Healthcare marketing is a complex undertaking, but Out of Home media enhances marketing for healthcare networks. Especially for regional and large local healthcare networks, maintaining a consistent and strong media presence within the community is crucial. These networks typically operate numerous individual facilities, ranging from full hospitals to local doctors and specialists. The right marketing strategy can pull these individual units into a larger whole that presents a coherent picture of serving the community in question.
Out-of-home media, when applied the right way, can accomplish just that. Done right, it’s an excellent channel to help these healthcare networks build brand awareness and trust, reach different niches within the community, and create a larger web of marketing in connection with other media channels.
More specifically, 5 key advantages show just Out of Home media enhances marketing for healthcare networks, and should be a core part of any plan.
1. Out-of-Home Excels at Delivering and Maintaining Brand Awareness
Healthcare networks tend to face a unique marketing challenge: people don’t always need them. But when they do, the brand needs to be top of mind in that instance. In other words, building brand awareness in the home market is absolutely vital to ensure that when potential patients are looking for medical experts, your network is the one they think of.
OOH can help in that process, thanks to its ability to reach large segments of the community at scale. It doesn’t need to be hyper-targeted to be effective. Instead, environmental advertising opportunities from billboards to screens in shopping malls can ensure a cost-efficient base level of brand awareness that, when needed, turns into actions on behalf of your audience.
2. Out-of-Home Creates an Impression of Stability and Reliability
Effective OOH advertising essentially blends into its community. It doesn’t appear only on mobile screens, or for 15 seconds on a TV at home. Instead, it becomes a consistent part of the environment, part of the daily commute for most potential patients.
That’s part of how Out of Home media enhances marketing for healthcare networks that want to establish their presence in the community. Prospective patients want to feel comfortable about their healthcare facility. They need to know that it has been established and is an integral part of the community.
The physical nature of OOH reinforces this feeling. Traditional channels, like billboards and buses, can establish a baseline of brand awareness. Meanwhile, experiential activations like screenings, pop-up sign-ups at local gatherings, etc. can help the network connect with prospective patients in person and build that community connection.
3. Out-of-Home can Deliver Target Messaging to Different Audience Segments
No community is homogenous. Every county and region is home to a large, diverse audience of prospective patients that come with different needs, concerns, and priorities when it comes to their health.
To address these unique and different needs, OOH can offer an inherently localized approach. The physical nature of these advertisements allows them to reach targeted communities, effectively reaching different ethnicities, incoming levels, education levels, and more.
Placing unique messaging in different community segments, of course, also means being able to customize the messaging accordingly. Billboards and other messages can appear in different languages, use images of people with different ethnic backgrounds, and more.
On a more in-depth level, hospitals and other healthcare networks can also identify unique differentiators of their offerings that appeal to different audience segments, then share that messaging only with those segments. The result is a more targeted approach that ultimately makes each Out of Home media placement more relevant for the audience in question.
4. Out-of-Home Integrates Well With and Amplifies Other Media Channels
Don’t think of OOH campaigns as isolated or separate from your other media efforts. In fact, it’s at its best when integrated tightly with those other channels ranging from digital to local radio and broadcast or cable TV.
Multi-channel marketing is the name of the game for most healthcare networks. A well-built out-of-home campaign can boost the performance of all of the typical channels you’ll use. In fact, studies continue to show the amplification effect that OOH has on those channels:
- OOH increases the effectiveness of TV campaigns by about 33%.
- OOH increases the effectiveness of digital campaigns by about 17%.
- OOH increases the effectiveness of radio by about 14%.
- OOH increases the effectiveness of print ads by about 17%.
And that’s not all. Research also shows that 91% of Gen Z, and 82% of millennials, are willing and happy to share OOH ads that they like or that made an impact on them on their social media channels. That willingness increases the potential for word-of-mouth, further increasing the potential reach of your healthcare marketing campaigns.
Keep in mind that out-of-home campaigns can accomplish this amplification at a fraction of the cost of other media channels. Put differently, it’s the perfect connector between your multichannel campaigns to achieve your core marketing goals.
5. Digital Out-of-Home Improves Messaging Flexibility for Healthcare Networks
Don’t think of OOH as a static channel on which messaging has to be consistent for months. Especially the rise of digital OOH has allowed advertisers to become much more flexible in the creation and deployment of key messaging.
In fact, digital OOH can change at a moment’s notice. A spike in flu cases in your area may prompt you to let people know about this increase, and ask them to get their flu vaccine. A high pollen count in spring can be an opportunity to warn your community about allergy season, just as a high UV index can trigger a reminder to your audience to wear sunscreen.
This messaging flexibility allows you to build crucial credibility and establishes your health network as an established expert within the community. But it can also extend to crisis situations. Consider the recent COVID-19 pandemic, in which healthcare networks successfully used their digital OOH channels to promote public health alerts, from the need for screenings to sharing mask mandates or offering vaccination information.
Thanks to this type of flexibility, Out of Home media enhances marketing for healthcare networks by turning it from “just another channel” to a key component of their messaging and communication strategy. It’s just one of the reasons why OOH needs to be a key part of every network’s media plan.
Out of Home media enhances marketing for healthcare networks in key ways.
Out of Home is a powerful, flexible, scalable, cost-efficient, and, unfortunately, all to often overlooked media channel. With the number of different ways in which it can help a media plan it is imperative for local and regional healthcare networks to look at how it can strategically employed to reach their community.
Learn more about how OOH can reach your target audience, and how EMC can streamline and simplify your Out of Home media buying process.
