Adoption Center of Illinois

Here’s how Mightybytes helps a local adoption agency leverage digital marketing techniques to expand its reach and educate expectant parents, adoptees, and families considering adoption about their options.

Adoption Center of Illinois (ACI) is a licensed adoption agency serving communities in the state of Illinois. ACI approached Mightybytes to revamp their digital presence, seeking a website and marketing campaigns to better convey their services and advocate their ethical and inclusive approach to adoption.

Identifying Marketing Challenges

ACI faced several key challenges when it came to their digital strategy:

• Multiple vendors handled different parts of their digital presence, leading to inconsistencies in managing Google Ads, web hosting, and content creation.
• ACI is committed to discussing the adoption process with empathy and transparency. However, they struggled to balance communications about this approach with the often problematic language that people use when searching for adoption resources online.
• The ACI team was relatively new to digital strategy, which created a need for more cohesive and well-researched approaches to content, SEO, and online communications.

ACI needed a strategic partner that could streamline their digital services while ensuring that their message remained inclusive, clear, and aligned with their values. Understanding this, we started with their website.

Fast-Tracking a Website Redesign

The current website wasn’t helping the organization meet its goals. We collectively agreed that a site redesign was in order. However, like many resource-constrained nonprofits, they had a tight budget to work with.

To address this, our teams collaborated to minimize cost and maximize efficiency in the following ways:

• All site content was handled by the ACI team.
• We kept site design processes simple and clean with no custom blocks or extensive revisions.
• We simplified approvals, project management, and administrative costs for the project.

While this approach was risky, it paid off through shared expectations on process. By setting and managing expectations up front, we were able to launch a new site under a compressed budget and timeline.

SEO and Content

Next, Mightybytes researched relevant search terms to help ACI optimize their service landing pages to improve search visibility and increase traffic. In our initial research, we identified gaps between the most ethical language and the language people use when conducting searches. 

To address this inconsistency, we took the following steps:

• First, we helped the ACI team better understand the importance of reaching people in the language they use when searching related topics.
• We created content to target popular search keyphrases even though ACI doesn’t use those terms in their inclusive approach to adoption.
• Plus, we made linguistic changes when the data dictated it was best while still maintaining their core principles.

Together, we’ve been able to deliver consistent results over the years through market challenges, algorithm updates, and changes in the landscape of public health.

Unifying a Digital Landscape

In 2021, ACI and Mightybytes expanded the scope of our relationship. We took over hosting for ACI and their Google Ads marketing in conjunction with our role in maintaining the website and optimizing site pages for organic search.

This increased efficiency by allowing us to take a holistic, cross-channel approach to digital marketing, which ultimately increased qualified leads across ACI’s many service areas.

Leveraging Google Ads

Next, we scaled ACI’s Google Ads presence by first eliminating inefficiencies in their ad spend and doubling down on the channels that showed the most promise. Through active and ongoing curation of search keyphrases and frequent updates to ad copy, we optimized their Google Search campaigns for maximum effectiveness.

Once we established a strong foundation with search ads, we expanded into Google Display ads. This move significantly broadened ACI’s reach, increasing their ad clicks by 30% and dramatically reducing their cost per conversion (CPC) by 90% year over year.

The result was a more efficient, high-performing Google Ads strategy that better aligned with ACI’s goals.

Collaborating for Sustainable Results

Over our years of working together, Mightybytes and ACI consistently show the value of continuous improvement. By measuring progress against our goals month-over-month and adjusting our approach as needed, we deliver consistent value over time with a successful, integrated digital strategy that drives long-term results.