Funneling Your Medical Competitors’ Patient Traffic Without Search Ads

Running a medical business is a cut-throat business. As a doctor and a business owner, you have to grasp at every available opportunity to acquire medical competitors’ patient leads and convert them into your own. That’s just how your medical business stays afloat. But there can be instances when you may run-up to a wall with no leads coming from anywhere. You look next to other medical businesses and they seem to be running just fine. This can be quite frustrating when you have tried everything and nothing seems to be working. Here is when you can make use of this circumstance and turn it into an opportunity for your medical business.

In medical marketing, using medical keywords to funnel other competitor medical businesses is one of the most effective ways to turn that influx of patient traffic towards you via Google Ads. But that can get pretty pricey and not to mention, quite tough to accomplish. But all is not lost here. The world of medical marketing is full of secret nooks that may offer you a flow of patients from the impossible. Lucky for you, there are some hacks that you can use to attract your competitor’s patient traffic towards you.

3 Funneling Practices to Target Your Medical Competitors’ Patient Traffic

The word “funneling” in medical marketing is used for practices that focus on changing the direction of patient traffic from one place to another. In this case, you are striving to target your medical competitors’ patient traffic towards your medical business. The most obvious way to achieve that would be targeting your rival’s Google Ads. But as mentioned before, bidding on their medical keywords is an expensive deal and can end up costing you more than profiting you. This is where you benefit from the nature of medical marketing.

Medical marketing, or marketing in general, is designed to acquire traffic from different web platforms, so it’s not just one door that will offer you patients. While Google Ads or Search Ads may have the deepest traffic intent, there are other targeting practices that you can use for your medical marketing campaigns. Here are the three practices that you can follow to reach your competitor’s patient traffic without emptying your marketing budget. 

• YouTube ads on your medical competitor’s videos.
• Custom patient audiences via your medical competitor’s URLs.
• By building custom patient audiences by using your medical competitors keywords without bidding. 

1. Putting YouTube Ads On Your Medical Rivals’ Videos

YouTube has developed marketing in the past decade to a certain degree. Now, if a patient sees a medical business promoting on Youtube, they think of it as credible and opt for it. This practice uses the principle of placement targeting, which is a branching of marketing that focuses on specific advertisements and uses it to put your medical business in front of your rival’s patient audience. This depends on having ads that have high convertibility power (simple CTAs, mini patient testimonials, and details about your medical services) and placing them in the right time and place.

To place your medical ads, you have to:

• Make sure to already have some medical ads on the go that you usually go for.
• Next, open your medical business’s YouTube ad placement options. The pop-up will show a search bar for placement targeting.
• Type in your rival’s account name and select it.
• You can now target some of their well-performing medical videos or their entire channel.

Your medical ads will now appear in front of your competitor’s videos, thus putting you in front of their thousands of viewers. This practice has a lead generation success of about 47%. Just make sure that your medical ads appear where they should and make a habit to monitor their success rate. You can use this practice for multiple for your rivals as well.

2. Building Patient Audiences Via Your Medical Competitors URLs

Did you know that you can target certain patient audiences via successful domains? Well, you can. Aside from a search term or medical keywords, you can use URLs too. Local SEO for medical practices uses all of your rivals’ medical site’s URLs and creates a pool of custom patient audiences for you to acquire as your own. This works by placing your medical ads on patients who visit the URLs of your rival sites. To create a custom patient audience, you have to:

• Open your Google Ads account and go to the audience option.
• Select the “Include people with the following interests or behaviors” tab.
• Under that tab, you will see the option for “Expanding your audience by also including”.
• Click on the pop-up that says “People who browse types of websites”.
• Now you will be given the option to add in the URLs of your rival medical sites and best-performing pages.
• Now your medical ads will be placed in front of patients who usually visit these sites and pages.

It is important to take note that this practice increases the visibility of your medical ads by using the patient audience pool that visits the URLs you used. Instead of remarketing, it tells Google to position your medical business towards patients that usually visit other medical sites.

3. Using Your Competitor’s Medical Keywords to Create Your Patient Audiences

Quite similar to the previous one, this practice involves making use of your rival’s keywords to target their respective patient audience instead of actually bidding on them. Google Ads has now created a  custom audience feature that helps you to reach patient audiences via URLs and already purchased keywords while also running competitive ads. To create a customer patient audience off of your rival’s medical keywords, you have to:

• Open the Tools & Settings, select Shared Library, and then Audience Manager to create your custom patient audience.
• Click on the pop-up to target “People who searched for any of these terms on Google.“
• Make sure the option says “on Google” as it is a feature designed by Google to focus your medical ads on keywords and search terms being looked up on Google or Youtube.
• Now make a list of your medical rival’s terms and keywords and add them into the Custom Audience bubble. If your rival is “CTD Medical Clinic”, you can add terms: CTD clinic near me, CTD flu services, CTD vaccine, CTD doctor, etc.
• Activate the campaign and your medical ads will show up to patients who look up those terms and keywords.

After activating this audience pool, test it out for your Video and Discovery campaigns as well to gain the full potential.

Practices for Turning Over Patient Directions

These low-cost options work better than actually bidding on your rival’s medical keywords and losing a bunch of marketing funds. Medical marketing strategies are actually presented by Google itself to increase the visibility of your medical business by leveraging your rivals’ sources (keywords, URLs, videos) in front of patients who may be interested in them or want to switch over to another medical business.