Are you struggling to attract new customers to your business? Do you feel like your marketing efforts are falling flat in a struggling market? Google Paid Ads may be the solution you’ve been searching for. With over 3.5 billion searches per day, Google is the most popular search engine in the world, and by utilising their paid advertising platform, you can effectively reach a wider audience and drive more traffic to your website. We’ve recently seen a huge increase in the number of clinics requesting more Paid Ads, thanks to the initial success of the results they’ve experienced.
Google Paid Ads, also known as pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, Paid Search, and Google Ads is a powerful tool for businesses of all sizes to reach their target audience, and drive traffic to their website. It can help you increase brand awareness, achieve higher conversion rates, as well as track and measure results.
The Main Benefits Of PPC (Pay per Click) Ads
- You can target specific audiences based on keywords, location, demographics, and interests. This means that businesses can ensure their ads are being seen by the people who are most likely to be interested in their products or services, increasing the likelihood of conversions and sales.
- You can set a budget and only pay when someone clicks on the ad, giving you better control of your advertising spend, ensuring an optimal return on investment.
- Real-time tracking and analysis, providing you with valuable insights into how your ads are performing, and where you can make improvements.
A lot of people are already familiar with Google Ads as a paid advertising platform. Many of the clinics we speak to have, at some point, had a go at placing ads themselves. Historically though, their feedback has often been that it’s expensive and hasn’t delivered. So what’s changed? Actually, nothing.
As a market leader in the Aesthetics and Dental Marketing industries, we know just how effective PPC ads are. But what we have now also realised is that clinics who don’t feel confident in spending money on this ultra-successful advertising format, didn’t really know what they were doing when they were placing their own ads. And why should they? They aren’t marketing experts, but rather skilled medical technicians and practitioners. The magic happens when industry-specific marketing professionals connect with the practitioners who want to successfully grow their business!
The larger clinics and healthcare companies use Google Ads a lot, because when they’re run properly and managed by professionals, they can be a great source of new enquiries and customers. In this article, we’re going to draw on our experience of looking after the marketing needs of clinics for many years, to give you a number of top tips. We’re going to help you understand what it takes to put together a great Google Paid Ads campaign.
Why Social Media Isn’t Enough Any More
Social media has blown up massively in recent years, and it’s certainly not going anywhere. Instagram is the platform of choice for a lot of aesthetic clinics and dental practices that have a niche in cosmetic treatments. However, have you considered that at least half of your clients are either not going to be on social media, or not following your posts?
Obviously, from a marketing point of view, it’s important for every clinic to have active social media accounts, where you yourself are posting information and content about yourself. It’s a way to keep clients who are following you connected. But what about the ones who aren’t? Or the potential clients who haven’t yet even heard of your brand, but would love the products and services you’re offering?
Building Brand Awareness For Small Clinics Who Can’t Wait For SEO
For smaller, newer clinics, building your brand awareness is a key strategy in growing your business. You can do that by putting your efforts into building your organic SEO on Google, but that’s a slow process! It can take months, or even years, to be successful at this, costing you time and money. If the doors of your business are open, and you have expenses to pay, can you really afford to not have money coming in? So how can you get customers in the meantime?
The quickest way to boost the traffic for your website is to identify a treatment you offer, that isn’t all that competitive in your local area, and then pay for a Google Ad about it, that will immediately place you at the top of search. Eg PRP instead of Botox. This ad could even be general in nature to take advantage of people looking for a ‘clinic in Cambridge’ or a ‘dental practice in Leeds’ (or wherever your local area is.) It’s easier to get to the top of search with a less competitive treatment . But, of course, you can sell more competitive treatments locally to the same clients, once they’ve either engaged with you, or enjoyed one of your services, and then want to know more.
An added benefit of doing this is that when people click on your ad at the top of search, Google will notice and place you higher in the organic search rankings too. We have noticed a few times, when placing a Google Paid Ad for a client, that they have appeared at the top of search organically, for the treatment they are advertising, as well as at the top with their advert. This only lends more authority to you, making you appear, without a doubt, the best option to provide that particular treatment in your area.
Boosting Your Website Traffic For The Right Price
Which is the right treatment for you to advertise? The treatments that are most competitive in your area will demand the highest Google Ad prices. Other local clinics, or national businesses targeting your area, who are also placing ads for the same treatment, will drive up the price. This is because there is only space for one top spot on Google!
Identifying a treatment that is less competitive in your area, that still has demand is important. Once you know this, you can estimate how much your ad campaign is going to cost you on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. This will help you understand how much each enquiry that arises from your campaign will cost, as well as the price of each conversion. A conversion is an enquiry that turns into a client, as a result of your ad campaign. For example, if you got 10 enquiries for every £10 you spent on ads, and of those 10 enquiries, 5 turned into paying clients – the price of each new client is just £2!
Most clinicians we speak to tell us they have a very high conversion rate; often 80% or 90%. Sometimes 100%. The reason why this is so high, is because people who search for aesthetic or dental treatments in their local area on Google, are actively interested in purchasing those treatments. It’s not like social media – where a target audience might have a vague interest in your products in the future.
Competitive Locations
If your clinic is in a very competitive location, that doesn’t mean that you can’t run a successful Google ad campaign there. It just means that you perhaps have to spend a bit of time, effort, and energy in strategically looking at which ads are more cost-effective for you.
When we’re working with clients on a tighter budget, we’ll use our software to help them identify, not just treatments that will fit in the top spot on Google, but also treatments that would be the second, third, or fourth in the ad rankings, at the top of the search page. This will give you cost options. We can also help you identify search volume options; which show you how popular your are treatments at that time.
Top Tips Before You Get Started On Your Google Paid Ads Campaign
We’ve worked with many new clinics, as well as established clinics, who are new to creating successful Google Paid Ads campaigns, and over the years we have developed our process to ensure optimal results as early as possible. Here’s our top tips for before you get started on your campaign.
10 Top Tips Before Starting a PPC Company
- Make sure you have realistic budget expectations before you start. Estimate your costs.
- Stick to your location. It might be tempting to appeal to as wide an audience as possible, but it’s unlikely that someone 300 miles away, looking at your ad, is going to travel that far for a consultation!
- Vary the time and day you place your ads to discover which works best. You could also try varying the platform your ad is on.
- Look at the cost of the less competitive treatments, before you commit to your ad content.
- Vary your ad content. You might find you get a huge response to the offer of a free consultation, but few people have responded to the symptoms you’re detailing.
- If you’re going to use Google Performance Max campaigns (where you instruct Google to handle your ads for you) make sure you do your research first, to ensure you give clear direction. Although it provides limited access, you need little knowledge, and ad management capabilities to reach new customers over several platforms (YouTube, Gmail, Search) with just with 1 campaign.
- If you’re just starting out, avoid promoting the big, popular, expensive treatments such as injectables
- Don’t leave your landing page to chance, or treat it as an afterthought. It can be an existing treatment page on your website, or a page created specifically for the ad, but it needs to be relevant to the ad, and so compelling that it does the selling for you. Plus, have a clear call to action. Before and after photos are often persuasive, in our experience.
- Don’t give up – A lot of clients have a bad first time with Google Ads – but often your campaign is not being run in the right way. If you’re not getting great results, ask an industry marketing specialist for advice. It’s also worth bearing in mind that as an ad campaign matures, it becomes more efficient, often delivering better results.
- Track the results of your PPC (pay only when you click) ads. When we look at results for our clients, after weeks and months, we can tell which ads are getting the best response. It helps us understand the tweaks we need to make in order to maximise ad performance. And it helps us understand why clients love the clinic they’ve chosen over others.
Getting The Most Out of Your Ad Agency
If you’re using an ad agency, who are delivering ad result data to you, make sure you talk to them about the quality of the leads you’re getting. Of your 50-100 enquiries per month, how many of them are converting? If that number is low, could it be that your enquiries are being driven by spam, bots, competitors, or brand haters; none of whom are going to turn into clients, and all of whom are wasting your time and money. If you’re a victim of lots of meaningless enquiries, it will naturally put you off using Google Paid Ads. This is a shame, because in the right hands, it’s such a powerful tool for gaining new clients.
It’s also well worth your time finding out how your agency operates. Are calls about your ads being picked up and answered efficiently? Are email enquiries getting answered quickly? One of the things that we’re seeing a lot of at the moment, in the current market place, is that people are making enquiries, but when the clinics are trying to call them back, they’re not picking up, or responding to emails.
This, of course, can be very frustrating but essentially comes down to the quality of leads your ad is producing. If your ad agency is getting high quality leads for you, you stand the best possible chance of converting. Your choice of ad agency, is as important as your choice of ad content!
If you are looking to blow some fresh energy into your digital marketing campaigns then do give our team a call. We’ll be more than happy to listen to your goals, needs, and preferences, in order to suggest the right sort of campaign and strategy for you. We have a range of different Google Ad packages to suit various budgets, starting from as little as £249 for one treatment campaign.
