With over 70 clinics nationwide, urgent care management and consulting group Premier Health relies on Gatorworks for tactical digital marketing strategies to grow their patient acquisition.
The Client
As a physician-owned and physician-driven company, Premier Health has a wealth of experience in the nation’s top healthcare systems and hospitals. In partnering with them, Premier Health has helped launch and operate their urgent care clinics across the company, providing management, consulting, and joint venture services ranging from financials, HR, clinical operations, compliance, market analysis, marketing and advertising, and more.
Though already extremely successful in their traditional marketing efforts, such as TV, radio, and billboard, Premier Health recognized a large opportunity for growth by turning to digital marketing services. They needed to reach new patients during their online searches, and they turned to Gatorworks to help accomplish this goal.
The Websites (aka the Foundation)
The first step in the comprehensive urgent care digital marketing plan for Premier Health was the build-out of both its corporate and urgent care partners’ websites. No matter what brilliant strategy is deployed, or clever and highly targeted ad campaigns are running, it’s all for nothing if new leads land on a website with a poor user experience, slow page speed, and poor functionality that just doesn’t work.
The Gatorworks team of in-house SEO specialists, interactive designers, and WordPress developers spent the better part of 18 months designing and building 20+ urgent care websites for some of the top health systems in the country. Focusing primarily on simple, yet critical actions such as Find a Location, Schedule an Appointment, or Check in Now, our design provided a mobile-first approach for optimized user experience since the majority of users searching for “urgent care near me” are on their phones. Other features included a map listing, a zip code search feature, quick links to patient portal and medical records, as well as options for other services such as medical weight loss and occupational medicine.
Local SEO & Keyword Targeting
When it comes to searching for an urgent care, it’s location, location, location, and ensuring that the local digital business listings for each clinic were optimized was a critical part of the search engine optimization strategy for all Premier Health ventures. By gaining access, verifying, and optimizing each business listing, Gatorworks ensured those business listings were prioritized within search results and directed users to the right information online.
The clinic’s website also had to be structured with pages titled with the location keywords that users would be searching. Identifying the optimal location radius and location keywords by which patients searched was not only a key part of the SEO’s setup, but part of ongoing efforts that our SEO team is constantly tweaking for best results and organic website traffic increases.
Expanding Reach with Google Ads
After careful and meticulous research into the various urgent care markets, our PPC team identified the best keywords and phrases to build a successful Google Ads campaign for each clinic. Utilizing features like ad snippets, bidding strategies, and performance max campaigns, we have brought hundreds of new patients to each clinic every month through PPC ads.
In our management of the Google Ads campaigns, we have seen tremendous results over the years, always staying on top of seasonality trends such as cold and flu or spring allergy campaigns, as well as optimizing performance of campaigns to get the biggest bang for our buck. Thanks to these ongoing efforts, we have seen numbers well below the industry benchmark in healthcare or urgent care patient acquisition.
Increasing Brand Awareness in Programmatic
A strong digital marketing strategy is not complete without top-of-the-sales-funnel tactics. While the search engine marketing services, SEO and PPC, are important for immediately capturing the users at the time of their search, what about making those future searches that much easier and cheaper by instilling direct brand recognition? That is the goal of Premier Health’s targeted display advertising campaigns—we want to find new patients and make them familiar with the brand, so when the time comes for them to need to visit an urgent care, the search becomes either easier with few clicks at a cheaper cost by clicking on branded ads or direct to the website, which we can tell occurs thanks to website analytics.
Whether it’s geofencing pharmacies to capture users who are already sick, targeting families with multiple children knowing their penchant for increased illness, or just focusing on users within 3-5 miles of each clinic–we’ve been able to execute on a variety of strategies that achieve the desired outcome: more patients.
OTT & Digital Audio
To further supplement digital efforts, as well as traditional, and create a fully comprehensive marketing strategy, OTT and programmatic audio were the next logical steps in Premier Health’s plan for new patient acquisition. Like with traditional TV and billboards, the paid media spend was calculated based on impressions, and our goal was to create as many trackable actions (meaning: new patients via appointments) from these ads as possible.
Placing the urgent care clinic’s messages on streaming platforms such as Roku and Spotify, we saw huge gains in how we measured the success of these campaigns. From when someone saw or heard an ad, we could track if they went to a clinic within a certain timeframe. The cost of these new leads surpassed industry benchmarks within just a few months of launching and careful optimization.
Project Summary
Through the combination of user-driven websites and multiple digital marketing service lines, Gatorworks drove a high volume of new patients into Premier Health’s partner network of urgent care clinic groups.