Population health marketers must balance prevention and chronic care in their marketing communications. Here’s a 3-step roadmap to help you balance and align strategy, brand and community needs in your marketing plans.
For population health organizations, marketing leaders often feel like they have a foot in two canoes. On one side is the need to champion primary care and prevention — the cornerstone of health and well-being. On the other side is the responsibility to address chronic disease, which continues to define much of community health. Both are essential, and both must be part of the story you tell.
The challenge is striking the right balance — supporting prevention and disease management, while ensuring every marketing dollar drives volume, strengthens the brand and advances population health goals.
It can feel daunting. But with the right roadmap and tools, you can prioritize confidently, maximize your marketing impact, and move the needle forward for both your community and your organization.
Read our 3-step guide to serve as your roadmap.
For population health marketers, your Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA) is the best place to start. If you have a recent CHNA, use it to understand and scope the health and social challenges facing your community. If you haven’t conducted a CHNA in some time, prioritize conducting a new one. A CHNA can reveal which social determinants of health are most important and which chronic conditions are most prevalent in your community.
For marketers, this data is more than a report — it’s a guide. It highlights the issues your organization (and community partners) needs to address, the programs that need visibility, and the service lines most critical to the populations you serve. By grounding your marketing strategy in CHNA findings, you ensure your campaigns are aligned with real community needs, not just internal pressures.
And it’s not just about CHNAs anymore. Advisory Board notes that some systems are starting to use “precision population health” and are looking at social and consumer data alongside clinical data to identify rising-risk patients earlier. Not every organization is there yet, but it shows where the industry is going and why building your marketing around solid data is so important.
Primary care is the cornerstone of population health. It drives prevention, wellness and continuity of care — and without it, even the best-designed population health initiatives or acute care programs will struggle.
The most strategic primary care campaigns don’t just tout appointments and access. That’s table stakes. The best primary care campaigns build long-term trust with your brand. Use this as an opportunity to further your brand story and promise, emphasize relationships and demonstrate your commitment to health and well-being.
This is where marketers can put CHNA data and insights into action. Use the data to:
For example, in ThedaCare’s We Look Forward to Seeing You, Healthy campaign, we helped humanize primary care by building on the brand’s commitment as a partner in care and well-being. Through multichannel marketing, it emphasized personalized care, helping inform and empower patients to stay healthy through ThedaCare’s wide range of care options.
Even with a strong primary care foundation in place, chronic disease is prevalent and shapes the health and well-being of each community. Diabetes, heart disease and cancer continue to show up as some of the most urgent needs. That’s why specialty service lines such as cardiology and oncology need to remain a priority for population health marketers.
But marketing isn’t just about what the community needs — it’s also about what your organization can realistically deliver. Advisory Board notes that service line success depends on balancing community demand with internal realities including physician capacity, operational readiness and financial sustainability. If you launch a campaign without strong access, clinical outcomes, or patient experience to back it up, you risk eroding trust instead of building it.
That’s where a Service Line Marketing Readiness Assessment can help. It gives marketers a framework to ask critical questions before a dollar is spent:
By applying the rigor of a marketing readiness assessment, marketers can determine the best opportunities for marketing investment and support. This will help ensure your organization and brand can deliver on what it promises and avoid any risks that come with marketing a service line that isn’t ready to deliver on the care experience.
Our work for TriHealth is a great example. The cardiovascular and oncology campaigns that we partnered on weren’t just service line campaigns — they were extensions of the brand promise. In theSee Your Possibilities cardiovascular campaign, we invited patients to envision life after treatment, reflecting TriHealth’s brand promise of helping people thrive beyond illness. In the Ask Fearlessly oncology campaign, the messaging encouraged patients to voice their toughest questions, showing TriHealth’s commitment to openness, empathy and partnership in care.
These campaigns worked because the service lines behind them were prepared to deliver on the promises being made and tied the messaging back to the larger brand story. They weren’t isolated campaigns — they reinforced who TriHealth is as an organization. That’s the power of readiness and alignment of community priorities, business realities and brand strategy. Campaigns don’t just drive volume — they build trust, strengthen the brand, and move your mission forward.
Population health marketing is about balance — prevention and treatment, brand and service lines, today’s needs and tomorrow’s outcomes. By starting with CHNA data, making primary care the foundation, and applying readiness discipline to specialty service lines, marketers can maximize both impact and ROI. The most successful campaigns don’t just drive appointments — they build trust, strengthen the brand and help move communities toward better health.
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Do you have a specialty service line ready to launch? Take our free Service Line Marketing Readiness Self-Assessment to cut through the noise, guide your planning, and invest where marketing can deliver the greatest impact.
