Brain Aneurysm Awareness Campaign
The Challenge
UI Health is a top destination for complicated neurological conditions, including brain aneurysm. But because awareness of brain aneurysm is low, many people do not know the signs or symptoms of brain aneurysm, let alone where they should go for the best aneurysm care. We saw an opportunity to close the general brain aneurysm awareness gap while magnifying our world-class Brain Aneurysm Program and its outstanding patient outcomes. To do this, we would create an integrated marketing campaign that included traditional media, paid media, outdoor advertising, and social and digital marketing. To maximize the impact, we decided to execute the campaign in conjunction with National Brain Aneurysm Awareness Month in September.
The Process
Our campaign started by establishing both marketing and communication objectives:
- Marketing: Increase web traffic to ChiBrain.org, the landing page for our brain aneurysm site.
- Communication: Increase awareness that a brain aneurysm is a treatable condition and that UI Health is the most successful aneurysm-treatment center in the region.
Next steps included developing a message strategy, including awareness highlights and calls to action, and creating our two-part brand equity:
- Who We Are: Expertise, Experience, Accessibility, Success
- What We Promise Our Patients: Tangible and Emotional Benefits
With our objectives and identity established, we then moved forward on developing a target audience — again, we developed in two parts. We identified a primary audience of women, ages 45-65, particularly with a genetic history of brain aneurysm, and a secondary audience of men aged 50+. We further investigated these groups to discover their knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs on brain aneurysm and its care.
The overall educational gap surrounding brain aneurysm influenced what we wanted to impress upon our target audiences:
- Educate: Know the symptoms of pre-ruptured aneurysm: Sudden, severe, localized headache with blurred or double vision.
- State a Claim: UI Health is where Chicago goes for brain care.
Our process concluded by securing our distribution and media channels. In addition to our target audience, the distribution plan was based on our PSA and influencer audience, highly educated people who would travel in order to receive the best neurological care. Our campaign included:
- Traditional Media: TV and radio advertising for a general audience
- Paid media: Physician appearance on Windy City Live
- Outdoor Media: Public transportation, including Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) buses and trains.
- Social media and digital promotions
Results
The campaign ran for approximately 45 days between August and September 2015 to coincide with Brain Aneurysm Awareness Month. Results were tracked through impressions, unique page views to ChiBrain.com, unique page views to Neurosurgery-related web pages, and increases in calls to the Neurosciences call center.
27M+
Viewer Impressions
More than 27 million impressions were created over primarily through radio and television advertising and our digital presence.16K+
Unique Vistors
These impressions lead to 16K+ unique visits to ChiBrain.org.1K%
Neuro Unique Visitors
Unique visits to all neuro-related pages increased by nearly 20,000 views, a more than 1,000% increase over the same time period a year prior.9K+
Neuro Call Center
The Neuro call center received more than 9,000 phone calls from August to October, an increase of more than 5,000 calls compared to the previous year.ISHMPR
Integrated Marketing Campaign
The Illinois Society for Healthcare Marketing and Public Relations awarded UI Health the Award of Merit for our Integrated Marketing Campaign. The campaign demonstrated achievement of marketing excellence through research, measurable campaign objectives, concise strategies, implementation, evaluation and achievement of measurable results.