29 Oct
Ever since the digitization of online medical marketing, things have changed — for the good and bad, at the same time. The digital space has become a ground of competitiveness, especially when it comes to online medical businesses. Each time, there is some new marketing trend or a new patient acquisition technique waiting for you to adopt it to open the gates of patient traffic. While this keeps a steady flux of new acquisition opportunities, it is safe to say that when it comes to funding these practices or trends, effective medical marketing has become more expensive and difficult to follow.
The average cost for pay per clicks ads, online marketing campaigns, medical keyword biddings is increasing progressively as new online medical businesses keep stepping the game to tighten the competition further. As a medical business owner and a doctor, your patient acquisition is your bread and butter. Hence why it is so easy to fall through the mistake of spending all your medical marketing budget in place on strategies and practices while they fail to live up to their patient acquisition potential.
It’s imperative to make certain that your medical marketing campaigns and strategies for acquiring new patients via these platforms are cost-effective and live up to their acquisition potential. Not only is it budget-friendly, but a smart practice to own if you want to successfully run your medical business for the long run while keeping a steady flow of patients along the way. Aside from maintaining a perfectly created paid medical marketing campaign, there are a variety of techniques out there that you can use to lower your patient acquisition costs to a notch, or at least make that marketing budget scalable over the long run.
What Are Patient Acquisition Costs and Why Are They Important?
Your patient acquisition costs are the costs that go into the acquisition strategies to acquire a new patient. In layman’s terms, patient acquisition costs refer to the financial resources or budgeting that a marketing strategy costs you. PAC is a key medical business metric that is used to evaluate the ratio between the money you’re investing in medical marketing and the return number of patients you are gaining by it. A common formula for this evaluation goes as:
PAC = (total cost of medical marketing) ÷ (number of patients acquired)
For instance, if you spend $10,000 to acquire 1000 patients, your PAC is $10.
PAC = ($10,000 spent) ÷ (1000 patients) = $10 per patient.
By fully understanding this ratio of PAC, a medical business can determine the most cost-effective marketing strategies to acquire patients. For example, if the PAC for your social media marketing campaigns is $5 per patient and $8 for PPC campaigns. You may focus more on improving your SMM strategies since its acquisition potential is high and the cost is low.
Common Techniques to Lower Your Patient Acquisition Costs
These techniques won’t just save you by weeding out the medical marketing strategies that are costing you more than they are worth. But it will help you use them in a way that will increase their patient acquisition potential. Some common ones are:
1. Diligent Tracking
Whether it is your medical ad campaigns, CTR, lead conversion, medical site click ability rate. You need to be aware of how much patent traffic is coming from which space. It is financially harmful to you to just activate any medical marketing space and start sending patients aimlessly through your site or channel without diligently tracking their conversion rates.
You won’t know which of your marketing platforms is performing the most for you unless you measure each of their performance and conversion metrics together. Whether it is your medical site’s landing pages or ads, it is essential to set a performance tracker on each of them to see how much are you gaining compared to how much you are investing in it.
2. Proper Ads Alignment
Medical ads are expensive, but they can end up costing you more if they aren’t properly aligned, hence missing all their acquisition potential. For instance, medical ads promoting your infection treatments won’t perform well for patients who are simply seeking flu vaccination services at the start of the fall season.
The best cost-effective way to use medical ads is to only activate them for your general services and when it is patient influx season. In the meantime, you can get by fine by creating retargeting ads for special or specific medical services. This saves you money in the long run and makes the patient acquisition potential of your ads ten times higher than before. Be sure to track the PAC for both.
3. Improve Your Medical Landing Pages
46% of your potential patients click away after their first visit to a medical site. The reason? Weak landing pages. Not only are you losing your potential patients that way, but wasting your marketing budget spent on the promotional strategy that brought the patient to your site in the first place.
Even if your medical site is conversion-optimized, there may be too many options on your medical website that can distract the potential patients from converting to the action you are targeting with your medical ad. By creating medical landing pages specific to the offers in your medical ads, you can gain those potential patients and the full PAC potential. You can also include important details in your medical landing page copy to get more conversions.
4. Use Marketing Nurturing
Marketing nurturing is a great way to increase the potential of your marketing strategies while not spending a dime. For instance, after promoting a discount deal, you can send follow-up emails to your patients to help them stay connected to the lead generation process and ensure that the patient converts to your medical services. This practice will help you gain the maximum potential of your PAC spent on your promotional strategy for the discount deal while converting those leads into active patients.
5. Broadening Your Target ability
Location can make or break your marketing strategies. Whether it is your medical content, social media posts, medical ads, you need to keep the location targeting much broader. While targeting marketing for doctors are an effective way to gain patients for a specific location, in a broader sense it will end up turning away patients that aren’t included in your selected locations.
Select the locations tab on your Google, Facebook, and Youtube campaigns and select the option of “people in or regularly in” your target area. This will help you gain the full acquisition potential while staying away from spending too much on specifically targeted campaigns.
Lowering Patient Acquisition Costs but Increasing Acquisition Potential
It is important to maintain a scalable marketing budget for your medical marketing campaigns and strategies. For the sake of your medical business survival, you must apply these techniques that narrow your marketing budget down but increase its potential power of attracting more and more patients.
