Best Hospital Advertising Strategies + Examples [2025]
In our increasingly competitive world, even small hospitals are expanding their marketing efforts. Effective advertising strategies enable hospitals to connect with their community, foster credibility, and build brand recognition. Let’s take a look at some examples and break down how to conduct a successful hospital advertising campaign.
How to Advertise a Hospital Effectively
Target the right audience
Healthcare industry advertisements won’t be of interest to everyone, such as healthy twenty-year-olds. To ensure your advertising impressions aren’t wasted on uninterested consumers, you’ve got to nail down a clear picture of your target audience!
The platforms and advertising content used by pediatricians, general hospitals, dermatologists, and primary care clinics vary because of the different target groups they are looking to reach. This is why it’s so important to know and understand your consumer base well before moving on to the next steps.
Select the best medium
When marketing a hospital, you need to select the correct channel to use, whether that’s billboards, wellness kiosks, or online advertising. Each advertising medium comes with its own unique benefits that make it superior in targeting different groups of people.
An online advertising campaign for a geriatric care center is unlikely to have much success, but a campaign that uses sanitizing billboards in pharmacy waiting areas will. You must consider what medium your consumer base is comfortable using and where they are likely to be.
Create consumer interest
Now that you’ve laid the groundwork for marketing a hospital and selected a medium, it’s time to consider what should be featured in your ads. Your message needs to be simple, concise, and communicate the unique value of your hospital in just a few seconds. This can be accomplished in several ways.
One way to approach is to showcase your hospital’s value by advertising what sets you apart from the competition, such as a new facility with advanced technology or awards you’ve received in patient care. Another approach is to promote one of your success stories. By featuring an exceptional patient recovery story, you can appeal to consumers’ emotions and build trust in your ability to address their health concerns.
Why Should Hospitals Advertise?
Telehealth saw a big rise during the pandemic but quickly fell off as consumers returned to in-person care. However, consumers have developed increasingly high expectations for high-quality medical services, and hospitals are finding themselves struggling to attract and retain patients. Many facilities have had to rethink their healthcare marketing strategies.
Hospital advertising is a key factor in driving up patient numbers for both small and large hospitals. Small hospitals rely on advertising to boost their recognition and credibility within their local communities. Similarly, large hospitals use advertising to differentiate themselves from the fierce competition they face.
Best Hospital Advertising Strategies
Wellness Billboards
One of the most effective advertising strategies for small hospitals is to invest in cost-efficient platforms that align with healthcare messaging. Wellness billboards—prominently featured on kiosks offering free hand sanitizing wipes—are an ideal solution. Located in supermarkets, drugstores, health clubs, and other local venues, these kiosks engage health-conscious consumers who stop to take a wipe and view the sponsor’s message.
Terraboost, a leader in this space, has placed wellness sanitizing kiosks in thousands of locations, including pharmacy wait areas at CVS and Walgreens, and storefronts of major supermarkets like Acme and Giant. These billboards consistently deliver strong results: 80% of in-store shoppers take a wipe, and 94% report a positive perception of the sponsoring brand.
Studies have shown that appealing to one or more of the five senses drives consumer engagement with advertising. So, it’s no wonder that wellness billboards, which display eye-catching ads and offer sanitizing wipes, are so successful.
TV Ads
TV ads are great if you’re looking to increase general public awareness of your hospital and grab the attention of a diverse population within a specific geographic region. These ads can generate impressive customer conversions if they feature emotional storytelling, like the success story of a child battling cancer.
A marketing strategy that primarily utilizes TV ads can vary greatly depending on the size of your hospital, the scope of your target audience, and your budget. A TV ad campaign that purchases airtime for just a few days and only targets a small geographic region may only cost between $1,500-$30,000. However, national TV ad campaigns that run for multiple months can be extremely expensive and cost $10 million or more.
Is TV Advertising Worth It?
TV advertising can be effective, but only for hospitals that have a relatively large budget and are aware of its various downsides. Let’s take a look at some of the pros and cons of TV advertising.
Pros:
- Mass Marketing: Television ads cast a wide net and excel at generating widespread awareness of your hospital.
- Emotional Impact: Hospital television ads most commonly feature heart-wrenching stories that leave an emotional impact on viewers. These ads foster trust and can showcase your patient care facilities that have saved lives.
- Increased Perceived Quality: Most consumers associate brands that advertise on television with high levels of professionalism since these brands have invested extensive time in production and have the financial resources to purchase ad space.
Cons:
- High Cost: To put the costs of an extensive TV marketing campaign into perspective, the Cancer Treatment Centers of America aired an ad that appeared 8,600 times and cost the company $11.8M. You can drastically reduce these costs, but you’ll have to air the ad for a limited amount of time and significantly restrict its geographic reach.
- Limited Targeting: TV ads can be targeted to specific regions, but that is the extent of their targeting capabilities. Alternatively, in-store digital ad space owners collect a ton of data so that you can feature your ads when the correct contextual conditions are met, such as audience demographics, weather, and time of day.
- Inability to Track Results: Tracking consumer engagement with your ads is especially difficult with the TV medium, as viewers are often multitasking or away from the screen when ads are featured. So, it’s tricky to measure the direct correlation between the TV ad and patient acquisition.
If you’re looking for a far more targeted approach to advertising and at a more affordable rate, Terraboost’s wellness billboards may be a better option for your hospital. By featuring ads on our wellness billboards in stores near your hospital, you can still reach your local community and do so through a more engaging medium than television ads.
Community Outreach
Small hospitals can see an impressive boost in brand recognition and credibility through local community outreach. Plus, this form of marketing won’t cost much aside from time and labor.
Here are some of the top forms of community outreach utilized by small hospitals:
- Health screenings and check-ups: Hospitals can reach a wide array of community members via discounted or free health screenings, check-ups, and diagnostic tests. These health screenings could involve simple blood pressure checks or more intensive cancer screenings.
- Health Education Workshops: These workshops typically take place in public schools or senior care facilities and feature seminars on preventative care, healthy lifestyle choices, or chronic disease management. This form of hospital marketing helps to promote your hospital as an active and caring member of the community.
- Partner with a local nonprofit: For this form of community outreach, it’s important to select a nonprofit group that aligns with healthcare messaging, or even better, your hospital’s specialty. Your hospital can aid a nonprofit group by donating medical supplies, helping organize a charity event, or providing educational resources to their members.
Direct Mail Campaigns
Direct mail campaigns are particularly versatile, as you can send a variety of marketing materials such as letters, brochures, flyers, and postcards to prospective patients. Plus, direct mail campaigns seem to work for just about every age demographic. A recent study found that 90% of direct mail is opened, and 75% of millennials report they enjoy receiving direct mail.
The cost of a direct mail campaign generally ranges from $.30 to over $10 a person, depending on how much you put into the design, marketing copy, mailing lists, and printing. While these costs can be quite stiff, marketing for hospitals through direct mail ads is known to generate an ROI of approximately 30%.
Pay-Per-Click Ads
With pay-per-click ads, you only pay when the ad is selected by a targeted audience. To successfully conduct a pay-per-click ad campaign, you’ll want to identify keywords that a member of your target audience would search for. When someone searches for a term from your keyword list, the ad will be displayed on search engines and websites, directing consumers to your website.
As healthcare professionals know too well, people have a predilection to research their real or imagined health conditions online. While this can be an annoyance for healthcare facilities as patients come in with inaccurate self-diagnoses, online ads can easily target those concerned about their health by incorporating user data into their campaigns.
Hospital Advertising Examples
New York Presbyterian Hospital’s Patient Stories
This print ad campaign showcased how doctors and nurses supported patients through dire circumstances. The emotional nature of these ad campaigns engaged consumers and inspired them to place their trust in the New York Presbyterian Hospital to similarly help them through their times of need. This ad campaign was also paired with a portion of the hospital’s website that featured the entire collection of these patient stories.
Mount Sinai Medical Center’s Wellness Billboards
Combining ad messaging with location delivers a more contextual and powerful message to consumers because the advertising connects with what they are doing at the moment.
Mt. Sinai Medical Center used wellness billboards placed in supermarkets, pharmacies, and fitness centers in key neighborhoods in the Miami area to raise awareness of their same-day appointment and their orthopedic services. By aligning its brand with wellness billboards offering sanitizing wipes, Mt. Sinai reinforces its commitment to health and wellness in the community.
Banner Health’s Infographics
A sure way to boost credibility in your community is to be seen as a trusted educator. Banner Health used digital advertising to push out their infographics on wellness, nutrition, and mental health. To increase the number of impressions, Banner Health provided links to make these infographics easy to share across all social media platforms.
Medspring Urgent Care’s Out-Of-Home Advertising
With the worst of the pandemic over, advertisers are turning back to out-of-home advertising campaigns to reach consumers while they are outside and engaging with their surroundings.
This MedSpring advertising campaign featured posters in neighborhoods where their clinics were located and is a great example of how to drive engagement at the local level. Another unique tactic used by MedSpring was to feature bright colors and happy imagery to negate some of the negative connotations people associate with seeing a doctor.
Finding the correct path forward in a hospital marketing campaign can be difficult. If you aren’t sure where your ads should be featured, we at Terraboost are leaders in the marketing industry and can provide you with guidance and a free personalized quote.
We have over 120,000 displays located in top-name stores such as CVS, Walgreens, Acme, and even mall networks like Brookfield Malls. Through our network of wellness billboards, we reach 130M consumers daily with up to 80% engagement.
Ready to grow your hospital’s visibility and patient trust? Request more information about how Terraboost’s wellness billboards can help you connect with your local community and boost patient engagement.
