Medical Practice Advertisement

This year we have a renewed commitment towards marketing, advertising and growing our patient community. I have a few post planned that describe some of things I’ve have been working on , so stay tuned for that.

As I’ve been thinking about what to do and how we should approach some of these initiatives, I’ve been looking back at some of the things we’ve put together for advertising pieces. So I thought I would share some of these with you all and give you some insight as to what I was going for when we ran with these pieces.

This is one  of the very first pieces I did. This poster appeared in the entrance of the local super market. As you can see, the idea was to use color and cute kids with a picture of the doc to draw people’s attention that  this was an advertisement for a pediatrician’s office. I purposely left out all the information one normally sees in private medical practice’s advertising; things like accepting new patients (which to me seems dumb to say in a piece. Why are we advertising in a public place in the first place? For our established patients? I think not), open late, accepts most insurance, etc.

We’ve used this piece above in several places including a few local magazines (both black & white and color). I think the bright colors and the picture of the children drives the point home of who we are and what we are trying to promote. Again, I choose one message and that is the one I go with.

This piece was designed to promote our pre-natal classes. I think that pictures that carry emotion go a long way towards conveying a message. Certainly more than a bunch of words and phrases describing we accept most insurances, that we are open on Saturdays and  have late appointments. All those things are important, but I think it is too much for an advertising piece. Most often than not, in advertising, less is more.

This piece was placed at the entrance of a local daycare. We spoke to the director and asked if  we could leave this piece at their entrance. We placed the piece in an acrylic display that had a place to hold our business cards. As you can see, we keep driving the same message.

Using similar design elements, this is a poster we put up in our office to let people know to follow us on Twitter and Facebook. We printed it in-house on an 8×11 photo paper so it would look nicer than regular paper. Because photographs can be used a decoration, the piece can serve two purposes. It adorns the walls and it is informative at the same time.

Here is another poster (we also printed these in postcard size and placed inside our new parents folders using 5×7 photo paper) we posted around the office and around the building we’re located in. The pictures are of actual members of the nursing mothers group.

When our new doc joined the practice, we created this piece above. I wanted to do something different than what other practices in our area have done in the past; which is a picture of the doc with a description of the doc’s credentials and maybe an excerpt of the doc’s philosophy. Nothing wrong with that approach, but I just think a picture of  a cute kid is better. Once we have their attention, then we can let them know what the poster is about.

This is a postcard that we’ve recently used to bring our patients back in for their physicals this summer. The back of the post-card has a call-to-action and how to get a hold of us.

This last piece is a huge 4×8 banner that we created for Life Time Fitness. This piece just went up on 6/1 so hopefully we’ll get some good exposure. A similar, but much smaller piece was created (poster size) that holds a tri-fold piece that talks about the office, our philosophy and things like that.

If you are wondering about where I get the images, I use images from iStock. Some of the fonts are from dafont.com, and some of the layouts (for example the Physical and Your Child is Growing piece) are from stocklayouts.com and modified to fit our message. I don’t know how to use Photoshop (just seems too complicated for me) or any of the better design programs. I just use MS Publisher. It is not the greatest, but has worked for me so far.

Anyway, I’d love to hear your feedback. What do you like about them? What don’t you like about them? By the way, with exception of the the last “red” piece, I designed all the different pieces. I’m not a designer (although I do like it a lot), so be gentle with your critic.