Changing behaviour to ease NHS pressures
Healthcare and NHS marketing campaigns are always a highly rewarding aspect of the work we do.
It’s an opportunity to pour our heart, soul and creative minds into a project which has real impact on the organisations we work with and a much wider social impact on the communities they serve.
When we collaborated with North West Ambulance Service (NWAS) on their ‘Make the Right Call’ initiative it was part of a much bigger picture to ease the mounting seasonal pressures on our wonderful NHS marketing services.
Developed to support a national NHS winter campaign, it was designed to help spread key messaging to the public when it comes to making the right healthcare choices during times of ill health.
Delivering awareness was our focus
It focussed on delivering awareness that while dialling 999 may seem an easy option, unless it’s a life-threatening emergency there are more appropriate choices ranging from self-treating minor ailments to pharmacists, GP’s, walk-in centres and NHS 111.
The core aspect was alerting people to the fact that using A&E or 999 for non-emergencies could take essential help away from someone who really needs it.
With the aim of raising awareness, educating and informing the region’s residents, we were briefed to create an engaging digital campaign alongside promotional literature design for GPs surgeries and outdoor banners to sit outside NWAS stations.
As we’ve partnered with NWAS on a number of projects over the years, it didn’t take us long to make the right call when it came to forming the foundations of an original and engaging campaign.
And not only did it succeed in resonating with the north west population, it also secured a gold accolade in the Healthcare Campaign category of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations’ 2019 North West PRide Awards – the UK’s most prestigious nationwide awards scheme recognising excellence in public relations and communications.
Want to know more? Read on!
Concepts, tactics, creativity and innovation
When it comes to changing behaviour, tone and messaging are crucial.
After all you want your audience to feel involved, engaged and motivated in the decision-making process.
With that in mind we extended an original messaging idea, which was simply ‘Right Call’, to ‘Make the Right Call’.
This informed the public there was actually a decision to be made and with the right information they could make the right choice for themselves.
With the headline and theme in place, we were able to tie in a cross-channel social media hashtag (#MakeTheRightCall).
We then welcomed back NWAS’s much-loved family of cartoon characters which had won the public’s affection during previous campaigns.
Creative calling
Our designers worked on creating a visual guide to help signpost people to the right service according to their symptoms.
Based on a thermometer with self care at the bottom rising to A&E or 999 at the top of the scale, it was colour-coded to reflect temperature, i.e., blue for colds and sore throats which can be self-treated through to red for chest pains and breathing problems to signify an emergency.
Re-introducing the lovable bunch of NWAS characters wasn’t just to strike a chord with the audience, it also ensured brand consistency across the organisation’s public-facing comms.
Norman, Carol, Suneta, James, Eileen and Phil quickly made a name for themselves in a patient stories animation which we rolled out across social media, the NWAS website and on YouTube.
They also popped up in a series of posters which drew the thermometer visual guide colours into the background to help the public understand the different routes to care.
These were designed to be displayed in GP surgeries and transferred across all marketing collateral including social media, online ads and outdoor banners.
The campaign was also strategically designed to reach out to children as well as their parents, to begin instilling the messaging from an early age.
This was achieved as an additional resource on the ‘Make the Right Call’ microsite – linked to NWAS website – which engaged youngsters by inviting them to colour in one of the cartoon characters and enter it into a competition via social media.
The digital power of persuasion
As this campaign largely hinged on digital elements, we developed a wide-reaching, multi-channel approach for their healthcare marketing campaign. This campaign included social media marketing, PPC and email marketing to NWAS members and CCGs in a bid to spread the word through brand advocacy.
We embarked on an intensive social media strategy, distributing up to twice a day across NWAS’s Facebook and Twitter accounts.
Accompanied by the hashtag, we used educational and informative messaging to encourage people to ‘Make the Right Call’ supported by quizzes, competitions and a ‘patient story’ series prompting people to click through to the website to discover the outcome of a medical scenario.
Social media efforts were backed by a PPC and Paid Social campaign to target various audience groups by boosting posts with Facebook Ads and Google Ads.
The microsite was the hub of interaction, fed by social media and signposted across all marketing elements.
It was designed to be visually engaging featuring an inbuilt online service finder to assist the care decision-making process and it was optimised to be accessible across mobile, tablet and desktop devices.
Healthy results
The campaign ran for three months and during that time the ‘Make the Right Call’ microsite attracted 2,806 page views, drawing in visitors from every corner of the north west.
Social media achieved incredible results, reaching well over half a million people organically and 267,890 people through paid advertising.
It referred 420 sessions to the microsite and attracted 22,238 new Facebook likes.
The video animation reached almost 267,900 people and received 187,616 views. Norman, Carol, Suneta, James, Eileen and Phil were catapulted to fame!
The awareness impact of this campaign was undoubtably instrumental in helping thousands of people to make the right health care choices and consequently free up the emergency services of NWAS and the NHS for those who really need them.
If you’re looking to make the right call on your marketing activities, get in touch.
As a full service marketing agency incorporating design, digital marketing, PR, print production and signage we offer our areas of expertise under strategic partnerships or to compliment the skillsets of in-house teams.
We’re renowned for our strategic and creative approach to achieve efficient, engaging and results-driven outcomes.
To find out more email us at clients@cornerstonedm.co.uk
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