Utilizing Marketing Techniques to Help Spread Public Health Information Efficiently

Healthcare is in a bit of a tight spot. In the Western world, it’s never been in particularly great shape to begin with. The combination of limited accessibility and high costs has seen to it that few people report complete and un-hesitant satisfaction with the system.

Covid didn’t help. Years of lockdowns and conflicting news reports have led to record-setting levels of public distrust toward the networks that are supposed to keep us safe.

In other words, public health could really benefit from some good marketing. In this article, we take a look at how techniques common to marketing can help spread information and generally improve public health.

Understand Your Goal

It’s important to keep in mind that true marketing is purpose-driven. There is a specific intention that needs to be met through the implementation of community outreach. In this case, your goal might be to increase trust or boost medical comprehension within your community.

You will use several vehicles to accomplish these goals, but it is important to understand the intention of your efforts from offset. In other words, start with a clear target, and then reverse engineer a path toward reaching it.

Find a Way to Measure Your Success

Marketers need to know when they are hitting their mark. In certain cases, success can be pretty straightforward: either people are seeing the message, or they are not.

Most of the time, however, marketing campaigns are all about conversions. It’s not enough that people see the message. They also need to follow through on the call to action.

In commercial enterprise, the call to action is usually to make a purchase. In this case, the goal could be any number of things. Maybe you want to increase preventative care in your community. Maybe you want to increase vaccination rates, or simply clarify misunderstandings.

Regardless, you need to have a way to measure success. Marketers will evaluate their campaign data routinely, adjusting their output in response to success and failure.

Note that most online platforms will come with data processing tools that will allow you to get a broad understanding of your campaign’s success. You will still need to refine your goals, but data tools are a good place to get initial insights.

Of course, it is important to keep in mind that public health unfolds on a much longer timeline than most commercial projects. Health decisions a person makes today could have an impact on their quality of life forty years from now.

This works to your advantage, in that it means you have a lot of time to reach the public. Unfortunately, though, this timeline also makes it harder to analyze the effectiveness of your campaign. Because tracking healthcare objectives can be so complicated, it is even more important that you have clear success indicators that you can measure to determine your level of progress.

Public Health Needs a Good Social Media Account

Would you follow your own community’s health on Twitter? Maybe if it’s good at hashtags, right? Obviously, the abstract concept of health can’t actually develop a social media presence. The people who work to maintain health in your community can. And they should.

The majority of adults get at least some of their news from social media. When it comes to marketing, you often want to follow the path of least resistance. In other words, meet people where they are at.

Unfortunately, it isn’t quite as simple as creating an account for a clinic or hospital, and waiting for people to come. Social media success is built on targeted and ongoing efforts. To find true success you must:

• Create your accounts: Simple, but important. Create accounts that are designed to reach the people most likely to follow you. For example, people interested in public health are most likely established adults in their late twenties and onward. Find out what platforms they use the most, and develop content accordingly.
• Post regularly: You don’t necessarily need to post daily, though you should make sure that your accounts are updated on a regular basis. Note that just firing off a Tweet at a random time during the day won’t get the job done. To maximize the impact of your effort, make sure that you are posting when your key demographic is most active online. Otherwise, your content will get buried beneath an ocean of other content.
• Find your voice: Marketing isn’t just about communicating an idea. It’s also about creating a feeling. You can do that by developing a voice—in this case, probably primarily informative and formal—and using that voice consistently.

Don’t sleep on social media! It’s a powerful, free tool that has the potential to significantly boost your reach.

Meet People Where They Are At

Let’s say the community you are trying to reach is distrustful of vaccines. Only thirty percent of the county is vaccinated, and even in our post-pandemic way of life, there are still viral outbreaks that seem to stem directly from a general lack of local awareness of how to stay safe.

The goal, in this situation, is very straightforward. You want to convince more people to get vaccinated and take general health precautions where applicable. But how do you accomplish this?

Well, here’s what you don’t want to do. Alienate people. Tell them why they are wrong and why you are right. Not only will this approach fail to sway them, but it will also likely lead to your removal from their social media feeds.

Instead, work on a campaign that addresses their concerns directly, and with compassion. Now, what that campaign looks like will be up to you. Maybe you take a storytelling approach—highlighting the journey of someone who started out vaccine-hesitant and is now fully inoculated.

The ultimate approach will of course depend on what type of messaging your community is most likely to respond to.

Conclusion

It’s weird to sell someone their own health and wellness. But in the United States, there is a lot more to healthcare than just feeling good. Costs are prohibitive. Insurance coverage isn’t always a guarantee. And misunderstandings between the healthcare community and the general public are still running rampant.

So yes, health does require some decent marketing. Fortunately, there are many ways to get this accomplished. Healthcare systems that lack the internal resources to manage a marketing campaign can access a wide range of freelance professionals who can coordinate the efforts for them.

With social media and other online platforms, high-quality marketing is now more accessible than ever.

Want to improve your marketing skills? While some projects are best left to the pros, anyone can communicate their message to the public with a little bit of training. You don’t have to enroll in a four-year program to develop useful skills. There are training bootcamps that make it easy to pick up marketing basics.