We have always believed the best way to serve patients was to, educate the market about high quality, low price services and maintain our independent, physician-owned practice. ProScan decided in 2016 that we needed to dive in headfirst to digital marketing.
ProScan has decades of sales and marketing expertise, with a large sales team and recognize-able billboards all around town. Yet we were late to the game in digital.
So we built a best-in-class team and dove in. One year later, here’s what we learned:
1. Start with Google AdWords if you want to see results quickly.
Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat… where to start? It depends on your business. For imaging centers, patients often have an acute need and are looking for help immediately. With Google AdWords, we are able to target patients in a specific location based on the services we provide. For example, in Cincinnati, we can target patients within driving distance of any of our centers searching for MRIs, CT and mammograms. Within hours, you’ll have local patients visiting your website who need an MRI.
Example report from Google
Facebook and Twitter, for example, are better at building brand awareness. While important, it will be difficult to see the impact of your results right away.
2. Measure the ROI of your ad spend using tracking tools
While Google gets you traffic early on, it can be difficult to translate that traffic into results. Google tells you what people searched for and how many people visited your website. How do you know if the patients came in and got a scan?
To solve this we combined tracking tools with our advertising to turn site visits into scans. Our website generates unique phone numbers exclusively for Google AdWords visitors. Each call is tracked.
Using this tool, our call center staff are able to take notes on each patient and add them to our appointment booking tool. At the end of the month, we analyze the data to see how many scans were completed.
3. Using data to generate insights and improve our marketing
Unlike billboards and radio ads -- you can create lots of Google ads and web pages quickly and cheaply to iterate. As an example, our first ad said “Request an Appointment.” We quickly noticed that many patients were searching for how to save money on their scans, and were asking our staff how much our services costs.
We created a new ad and webpage that said “Request a Price Quote” and sent 30% of our traffic there. Within two weeks, it was clear the Price Quote was the winner -- resulting in 50% more calls and appointments than the original language. We’ve just scratched the surface on the experiments we can run to optimize our ad campaigns.
So a year in, what’s our biggest takeaway?
Digital marketing is indeed the future and more important than ever for our business. But it’s not set-it-and-forget -it. We saw a 2x ROI in our first year and we’ve only scratched the surface on what we can do. We can’t wait to keep building in 2018.
Are you considering investing in Digital Marketing for your imaging center? We’d love to chat with you. To learn more about how ProScan Digital can help you get started with Digital Marketing, click here!
Thanks,
Daniel
Director, ProScan Imaging
