Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Public Health and Surveillance
Date Submitted: Jul 17, 2023
Date Accepted: May 21, 2024
Identifying Effective Components of a Social Marketing Campaign to Improve Engagement with Express Sexual Health Services Among Gay, Bisexual, and Other Men Who Have Sex with Men: A Case Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Little is known about how best to reach people with social marketing messages promoting use of clinical human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and sexually transmitted infection (STI) services.
Objective:
We evaluated a multi-platform, digital social marketing campaign intended to increase use of HIV/STI testing, treatment, and prevention services among gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (MSM) at an LGBTQ+ community health center.
Methods:
We evaluated engagement with a social marketing campaign launched by Open Door Health, the only LGBTQ+ community health center in Rhode Island, during the first eight months of implementation (April to November 2021). Three types of advertisements encouraging use of HIV/STI services were developed for and implemented on Google search, Google display, Grindr, and Facebook. Platforms tracked the number of times that an advertisement was displayed to a user (impressions), that a user clicked through to a landing page that facilitated scheduling (clicks), and that a user requested a call to schedule an appointment from the landing page (conversions). We calculated the click-through rate (clicks per impression), conversion rate (conversions per click), and the dollar amount spent per 1,000 impressions and per click and conversion.
Results:
Overall, Google search yielded the highest click-through rate (7.1%) and conversion rate (7.0%) compared to Google display, Grindr, and Facebook (click-through rates=0.4-3.3%; conversion rates=0-0.03%). Although the spend per 1,000 impressions and per click was higher for Google search than other platforms, the spend per conversion – which measures the number of people intending to attend the clinic for services – was substantially lower for Google search ($48.19 versus $3,120.42-3,436.03).
Conclusions:
Campaigns using the Google search platform may yield the greatest return on investment for engaging MSM in HIV/STI services at community health clinics. Future studies are needed to measure clinical outcomes among those who present to the clinic for services after viewing campaign advertisements and to compare the return on investment with use of social marketing campaigns relative to other approaches. Clinical Trial: Not applicable.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.