Geotargeting might sound technical and complicated, but it honestly isn’t. It can be an extremely helpful and effective way of advertising for local businesses, including physical therapists. We promise you it’s really straightforward and it is something you can set up for your PT business and attract local clients with.
Stick with us and find out what geotargeting is and how you can use it to bring in qualified local leads with our geotargeting advertising tips for physical therapists.
What is geotargeting and how does it work?
Geotargeting, or geotargeted advertising, is a form of paid advertising that you can set up for your business on Google ads and some social media platforms, including Facebook and LinkedIn.
If you’ve already run any kind of paid ads before, you’re already on your way to taking advantage of geotargeting. You’ll know that you can choose demographics and other information, such as age, gender, education levels, and more to target your ads closely to your ideal audience. With geotargeting, all you are doing is adding location to that, which is perfect for a local physical therapy business.
You can use radius targeting where you set your practice as the center of a circle and then select the size of the radius around your practice, just like putting a pair of compasses on a map and drawing a circle around your practice. You can choose how many miles your radius covers so that you aren’t reaching too far for customers. Convenience is a big factor for many people and if they have a physical therapy clinic two streets away, they’re unlikely to travel to yours ten miles away.
When you choose your locations, pay attention to where your competitors are on the map. We’re not at all saying that you shouldn’t target their locations too, but be aware of how likely your customers are to travel to you if other physical therapists are nearer to them. Of course, you can affect the likelihood of people traveling to see you with excellent reviews and superior content, but do bear distance and your competitors in mind.
If you don’t want to use radius targeting, you can simply choose your locations depending on the area you serve. If you only serve the area around a small town, then you can specify that. If you cover the whole of New Jersey with multiple practices, then you can do ads for New Jersey and ads for counties and towns within New Jersey that your practices cover.
Geotargeting really does suit any size of business, whether you’re a solopreneur with one location or a whole chain of physical therapy practices across the US.
Should you use geotargeting to promote your physical therapy business?
Well, the short answer is yes! Most businesses don’t have an unlimited marketing budget and with geotargeting, you can narrow down your ads so they only show in the local areas that your practice covers. That way, you’re not wasting precious marketing dollars showing ads to people who will never visit you.
In addition, with geotargeting, you can serve the right ads to the right segments of your audience. You can show different content in different areas and show off your local knowledge. If you know, for example, that your nearest town has a local marathon or 10K race every year, you could place ads near the time that mention the race and talk about getting into peak fitness ready for the event. Or you could offer relief for any runners that overdid it or were injured in the race.
Geotargeting really does have so many possibilities for local brick-and-mortar businesses. And these ads are highly effective.
Lawless Research found that “9 in 10 marketers said location-based marketing had led to higher sales, with 86% saying it had helped them grow their customer base and 84% saying it had increased customer engagement.”
Super simple geotargeting best practices
Geotargeted ads are straightforward if you know what you’re doing, but they aren’t completely foolproof. Read on for our geotargeting advertising tips for physical therapists to see how to make the most of these ads and what to avoid:
1) Target the areas your business serves
You should know your customers very well, including where they live. If you need to, take a look at your buyer personas and re-familiarize yourself with your audience. Check your analytics on your website and your social media too, as you can find geographical information there to see who is looking at your pages and interacting with your content.
You can also look at your competitors and where they are. Just because your competitors serve a particular area doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use ads to target that area, as long as it’s relevant to do so and you have potential customers in that area that will travel to see you.
Decide what geographical area you serve. Then look at whether you’re better using radius targeting as we mentioned above, or whether it’s more effective to choose specific towns, areas, counties, or states. You may find that you want to do a mix of both types of ads so that radius targeting can cover a general area, while your more focused local ads use local-focused content targeted just to them.
You can choose your geographical areas on your ads dashboard when you set up your new ads and it’s simple to change this and try new things if you think another area might be more effective.
With some ads and software, you can set your bids to attract people to your door the closer they get to your practice location. If you have any offers that you know will appeal, you can pay a little more and bid higher for clicks for people near your location. You could then attract walk-ins. If your practice is set up to cope with extra patients that aren’t already on your schedule, you may be able to treat them there and then, or you can give them all the information they need, talk to them about how you can help, and send them off with an appointment for another time.
If you have multiple locations, you’ll do things slightly differently. You can still choose precise locations, such as specific towns where your practices are, but you may also want to do state-wide or countrywide ads, depending on how big your company is. You’ll tailor your content to be more local in the locally set ads and perhaps more general about your practice and what you offer in the wider area ads.
One other thing to watch out for with multiple locations is that you don’t want to choose overlapping areas for your ads. That might sound as if it could be more effective because people may well see more ads for your practices, but in reality, what will happen is that you’ll just be competing with yourself and upping the cost of your own bids.
Choose your areas carefully!
As with any type of paid ads, you’ll want to keep testing and refining, trying different keywords, images, and ad copy to see what’s most effective.
2) Exclude the locations you don’t serve
This might sound obvious but it can make a real difference to your budget – no more wasting money targeting people that will never buy.
If you’ve done paid ads before, you may well be familiar with negative keywords, where you choose keywords that you don’t want people to search for. If so, then you should find this easy as all you’re doing is specifying the areas that you don’t serve and where you don’t want to show your ads.
If your practice only serves a couple of small towns, you can exclude the rest of your state. You can exclude different areas of larger cities, specify just Louisville and exclude the rest of Kentucky, and so much more. If you don’t serve North America, you can exclude that. If you only work within the US, exclude the rest of the world. You get the idea.
What this does is protect your budget and allow you to narrow your focus.
One more trick that might give you a small advantage is to exclude your competitor’s IP addresses so they can’t see if you’re running any ads and what they are. They can get around it if they have software, such as SEMRush, but otherwise, you’ll be able to test and refine, secure in the knowledge that they don’t know what you’re up to.
3) Use location extensions and call extensions
If you set up your ads with location extensions and call extensions, your local leads can contact you or find out your address without leaving your ad.
Using a location extension will show your address at the bottom of your advert, and using a call extension adds your phone number too.
This gives your customers the ultimate in convenience. Make it easy for them. Let them contact you from your ad, without even needing to click on your website for more information.
If you do this, ensure that you select that ads should only be shown to people who live in the local area you’ve selected for your ads. The default is to allow ads to be shown to people who are looking at information about your local area, which is likely to reach people who don’t even live near you and waste some of your ad spend.
Attend a Surefire Local Marketing Platform Demo
Geotargeting is extremely useful for any local business. You’re more easily able to target specific local areas and show your ads to qualified leads.
There is a small learning curve, but you can do it, so why not give it a go?
If you’d like some help with geotargeting and with the rest of your marketing, let Surefire Local help with our powerful business intelligence marketing software.
You can manage your paid ads on our dashboard, and manage every other aspect of your marketing too. You can create content, publish it, and schedule it for your website, your social accounts, and your email marketing campaigns.
And you can easily see how every part of your marketing is performing and what results you’re getting with our accurate and precise reports and analytics.
Take the guesswork out of your marketing and request a demo of our marketing platform.