This month the Sunny Bird PR team is celebrating our three-year clientversary, and most successful year to date, with private healthcare provider Ramsay Health Care UK.
The healthcare provider first began working with SBPR back in 2015 with the primary objective of positioning Ramsay as a trusted voice of authority in the field while securing backlinks directing readers to the website; increasing Ramsay’s SEO and ultimately boosting sales and patient numbers.
The SBPR team have used creative campaigns to ensure we smash our KPIs year-on-year and achieve national coverage on a monthly basis. This year we have seen a 90% increase in our coverage from the year previous including exclusive features in the likes of the Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph as well as interviews on Sky News Radio.
To achieve maximum coverage every year, SBPR devise a detailed 12-month strategy which includes a mixture of long-form features, surveys and expert advice to ensure we have something to talk to journalists about over the coming 12 months.
We kicked off this year by tapping into the media’s ‘New Year, New Me’ ethos to promote Ramsay’s weight-loss procedures on a national level. With the media saturated in weight-loss stories, we knew we needed some hard-hitting statistics and relatable case studies to be heard above the noise.
To do this, we surveyed 2000 women who had experienced difficulties with weight loss and discovered that 75% of them were ashamed or embarrassed by their weight gain. The shocking figure was just the hook we needed to take the story to the media. We pitched the feature to national radio stations along with a leading weight loss surgeon from Ramsay, and a case study who had undergone weight loss surgery with Ramsay. Both were available for radio interviews and happy to comment on procedures, statistics in the survey, as well as their own personal experiences to produce some informative and relatable pieces for radio.
Dr Halstead and case study Plaxy on the air
The campaign was a phenomenal success with a total of 14 radio interviews including Sky News Radio, talkRadio and regional stations in key hospital areas. Overall, we reached almost 4 million listeners spreading news of Ramsay weight loss procedures across the country.
Our second targeted media outreach of the year was Bowel Cancer Awareness Month in April. For this, the team utilised assets made in previous years including an eye-catching graphic, which ran with the headline ‘What Does your Stool Say About You?’, highlighted the often-overlooked symptoms of Bowel Cancer.
Our bowel cancer awareness campaign reached over 2.8 million people with 12 pieces of coverage including The Daily Telegraph, Express Online and Yahoo!
This summer, SBPR took on a new challenge away from the national limelight in the form of Ramsay’s regional PR. We were asked to support with the launch of its nationwide Speaking Up for Safety Initiative. Ramsay are the first hospital group in the UK to launch the initiative which encourages and empowers staff to challenge anyone, including senior colleagues, who may be putting patients at risk with their behaviour.
SBPR had just one week to secure as much coverage as possible across the country in advance of the initiative going live in each of Ramsay’s 38 hospitals. Over the course of just one week, the team created targeted media lists of the publications in each of the hospital’s regions, and through intensive calls to regional journalists the team achieved 22 pieces of coverage from Yorkshire to Wiltshire.
Our final campaign of the year focused on sports injuries and the importance of warming up to avoid serious injury - a campaign designed to feature in women’s magazines and more specialist sporting titles.
To deliver this campaign we gathered several assets including shocking survey statistics. The carefully-conducted survey asked 2000 people how they injured themselves while playing sport, as well as their recovery time, age and gender. The survey produced newsworthy results such as 70% of people over 55 have been to A&E with sports related injuries and that sports injuries account for more than 13.5 working days lost per person.
These results were presented to journalists along with heartfelt case studies from women who experienced serious sports injuries impacting their lives who then went on to receive corrective surgery from Ramsay allowing them to return to their sport. Simple warm-up exercises with instructions and corresponding photography were also provided along with expert comment from a Ramsay consultant on the importance of warming up.
This gave the team an array of material and assets to pitch to journalists depending on which were most suitable for their audience and publication. Consequently, we achieved numerous feature length pieces, and backlinks, in key titles such as Top Santé, Runner’s Radar, My Weekly, Trail Running and many more.
Thanks to the team’s carefully planned PR Strategy and great media contacts within the national health press, we managed to secure a huge 64 pieces of coverage for Ramsay Health Care UK over the past twelve months. That coverage has reached over 23 MILLION people, and if the equivalent space was bought in advertising would have cost over £640,000!
