Digital Leaders Week is a conference we look forward to every year. Not only do we get to hear brilliant talks from a range of industry leaders, we also get to share key insights we’ve gathered from successful campaigns to help others with their marketing.

This year, Director Sue Keogh, Digital Strategist Clark Chapman, and Head of Creative Marisa Crimlis-Brown got to the heart of what helps content cut through the noise across social media, allowing us to hone in on critical data to make better campaign decisions. 

Watch the talk to hear our insights from three recent Sookio campaigns across healthcare, arts and culture, and the public sector.

We break down our rationale, from content ideation and messaging, to advertising strategies and data analysis. 

Here’s a quick overview of the insights and campaigns we shared:

Define your audience and goals

Case study: NHS 111 campaign

This campaign was for Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG).

The goal was to help reduce strain on A&E during the winter months when Covid cases were rising. Much of their audience was unfamiliar with 111 and the wealth of services provided, so would instead lean on 999, which put significant pressure on over-stretched hospital services.

The challenge was getting to those hard-to-reach audiences in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, which included parents of young children, communities where English wasn’t the audience’s first language, and those living in rural locations.

Running on Facebook and Instagram, the campaign got nearly 700k views using a mix of organic and paid activity.

Campaign takeaways:

• Learn from your audience. Start broad and narrow with time

• Don’t set too many variables

• Don’t rely on platforms as your sole sour of data

Which platforms and content?

Case study: University of Cambridge Museums

Come On In was a campaign that ran from summer to Christmas 2021, as all these cultural venues were opening up again as we moved out of the lockdown period!

Funded by the Cultural Recovery Fund, the goal was to encourage footfall in museums and other cultural venues in Cambridge. There was a genuine need to make sure this campaign worked effectively, particularly after this sector had been hit so hard by Covid and enforced closures.

The goal wasn’t just to get audiences back in museums, it was to get local residents to visit for the first time. As we’ll explain, the activity was largely based on Instagram Reels, coupled with paid activity on Facebook, video content and an ident.

It got pretty impressive results!

• 800k impressions across Cambridgeshire

• Nearly 6k clicks to the website

• 19k video views

…and all for a pretty modest ad budget.

Campaign takeaways:

• Be realistic in order to do the best job within the budget and resources available

• Don’t get hung up on perfection

• Don’t be afraid to make changes (but don’t change everything at once)

Test and refine, test and refine

Case study: HDC #ThinkLocal

Now we’re going to look at the #ThinkLocal campaign that we ran with Huntingdonshire District Council during the pandemic period. The goal here was to support the local high streets in four market towns.

As with the University of Cambridge Museums, we wanted footfall, and also to get people buying from their brilliant local businesses. Again, we found Facebook to be a particularly effective platform for highly targeted paid activity, along with Instagram and Twitter for regular updates.

We were continually testing and refining, learning from each campaign and applying it to the next.

In just one campaign alone:

• we reached 220k people across Huntingdonshire and the surrounding areas

• our campaigns were featured nearly 800k times on Facebook and Instagram feeds

• we honed in on the humans behind the businesses, using video and photography to tell their stories.

Campaign takeaways:

• Give campaigns time to run, to gather useful data

• Be willing to change your creative vision

• Stay on top of the data with your web team

Feeling inspired?

Talk to us about your campaign. We love setting your content alight!