Healthwatch Kirklees wanted to drive more traffic to Kirklees’ smoke-free website to encourage people to stop smoking before an operation. This case study forms part of our social media strategy resource.
Objectives – what did you want to achieve?
Primarily we wanted to drive more traffic to Kirklees’ smoke-free website to encourage people to stop smoking before an operation. We had previously worked with Kirklees’ Public Health team to provide feedback on their previous stop smoking campaign. We discovered that people didn’t feel that the previous poster campaign was clear or made people want to stop smoking. We fed this back and our findings were used to completely redesign the campaign, with much more successful results. The new posters were clearly targeted at smokers and were much harder hitting. After the success of that the team approached us to design a new social media campaign specifically around encouraging people to stop smoking before an operation as events like that are often a good opportunity to motivate behaviour change.
Audiences – who did you target and why?
We focused our activities on geographical areas based upon numbers of smokers. We used audience segmentation data and information from our local Joint Strategic Needs Assessment (JSNA) to get a comprehensive picture of the health and wellbeing of the Kirklees population. Our evaluation suggested we direct our messages to people aged between 18-65 in Mirfield, Cleckheaton, Batley and Dewsbury. We had one advert towards females the other advert targeted to males
Strategy and tactics
As we wanted to increase the number of people visiting the Kirklees smoke free website and being treated by the service we focused on digital channels. We had five posters specifically tailored for Facebook as well as adverts shown on third-party mobile apps, websites and Instagram channels. We created two separate Facebook advertisements – one for men and one for women but we made sure that our other adverts were identical and included a carousel of all the posters the Public Health Team had created. Each poster linked to a different story on the Kirklees Smoke Free website (such as clinic locations or reasons to stop). The adverts ran throughout July 2016, with a budget of £400, although we actually only spent £386.16
Did it work? What were the outcomes?
Our measurement showed that 52, 863 people saw the adverts and 2,305 people reacted to the adverts by clicking on the images or ‘learn more’. We saw some slight gender variants with engagement levels and website clicks higher in men throughout Kirklees, particularly those aged 18-35 years old. For women, each age range engaged with the campaign in broadly similar ways. Our Smoke Free insights team discovered a significant spike in the amount of traffic visiting the site from July onwards when the campaign was launched and we discovered 80 per cent of that traffic was new and from people who had clicked our link and had never used the website before.
What did you learn?
This was our first targeted social media campaign of this kind. We learnt to spend time researching the correct target audience and to target the correct people in the right areas, as it was key for this piece of work. If we had targeted the whole of Kirklees it may not have been as successful.
We also learnt that Facebook/Instagram and third party websites (affiliated with Facebook) do not accept images for adverts which are more than 20 per cent text as their conducted research shows that 80 per cent images and 20 per cent text is the most eye catching to users of these channels.
Would you do anything differently?
As the campaign progressed it may have been useful to focus our targeting even further to men aged 18-35 years old as this was the most successful group in responding to the messages and images.
We also could have used the information we collated to focus on any behaviours, interests, detailed demographics or education, which smokers shared within Kirklees. This would have increased the Facebook relevance score.
Want to know more?
Contact Stacey Appleyard, Communications and Intelligence Officer at Health watch Kirklees on 01924 450379
Healthwatch Kirklees – Using social media in targeted campaigns