In our third post here at the Medical Marketing corner, Toby aptly stated that much of the work of marketing is "Synergizing Tactics."  Smart marketing is also understanding how to distribute your resources and money to achieve your goals. 

Because of the difficulty quickly of driving traffic to a blog, I want to take a moment here to shift away from blogging as a marketing tactic to briefly discuss the role of traditional marketing avenues in an overall marketing strategy.

At their bare minimum, traditional marketing tactics such as print ads, billboards, radio and tv spots, phonebook, sponsorships and direct mail get your name and your logo out in front of a lot of people.  In Rubel's Model, these avenues are focused on increasing awareness of you and your products or services.  Well-crafted campaigns can help to brand, create an emotional impression, educate, and motivate.  

Given the growing impatience and cynicism of consumers, crafting an award-winning traditional campaign is quite difficult.  In today's world busy people want their information in bite-sized pieces that can be easily catalogged and remembered for follow-up and further investigation later. Note: this assumes that your marketing strategy has a place where a person can discover specific information about the organization, provider, or service.  This is especially true in the healthcare field, where most people do not willy-nilly just show up at a provider at random.  They usually have spent some time thinking about it, either in the car driving somewhere, while cooking dinner or mowing the lawn.

So what bite-sized information is important to convey in traditional marketing campaigns? 

Well, as always it depends on the type of campaign.  Afterall, you have more time and space to present information in some types versus others.

Print materials can easily be referred back to at a later date--- so the information has a greater shelf life than a tv, billboard or radio ad that cannot be recalled when needed.  Subsequently, important information information to  consider incorporating into thes ads include:  Logo, address, phone number, web address, service lines, any awards or information that conveys competence or expertise, and a meaningful graphic that conveys a postive image/attribute of your business.

TV and radio ads have the advantage of periodic repitition to a somewhat captive audience to increase the retention of information.  However, they cannot be referred to later and the time the information is in front of the potential customer is just a few seconds.  For TV and Radio ads, stories can convey a lot of information, create an emotional impression and can provide general education.  However, it is difficult for people to remember anything with numbers in it (phone number, addresses, specific statistics) so keep the information general.  The only way to increase the chance of remembering numerical information is to repeat it often in the ad.  This only serves to annoy people and given the fact you don't really want to leave this emotional impression with your potential customers, refrain from this in your tv or radio ads.  Because of their linguistic nature, web addresses are more easily remembered.  Therefore they should be included in the ad.

Billboards have the advantage of being in places that garner attention simply by providing a momentary diversion from looking at the road or the person in front of you. Additionally, people usually take the same routes to work, the grocery store, and their favorite resturant.  So billboards can serve to repeat information and because they are a fixed point and because of this they can be referred to later.  However, the impression time is just a few seconds.  Web addresses, logos, short, compelling slogans, and a noteworthy picture that conveys a postive facet of your business should be included in billboard ads.

In conclusion, traditional marketing avenues do have a place in healthcare marketing. They are quite effective in increasing awareness about your services. However, given the changing face of healthcare where patients are being asked to become active participants in their healthcare, traditional marketing avenues are limited in the ability to convey important personalized information.  Therefore, tradtional marketing should be just a part of an overall strategy and not the entire strategy.

TTYL!

Toby & Carol 

For more information about marketing and blogs, please visit Toby's Diva Marketing Blog and Carol's Driving in Traffic Blog.