case study
FEMA’s Bilingual Ad Campaign Reduces Cost Per Result By 54%
The Ad Council, FEMA, and Llama Lead Gen collaborated on a successful "Emergency Preparedness" campaign targeting Black and Latino families across Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. The campaign aimed to drive traffic to a landing page for disaster readiness. On Facebook and Instagram, the focus was on website visits and completion of a Family Emergency Communication Plan, resulting in 180K visits, a 70% retention rate, and a 54% cost reduction per visit. YouTube emphasized visits to the landing page and video views, achieving 19M impressions and 4M views. The bilingual content strategy highlighted the effectiveness of tailored messaging and multi-platform approaches, engaging diverse communities for social good, particularly the Black and Latino populations.
#DisasterPrevention
#LatinoOutreach
#BlackCommunityEngagement
#SocialMediaForGood
#MultiPlatformStrategy
Introduction
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is the federal government's lead agency in responding to and recovering from many of the country's major crises and disasters. FEMA’s mission is centered around all parts of the process to maximize recovery and mitigate loss in the event of a disaster, both natural and man-made. As a part of the broader mission, “Preparedness” is an important pillar where FEMA takes steps to help people and communities to be more readied and resilient in the face of a disaster.
FEMA and the Ad Council approached Llama Lead Gen as a trusted digital marketing partner with the “Emergency Preparedness” campaign with the goal of reaching Black and Latino communities living in top natural disaster states in order to encourage, educate, and empower the development of their own emergency preparedness plans.
In this campaign, we developed and utilized video creatives in both English and Spanish. These creatives were imbued with culturally relevant themes to effectively engage our target audiences and guide them to the campaign's landing pages, ready.gov and listo.gov. Recognizing the intricacies of a bilingual campaign, we meticulously crafted messages to resonate with the linguistic and cultural nuances of both English and Spanish-speaking audiences. This approach was vital on platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, where language and cultural relevance play a significant role in user engagement.
The landing page included a wealth of resources that can help visitors better understand each step to becoming disaster ready. The primary goal of the campaign is to encourage families to improve their own preparedness by visiting the landing page to browse through the available resources. There was a secondary goal of driving form submission on the Family Emergency Communication Plan page to ensure that families can be easily reunited in the event of an emergency.
The Challenge
FEMA and the Ad Council came to Llama Lead Gen to strategize around a multi-platform “Emergency Preparedness” awareness campaign across Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. The two-prong approach is to ensure mass reach across two major platforms with Facebook and Instagram, focused on driving traffic to the English and Spanish sites and YouTube focused on driving video views.
One main challenge in this campaign from a media perspective was the multi-step process to get users from the Facebook and Instagram platforms to the landing page to visit or submit a form on the Family Emergency Communications Plan page. We needed to ensure that our creative and ad copy clearly convinced the user of the importance of taking the time to complete this step as well as find relevant users who would find this message crucial. Additionally, given the demographically tailored creative in this campaign, it was important to be accurate in our targeting to ensure the message reached the relevant audience.
To address the diverse audience, our campaign incorporated bilingual targeting, catering to both English and Spanish speakers. This aspect added complexity, requiring nuanced understanding and execution in a multi-lingual ad campaign, especially on platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram where language significantly influences user engagement.
Ensuring that our messaging was culturally and linguistically aligned with our targeted demographics was paramount. This precision in targeting was essential not just for language relevance, but also for aligning with the cultural contexts and preferences of our Black and Latino audience segments. The success of our campaign hinged on this delicate balance of language, cultural sensitivity, and effective targeting.
Strategy
Given the importance of the initiative, FEMA had dedicated a sizable budget to educating the Black and Latino communities, in order to maximize reach across demographics, we decided to target across Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Historically, we have seen that while all platforms have mass reach, user behaviors still vary on the two platforms. By leveraging Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, we were able to focus on driving traffic to the landing page as well as video views to ensure the messaging was delivered as effectively as possible.
A notable element in our strategy was implementing a bilingual approach, particularly for the Latino audience. Recognizing the nuances of a multi-lingual ad campaign, we produced Spanish language creatives specifically tailored to the Latino audience. This was a crucial aspect of our campaign on YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, where language plays a pivotal role in user engagement and message resonance. Our sophisticated targeting ensured that the language of the ads aligned with the user's preferred language, enhancing the relevance and impact of our messaging.
Across platforms, we targeted Black and Latino parents and caregivers who live in states with a high propensity for natural disasters, as well as retargeting users who have visited the landing page as well as lookalikes of those site visitors.
Specific to Facebook and Instagram, there was an A/B test set up breaking out Black and Latino parents in high disaster areas versus broad geo-targeting in order to gauge the receptiveness of our messaging in getting users to visit the ready.gov landing page.
We leveraged creative themes that were tailored to Black and Latino audiences featuring cultural themes and actors that can resonate with each of our audiences. Spanish language creatives were produced specifically for the Latino audience group, and we leveraged specific targeting to ensure that the languages of the ads received by each user were in alignment with them. This attention to cultural nuances was a key factor in the success of our multi-platform, multi-lingual campaign.
Solution & Implementation
After gaining a full understanding of the strategy and goals of this campaign, we collaborated with the Ad Council and FEMA to align on finalized ad copy and ensured that the target audiences were appropriate for the campaign. The Llama Lead Gen team took full ownership of the execution of the campaign set up within both platforms.
A significant aspect of this campaign involved the deployment of a bilingual strategy, targeting both English and Spanish speaking audiences. This multi-lingual approach introduced unique complexities, particularly in tailoring content and messaging to resonate authentically with each language group. On platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, nuances in cultural context and language usage demanded an adaptive and sensitive approach to ensure maximum engagement and relevance across both language segments.
The campaign was launched after careful QA to ensure that our campaigns, audiences, and ads were set up properly. Our team monitored the performance daily and adjusted the budget accordingly based on what ads and audiences were performing well. Shifting dollars into more efficient audiences and ads.
For this campaign, we also set up an A/B test for our main audience group of parents on Facebook and Instagram, where we broke out our audiences by geographies. One of the groups targeted all of the US, while the other honed in on 9 states with a higher propensity for natural disaster during the season in which our campaign was live.
We carefully monitored the performances between the two audiences for the initial week in order to see the difference in results. By mid-campaign, it was determined that there were no significant variations in performance across geo break out, and therefore it was consolidated for the remainder of the campaign.
Language
We implemented a tailored approach by segmenting our creatives and targeting based on language preferences, distinguishing between English and Spanish. This strategy was underpinned by the observed differences in age demographics reached across the platforms, which likely influenced the varying performance metrics related to language.
Specifically, on YouTube, where our primary goal was video view rates, the Latino audience demonstrated a marginally superior engagement with Spanish language ads. This trend extended to other key metrics: the Spanish ads notably outperformed their English counterparts, achieving 2x the engagement rate and click-through rate (CTR).
Conversely, on Facebook and Instagram, our focus was on driving site traffic. Here, the trend reversed: English language ads significantly outperformed Spanish ads. They generated 2.5x more clicks and yielded a 24% more cost-effective cost-per-click (CPC). While engagement was not a central metric for this campaign, it's noteworthy that the engagement rate for English ads was twice that of the Spanish ads. However, aligning with the YouTube results, the Spanish ads maintained a higher video view rate across both these platforms.
This data underscores the importance of a nuanced, language-specific approach in digital marketing campaigns to effectively engage diverse audience groups.
Performance & Data
The KPI of this campaign was two-pronged, with YouTube focused on video views and Facebook and Instagram, focused on driving users to the landing page. Throughout the campaign, mid-funnel KPIs such as clickthrough rates, landing page views, and video view rates provided additional data points to guide optimization decisions. Across YouTube, we saw over 19M impressions, 4M video views as well as 34K clicks to the website. Across Facebook and Instagram, we drove 9.4M impressions, 180K landing page views as well as 860K video views.
For Facebook and Instagram, when looking at the flow of users through a multi-step process, we saw that out of the 258K users who clicked through to the ads, more than 70% of those users were retained from the ad to ready.gov/listo.gov. This is a strong indication that we were able to find qualified users who were engaged in our messaging.
From a historical perspective, this campaign had the lowest cost per landing page views compared to prior “Emergency Preparedness” campaigns from FEMA. We were able to achieve a cost per landing page views of $0.84 compared to an average of $1.81 in prior efforts. Meaning that we were able to achieve a reduction in cost of 54%!
Combining all platforms, the campaign was able to generate mass reach garnering nearly 30M impressions, 5M video views, and 200K+ landing page visits. While engagement was not the focus of the campaign, across Facebook and Instagram, we did see a majority of positive comments on our ads. We garnered 5K reactions, 155 comments, and 450+ shares of our ads.
9,420,794
Impressions
258,614
Clicks (2.75% CTR)
180,663
Landing Page Views (70%)
19,409,242
Impressions
4,148,605
Video Views
34,529
Clicks
Llama Lead Gen is incredibly savvy in managing our campaigns from start to finish. What I find most impressive is their agility, quickness to respond, and the feeling that they were our teammates through and through. The wrap-up reports they provide are exceptional. I look forward to working with Llama Lead Gen in the future.
Laurie Keith
VP of Media, Social & Emerging @ Ad Council
Moving Forward
FEMA partnered with the Ad Council and Llama Lead Gen to launch their latest iteration of the “Emergency Preparedness” campaign to help citizens better understand how to prepare themselves in the event of a disaster. The campaign targeted Black and Latino families with culturally relevant creatives in order to raise awareness of the steps necessary to prepare one’s family. The campaign ran across YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, with each platform focused on video views and traffic to the landing page (ready.gov) respectively.
In total, the campaign generated massive reach garnering nearly 30M impressions, 5M video views, and 200K+ landing page visits. We were able to achieve a cost per landing page view that was 54% lower than historical performance. While engagement was not the focus of the campaign, across Facebook and Instagram, we also saw positive comments generating 5K reactions, 155 comments, and 450+ shares.
From a targeting perspective, we leveraged an A/B test on Facebook and Instagram to gauge the potential improvement in performance by breaking out specific states that had a higher propensity for natural disasters. However, based on the results we concluded that broad targeting was more effective in achieving the campaign’s goal of landing page views.
One thing to note from a demographic perspective was that we noted a significant difference in our top-performing age groups between Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. On Facebook and Instagram, we saw that A55+ made up the majority of landing page views while across YouTube highest video view rates were amongst A25-44. By leveraging Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, we were able to see a more even distribution of audience engaging with the campaign message across all age groups.
The Ad Council's satisfaction with the campaign's performance is a testament to its success and the efficacy of our strategic approach. The results speak volumes about our impact together, with the campaign's impressive reach and deep engagement among the target demographic.
Let’s Connect
If you aim to tap into the extensive reach of Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube to engage with your audience effectively, let's connect. Book a call with Llama Lead Gen, and allow us to assist you in utilizing Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube marketing to its fullest potential, ensuring your campaign objectives are not just met but exceeded.
