Search and Social Campaign Delivers 649% ROI for the RCN

The Royal College of Nursing is the UK's largest nonprofit professional nursing body, representing more than 435,000 nurses, student nurses, midwives, health care assistants and assistant practitioners in the UK and internationally.

To communicate its membership benefits to the UK healthcare workforce, the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) sought our help to create its first ever digital recruitment campaign.

The campaign's objectives were:

• Communicate that health care assistants, assistant practitioners, nurses and students can join the RCN and explain what the membership benefits are in a compelling fashion.
• Reach target audiences and drive memberships in a cost effective way.
• Optimise the campaign in real-time by measuring the success of activity.

We first ran a series of test campaigns to identify which channels generated the greatest number of memberships at a cost effective ROI. Based on the results, we developed a campaign strategy which leant on paid search and Facebook advertising to drive audiences to sign up for RCN membership.

+ Landing Pages
The pages we wanted to drive audiences to did not exist, so we created responsive, mobile-friendly landing pages. Next, we focused on creating a compelling list of benefits for each of the audience landing pages. We communicated the RCN’s five membership points to health care assistants and assistant practitioners, listed reasons why nurses should join the RCN and promoted educational support benefits to nursing students.

+ Paid Search
We built and ran granular AdWords campaigns to target health care assistants, assistant practioners, nurses and students. To ensure we were targeting the right audiences with the correct messaging, we created bespoke ad copy which resonated with each audience. To increase traffic to the target landing pages, we expanded our ad campaigns to include specialty terms and more relevant job titles.

+ Facebook Advertising
We ran a campaign to test seven different creatives. The best performing adverts achieved a 10 out of 10 Facebook relevancy score and drove audiences to target landing pages for a very low cost per click. To broaden our reach, we expanded the job titles campaign to include variations used in different UK locations. Interestingly 79% of clicks came from mobile users.

+ Attribution
To monitor the effectiveness of our campaign, we created a unique attribution model to understand which channel accounted for each conversion. This approach provided valuable insights which we used to optimise the campaign.

• The communications we used to target each of our audiences proved to be convincing and compelling. Of the 35,084 visitors we drove to our target landing pages, 6,543 continued through to the membership registration page, and 1,412 went on to sign up for RCN membership.
  
• Using a mixture of clever targeting techniques, we have been able to drive audiences to sign up for memberships in a cost effective way. For every £1 spent, our campaign returned 629% revenue.
• We continuously optimised our AdWords and Facebook advertising campaigns to improve the performance and results. This helped to increase the number of memeberships generated throughout the life of the campaign by 571%.