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Case study: LloydsPharmacy Online Doctor
Offering a discreet and convenient alternative to seeing a GP for patients
Published: 13 Jan 2017
Client: LloydsPharmacy Online Doctor
Agency: Pegasus
Campaign: Sex Degrees of Separation, LloydsPharmacy Online Doctor
Timescale: N/A
A quick look
Challenge
LloydsPharmacy Online Doctor (LPOD) offers a convenient and discreet alternative to seeing a GP for a million patients, especially for issues like sexual health. In 2009, as a relatively new service, LPOD developed and launched an online tool to raise awareness of its brand and highlight risks around STIs. The tool allowed patients to calculate the number of sexual partners they may have been indirectly exposed to.
In 2015, LPOD tasked Pegasus to raise awareness of its sexual health services and specifically to:
- Position LPOD as a 'go-to' expert in sexual health
- Use media relation to earn high-quality links to the LPOD website
- Increase web traffic and organic revenue.
Pegasus quickly appreciated that media success would lie in the repurposing of this engaging tool*, by giving it new angles and an improved focus on shareability.
Solution
Our media relations strategy had to cleverly take an existing piece of content that had already received media coverage six years ago, and ensure it had refreshed news value to deliver a short-term traffic hit as well as securing links on high domain authority sites
to support a longer-term SEO strategy once the media hype had died down.
We also had to ensure the resulting coverage had a balance between bold messaging and sensitive treatment of the subject and, above all, bridged the gap between educating people about STI risk and encouraging them to get tested.
The messages around the calculator were inextricably linked to sexual health and we approached the subject with sensitivity, promoting safe sex rather than shaming those with a higher number.
A message hierarchy was put in place to support this and a series of comments from LPOD’s experts helped bring the topic back to a serious health issue and guide people on what to do if they were worried about STIs.
We commissioned a survey of 6,000 adults to understand sexual behaviour in 2015 and secure fresh data, and then worked with LPOD to incorporate this data into the algorithm of the calculator and update the look of the calculator.
To grab the media’s attention, our news angles centred on Britons’ ‘average number’, but to make the story more relatable we equated the stats to country populations, eg the average Brit has ‘slept’ with the population of Latvia twice over.
This also allowed us to generate a global angle to help ensure the story had widespread pick-up across the internet. We launched during Sexual Health Week when the media would already be focused on STIs.
Selling an initial exclusive to the Mail Online to drive interest among other national news sites, the team then used the success of the initial national news pick-up to target the more trend-driven sites by highlighting the level of traffic already driven to the calculator and creating a trend story.
This further fuelled interest in the story and gave us the traction to reach out to the highly influential online sites, with pre-prepared creative feature content.
The creative feature angles helped to ensure the story was more suited to the specific readership of our target websites. To convert the media ‘buzz’ into links and sales, we made it highly shareable, encouraging readers to compare ‘scores’.
Authoritative bloggers were given unique content and a sexual health kit from LloydsPharmacy, and students were targeted during Fresher’s Week ensuring all avenues for coverage were thoroughly exploited.
Results
This impactful campaign had more than met objectives and exceeded KPIs. Our global media coverage had 90% key message penetration, contained 396 follow links and drove 1.3 million people to the LPOD calculator.
The calculator itself had 1.6 million completions and received 20,000 social shares. Most importantly nearly 1,300 people registered for an STI test and LloydsPharmacy saw a 97% increase in organic revenue from sexual health products.
Client verdict
“We are truly amazed at the success of this campaign. With a modest budget, the due diligence we did at the start
to map out the audience and media opportunities paid off, as we knew the content and creative angles were highly targeted and had a very direct and simple call to action at its heart. On day one, we’d got blanket coverage across the web and had successfully news-jacked Sexual Health Week, ranking top for all related terms in Google News. After three months, we had noticed a direct impact on SEO performance of sexual health products, with organic revenue almost doubling.” Nicole Taylor, Content Manager for LloydsPharmacy Online Doctor. *Please note the calculator tool was not developed by Pegasus
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