As any addiction recovery worker can attest, one of the most important steps to helping people get the treatment and care they need is making sure they can discover where they can get that help in the first place.
Of course, making sure that individuals in need discover and choose your addiction recovery center isn’t always easy. While it’s true that the internet has opened up new possibilities for helping others find your services, there is a lot of competition out there. So what can you do to make sure that potential clients are able to find your facility?
Your answer lies in formulating a well-crafted PPC campaign. Here’s how you can make sure your PPC efforts deliver the results your facility needs.
1) Initial Research
Before you dive into the nitty gritty of keyword research, you need to start with the basics. Which of your services do you wish to promote with your PPC campaign? What are your campaign goals? Who do you wish to target with your campaign—the individuals suffering from addiction, or their loved ones?
Take a look at what your competition is doing. What kind of ads are they running? How do your services, prices, and facility compare with theirs? Are there any areas where you have a competitive advantage?
This initial market research may seem time consuming, but the better you know your audience, your competition, and yourself, the better prepared you’ll be to craft an effective campaign.
2) Keywords
Keyword research is a critical initial step for formulating a successful PPC campaign. The wrong keywords could cause you to quickly waste your marketing budget, while selecting relevant, targeted keywords can help you yield a high conversion rate.
When selecting keywords for your PPC campaign, you should pay close attention to such important details as relevancy, search volume, and pricing. Long-tail keywords and locally targeted keywords are a great way to generate high-quality leads, and negative keywords will keep you from showing up in irrelevant searches.
Google’s Keyword Planner is just one of the resources available to help you find the right keywords. Remember, your keywords will make or break your campaign—so it’s well worth the time and energy to select the right ones.
3) Set Campaign Parameters
Finding quality keywords is great, but that is far from the only task you need to complete to set up a successful campaign. Carefully establishing campaign parameters will ensure that your messages will reach the right people.
Start with targeting. Google and other search engines offer an extensive range of targeting options, allowing you to target your campaign based on language, geographic location, device used, and other demographic data. You can even target those who have visited your website in the past! Proper targeting will help your keywords become much more effective.
You should also pay close attention to ad bidding. The amount you pay per click can vary based on competitiveness, click through rate, and even the quality of your ad! Setting a daily budget, maximum bids, and other parameters will help you keep your PPC spend under control.
4) Ad Groups
More likely than not, your addiction recovery center offers a range of services to help individuals (and their loved ones) on the road to a healthier lifestyle. This might include medication-assisted treatment, group counseling, inpatient housing, and so on.
Because of this, while you may have a campaign goal to increase your number of inpatient admissions, you may wish to focus on the individual services that set your practice apart. The thing is, you don’t necessarily want people searching for “drug addiction counseling” to get your ad focused on “medication therapy,” instead.
Creating individual ad groups within your campaign allows you to further break down your keyword targeting, assigning specific messages to relevant keyword groups so the right ads reach the right people.
5) Conversion-Focused Copy
You have a limited amount of text space in your PPC ads—are you making the most of it? Many businesses do themselves no favors by making their ad copy too generic, or by trying to fit in too much information. Remember, all you’re really trying to do with your PPC ad is get people to click and visit your website. You don’t need to completely sell them on how great your recovery center is yet.
The most effective PPC ads share a few key copywriting characteristics. You absolutely must start with a compelling headline, something descriptive and enticing that helps you stand out. The rest of your ad copy also needs to pack a lot of punch in a limited space.
Focus on your differentiating characteristics—the more specific you can get, the better. Always include a clear call to action that entices viewers to click. People will decide in mere seconds whether they want to click or not, so your ad copy needs to get the job done quickly.
6) Landing Pages
Far too many addiction recovery centers assume that getting someone to click on a PPC ad is the be-all end-all that determines whether or not they’ll have a successful campaign. This is far from the truth. Your PPC ad is only the first half of your campaign—you need to offer an equally compelling landing page if you wish to get new patients to come to your facility.
For best results, you should create a unique landing page for each of your targeted ad groups. These landing pages should have a headline that matches the content of your PPC ad, concise copy that demonstrates the benefits of choosing your facility, and a simple, easy to use contact form. By housing these elements in a sleek design, you’ll do more than just generate clicks—you’ll bring new people into your recovery center.
7) Testing and Refinement
The greatest challenge of PPC marketing is that you’ll never truly know which of your ads will be the most effective until you actually run them. Because of this, you need to constantly review your campaign results so you can learn from them and refine them.
One of the chief tasks you should consider when refining your PPC campaign is to analyze which keywords are providing real results and helping you get new patients. Testing can help you spot mistakes you might be making with your keyword selection, allowing you to make key changes that ensure you won’t waste your budget.
Another common method of improving your campaign is to conduct A/B testing with your ad copy. Within individual ad groups, does one ad generate a higher click through rate than others? Identifying the winners and losers can help you dramatically improve your results.
Conclusion
By following this process, you can ensure that your PPC advertising efforts will provide lasting results for your addiction recovery center. As you go through the appropriate steps to craft your PPC campaign, you’ll receive a solid return on your investment and be able to provide your specialized help to more of the people who need it.
