Dominate your market with a hospital magazine

Here are 17 reasons you should consider adding a magazine to your hospital's marketing mix:

  1. Gain new patients by inducing trial of gateway services, such as maternity care.

  2. Educate your community about wellness and healthcare. Empower the consumer with articles on self-care, family care, prevention of illness, guidelines for health screening and early intervention, and the availability of healthcare resources.

  3. Build brand awareness and brand preference for your hospital. A hospital magazine is an extremely effective tool for keeping a high community profile and shaping consumer perception.


  1. Build consumer relationships. Your own magazine lets you build a reader franchise that grows stronger with time. This ongoing reinforcement lets you gain an increasing share of heart and share of mind with your future customers, and it helps turn past customers into brand loyalists.

  2. Generate qualified leads through targeted direct-response promotions. Example: Offer a pregnancy planning packet to readers of the publication. Respondents will constitute a database of future maternity patients, who can then be marketed to over time—increasing the likelihood that ultimately they’ll choose your facility for childbirth.
"You folks at Wainscot do an A.W.E.S.O.M.E. job!  Right now, everyone on my side of the world is swooning over the recent issue!

Thank you for making our day!
"

Mario D. Smith
Communications Manager

Marketing & Corporate Communications

Westchester Medical Center
  1. Provide a superb vehicle for your own advertising. Your custom health publication is the perfect environment for your own ads and a low-cost way to maximize consumer exposure.

  2. Create an information gateway. Your custom magazine becomes a virtual gateway to your facilities and services. It can lead readers to additional learning experiences, to hospital-affiliated self-care and support programs, and directly to clinical encounters.

  3. Boost consumer awareness of your hospital’s services, affiliations and ancillary centers of care.

  4. Position your hospital as a center of excellence for various services. As part of an overall branding strategy, this can help consumers differentiate your hospital from the competition.


  1. Shine a spotlight on innovations in care. Is one of your physicians an early adapter of a new minimally invasive surgery? Have you just installed the latest diagnostic machinery? Those are powerful branding messages best expressed in a magazine feature article.

  2. Generate attendance at hospital-sponsored events. Many Wainscot clients use events calendars and promotional features within their publications as their primary or sole means of generating in-person participation at hospital functions, from physician lectures to support groups to exercise classes. A good direct mail publication is incredibly effective at getting consumers “over the threshold”—a key step in building lasting consumer relationships.

  3. Turn the publication into a direct revenue generator by incorporating a mechanism for charitable giving. Some Wainscot clients incorporate a fund-raising solicitation and reply envelope in every copy of their publication. Foundation offices have found that these efforts more than pay for themselves!
“Health & Life is beautifully designed, production is of the highest quality, and it is a publication Saint Peter’s is proud to have our name on.”

Michelle Lazzarotti
Director, Marketing and Media Relations
Saint Peter’s University Hospital
  1. Promote your hospital as an organization of caring, committed individuals. Use the publication to tell stories of the humanistic aspects of your care, to feature staff personalities and to dramatize your commitment to customer service. A branding strategy that focuses on service can work well for almost any healthcare organization.

  2. Trim direct mail expense. It’s easy to do by using your custom magazine as a delivery vehicle for other published pieces. Brochures, reports to the community, events calendars and other publications can be produced as pages in your magazine or newsletter. Alternatively, pre-printed pieces can be bound into the center of the publication or “ride along” in a polybag. Wainscot clients, for example, have delivered physician directories in the same package with their magazine.

  3. Build a direct marketing database. Incorporate a reader in your publication. Over time, you’ll build a comprehensive, proprietary database that categorizes consumers by health status and healthcare preferences. Your hospital will be able to capitalize on the opportunities in database marketing, which include the abilities to conduct highly targeted campaigns and to negotiate better contracts wit health plans.

  4. Provide a customer feedback loop. Keep tabs on your market by inviting reader input and providing feedback mechanisms within the publication. The process not only helps you tailor your communications to market needs; you’ll also demonstrate to the community your hospital’s service orientation.

  5. Induce physician referrals by featuring doctors in the publication. As part of your branding strategy, position them as local experts on various kinds of care and/or as “caring personalities.”

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Health & Life Magazine? 
It’s a unique magazine customized for hospitals. Health & Life is designed to make hospitalsstand out in a competitive market.

What makes Health & Life unique?
Four things: the name, the content, the size of the magazine and its availability in multimedia formats—a digital edition, an audio podcast, a radio show, a live health expo. Think of the print magazine as the hub of a multimedia brand that you control.

What’s so special about the name? 
The name Health & Life is particularized for every marketplace. A local hospital edition is called Tulsa Health & Life or Tidewater Health & Life. As an alternative, your hospital’s name can be part of the title, as in Methodist Hospital’s Health & Life.

What’s unique about the content? 
Its breadth and quality. The magazine is about medicine and much more. Health & Life is visually gorgeous, and the quality of the writing is simply unparalleled among hospital magazines. Readers see this quality as an implicit reflection of your clinical quality.

Do lifestyle features really belong in a hospital magazine? 
Absolutely. Lifestyle features are a magnet for readers, meaning that exposure to your marketing messages is maximized. Health & Life has high pass-along readership and a long shelf life.

How many pages are in an issue of Health & Life?
Standard editions are 24 pages, 36 pages and 52 pages. But everything is customizable.

How many times a year is Health & Life published? 
That’s up to you. You can choose anywhere from once a year to six issues a year. Most hospitals choose quarterly. In effect, Health & Life can fit any budget.

"It was the best marketing decision I've made in five years."

Frank J. Vozos, M.D.,Executive Director, Monmouth Medical Center

Can I have exclusivity in my area? 
Yes, that’s automatic. Only one hospital per market may publish Health & Life. You can lock out the competition—or vice versa, of course.

How many pages are devoted to the hospital? 
That varies by issue size. In the 52-page magazine, the hospital gets 20 pages—a custom cover, 12 editorial pages and 7 advertising pages. You can add more custom pages if needed.

Can I also personalize the pages that aren’t devoted to the hospital? 
Yes, every article can be personalized.

I love the magazine, but I have reservations about the glossy paper. Could I have Health & Life on matte paper? 
Yes, that’s an option. You can also print on a heavier cover stock and heavier interior pages.

The Health & Life program sounds very flexible. Can you accommodate inserts, ride-alongs, gatefolds…?
Sure. We’ve done all of those things for our client hospitals.

Where do your articles come from? 
Our editorial staff writes most of what appears in Health & Life; some are specialists in medical writing, and some in lifestyle writing. Hospitals typically prefer to supply text for their pages, so that’s become our standard procedure. If you prefer for us to write your hospital articles, we can do that.

"The last edition looks wonderful! Good job!"

Lori Zavada, Baptist Healthcare

Why do some editions of Health & Life carry advertising?
In select markets, we sell local advertising, which creates a thicker magazine and adds another kind of value for readers. This is strictly optional. 

What is “Total Health”?
It’s a special issue of Health & Life—a health planning guide that’s designed to be saved by readers. It you decide to publish just one issue of Health & Life a year, this is the best choice.

Health & Life sounds expensive. Is it?
It’s a lot more affordable than you might think. We’ve designed the program with options so it fits most community hospital budgets. You select the number of pages per issue, the number of issues per year, the circulation, the distribution method.

What kind of commitment do I need to make?
It’s very easy to try Health & Life: A single issue is the minimum commitment. We know from experience that hospitals immediately love Health & Life and stick with it.

So, why do hospitals love it?
It gets noticed and gets results. Physicians are big supporters because the magazine raises their profile and patients comment on it. Foundations see results when they profile donors and promote capital campaigns. The public responds to calls to action. And because of all this, Health & Life makes hospital marketers and senior executives look good.

What are the unique benefits of Health & Life for hospitals?
Like other hospital publications, Health & Life is a branding tool and a vehicle for consumer marketing and education. But it’s also an authentic magazine—a local media brand that you control. It serves as the ultimate positive PR vehicle because you control the news about your hospital. And with multimedia add-ons, the magazine can be the centerpiece of an integrated marketing program. 

How will you measure R.O.I.? 
We’ll do an annual reader study. For quantitative measurement of financial effects, we can help you with a patient match study. 

Has Health & Life won any awards?
Yes. It’s twice won Gold in the Annual Healthcare Advertising Awards and the Judge's Choice Aster Award for Excellence in Medical Marketing. We don’t enter a lot of awards competitions, but when we do, we tend to win. 

How much experience do you have in hospital marketing?
We’ve been helping hospitals market themselves since 1992, first as Dowden Health Media and then as Wainscot Media, which began as a division of Dowden.

I’ve worked with a custom publisher in the past, and it felt like I was part of a newsletter mill. How are you different?
When you talk to our partner hospitals, you’ll find we’re known for client service. We work collaboratively and consultatively to help you reach objectives.

 

 

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