When the National Commission on Certification of Physician Assistants (NCCPA) announced earlier this year that its certification exam would be getting a lot harder, physician assistant (PA) students, faculty and universities panicked. A harder exam means a lower pass rate, which can be devastating for both individual PA students and PA programs as a whole.
CME4Life, a longtime Parkway Digital client, saw this situation as an opportunity. It’s built a reputation on preparing PAs for their certification exam, which is called the PANCE. Plus, they offer continuing medical education for PAs at all stages of their careers.
A downloadable study guide designed for PA students not only introduces them to other board review products that are profitable for CME4Life. The study guide also helps these individuals get to know CME4Life as a whole. If CME4Life can help these students pass their exams and become practicing PAs, it gains brand-loyal customers who come back to continue their education in the future.
This downloadable study guide needed to include a lot of information, without being overwhelming. We partnered with CME4Life’s medical educators and leadership to design a simple study guide that outlines exactly what PA students need to know.
Maximizing Distribution
CME4Life’s study guide is only helpful for students if they know it exists. Parkway Digital built an advertising campaign that combined targeted search and social ads with email marketing and remarketing.
Connecting with Current Customers
We started by leveraging CME4Life’s reputation among PA faculty and programs. To connect with faculty familiar with our client, we sent segmented emails focused on specific elements of the situation:
- How has the exam changed?
- How will this affect how students study?
- What tools will you need to prepare?
Of course, the answers to these questions and more can be found in CME4Life’s study guide. In the three months following the launch of the study guide, these emails (and others like them) resulted in a goal conversion rate of over 35%. More than one in three of the faculty members who visited the CME4Life website from this email campaign went on to download the study guide!
Parkway Digital also created Facebook ads targeted toward users who had previously engaged with CME4Life in some way on the platform. In the same three months, these ads enjoyed an engagement click through rate of 1.3%. After clicking, website visitors from this campaign downloaded the study guide over 20% of the time.
Expanding Reach
In order to reach PA students themselves, we cast a wider net with search and social ads. When students search for “PANCE review” or “PANCE study schedule” on Google, they’ll see an ad for CME4Life’s free study guide.
These ads received a click through rate of over 6% and resulted in a conversion rate of approximately 16%. Pretty good for people who, in general, didn’t know much about CME4Life!
Parkway Digital also built a Facebook campaign designed to catch the attention of users interested in physician assistant-related topics who were likely unfamiliar with CME4Life. As expected, this campaign did not perform as well as the ads targeted toward CME4Life’s followers. However, it still resulted in a 0.9% engagement click through rate and a 9% conversion rate after viewers landed on the website.
Remarketing to Past Visitors
In addition to driving new visitors to download the study guide, we used display ads to target people who had previously visited the website. This type of ad doesn’t always result in immediate action, but it’s a great way to stay in front of potential customers. In this case, these ads received well over half a million impressions in three months!
