If you have a big marketing budget, it is fairly easy to market your hospital. You can penetrate your market using all available media.

However, many of us need to work within small to medium marketing budgets. Often the smaller community hospital does not have the thousands of dollars needed to conduct a mega marketing campaign.

 That means that you need to create a small, community hospital marketing strategy that is very cost effective. With so many marketing mediums available, how do you know which medium will bring you the highest return on investment?

Here's an overview of what we have found:

• Internet adverting cost the least and is often the most effective
• Television advertising is the second most effective advertising medium
• Print is the third most effective medium
• Radio is a costly advertising medium and often has the lowest response rate
• Internet advertising brings substantially more visitors to your site than any other medium

How do we know this?

Recently we conducted a Joint Center marketing campaign for a small community hospital. Here is the chart of the advertising responses broken down by advertising medium 30 days into the campaign.

What is is interesting to note is that the Internet advertising had the smallest budget of any of the advertising mediums. However the Internet advertising brought more response than any other medium in both web visits and phone calls generated.

Television advertising was also very effective. However it is often the most costly advertising. An average cable insertion TV ad campaign cost thousands of dollars to implement....not to mention the high cost of producing the commercial.

The data from our campaign illustrates that Internet advertising is often the most cost effective form of advertising for campaigns with smaller advertising budgets.

Beware of Internet Advertising Pitfalls

However there is a catch. If you simply go to Yahoo and Google and take out advertising directly, you will probably not get the results you would like. Why? There are several reasons. First, you are not using software that allows you to dynamically adjust your ad bids 24/7 in real time. If you don't have this software, your ad will quickly slip off the initial search results and your response rate will plummet. Using the right software to mange your campaign is key to the process.

Another reason for poor Internet advertising results is the lack of proper research. Before creating an ad, you need to know what search users want. Most organizations design ads with their message. What you need to do is to design your advertising around what the user wants. That requires specialized software tools and research. It is best to have a marketing professional help design a campaign that will get the results you need.

If you design the right campaign for your small, community hospital, you may be surprised at the quality results you can achieve.

Want to learn more? Please contact us today for a free consultation. We want to help you understand hospital marketing.