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Do your medical marketing materials fade away as soon as you produce them? Do they lack excitement, a sense of urgency and effectiveness? Here are 3 more techniques from the bare-knuckles world of DRTV (that's Direct Response TV).

That doesn't mean you have to make obnoxious commercials for Ginsu Surgery ("But Wait! There's More! Well also throw in a free rhinoplasty!"). What you need to do is try to forget about the response of the Head of Cardiology, the Head Nurse or any other Administrative Head in your hospital. Before you create a healthcare organization marketing plan, medical marketing kit or any medical marketing materials, you really need to focus on the only people who can make your marketing a success: your patients, and what they really want. Not what YOU want them to want, but what they really really want. Use any means to find it out, from in-room interviews to telephone surveys and mall intercepts, but find out. Knowing what your patients want is the critical first step to medical marketing that gets results.

OK, here's another important suggestion - sometimes size really does matter. That simply means the wonders of medicine and your unique selling proposition are almost certainly too complicated for a 30 second commercial. If you have an important point of difference that's too complicated for a short commercial, consider a half hour 'infomercial'. Nothing sells a new product or procedure better than a long format commercial.

The biggest barrier to a long commercial are the dollars involved in production. But non-prime DRTV media costs are so much less expensive that your cost of production soon fades away. On top of that, there's another hidden bonus that can make your long format commercial the hero of your healthcare organization marketing plan: long spots always get better response - always. Response that will put your ROI on steriods.

Since there aren't many people who respond to medical marketing materials by asking the ambulance driver to turn around and take them to that hospital they heard about on TV, most medical marketing is about relationship building. Nothing kick-starts a relationship like giving folks something for free. Free stuff (you can call it by its fancy marketing name: a Value Added Offer) gets people's attention.

What should you offer? It can be anything from a Free Guide on preventing or treating a common killer like diabetes to free screening for indicators of disease like heart disease or high blood pressure. One of my clients, a large regional health system, offered women free tests for indicators of heart disease. The women who received those tests were 60% more likely to come to this hospital for heart treatment. That program was so successful that they're expanding it to include men.

Another killer idea Direct Response marketing can teach medical marketing: What gets measured gets improved. Here's a hot news flash: Direct Response is set up to measure...response. You know in24 hours whether your commercial is working like it should be. There are affordable and easy ways to measure response. One of the easiest: put a different phone number in every commercial, of every length, on every station, and measure call volume. Then you'll know that people are responding to your :120 second commercial on Fox News at twice the rate as the same commercial on MSNBC.

When you think of it, most people who put together healthcare organization marketing plans don't ever know if anyone is responding to their medical marketing materials.  Most medical marketing gets thrown on the air, or onto a brochure rack, or on a billboard with little strategic thinking. If forced to answer truthfully, most healthcare marketing directors have little idea whether their campaigns are working. Don't let that be you.