Overview
A med spa practice in the Midwest experienced flat new patient growth for 10 consecutive quarters due to over-reliance on referrals for patient acquisition.
The Problem
Demand for our client’s med spa services hadn’t decreased—but their primary source of new patient acquisition, referrals, had slowed to a crawl in recent years, fueled primarily by an aging client roster. By the time the client reached out to us, they had experienced more than 2 years with flat or declining patient growth.
What we found—and what we did next
The med spa ranked #1 organically for its own brand-related keywords, but had no active digital advertising campaigns targeting prospective new patients. They were not being found via category searches such as “botox near me” or “med spa naperville”, as they ranked below the 1st page on most of these popular search queries.
Brand awareness was the client’s issue: for those familiar with their brand, they performed very well. With everyone else, however, they were, for all intents and purposes, invisible.
We stepped in and developed an extensive nonbranded paid search campaign for the client, bidding on high-volume category keywords and developing specialty-specific landing pages for Quality Score and conversion rate optimization. We also implemented a local Connected TV ad campaign and rebuilt the client’s current paid social campaigns, targeted both contextually (to related content) and behaviorally (based on search and website visits) to fill the top of the marketing funnel.
Results
During the first 24 weeks of our digital advertising campaign, new patient volume increased significantly, up 308% over the previous 24 weeks. But maybe even more impressive were the conversion metrics: typically, when a client is driving more top of the funnel traffic to their website, conversion rates decrease. In this case, the client’s key conversions improved across the board—lead conversion was up 87%, and case acceptance rate improved 31%.
This drove the average cost of new patient acquisition down by 62%. Advertising costs remained flat: budget was reallocated from traditional advertising such as radio and billboards, but no additional budget was added.
The practice’s reviews also improved as a result of this high-impact and category advertising strategy. Reviews can be a strong ranking factor for SEO and AI-based search.
| KPI | YoY Change |
|---|---|
| New Patients | +308% |
| Lead Conversion Rate | +87% |
| Cost per Patient Acquisition | -62% |
| Case Acceptance Rate | +31% |
| Reviews | +81% |
What this means for you
Top of the funnel marketing is important, but often overlooked, by independent practices. High-impact or brand awareness initiatives help to reduce reliance on earned opportunities from sources like referrals and organic search, two great avenues that unfortunately we have little control over.
By developing new in market brand-aware audiences, referral and review opportunities increase, as does the volume of organic website visits, which is one of the highest-converting sources of traffic there are.
Download this Healthcare advertising case study
You can download this Screechy Cat Media healthcare advertising case study below. If you run a healthcare practice and are looking for ways to help improve new patient acquisition, head over to our scheduler and set up a free, no obligation consultation.
