If you’re an optometrist looking to step up your advertising game, geotargeting is a great place to start. By displaying your ads to users only in the specific geographic locations you choose, you can make sure that your message is reaching the people who are most likely to need your vision and eye health care.
There are a few different ways to go about local marketing with geotargeting, and we’ve got three super simple tips to help you get started, refine your strategy, and make the most of your marketing budget.
With Surefire Local’s business intelligence marketing software, you can go beyond geotargeting advertising tips for optometrists and take control of your entire marketing campaign to make sure your ads are being seen by the right people at the right time. With our platform, you can track your results and make adjustments on the fly to ensure that your campaigns are as effective as possible.
The Importance Of Geotargeting In Optometry Advertising
Geotargeting is a relatively new method of marketing that relies on GPS and search engine algorithms to target ads to specific locations. In doing so, businesses can better reach their ideal audience with ads that are most relevant to them and their experiences. This is especially important for businesses like optometrists, who rely on patients in their local area to keep their business running.
Eye doctors rely heavily on foot traffic in addition to booking regular appointments, even more so than family doctors and dentists. People often stop by to look at glasses displays and end up making a purchase or are searching for somewhere they can take their glasses to get cleaned or repaired. Geotargeting can help advertise specifically to people within walking distance and surrounding areas to maximize the quality of your ad exposure.
How Does Geotargeting Work?
Geotargeting works by using a variety of data sources to determine the location of an individual. This data can come from things like IP addresses, GPS coordinates, cell towers, or even information entered into a contact form on a website. Once someone’s location is determined, businesses can then target ads specifically to that location.
For example, optometrists can set up an advertising campaign for a discount on new patient eye exams to display only to users within 2 miles of their office, or they can advertise school exam discounts to users within a certain distance from a school.
Benefits of Geotargeting Ads for Optometrists
There are many benefits of geotargeting advertising for optometrists, the most obvious being that it allows you to target your advertising specifically to areas where you have offices. This ensures that your advertising budget is being spent in the most effective way possible and that your ads are reaching people who can visit your office.
Another benefit of geotargeting is that it allows you to exclude areas where you don’t have an office or even audiences that you don’t intend to reach. This ensures that people who aren’t close enough to visit your office or who won’t be interested in the ad aren’t wasting your marketing dollars on a view that doesn’t have any value.
Finally, optometrists can use location and call extensions in their ad campaigns to make them more effective. These extensions allow people who see your ad to click on a button that will take them directly to your website or give them the option to call your office directly from the ad. The “click to call” feature is a specific example of this, and making it easier for people to contact your office is a great way to increase your conversion rate.
All of these benefits work together to create a more effective and efficient advertising campaign for optometrists. By targeting your advertising specifically to areas and audiences who are interested in your services and where your offices are located, you can ensure that your ad money is spent only on target users who stand a good chance of becoming a customer.
And since you’re only paying for clicks from your ideal users and not every user that visits, your marketing budget goes a lot farther.
5 Super Simple Geotargeting Advertising Tips for Optometrists
Including and excluding the right audiences and using location and call extensions to customize your ads are just the start. Here are 3 more easy geotargeting advertising tips for optometrists:
1. Use Dynamic Keyword Insertion
Dynamic keyword insertion enables Google to automatically change the keywords in your ads depending on which search terms your target audience is using. For example, if you’re running a dynamic keyword ad for “men’s sunglasses,” users don’t have to type in this exact match to see your ad. Instead, they can type any similar keyword, like “sunglasses for men.”
Google’s sophisticated SEO algorithms would be able to sense the semantically related keywords, but since the user is specifically looking for “sunglasses for men,” the keyword in your ad would be changed from “men’s sunglasses” to “sunglasses for men.” If another user in your targeted area were to search for “men’s designer sunglasses,” they would see your ad for men’s sunglasses, but with their specific keyword.
Research has long shown that the closer a Search Engine Page Result (SERP) is to a user query, the greater the chance they’ll get the click. Now, advanced search engine technology allows Google to know when a search query is “close enough” to an ad and to change the keyword in the ad to reflect the user’s query verbatim.
2. Optimize Your Ads for the Busiest Times
Geotargeting isn’t just about location – you can set your ads to display to your target audience at specific times, too. This extra level of customization can help make your ads even more effective by showing more ads when your foot traffic is likely to be the busiest, and even by excluding local ads when your office is closed in the evening and on weekends. If you’re not optimizing for time too, you’ll be spending money on displaying your ads when patients can’t even come into your office.
3. Split-Test Your Ad Campaigns
Split-testing your ads is a great way to quickly identify what is and isn’t working, so you’re only spending money on effective ads. A split test is an experiment where two or more variants of an ad or page are shown to users at random, and statistical analysis is used to determine which variation performs better for a given conversion goal.
This allows you to test multiple messages and see which ones resonate best with your target audience. If you split-test early on before ramping up large-scale campaigns, you can be sure that you’re only launching high-spend ads that have proven to be effective with your target audience.
4. Make Sure Your Locations Are Set Correctly
Don’t forget to double-check that you’ve set the locations on your ads properly before launching them. If you’re targeting a specific city, county, or region, you’ll want to make sure that your ad is set to the correct zip code. The last thing you want is for your ad to be running in a completely different area than what you intended. For example, there are a lot of places called “Franklin” or “Clinton.” It could be detrimental to your campaign to launch expensive ads to a “Lebanon” in another state entirely.
5. Cull Ads That Aren’t Performing
To improve your ad performance, cull ads that aren’t performing well, ideally as early on in the campaign as possible. Look at your click-through rate (CTR) to see which ads are getting the most attention from users and if one is particularly low, it’s probably not doing well. Also, take a look at your conversion rate to see which ads are bringing people into your office. If an ad isn’t performing well in either of these metrics, it’s probably not worth keeping around and spending money on it.
Refine Your Geotargeting Strategy With Surefire Local
If you want to continue honing in on your optometrist office’s geotargeting strategy, consider using a business intelligence marketing tool like Surefire Local. Surefire Local is a comprehensive, all-in-one platform that allows you to manage and optimize your online marketing campaigns across multiple channels, including search, social, and review sites.
With Surefire Local, you can target customers in specific geographic areas with laser precision. You can also exclude areas that you don’t serve, so you’re not wasting your time and money reaching out to people who are outside of your service area. Our tool makes it easy to create and manage location-based ads with call extensions and dynamic keyword insertion, which are critical for edging out the competition in high-traffic areas.
Surefire Local is an affordable solution for optometrists who want to get the most out of their marketing budget. And because it’s easy to use, you’ll be able to get up and running quickly and see results fast.
We can also help you manage your online reputation, get more 5-star reviews, track your performance everywhere you have a presence, and so much more. Contact us today by calling (703) 884-8442 or request a demo by filling out our short online form here and we’ll get right back to you as soon as possible.