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Why do you run a content marketing campaign? When do you use social media? Most businesses have the same answer for these questions and it always concerns getting more customers to spend more money. What if your business had all the customers they need? What if those customers were unlikely to spend much time using social media tools? What if you had little control over how much money you could earn. Would it make sense to invest in a digital marketing strategy? You bet.

A Case Study: The Aged Care Industry

I’ve always marvelled at the aged care industry. Like maternity hospitals, there’s not a great deal they have to do to get people through the door. With the first Baby Boomers reaching retirement age, they’re in the uncomfortable position of knowing they cannot keep up with the burgeoning demand for services. At least in Australia, the industry has discovered modern techniques to help solve these problems.

Influencing Social Policy
In a post at the Content Marketing Institute, I wrote about how the aged care industry in Australia is using a strategically crafted content marketing campaign to effect social policy. Titled, What Content Marketers Can Learn From an Australian Non-Profit, the article describes how the The Grand Plan is encouraging people to take action at the government level on their behalf.

Raising Awareness
The precursor to The Grand Plan was a wildly popular campaign known as Kevin87. Referring to the campaign slogan of Kevin Rudd during the 2007 Australian federal elections Kevin ’07 Aged & Community Services (ACSA), ran a video of Rudd morphing from a relatively youthful politician to an 87-year-old man. When the video went viral, ACSA got busy and made sure the opposition leader, along with the deputy PM, were given the same treatment. It helped give focus to the shortage of aged care workers in Australia.

Fostering Groundswell Support
Nearly a year after the Kevin87 project – an unthinkable passage of time in “web world” - aged care advocates are participating in a daily online newspaper service called paper.li Publishing what looks like an old-fashioned broadsheet online, the service collates all Twitter activity containing the hashtag #agedcare. Every day a new paper is published printing all the tweets, linked articles and Twitter ids of people actively using the hashtag. It’s a great way for all the advocates of the aged care industry to find each other and band together.

Listening Posts
Twitter remains a valuable tool to advance their agenda, provide avenues to inform the public and even influence politicians. A recent #agedcare tweet caught the eye of the The Australian Sex Party who took note of the issues in the industry. Organising meetings to gather more information, the Sex Party was able to glean vital information to craft their own policies on aged care.

Generating revenue has always been the topic of popular business discussion and nothing will ever change in that regard. Using content marketing and social media to advocate change and influence social policy is worth a consideration. The aged care industry has provided a great case study and they have all the business they need.

Have you used social media or content marketing to effect change?

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