After reviewing the most recent VMS report on competitive spend, we saw that the competition was spending most of its budget on traditional media but very little emphasis toward the digital platform. Knowing that 80% of women, the family health care decision maker, search online first for a physician or research medical conditions, and with proven results that the cost per patient acquisition was much less than traditional channels, we set a robust digital strategy in place. Search engine marketing, social media advertising, digital advertising on a mix of sites where our target was known to spend time: health care, apparel, home interior, entertainment and food sites became part of surrounding our target with meaningful messages online.

Our media plan used an out-of-the-box, three-tiered, geo-targeted approach that cast a wide, but dedicated net featuring zip code-centric media for each individual hospital, metroplex-wide media for the hospital system and regional media for health care service lines that we identified as desirable for “medical tourism.” We also invested time and effort into search engine optimization to assure that we were pointing our target audience to the most meaningful website content on service pages focused on conditions.