Do patients actually click on paid ads when looking for medical services? Will a paid search campaign really grow your practice?

The short answer is … Probably, but it depends.

Paid search campaigns can help you reach potential patients extremely precisely. The most important thing we always recommend the doctors we work with, is to define who is the typical patient who comes to see you in clinic.

Be extremely specific with the details, down to the point where if you told someone else they could go out on to the street and find this person.

With paid ads we have the power to define the location, demographics, interests, behaviours and even relative affluence of your desired patient.

Here are 2 examples, as to how this might be useful for you in your private practice:

1. As an orthopaedic surgeon who specialises in ACL surgery, we might set your patient audience to be ‘Men, aged 25 - 40, living in London, who like sports such as football and rugby’.
2. As a dermatologist who specialises in Acne, we might set your patient audience to be ‘Women, aged 18 - 30, living in London, who like Mac beauty products and Love Island, and have recently gone through a breakup’.

Whilst this process is extremely effective with most clinicians, this process is not prescriptive for everyone.

Just as your clinical practice varies from one specialty to another, so too do paid ads.

Speaking to a surgeon today, it transpired that the majority of their private practice referrals are not direct self-pay patients or GPs but instead other surgeons and solicitors for medico-legal work.

This means we need to completely tailor our paid ad campaign to suit this. Rather than targeting patients, we need to target these solicitors and other surgeons so as to increase the referrals coming in to the private practice.

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