A solid medical practice or health care digital marketing strategy involves several components, but paid search marketing (PPC) is the most direct and effective route to your bottom line. Below are some marketing strategies that health care and medical practitioners can use to gain exposure and results through paid search marketing.

Expensive keywords, high competition, and self-diagnostics are some of the challenges many health care services deal with regarding paid search marketing, which is why it’s important to hire a digital marketing professional to handle your paid search marketing campaigns.

Know Your Audience

You need to know your buyers like the back of your hand, and chances are you will have various buyer personas that you’ll need to target in different ways. For healthcare advertisers, you will most likely be targeting future patients, and therefore you’ll need to determine if that patient is in a research stage, or weighing their options between care providers, or in an urgent care state-of-emergency.

First there are the searchers who are at the top of the funnel, they are in research mode; they have some pain, and they know something’s wrong, but they’re hoping it will go away without a doctor visit. Second, there are chronic patients – these people know exactly what they’re looking for; they’re typically older or athletes injured in the past. These people are looking for a healthcare professionals’ attention asap, and they convert fast. This is your most ideal target. Lastly, there are emergency patients who you’re competing against 911 with.

Make Contact Information Available in Ads

Think about a patient in a state of an emergency or in serious pain; they are without a doubt going to want immediate access to a phone number or address to receive urgent care. You can add this information via ad extensions on Google Ads Manager. Set-up Call Extension, Location Extensions, and Sitelink Extensions (linking to your contact page) for all Campaigns: This is easy to do, and will not only extend the real-estate of your ad while providing important information, but ad extensions have also been known to improve ad rank on the SERPs. You should also have your contact information visible on every landing page on your website!

Ensure Your Website and Landing Pages are Optimized for Mobile

Offering a smooth and easy mobile experience for potential patients and clients is even more important for the healthcare and medical industry than any other industry. This is because a lot of people use cell phones, especially when at work because they don’t want their coworkers or sometimes even their family members to find out their medical conditions. Here are some things you can do to ensure your paid marketing strategy is just as effective on mobile users.

• Check your mobile stats – how do these numbers match up against the desktop performance?
• Mobile bid adjustments – If you are in fact seeing great results with mobile, you might want to make mobile bid adjustments for certain campaigns. Google allows you to bid as high as 300% more on mobile or exclude mobile completely by making a negative bid adjustment of -100.
• Mobile Preferred Ads – Your desktop ads will show on mobile if you skip this step, but it’s preferable to have two mobile focused ads (in addition to two desktop ads) per ad group. In these ads be sure to use call extensions, include short and relevant calls-to-action (ex. “Call Now!”) 
• Make sure your landing pages are mobile optimized – Visit your site on your iPhone to see how it appears. How quickly does the page load? Is the content responsive? Is contact information readily available on all landing pages? 

Invest in High-quality Videos and Images for your Landing Pages

High-quality videos and images need to be incorporated into your entire marketing strategy from YouTube ads, landing pages, and within email blasts to personalize the experience, build trust, and provide a deeper, more entertaining explanation of what your healthcare company has to offer.

Paid search marketing (PPC) is critical in gaining more exposure. It generates more potential customers each and every month, and allows us to tell our unique story on our landing pages tied to the keywords we’re bidding on. To start your paid search marketing strategy with Virtual Image, contact us today!