Display ads aren’t a substitute for great SEO practices, but they definitely have their place. SEO takes time but if you have a new service or are opening a new clinic, for example, display ads can give you instant visibility and get your business seen by people who are genuinely looking for what you do.
As with most things marketing, you need to know what you’re doing with display ads, or you can waste your precious marketing dollars. So, to save you time and keep your budget firmly in hand, follow along with our display ads best practices for dermatologists and learn how you can make the most of your ads budget and results.
What are display ads?
Display ads are paid ads that appear on sites such as Facebook, apps, and related websites to the subject of the ad. If you use display ads, for example, someone searching on a skincare site for skin cream or help with dry skin could well see display ads next to their search results advertising your dermatology clinic.
These ads really are highly relevant to searchers which makes them highly effective for you.
Not only that, but these ads grab attention. Unlike native ads which are designed to blend in, display ads are designed to get people to stop what they’re doing and look. You can have up to seven different options with these ads, including text, video, GIF, and images. Obviously, you need to design these ads to suit your product or service and to attract the attention of your ideal client, just like any other ad, but they really can make a big difference when marketing your dermatology clinic.
To set these ads up, you’ll need to use a site like Facebook or Google Ads Network.
Benefits of display ads
No doubt you can already see some of the benefits of display ads, but here are just a few more:
- It’s much easier to match your company branding with display ads as you can alter the color, font, and more, allowing you to not only advertise your business but build your brand too.
- These ads are displayed when someone is searching for related items to your service, so anyone viewing these ads is likely to be a warmer lead for you.
- You can easily experiment with these ads to optimize them. You can alter the color on the call-to-action button, change your colors and fonts, alter the image, or the type of visual, and more. These ads are really flexible and allow you to test changes to see what works best.
- Additionally, as your ads are shown more and your chosen platform will learn and begin to show the most effective ads over ads that don’t work as well.
- You can select which websites your ads appear on or you can leave it to your platform to do that for you, giving you a lot of control.
Common types of display ads
Site Placement
If you opt for site placement ads, you have full control by choosing which websites to place your ads on.
Contextual
With contextual ads, your ad platform will choose the websites your ad appears on based on relevancy. This can be helpful particularly when you’re just getting started with display ads if you’re not sure which sites to choose.
Remarketing
Ever go to buy something from Walmart or Target’s website and had ads for that same product following you for days on seemingly every website you visit and your social media? Those are remarketing ads, designed to get you to go back to the store and buy more. You can use these ads too to nudge people who’ve already visited your website back to hopefully sign up for your newsletter or even book an appointment.
Display ads best practices for dermatologists
Follow our top tips below to cut your learning curve when starting to run display ads:
1. Message
While display ads themselves are designed to grab attention, you also need a clear and compelling headline to ensure that your audience reads the rest of your ad or stays to watch your video. Every part of your ad should work together to pull your audience in and make them take action. Your headline is just the first part of this, and it has to be good.
This is one place where practice really does make perfect. Write as many headlines as you can and pick the best ones you feel will resonate with your audience for your ads. Or, if writing isn’t your strength, it’s definitely worth investing in an expert content writer with ad copy experience.
2. Design
You can waste an awful lot of money on ads if the design isn’t right. As we said above, every element has to work together to grab your audience and keep them interested. Given that display ads are very visual and designed to catch attention, they must be designed in a visually appealing way with relevant images, animation, or video to suit what you are advertising and your audience.
As with so many things in marketing, it’s a case of giving your audience what they want.
Because the visual aspect of these ads is so important, if you’re going to spend money on getting the professionals in, we recommend that it’s for your design, including any copy that has to be there to tell the audience what to do next. Spend your budget wisely on great design and copy and you will benefit from it.
3. Color
One of the biggest advantages of display ads is that you can alter the colors of your ads to suit your branding. This makes your ads work harder as they’re not only advertising your business, but also building your brand.
Use the color palette you created when you worked on your company branding and do this for your ad colors and your landing page colors to show your audience a consistent look throughout and reassure them that they are in the right place.
When it comes to color choices, you really need your call-to-action button to stand out. It has to be obvious what you want your audience to do next and where they need to go. However, you can still do this and maintain brand consistency by using contrasting colors on your branding color palette, rather than colors that don’t suit your branding at all.
4. Targeting
Before running any kind of ads, you need to know the key demographics that make up your ideal customer. If you have buyer personas for your target audience, then look at those and find the information you need to help you target your ads. If you don’t have buyer personas, then it’s time to work on those before you create any ads.
You’ll be able to select different demographics and settings depending on the platform you choose and target your audience. It’s also a good idea to tailor your ads to suit the platform you are using.
As we said earlier, you can also choose your own websites to advertise on or let your platform do that for you.
5. Website
For every product, service, or clinic you want to advertise, you need to create a landing page. It’s a bad idea to try to sell more than one item at once. All that will do is confuse your audience and leave them wondering what to do next.
Keep your landing pages clean and single-focused, with no distractions. All you need is the information on what you are selling and a call-to-action button. That’s it. Don’t link to your blog or other pages on your site. Don’t talk about anything other than what you are advertising.
Run your ads to gather initial data and see how successful they are and then start optimizing your landing pages to drive more conversions. Try different colors, alter your headline, trial new copy, alter the wording on your call-to-action button and even the color. However, only alter one thing at once and see what effect it has. If you alter several items at once, you won’t know which one is making a difference and giving you better results.
Once your ads are running, it’s also important to ensure your own website is well-designed and optimized too. While people will go to your landing pages via your ads, some people will find your website first and it needs to look the part and reflect your business. Give it a refresh and ensure it creates the right impression and it’s easy for potential clients to find what they need and move smoothly through your sales funnel.
6. Accessible
Following on from the single focus your landing pages need, you also have to ensure that your ads and your landing pages are mobile-friendly.
So many people now shop with their mobile phones that you’re cutting out a huge part of your target market if your pages and ads don’t function properly on phones.
Once you’ve set your pages and your ads up, check how they look on mobiles and make sure everything works.
7. Authenticity
Whenever you do anything online, whether it’s creating an ad, posting on social media, or building your website, you need to create a personal brand experience and build your online reputation to earn new customers’ trust. To do that, what you need is consistency and authenticity every time.
We already mentioned that your landing pages and your ads need to be branded consistently with your look and colors, and it’s the same everywhere online, including with your brand voice.
This allows people to start to recognize your business quickly wherever you post. Your brand will also begin to feel familiar and reassuring.
It’s not just about building your brand, however. It’s also about being genuinely and authentically you everywhere you post, including on your landing pages and in your ads. You know your own business values and you know what you won’t compromise on. Let your audience see those things too, consistently be authentic online, and you won’t just be yet another dermatology clinic that blends into the rest. You’ll stand out and potential clients will be more likely to trust you and book with you.
8. Measure
You really can’t run ads of any kind without looking at your statistics and analyzing your results. You need to keep your eye on what’s working and stop any ads that are underperforming, and the only way to do that is to dive into your statistics regularly.
We mentioned earlier that you need to keep testing and comparing different elements of your ads and landing pages to see how you can optimize your pages and get better results. Again, you need your statistics to do this.
You do get some help from your chosen ad platforms as each platform will do some analysis for you and start to push the ads that are getting results over the ones that aren’t performing, however, it’s always best to keep an eye on this yourself too.
Attend a Surefire Local Marketing Platform demo
With Surefire’s local marketing platform, you can get business intelligence marketing software at a fraction of the cost of buying other tools or hiring agencies. Our software helps you manage your most important online marketing activities all within one platform, including your paid ads.
You can set up your ads, check how they’re performing, and gain a host of insights into your results with our detailed statistics, reports, and analysis. And you don’t have to leave our dashboard to manage everything.
Not only that, but our marketing software also allows you to manage the whole of your marketing all in one place, covering everything from content, social media, and email marketing, to receiving and responding to reviews, and managing your directories and Google Business Profile.
You can also get afollow along with our display ads best practices for dermatologists and learn how you can make the most of your ads budget and results full analysis of how your ads are performing and how those results fit in with the rest of your marketing, and detailed reports on every aspect of your marketing to set you up for success.
Why not book a demo with our team and see what Surefire’s platform can do for your dermatology clinic?