“Health equity” and “social determinants of health” can feel like buzzwords when you work in healthcare, but these terms are used so often because they are addressing real phenomena that affect millions of Americans. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines health equity as the idea that every person has a fair chance to be as healthy as possible. While society is striving for equity, we’re not there and disparities still exist. These disparities are the preventable differences that people experience in their access to healthcare.
Factors that affect health equity include social determinates of health like social context (where you live, play and worship), access to healthcare, physical environment, workplace conditions, access to transportation, education and income.
But healthcare marketing efforts can play a large role in reducing some of these disparities. Through awareness and education campaigns, marketing can help empower individuals with knowledge about their health and the resources available to them. To prioritize health equity in your marketing, here are a few steps to take to create strategic campaigns that reduce disparity among your target audience.
Conduct Research
Knowledge is power. Before you start creating a campaign, it’s important to understand your target audience. Conducting research can help you get a fuller picture of the health disparities in your service area. You’ll be looking for answers to questions like: What are common health conditions? Are there cultural factors influencing health behaviors? What are the barriers to healthcare access? Where does your target audience consume media?
By starting with research, you can create a data-backed strategy that will enable you to more effectively and efficiently target those harder-to-reach pockets of your audience and provide them the information that you know can have a positive effect on their health outcomes.
Develop Target Personas
Once you’ve better identified the needs of various populations in your service area, create target personas to help you better think through the right strategy, targeting and messaging for different groups within your audience. This will help you get a fuller picture of these groups’ needs and therefore, better tailor your targeting, messaging and services to reach them.
Create Accessible Content
When trying to reach out to underserved or disadvantaged groups, you want your messaging to be a help and not a hinderance. This means creating content that is culturally sensitive, uses positive language and is easy to understand.
Cultural sensitivity could entail including customs and traditions of certain groups of people in your communications. This could also be the inverse—making sure you’re not saying or doing things that could be offensive out of ignorance.
Language has shown to have a powerful impact on patient behavior, outcomes and care—both for good and ill. When creating content, it’s imperative that you choose words that are inspiring and empowering and not critical, judgmental or fear-evoking.
Remember, too, that healthcare can be confusing. Use clear, jargon-free language so that individuals with varying levels of health literacy can learn and understand. If you know that education is a barrier to health for one of your target personas, consider tailoring your writing to a more basic reading level to increase understanding. Similarly, translate marketing and education materials into target personas’ native languages to help reach out to non-English speakers. Outreach through customized content like this can help grow trust and increase engagement with target populations.
Check Digital Accessibility
It can be easy to take technology for granted, but not all online resources are easy to access for individuals with disabilities. Make sure that your online health resources are all ADA compliant and designed to be user-friendly for people of all abilities. Inclusive resources and technology are continuously evolving so it’s a good idea to keep a finger on the pulse of these guidelines and innovations.
Diversify Media Placements
To ensure your messaging reaches a diverse audience effectively and efficiently, we recommend employing a diverse, omnichannel advertising approach. This includes traditional media such as broadcast TV, radio, outdoor, etc., as well as more targeted advertising on social media, search engines and programmatic display. Then,
incorporate niche publications that cater specifically to the harder-to-reach subsets of your target audience. Think about placing ads in a local Spanish language newspaper or small-town papers servicing rural communities, for example.
When marketers have health equity in mind and take an intentional approach to their communications, they can make a real change and improve outcomes for many in their communities. If you need strategic guidance or creative assets to help with your outreach to underserved patients, B&Y is ready to help. Let’s start a conversation today.