When marketing any business, there are always new tactics and things to learn. If you haven’t heard of it before, geotargeting, or geotargeted advertising, can help your dermatology practice target and bring in more local leads than ever.
It works for single locations, service area radiuses, and multiple locations alike, so it doesn’t matter how small or how large your business is. Geotargeting can benefit you and become an important part of your local marketing mix.
But what is geotargeting, how do you make it work for you, and what do you need to be aware of? Read on for our geotargeting advertising tips for dermatologists to ensure a constant stream of targeted leads that will boost your bottom line.
What is geotargeting and how does it work?
In a nutshell, geotargeting allows you to deliver targeted ads and tailored content to your target market, based on their geographical area. If you’ve run paid ads before, you’ll know you can target certain demographics, such as ag and gender but you can go further with geotargeting and specify where your qualified leads live.
For a brick-and-mortar business that’s focused on one local area, state, or city, geotargeted ads can be a godsend. With these ads, you can focus your attention solely on the area surrounding your business and exclude any other areas so that you aren’t wasting ad spend. Even if you have a huge budget for marketing, it’s still better to spend it as effectively as possible. These paid ads allow you to narrow your focus and ensure you’re only spending your marketing dollars where they’ll actually be effective.
How does it work? Well, you can use geotargeting with Google Ads, and with some social media platforms too, such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
As usual, with your marketing, it’s important to pick the platforms where you’re more likely to find your audience. From there, you can then set up your ads and pick your options to set your geographical areas to target.
With geotargeting, you can focus your attention on just one town or one state. If you have multiple locations for your practices, you can add geotargeted ads to cover each location.
If you prefer, you can also go for radius targeting, where you set your business as the center of a specific radius so that your ads are only shown in that area. For example, you could place a radius of ten miles around your dermatology practice and market just to everyone in that area. If you know people will travel further to visit you because of your reputation and the services you offer, you could draw a bigger radius to advertise to.
These ads are entirely flexible based on the area you serve and who you want to market to.
Should you use geotargeting ads to promote your business?
We think it’s safe to say that geotargeting can definitely work for dermatology businesses. We’ve already talked about the possibilities of tighter targeting of local leads and saving marketing dollars by not advertising in areas that you don’t serve. But there’s more to geotargeting than just those advantages.
Not only can you specify which areas you want to reach, you can also serve different content to different areas and audiences to target potential leads even more closely. You could, for example, create specific geotargeted ads to promote your more expensive and exclusive services in local areas that have higher incomes.
You can also use location extensions and call extensions to bring up your address and phone number in your ads, allowing customers to make a call there and then. It’s good for you because you can target so tightly, but it’s also convenient for your customers. They don’t even need to leave the ad to get in touch with you.
According to Statista, in 2025, “the number of mobile users worldwide is projected to reach 7.49 billion.” That’s up from 7.1 billion in 2021, and it’s continuing to grow. Being able to advertise straight to just the interested people in your local area can help you build better relationships with potential leads and increase engagement.
“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.” – from Lawless Research
Super simple geotargeting best practices
While geotargeting is an excellent choice for refining your paid ads to the right locations, there are things you need to be aware of and ways to set your ads up for the best effect.
1) Target The Areas Your Business Serves
It sounds obvious to target the areas your practice serves, and it is, but with geotargeting, it is possible to set your locations as closely or as widely as you need to.
If you have dermatology clinics in every state in the US, then you’ll need to advertise to the whole of the US with some ads, while using specific local targeting around the location of each clinic. You can advertise countrywide and also create local ads focusing on the specific town each clinic is in. You can also use radius advertising via your Google Business Profile, as we said earlier, and set ads to cover so many miles outside your clinic’s area.
One other helpful trick is to change your bids depending on how far out your customers are. If they are within, for example, five miles of your clinic, you could pay less for your keyword bids at that distance and up your bids, the closer people are to your practice to ensure you attract the people most likely to attend your practice over another competing business.
You can adjust your bids, your locations, your radiuses, and more at any time if you find your ads are either not working or costing more than you’ve budgeted.
You can also experiment by seeing what areas work best for each practice you have. You might find that in certain parts of your state, you get no, or so few patients, that it’s not worth advertising in that area.
Give your ads time to work, collect your data, and keep a close eye on your results and your budget.
One other consideration is multiple locations. If you have several practices within close proximity to each other, check your locations carefully and don’t overlap them. If you’re advertising for multiple practices and your ads cross over the same locations, you’re going to be upping your own bids and competing against yourself, which, of course, is something to avoid.
Pro Tip: Be very precise when selecting your locations. For example, if you’re trying to reach potential clients in Washington State, make sure you select that one in the options and not Washington D.C., which won’t get you the results you’re looking for. Check your ads carefully before you make them live to ensure you don’t waste ad spend on the wrong locations.
2) Exclude The Locations You Don’t Serve
In addition to specifying the areas you want to target, you can also specify which areas you don’t want to advertise to. If you’re only based in Seattle, for example, you can exclude any areas that aren’t Washington State or even exclude everything other than Seattle itself. If you’re US only, you can exclude other countries. If you’re only in North America, you can exclude South America.
It really is that flexible and that precise.
You’ll probably have used negative keywords in your ads before to exclude words you don’t want people to search for and this is just the same, only for locations.
Pro Tip: If you’re trying something new with your ads or offering a new service and you’d rather your competitors aren’t following what you’re doing, you can hide your ads from them by excluding their IP address from your ads.
It’s not foolproof as anyone with the right software, such as SEMRush, will still be able to see your ads. And of course, be aware that it cuts both ways and your competitors can hide their ads from you too, but you may find you can get some competitive advantage for at least a while by using this trick.
3) Use Location Extensions and Call extensions
When setting up your ads, you can enable location extensions, call extensions, or both.
If you enable location extensions, your physical address will be listed below your ad, allowing potential clients to see exactly where you are.
Call extensions, as you might expect, will add your phone number to the ad.
Both of these options can add more convenience for potential leads as it’s easy to contact you without searching any further. However, bear in mind that both of them alter your ad’s appearance to include extra information, and you may not want the design to be altered.
Again, with this, try it out and see what works best for your dermatology practice.
Pro Tip: When setting up your ads with location extensions, be sure to select that you only want your ads to be shown to people present in your chosen location. If you leave it as the default, you will get people who are searching for your location on Google, and these people are far less likely to be your target market. With the default setting, you’ll be very likely to waste money and pay for clicks that don’t lead to qualified prospects.
While there may be a learning curve with geotargeting, it’s well worth trying out these types of ads to more closely focus on your promising leads in your local area.
We hope our geotargeting advertising tips for dermatologists have given you some ideas on how to manage your marketing spend better and budget effectively, while still getting great results.
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