Tag Archives: medical marketing
Giant Inflatable Organs Are Crowd Pleasers
Each year, more Americans die from colon cancer than AIDs or breast cancer. That’s why during March’s Colon Cancer Awareness Month, organizations like Strides for Life travel with a secret weapon: a huge attention-getting, inflatable colon.
Rather than read from a flimsy pamphlet, people tour the enormous colon and get to see what happens inside the body. By taking a light-hearted approach to a serious topic, the inflatable colon has become a marketing tool to promote colon cancer screenings and raise brand awareness.
So, for your next healthcare event, consider a giant organ to draw the crowds. Plus, they’re effective for all ages – especially families. If colons aren’t your style, just wait. There’s much, much more…
Pick an Organ. Any Organ.
Companies like Interactive Exhibits and Medical Inflatables serve up huge “MEGA” hearts, lungs (coming soon) and brains. These interactive, walk-through models help people understand the risks, symptoms and causes of various diseases. And every single exhibit has drawn crowds that promote health education and healthy lifestyles. Check out the company’s YouTube channel to see how a giant heart could spark the buzz at your next healthcare event.
If you’re thinking outside the box, turn human anatomy into a children’s game with these anatomy aprons. Who knows? Maybe adults could use the education too!
Eight Risky Hospital Marketing Procedures
- Envision your hospital as a conglomeration of separate companies or rogue states, e.g. radiology, oncology, ER, orthopedics, and our favorite, “The Open MRI Toaster.”
- Show lots of doctors in your ads. Doctors with their arms folded. Doctors with patients. Doctors with other doctors. Doctors with weird medical devices or doctors in scrubs. All available to you and your competitors on the nearest cheapo stock photo site.
- Use a safe tagline or positioning theme. Keywords and phrases: caring, extraordinary, we care more, our docs are smarter, excellence, (blank) for life, patients come first, your health comes first, we’re number one, blah, blah, blah.
- Assume it’s marketing’s job to sell whatever products they’re given. Refuse to act on consumer research, or don’t perform any at all, and deny marketing a seat at the table where real decisions are made.
- Position your hospital as the experts in a single field: The baby hospital. The heart hospital. The largest colon hospital. The niche positioning is a house of cards next year when your competitors pull ahead in the rankings.
- Ignore social media because you can’t control it. Pssst, your doctors and employees are already tweeting it up, so might as well listen join the conversation.
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Pander to internal constituencies rather than serve the huge healthcare information needs of your patients.
Ignore the fact that patients are smarter than they used to be. They have Web M.D., access to doctor and institutional reviews, drug interactions, and morbidity rates for various procedures.