How to Distribute WIC education Throughout Your Service Area
There is a saying that it takes a village to raise a child. The Special Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) is the framework that makes that village practical and functional. This program facilitates federal grants to states to help care for, feed, and treat pregnant women and infants all over the country. In addition, WIC helps states provide supplemental foods, nutritional education, and health care referrals, particularly for women and children in low-income areas.
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Considering that we no longer live in villages anymore, one of the biggest challenges WIC aims to solve is to make nutritional programs accessible to women and children anywhere in the country. This is a great challenge considering that new mothers who need the services of WIC rarely leave to go looking for them.
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WIC has helped mothers become confident parents bringing up healthy kids for over four decades. Through Federally Qualified Health Clinics, the WIC program helps mothers find answers to pressing nutritional and health questions and helps children under the age of five who are at risk of malnutrition eat healthier.
Targeting The Right Demographics for WIC
The most important step in helping a community within a service area take advantage of the WIC program is reaching out to the right people. However, before a clinic can achieve this, it must first take the time and put in the effort to understand the greatest needs of the community. In most cases, this will involve analyzing the current and projected future health needs of the community.
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The WIC program targets pregnant women, breastfeeding and non-breastfeeding postpartum women, infants, and toddlers up to the age of five. An FQHC can use local data to create personas for this demographic in their service area to gauge their specific needs better and find out how badly they need the WIC solutions.
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As a part of analyzing the target demographics, the clinic must establish:
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- How healthy their target clients are
- The overall health status of the community they serve
- Elaborate on the most concerning issues among mothers and children that WIC can alleviate
- The specific lifestyles that affect the overall health status of the community
- The best ways to reach the target demographics in the community
Formulating the Right Messages, Ad Designs, and Language Styles
Most WIC recipients may not know or appreciate how they can access their benefits in your service area. Getting the right message to mothers can be challenging if a clinic does not have an already-established relationship with them or their inner circles. One common strategy that clinics use involves creating in-depth and clear instructions in brochures or handouts and making them available in the community.
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However, as the world becomes increasingly digital and services move to the cloud, it is becoming more effective to reach WIC beneficiaries online. Therefore, even before a clinic chooses the medium, it is critical that they formulate the right message that will grab the target audience’s attention. This goes beyond the message composition to include its design, language used, and themed templates that make spreading the message seamless.
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Messages targeting mothers and their caregivers should include information on the critical services WIC provides. In addition, it must highlight how the nutritional support will benefit the mother, child, and the community at large. The key to grabbing the attention of the target market is clear communication and inviting discussions on subsequent questions and concerns.
The Best Outreach Tactics to Use
It can be tricky to pull off a successful marketing campaign for programs in the healthcare industry. This is because there are several regulations, including HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), passed to protect patient data. Consequently, the contents of a marketing campaign message, the platforms to market them, and the media to use must abide by these regulations.
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It is advisable that a clinic marketing a WIC program hires an experienced expert company in the healthcare industry. An expert in both healthcare and marketing is best placed to formulate the right strategies optimized for the community the clinic targets.
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There are many marketing strategies you can use to reach out to mothers and their families in your community. The most notable include:
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- Paid media, including social media, pay-per-click, social media, and display ads
- Content marketing campaigns covering informational and promotional ads, lead generation, email, and blog marketing
- In-person and online public relations
- Search engine optimization
Digital media offers the most potent tactics to reach the target audience in a community over traditional advertising channels such as radio, TV, and print. Besides, these new technology and data-reliant tactics target the audience with community-specific messages more precisely.
Leveraging Conversion Rates Data to Market WIC Programs
The WIC program has grown remarkably since Congress passed a bill to start it in 1974. Back then, it had just over 88,000 participants. The program’s effectiveness over the subsequent two decades led to Congress increasing its funding and enabling it to reach out to more participants. As a result, in 1997, WIC became a fully-funded program that could finally serve all eligible mothers, infants, and toddlers who need their services. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, as of 2021, WIC catered to over 7 million mothers, infants, and children every month.
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The data on WIC conversion rates are critical to marketing the program. Unfortunately, widespread misconceptions about who is or is not eligible for WIC, cultural and language barriers, and false information greatly impact how communities perceive the program. A clinic must focus on undoing such misunderstandings to better appeal to the misinformed demographics in its service areas.
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An effective way to convince WIC program recipients of the WIC program’s potency is to use current and past WIC conversion rates to win over skeptics. With the right data-backed campaign, most prospective recipients will be sold and may even be converted to new patients for the clinic.
Follow-Up, Reviews, and Feedback Loops
The effectiveness of your clinic’s WIC marketing campaigns offers an opportunity for even more conversions. As word on WIC and new conversions’ experience in your clinic spread, more mothers and their families will discover the program and services the clinic offers. This will go a long way to boost the reputation of both the clinic and the WIC program within the community.
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As a rule of thumb, collecting reviews from mothers and their families is a great strategy to learn what you are doing right and what can be improved. Reviews also provide a positive feedback loop that will further boost the efficiency and popularity of WIC in your service area.
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Let Target Continuum Help with Your WIC Marketing and Education
If your clinic has experience with the WIC program, you will admit that reaching the target market with the right message is quite a challenge. However, as pointed out earlier, the most effective approach is to leverage the skills of professionals in both the healthcare and marketing industries.
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The right team should be capable of a lot more than marketing. It should be well placed to help your clinic understand the communities in its service areas and have proven outreach tactics already approved by the state.
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Target Continuum is the right team of professionals in marketing and healthcare to help your clinic market the WIC program. Their marketing strategies are designed and developed by experts in various healthcare niches. In addition, they develop marketing campaigns optimized and automated to fit the needs of your organization and the communities you target. Visit targetcontinuum.com to discover how the team can help you distribute WIC education and boost conversions in your community.