Tag: Healthcare

6 Healthcare PPC Best Practices for Targeting the Right Practices

Contributed by BTW SEM Team

Advertising of any kind within the healthcare industry can be challenging, especially with all the rules and regulations surrounding it. Healthcare PPC adds another level of complexity.

While it can be tempting to ignore PPC because of its innate challenges, that could be detrimental to the health of your business. Instead, you need to learn the right way to manage your advertising beyond simple word-of-mouth recommendations.

Digital marketing is the way forward for the healthcare industry. According to a 2019 report, Google gets about 70,000 health-related queries every minute. An effective PPC strategy can help capture some of those searches and lead them to your business.

The right digital marketing strategy can lead to long-term growth and increased revenue for your practice.

What Is Healthcare PPC

PPC stands for “pay per click.” These are typically the ads someone sees at the top of their Google search results. A business only pays for the ad space when someone clicks on the ad.

You get to choose which keywords you want to focus on to trigger your ad. For example, if you are part of a pediatric practice in Houston, you could run a PPC ad campaign targeting people who search for “pediatricians in Houston.” If someone Googles that phrase, your PPC ad would be near the top of the page.

Tracking and measuring the results of PPC campaigns is also relatively simple. This means you can quickly gauge how effective your strategy is and make changes if you don’t get the results you want.

6 Best Practices to Maximize Healthcare PPC

If you are looking for ways to maximize your marketing dollars, PPC is a great place to start. However, there are a few strategies and best practices you should keep in mind.

1. Understand Healthcare Paid Search Rules 

Healthcare is a highly regulated industry. There are specific rules and regulations you must follow, or you run the risk of incurring fines and other more serious consequences.

Google has specific paid search policies for healthcare ads. These policies apply to ads related to:

  • Clinical trial recruitment
  • Restricted drug terms 
  • Experimental medical treatments
  • Addiction services
  • Unapproved substances

There are also specific rules surrounding “health in personalized advertising.” This means you cannot target users based on their personal health information, including the following:

  • Chronic health conditions
  • Disabilities
  • Physical or mental health conditions
  • Sexual health

2. Know Your Audience 

One of the benefits of medical PPC and healthcare marketing is that the target audience is generally highly segmented already. Most practices know exactly who their target demographic is. This information can help you target new customers.

To do this, you will need to:

  • Create patient personas: Look through the historical demographic data of your patients and create detailed patient personas. Include information such as profession, healthcare concerns, income, etc. The marketing team can use these personas to create ad campaigns that target your ideal patients.
  • Create relatable messaging: Your ads and overall messaging need to reflect what your potential patients are looking for. Ads for a dental practice should be very different than those for an oncologist.
  • Track your ad performance: One of the best things about PPC advertising is that it is very easy to track. You can do A/B testing to see which ad copy or CTA works the best for your clients and delivers the most conversions.

3. Create Customized Landing Pages 

When someone sees your ad based on specific keywords and then clicks on your ad, they should immediately see relevant information on your website. The best way to do this is to create custom landing pages unique to each set of PPC criteria. Do not send people to your homepage. They will feel lost and not know where to click.

The landing page should have the same or similar wording to the triggering keyword or phrase. For example, if your PPC ad promises free dental x-rays for new patients, users should see the same offer on the landing page.

It should also feature a clean, minimal design with a straightforward CTA that lets users know exactly what they are supposed to do, like schedule an appointment. Be sure to thoroughly test your landing pages from the customer’s perspective. Are there any confusing steps or obstacles? Try to make the journey as smooth and seamless as possible.

4. Use Geotargeting 

While healthcare has shifted more into the digital world the past couple of years, it is still very much a local operation. Using geotargeting in your PPC campaigns is necessary to reach the right audience in the right place.

If someone searches for “urgent care near me” and they are in San Francisco, California, they will get results for urgent care centers near them. If you run an urgent care office near San Francisco, you can create a PPC campaign that delivers your ads to users within your geographic area.

5. Add Ad Extensions 

Ad extensions on the search engine results page (SERP) amplify your content and give users more information. Some of the most common extensions include:

  • Callouts: This is a short 25-character description that supports the main ad copy. You can highlight what your healthcare business has to offer.
  • Structured snippets: Use this area to highlight more of your services.
  • Sitelinks: Along with the main headline link, you can add additional sitelinks near the bottom of your ad. These links lead to specific landing pages, such as “About Us,” “Schedule an Appointment,” etc.
  • Location: Providing your address in your PPC ad is an easy way to let users know if your healthcare business is convenient for them. 
  • Call: With a phone number extension, users can click or tap the number to call you directly. 

6. Optimize Your Ads for Mobile 

According to Pew Research, 85% of Americans use a smartphone. Most of those people use their phones to research information online, including information about their health. Your website and all its landing pages must be optimized for mobile use. This means text, images, and CTAs should display appropriately without users needing to scroll around to find what they need.

Luckily, Google offers responsive search ads which automatically adapt based on the user’s device. You simply need to create multiple headlines and descriptions and the system will choose the best combination for each user.

Expand Your Healthcare PPC Potential with Behind the Work

If healthcare marketing feels overwhelming, don’t worry. Behind the Work is here to help. Just as we would never try to diagnose our own health conditions, we wouldn’t expect medical professionals to do their own marketing.

Our team of marketing experts is here to help your healthcare business with whatever digital marketing needs you have, whether that is SEO optimization, PPC ad campaigns, or anything else. We want to help your potential patients find you and get the expert medical help they need.

Ready to explore the world of healthcare marketing? Contact us today to start improving your online performance.

DLD | 637% + New Users

Contributed by BTW Content Team

Dental Lab Direct is a lab and online retailer that delivers dental appliances directly to your door, eliminating the need to visit a dentist. 

“Being able to consistently speak with 1 or 2 people from their team was great.” – Joe Bazzi, Founder of Dental Lab Direct

The Challenge

Dental Lab Direct is an online retailer that delivers dental appliances directly to your door, eliminating the need to visit a dentist. Dental appliances like partial dentures and retainers are costly on their own – visiting a dentist adds hefty additional surcharges that can prevent those with crooked or missing teeth from getting the products they need. These services can be performed directly from home, eliminating the need to visit a dentist.

The client approached us at 120/80 with three primary objectives:

  • Setting up their ecommerce operations
  • Building out a lucrative lead generation pipeline through digital paid and organic traffic
  • Identifying new opportunities for growth

Now just shy of a year after beginning their campaign, our digital marketing campaign for Dental Lab Direct has been a resounding success. Even as pandemic-related sales diminish, their sales continue to expand in all directions.

Our Approach

We began our campaign by starting where the client thought the greatest success would be achieved. After setting up ecommerce through Google Shopping, we experimented with adding additional channels to create more opportunities. The insights gained during this discovery phase allowed us to lift sales on products that were less popular while expanding sales for products with high demand.

Paid digital search generally focuses its efforts on Google, as the search engine constitutes a 92% market share globally. However, this percentage is not consistent across all demographics. It is estimated that around 71% of Bing users are 35 or older, and the average cost-per-click on Bing is nearly 60% lower than those on Google. As partial dentures constitute the bulk of Dental Lab Direct’s sales, targeting a search engine mostly frequented by older adults offered an easy opportunity to keep PPC costs low and revenue high. 18.5% of the clients traffic comes from Bing PPC efforts.

Our organic search campaign began with a competitor analysis to assess which terms they were ranking for, and keyword gaps that they had missed. A list was generated around these terms, and expanded to include related search queries. These keywords were further broken down by search volume against keyword difficulty to determine which content had the best opportunities for rankings.

The most successful content offers unique industry insights and perspectives. As our campaign gained traction, new keyword opportunities were discovered around products like DIY dentures – ones that dental experts have deemed neither safe nor reliable. Differentiating Dental Lab Direct’s services from these allows customers to learn more about what options will provide the best results, expanding our organic reach even further.

431%

431% Return on Ad Spend

637%

637% Increase in New Users

1650%

1650% Increase in Top 3 Ranking Keywords Positions

The Outcome

120/80’s campaign with Dental Lab Direct has been a resounding success. Over the course of a year, they have seen explosive growth with no end in sight.

A year after our initial engagement, our relationship with Dental Lab Direct has continued to evolve. A recent email campaign we launched has already seen a 1159% improvement in performance over the last three months when it was handled by a different vendor. Experimentation is essential to our methodology, and opportunities like this have allowed us to find new territory to expand beyond our competition.

Our success with Dental Lab Direct has taken place at all levels thanks to consistent communication between our team and the client. We have found competitors liable of optimizing an account at the beginning, and letting it run its course without communicating successes or missteps with the client. 120/80 recognizes that opportunities emerge throughout the life cycle of an account, and that the most successful digital marketing initiatives are an act of trial, error, and resolution.

Modento | Converted 46%

Contributed by BTW Content Team
A Dental Practice Patient Engagement Platform Turned to us to Increase Traffic and Drive New Customer Acquisition Through the Buyer’s Journey

“…It’s so refreshing to have a company put in the work on the front end to really know and understand your product, brand, and voice – I have been continually amazed by how well they have been able to produce content that is aligned with our goals and vision. On top of incredible content, they have the expertise to practically implement content strategies via HubSpot and make sure every piece is getting in front of the right people at the right time. They have saved me so much time and energy and have been an absolute delight to partner with. – Kelly Kaufman, Director of Demand Generation for Modento

Overview

A lot goes into managing a dental practice, and Modento equips providers with the tools they need to run as efficiently as possible. The developers of this all-in-one patient engagement platform knew they had a tool that could benefit many providers, but they needed some help getting their story out to their audience.

After looking at multiple marketing agencies, the team at Modento turned to us to increase website traffic, drive engagement, and generate thoughtful content that proved their industry knowledge. The goals prior to starting the campaign looked like the following:

  • Improving monthly traffic to 300 visits per month starting three months after the campaign began 
  • Initiating discussions that show their status as an industry thought leader
  • Increasing engagement and lead generation due to a better experience across the buyer journey

Challenge

Being a small startup in the software development industry sometimes requires each team member to take on multiple roles, and that can make a deep dive into each marketing channel a difficult task. The developers at Modento felt this pain point, with one team member saying:

“…Being a small startup and a one-woman marketing team at that time and wearing a lot of different hats, I just was spread too thin. I felt like I was kind of scratching the surface on a lot of different marketing channels and marketing efforts and didn’t have the time or manpower or knowledge to go deeper. And some of those channels, specifically inbound content and blog content, (were) those things that I really wanted to prioritize as we were working to become a thought leader in our space and in our industry, but just didn’t have the resources to pursue.”

The Modento team knew they needed help marketing their product, but while other agencies offered the same host of video, blog, and production deliverables, they felt an organic connection was lacking. They wanted to leverage their inbound and blog content to drive higher traffic and more engagement on their site, but they didn’t want a one-size-fits-all approach. Their goal was to reach 300 website visits per month with content that showed their value, but they wanted to be treated like a partner, not just a project.

Solution

We pride ourselves on meeting each client on their terms, so we found ourselves compatible with the team at Modento right from the start. We understood their need for higher website traffic, and we partnered with them to help them reach their goal. We assisted by: 

  • Developing a strategy to drive more inbound leads through online sources
  • Positioning Modento as a revolutionary technology that is transparent and high-value, setting it apart from its more established competitors 
  • Showcasing Modento’s advantages in price, packages, and feature offerings
  • Developing content that builds Modento’s authority and thought-leadership in patient engagement 
  • Building trust through high-quality, video-supported case studies and testimonials
  • Increasing the number of live-demo requests 
  • Using content to educate current users on how they can access more features to derive additional value from the platform

EXAMPLES

By launching a campaign that would inform visitors, display the platform’s value, and address common dentistry practice concerns, we sought to furnish Modento with content that would both heighten visibility and drive visitors through the funnel — and the results show that we did.

46%

Of contacts converted from organic search to customers

3k

Website visitors per month after just 3 months

2x

Their website traffic in 9 months

Results

After implementing our campaign, the team at Modento had achieved their goal of increasing website traffic, and were successfully making their platform known. Some of the results were:

  • Over 10 times more blog readers 
  • Greater content engagement
  • Establishment as an industry thought-leader
  • More positive visitor feedback

One Modento team member noted just how helpful our content had proven by citing how many clients told him that they were reevaluating their patient management structures because of the insights they’d found on Modento’s blog.

So whether they purchase the platform or not, our relevant, value-adding content proved instrumental in meeting industry needs and helped Modento put their product on display.