Balance Activ: ‘Maybe It’s Not Thrush?’

Bacterial Vaginosis (BV) is the most common vaginal condition, yet 60% of women mistake their symptoms for thrush.  We needed to step-change consumer awareness of the condition amongst women aged 18-40 to ensure they diagnosed and treated it properly and position Balance Activ as a natural and effective treatment.

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.

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.