A guide to gauging ad effectiveness

Techniques that have proven successful in private industry can help hospital executives increase their accountability for advertising expenditures. Among these techniques are: The random telephone survey, which can be used to measure whether the hospital's awareness level among the public has increased as the result of a particular ad; The focus group, which assists the hospital in evaluating how it is perceived in relation to other hospitals in its market; The pretest, to determine which ads to eliminate from a campaign and which ones to refine; Educational seminars and direct-response ads; Reliable baseline data on patients and services for use in comparing figures before and after an ad has been used. Above all, careful planning is required to enable the marketing staff to determine what it wishes to accomplish through advertising and to set measurable goals that reflect its expectations for each component of a campaign.