Objectives 

The sole purpose of the AbilitiCBT app was to help Ontarians with their mental health well-being as mental health affects everyone of all ages, sexes, and socioeconomics. A global pandemic then pushed mental health needs to unprecedented levels at a time when the healthcare system’s ability to offer support was severely diminished.

 Insight 

Our insight came from deciphering social listening, with the help of professional therapists. Social media habits can sometimes be a better indicator of our mental health, even more so than online self-assessments.

The key insight was understanding the power of social listening; how activities online drove mental health prescriptions; i.e. time spent online and time of day online were key indicators of potential mental health issues. Knowing how, when, and where they consume media can tell a lot about their mental health state. Sometimes the signs are hidden from people and although they are feeling “ok” some signs can lead to mental health issues. Ie triggers like lack of sleep and excessive screen time. We engaged professional therapists to listen and help access mental health signs and solutions designed for individual Ontarians. Curated content would be designed specifically for their symptoms. By understanding what triggers an unhealthy state of mind. 

This key insight allowed us to make a major impact in the market as we helped over 70,000 Ontarians with discussions on their mental health. More than ever before. We were able to develop a new way to discuss mental health which can still be a delicate conversation. Our instant consumer research allowed us to identify areas of focus and provide a robust strategic and tactical plan of attack.

Strategy 

Our insight helped develop a social strategy, where the target audience steered

campaign insights, development, and executions. Organically joining conversations and “really hearing'' the challenges and questions that arose, we were able to create targeted solutions that spoke directly to individuals. We needed not to jump into every conversation with bespoke solutions, but to be there with appropriate specific solutions.

Media habits dictated our creative solutions. We used conversations created organically on social media with therapists as micro-insights for daily optimization and then executed content based on real assessments and social habits in contextual media formats/channels. The AbilitiCBT campaign was a social+ search plan, each building on the other, where the medium and message worked together. Using targeted focused messages to the right people allowed to achieve higher levels of activity throughout the user experience. In doing so provided a better return on investment than any other government app. 

Execution 

Our channel plan involved various activities to help drive activity through the funnel.

At the top of the funnel, we used paid social media to drive awareness and traffic to the AbilitiCBT app. This drove high-efficiency leads and allowed us to focus a targeted search strategy on social channels, like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. 

Knowing that some symptoms like excessive screen time and late-night internet surfing were key indicators to mental health, helped drive higher than normal conversations. This conversational approach allowed us to micro-tune messaging to reflect the tone, time, or topic of the content. We chose to be supportive - not invasive. From a customer experience perspective, "Likes" on our little posts of encouragement ranged anywhere from 20 to 2500 and comments were overwhelmingly positive and appreciative -- "Brilliant!" -- "I love this" -- "Absolutely right" -- "Thanks for the reminder".

Our bottom-funnel strategy used branded and related services keywords to find how people reacted. We closed the loop on the social media conversation with a robust paid search campaign. This allowed us to capture traffic and downloads after our audience had engaged with our social content.

Using our community managers, we communicated with our target and provided instant responses based on professional assessments. This allowed us to test various keywords and channels and quickly shift direction based on activity and user experience.

All of our strategies combined, allowed for a seamless level of activity, which allowed us to achieve all our goals.  

Results 

Our approach since relaunching with this targeted social strategy exceeded expectations but more satisfying than anything is we know we had an impact in helping save lives in Ontario, with over 70,000 new activations.

We achieved over 50% market share, higher than the launch and more than any other government app. Our increase in intake and activities on average were 12x higher than in previous months. The recorded highest month of users was 5000 vs 600 prior, for a total of 148,000 conversions. A total high conversions for all of 2021. 

The Campaign generated a return on investment of 15x based on government expenditure and outlay.

And most importantly we were able to take this program into other provinces, with our new launch in Manitoba.

We learned a lot about this campaign and how to approach sensitive discussions. The pandemic did help with the activity levels of the campaign as more people used our services but our success was how we engaged them and helped provide solutions.