Health Care Website and Blog

Do your medical marketing materials fade away as soon as you produce them? Do they lack excitement, a sense of urgency and effectiveness? Here are 3 more techniques from the bare-knuckles world of DRTV (that’s Direct Response TV).

That doesn’t mean you have to make obnoxious commercials for Ginsu Surgery (”But Wait! There’s More! Well also throw in a free rhinoplasty!”). What you need to do is try to forget about the response of the Head of Cardiology, the Head Nurse or any other Administrative Head in your hospital. Before you create a healthcare organization marketing plan, medical marketing kit or any medical marketing materials, you really need to focus on the only people who can make your marketing a success: your patients, and what they really want. Not what YOU want them to want, but what they really really want. Use any means to find it out, from in-room interviews to telephone surveys and mall intercepts, but find out. Knowing what your patients want is the critical first step to medical marketing that gets results.

OK, here’s another crucial technique - sometimes size really does matter. By that I mean that the wonders of medicine and the unique selling proposition of your hospital are too complicated for a 30 second spot. If you have important news that’s too complicated for a short commercial, consider a commercial that runs for a half hour! Nothing gets across the subtle advantages of a new procedure or product better than a long format commercial.

The biggest hurdle of a long format commercial is production. But non-prime DR media costs are so affordable that cost of production soon fades away. And there’s another hidden fact that can make your long format commercial the hero of your healthcare organization marketing plan: longer commercials always get better response - always. Response that supercharges your ROI.

Since there aren’t many folks who respond to medical marketing materials by asking the EMT or ambulance driver to turn around and take them to that hospital they heard about in a commercial, most medical marketing is about relationship building. Nothing jump-starts relationships like giving people something for free. Free stuff (you can call it by its MBA name: a Value Added Offer) gets people’s attention. Doesn’t it get yours?

What should you offer? It can be anything from free screening for heart disease or high blood pressure, to a Free Guide on preventing or treating a common killer like diabetes. A large regional health system I work with offered women free tests for indicators of heart disease. The women who received them were almost twice as likely to come to this hospital for heart treatment. That program was so successful that they’re expanding it to include men.

Another effective philosophy medical marketing can learn from Direct Response marketing: What gets measured gets improved.Maybe I don’t need to say this, but I will anyway: DRTV is set up to measure response. You know within two days whether your DRTV campaign is working. There are a few easy and affordable ways to track response. One of the easiest: put a different phone number in every commercial. Then you’ll know that people are responding to your 2 minute spot on Style at twice the rate as the same commercial on Spike.

Heck, most people who put together healthcare organization marketing plans don’t know if anyone is responding to their medical marketing materials at all! Most medical marketing gets thrown into the marketplace, and if forced to answer truthfully, most marketing directors have little idea whether their medical marketing campaigns are working. Don’t let that be you.