It may come to you as a surprise but despite all your marketing efforts, patients may visit your medical site but choose not to convert to your medical services. This may be frustrating due to the effort you put in your medical marketing strategies and how much you spend on them. The reason why patients click on your medical ads but dont convert by them is because they lack lead qualification.
According to a marketing study, almost two-thirds of online businesses fail to consider lead qualification when creating their marketing strategies which brings them a 30% loss in financial and sales aspects. Fortunately for doctors, it is easy to avoid this kind of loss by using patient lead qualification tactics when they create or update their medical marketing game plan.
Lead qualification is a set of conversion strategies that determine which patient prospects must be marketed to. In layman’s terms, patient lead qualification helps you save the money you lose marketing to prospects that are never going to convert into your patients. It also helps your medical business make the most out of your marketing strategies by ensuring a 100% patient conversion rate.
What Is Patient Lead Qualification?
Patient lead qualification refers to the helpful strategies you can utilize to identify which potential patients are the most likely to convert into becoming your regular patients and use your medical services. It is an integral aspect of medical marketing and acts as a foundation for supporting your major marketing strategies by optimizing their potential level.
Lead qualification helps you avoid shooting arrows in air and only focus on prospects that have a high converting potential. These strategies help your marketing assets drive qualified patient traffic to your medical site and help it by ensuring effective lead generation.
Why Is Patient Lead Qualification Important For A Medical Business?
It is the goal of every medical business to want qualified patients leads coming in from your medical marketing efforts. But in your strive to drive in patients, you may be overseeing a financial aspect of it. While you invest a big part of your medical marketing budget in running paid medical ads, you are losing your money to the patients who were never going to seek your medical services despite being marketed to.
Employing lead qualification practices also helps you save the money that would be wasted on marketing to individuals that are never going to use your medical services. To make sure that your click-through rate aligns with your patient conversion rate, you need to apply lead qualification strategies to your marketing funnel and especially on your PPC assets.
5 Easy Patient Lead Qualification Strategies For Doctors
If you are paying for thousands of clicks but are not getting an equal ratio of conversions, then you are wasting your marketing efforts and money on unqualified patient traffic. These patient lead qualification strategies help you improve your PPC potential and patient traffic conversion while saving you the money that may be otherwise lost on unqualified patient leads.
1. Being Specific In Your Medical Ad Copy
By having certain wording or keywords in your medical as copy, you can filter through patient leads that were never going to convert. By either having a specific geographic location or medical services mentioned in your medical ad copy can help you target patients who are specifically looking for those details.
This practice is best applied in a moderate amount and only on medical ads that are too vague, to begin with. If you are unsure of how to create a more targeted ad copy, this strategy works in your favor too. This can also help you target broader medical keywords without wasting money on unqualified clicks.
2. Tracking Potential Patient Behavior
When patients interact with your medical services, you can monitor their behavior on your medical site, social media platforms, and ads. By tracking their behavior, you can gain a lot of information about your patients without wasting your time and effort by guessing their preferences for a suitable medical business. This can help you narrow down qualified leads and target your marketing assets on them.
For instance, if you see them visit your pricing page on your medical site, they are already halfway converted. You can now target your most effective ad copy to that margin of patient leads to ensure that they are fully converted into becoming your regular patients. You can use this information to make certain patient lead groups, depending on how much is their conversion potential and market to them respectively.
3. Implementing Price Extensions
A lot of patient leads see your medical ads, travel to your medical site, click on your pricing page and click off. The result? A high CTR but a lost patient lead and wasted money spent on that ad for that lead. To avoid this pitfall, you can mention the pricing of your medical services in some of your ads. This strategy must also be used on specific ads that are narrowed in targeting. This also works positively in your favor for patient leads who are already looking for pricing of medical services when targeted with ads of medical businesses.
4. Optimizing Patient Lead Forms For Quality
When using Google and Facebook ads, you can customize their type settings for their lead forms to target patients who are more likely to convert. This gives you the chance to optimize your ads for lead quality instead of lead volume. By switching your optimization settings on these lead forms, you will see a more equalized ratio between your patient CTR and conversion rate. Be sure to do a beta test on these settings instead of changing all your ad copies at once to get a better understanding of this strategy.
5. Asking Relevant Questions
One of the best ways to sort out the most viable patient leads is to ask them yourself. You can use pop-up forms or surveys on your medical site and encourage visiting leads to take them to gain a better understanding of what they look for in a medical business and its services. By asking specific questions, you can analyze this data and see which leads’ answers match the most with your medical business. After sorting out the matches, you can then specifically target your medical ads to them.
Make The Most Of Your Medical Marketing Budget With Patient Lead Qualification
Patient conversion is a difficult thing to accomplish if your initial efforts are not strong enough. While having a high CTR in your metrics may make you happy, taking a look at the much lower conversion rate may diminish that joy just as quickly. To avoid wasting your marketing budget and efforts on unqualified leads, try applying lead qualification strategies. If you are qualifying the right patients, your conversion rates may start to climb up to your CTR and your medical business can prosper freely.
In the world of medical marketing, opting for a website for your medical services is the best call. However, in order to generate new leads for online medical business. Learn how to do that here.