Health communication & social marketing practice

The past decade has seen an enormous surge in social marketing and healthcare to convey various messages. Social marketing has also been established as an essential health communications tool to promote health initiatives. Social marketing should not be the only tool to communicate information to the general public, but to complement the existing practices in place.

This week, you will examine the use of social marketing as a communication channel in healthcare.

Review the following website article:

• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2012). Gateway to health communication & social marketing practice. Retrieved from http://www.cdc.gov/healthcommunication/

Using the readings for the week, the South University Online Library, and the Internet, create a 15- to 20-slide Microsoft PowerPoint presentation with a separate title and reference slide. Include the following:

• Justify why social marketing is needed in today’s society to promote health initiatives.
• List the numerous communication channels that are used in developing a health campaign.
• Explain how you will evaluate the effectiveness of your communications campaign.
• Provide a specific example of how social marketing was used in a health campaign.

 

 

 

Social Marketing and Healthcare

 

 

 

Student’s Name

University

Course

Professor

Date

Social Marketing and Healthcare

Health Communication and Social Marketing Practice

“Brand is just acumen, and acumen will match reality over time.” (Elon Musk). Social marketing is the adoption of commercial, promotional technologies into programs that are intended to influence the response of target audiences to improve both the individuals’ well-being and the well-being of the community in which they belong (Deshpande, 2019). Social marketing is not just about fresh leads but keeping revenue up across every front. The use of social media marketing will be critical for engaging existing customers, reaching new audiences, and building trust and loyalty that carries into renewals, upsell and cross-sell growth. Social marketing aims to inform people about voluntary strategies they can use to change their behavior. This behavior change should be voluntary, and the planner’s job is to make the desired behavior an easy choice for the target audience.

Health professionals must understand marketing key concepts, designing programs to aid health products, and changing health behavior. Social marketing is an outlook to persuade people to accept ideas and attitudes, perform healthy behaviors, refer to health facilities, and receive health products (Friedman et al., 2022). The social marketing planning process stages are getting started, scope, developing, implementing, evaluating and follow-up. Health communication involves verbal and written strategies to influence and empower individuals, populations, and communities to make healthier decisions. Health communication often integrates components of multiple theories and models to aid positive changes in attitudes and behaviors (Nabi & Myrick, 2019). Public health experts grant health communication essential to public health programs that direct disease prevention, health nurturing, and quality of life, and it can make significant contributions to aid and refine the health of individuals, communities, and society. Social marketing is needed in today’s society to promote health initiatives, where communication channels are used in developing health campaigns and evaluating the effectiveness of communication campaigns.

The Need for Social Marketing in Today’s Society to Promote Health Initiatives

Social marketing is a procedure that applies marketing principles and ways to create, communicate and provide value in order to impact target audience behaviors that avail society public health, safety, the environment, and communities targeting audience. Social marketing aims to promote public health, and its goal is to upgrade health for all (Giustini et al., 2018). Its strategy is predominantly preventive. It could even be seen to be in competition with commercial healthcare marketing as it seeks to reduce the market for curative services. Marketing drives a consumer economy, upgrading goods and services and aiming consumers to become buyers. Higher sales for a business that provides successful marketing forms translate into expansion, job creation, higher tax revenue for governments and, overall economic growth. Social marketing uses community health needs assessments and community development methods to work with communities to understand their needs and wants and how to address them (Selkie et al., 2020). It is used to address a broad range of health issues, including improving nutrition, decreasing injuries, responding to infectious disease outbreaks, and reducing risk factors that contribute to chronic diseases. It can be used in both developing and highly developed countries and settings. Healthcare marketing can provide one practice with many benefits like outreach, awareness, finding new patients and taking better care of existing ones so they keep coming back

Communication Channels used in Developing a Health Campaign

Developing health campaigns is vital as it keeps the public informed on the impotance of good health. Channels for developing a health campaign include radio, television, newspapers, flyers, brochures, the internet, and social media tools like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, where radio campaigns are efficient equipment to influence the public opinion because radio reaches a broader audience than any other medium, and is accessible to people otherwise isolated by geography, conflict, illiteracy or poverty (Te et al., 2019). Television is essential in developing health campaigns, for example, after viewing televised antismoking campaign messages, several members of a social group might be prompted to form a support group to help them stop smoking. Another individual who has not seen the television campaign could decide to join the support group and change his or her own behaviour, and since it is a relatively new technology, there is little research to establish the long-term upshot, good or bad, of social media use. However, various studies have found a strong loop between heavy social media and an increased menace for depression, anxiety, loneliness, self-harm, and even suicidal thoughts. Social media provides an outlet to increase and promote translational health communication strategies and effective data dissemination in ways that allow users to not only utilize but also create and share pertinent health information

Evaluating the Effectiveness of a Communications Campaign

Marketing campaign effectiveness metrics are the backbone of any successful campaign. To determine a communications campaign’s effectiveness, one wants to measure the effects and changes that resulted from the campaign and the outcomes in the target audiences resulting from campaign strategies and activities. The idea is that good data drives sound decisions. Data that informs, provides program insights and improves the customer experience will undoubtedly result in acquiring more quality leads and ultimately increase sales (McColl-Kennedy et al., 2019). It requires one to clearly define what they are trying to accomplish and be direct about what they are giving up. It means building support and educating others about their campaign message and disciplined focus amid criticism from those who want to communicate a different message. The components of a marketing campaign involve a planning stage, evaluating how the campaign’s outcome will be measured, deciding a target market, how the campaign will be delivered, ways to achieve results, and finally, assessing how well the campaign did. Among its many benefits, evaluation can contribute to professionalizing the field of public communication by providing evidence of its impact and lessons on what works and what does not.

Uses of Social Marketing in a Health Campaign

Social marketing is essential in health campaign as it delivers crucial information on health to individuals with less information on good health. Social marketing can encourage certain personal behaviors by mothers or reciprocal behaviors between mothers and others, such as encouraging nurses to support a mother’s choice to breastfeed within 1 hour of birth. Social marketing is used to address a broad range of health issues, including improving nutrition, decreasing injuries, responding to infectious disease outbreaks, and reducing risk factors that contribute to chronic diseases (Suarez-Lledo & Alvarez-Galvez, 2021). It can be used in both developing and highly developed countries and settings. Social marketing channels like the radio are used to deliver health campaigns to every corner of the country to persons who cannot afford social midea platforms like Facebook and Twitter, keeping everyone informed on health issues and the things to do to improve their health. Social marketing is essential in health campaigns and promoting health and the healthcare industry.

Conclusion

Social marketing is the adoption of commercial, promotional technologies into programs that are intended to influence the response of target audiences to improve both the individuals’ well-being and the well-being of the community in which they belong and apply marketing principles and ways to create, communicate and provide value in order to impact target audience behaviors that avail society public health, safety, the environment, and communities targeting audience. Channels for developing a health campaign include radio, television, newspapers, flyers, brochures, the internet, and social media tools like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, where radio campaigns are efficient equipment to influence the public opinion because radio reaches a broader audience than any other medium, and is accessible to people otherwise isolated by geography, conflict, illiteracy or poverty and its evaluation can contribute to professionalizing the field of public communication by providing evidence of its impact and lessons on what works and what does not. Social marketing is vital in health campaigns and the overall healthcare industry as it keeps the nation alert on the developing issues in the healthcare industry.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

References

Deshpande, S. (2019). Social marketing’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT): A commentary. Social Marketing Quarterly, 25(4), 231-242. https://doi.org/10.1177/1524500419881770

Friedman, V. J., Wright, C. J., Molenaar, A., McCaffrey, T., Brennan, L., & Lim, M. S. (2022). The use of social media as a persuasive platform to facilitate nutrition and health behavior change in young adults: web-based conversation study. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 24(5), e28063.

Nabi, R. L., & Myrick, J. G. (2019). Uplifting fear appeals: Considering the role of hope in fear-based persuasive messages. Health communication, 34(4), 463-474. https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2017.1422847

Giustini, D. M., Ali, S. M., Fraser, M., & Boulos, M. N. K. (2018). Effective uses of social media in public health and medicine: a systematic review of systematic reviews. Online journal of public health informatics, 10(2). http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6197-8788

Selkie, E., Adkins, V., Masters, E., Bajpai, A., & Shumer, D. (2020). Transgender adolescents’ uses of social media for social support. Journal of Adolescent Health, 66(3), 275-280. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jadohealth.2019.08.011

Te, V., Ford, P., & Schubert, L. (2019). Exploring social media campaigns against sugar-sweetened beverage consumption: A systematic search. Cogent Medicine, 6(1), 1607432. https://doi.org/10.1080/2331205X.2019.1607432

McColl-Kennedy, J. R., Zaki, M., Lemon, K. N., Urmetzer, F., & Neely, A. (2019). Gaining customer experience insights that matter. Journal of service research, 22(1), 8-26. https://doi.org/10.1177/1094670518812182

Suarez-Lledo, V., & Alvarez-Galvez, J. (2021). Prevalence of health misinformation on social media: systematic review. Journal of medical Internet research, 23(1), e17187.

If you are having challenges with writing your nursing essay either because of lack of time or not knowing where to start, you can order your paper here