Lessons from 11 Innovative Health Care Marketing Campaigns [Special Report]

Advertising Worth Noting

// By Peter Hochstein //

This exclusive SHCM special report is filled with real-life health care marketing success stories…from the best use of television ads, to innovative print campaigns, to smart radio spots and more.

Here, you’ll see what’s working well for other hospitals and health care facilities around the country so you can adapt the best work of others to your own marketing campaigns and boost your ROI. It’s an exciting time to be in the health care field, and we want to help you make the most of it.

Our goal for this report is to get the creative ideas flowing for your next successful campaign at your facility. I am confident you will come away with some new ways to present your unique offerings and strengths to your target market.

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Children’s Hospital Ad Campaign Adds Pinch of Emotion to Case Histories. Result: A Boom in Internet Attention

// By Peter Hochstein // There’s always a fresh approach to case history advertising focused on positive outcomes. Here’s How Children’s Mercy Kansas City took an old technique and made it original for its brand. Hospital advertising and positive outcome case histories were made for each other. People arrive sick, injured, or teetering on the Read More

Want More Bang for Your Hospital’s Advertising Bucks? CoxHealth Found Cost Effectiveness with Real Market Impact (Hello, Radio!)

// By Peter Hochstein //A radio-focused advertising campaign enabled this regional hospital system to significantly increase its telehealth and urgent-care traffic, with relatively low media and production costs. But a caveat: Radio works best when the message is simple.What’s radio for? Largely it’s there these days to keep you company while you drive the car Read More

Do you handle hospital PR? How do you perceive your mission? Are you primarily a brand builder? Or are you the Praetorian Guard?

// By Peter Hochstein // If editorial and PR people fall into a passive-aggressive relationship, something’s wrong. Sometimes on both sides. There’s no magic to how I find sources for most of the stories I write in this space. Sometimes I start by calling the advertising agency that was involved. Most ad agencies love publicity Read More

Your hospital changes its name. Should it advertise that fact? Or spend its ad dollars on something else? Don’t answer until you read this.

// By Peter Hochstein // In some cases, letting your ads ignore the news about a name change can be a smarter move than headlining it. Here’s a case in point. It all seemed like a brilliant idea back in 1895. Fresh sea air is good for you, right? All that bracing oxygen and salt Read More

Can You Leverage the Anxious Language of a Pandemic to Build a Stronger Hospital Brand? Here’s What Nemours Children’s Health System Did

// By Peter Hochstein // You might think that co-opting language associated with COVID-19 could scare people away. Instead, it called attention to advertising that helped to reassure worried parents. Let’s clearly state a few factual negatives first. Tilt, the advertising agency behind the campaign you’re about to read about, is not the same Tilt Read More

Earlier in the Pandemic, Patients Were Told to Stay Away from Your Hospital. Now, How Do You Get Them Back?

// By Peter Hochstein // At the Deborah Heart and Lung Center in southern New Jersey, the task of letting patients know it was safe and even wise to return evolved into a multimedia effort. The campaign has been paying off with a substantial increase in patient visits. Don’t let the bed count — there Read More

While the National Mood Is Grim, Internet Campaign at Johns Hopkins Medicine Goes Just a Tad Upbeat, Building Staff Morale While Standing Out from the Crowd

// By Peter Hochstein // Hey, there’s a pandemic going on! Hospital workers are supposed to look harassed, grave, and ready to collapse from exhaustion, right? That’s not quite the way the communicators and staff at Johns Hopkins Medicine saw it. Result? Internet views by the — no, not by the thousands, by multiples of Read More

Optimize Your Website and the World May Beat a Path to Your Door — Plus Other PR Wisdom from a Not-So-Little Hospital System on the Prairie

// By Peter Hochstein // Whether it’s a national news network on the phone, or a triple-header of a tornado, some of the biggest PR opportunities are unplanned. Even Lindsey Meyers, vice president of public relations and communications for Avera Health, sounds just a tad surprised that there’s such sophisticated medical research going on in Read More

How a Four-Word Imperative Sentence Reversed a Hospital’s Sliding Fortunes

// By Peter Hochstein // The situation seemed dire at Vassar Brothers Medical Center. Doctors at a large medical group were under orders to refer patients to a different hospital. Then Vassar launched an ad campaign that empowered patients to defy their doctors. And everything changed. The news arrived more than a little jarringly at Read More

How to Sell Social Distancing and Make It Emotionally Positive: A Case History (Sort of)

// By Peter Hochstein // A group of musicians in Iceland demonstrated that promoting social distancing doesn’t have to sound like somber, top-down marching orders from an authoritarian central command. Instead, they tapped into something uplifting, communal, and perhaps instinctively primeval. I feel sorry for the American doctors and public health experts who’ve been tasked Read More

Sick Kids with Fierce Determination Raise Preference Scores and Brand Recognition for Virginia’s Children’s Hospital of Richmond

// By Peter Hochstein // Sometimes the best way to trigger a strong emotional response is to emphasize the positive. Nothing triggers an emotional reaction like watching someone trying to resist it. There’s a kids’ game in which the object is to stare at all the other kids and try to make one of them Read More

Seize the Opportunity to Keep Patients Informed on How COVID-19 Affects Them: It Helps Position Your Institution as a Leader.

// By Peter Hochstein // If you become a trusted source of information in a time of crisis, you are demonstrating leadership rather than simply claiming it. And people notice. Are we all actually dealing simultaneously with two pandemics? There must be millions of Americans who are simultaneously struggling to avoid a pair of plagues. Read More

TV Spots for a Women’s Hospital Took Audiences by Surprise, Then the #MeToo Movement Provided Another Powerful Boost

// By Peter Hochstein // Successfully building awareness of the complete range of services at a women’s hospital began with a new approach to an old advertising technique. There was something unexpectedly disarming about the advertising that began appearing on air and on the internet late in 2016 in the Upstate New York Capitol Region, Read More

“What Goes On in That New Building?” VCU Health Offers a Soft-Sell Explanation with Equal Parts Nostalgia, Induced Guilt, and Romantic Playfulness

// By Peter Hochstein // Can simple charm compete for share-of-mind in a hot health care marketplace? Yes, if the charm is really charming enough. Here’s how it works in Richmond, Virginia. This probably isn’t the first time you’ve seen a bicycle treated so callously. It stands in a dusty garage, surrounded by other carelessly Read More

It’s Not Your Usual Hospital Advertising Target Audience. Or Message. Or Media Plan. So What is Dana-Farber Cancer Institute’s Ad Campaign Up To?

// By Peter Hochstein // Sometimes there’s more to hospital advertising than recruiting and reassuring patients. One thing’s fairly certain. When a hospital with facilities that are pretty much limited to the Boston area starts advertising in New York and other major metropolitan centers around the nation, they must be doing something other than trying Read More

Was It the Seahawks vs. Cancer Game? Not Exactly. But When Two Seattle Area Hospitals Teamed Up with Their Local Football Team, They Scored Big Dividends.

// By Peter Hochstein // Properly done, the participation of sports teams can create impressive visibility and emotional involvement for a cancer awareness promotion. Here’s what it produced for the State of Washington’s Virginia Mason Health System and CHI Franciscan. If you didn’t know the whole story, you’d think last October 20 was a less-than-glorious Read More

Looking for a Memorable Symbol for Your Health Care Services? Here’s What Happened When a Chain of Urgent Care Clinics Got a Spokes-Puppet

// By Peter Hochstein // Meet Bebo. He’s preposterous. He’s orange. He’s always sick or injured. And he’s helping Patient Plus clinics in Baton Rouge, Louisiana carve out a strong identity in a highly competitive market. You can do terrible things to a puppet for popular amusement that aren’t funny when they happen to real Read More

Eek! You Just Know Off-Camera Disaster Lurks in a Pair of Hilarious TV Spots for a Children’s Emergency Center, but the Hilarity and Danger Create a Marketing Triumph

// By Peter Hochstein // How brave do marketers have to be to use humor in a spot for pediatric emergency care that shows kids flirting with danger? Uh oh! Trouble in the backyard. On a steeply sloping patch of lawn, three girls who appear to be the right age for middle school have erected Read More

How Can You Get Potential Patients to Pay More Attention to Your Hospital’s Advertising? Try Telling Them What They Do for You

Here’s a new approach to hospital advertising that turns an old technique on its head. // By Peter Hochstein // It’s difficult to sift through hospital advertising month after month without regularly coming across some variation of the phrase “We care about you.” Little wonder. As hospital systems grow larger and busier, they also can Read More

Who’s the Hero of the NYU Langone Orthopedics Campaign? You Are! (If You’re a New Yorker, That Is)

Notable Health Care Advertising // By Peter Hochstein // “Hyperlocalization” may not be a real word. But NYU Langone has made it a real advertising thing. And it turns out to be an amusing, identifiable, and highly effective technique. There’s nothing new about hospitals giving their advertising a distinctly local flavor. We described one successful Read More

Expressions of Rage? Or Inspirational Pep Talks? Whatever You Call Them, Hospital Ads with an Aggressive Stance Could Make Your Market Sit Up and Take Notice

Notable Health Care Advertising // By Peter Hochstein // Fighting words and images may be just the thing some hospitals need to break through the miasma of inattention. In an upcoming issue of this publication, a fellow contributor, James A. Gardner, will write about a campaign for the Canadian pediatric hospital, Sick Kids. The campaign Read More

Advertising Campaign Meant to Do Good Also Does Remarkably Well — With a Boost from Judiciously Deployed Radio

What can radio deliver for hospital advertisers that other media can’t? It’s more than just another way to reach your target market. Notable Health Care Advertising // By Peter Hochstein // As often as not these days, radio advertising is an afterthought — part of the creative mix that gets done after someone has written Read More

Sometimes Branding Is an Art in More Ways Than One

What besides advertising could contribute to a children’s hospital brand experience? It could be a friendly bear, a playful dog, a rocky wolf, or a little girl with a perpetually broken leg. // By Peter Hochstein // There’s an enormous bear. And he’s just outside the front door of a children’s hospital. And with his Read More

What Can Negativity Do for Your Advertising? At the University of Rochester Medical Center, Talking About “The Bad Stuff” Is Doing Lots of Good

Notable Health Care Advertising // By Peter Hochstein // Here’s a powerful technique for building emotion into your advertising. If you dare to use it. Advertisers in almost any business — and the advertising agencies that service them — usually hate negativity. They look for emphasis on the upbeat. They like to portray, as the Read More