People are searching for medical care and healthcare services on google and other search engines more than ever before.
According to an estimate from Google, there are approximately 175 million searches related to health per day!
This creates a huge demand for healthcare services online and an opportunity for healthcare providers to meet the demands of people by reaching them out online via different digital mediums and channels like a website, social media, mobile app, etc.
Business objective
A broad, top-level goal for your company. This goal typically focuses on increasing revenue, profit margin, or volume (for example, Increase the number of actual patients by 2%). If you want to increase your revenue, you can either increase your price or increase your volume.
Increasing prices could mean losing current customers that are price sensitive or less loyal. That means it's a risky solution & not every business can afford it.
Marketing Objective
The best possible solution for the given situation is to work on growing the sales volume by making efficient marketing and advertising efforts, building your brand, acquiring new customers who may be interested in your product or service (in this case people looking for safe and trusted healthcare services.)
Major advertising platforms healthcare advertisers use are Google Ads & Bing Ads. The most common advertising goal is to increase the number of qualified leads/actual patients. The most used advertising placements are Search Ads, Display Ads & Video Ads.
The core function of marketing is to connect the right people to the right product by surfacing the right messages at the right time.
Healthcare Patient Journey Begins Online
5% of all Google searches are health-related.
Search drives 3x more visitors to hospital sites compared to non-search.
Patients who booked healthcare appointments ran 3x more searches than those who didn’t.
Consumers researching physical therapists, nursing homes, and optometrists are the most likely to use search engines.
94% of healthcare patients use online reviews to evaluate providers.
84% of consumers trust reviews as much as personal recommendations.
It only takes 1-6 online reviews for potential patients to form an opinion about your practice.
81% of consumers are unsatisfied with their healthcare experience.
The average cost for a healthcare lead is $286.
88% of healthcare appointments are scheduled by phone.
Phone calls convert to 10-15x more revenue than web leads.
2.4% of healthcare appointments are scheduled online.
Callers convert 30% faster than web leads.
The caller retention rate is 28% higher than the web lead retention rate.
Healthcare companies’ global advertising expenditure is projected to increase by 4.3% in 2021.
These are some nice healthcare advertising stats that I could gather for your reference. These stats tell us that there is a huge demand for healthcare services and people are searching over the internet about it.
According to the Harvard Business Review, acquiring new customers (which includes patients) is between 5-25x more expensive than retaining existing ones. But you do have to acquire new patients at some point, or else you won’t have any to retain.
What about the Patient Online Journey?
If you are already running Google Search or Display Ads for your medical and healthcare services, you must have noticed that there are various stages that an online user goes through before converting as a patient.
Stages can be defined as:
Awareness Stage (Topic) - The patient becomes aware that he or she is experiencing some sort of problem.
Research Stage (Topic) - With a vague understanding of their problem, patients begin using the Internet to research the details. Research might be short or take some time to complete.
Research & Evaluate Healthcare Facilities - At this point, the patient will begin the search for finding a healthcare provider to help them address their issue.
Schedule/Book an Appointment
Delight/Feedback
There are many things to look for before setting up any healthcare or medical ad campaign. Most importantly one should plan a proper ad campaign strategy before even jumping to setting up the ad campaign, ad groups, keywords, or landing pages for that matter.
Understanding the user journey of a patient and then drafting quality ad campaigns for your patients will drive you more conversions and also will cost you less (reduced CPC).
Check out my PPC project for a Healthcare Provider wherein I have worked on Setting up and managing/optimizing their Google Ad Search Campaigns.
If you are already running ads for your healthcare services and need an audit or consultation, or even if you want to start out and need your ads to be set up and managed, feel free to reach me out by filling this simple form. You will receive an email to book your FREE appointment with me.