Consider Your Mental Health an Integrated Campaign

Five Marketing Practices to Apply to Your Well-being

Marketing is about making connections between people, products, and ideas. It can be especially rewarding to connect those components in new and different ways. These past few years have been challenging, and one of the connections I’ve made has been between my work as a marketer and the work I’ve been doing to manage my own mental health.

Thinking of my mental health as an integrated campaign has helped me approach my own wellbeing with intention, and also provided me with some distance with which to evaluate my progress. It’s important to note that I am not a mental health professional–I am merely offering my perspective as a marketer. 

Here, then, are five marketing practices you can apply to managing your mental health as an integrated campaign.

1. Start with your audience.

A good campaign plan begins with defining your audience. In this case, you only have one target buyer persona, and it’s you. So interview yourself. What are your goals, challenges, and motivators? What gets you out of bed, and what fills you with dread?

Consider your goals, starting with the short term. Do you want to have more energy? Connect more with others? Feel a greater sense of purpose? 

What challenges prevent you from reaching these goals? These could be external or internal obstacles. Maybe your job or the onset of winter weather is wearing you down. Maybe your negative self-talk is getting in the way.

What motivates or energizes you? What do you enjoy doing, under normal circumstances? (I say “normal,” because if you are experiencing symptoms of depression, you might not take pleasure in the same things you once did.) What brings you energy?

2. Craft your message.

Stories have immense power. And the stories with the greatest potential to create or destroy are the stories we tell ourselves. What is the defining story or message of your campaign? How do you want to think and feel about yourself, your life, and your situation? Return to some of those challenges you uncovered in your interview with yourself. Are some of those self-limiting beliefs, the false marketing messages you’ve been feeding yourself? How can you reformulate these distorted thought patterns into compelling and empowering affirmations?

For example, you might think that you are alone. You can identify “I am alone” as a belief that may be getting in your way and reframe it as “I am open and vulnerable, attracting others who share my values.”

3. Consider your channels.

In marketing terms, it takes a certain number of impressions for your target to respond to your call to action. The purpose of an integrated campaign is to meet your target across multiple channels. You want to optimize the channels where your message appears. An effective integrated campaign will include a mix of owned, earned, and paid channels.

Owned: In the case of your integrated mental health campaign, start with the channels you own–your thoughts, your actions, and your habits. If you notice one of those distorted thoughts creeping in, reframe it with the new message you’ve crafted. Think of your motivators and the things you enjoy; how can you incorporate more of these into your daily and weekly routines? A good night’s sleep, exercise, time outdoors, morning coffee, fresh flowers, hobbies, your favorite tunes—all of these are to some degree within your control.

Earned: In the marketing world, these are channels you don’t own, but where others carry your message based on merit: favorable customer reviews on reputable sites, social posts shared organically, articles written by journalists or analysts in respected publications. In relation to your mental health, your earned channels are the people with whom you surround yourself: your friends, your family, your partner, your colleagues. You want them to amplify the message you’ve chosen for yourself. Whose company do you enjoy right now? Who makes you feel good about yourself?

Paid: In many marketing campaigns, we need to enlist paid help to boost our signal and get the attention of our target audience, whether it’s with advertising, brand partnerships, or sponsored content. If your budget allows, you may want to engage the services of a professional in support of your mental health. This could be a licensed therapist, but it could also be another form of self-care, such as a massage or spa treatment, a concert, a meal out, or a small gift signifying your investment in yourself.

4. Balance consistency with flexibility.

Your message needs to appear repeatedly in multiple places on a regular basis. But that doesn’t mean you are locked into the plan you set at the very beginning. Market conditions change. You may have to revisit your assumptions when your campaign isn’t performing quite as you’d hoped. Check in with yourself once a month to see how your mental health campaign is going. How are you feeling? Are your goals the same? Are you deriving enjoyment from the activities you planned? From your routine, from the people around you? It’s okay to make tweaks to your messaging or adjust your channel mix. Just make sure your message keeps showing up where you can see it, and that you’re showing up for yourself.

5. Give it time.

The art of persuasion requires patience and skill—but of course you want to feel better now. Although it will be difficult, try not to act like the executive demanding to see the return on investment for marketing spend after a paltry few weeks. Instead, be the savvy marketer who knows–and accepts–that it will take many impressions before you begin to see a change in your outlook.

You wouldn’t jump to the conclusion that your marketing campaign was doomed after low engagement on one email or social media post, would you? If you saw low attendance at a trade show booth, would you scrap your campaign without first considering overall exhibit hall traffic? No. You’d give your campaign a reasonable amount of time to perform before evaluating the results.

Conclusion

When you’re experiencing turbulent emotions or existential malaise, it can be difficult to activate the part of your brain dedicated to strategy and planning. An integrated marketing campaign plan provides a framework that is structured and simple to navigate and yet unexpected enough to give you some distance from which to view your situation objectively. By conducting an exercise similar to campaign planning and management you may be able to approach your mental health more strategically and intentionally.