Being a leading local marketing firm we are often asked the question as to which local marketing tactics our clients should use to drive leads and appointment requests to their physician practice, dentist practice, ophthalmology practice, home care company or home improvement company.
The answer varies depending on a few things related to goals, budgets, and assets you currently have.
I Need Leads Now & I Can Not Wait
Tactic #1: Pay Per Click Marketing
In this event, local pay-per-click marketing is the most obvious choice. This tactic can bring traffic and leads to your business almost immediately To execute this simply setup a landing page that has information as to why someone should become your customer, have a strong call to action to schedule an appointment via phone and web form, and have no or next to no navigation on the landing page. This will keep your conversion rate, also known as the number of appointment requests per website visitor, higher than if you simply directed traffic to a page on your website. Then you can go into Google AdWords and Bing Ads and setup your campaigns. Once you activate your campaigns the traffic will start coming almost immediately. The downside with this tactic is that you must have the budget to pay for the traffic to your website. Yet, if your campaign is run well and uses local marketing best practices these campaigns should be very profitable for you.
Tactic #2: Email Marketing & Marketing Automation
If you have the email addresses of potential, current and past customers / patients simply emailing them once per month with good content that is useful to them and then having strong calls to action within the email to schedule an appointment can result in immediate and low-cost leads and appointment requests. Your email recipients should also be happy because you are emailing them great free content that they find useful. We also recommend that you use email specific landing pages that are responsive to desktop and various mobile devices as well as use responsive HTML email messages. This is usually the highest form
I Want To Maximize My Market Opportunity
Tactic #3: Search Engine Optimization & Social Media
Search Engine Optimization & Social Media are incredibly high ROI forms of local marketing yet they take 3 to 6 months of work before you see any results as it takes time to build authority up with search engines like Google. Yet, 70% of search traffic in Google comes from organic results. In addition, if you want to dominate the search engine results you will need the social sharing and the power of content marketing through social media to get you those high organic rankings.
This is a a summary of the most commonly used forms of digital local marketing and their advantages and disadvantages. For more ideas review the free local marketing strategies on Choice Local’s resource page or request a free local marketing strategy.
