MedMarketLink

Medical Marketing: The Case for PR Over Advertising

It seems that everyone's got something to sell. Sometimes it's a product, often a service. Not often enough it's something else: a unique idea.

That's what effective public relations are all about. Ideas. Thinking. Good ol'-fashioned brainwork.

It's not really what you sell that matters so much but, really, how you lead people to think of it. After all, we humans have identical needs: shelter, food, clothing and drink. So what's the difference between Starbucks and Folger's? Why are there lines out the door to spend $4 on one and no waiting to plop down 50 cents on the other?

Advertising alone can't do that. In most larger American cities, the cost of an effective advertising campaign is usually well into the high five figures for a duration of three to six weeks – and that's advertising only on one or two media such as radio and TV.

And who remembers a single ad? For this reason, you need three or four such campaigns per year to reach the target market effectively. For that, expect to spend $200,000 to $500,000 annually.

An ongoing PR program almost always costs a fraction of advertising and usually has many times more impact. Public relations typically generate five to ten times as much exposure as it costs. So if you spend $15,000 on a PR campaign, it's common to get the same exposure that you'd have to spend $75,000 to $150,000 to get by advertising.

Good PR campaigns focus on affecting how how people think. For example, helping lead people to think differently is how the MedMarketLink program has been able to help:

Grow patient caseload by nearly 10 percent in one year for an infertility medical practice, when patient visits nationally were flat in the same year – and in a state that led the nation in both personal and business bankruptcies.
Kick start a brand-new practice with four physicians but no patients of its own – but within one year and some $70,000 in unpaid media coverage later was averaging 130 new patients per month.
Book 25 new-patient appointments within 24 hours of a TV news story – all of the callers said they were responding to the single coverage.

Moms Mad for the Web Parents are among the highest users of the Internet, significantly outpacing couples and singles without children, according to a variety of sources. Online Journalism Booming While newsrooms are shrinking alarmingly quickly, many major daily newspapers are seeing mushrooming growth in online readers, according to Editor and Publisher magazine and the Nielsen research company. As of 2008, some newspapers have seen a doubling in numbers of online readers in just a year. The Vanishing Newspaper Is the daily newspaper dying? Or just catching its breath for a new competitive sprint in a different format? The Pew Charitable Trust's annual report on American media says people appreciate journalism perhaps as much as ever. But mass communications is reaching a pivot point in accelerating changes.