Marketing your medical organization requires overcoming numerous hurdles. Rejected ads, suspended ad accounts, deactivated Instagram profiles, challenges with data logistics, and unfair reviews are just some obstacles that impact healthcare organizations.
How can you navigate these challenges and give your company the best chance of success?
Let’s identify ten common roadblocks and discover strategies to overcome them.
Challenge 1:
Google, Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms reject your paid ad campaigns without providing a specific reason for their decision.
Solution: Avoid mentioning guarantees in your ads as a best practice. Weigh the pros and cons of getting a LegitScript certification for your advertising campaigns. You can’t use certain medical terminology in your ads without it, but there is an alternative approach.
Google allows the following types of businesses to run ads on their platform if the company has a LegitScript certification: online pharmacies, specific recovery-oriented drug and alcohol addiction services, and CBD products. Facebook, Instagram, and Microsoft have similar rules.
Pros of a LegitScript certification:
● Some industry professionals associate a LegitScript certification with credibility and trustworthiness.
● The certification can provide a competitive advantage if your competitors struggle with ad rejections because they do not have a LegitScript certification.
Cons of a LegitScript certification:
● The initial application fee can range between $535 and $2,500 per facility. The certification process usually takes between 2 and 4 months and involves completing detailed documentation. The annual renewal fee is up to $3,000 per year for each facility.
For online pharmacies, drug recovery companies, alcohol addiction services, and CBD organizations, a LegitScript certification is often seen as advantageous.
For companies who find the certification expense unappealing or cost-prohibitive, the alternative approach is to create ads emphasizing the benefits of working with your company without mentioning certain medical terminology that could prompt the system to reject your ad.
Challenge 2:
Google, Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms shut down your entire ad account.
Solution: If that happens, start a new ad account, re-create your highest-performing ads, and avoid publishing ads the platform previously rejected. Connect with a Facebook representative to establish a line of communication with them in the event that Facebook takes down your ad account again. It is helpful to have a point of contact at Facebook that you can email or schedule a call with if you need timely assistance. A representative can escalate support tickets to higher-tier teams within Facebook.
Challenge 3:
Instagram suspended your profile because one of your staff members posted a risque before and after picture of a patient. One of my clients had their Instagram account suspended 7 times in 6 weeks because of this issue.
Solution: Contact Instagram’s support team, explain the situation, and respond to the questions from the Instagram support team. Instagram has asked business owners to write a numerical code on a piece of paper and take a picture of themselves holding the piece of paper to verify the business owner’s identity. Next, Instagram asks for business documentation to verify your organization. Based on that material, Instagram decides if they will restore your account. Have your team members publish professional, appropriate material on your Instagram account instead of revealing visuals.
Challenge 4:
Your patient management system is not in sync with your email and text marketing softwares. Therefore, your newest patients are not receiving your promotional emails and text messages because they are not in your marketing systems.
Solution: Regularly import patient information into your email and text message marketing systems. Examples of those standalone marketing systems include Mailchimp, Constant Contact, SlickText, Textedly, etc. Another approach is to use a patient management system with marketing capabilities so you can perform all the promotional actions with one software.
Challenge 5:
An unfair, spammy online review lowered your average star rating on Google.
Solution: Respond professionally to the negative review. Ask your patients for reviews on Google to bury the negative review with positive feedback. Also, respond to your positive reviews, thanking them for posting their feedback. When you respond to reviews, Google sends the reviewer an email informing them that you responded. Report any potential spam reviews to Google. Publish posts to your Google business profile describing the positive experiences and excellent results that your patients receive from your organization.
Challenge 6:
Patients try to double-dip and combine discounts for increased savings.
Solution: Include the following language in your promotions: “Cannot be combined with any promotions, discounts, or memberships.” Medical aesthetics practices often put this language in their marketing emails underneath their promotion.
Challenge 7:
One of my clients previously boosted Instagram posts from her phone. She clicked the “boost” button, chose some targeting options, and submitted the ad for review. She received some likes in exchange for the funds she paid. In short, she overpaid for underperformance.
When you boost posts on your phone, Instagram gives you a small slice of its targeting functionality to choose from. They call it a “low-barrier-to-entry advertising product.” The problem is that low-barrier-to-entry ad targeting often produces low-quality results. For example, you may spend $5 to boost your post from your phone and get 4 likes as a result. Meanwhile, advertisers using all of Instagram’s capabilities can promote a post, spend the same $5, and get between 25 – 100 likes from potential customers. One advertiser is using a small portion of Instagram’s targeting options. The other is using everything that the platform has to offer.
Solution: Avoid boosting posts from your phone. High-quality paid ad campaigns are built and optimized on a computer, not a mobile app so that you can use everything the advertising platform offers.
In addition to being expensive and ineffective, Apple charges a 30% service fee for iPhone users who boost posts on Instagram’s mobile app. Therefore, if you boost an Instagram post for $30 on the Instagram mobile app on your iPhone, your expense will be $39 ($30 to Instagram + $9 to Apple because of the 30% service charge) before applicable taxes.
Challenge 8:
If a healthcare organization decides to stop working with a marketing agency or freelancer, sometimes the marketing agency or freelancer can become vengeful and hold their clients’ websites and mobile apps hostage or delete them altogether. For example, a senior care company stopped using their web design agency on a Friday. On Monday morning, the website that the senior care company paid for was deleted without notice. The senior care company worked with me to re-create their website on an accelerated timeline using a different design software.
Solution: Confirm that you own your website’s domain name, hosting account, and design software. Your marketing agency or web design freelancer should not be listed as the owner of your website or mobile app. You should have the highest level of access, also known as admin or super admin access, to your website’s domain name information, hosting account, and design software.
Challenge 9:
When you build an Instagram or Facebook ad campaign on a computer, Facebook does not set an end date for the campaign by default. Campaigns for temporary topics, like in-person events or seasonal specials, need an end date. I have seen healthcare organizations unknowingly continue to run ads for their in-person event that already took place because their marketing agency did not set an end date for their campaign.
Solution: Set an end date for ad campaigns promoting your seasonal specials and in-person events, so you don’t continue to promote an event that has already taken place or a special that is no longer available. For example, if the annual Patient Appreciation Event at your office starts at 8 p.m. on a Thursday, consider scheduling its ad campaign to end a few hours before the event’s start time or the night before.
Challenge 10:
Because of staff changes, form submissions from potential customers can fall through the cracks. For example, for months, potential customers completed a “contact us” form on a website for an eye doctor based in Upstate New York. The problem is that the email notifications for those form submissions went to the email account of a staff member who left 4 months earlier, and no one was monitoring their email account.
Solution: Regularly test the forms on your website to confirm that your form submissions go to active email addresses used by current staff members.
Bringing it all together:
These are common challenges that health organizations face due to the sensitivity of health information, staff changes, and the logistics of data management and web design. Now you have the solutions to overcome them.
Safeguard your organization against unscrupulous agencies, test the forms on your website, craft high-performing ad campaigns on a computer instead of a mobile device, and prevent your patients from combining multiple discounts. When patients double-dip discounts, some companies refer to that as “death by discounts” for a business, and now you know how to avoid it.
Start implementing these tactics, tracking your progress regularly, and adjusting the strategies as needed. Adaptability and agility are critical ingredients for success in a competitive medical marketing environment. Continue measuring, refining, and strengthening your marketing strategies to achieve sustainable growth.
Hi, I'm Michael Guberti, a digital marketing strategist and freelance writer whose campaigns have generated $90 million in lifetime revenue for clients. As a speaker at major industry events like the annual ISPAN conference and the Vegas Cosmetic Surgery Conference, as well as the winner of the Best Marketing Campaign of the Year Award, and the Sweetwater Clifton City Spirit Award from the New York Knicks, I am passionate about results-driven marketing.
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