Your Budget for Advertising to Healthcare Businesses is Being Wasted. Here's Why.

Healthcare marketing can be frustrating, just like any type of marketing! You’re constantly aiming your tactics at moving targets, meaning your budgets and overall strategy have to move as well. This can be especially frustrating when there’s a complete and total disconnect between your messaging and your audience, which is not uncommon in the healthcare space. 

Here’s how that could play out in the real world. You’re buying digital ads promoting your optometrist legal support business and moving it up in the Google search results, but you’re only receiving phone calls from patients asking for legal representation in that field. You’ve spent time and money aiming in the right direction, but there’s an obvious disconnect. The right people aren’t seeing your ads. 

This problem is more than just frustrating, however. It can be expensive. The time and money you spend on advertising that isn’t producing qualified leads is being wasted, but don’t worry—we want to help you diagnose the issue so you can solve it. 

Website is Not Properly Optimized 

Your website is the cornerstone of all your marketing efforts. It’s the central representation of your brand that displays information, tells your story, provides education, and guides your prospects down the path of becoming a paying client. 

It’s the key element that makes your business stand out on the website, so it’s important to make sure that search engines like Google like it. Google and other search engines “like” your page when it’s optimized for their algorithms. This search engine optimization (SEO) happens in a variety of different ways, with the ultimate goal of appearing at the top of the first page of search results. 

First off, your organization needs to be publishing relevant, authoritative content to help build your credibility and presence on the web. The more high-quality content that your site hosts, the more seriously the search engine algorithms will take you. Each of these pieces of content should try to focus around keywords that your audience members are searching for. If you can answer their questions, your site will become more reputable and useful, meaning Google will be very happy. 

You also need to have some technical aspects of your website optimized as well, such as your metadata. Moz has a great article that introduces and explains this topic; it’s definitely worth the read. 

Some other things that help with your site’s optimization involve link-building. There’s a lot of technical information in relation to this topic, but here’s the skinny: you need to link outward to highly authoritative sites, and you need to have links coming inward towards your site (usually from your digital and content marketing tactics.) The more your site “speaks” about other sites (outbound links) and is “talked about” (inbound links), the better your search engine rankings will be. 

Overall, you need to make sure your website is set up to perform well on the web so that your target prospects can find you in the first place. 

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>>> Still not sure if your website is optimized? Check out what our experts have to say about SEO, Website Optimization, and much more to help you succeed through your marketing efforts! 

Low Consumer Awareness 

Your consumer awareness level can affect your advertising performance in a few different ways. If it’s too low, it may lead to a disconnect between your ads and conversions. In other words, your ads could be fantastic and hitting the right people, but if your prospects don’t know who you are or don’t trust you they won’t make the decision to engage with your business. 

This can be especially frustrating since it’s not something you can pay to fix overnight. Building your consumer awareness is a marathon, not a sprint, but there are ways to start improving it quickly. 

For starters, you need to make sure your website is optimized properly, as mentioned before. Your site needs to be searchable for anyone to remember it. Further, your site needs to crystal-clear about what you do. All of your services, specialities, and offerings should be easy to find and understand. Healthcare professionals who visit your site should be able to glance at it briefly and remember the core idea of who you are and what you do. 

Since healthcare is such a specialized industry, you need to speak to your specialty and provide specifics about what you do, in order to help your business stand out. The more you can become associated with your specific offerings in the industry, the more you’ll remain in the minds of prospective clients as they consider you. Essentially, you want to become the name that comes to mind when a prospect is wondering where to look. 

Not Utilizing or Optimizing Paid Media 

Paid search engine and social media advertisements may be intimidating for healthcare businesses who haven’t utilized them a lot yet, but they’re remarkably effective and provide great ROI. In fact, about 65% of all clicks across paid media advertisements are made by users who want to make a purchase. 

Many healthcare advisors make the mistake of investing more of their budget into less effective (but more familiar) forms of advertising like trade publication ads, tv ads, radio ads, and other channels that aren’t even close to paid media advertisements in terms of cost-effectiveness.

The ones that do use paid media advertising but experience poor returns may not be optimizing them to their full extent. They may be purchasing ads for keywords that their audiences aren’t actually searching for, leading to unqualified leads and wasted money. 

A way to address this issue is spending more time aligning your purchased keywords with your services, but in the context of your prospective consumers’ questions. This will help to reduce the amount of money spent on unqualified leads significantly. However, there’s an even better way to target healthcare audiences specifically…

Expedite the Whole Marketing Process With Perla—a Private, Specialized Healthcare Marketing Platform  

While all these different marketing budget optimization strategies are beneficial for healthcare consultants seeking leads from healthcare professionals and entities, there is a new and better way forward—Perla. 

Founded to correct the inefficiencies of traditional healthcare sales and marketing, Perla is a private networking platform that enables you to market DIRECTLY to healthcare entities and professionals in the segment your organization specializes in. 

Powered by intelligent matching, Perla allows you to reduce the length and cost of your marketing efforts by ensuring you’ll only receive leads from healthcare entities and professionals that are searching for your exact offerings. 

Add Perla into your sales and marketing process to make the most out of your investment while speeding up your marketing timelines. Spare yourself from the frustration of wasted marketing budgets. 

Request a demo to learn more about Perla, see how it works.