Balance Activ: Tackling taboos with creative comms

Balance Activ: Tackling taboos with creative comms

CHALLENGE

Raise awareness of bacterial vaginosis (BV) among women aged 18-40 to encourage accurate diagnosis and position Balance Activ as a natural and effective treatment for the condition.

APPROACH

BV is twice as common as thrush, but it has very low awareness. Turning this problem into an opportunity, we developed a creative communications campaign strategy that leveraged awareness of thrush to deliver educational messaging about BV.

The ‘Maybe It’s Not Thrush?’ campaign took a straight-talking, no-nonsense approach to educate women on the differences between BV and thrush and encourage them to use the brand’s online symptom checker for an accurate diagnosis. We developed a highly targeted and optimised paid social media campaign on Facebook and Instagram. For media, we partnered with a top gynaecologist to shape an educational story and collaborated with several leading women’s lifestyle publications to create bespoke video and feature articles about the condition.

IMPACT

The integrated marketing campaign secured 24 pieces of earned media, reaching over 500 million.

88% of coverage directed readers to the symptom checker, which was used 31,000 times during the campaign.

Media partner content achieved over 83,000 unique views, with banner ad click-throughs outperforming benchmark by over 200 percent.​

The optimised paid social campaign reached 35 million women and delivered a phenomenal 5.6% engagement rate, a huge figure for a topic that could be viewed as too personal and embarrassing to consume on social media.​

Most importantly, product sales saw double-digit growth vs a year ago and regained number 1 market share position. 

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The ‘Maybe it’s Not Thrush’ campaign has also been recognised at a number of award programmes, winning Best Social Media and/or Influencers Healthcare/Pharma campaign at the PRWeek Healthcare & Pharma Comms Awards and the Best Direct Response Social Media Campaign at the UK Social Media Awards and has been shortlisted a further eight times at the Creative Moment, PRCA, PRMoment, PRWeek, SABRE EMEA, and UK Social Media Awards.