Health Care Marketing on a Shoestring: Small Budget, Big Results

In the small city of Peoria, Illinois (population 116,513), OSF Saint Francis Medical Center (609 beds) used a very small media budget ($45,000) for one of its services and got some big results.

The service was mammogram screening. And, yes, there were other costs for production and Internet usage and design, too. Richole Ogburn, account manager at Saint Francis Medical Center’s advertising agency, the Hippo health care division of Muller Bressler Brown in Kansas City, Kansas, estimates “around $13,000” for building an Internet platform, and $5,000 for production and design work. Altogether, campaign expenditures came to roughly $63,000.

So what happened?

For the three months that the campaign ran, requests for appointments increased 8 percent over what they had been in the three months preceding the campaign. And while the campaign ran, overall appointments were up 3 percent over the same three-month period in 2013. When the flight of advertising in paid media stopped, there was a noticeable decrease in appointments, indicating that advertising was powering a significant portion of the appointment activity.

How did they do it? Read our full story for all the details: A Midwestern Hospital Builds Traffic With a Small Ad Budget and Lots of Woman-to-Woman Conversations.

Best regards,
Matt Humphrey
President