Case study · Healthcare and public sector
The communications team at NHS North Central London Integrated Care Board wanted to run paid social campaigns themselves. We built Meta advertising training around the realities of NHS comms, from blocked ad accounts to recruitment ad rules, and walked the team through building a campaign live.
- 5 boroughs covered by the ICB
- 2 hour session
- 66 page guide to keep
- 1 month of follow-up support
- Client NHS North Central London ICB
- Sector Healthcare, public sector
- Training Paid social, Meta advertising
- When March 2025
- Audience Communications and engagement team
- Format Two-hour session with live demo
What did the NHS need?
North Central London ICB covers Barnet, Camden, Enfield, Haringey and Islington. Its comms team wanted to create “innovative, topical and tailored paid content” that reached local communities, pitched at a basic to intermediate level.
The team named four challenges: setting up a campaign in line with best practice, reaching and targeting the right audience, creating useful paid content, and measuring return on investment.
- Business objective: reach local communities with health messages more effectively.
- Training objective: equip the team to plan, set up and measure paid campaigns on Facebook and Instagram.
What was the insight?
Generic Meta training doesn’t survive contact with the NHS. Health ads get blocked, recruitment ads fall under special rules, and budgets are under scrutiny. So the course was built around NHS problems, with real healthcare examples and benchmark costs the team could plan against.
What did the training cover?
- Meta in healthcare. How the NHS can use paid social for community engagement, health tips and steering people to the right service.
- The NHS pitfalls. Blocked ad accounts, overspend, high costs per result and the special ad category for recruitment.
- Ads Manager step by step. Objectives, formats, targeting, budgets and admin best practice.
- Measurement. What to track, how to optimise, and benchmark costs for engagement and reach.
- Live demo and a plan. A campaign built live in Ads Manager, plus an ad strategy on a page template and a step-by-step build guide.
Tyler Smith and Will Ockenden delivered the session.
What did it achieve?
Results by stage of the AMEC evaluation framework, with the source for each figure.
| Stage | Measure | Result | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Outputs | Training session | 2 hours, 26 March 2025 | Training deck |
| Outputs | Reference guide | 66-page deck with step-by-step Ads Manager guide | Training deck |
| Outputs | Planning tool | Ad strategy on a page template | Training deck |
| Outputs | Follow-up support | One month of post-training help | Purchase order |
What did the NHS get from it?
A comms team with the know-how to run paid social in-house, a guide to work from, and benchmarks to plan budgets against. The booking survived an organisational restructure, with the training delivered once the new team was in post.
What did we learn?
- Sector specifics matter most. Building the course around NHS pitfalls made it usable from day one.
- Wait for the right team. Delaying until new staff were in post meant the right people were trained.
- What we would do differently. Agree a first campaign to review together a month later, so the impact can be measured.
Running paid social in the public sector? Talk to us about paid social training.
