CASE STUDY
INDUSTRY: Orthodontics
AGENCY SERVICES: Paid Search, Remarketing, and Programmatic Advertising
What do you do when your client says they need to reduce their digital marketing budget, but still get the same results? You pivot and drive even more leads! Being a good marketer requires one to be willing to change directions, adapt, and use data to revise your plans. And that’s just what the Afflecto Media team did when our client made that call. Find out how our team was able to increase leads, drive more new patient starts, and generate more first-time callers than before despite the decreased budget. Keep reading to find out how we accomplished this task.
CLIENT
Orthodontic network in the St. Louis metro area with six offices under three different practice names.
CLIENT CHALLENGE
For nearly two years, our client had been successfully using digital marketing to increase awareness and drive leads for their orthodontic practices. However, after purchasing additional practices to grow their Dental Service Organization they needed to reallocate budgets to fund onboarding the new practices. The reallocation led to a 46% decrease in their digital marketing spend.
AGENCY OBJECTIVE
Afflecto was tasked with continuing to drive new patient leads with a reduced digital advertising budget. Spend less. Drive the same quantity – if not more – leads. Got it!
AGENCY SOLUTION
We opted to reduce awareness tactics in order to focus the majority of the budget on conversion efforts. This didn’t mean removing all awareness advertising. Supporting awareness is crucial to ensure your marketing reaches people throughout their decision-making process. And the decision-making process for dental and orthodontic decisions can take some time. So it was imperative that our client remain top of mind.
Our past social media advertising and digital display efforts had increased brand awareness for all ortho practices and resulted in an increase of 41% (on average) new website visitors. With demand and attention for these practices established, we knew that a continuity approach to brand awareness would be enough to sustain brand recognition. This allowed us to allocate more dollars to conversion tactics.
Even with these changes to the media plan, additional tweaks were necessary to ensure we reached our lead goals. We knew continuing to use Google Ads and Website Remarketing was the way to go, but how could we rethink our approach? We shifted our strategy to hone in on people who had a higher propensity to convert sooner rather than later.
A NEW SEARCH ADVERTISING STRATEGY
This meant fine tuning our Search targeting to focus only on people making a decision about ortho treatment now; and excluding those who were considering future treatment options. To do this we honed in on the top ten long-tail keywords. These type of keywords are more specific, less competitive, and attract a smaller, super relevant audience. They were the keywords that not only drive a lot of leads, but the ones that turn into new patient starts. They were not necessarily the least expensive, but they were the most effective.
If you can convert higher priced keywords more than the less expensive ones you tend to spend less overall for the same amount of – sometimes more – conversions. Or, in this case new patient starts.
We also focused on website visitors who did not make an appointment or call. Since they had demonstrated a high level of intent it was likely they’d remain interested for the foreseeable future. And convert to new patient starts faster than other groups. These people saw our remarketing ads – both digital display and video – while online. The Afflecto team as able to remarket to this audience using their excusive programmatic partner.
THE RESULT
After six months of the new digital plan being in place we were able to drive more leads with a smaller budget for all orthodontic offices. They also increased new patient starts and first-time callers. Sometimes less can be more.
The year-over-year starts for all six offices were positive with an average of 63% increase in new patients at each location.
The new plan increased calls from an average of 385 per office to 675 calls per office. Additionally, there was a 89% increase in first-time callers to all offices.
Online ‘Contact Form’ submissions from their websites increased 13% (on average) across all six offices.
Contact Afflecto
Interested in driving leads with a smaller budget? Maybe you want to fine-tune your digital marketing plan? Afflecto has extensive experience with developing strategy and running successful digital campaigns. Our experienced team would love to talk to you about your business goals. Let’s chat! Contact Afflecto Media Marketing today.