Virgin Care

Before its purchase by Twenty20 Capital, Virgin Care, part of the Virgin Group, approached The PHA Group to support their launch of a Virgin Care Private Hospital in Birmingham. The clinic targeted a high-net-worth demographic for services such as GP appointments and mental and social health care.

Despite a firm brand name, search traffic and conversion were relatively low, and Virgin Care was eager to adopt a digital-first approach to its marketing. This approach would involve digital PR, content and paid search (PPC).

Initially, the team began to collect and analyse data to support the campaign. The analysis involved looking at the most in-demand services across Virgin Care’s launch period and understanding the search intent level for each service. This approach allowed the team to work with Virgin Care’s development agency to create appropriate landing pages for their key terms. These landing pages would ensure that they were capturing those with high search intent for particular services and serving them with the most appropriate information, leading to better conversion.

In addition, our team worked collaboratively with healthcare consultants to understand the services and integrated this into our ad copy and keyword targeting for organic and paid searches. This collaboration allowed us to create a hub of wellbeing that we could use as a focal point for assets, allowing us to drive traffic. We also supported Virgin Care with influencer content, creating an engaging plan and filtering this out through various influencers to help drive trust amongst the target audience.

Finally, we created a PPC strategy to gather leads from local, high-intent audiences. This strategy involved running geo-targeted lead generation ads to people in Birmingham across paid search and paid social. We were gradually optimising to make the most out of the client’s budget and working closely with their team to review the results.

In total, we supported Virgin Care for 12 months. This support included six months pre-sale and six months post-sale. Following the development and implementation of the strategy, we trained the Virgin Care team before handing it over to them at the end of the engagement. The training included data analysis, content planning and creation, influencer marketing, social marketing, and paid search.

During the engagement, we helped drive a 4x increase in marketing qualified leads compared to the leads achieved by Virgin Care during the previous six months. In addition, 50% more of the leads converted into customers for Virgin Care Private. Finally, searches for the brand term Virgin Care increased 10-fold.