Performance Marketing in Healthcare: Everything You Need to Know
How can healthcare providers be successful in the long term despite growing competition, outdated administrative processes and a lack of specialised staff? In this blog post, we explain how you can use online marketing tools to overcome these challenges.
What Is Performance Marketing?
Performance marketing is online advertising where you pay only for measurable results, such as clicks, leads or sales. This form of online marketing is used in all highly competitive sectors, as it gives you good control over placement and targeting, and can deliver fast results. This also applies to health advertising, laying a foundation for successful marketing in healthcare.
The aim of performance marketing is to direct high-quality traffic to websites or landing pages and thus achieve a positive return on investment (ROI). One example of this is 'pay-per-click' (PPC) advertising.
Pay-per-click Advertising As a Form of Performance Marketing for Clinics
Let's imagine a healthcare organisation launches a PPC campaign via Facebook, Instagram or Google to promote patient acquisition for new treatments. The campaign consists of an online advert linking to a website.
With this campaign, the healthcare provider only incurs costs if a user clicks on the ad and visits the website.
Important: if the campaign generates many clicks on the website but only a few new patients, they should reconsider their target group approach.
Paid Advertising Networks for Performance Marketing
Not all paid ad networks are created equally, so for healthcare providers, choosing the right networks for performance marketing is critical.
Most struggle to profitably attract patients through ad networks like Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads and Google Ads. We therefore recommend the following three campaigns to run efficient performance marketing in healthcare:
Services with a high profit margin: high-quality treatments with a good profit margin can be advertised well with the help of performance marketing.
Services with a high repetition rate: for healthcare services that have a high repetition rate, your healthcare ads can regularly direct patients to your own communication channels.
Services with word-of-mouth or referral potential: if new patients make a recommendation for your facility, you can afford an initial loss in acquiring these patients through adverts.
Word-of-mouth continues to be a key growth factor in healthcare and highlights the importance of providing patients with an exceptional experience. Building a strong relationship with your patients by closely accompanying them across their entire journey can lead to organic growth as they talk about their positive experiences.
How to Choose the Right Advertising Channel for Your Performance Marketing Campaign
When choosing a paid channel for medical advertising, you should consider factors such as the granularity of the target audiences, the expected costs and the effort required to make it work for your healthcare organisation.
Paid Marketing Channels At a Glance
Paid search (SEA: Search Engine Acquisition)
Paid search, especially on Google, is a powerful tool for healthcare marketing. By targeting people who are actively searching for specific treatments, you reach your desired target group much more efficiently.
Target group accuracy: keywords, location, (limited) demographic data.
Expected cost per lead: depends on the competition; usually in the medium to high range.
Expected effort: commitment to fine-tuning and optimisation with significant ad budgets.
Paid social media: Meta (Facebook & Instagram)
Medical social media marketing on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram can be used for brand awareness, retargeting and to complement other marketing efforts.
Audience accuracy: detailed user profiles, including age, gender and location.
Expected cost per lead: dependent on ad design; potentially low.
Expected effort: requires significant creative input and testing.
Display marketing (e.g. Google Display Network)
Display marketing is based on user behaviour or searched content. It introduces potential patients to your healthcare brand and creates familiarity, even if they are not actively looking for you.
Targeting accuracy: difficult in healthcare, but contextual advertising is possible.
Expected cost per lead: depends on ad design; often quite high.
Expected effort: high creative effort and significant testing budgets.
Our patient relationship solution Qunosuite offers you a wide range of functions to automate your marketing activities. In this way, we support your healthcare facility with a targeted patient approach across the entire patient journey.
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