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:

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