When it comes to paid advertising, there are a lot of red flags waving around in the air. A few questions people ask themselves is ‘What am I paying for?’ and ‘Does this drive more traffic to my site and ultimately my practice than other marketing strategies?’
We’re here to break it down the most popular forms of paid advertising: Facebook and Google AdWords. Rather, paid advertising is a way to accurately target the most relevant potential patients online and improve the amount of bookings you can generate from gearing them to your website through these paid advertising methods.
Benefits of Paid Advertising
1. You Pay Per Click – The good thing about AdWords is that you are only spending money when users are clicking on your ads. You are not charged for just showing up on search results.
2. You’re in Control – when you run paid advertising campaigns for your business you are in control of setting your budget, creating your ads, and targeting a relevant demographic. You can even select the keywords that most accurately represent what patients in your area are looking for and see what devices they are using to find this information.
3. Immediate Results & Data – By running paid ads through AdWords, Facebook, and other platforms, you are able to set up and immediately run your ads, while keeping track of their progress in real time. Running paid ads allows you to get more exposure to your clinic’s website and have precedence over competitors that are not running ads.
4. Brand Awareness – Paid advertisements also allow you to increase your practice’s brand awareness online. For example, when you run creative video or image ads you are able to engage with users directly on their timelines and allow them to associate your medical services and doctors alike.
5. Encourage Engagement – When creating the ad, you have the ability to ad appealing and attractive aspects of your medical services that they could be in need of, and may result in users engaging with your ad and ultimately your website.
Paid Advertising: A Breakdown
There is a wide variety of paid advertising platforms that could enhance a number of service-based businesses. For your convenience, we broke down top ranked marketing platforms and the formats of their ads accordingly.
We have termed Facebook as serving the purpose of ‘discovery’, which means that when you are using this platform as a marketing tool you are showing your ads to a population of users that would be interested in booking an appointment with you if the right ad is shown to them.
There are many instances your practice or clinic may run a Facebook ad:
- Create exposure to the people in the area surrounding your practice
- Promote a certain holiday or seasonal special your practice is hosting
- Using videos of the interior of your clinic or practice as well as your staff to create a more personal feel for your practice online
Google AdWords
AdWords has rightfully been dubbed as synonymous with “paid search” as it is the most popular pay-per-click advertising platform worldwide. Going off of this point, we have termed AdWords as ‘demand-based’. Google is the most actively used search engine in the world, and so it only makes sense that using its platform means you are able to target your services to potential patients who are already looking for them.
There are many ways you can gear potential patients to your website:
- Targeting based on the location that most of your patients typically come from
- Creating ads that are geared at specific keywords potential patients are looking up “dental clinic near me” for example
- Creating attractive content on your ads about specific services or advantages your practice has in comparison to competitors
Essentially, as an AdWords user, you are paying for the opportunity to target your ads at new customers based on the searches they input into Google.
The Take Away
While there are many different online marketing platforms to choose from, the most successful ones, in our experience, for a variety of businesses have been Google AdWords and Facebook consistently. Although this information might seem a little overwhelming, there has been huge success within these facets of marketing for business in many different industries. The best way to guarantee your online marketing success is through careful research and education.
About the Author
Donya Ferris is the Marketing Director for Adit, a full-service online marketing company based in Houston, Texas www.adit.co.
