Building Lasting Connections: Marketing and Patient Relationships in Community Health

Welcome to Episode 15 of the CHM Micro-Credential podcast, hosted by Tami Moser. In this episode, we'll be diving deep into effective marketing and patient relationship strategies tailored for community health programs. We'll explore the successful tactics employed by the "Healthy Kids Millbrook Partnership," including school coordination, multilingual communication, and engagement through social media and direct mail. We'll also discuss the importance of understanding your target audience through personas, the benefits of email marketing integration, and the role of cultural sensitivity in communication.

Tune in as we cover the essential elements of marketing strategy selection, analyze past campaigns for continuous improvement, and offer practical examples and calls to action to enhance your outreach efforts. This episode will provide you with the tools and insights to build strong relationships with your community, ensuring your health programs make a meaningful impact. Stay with us as we explore the philosophy that connection and sincerity are at the heart of successful community health marketing.

Tami Moser [00:00:00]:
Welcome to the community health management design podcast. I'm doctor Tami Moser. And today, we're exploring the crucial topics of marketing and patient relationship strategies and community health. You know, the marketing component and outreach is critical, and it does closely couple with your personas and those patient profiles. The more you understand about the personas of those you're trying to reach, the better off you are and actually then moving on to designing marketing and outreach campaigns. And this also helps you determine what channels will be the best channels available to you. So in community health, success isn't just about designing a great program. It's about reaching the right people and building lasting relationships with them.

Tami Moser [00:00:53]:
I mean, you can have the best program in the world designed. And, really, I mean, if somebody looks at it, it goes, this is fantastic. And then it sits there, and you have no one using the program because the audience that it's designed for is not being reached effectively. So today, we're gonna dive into selecting appropriate marketing channels and developing patient relationship building approaches. So let's get started. 1st, let's talk about selecting appropriate marketing channels. In the digital age, we have more options than ever to reach our target audience. But more isn't always about more isn't always better.

Tami Moser [00:01:35]:
Let me put it that way. It's about choosing the right channels for your specific community and program, and that can be vastly different, for each type of program you develop. And even within a program, that can be very different per persona. So let's break down some key marketing channels and when the best case is to use them. 1st, we have social media, which I think we all are very familiar with and platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter can be excellent for reaching younger audiences and sharing quick health tips or program updates. This can allow for that outreach and community building to be occurring. Right? It can build an audience that would actually be interested in your program. For our Healthy Kids Millbrook example, we might use Instagram to share healthy recipe ideas or fun physical activity challenges.

Tami Moser [00:02:28]:
Now a couple of platforms I didn't mention to begin with are things like Pinterest, which also can be a great place like Instagram to put healthy recipe ideas or fun physical activity challenges in place. But you and Twitter can sometimes be useful and not depending. It can sometimes get like the wild wild West on Twitter. Let's be honest. And so you've got to be sure that you can find the audience you want to find, and then make sure whoever's watching these channels can engage with people, but not engage with the negative, or the trolls. And I will say on any social media anymore and Twitter is very bad about this, you'll have people trolling just to cause problems. Now a couple of other social media

Tami Moser [00:03:19]:
platforms are things like YouTube. It's the

Tami Moser [00:03:19]:
largest search engine in the mechanism for people finding what you're doing. But it can be a heavier lift because cutting the videos, editing videos, getting them up, and having them look appropriately, professional can sometimes be more of a challenge. But that's your first big category. Right? It's not just about, okay, we're gonna use social media. It's about which of the platforms actually best meet, our profiles, and where are we gonna find these people in social media. Then we have email marketing and this is great for sharing more detailed information and maintaining ongoing communication with program participants. For instance, we could send weekly newsletters with health tips, upcoming events, and success stories.

Tami Moser [00:04:13]:
And email marketing is probably one of

Tami Moser [00:04:13]:
the best options available, standard mail can have its place and we'll talk about it in a little bit, but the email marketing can be very helpful. And with the email marketing, there are many different platforms available to you that allow you to set up a marketing campaign, if you will, that can span a lengthy period of time even. So you can have patients go, oh, I want information on x and they can click a button, and that will trigger a series of events on the back end in your system that goes over the next 10 days. They're gonna get an email every 2 days, and that is going to give them information and build their knowledge base or build toward them taking an action in relationship to your program. And taking one step back with social media, same thing. My biggest piece of advice is to use one of the programs that allows you to plan out a social media campaign. You can program it to send one thing or or you can set up a a 6 month campaign where it just automatically posts. So it's got a heavier lift in the front end because you've gotta sit down and design and develop your full campaign.

Tami Moser [00:05:39]:
But that also is very helpful because as you design that full campaign, you get all of those pieces in place. And it doesn't mean you can't throw something else out there because, I don't know, you got a new piece of information and thought, oh, everybody would really like to hear about this. And so you could just target something to go out immediately. But you have a standard campaign that's gonna run over the next 6 months and every every day, a new recipe is gonna go out. Or one day, a recipe is gonna go out. 2 days later, a physical activity challenge will go out for the week. I mean, you can have a pattern to it too. So using the social media in combination with the email marketing can be very, very helpful because social media will help you build the audience and start educating and providing outreach and engagement.

Tami Moser [00:06:26]:
And the email marketing gives them a mechanism to go one level deeper because in the social media, you can give a link out where they can sign up for, for instance, the newsletter. One of the other differentiations you wanna make here is social media, you are at the mercy of those platforms. So for instance, I get alerts on a regular basis that YouTube is changing its, algorithm, and they're changing the rules, and you need to do this and that and the other. Channels get taken down, and then you've got to try to get them back up. And you don't own your list, if you will, of names there. So people that, you know, subscribe to your YouTube channel or follow you on Instagram. If Instagram or YouTube decide to take you down, you don't have that you can't reach them. Right? You you've lost that.

Tami Moser [00:07:22]:
And there are a number of people that have very high profile channels with 100 of thousands of followers that get taken down and they have to start from scratch. And so while social media is very useful, you really wanna find a way if you're gonna use that effectively to have the social media help you gain interest and target the audience, and then have a mechanism for them to move from the social media to the email marketing. Because email marketing your email list you own. Right? It's yours. So you nothing can take that down. You can change your email marketing platform and fine. You just, you know, send out a CSV file and then bring the CSV file back to your new marketing, technology platform. And I have suggestions here.

Tami Moser [00:08:20]:
I'll leave a few, for email marketing platforms, and I'm happy to talk to anybody about the different options. Or if this is an area that needs a lot more depth for you, please let me know. Reach out. Send me an email and say I need more on x of this, and I'll get something put together. But, you know, this is what you're what you start with here. Social media, second email marketing. And it was hard for me to decide which to go first and which to go second because the email marketing is so important because you own the list. So I really value that more than the social media platforms, but the social media platforms obviously allow you a place to start from scratch and build.

Tami Moser [00:09:05]:
So depends. You may if you're using your internal database of patients to start with, and that email marketing option is really important if they have access to email. And so that's gonna be or social media. That's gonna be something you have to consider depending upon the profiles. The third is community partnerships, and this is where you're collaborating with local organizations like schools, churches or community centers, and they can help you reach people where they already are. So for example, our healthy mid, Millbrook Healthy Kids Millbrook program, we would partner with schools for on-site program promotion, and that could be highly effective. We maybe could come to a parent teacher night and have a table or an area where parents that are concerned about their kids' health would have an opportunity to pick up information or talk to you or consider if their children should be enrolled in this. So the community partnerships, whether it's churches, organizations like schools or community centers, This can also be a great place.

Tami Moser [00:10:11]:
So you might go into something like this and let's go back to the Healthy Kids Millbrook. And let's say we're partnering partnering with the school for on-site pro program promotion, and they're gonna have a parent teacher night that's coming up. And so you're gonna have a booth, if you will, with not only flyers for them to take and maybe you've got those flyers in multiple languages. So grandparents who don't speak the language can actually read the preparatory material. And then you would have or someone who's bilingual and English is their second language, and it would just be better in terms of being able to communicate effectively to have it written in their native language. I mean, it that's an option. But you have information available.

Tami Moser [00:10:53]:
Right? You decide what that needs to

Tami Moser [00:10:53]:
be when you get there in terms of the culturally sensitive aspect. And then you have a sign up sheet. And, you know, would you like to receive the newsletter that we put out for free that addresses different ways in which kids can eat better, be more active, how the family can engage. And if you are interested in that, then please just put a good email address and your name. And if you could even have on there, is there a social media platform that you're interested in? You could have some QR codes on the handout materials and those QR codes could link to your social platform so that they could go on and if they're interested in Facebook, they can use that Facebook QR code to follow you. So you've got options there to kinda couple these things together, find out about their preferences in social media, and then give them information that they take with them with that would allow them to subscribe or follow on the platform of their choice. And then get their email address for an email marketing campaign so you can start sending them some newsletters and 2 or 3 educational pieces in on the newsletters. You could then have the your call to action.

Tami Moser [00:12:15]:
And the call to action would be a sign up for the next start. So maybe your program is either has ongoing enrollment, so at any time people can enroll or you go by cohort and so you do one at a time. And so every 8 weeks, there's a new cohort starting that someone can sign up for. I mean, I'm just kinda pulling things out of thin air. But you can depending on how you design your program, now you see we're on the third one, community partnerships. But we're using the community partnerships and leveraging that with email marketing and social media. So this is not a one size I mean, a one piece only. You don't just have to say, well, I only have social media available.

Tami Moser [00:12:52]:
No. You can start looking. Okay. How can we leverage these and use them in combination to reach all of these profiles that we have effectively? And then communicate in the using the mechanism that they're gonna be most engaged with. 4th is local media. So don't underestimate the power of local newspapers, radio stations, or community bulletins, especially for reaching older demographics or those less active online. This can still be, if you've got radio programs like community coffees once a week or, you know, once a month where the show will actually have someone there to talk about different things that are available in the community resources, things of that nature. You go in, you sit down, you have coffee with the host, and they ask you some questions and you're able to present it and then give contact information for people who wanna, you know, get, closer to that.

Tami Moser [00:13:47]:
And and so local media can be leveraged. It can be very useful. What it has kind of a narrow indices, I would say, anymore. Newspaper, you might be looking at the online newspaper versus print too. So think about what's available in your community that really connects with the demographic you're trying to use. Direct mail, it's often overlooked, but personalized mailers can be effective especially when targeting specific neighborhoods or demographics. So maybe this is a demographic or a persona of people that don't use social media. They're not gonna be reading email marketing.

Tami Moser [00:14:28]:
You know, you're just not going to reach them very easily unless something shows up for them to read. With the direct mail, you've got a couple of challenges here. 1, it's much more expensive in many ways because you still have to design what's going out, and you've gotta design it to be I mean, just printing off an 8a half by 11 piece of paper with a lot of facts on it isn't gonna really grab people's attention. If you wanna stand out, I mean, look at the mailers you get and what grabs your attention. That's a good place to start. Right? Do you get something in the mail and you're like, oh, okay. This is a handout handout that stops me long enough to read the title of it, and then that has to grab me to go further. It also needs to have a good call to action.

Tami Moser [00:15:17]:
I think one of the things that people often fail to do is realize you're sailing selling this service or product to the personas. It may be something they don't have to pay for except in time that they invest. But whatever that is, you've gotta ask them basically to buy your program. And this is where a lot of people get uncomfortable and stop. You've gotta put the call to action. So if you don't like thinking about it as sales and asking them to buy, if you will, think of it as a call to action. What do you want them to do when they get that piece of direct mail? Who do you want them to call? What do you want them to send? Do you want them to send an email? Do they just need to be referred to a website or a sign up sheet? I mean, it can be a wide range, right, in that direct mail piece, but it's gotta grab attention, which means you're gonna spend some time on design and making sure that the copy on it is clean, clear, clear call for action, clear understanding of what exactly you're offering. And, you know, you gotta lay that out.

Tami Moser [00:16:28]:
It is more expensive in that you're gonna be paying for postage, print services. And while you can get some of that, especially online anymore, a pretty cheaper I mean, that, you know, the design itself and the print job can be cheaper than we might expect depending on how many you're sending out. That's still expensive, and it's more expensive than, let's say, I'm back on social media. And while I've got design I need to do there, so if I'm posting things on Instagram, Pinterest, they need to be very visually interesting. If I'm doing YouTube videos, you do possibly need to do some kind of editing. Of add on to that the print costs and the, cost of postage and that type of thing. So I'm less sold on the direct mail and part of this just has to do with the way I look at it and our, I think, view of direct mail as junk mail. I mean, that's generally how we think about it and how we treat it if we didn't ask for it.

Tami Moser [00:17:50]:
So, this one has some challenges with it. But depending on your neighborhood and demographics, it may be what you need to work with. Right? Or at least couple it into the overall, marketing campaign. And then we have health fairs and community events. And so these provide opportunities for face to face interaction and can be great for initial program promotion and recruitment if you're actually gonna run into the people that you would need to hit. Right? So now we go back to our personas. This is why those personas are so important. It kind of can be a pain to develop them, and track, you know, where you're getting your information.

Tami Moser [00:18:28]:
It shouldn't just be an imaginary type of exercise. It should be you've got some concrete information to help you here. And so, you know, that's that's why those are so important. You can't really design your marketing campaign effectively if you don't know who you're trying to reach and you don't understand once you reach them how to grab their intention and get them engaged. And so spend some time there and make sure you've got that right. And if you already are in a situation where you've had marketing campaigns fail in services or programs you've offered in the past, I would really recommend stopping here and doing a analysis of why it failed. Look at the who you were targeting. Look at how you were targeting them.

Tami Moser [00:19:18]:
Pay attention to your copy, your visuals, and really think about, okay. Who was I trying to reach here? And if you don't have profiles for the program where your marketing failed, create them now with who you were really trying to target. Go ahead and create them. Now look at your marketing and go, okay. Did that even come close to reaching who we really wanted to target? That analysis can help you better understand how to do this now. But, again, let me know if you need more here because I I understand that this can be a little bit more challenging. I'm gonna put some information just about marketing. And so kinda like the SWAT tutorial, you'll see in your book, micro credential book.

Tami Moser [00:20:09]:
You can also read more about marketing channels if you want to, if that would be helpful for you. So here are some strategies for building and maintaining strong patient relationships. 1, personalization. Use the information from your post patient profiles to tailor your communication and services. For Healthy Kids Millbrook, this might mean offering culturally appropriate recipes or considering family schedules when planning activities. Another thing you can do here that's really simple is if you're doing, email marketing campaigns. When people sign up, they give you name. And when you send and set up your newsletters to send, you can put in a placeholder that for each email it sends out, it will actually plug

Tami Moser [00:20:58]:
in that person's name. So it would say, hi, Tami, or hey.

Tami Moser [00:20:58]:
How you doing, Tami? I mean, however you set up the newsletter to start. But it'll address me by name, and so everybody who signed up will get that newsletter with it personalized to them by name. Now that's not gonna personalize all the other factors. However, you can have tags that you set to a patient. And with those tags in your email marketing system, you could actually have different newsletters going to different people or different pieces of information being placed in emails that are going to people that have x tag and then this separate piece of information for people who have this other tag. So you can get really personalized in these setups so that you can do more personalization in the emails that go out. That's a little more advanced, but it is definitely something you could do. And the email marketing platform you use will have some impact on how effective you can be with that.

Tami Moser [00:21:58]:
Next is regular check ins. Establish a system for regular follow-up with participants. This could be through, excuse me, phone calls, text messages, or in person meetings. The frequency might vary based on the intensity of your program and individual patient needs. One of the other things you have here that you could use for regular check ins can be tools like WhatsApp, where you can set it up and actually get into conversations with patients and send texts back and forth. Now what you do have to pay attention to is HIPAA, and HIPAA you don't wanna violate HIPAA, so you need to make sure whatever platform you're using is HIPAA compliant for things like this. And I'd have to look into WhatsApp to see if it is HIPAA compliant. It's used a lot in marketing in that way.

Tami Moser [00:22:48]:
In other words, I can set up a WhatsApp business account and be able to have conversations back and forth or answer, people's kinda direct messages. But Instagram has a DM section too. Again, HIPAA compliance, they'd have to look at. But if people are asking generalized questions, that's a way for you to engage with them. So the the checkup doesn't have to be, we have to find time and schedule them to come in and see a physician or see a nutritionist or do x. I mean, that may very well be part of your program, but you can set up a way to have more frequent follow ups and checkups or check ins with people by just having that kind of DM capability, DM direct message. So someone could direct message, your program, and somebody would respond, and you could set up, you know, accountability and responsibilities for that phase. The next is educational content.

Tami Moser [00:23:43]:
So provide ongoing value through educational materials. This could be through blog posts, video tutorials, or workshops. Webinars can also be something that you can do live streams. For our program, we might offer monthly webinars on topics like meal planning or stress management for families or how to have conversations about healthy eating with a child who's, you know, addicted to junk food and sugar, ways to transition them. I mean, you could depending on your program. Again, this is the healthy kids kind of example, but you can do a lot there. And so having a mechanism for continuing education, this can also tie back to social media because that's where you can provide a lot of your edge free educational content, which again can get people interested in you and what you do. Then there's community building, and these are creating opportunities for participants to connect with each other.

Tami Moser [00:24:41]:
So this is where you can think about, do we want an online forum available, support groups, or community events? Peer support can be a powerful motivator in health behavior change. And so if you can find mechanisms for people to interact and engage, now this could be through social media platforms, but again, you don't own that. And when you're talking about people discussing their health, you can make sure they're very aware. Like, for instance, if it's not HIPAA compliant, you they are communicating with people in the program itself and with you, but you can set something and alert on there to let them know that this is a public forum and anything they post others can read. And so, you know, if it's something they want kept private, this would not be a place for them to communicate. But you can set up I mean, in my external, business, I have community forums. And depending on, you know, which group they're in, they have different community areas that are private for them to engage. So community and community engagement is really big right now, and there are a lot of really useful programs and some with minimal costs that allow you to set up forums.

Tami Moser [00:25:54]:
And those can even be HIPAA, I mean, HIPAA compliant. So once it's set up that way and it's HIPAA compliant, that the program I use can be HIPAA compliant and that I set people up in can be HIPAA compliant. And so it's a really good option, but there's a lot of them. So don't think that you're stuck to a Facebook group or a social media platform. You are not. There are platforms where you can be completely independent of that. And again, couple it with your email marketing and you have a pretty powerful platform for them to be able to engage. Feedback loops are very important in this.

Tami Moser [00:26:29]:
So regularly seek and act on patient feedback. This not only helps you improve your program, but also shows participants that their opinions matter. You can use surveys, focus groups, or suggestion boxes. And this can also be something where you can couple it with whatever kind of DM, or platform you're using. So if they're able to direct message you or you've got a community platform like I've been talking about, you can just send out 2 poll questions. And so it doesn't have to be like these long surveys. The thing about the feedback loops, let's say, I want to engage people biweekly. And so we've set a series of 15 questions that we would like feedback from our members in our Healthy Kids Millbrook program.

Tami Moser [00:27:15]:
And we're not gonna send out all 15 at once. We're gonna stagger them over time as 1 or 2 as poll questions. And they're gonna go out and go into people's text messages. So if you use WhatsApp and some other systems, now there's some back end work to this. It's not just always a seamless setup, but it is doable where you have a text messaging. And I I'm almost positive everybody who's gonna be listening to this uses or has engaged in this in some way because most most platforms or companies have that available. Right? You set set up for email newsletter and then they ask if you want text messages or they want your email and then your telephone number before you get x discount. And what then you start getting is text messages.

Tami Moser [00:28:03]:
And so you can do that. The poll question can go out in a text message either through WhatsApp or your community platform, and they just have to do yes or no or a short, comment. And it engages the audience. It lets them know you care about what they have to say and then you're able to take that in consideration in real time and possibly make adjustments or respond back to people directly if they're having some kind of issue you want to deal with them about. Right? So this does not have to be a huge survey focus group or suggestion box, although you can't. You can even use the focus group methodology, but do a webinar or a live stream. So a live stream is I'm gonna go live at x time, and you can show up if you want to not show up. If you show up, I'll engage with you and answer your questions.

Tami Moser [00:28:55]:
If you don't, I'll, you know, deal with some predetermined questions that I can ask and answer. And then that livestream is recorded and people can come back later. But as a focus group option, if you can get a diverse group of your population or a particular persona to come to that particular livestream, then you can get them to ask you questions, and you can ask them questions. And it can be quite the interesting, dynamic in order for you to get information that's useful, that you can feedback into your program. And I would highly recommend if you don't do it any other time that you do this at the end. It's it's that, you know, we're gonna close our close out with a strong, discussion and feedback loop. Then celebrate milestones. Acknowledge and celebrate participants achievements no matter how small.

Tami Moser [00:29:45]:
And this could be through personal congratulatory messages, public recognition

Tami Moser [00:29:45]:
with permission, or small and messages. If you're if you've got it set up on a community platform, and that platform also allows for the posting of education materials, you can, depending on the so the one I use does this, but there are others that would do it as well. But you can actually set it up to where if they finish something or complete something that you already have a predetermined message in there to congratulate them that will go to them, and it's personalized again because your system knows that, hey, it was Tami that just checked this office finished on the checklist. So Tami gets the message popping up in her email or DMs that says, hey, great job. And, you know, don't forget, this is gonna be next, and this is why this would be important. I mean, you can kinda fill in the brakes, but it gives you opportunities to engage more. And then multichannel communication offer multiple ways for patients to reach out and engage with your program. Some might prefer phone calls, while others might like text messages or email.

Tami Moser [00:30:49]:
There's this variation of what people want to or how they want to engage. I don't typically so if I was one of your patient I don't answer phone calls. I let them go to voice mail and then I listen to the voice mail. I look at who it is and if, you know, they're confirming an appointment or I mean, like, I don't have time. I don't wanna waste that. If I get a text message and I just need to put y back to them, that's not a big issue. But I'm not gonna stop and make a phone call. So that's me.

Tami Moser [00:31:16]:
You have someone else, though, that they wanna talk on the phone. They wanna actually talk to somebody. They want to hear that conversation, and they want the time. That's gonna have to do with those patient personas again. So remember, building patient relationship is an ongoing process. It requires consistency, empathy, and a genuine commitment to your participants' well-being and the success of your program. As you develop your marketing and relationship building strategies, always keep your program goals and patient needs at the forefront. The most effective strategies align with your overall mission and resonate with your target audience.

Tami Moser [00:31:53]:
Now it's your turn. Take some time to outline a marketing plan for your community health program. Choose 3 to 5 marketing channels that best fit your target audience and explain why you chose each, so rationale. Then develop a patient relationship building plan that includes at least 3 specific strategies we've discussed in this podcast. In our next episode, we'll discuss how to measure the effectiveness of your marketing and relationship building efforts and ensure that you're not just reaching people, but truly engaging with them in your program. Remembering community health marketing isn't just about promotion, it's about connection. And patient relationships aren't just about retention, they're about creating lasting impact. Keep strategizing, keep connecting, and keep building those relationships that can transform community health.

Tami Moser [00:32:46]:
Until next time, this is doctor Tami Moser signing off.