Managing physicians are always looking for the most efficient advertising techniques to acquire more patients. These days, with the help of geofencing for clinics, you can do just that. Geofencing can help you zero in on a precise target market to get the best results from your advertising funds and to more effectively reach the people who need your services the most.
What is geofencing?
Geofencing describes the art of creating a target area by drawing a virtual fence on a map. It can be as simple as drawing an actual circle on Google Maps to mark your area of reach, or more complex, like for retailers wanting to trigger alerts in an app when customers are inside their store. Geofencing can be used to ensure your marketing efforts are not in vain by preventing your advertisements from appearing in areas outside your clinic’s reach. And, it can be done on a variety of platforms to more effectively reach your specific targeted audience.
How does it work?
When users have their location tracking settings on, an IP (Internet Protocol) address can be seen. If you wanted to target people living within a five mile radius of your clinic, you could draw a geofence to include this area and create targeted ads for them. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Google all offer some form of geofencing to help designate users for your paid ads.
What is the difference between geofencing and geotargeting?
Geofencing is a first step: it narrows down your audience by creating a location-specific target. However, geotargeting takes this step further by delivering ads to people who both fall within your geo-fenced radius and meet certain demographic criteria. It allows you to customize your target area by specifying things like interests and hobbies people may have, sizes of people’s households, and so on.
For example, if you wanted to primarily reach parents of young children, you might start by zeroing in on every Facebook user within five miles of your location who had recently liked a local elementary school page. You would likely need to narrow your audience further by adding more specific criteria later on, but this would at least give you a start toward an audience better tailored to your goals.
Developing the most effective paid ads
For the most successful use of geofencing and geotargeting, you will first want to break up your campaign by location, as this will help to keep costs down and reach more relevant clients. A one-keyword approach can be used to increase relevance and quality, and city-related keywords can be used for higher conversion rates.
The ad should be driven by location, but be mindful of the ad quality, too. While part of reaching your target audience is knowing how to get your ad in front of the right people, the counterparts are the actual content and its placement within the ad. Factors like offers, benefits, and a call to action should all be carefully positioned.
Finally, be prepared to track your ads to see what is getting the best results for your specific clinic, and adjust your strategy accordingly.
Social media marketing
When considering social media marketing for doctors, Facebook is a great place to start. It offers many detailed targeting options based on interests and behaviors, and since user profiles contain an amount of personal data that is unmatched to other platforms, you can customize your audience by a range of factors; things like age, gender, location, likes, and interests are all tracked and linked to individual users. Facebook also makes advertising available in photo, link, and text formats that are accessible on all types of devices, which will allow you to reach more people.
Even with all the new up-and-coming social platforms, Instagram is still the fastest growing social networking app. It offers a unique mobile-only image-focused platform for reaching potential patrons, making it easy to start by simply building an audience and a branding voice to communicate your message to them. This platform is also a great place for paid advertising, since it uses a sponsored post format to place visual ads on the feed of your targeted audience. It is owned by Facebook and designed to be easy to manage alongside it via the Facebook ad portal.
PPC Marketing
Many industries also use PPC (pay-per-click) marketing for small businesses to directly attract customers. In fact, 50% of people arriving at a retailer’s site from paid ads are more likely to buy than those who came from an organic link.
When it comes to creating the best pay-per-click ads for your clinic, there are a few helpful hints to remember:
- First, less is more. Keep your ads simple and clear to attract the attention of your viewers. Use contrast in your design to make it easy to read, and don’t add unnecessary elements that will distract from your message.
- Second, make it accessible. Optimize the ad to display across a wide range of devices, including phones, tablets, and computers, so that those with each type of device will have access to it.
- Finally, geotarget. You will not need the whole world to view your ad, so you can use geotargeting to place it in front of your target audience and ensure that you do not risk any wasted clicks by someone outside of your area. If you’re unsure where to start, you can try Local PPC, which is a feature available in Google AdWords that allows you to design an ad that appears to viewers within a specific location.
Make the most of your marketing
For help designing a customized strategy using geofencing and a variety of paid ads to increase your patient acquisition, contact the marketing experts at iProv today. We are here for you, and we want to ensure that no marketing dollar goes to waste so you can get the most out of your marketing budget.
A note about safety during the COVID-19 outbreak
At iProv, we want you to stay safe and healthy during the COVID-19 outbreak. As a digital marketing company that helps healthcare providers reach more patients, it is more important now than ever to follow the guidelines in your area. Use telemedicine services whenever possible for regular healthcare visits. If you have concerns or think you may have been exposed to COVID-19, take a free online health screening.
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