You want a higher volume of quality leads to your medical practice. A digital marketing strategy is a way to get that. Developing and implementing the strategy? Easier said than done.

Patients today have more opportunities than ever to engage your competition. That’s why we’ve analyzed a test group of medical practices. We discovered five common traits among the highest performing practices to help you improve your digital marketing strategy.

Each Medical Practice Engaged a Long-Term SEO Strategy

After a website is developed, a strategy to help drive quality traffic is imperative.

Medical practices that see a steady influx of leads have a fleshed-out SEO strategy. This strategy focuses on specific keyword searches. The keyword searches are chosen by balancing high-volume search queries with keywords for procedures unique to each practice. You want to combine popular keywords with more specific keywords directly related to your procedures.

Let’s take, for example, plastic surgeons who perform abdominoplasties and breast augmentation. They likely use high-volume keywords that are more difficult to rank for organically. For maximum effectiveness, the same SEO strategy also includes keywords related to less common procedures. These could focus on belly button revisions or deviated septums, labiaplasties, and others that still have a high demand. These lower-volume keywords can be more affordable and have a higher probability of organic rankings.

The monthly ad budget was set to $5K-$10K on average

Medical practices, specifically in the cosmetic, plastic, and reconstructive industries, spent $5,000 and $10,000 on average each month in paid media.

Their budgets combined both paid search and paid social advertising campaigns. Both platforms drove traffic to landing pages for conversions. Conversions were in the form of text messages, phone calls, and form submissions. Practices that engaged in higher-level performance strategy decreased the overall CPA (cost per acquisition) by 10% quarterly and were able to increase the overall volume of quality leads.

Higher Conversion Rates were associated with consistent a/b testing

Medical practices that A/B test paid traffic generated a higher volume of quality leads than the average practice.

Medical marketing directors who chose to test the final URL destination gained more behavioral data from their audience. This provided the possibility to optimize the campaigns based on real-time data. Practices that continually ran experiments to optimize their conversion rate produced significantly more than the practices that failed to do any testing or weren’t able to consistently test from campaign to campaign.

High performing medical practices track each stage of their digital funnel

Medical practices that produced the most marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) tracked each phase of the funnel.

Outlining a specific digital journey for their target audience allowed these practices to identify drop-off rates for each part of their funnel. From the link click to the page loading all the way through to the final form submission, these practices tracked every step of the process. Then, they developed strategies that optimized their specific data because they knew where the kink was located in their digital funnel.

Understanding where your highest drop-off rates happen helps provide direction and context to start optimizing your strategy.

For example, we know traffic is flowing through from link click to page load but faltering and stalling at the form submission. Analyzing your landing page and the actual form that users submit can help us pinpoint where to optimize. This provides a more targeted approach to diagnosing the issue within your funnel.

all medical practices that used a form of remarketing had significantly higher conversion rates than the average practice

One of the highest-converting marketing strategies for a medical practice is remarketing.

Getting in front of your audience and staying top of mind with multiple touchpoints is a statistical method of optimizing the bottom phase of your funnel. Medical practices that used a form of remarketing ads had higher conversion rates on average when compared to other practices.

The practices that continued optimizing their retargeting audience were able to create custom conversion-rich audience lists. These were then easily replicated into look-alike audiences and used in other targeting features to help convert more bottom-of-the-funnel prospects.

No matter the specialty of your medical practice, these five common traits of high-performance medical marketing strategies apply. They help identify the right audience and then scale the strategy based on performance data. Our prediction is these types of characteristics will become best practices in marketing within the healthcare industry.