Health marketing is the application of marketing principles to create effective communication campaigns to help customer-owners make healthy lifestyle choices. For example, “Dinner Makes a Difference” is a campaign to educate customer-owners about the importance of nutrition and how to prepare healthier meals. SCF runs many of these campaigns on a semi-regular or ongoing basis.
10 steps to create effective health marketing campaigns:
- Determine the health issue and the focus of the campaign. What healthy behavior do we want to promote?
- Conduct an analysis of the situation. Why might customer-owners be making unhealthy choices in this area?
- Determine the primary target audience for the campaign. Who, specifically, do we want to reach?
- Determine goals and objectives. What should the outcome of the campaign look like?
- Identify the barriers the target audience is facing. What stands in the way of their making healthier choices?
- Identify how the desired healthy behavior would help the target audience.
- Identify what is competing with this behavior. What makes it difficult for the target audience to change?
- Identify national or local campaigns we can partner with or adopt. Other marketing resources may already be available.
- Draft the message: our campaign statement. This should be clear and concise, and tailored to the target audience.
- Determine who will deliver the message and how. Decide what means and/or activities will be used to distribute the message.
SCF uses a number of tools to distribute health messages, including presence at community events, and social media campaigns. SCF also maintains the Health Education department, which coordinates these campaigns and works with customer-owners to promote healthy lifestyle choices. As SCF’s experience has shown, these kinds of health marketing campaigns can be an excellent method for health care systems to expand their work with customers and help them make healthier choices in their lives.