Marketing communications plays a key role in the success of your worksite wellness initiative. It positions the initiative as a key business priority and demonstrates the value of wellness to your organization. It educates employees about the initiative, the brand and how works. It gets people involved and it motivates them to continue on.
In fact, participation in your wellness interventions and programming is directly related to how successful you are with your marketing communications efforts.
That’s why a well-designed marketing communications plan is essential.
So where do you start? There are key questions to consider when formulating your plan:
- What is your communications objective? Are you launching your wellness initiative or kicking off a weight management program?
- Who is your target audience? Are you communicating to employees or senior executives? Are you communicating to employees who are ready to make changes or just starting to think about it and want to know their options?
- What is your message? How do you want to say it? Are you building awareness, recruiting participants or communicating results? What inspiring stories to you have to share?
- What is your call to action? What will it look like? Is this a new campaign? Are you providing content to your Webmaster or a file for printing? Well-designed communications attract attention.
- What channels will you use to reach your audience? Will you use email, posters or the company intranet? Effective communication relies on multiple channels to meet the needs your audience and their communications preferences.
- When will you communicate to your audience? Will you announce an event three weeks before? Will you remind participants a week before and the day of? Consistent timely communications drive participation.
- How will you measure success? By number of participants? By satisfaction? All these questions impact your plan.
There are many tools and resources to help you formulate your marketing communications plan and breakdown the elements into specific communications, manageable tasks and timelines. Find a tool that works for you and your wellness committee or team.
Let’s look at how you can use marketing communications to promote participation. One way to drive participation is to promote individual wellness activities and to do it in a variety of ways. The Gandara Center employs more than 900 employees in multiple locations across the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. To accomplish their goal and objectives around increasing physical among employees, the wellness committee implements several interventions all requiring communication strategies to reach their disparate employee population. There is a series of regular communications for employees. By using email, text messaging, Facebook, flyers/posters and a newsletter, the wellness committee has channels and a schedule to reach all their employees with information about physical fitness and health, onsite group zumba and spinning classes, walking groups and sports leagues, and the new healthy meeting policy.
Clearly the Gandara Center works hard to plan and develop the foundation for great communication. The wellness committee clearly knows their audience and how to reach them. As a result, communications are timely and actionable. Yours can be too!