Michigan Health & Hospital Association
MI Hospital Careers Social Media
Goal: Bellwether worked with the Michigan Health & Hospital Association (MHA) to develop the MI Hospital Careers campaign to build awareness, motivation and action to close the hospital employment gap in hospitals and health systems across the state.
Notable Awards/Recognitions:
First-place Pinnacle Award for Social Mediums Tactic
Research:
Primary Research: Bellwether Public Relations reviewed survey data conducted around employee turnover at Michigan hospitals and a labor market analysis that provided insights into the challenges that hospitals across the state face in attracting talent as well as the challenges that the workforce has faced since COVID-19. The research informed key messaging about the benefits of a position in a Michigan hospital. With wages, work/life balance and benefits packages being among the top job features for potential employees, we applied this formal research into message development, ensuring the goals of future employees were married with the goals of the employers, hospitals.
Secondary Research: Michigan is not alone in its shortage of healthcare workers, with most other states also struggling to recruit and retain talented hospital staff. That in mind, Bellwether and MHA met with three other state hospital associations to discuss their own hiring campaigns, including research, development, creative and performance. Building on their experiences, we refined the campaign strategy and creative for Michigan audiences.
Action Plan & Communication Overview:
MI Hospital Careers was a new brand with new assets and website. The site went live ahead of the campaign launch with a press release and media roundtable for key media outlets to learn more about the campaign, purpose of the site and its benefits for job-searchers in Michigan. As tens of thousands of users were being sent to the campaign website from owned, earned and paid channels, our team tracked position pages to better understand user traffic within the website, as well as outbound clicks on job postings. This information was used to report back on the positions that users were most interested in on the site for ongoing data collection.
With limited targeting opportunities offered by social media platforms for recruitment/employment campaigns, our team was challenged with the need to reach our audiences using not only content that appealed to their interests and needs, but on the platforms where they are most likely to be. To address this, we prioritized reaching our target audiences on the platforms we researched would be best based on their demographics and interests, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube and Reddit. This social media outreach accompanied a broader campaign that also included earned media, digital advertising, college campus displays, gas station and connected TVs and organic social media. We had two main goals for this campaign, first, within six months, achieve at least 456,000 social media engagements (half of the annual 12-month Sprout Social 2023 hospital and healthcare benchmark engagements). Second, reach at least a quarter million (250,000) website sessions within six months.
Evaluation:
As the campaign launched across earned, owned and paid channels in June 2023, Bellwether worked closely with MHA to develop ongoing optimization recommendations and strategies to prioritize top-performing social media content and channels.
During the campaign, our team weighted campaign resources for students around college and universities, and on the platforms where they are likely to be found. The first six months of the campaign exceeded expectations and objectives, by achieving more than 6.6 million engagements on social media channels, and more than 359,000 website sessions. While the website sessions could also have been tied to other campaign tactics aside from social media, it was evident based on the initial campaign social media results that we clearly reached our intended audience with content they found engaging and relevant.
In addition, across all platforms our social media advertising generated over 78 million impressions and resulted in over a half million link clicks from engaged and informed members of our target audiences. The campaign has been continued into 2024 with a heavier emphasis on social media outreach.
At the start of 2024, the Michigan Health & Hospital Association completed an updated survey that resulted in a reduced number of open positions.
With an original challenge of 27,000 open roles, over the course of 2023, including the start of our campaign, the number of open positions lowered to 19,000.
While there is more work to be done, the Hospital Careers campaign continues into 2025 with elevated tactics, refined website features and fresh creative pieces.
