Running and managing a digital advertising program for your dermatology practice is no easy feat. After all, your expertise lies in helping patients and medical backgrounds, not PPC advertising and digital marketing strategy. But in order to effectively market against competitors and bring new patients into your place of business, PPC is a necessary part of your overall marketing strategy.
If you feel confused by PPC advertising, don’t worry. This guide will give you not only PPC advertising tips for dermatologists, but will also help you grasp the important trends in PPC advertising and explain the benefits that digital advertising can bring to your business.
Advertising Trends and Insights
As digital marketing evolves, so do the trends and insights of digital advertising, including PPC, or pay-per-click, ads.
What is PPC?
PPC is a digital advertising strategy in which a brand creates and distributes a digital ad and pays each time the ad is clicked on. This means that the ad placement itself is free and companies only pay by the click. The best example of PPC ads display at the top of on Google search results and are great for helping strengthen your online presence and driving more conversions.
Meeting Customers Along the Journey
A great PPC strategy involves more than just showing up for relevant searches—it also needs to be the right message at the right time.
Your customers and leads are all moving towards a purchase decision on a path called the buyer’s journey. This starts from first realizing a problem has arisen and moves onto interest in solutions, research, and ultimately purchasing. After purchase, you then have the job of creating a positive experience that brings your customer back for more.
Digital advertising needs to meet the needs of your prospects at the stage they are in. For example, if a prospect is just starting to wonder if they have a skin condition, you wouldn’t want the first ad they see from your business to be a push to call in and set an appointment immediately—it’s too early for a prospect to know if your business is the option they want to go with. A better advertisement would be a link to a landing page for a guide on common skin ailments or the types of services offered by dermatologists.
Standing Out from the Crowd
Online prospects can see up to 5,000 digital ads per day. That means that unless you have a message that resonates with your audience, your PPC ad is likely to go unclicked. While the amount of exposure to digital ads that the average person has can seem like a hurdle, it also offers plentiful opportunities for you to reach target audiences.
Digital Advertising Options
Digital advertising is an ever-evolving landscape, and there are many different ways to go about developing your PPC advertising strategy. Before getting into PPC advertising tips for dermatologists, however, it’s important to understand the types of platforms you can use for digital advertising and the benefits that a digital advertising strategy will bring to your business.
Platforms
There are many platforms on which to display your digital ads, but they can usually be divided into three main categories: search, social, and display.
Search Ads
Search advertising is commonly summarized as Google Ads, but there’s a bit more complexity than that. Google advertising works in two ways: search and display. Search advertising helps you target specific keywords and search queries that you want to have your ads display for, and this can happen on both Google and Microsoft. A well-rounded PPC strategy will have you investing in both platforms.
Social
Social advertising is great for helping you reach audiences and groups of targets rather than search terms. Virtually all social media platforms offer advertising services, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and TikTok. Understanding which social platforms your audience frequents is essential to understand where your money will be best spent.
Display
Display advertising uses visual elements like graphics, videos, or audio to help convey your messages and is typically found on Google or YouTube. Display advertising is great at creating brand awareness and creating cost-effective conversions.
Benefits
Compared to traditional advertising, digital advertising can save your business money and bring in more leads. Traditional advertising like billboards, commercials, and radio ads have high costs and inconsistent ROI. Let’s take a look at some of the major benefits that digital advertising can bring to your dermatology practice.
Gain More Leads
Digital advertising can get your ads in front of more audiences and create clear paths to conversion. When you put your brand name out in PPC ads, you can stand away from the competition and bring in more leads.
Increase Brand Awareness
A digital ad strategy will help people in your area and community understand your brand, message, and values. You can create positive associations with your brand name and build a clear understanding of your services and offerings.
Target Specific Audiences with Granular Messaging
Digital advertising can get you in front of the audiences and leads that you want to target—not just everyone driving by on the highway. This allows you to create specific campaigns and target messages that drive more leads to your website and services.
Easily Track and Adapt Your Campaigns
Digital advertising allows you to closely monitor the results of your advertisements and make adjustments as needed during the run of your ads. Rather than traditional advertising, which doesn’t allow for optimization along the way, digital advertising helps you easily pivot and adapt your campaigns to increase sales.
Strategies and Top Tips for Dermatologists
Now that we understand the trends, platforms, and benefits of digital advertising, let’s dive into some specific PPC advertising tips for dermatologists to help you craft a strategy that drives awareness and sales in your business.
1. Set Goals
The beginning stage of every PPC advertising strategy is setting goals. Without a goal in mind, you won’t know if your campaigns are successful and will be guessing whether or not you’ve achieved your objectives. Examples of goals include:
- Generate X new patients
- Drive % of offline or online sales
- Increase brand awareness
- Re-engage inactive patients
- Increase web page traffic by %
2. Targeting
After you’ve created the goals you want to set in place for your PPC campaign, it’s time to determine the audience you want to target. PPC advertising allows you to dive into the details and demographics of your target audiences to narrowly select the people you want to convert.
A great practice for targeting is to create or revise your ideal customer profiles. This allows you to create specific demographic targets that you want to focus on during your PPC campaign. Details can include concrete things like age, income, education, location, and job roles, along with more elusive details about needs, motivations, goals, responsibilities, and interests.
3. Messaging
The right message will meet people where they are on the buyer’s journey and help them move along the path towards a purchase decision. Reaching the right person at the right time in the right place is always the best philosophy to take when approaching messaging in your PPC ads. Alternatively, the wrong message can send your prospects packing.
4. Tracking Performance
PPC advertising gives you an incredible opportunity to track performance in real-time through different reporting tools and metrics. Most advertising platforms have built-in tools to help you understand the impact your advertising is having on viewers and help you visualize the path your prospects are taking—as well as show you any gaps you might have in your strategy.
5. Optimizing
In addition to tracking and reporting tools, digital advertising platforms allow you to edit and optimize your ad campaigns as they are running. For example, if you notice one ad is receiving more clicks than another ad, you can edit your less successful ad to change the messaging or target different keywords to increase your chances for sales and revenue.
6. Expanding
PPC advertising can start small and increase and expand to include multiple channels and platforms. If you don’t want to commit to a multi-channel digital advertising strategy from the beginning, you can slowly grow your reach and scale appropriately.
Start with search advertising to capture demand, then expand to Facebook or other social platforms to capture new patients, build your audience, and increase awareness. Then layer in display ads to remarket to patients and engage prospects.
How Surefire Local Can Help
Surefire Local is here to help your dermatology practice get to the next level through PPC advertising. We make online marketing easier and help businesses grow with a single platform where you can control all your marketing activities. For more information, contact us and start improving your online advertising today.