Project Bookshelf
Project Bookshelf was one of my proudest marketing campaigns I’ve been involved in.
The subject matter resonated with me in particular. as at the time of creating the project, I’d just lost my grandmother to Alzheimer’s disease.
I was part of a small team of three creating this for AllClear Insurance on behalf of Latitude (Now Jellyfish).
AllClear Insurance
AllClear Insurance is a specialist provider of travel insurance for customers with pre-existing medical conditions.
The Challenge
When AllClear approached Latitude (as It was when then pre-Jellyfish acquisition), their objective was to drive qualified traffic to the AllClear website with content marketing, during what can typically be a quiet time of year (September-November).
Our primary KPI was to drive traffic to the dedicated campaign landing page.
Target: 3,000 visitors
Our secondary KPI was to demonstrate reach by creating the most shared AllClear content project in the last 12 months.
Target: 1,200 social engagements
The Solution
We created an interactive landing page experience, which contained an illustrated house - built with 12 household analogies, each explaining what life can be like for those living with dementia.
We named the campaign Project Bookshelf. And here’s the story of how it came to be: We did not pluck the idea out of thin air. Instead, the idea presented itself to us, after our rigid approach to researching what we call “Content that Moves” for this sector:
The investigation
Amongst Google Analytics data and other sources we created a customer profile. We then accessed the AllClear Facebook account and analysed Facebook Insights from a 28-day period. Aside from the customer profile, we knew this was a crucial step in further enhancing our understanding of the AllClear customer by assessing their behavior on their preferred social network.
From this, we found out that the AllClear Facebook audience was dominated by women – a stark contrast to the split in actual policy-holders, which mostly consisted of a male demographic.
This was compelling enough for us to consider the feminine angle more seriously in our creative thinking – whilst not conclusive enough for us to exclude men entirely.
Facebook Insights also enabled us to consider AllClear’s top performing content in more detail. We found that the two best performing posts in terms of engagement were similar in that they were both human-led stories using inspiration to generate interest.
For example... One of the posts shared the story of the passing of a 91-year-old lady who skipped her chemotherapy to go on an end-of-life road trip. The other post was a feel-good story concerning an elderly gentleman who had combatted loneliness after the death of his wife by becoming more involved in the community.
As far as we were concerned, the success of both of these sad yet heart-warming posts was a telling insight into what type of content could resonate with the AllClear Facebook audience.
This was somewhat reinforced after our analysis of AllClear’s largest competitor’s top performing Facebook posts.
In a similar vein to AllClear’s most successful posts, we could see that high engagement was yielded from similar human-led stories told in a way that makes you feel inspired.
Another theme that kept cropping up throughout our analysis of AllClear’s competitors was content that played on the angle of openness – sharing with the world what it is like to live with a certain condition.
This was another clue as to the type of content we needed to create.
Bearing all of this in mind, the next stage of our investigative process was to assess the flow of traffic to and from the AllClear website. Previous sites visited before AllClear included similar research and comparison sites – including the competitor in question.
When we looked at websites visited after the AllClear site, we noticed the site of the same competitor cropped up again – so we decided to look at them in more detail. We checked which sites had been visited before the competitor site, and found that a reasonable amount of traffic had come directly from the BBC news site... So, we performed a site search on BBC News for the name of the competitor, and sure enough, we found coverage of the same type of human-led content that shone a light on what it can be like to like with a certain medical condition.
The fact that this type of content was deemed worthy enough to receive national media coverage was once again indication of the route we needed to take with our creative thinking.
The Case
Our investigation enabled us to determine the elements required to form ideas for “Content that Moves.” During conception, each idea would need to meet three requirements – or, what we would call “Triggers that Move.”
1. It needed to be easy to use
2. It needed to be authentic
3. It needed to shine a light on what life can be like for someone living with a certain medical condition
We knew with a maturing audience of sceptical surfers, ease of use would be a must across all devices. Having witnessed and taken inspiration from the content already out there, we knew that our concepts needed to be authentic.
That said, we knew it would need to affect the audience in a similar way – having assessed the most successful AllClear social posts and the BBC competitor article. Prior to our research into the customer, initial creative thinking was geared almost entirely around ideas related to travel.
However, by taking the time to study the AllClear customer in greater detail, it became clear that this project was a unique opportunity to give those living with a medical condition a louder voice.
This was something we couldn’t ignore – and it became the driving force behind all creative thinking when forming the three well-informed concepts in the creation stage.
The Creation
The process of customer profiling, research and investigation had left us in the best possible place to collaborate ideas.
All creative activity was now underpinned by a truly solid process - completely tailored to meet the needs of the AllClear audience.
The winning concept however, was inspired by two things. Firstly, keyword research enabled us to identify dementia as a topic of interest. Having identified the opportunity to appeal to a maturing audience and the chance to give people insight into life with a certain condition, this felt like a major clue in terms of what the subject matter of our content could address.
It began to feel like we had a profound and relevant medical condition we could leverage. The second element of inspiration came to us in a different way – fate. Once signed off, the launch of the project would fall within World Alzheimer’s Awareness Month – an astonishing coincidence considering what we already knew regarding the potential link between dementia and the AllClear audience online.
Furthermore, a charity event held weeks before had left an even more extraordinary clue. The Alzheimer’s Society Initiative – Dementia Friends, delivered an inspiring and powerful presentation at Latitude.
This resonated with the team especially – with some having, at some point, seen the effects of the condition on friends and family members. However, the most poignant section of the presentation was Dementia Friends’ simple and effective explanation of how dementia affects the human brain.
This was the bookshelf analogy – and it goes something like this... Imagine the brain is a bookshelf. The books stored on each shelf are memories. Those towards the bottom are distant memories, whilst those towards the top are recent memories. When dementia affects the brain, the bookshelf begins to shake. Those recent memories closer to the top of the bookshelf are the first to go. Yet the memories stored towards the bottom of the bookshelf remain fairly secure.
This explains how people living with the condition can often fail to remember things that happened minutes ago, yet can still recall things from childhood.
This encounter would prove to be pivotal.
It left us asking a number of questions between ourselves. What if we could explain more elements of dementia with more analogies like this? What if the whole project was one large analogy to capture the idea of living well with dementia?
What if we created the most beautiful and accessible resource on this topic? What if we could give the community a louder voice?
We saw this as a window of opportunity that we simply couldn’t overlook. The bookshelf analogy had inspired us enough to research dementia in more detail, forming more household analogies to explain the various nuances of the condition. As a result, the chosen concept was born – and affectionately named Project Bookshelf.
The Launch
There were three strands to this.
The first was manual outreach, where (when possible) we tailored bespoke messages to the various influencers in an attempt to drive social shares/ engagements and get the wider dementia community interested and inspired.
Besides this, we created satellite content promoting not just the campaign but also dementia awareness – which was highly relevant and timely given the World Alzheimer’s Awareness Month launch.
This also served as an effective link-building strategy, with each article including a follow link back to the campaign landing page. Although backlink generation wasn’t a main KPI, this still aligned with our main goal of driving traffic to the AllClear site. When we had exhausted our manual outreach list, the third and final stage of promotion was to activate a paid Facebook campaign.
With a £500 budget, we knew we had to be selective with our audiences in order to get the very best out of the campaign. We identified four primary audience segments for Facebook. Audiences A and B consisted of people interested in Alzheimer’s-related pages, whilst Audience B was also narrowed down further to include people with an interest in sites publishing similar types of content – such as BoredPanda and Upworthy. Audiences C and D targeted people interested in caregiver pages such as Age Concern and Age UK.
We decided to pursue this tactic after noticing that caregivers were especially responding positively to the campaign organically. It was a powerful piece of content for them to share with a loved one living with dementia and also acted as a nice message for their family/friends – helping everyone involved to understand the more difficult parts of the condition.
As a larger segment, we wanted to use this to monitor the engagement rate in comparison to all other segments, which were much narrower. Again, we narrowed down Audience D based on their interest in sharing content from the content-led brands from Audience B’s targeting. We adopted the “10+” element in the ad copy after reviewing hundreds of headlines in BuzzSumo from the last 12 months
These were the types of headlines that were particularly successful on the content sharing websites we identified. When monitoring Facebook Power Editor, we could see that Audience C was running at almost double the CPC as any of the others. If we reinvested Audience C funds into the others on the following Monday, we’d be theoretically running at a 10p CPC for the remaining seven days of the campaign.
Across those seven days, we would spend another £350.00. At 10p per click, we could expect to drive a further 3,500 clicks across those seven days.
In total, that would bring Paid Facebook traffic to approximately 4,500 – which would mean we doubled traffic since activating the Paid Facebook activity.
The Results
12,650 sessions on campaign landing page (Third highest sessions count on the website, making it the most viewed non-product page in 2017).
Average time on campaign landing page was 5 minutes.
The page accounted for 9% of total traffic (exceeding the next most visited page by 194%).
86% of people seeing the project were visiting AllClear for the first time.
3k+ Social Engagements
PAID FACEBOOK
Total reach: 49,024
Total impressions: 61,416
Total unique clicks: 5,044
Average CPC: £0.09
This campaign is not just a success because of the beautiful design, or the collection of ingenious and sensitively-crafted analogies.
It’s was a victory for Latitude’s approach to creative projects – from customer profiling right through to launch and promotion.
As far as the paid Facebook activity is concerned, the respect and attention paid to the end user is what allowed us to share the Dementia House with so many of the right people. Not only did we carefully select targeting criteria to isolate a highly qualified audience – we also pinpointed two segments as “more likely to share content of this nature”, which resulted in high engagement – not just traffic.
In conclusion, we achieved AllClear’s objectives as well as our own personal goal to make it the most viewed non-product page in 2017.
However, the most pleasing thing is that we can honestly say we created something that genuinely moved people. Project Bookshelf is now a timeless campaign for raising awareness for dementia.
““The Dementia House is a powerful piece of content for so many reasons. To see it deliver the level of traffic that it did during a quiet period for the business was
especially pleasing – and this is testament to Latitude’s thorough and effective profiling of the AllClear customer. The creativity and attention to detail exceeded our expectations”