare.’
Now that we had the foundation of the campaign, we wanted to give the campaign some authority and notoriety. Dr. Al Freedman is one of the country’s leading psychologists who specializes specifically in therapy for patients with rare diseases. We knew that with Dr. Al’s expertise and his own following, we had a shot at generating meaningful engagement and, more importantly, providing real value to the rare disease community.
As the last piece to the puzzle, the Bionews corporate team was able to secure a big brand partnership for the campaign in NORD, the National Organization for Rare Disorder to help amplify our message.
The stage was set. It was time to bring it all to life.
Working directly with Bionews’ internal team, we were able to enlist the help of several corporate employees who were patients as well as individual disease site columnists to be featured in the videos. This would give the campaign an authentic angle and underscore the importance of the patient perspective.
Each video would be shot as a town hall style Q&A where the patients would ask Dr. Al questions. The uniqueness of this format essentially gave rare disease patients direct access to therapy sessions and professional insights from one of the area’s leading experts. We knew this content would be equally engaging and valuable for patients.
Since the patients and Dr. Al came to us from all over the nation, we used Riverside to record the conversations for high-quality audio and video.
As with any campaign, we wanted to drive people to a landing page so that we could track the effectiveness and give people a more thorough way to engage with the content.
This landing page came together on the corporate site and featured all of the videos in the campaign with a deeper dive on Bionews, Dr. Al’s story, and our campaign partner. We also added a unique contact form through Klaviyo so that we could send custom email messaging to interested contacts and follow up with potential leads.
We didn’t want to leave anything to chance with this campaign. We also wanted to ensure that we were increasing our brand awareness and reaching new leads. Because of this, we brought in a paid component to supplement our organic strategy.
The campaign was going to have a high cost per click, but we knew the audience would be narrow. And since the campaign was only a week, paid was a way to keep the impressions going after the posts were already up. This encouraged us to keep the paid campaign running into March after the final post had already been posted.
Although much of this campaign was aimed at reaching new audiences, it was also an opportunity to re-engage our existing contacts. Email is one of the best ways to do this.
We leveraged Klaviyo to create a series of 3 separate emails that spanned the launch and closing of the campaign. This gave us the opportunity to drive more qualified traffic to our campaign landing page and reignite interest within a niche audience who either already works with us or is thinking about working with Bionews.
With the landing page and content recorded, all we had to do was schedule out the posts, the emails, and launch the paid ads. Since Rare Disease Day was on Friday, February 28, the 5-part series fit perfectly within the week.
Every day, we posted a new segment of the campaign on LinkedIn. We closely monitored the engagement and encouraged internal team members to engage with and share the content as much as possible to boost the organic reach.
The campaign was a success and well received by the community and our client. We saw a massive boost in website traffic, a click-through rate well above the industry average, thousands of impressions, and generated leads.
See below to see data and results from the 5-day Keepin’ It Rare campaign.
LinkedIn (Organic)
Average CTR: 6.71%
Total clicks: 289
Total impressions: 4,296
Total video views: 2,648
New followers: 23 → 155% increase
Unique visitors: 111 → 54% increase
Page views: 227 → 54% increase
Paid
Impressions: 3,291
Total Clicks: 25
Total Spend: $982
Average CTR: 0.77%
Average CPC: $40.21
Website
Total Users: 1,818
Total Sessions: 2,197
Total Page Views: 2,407
Engagement Time Per Session: 2:22
Increase in website traffic from the prior week: 194%
Email
Emails Sent: 3
Average Open Rate: 33.88%
Average CTR: .81%
