No matter what business you’re in, there’s a lot of competition on the internet when trying to gain visibility. You can and should put time into SEO to build your reach and organically gain higher listings in the search engine results, but paid display ads can get your physical therapy practice noticed much more quickly.
There is a bit of a learning curve with display ads, but the results can be well worth it, with ads targeted directly to people who are likely to be actively searching for your services.
In this article, we’re going to help you shortcut at least some of that learning curve and walk through our display ads best practices for physical therapists.
What are display ads?
Display ads are highly visual paid ads, using text, a quality image, a GIF, or even video to get attention. Rather than appearing at the top of the search engine results like standard paid ads, display ads are usually found in apps, on websites, and on sites such as Facebook.
These ads are push ads in that they aren’t waiting for someone to go to Google and search for physical therapists; they are actively targeted to, and displayed where, people who are interested in your services are likely to be.
If you visit a pharmacy site, for example, and search for anything along the lines of support bandages, slings, or similar, you may well see tailored banner ads for physical therapy, alongside the product listings.
To set up display ads, you would need to use something like Google Display Network or Facebook to place your ads, and then either you might choose which sites you want your ads to be published on or you could let the publishing site determine that for you.
Benefits of display ads
These ads are definite attention-getters. Visuals always grab attention far more than just text and, with these ads, you can customize the size of the banner, your colors, fonts, and shapes to create something unique that represents your business and adheres to your branding.
Here are just some of the other benefits of display ads:
- As we said above, these ads are displayed to directly target your ideal clients where they are. If they’re already primed to be searching for physical therapy and then they see your ad as well, they’re far more likely to click and potentially to book.
- What you’re getting here are warm leads that are half convinced already. You’re not trying to persuade cold leads to convert, and that takes far less time and effort.
- You can quickly set up and run multiple ads and try out different formats, designs, and more to test which ads get the best results.
- You can use these ads for building your brand as well as for trying to make the sale and they’re highly effective for both purposes.
- These ads allow you to remarket to people who have already visited your website but left without buying. You can remind them of your practice and what they were looking for.
Common types of display ads
1) Site Placement
With site placement, you get to select the website(s) that you want your ads to appear on.
2) Contextual
Conversely, with contextual ads, your display network will choose relevant websites for your ad to appear on. So, for example, your ad on performance improvement might appear on a sports site or on a site that sells gym equipment.
3) Remarketing
We’ve talked about this above, and this is a really helpful display ad that can reattract previous website visitors to take another look at your services.
Display ads best practices for physical therapists
Follow our steps below to create visual and compelling display ads that bring you results and highly targeted leads:
1. Message
Your headline is likely to be one of the first things that gets your audience’s attention. And once gotten, the next thing they’re likely to do is to read your copy.
You probably know this already from writing blog posts and general marketing copy, but you really must have a clear and compelling headline to ensure the right people are attracted to your ad and want to read the next line.
Without this, you have a far smaller chance of people reading your ad and even less of them clicking through.
Take your time on this. Come up with as many ideas as you can because they won’t be wasted. You can try them again on other ads.
Why not use software, such as ChatGPT, to help you generate hundreds of possible headlines and relevant copy for your ads? You can save time and potentially gain new ideas you wouldn’t have thought of.
2. Design
For these ads, you really do need a visually appealing, professional design that grabs attention and keeps it. Your images and animation should also be relevant to what you are promoting.
Get the design professionals in for this and let them help you create stunning visual ads that make your audience pay attention. Or you can try yourself using a free tool such as Canva.
Again, it’s the case that you have seconds to catch attention and make people read your ad, so don’t skimp on this aspect of your ad design.
3. Color
Color is incredibly important when it comes to design. Again, get your designer involved here unless you happen to know a ton about color theory and the effects it can have on audiences.
You should already have done this exercise to an extent when you set up your branding, choosing company colors and a palette of complementary colors that reflect your brand. If so, use those colors here. You want a smooth, consistent experience for anyone who interacts with your ad, where it’s obvious that the ad is in your brand colors and that the landing page is also consistent with the same look and feel.
You don’t want to jar people out of the experience and have them wondering if they’ve clicked on a fake ad or an incorrect link.
Imagine a display ad for Coca Cola. You can see that particular shade of red in your mind’s eye and the curly white lettering, because we’re all so familiar with that branding. Now imagine you click through to the landing page and the branding is blue with a completely different font. Chances are, you’d click the back button in a hurry because you wouldn’t be convinced that you’d landed on the Coca Cola site.
Don’t do that to your audience. You won’t get the conversion rates you should if you do.
When looking at color, you also want to provide a clear, color-contrasting call-to-action button that stands out on your ad so that people can’t miss it.
4. Targeting
Obviously, you’ve got to know your target audience and have your buyer personas down before you think about advertising.
You can’t choose the key demographics that make up your ideal customer for your ad if you don’t know what they are.
Go through your current buyer personas and check if they’re still up to date before you start to set up your ads.
Then, when you do, go carefully through the options and ensure you choose the right demographics and other ad options to reach your target market.
You can waste money on the wrong audience if you don’t get this right.
5. Website
When you set up your ads, you will also need to set up a specific landing page for each ad. You need everything to be consistent, from your ad message to the messaging on your landing page so that people know they’ve landed in the right place and they will find what they need.
In addition, your landing page also needs a clear call to action that tells them what will happen when they click the button so they are more likely to click it.
Not only that, but there should be nothing else on your landing pages. They should have great design and the same look, colors, and feel as your ad, but there should be no other distractions. Don’t link to any other pages on your site, don’t try and sell more than one thing at once. Simply create just one clear and compelling call to action, draw their attention to it with a good headline and great copy, and let them take that action.
If there’s too much information and too many options on your landing pages, you will confuse people and they won’t know what you want them to do. Unfortunately, confused leads tend to do nothing, so ensure you optimize your landing pages to drive more conversions.
6. Accessible
So many people now shop on their mobile phones that you’re missing out on a huge part of your target market if your ads and landing pages aren’t mobile friendly.
Don’t spend money on ads only to lose out because you haven’t ensured your ads look equally good on phones o tablets.
Check and test your ads on multiple devices so you know what your target audience is seeing and you can adjust if needed.
7. Authenticity
We’ve already talked earlier about ensuring that your ads and landing pages are consistently branded.
That’s so important. You want people to feel that your landing page is familiar when they see it because it reminds them of your ad, which reminds them of your website. This is especially important for remarketing ads when you want people to remember they’ve visited your site before.
However, it’s more than just the look of your ads and pages.
You need to use your brand voice and be consistent on messaging too, and on how you come across. It should be a seamless and authentic experience whether a customer is visiting you on social media, seeing your website, clicking your ad, or viewing your landing page.
Make your potential customer feel welcome and in the right place at every stage to build trust, particularly when aiming for new customers that haven’t bought from you yet.
8. Measure
You do get excellent analytics and plenty of data the more you run ads and it’s important that you regularly look at your analytics and find out which of your ads are performing the best and which you need to shut off.
Don’t lose money on ads that aren’t working. Keep an eye on your results.
You can also split test aspects of your ads to see what happens with a new headline or a different color on the call to action button, though only test one aspect at once or you won’t know what has made the difference.
You can keep refining and adjusting your ads and landing pages so that you can keep aiming for better and better conversion rates.
Google will also help with this as they will do their own analysis and start to show your most popular and best performing ads more and the ones that don’t work as well less. You’ll then receive this data so that you can continue to test and improve.
Attend a Surefire Local Marketing Platform demo
With Surefire Local’s business intelligence marketing software, you can manage your paid ads right from our dashboard, without needing to log into anything else. You can then get further analysis and reports to show you how your paid ads are working compared to other parts of your marketing and see how your marketing efforts are performing overall.
With our all-in-one platform, you can manage your most important online marketing activities in one place, without multiple logins or learning multiple pieces of software.
Manage your content marketing, manage and reply to reviews, send out email campaigns, jot down ideas, post to social media, and more, all within your easy-to-use dashboard.
Why not book a demo today and see how much time we can save you?