Some Awesome Medical Marketing

Speaking about marketing and in general online marketing, there are many objectives and production items to observe in detail. Of course the vast amount of marketing data gathered together by so many marketers has to be processed first (data-digestion).

Online Medical Marketing today - What we already now

If we take one piece of the pie (the Marketing on the Medical and Health sector alone). We find that Almost every Medical facility, Cosmetic Institute, Doctor Praxis, Surgeons, etc is putting heavy financial efforts in increasing their marketing exposure online. The Marketing budget for the Health & Medical sector has multiplied many times the investment budget over the last 4 years (since 2010).

We take a more detailed look at the Plastic Surgery Market, where plastic surgeons and cosmetic clinics are the clients.

Generally a cosmetic surgeon uses advertisements channels like (Google Adwords). Adwords represents the quick access to exposure which can translate into customers (also known as leads - see lead generation for more). Surgeons need visitors to their sites, and the ways to obtain those visitors are either online or offline. Online channels are : direct traffic, ad exposure, organic search results, ads in third party sites, links from other sites.

A professional Marketing company will offer physicians of plastic surgeries, opportunities to track their visitors and even track visitors that are generated and make phone contact. In the past it was almost impossible to track back if a visitor that made a phone call, came actually after visiting the site, or by referral of another patient, by a newspaper ad, or any other online or offline lead channel. Nowadays it is possible to track if the one who calls actually visited the site, and even from what ad he converted into a potential lead and customer.

The Profile of a Plastic Surgery Lead (the potential patient)

We have analyzed thousands of visitor profiles, including their location based on ip ranges, ages, gender, avg time on site, pages visited, response to a call to action, and some other 30 factors and variables. This experiment was done over a period of 6 months on the website (www.smartlipo.com/). The visitor profiles are protected anonymously for a respect to the privacy agreement that is featured on the site.

On a first look, the visitors on average responded well to the business marketing strategy built around the whole marketing frame of the company. 60 % of the visitors landed on the home page, the remaining 40% entered the site through internal pages. Of this 60% of the visits 17% filled out the contact form, this means that the raw visitor converted into a lead. 17% is a high conversion rate for any medical and plastic surgery related website. The average of the medical market lies just between 7 to 11%.

Visitors also stayed for an average of 2:30 minutes on the site. This is relatively low compared to specific doctor sites. Since smartlipo.com is a directory of liposuction specialists, here the time on site highly depends on where the visitor comes from and if he or she quickly finds a doctor in his/her area. A surgeon site is target for a local market (aka local search – local listing) in Google. The visitors are already determined by either the local exposure in google (google will only list Chicago surgeons for people searching from Chicago, or just Atlanta surgeons will be shown in the local listings for people who search from nearby cities in that region in Georgia).

The Conclusions - Who is my Patient?

A Web Marketing company is responsible in a very mayor part for the success of a medical company in the case we analyzed (smartlipo.com) for a group of plastic surgeons. The budget levels are of course higher in this niche, since the bidding values for ads for plastic surgery procedures. The national average bidding for liposuction or laser liposuction ranges between 7 to 15 USD per click. Plastic physicians can expect to spend an avg of 6K a month to have 50 to 70 visitors a day. For many other sectors this might look like a high number. But for a plastic surgeon that does 3 to 4 surgeries a week for not less than 20 to 30k, this is almost the value of a single procedure. A single patient will pay for all marketing expenses of a month.

The success is in tracking, tracking and tracking visitor data, who is the visitor (women, men)? What ages? What do they want on the site? What Information before the consultation are they looking to get answered?

Understand your visitor and you will know how your patients are.