By Tram Do, Communication Coordinator, KMC, Vietnam; Stephen Maina, Program Manager, Social Media Optimization, PSI Global
In Vietnam, access to quality health services can be challenging, especially for low-income populations with whom, taking time to visit a medical facility means out-of-pocket expenses as well as loss of income. For example, 68% of people working in industrial zones (predominantly female) have STIs and other SRH health complications but only 50% of them were examined and treated1.
In response, PSI leverages digital tools to build solutions. With funding from Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, PSI partnered with Babylon to develop a web-based application named AIOI (Hey AI – Artificial Intelligence) that can be accessed through your phone and used to assess health symptoms, provide health recommendations, and direct the user to health products and local care providers.
Under our global partnership with Meta, PSI launched a digital campaign to put this innovative product in the hands of people in Vietnam. From August to November, through two phases of the digital campaign, we focused on reaching men and women aged 18-44 with quality health information, building a community and connecting them with the solution.
Here is what we learned:
- The campaign was successful with driving traffic to the AIOI website with more than 433,000 link clicks and an average CTR of 0.95%.
- Built an active community of over 21,000 people among our target audience in Vietnam in 1.5 months.
- The use of real images resonated well with the target audience, leading to higher engagement and traffic to the digital health platform compared to illustrations based on an A/B test that was conducted.
- While it is standard practice to use minimal text on digital health creatives, the campaign target audience (18-44 years) resulted in a higher engagement to busier, more informative graphics. We incorporated these learnings into campaign content to more effectively share health information and drive website traffic.
PHASE 1: COMMUNITY BUILDING
In the first phase of the AIOI campaign, we focused on building community among individuals in Vietnam who can benefit from the web-app. We built a Facebook page to connect people, mostly women, who had concerns about sexual health, reproductive health, non-communicable diseases, nutrition, and children’s health. We informed page members that an online symptom checker was coming soon, and the page was updated frequently with trendy and informative health content to foster engagement from the target audience.
The Facebook community reached 19,000 followers within 2 months of being launched. The overall campaign, which incorporated paid ads and organic posts reached 16 million people, with an average engagement rate of 0.24% which is lower than previous COVID19 campaigns at 1.62%. Although both men and women were targeted in the campaign, there was a 16% higher reach among men than in women. The most popular post (shown below) was about Adeno virus and shared 9,300 times which would indicate that this particular message resonated with our target audience they felt moved to share with friends and family.
Figure 1: The best performing posts
Phase 2: Driving Traffic to the AIOI Website
Based on the findings from the first phase, PSI Vietnam significantly modified the approach for the second phase. To maximize impact, the main campaign objective was to drive traffic to the AIOI website from the Facebook page.
Figure 4 & 5: Creative with a call-to-action directing the audience to the aioi.vn website
We targeted locations with high concentrations of industrial workers in Vietnam such as Hanoi, Thai Nguyen, Bac Giang, and Bac Ninh. Since a majority of our audience is located in Hanoi, we targeted half of campaign ads towards residents of Hanoi.
RESULTS
- We used the campaign click-through-rate (CTR) as the key performance indicator (KPI) for driving website traffic. The average CTR across the campaign was 0.95% which was evenly spread across age groups and genders, but was lower than CTR observed in previous campaigns of 4.3%.
- We managed to achieve a reach of 20 million which was 25% higher than the reach achieved in phase 1.
- Our campaigns did not achieve a lift, meaning there was little or no change in the self-reported knowledge of the AIOI online symptom checker among the target audience.
NEXT STEPS
Despite failing to achieve a lift, we learned the true impact of leveraging digital health tools to put quality health information and care in the hands of consumers. In Vietnam, access to health information and care is limited and often requires individuals to travel to in-person health clinics. Using a web-based platform that can be accessed on your phone, a tool that most people are already using daily, we can make healthcare more accessible and user-friendly. As PSI continues to tackle the health challenges of today and the future, digital healthcare stands out as a valuable solution.
