The 5-Step System We Use to Get Healthcare Clients 5x More Leads

There's one industry where your ads get rejected by Google, your audience doesn't trust anything they read online and a few bad reviews can end your business. Healthcare. If you're not in healthcare marketing, be grateful. If you are, the bad news is it's only getting harder. Take the UK. The UK digital health market is growing 12% yearonear, which means more competitors means more budget going into digital marketing to compete for the same patients and health care professionals. But here's what's interesting. We've been working with healthcare clients at our agency, Exposure Ninja, for years now. In fact, it's one of the industries that we've had the most success with. And despite this being such a challenging industry to market, we've had some fantastic results for our clients, particularly those using the framework that we're going to talk about today. It's a five-part system that we've used across a range of clients from small individual clinics to large multi-billion dollar global healthcare brands. We're going to go through each of the five steps of this system and show you what happened. And by the way, if you don't work in healthcare marketing, stay tuned because each of these tactics also works in any competitive service industry. Okay, the five areas vi vital. V stands for visibility and in healthcare, this is usually primarily on Google. Google is the number one place that people search for healthcare information online. 56% of people according to this McKenzie study search Google for healthcare information. When one of our healthcare clients came to us, they were generating only 60 leads per month from their website. But we completely rebuilt their SEO foundation. We optimized the website. We fixed a lot of keyword cannibalization where they had multiple pages fighting each other to rank for certain keywords. We sorted all of that out. We rebuilt their internal link structure. We refreshed and improved the pages on their service pages. and we included more prominent calls to action on those service pages as well. This took them from 60 leads per month to 300 leads per month and they only spent 4% of their total marketing budget on the SEO piece. We also worked with a private hospital chain to 10x their leads. Again, by working on an SEO foundation to improve the visibility of their website. Of course, it's not enough to just get visibility on Google. You also need to make sure you're turning those visitors into conversions. with conversion rate optimization. And here's where a lot of healthcare brands really struggle. Let's take a look at an example. So, here we are on the Ber website. Ber is a private health care company in the UK. They've got a few different target audiences. Of course, they want individuals like you and I to sign up for health insurance. They also want to sign up businesses for health insurance and they want to attract health care professionals to join ber so that they can deliver the consultations which we get when we're a healthcare member. Of course, the marketing and the conversion rate optimization on the individual side of things is really good. Look, here I'm on the homepage. Get an insurance quote, get your health assessment options, find the health care that you need. It's already consumerf facing. It's great. There's information, loads of CTAs, loads of buttons. Happy days. But like many health care businesses, for their secondary and tertiary audiences, the calls to action are terrible. Here we are on the page targeting consultants. So bear in mind this is a page to get people signed up to be the consultants for Ber. It's a really important page. But where are the calls to action? Well, there's one here, but it's not actually to get them signed up as a consultant. It's just to get them to take on Ber health insurance. You've got these boxes here, but they're written in Ber's language, not your language. So you might not understand what any of this stuff means. There is a CTA just in case you happen to want to practice at one specific hospital in London. And then there's this with no links whatsoever. When we do finally get to a CTA, again, it's not the primary goal of this page. It's trying to sell these consultants booper insurance. Finally, we get a phone number and an email, but no instruction. They're not trying to filter these leads first. So, there's going to be people on the other end of this sorting through all sorts of spam, all sorts of irrelevant stuff because none of the contacts are being pre-qualified by a form with specific fields. And this is fairly common across lots of healthcare. You'll often see a page of really good information and the only call to action is the direct contact details of some health care professional who is now getting obliterated with spam emails and people who are totally unqualified. So that highly paid person who should be heavily utilized on billable work spends all their time digging through mountains of trash in their email inbox just because nobody has conversion optimized the website with a form that has nice qualification fields in it. But anyway, so visibility in search is really important as is conversion rate optimization. That was the V. This is the I for intent targeting with pay-per-click. Paperclick particularly on Google ads is one of the primary ways of getting people at the bottom of the funnel, i.e. ready to take an action. And one of the reasons for that is that Google makes so much money from healthcare related searches. It often displays Google ads in healthcare related searches really prominently and that gives those ads one of the highest click-through rates across all industries at around 3.2%. But Google ads for healthcare can also be a minefield. All of that competition and the high average order value of a lot of health care purchases mean that cost per click can be really high. We've worked with lots of businesses who've come to us with their previous campaigns spending vast amounts of money and getting very little return for that money. So, you've got to be careful. And of course, don't just hand over your credit card to Google and say, "Get me leads." And one of the reasons that healthcare can be a bit of a pay-per-click nightmare is that patients and consumers often don't really know what they're searching for. I might know that I've got a condition, but I might not know what the name of the treatment is. Saying my ears are blocked. I might go on to Google and just type in ears blocked. Now ears blocked strictly speaking is anformational search term. Look, Semrush has categorized it as informational. It shows a 0 cost per click, meaning advertisers aren't willing to spend very much money on this search. If we have a look at the content that's ranking, we'll understand that this is indeed anformational search. We've got this AI overview at the top. So, Google has also decided that the thing people want as a result of this is information about blocked ears. We do have some ads. We're going to come back to those in a second. But the content that's ranking organically is also informational in nature. Even when it's businesses that have something to sell in this space, it's theformational pages on those websites that are typically ranking, not the service pages. And then of course, we've got all the Reddit stuff. We've got the videos again showing that Google considers this to be anformational search. So you might say, well, what are these advertisers doing then? Running ads on anformational search term. Well, the reality is they're actually copying Exposure Ninja. See, we're working with an aiology clinic client. This client sells hearing aids and private hearing aids can cost around £2,000. So, there's a reasonable average order value. When they came to us, they were running ads for hearing aids and aiology clinics. Phrases like that that were really high competition. They were going up against huge brands that had vast budgets and their agencies had probably convinced them to stop tracking results. So, they were spending vast amounts of money. And try as we might, we just couldn't make the numbers work for our client. But we got talking to the client and we learned that they would often get patients coming into their clinic complaining of blocked ears. When they clear that person's ears and then run a hearing test, they would sometimes discover that actually that person didn't just have blocked ears, they had the early stages of hearing loss. Some of those people would then turn into hearing aid customers. So we ran a campaign againstformational search terms like ears blocked. Now, at the time, not many people were advertising on these phrases. So, whilst they're still fairly cheap today, they were really cheap back then. We'd get those patients to come into the clinic to get their ears cleaned. And the amazing team in the clinic would then turn some of those people into customers for hearing aids. The end result of all of this is when this business came to us originally, they were paying about £60 per lead, but we got them to around £21 per lead. This model proved incredibly scalable and they grew from one clinic to six clinics in a relatively short space of time because they knew they could just copy this strategy into each new territory that they wanted to target knowing they'd be able to get leads a lot cheaper than their competitors and start filling up that clinic very early. Of course, there are times where you should be willing to spend whatever it costs to get traffic to your website. We worked with a very large multi-billion dollar in fact more than $20 billion a year global healthcare manufacturer and they're selling incredibly expensive machines. Some of them cost six or even seven figures. So for a business like that spending a lot of money per click actually totally makes sense because very few people are actually searching to buy a CT scanner every month and those who are you kind of want them to get on your website. VIT stands for trust building content. 75% of people engage with medical content at least once per week. But trust is a huge issue. Of the 60% of people that have watched healthcare related videos, only 40% of them trust what they're seeing. And actually, that's fair enough because 30 to 40% of posts about some of these healthcare topics shared on social media contain misinformation. Now, one of the goats of high trust medical content is Mayo Clinic. And if you're in a business, whether healthcare or not, that needs to build trust with your audience, there's a lot to love about this type of content. Here we are on a page about B cell lymphoma. Now, the structure of this content is pretty good. It's actually well optimized for AI search visibility as well. We've got summary at the top here. We've got information about the different types. You can click through and go into more detail about any of these. We've got symptoms. We've got advice on when to see a doctor with a call to action perfectly placed. We've got information about who wrote it. They could have made this a little bit better by including specific names and qualifications, but we've got information about the people on the Mayo Clinic staff. So, we've got a bit of reassurance here that everyone does have their qualifications. And then we also importantly have down here a list of the references as well. So, this is wellressearched content written by experts including the references with links through to further information and calls to action is pretty good. They also publish thought leadership content for their medical professionals. For example, here's the stuff in pediatrics. And a lot of these articles will also have videos in there as well. One example where it has a video, which is just a really nice engaging way to consume this type of information. One of the challenges a lot of healthcare brands have though is okay, we know we need to produce content that needs to build trust, but what do we actually produce stuff around? Well, the best advice here is to actually listen to your customers, clients, and patients. One of the things that we'll often do is arrange calls or meetings with the sales team to understand the types of questions they're getting from their patients or customers so that we can translate this into content. There's also plenty of research that you can do on the likes of Reddit and Kora. See the questions that people are asking and produce content that matches those topics. Don't forget classic Google EAT. That's expertise, experience, authoritiveness, and trust. Experience piece is really key. If you can integrate particular case studies or examples into your content, that's going to give it an advantage over the sort of generic stuff that people get in chat GBT. If you're talking about inflammatory bowel disease and you're talking about specific examples and how you treated certain patients, that gives you a lot more credibility than just a generic article or even chat GBT zone output. Of course, ideally all of your content would have a call to action, a sensible, logical next step. So for example, this page about pediatrics, about IBD, there should be some sort of link for medical professionals to take the next step with Mayo Clinic, whatever that might be. But there we go. Of course, if you actually want to generate leads and sales from your content, then ideally you would have a call to action on that page allowing people to take a next step. So on this page on the Mayo Clinic, for example, yes, they've got a video, yes, it's got a transcript, but what's the next step that people should take if they're a medical professional and they're interested in working with the Mayo Clinic? I guess this is where you have to decide whether this comes out of your charity budget or your marketing budget. VITA stands for AI search visibility. It's no secret that we are talking to ChatGpt about our healthcare. In fact, according to this study, one in six adults say they use AI tools like ChatGBT at least once a month to discuss their healthcare. Interestingly, for under 30s, this grows to 25%. Little anecdote for you. My wife Kate's mom and her aunties just recently learned that ChatGBT knows about things other than health. Yes, they thought it was just a health tool cuz that's all they talk to it about. But it's not hard to understand why we're turning to AI tools to discuss our health because the answers we can get are much more customized, much more bespoke. We can add in additional information about symptoms or link into other systems. And of course, they've got access to memory, so they can piece together other parts of their conversations with us to help us diagnose what could go wrong. Let's take a look at an example. Let's say that we're searching for private ADHD assessment in London. Look at the search results page. We've got these ads up here, but are they ads? We don't really know. This one says sponsored, but none of these say sponsored. So, what's an ad? What isn't an ad? Then we got the Google map here. For some reason, really zoomed out. I can see a bit of France. Then we've got what I guess would be organic results. Then we got Oh, more ads. organic results people also asked. It's a lot and you've got to dig through and find the right stuff for you. Contrast that with the experience on perplexity where you search for this. It gives you three results a much more detailed answer and then you can follow up and ask additional questions if you want to. So [music] the name of the game is making sure you're being found in this answer. If people having long conversations with chat GBT about their health, chat GBT is not actually going to be able to solve it for them. Eventually, they're going to have to go and see someone or interact with some sort of business to get a resolution. And at that point, are they finding you? We've covered in recent videos about how to improve your visibility in AI search. So, I'm not going to go through this in loads of detail, but one of the mistakes a lot of healthcare brands make with AI search optimization is they think of it as a single thing, right? We're going to increase our visibility in all AI search. But actually, each AI search platform operates slightly differently. And in particular, they tend to pull from or site different types of websites. Here's unitedhealthcarec.com. You can see their visibility is very different on different types of platforms. AI overviews as an example, they've got visibility in the '9s because AI overviews often takes from the organic search results quite as is whereas their visibility in something like chat GBT is much lower and has been dropping. chat GBT of course pulling from a different type of website typically to produce this answer. All of this means that if you want to improve your visibility in AI search, you actually need an AI search strategy. It's one of the things that we do with our clients here at Exposure Ninja, by the way. And if you want help with your AI search visibility, you can contact us for a free digital marketing review. We'll analyze your visibility in lots of different AI search platforms as well as on traditional search and paid search as well. And we'll map you out a prioritized action plan that you can follow over the next 6 to 12 months to increase your visibility and the leads and the lead quality that you're generating from your digital marketing. This service is free, but it's not available to everyone. So, you do need to apply for it at exposuringinja.com/re. So, if you're interested in working with Exposure Ninja and you want to see what we would do with your digital marketing, head over to exposioninja.com/re. And if you're really keen, we do actually have a separate AI search strategy offering where we can focus entirely on your visibility in AI search and show you exactly what you need to do to improve your visibility in the platforms that are most being used by your audience. Bit T is for life cycle nurturing. This is primarily through email and SMS in the world of healthcare. Email marketing is one of the highest return on investment marketing channels you can use. Not least because sending email is actually free. Interestingly, medical, dental, and healthcare has one of the highest click to open rates in the industry at 7.31% according to Mailorite. And in a sector where trust, clarity, and relationship can be really important to build enough trust for someone to convert, email is a great channel because it allows you to have continued exposure to your audience. To give an example of one of our healthcare clients where we've worked on the email side of things, they were picking up a lot of generic email subscribers via their blog and via the different pages on their website. They were then just sending out fairly generic emails to this whole list, but it wasn't really doing particularly well for them. So what we did is we identified the different segments that made up this audience and we identified around 10 different segments. For example, some of these people were ready to buy now. Some of them were looking for the future. And if they were looking to buy now, they wanted a much faster email frequency than people who are maybe looking for a few years time. So we built different email sequences for each of these different segments that match the speed that they were going to be making their decisions at. Some of these streams had bi-weekly, others had weekly emails. It had to be tailored to how much information that person wanted about the business because you don't want to overwhelm people, but you also don't want to stand off so much that they forget about you and go somewhere else. Now, we got them an 8% click-through rate, which is huge. And we increased their revenue from email by 127%. With much of this coming from those automations, which remember once those automations are set up, you can forget about them. They just keep going. Of course, one of the main benefits of email marketing is review collection. And in medical, review collection is such a challenge. Look at this article from medical economics. Patients trust online reviews, but they don't leave them. And this is true for so many industries. So, what do you do? Well, either you can get your health care professionals to ask people while they're in the clinic to leave a review, which is awkward, and that, let's be honest, they're just not going to do it. Or you can set up automations which will follow up with people after the appointment, inviting them to leave a review and giving them a really clear, easy to use link. You can do this by SMS, you can do this by email. We typically find when we're working with clients, the key is volume. The key is to automate this so you can be asking as many people for reviews as possible. You can test the gap between the appointment and the review request to get the highest conversion rate. But really, this stuff needs to be on autopilot because even if you only get a 1% response rate, if you're sending out hundreds of thousands of emails per month to people who are able to leave a review, you're going to build up a formidable review profile. That's going to help you with your AI visibility, but it's also going to help with your click-through rate from search if people can see your reviews in the search results and your conversion rate when they land on your website and they see all of these amazing reviews. So, there you have it. visibility through SEO, intent targeting through PPC, trust building content, AI search domination, and life cycle nurturing via email marketing. That's how to market in one of the most difficult to market industries. And if you're a business that relies on trust, that model could work very well for you. If you're interested in improving your brand's visibility and search, check out this video here. And of course, if you want help with your digital marketing, request a free digital marketing review from the team at exposioninja. Just go to exposioninja.com/re.