Doctor Google will see you now?

Misinformation online can prevent public health messages getting through to the people who need to see them. Applying smarter insights and behaviour change theory to your campaign strategy could make all the difference.

Can you remember a public health campaign that stuck in your head? The brightly coloured jelly baby figures from Change4Life, or marketing phrases like “Catch it, bin it, kill it” or “Every mind matters”? Certainly “Stay home, protect the NHS, save lives”.

But can you think of a public health campaign that helped change your own behaviour in the long term? Whether the campaign was about diet or exercise or smoking cessation, did the personal outcomes linger longer than the clever creatives or snappy straplines?

In a digital environment awash with attention-grabbing content, public health campaigns can end up being another cartoony figure, another smart phrase. Especially if the audience is looking elsewhere for their health information.

Doctor Google and Nurse TikTok

More than six million people in the UK now turn to social media for answers to general health queries, according to a recent article from The Media Leader reporting on new stats from Omnicom. 

This throws up serious issues for those of us tasked with communicating on public health: how do we reach these people with the right information and what sort of messages will they respond to?

The new stats revealed that, on a global scale, some 33% of Generation Z (born 1997-2012) and 26% of Millennials (born 1981-1996) seek general health information on TikTok, Instagram and Twitter (plus Facebook for millennials). And people in all age groups who are living with chronic health conditions increasingly rely on social media influencers for advice.

It goes without saying that nearly every one of us regularly sticks health symptoms into Google Search, panicking at the array of serious illnesses we could be harbouring!

Being a bit smarter with our campaign strategies for public health campaigns can make a massive difference to outcomes and help tackle Doctor Google and Nurse TikTok head-on!

Here are three key tactics we’ve had success with over the past three years, through the Covid-19 pandemic and beyond, with digital public health campaigns for councils and NHS ICBs.

1. Use paid-for “always on” Google Search

Go head-to-head with Dr Google. A comprehensive paid-for search profile, that runs either year-round or seasonally depending on the theme, will be the extra boost your campaign needs to make sure people land on a webpage with accurate, up-to-date information.

This is especially useful for supporting winter demand management in acute services – encouraging people to use their local pharmacy, NHS 111 or GP when they Google keywords around sickness or flu symptoms or minor ailments instead of going straight to A&E. Geo-target around local A&E departments and pharmacies, to influence people on the ground.

When compiling your search keywords and ad text, one way to head off dangerous misinformation online is to research which health issues most concern your residents and use this as your basis. 

In fact, once you know more about local concerns across different social and age groups (and – sometimes more importantly – what isn’t on their radar) this can inform your messaging and targeting across all platforms.

At CAN Digital, we have been using an invaluable new search share tool that plots which terms people in specific locations are Googling over a defined time period. I’ve recorded a five-minute video on our latest quarterly report on health searches in England including immunisation, mental health and A&E demand management which might help.

2. Apply behaviour change theory at scale

Back with the Change4Life jelly babies, strong imagery and messaging can only do so much to grab attention. With most public health themes – exercise, diet, smoking, mental health – we’re trying to get people to change deeply embedded behaviours.

The key to communicating with people to shape what they do next lies in understanding the theory of behaviour change: mapping out a typical journey from end to end and maintaining an awareness of issues to be addressed along the way to stop them losing interest and giving up.

Once you’ve mapped out a typical idea journey for each behaviour change, campaign tactics could involve:

• Testing a wide range of creatives and messages – informed by your research – to identify those that perform best with target audiences.
• Getting messages seen multiple times each week to “social norm” them, build trust with disengaged audiences, and counterbalance online misinformation.
• Listen, benchmark, and refine by running surveys as part of the campaign to encourage feedback, and optimise top-performing tactics.

3: Integrate public health campaigns with related council ones

We often think about each campaign we plan in isolation. But there are proven links between social/economic factors and health outcomes: the impact of cost of living on mental health, for example.

In one London borough, we used digital advertising to reach people who had accessed the council’s cost of living support webpages with local NHS mental health services information.

Another London borough’s increase in uptake of the polio vaccine (the highest in north-east London) correlated with our remarketing to people visiting council webpages to check school term dates with messaging on childhood vaccinations.

Public health campaigns should be improving lives – saving lives. You can cut through the noise online and make a positive difference given the right tools.

John-Paul Danon is co-founder and sales director at CAN Digital. This is an edited version of a post which was first published at comms2point0.co.uk. Read the original post.