Medical Digital Marketing: How To Promote Clinics

As a rule, the agency builds the following format of promotion work: set up advertising → check the dynamics in analytics → check the report from the call center. If the campaign doesn’t generate leads, the agency’s specialists test new hypotheses. This strategy is most often used to promote online stores — it has a fast decision-making cycle, which means that analytics will immediately show sales if the ad is configured accurately.

The promotion of companies, for example, in the construction sector, looks quite different. Ads don’t give you instant results. A potential buyer of an apartment can choose from several options for several months and compare price offers.

This is roughly how the path of clients of medical clinics looks like. The target audience will weigh the decision to contact a clinic specialist, and even more so-to agree to inpatient treatment. In other words, leads and calls will not be the goal, you need actual sales of the product or service.

We will not name the clinic, as the NDA applies. But we’ll tell you how it works.

Customer calls and completed application forms are important for the Clinic. But they do not guarantee that the customer will become a buyer — they can «jump off» after the call or even refuse to make an appointment.

The clinic we worked with specializes in expensive treatment: diseases with a severe course, including incurable ones. The clinic is unique because of its well-equipped hospital and highly qualified doctors.

Hospitalization is the ultimate service, so one click on an ad is not enough. It is important that the patient seek treatment directly on the spot. This means that it was necessary not just to record leads, but to build work with different departments within the clinic itself.

Prior to our collaboration, analytics was very simple: even call tracking had nothing to do with analytics systems.

The importance of call tracking is indisputable, since calls to the clinic are received much more often than requests on the site. it was important for us to set up analytics in such a way as to track the entire path of the client — starting with a click on an ad and ending with making an appointment with a clinic specialist.

Here are the stages of the work:

The seemingly simple steps actually include a lot of details: you can write a separate article about everything that we had to take into account.

The call tracking setup had to be very precise. Ads show different phone numbers: you can use them to determine which particular ad the patient came from and evaluate the effectiveness of the ad.

However, there are also pitfalls: if a person simply dialed the wrong number or is not included in the clinic’s audience profile, such leads are considered low-quality calls. There were up to 80 of them a day-for the first month of work.

How we identified high-quality calls:

1. The duration is more than 30 minutes.

2. At least one repeat call from the patient. During the first call, a person clarifies the information he needs, and only on the second decides to enroll in a clinic.

It was important for us that the ad delivered the results that the business needed, so we worked with the data in a more complex format:

At the same time, we understood that it was impossible to limit ourselves to analytics alone. It was necessary to work closely with the clinic team.

The solution of such tasks is based on a constant exchange of information. During the day, the call center employee checks calls against the quality criterion, then unsubscribes in the internal chat. In case of problems, it informs you, for example, that the time required to make an appointment with a doctor has decreased by half.

We promptly process this information and find out what caused it. It happens that some creatives didn’t work during testing, or key advertising spots were taken by competing companies.

The client’s team helped us delve into the details and understand how the clinic works. To do this, a special person worked with us: it was important for us to accurately understand specific medical terms, create advertisements based on them, and work out the semantic core in a high-quality way.

We knew that we wouldn’t be able to limit ourselves to uploading the database of the most frequent requests. It is necessary to delve into the patient’s chain of reasoning — what is important for them, what influences the decision to call and hospitalize.

This is how our team communicates with the clinic:

The standard work of other agencies in such cases often looks like this: sales dynamics are falling, the agency reports this during business hours and waits for feedback from the client. As a result, time runs out and the client loses money.

We initially set up our work in such a way as to change ads in real time. To do this, we constantly monitored the situation, including on weekends. So we could see when there were fewer calls and requests and quickly take action. The clinic team trusted our approach.

This format made it possible to react as quickly as possible when indicators changed.

In one case, the ad started clicking for no apparent reason. But in the end, we found out that the media got a message about a famous person with a disease from those who are treated by the clinic. This aroused healthy people’s curiosity and they clicked on the ad.

Thanks to continuous monitoring, we quickly eliminated such requests so that our client could save money.

It should be noted that close interaction has become a key factor for successful work. Not every company will want to disclose internal information or negotiate with employees to take the time to explain.

In addition, clients do not always trust the agency even in the conditions of cooperation.Perhaps due to the fear of disclosing data to competitors or advertising that may carry reputational risks, such situations end up working in the format of strict coordination of each step and lack of feedback.

We understand that customers are concerned about the outcome of their advertising campaigns.

One of the key points is understanding common tasks. If the agency asks questions, then they are necessary precisely in order to give the best result at the end of the work.