Supporting inpatient recruitment for Cardinal Clinic

Challenge

To increase the number of Inpatient ‘bed days’ for private mental health hospital Cardinal Clinic, through GP referrals and self-pay patients.

Cardinal Clinic offers high quality mental health services to sufferers in Windsor, London and the South of England. As well as attracting patients with private health insurance, our focus was attracting self-pay patients.

Our goal was to recruit 4 additional inpatients per month, which is equivalent to approximately 170 bed days. Through targeted digital marketing and social media campaigns we were tasked driving customer acquisition and improving overall financial performance.

Solution

We leveraged behavioural biases like The Pratfall Effect — the idea a flaw can make you more authentic and appealing — as part of our overarching strategy to overcome price as a barrier to entry for audiences. 

 As part of this, we split the audience profiling into two segments: supporters and sufferers. Using this, we adapted creative assets and messaging to reach the influencers in the patient journey such as parents and partners.

Combining our creative, digital marketing, and social media teams, we provided Cardinal Clinic with:

• Tactical delivery of paid social and PPC (including prospecting, retargeting, geographical, GP, recruitment, and condition-specific campaigns)
• Organic social consultancy to align with paid media strategy, including boosted posts.
• Seasonal on-location content shoots
• Asset ideation and creation for organic and paid social
• SEO consultancy, including working with Cardinal’s web developers to improve user experience and customer journeys.

Impact

• Increased monthly inpatient numbers from 12 to 16 in 2 years.
• This caused a huge increase of 2,000 bed days per year
• Increased website sessions by 3,428%.
• Generated 836% more patient enquiries.
• Reached over 1,100% more users.
• Grown Facebook and Instagram followers by 138%.