Client Success: Driving Increased Patient Growth

Competition for patients is intense among healthcare organizations. Each provider wants to be the ‘go-to’ for a given patient regardless of whether that patient needs a wellness visit, an emergency heart surgery, or elective procedure.

While quality of care is a top consideration for patients choosing where to establish their care, it isn’t the only factor taken into consideration. Other criteria, including the ease of healthcare access, proximity of healthcare destinations to home, and friction in the patient experience can all affect whether an individual chooses a particular healthcare system as its provider.

Facing these industry-specific pressures, a large micro-hospital provider approached Cox Media to see how new, data-driven ad campaigns could help the organization achieve its lofty growth goals.

The Goal

The overall goal of this large micro-hospital system was increasing patient growth across its national locations. But these growth goals were also aimed at not just volume, but efficiency: By increasing patient volume at each of its facilities, the company could provide care to more patients and increase its revenue across its national footprint.

In particular, the organization was determined to launch ad campaigns that increased patient volume, raised awareness of convenient services like online check-in, and delivered optimized results that increased ad ROI while reducing campaign waste.

The Campaign

In response to these needs, Cox Media built a multi-channel advertising strategy that utilized a wide range of digital ad channels—including display, pre-roll video, and TV Everywhere ads—to target different audience segments across different stages of the marketing funnel.

Other key components of this ad strategy included:

• Location-based targeting that restricted ad impressions to devices and households within a five to seven-mile radius of each healthcare facility across the country;
• Geo-fenced targeting to focus ad delivery to locations facing the greatest need for medical care, including (but not limited to) schools, hospitals, medical centers, parks, urgent cares, and other healthcare properties;
• Addressable geo-fencing that delivered specific ad campaigns—including ads for pediatric care—to households with children;
• Search and keyword retargeting to connect with online users performing relevant healthcare queries via search engines;
• Native advertising to connect with potential patients through relevant healthcare-focused content;
• Search engine marketing (SEM) to purchase paid ad space at the top of relevant search queries.

This multifaceted strategy gave the hospital system great flexibility in delivering different types of ads in different ways, resulting in more cost-effective ad campaigns that maximized visibility, engagement, and lead quality for patients referred through these ad exposures.

The Results

Through this digital-focused ad campaign, the large micro-hospital provider achieved widespread success across several of its most important performance metrics. Although specific performance results varied from one healthcare property to the next, overall performance resulted in the following achievements:

• Average patient volume increases between 14 and 33 percent;
• Online check-in rate increases between 30 and 81 percent;
• An average of 1.5-2 new patients served per day per facility;
• A total revenue increase of 33 percent.

Thanks to clear advertising goals and accurate metrics to reflect those goals, Cox Media was able to build a digital ad strategy that prioritized those goals and delivered ROI-positive results for the client.

Ready to launch similar success for your healthcare company? Contact us today to get started.