Who Says Radio Is Dead?

Stacy Fender, associate marketing director, CoxHealth

In Peter Hochstein’s new story, he explains how a radio-focused advertising campaign enabled a regional hospital system to significantly increase its telehealth and urgent-care traffic, with relatively low media and production costs.

Here’s an excerpt:

Radio tends to be a medium that reaches people while their minds are on something else. There are exceptions, of course. You might actually focus on your radio when listening to a ball game or a traffic report. But for the most part, radio is part of life’s background sound.

Little wonder radio is sometimes an afterthought in advertising plans, whether the advertising is for hospitals, home insurance, or hot dogs. Television and print give you visuals to fasten on. They reach you while your rear end is anchored in a seat and your eyeballs are on the picture. But used properly, radio can also be a powerful engine for building awareness and listener engagement at reasonable cost.

A case in point is what happened when CoxHealth made radio the centerpiece of a multichannel advertising campaign that talked mainly about telehealth and reservations for urgent care.

The campaign needed to cast its nets for a wide audience, “all adults 28 and over with a lot of urban and rural variation,” says Stacy Fender, associate marketing director at CoxHealth. “It sounds trite, but we wanted to reach almost everybody in our market. So we needed to create something that had broad appeal and would be interesting. And that’s what we tried to do, especially with the radio component of the campaign.”

The campaign has generated impressive results; read the full story to learn more:

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

Best regards,
Matt Humphrey
President