Developing paid social and OOH campaigns for Solihull Active

The challenge

Following a successful launch campaign in January 2023, Solihull Borough Council’s Solihull Active team challenged us to deliver three additional campaigns strategically spread throughout the year to promote their ‘On The Move’ campaign.

Solihull On The Move aims to inspire healthier, happier and more sustainable communities through moving more, more often. With that in mind, our challenge was to spread the message to different age groups across Solihull via paid social and out-of-home (OOH) campaigns, using strategically written copy alongside activity-inspiring creative.

Turning instinct into action

With an entire community to reach, every element of our paid social and OOH campaign had to target, and cater to, audiences of all ages — from as young as 13 to as old as 65+.

Starting from scratch, we reached out to members of the local community, bringing them together for a content shoot that focused on capturing empowering images of individuals and groups taking part in a variety of physical activities. From outdoorsy activities like cycling and walking to indoors-based ones like swimming and the gym, this gave us plenty of creative to build a campaign around.

With images at the ready, we developed a pool of creative assets combining the empowering photos with inspiring and motivational copy, as well as witty attention-grabbing phrases like ‘it’s easy to grab a table for lunch…’ to promote table tennis sessions.

Three to four assets were chosen for each campaign throughout the year — January, May, July/August, and September and were paired with content from our in-house paid social and copywriting experts written specifically for each audience. For example:

• For a family-focused audience encouraging swimming at local pools, we said: “there’s lots of activities to keep your children physically active this summer including family swimming sessions at your local pool.
• For an older teen audience promoting table tennis sessions, we said “looking for something to do with your mates this summer? Try our Ping! Table tennis sessions in your local park.

Audience targeting focused specifically on residents living in the Solihull area, and as each campaign developed throughout the year, we built out different audiences for different ages, including physical and non-physical interests to tap into the more — and less — active members of the community that the campaign is designed to reach.

Impact

Across just four monthly campaigns in 2023, our paid social ads were seen nearly 2 million times by over 325,000 Solihull citizens, generating over 13,000 clicks through to the website to learn more about the activities on offer and raise awareness of the campaign.

Engagement with the ads was strong, with the May campaign achieving a high click-through rate of 7.02% — which is significantly higher than the Fitness industry average of 1.01%. At the same time, a low cost-per-click of £0.46 is far less than the Fitness industry average of £1.50.

Our OOH campaigns ran during January and June/July, generating 2,781,932 impacts across both campaigns.

Overall, our campaigns drove over 27,000 users to the website — that’s 13% of the entire population of Solihull —, 32% of which came directly from our paid social ads.