Many health care organizations use the local newspaper, billboards, and more traditional communication as a primary resource when doing a campaign. These types of media, however, are going out of favor with consumers as evident with their declining market share. With cellphones becoming more and more like mini-portable computers, consumers are looking for information from internet sites and apps that can be tailored to their needs and wants. With that being said, now let’s discuss a better way for health care organizations to discuss communicating with consumers more effectively.

With the emergence of electronic healthcare records (EHR), secure messaging and patient portals, as well as tele-medicine gaining ground, more and more consumers of health care are getting used to utilizing this type of technology, while also seeing the benefits of its convenience and ease of use. It would be beneficial for health care organizations to also embrace web-based communication for campaigns to garner the attention of its consumers. Apps like Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, and blogging have fast become extremely popular with consumers connecting people around the world in an instant. Schumann, von Wangenheim & Groene (2014). noted that targeted online advertising can now use a consumers previous browsing history to personalize advertising, and more importantly track changes in browsing that can help the organization anticipate changes in the market to better engage consumers and showcase new technologies and practices within the organization.

Another important aspect to online advertising, is for an organization to look at its own website and possibility target its patients and family members with new services offered and future strategic planning that may be of interest to them (Lambrecht & Tucker, 2013). An organization must continuously monitor and update its own website and media presence, so as to appraise consumers of new techniques and technologies offered, and keep loyal consumers engaged. Goldfarb (2014) noted that as consumers increase their time spent on media, online advertising is gaining in market share, while traditional forms of advertising is seeing a rapid decline.

References:

Goldfarb, A. (2014) What is different about online advertising? Review of Industrial organization. 44(2); 115-129.

Lambrecht, A., & Tucker, C. (2013). When does retargeting work? Information specificity in online advertising. Journal of Marketing Research. 50(5);561-576.

Schumann, J., von Wangenheim, F., & Groene, N. (2014). Targeted online advertising: Using reciprocity appeals to increase acceptance among users of free web services. Journal of