Meet the Client
The Orders of St John Care Trust is one of the UK’s leading not-for-profit care organisations working solely to provide high quality care for older people. They provide reputable trusted care, support and housing to residents and tenants across 66 homes and 14 accommodation schemes covering Gloucestershire, Lincolnshire, Oxfordshire, Suffolk, West Sussex and Wiltshire.
Their offering to the elderly includes specialised dementia, intermediate, respite, day care and expert nursing. They were among the first care providers to employ its own specialist Admiral Nurses. The Trust employs approximately 4,800 staff and assists more than 3,500 residents. Their financial surplus is reinvested for the benefit of the residents.
The Challenge
The recent pandemic has affected the care home industry drastically, especially given the negative press coverage care homes have received. In light of that, the marketing team at OSJCT knew it was critical to change public perception and reassure their communities that they continue to nurture a vibrant and caring atmosphere during these hard times.
With every Covid precaution taken, they worked with Smooth Digital to create a story around a resident named ‘Molly’. Videos were shot via video calls to ensure her safety and edited afterwards.
The campaign was nominated for Best Care Home Marketing, Advertising, PR or Digital Initiative at a leading industry awards event.
We then built upon our learnings from this reassurance campaign and applied these to a recruitment targeted one, reaching out to those who had lost their jobs and were looking for a career change through social campaigns. Using employee shot footage, we captured the atmosphere and essence of daily life within various different homes, showing a real sense of unity and a reflection of what it’s like to live in an OSJCT home, whilst discrediting misconceptions the media had created.
Smooth Digital’s Approach
Smooth Digital created a comprehensive digital marketing strategy and brought it to life; ensuring the campaign was launched seamlessly and successfully.
This included:
- Setting up a consultation to understand their business specifically and what their USP’s are compared to the competitors in the area
- Suggesting improvements on websites to ensure they are set up with all necessary call to actions, lead triggers & easy navigation of user experience
- Targeted brand awareness campaigns over Google, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube
- Targeted customer acquisition campaign using various Google tools
- Targeted Google and Facebook recruitment campaigns
- Implementing a tailored remarketing strategy
- Implementing bid strategies to receive the maximum amount of leads for the minimum cost per acquisition
- Daily monitoring, management and refinement of the campaigns
- Monthly campaign meetings and feedback reports
- Getting to know the business and keeping a keen interest so that we could constantly feedback suggestions or improvements
- Lead handling training with the key care managers to ensure everyone is aligned with the same goal and understanding
Client Feedback
“Smooth is great at understanding the issues and challenges that we have faced in the current climate and also delivered a successful digital lead generation campaign for us. Smooth are definitely solution focused and deliver success every time, I would not hesitate in recommending them.”
The Result
OVER A 6 MONTH PERIOD, OUR DIGITAL BRAND AWARENESS ADS APPEARED OVER 10 MILLION TIMES
THE RECRUITMENT CAMPAIGN RESULTED IN 522 JOB APPLICATIONS OVER A 3 MONTH PERIOD
It has been great to get to know and work with the Smooth team. They have shown us as an organisation a fresh and innovative approach to our social and digital campaigns. The Smooth team has been instrumental in shaping and executing our Reassurance and Awareness campaign which has delivered positive results with increased website traffic and over 2 million views of our campaign video.
– Matthew Wix, OSJCT Interim Head of Marketing PR and Comms –
