There’s nothing worse than paying for traffic that doesn’t turn into patients. Optimize your search ads and improve conversion rate with better landing pages for your medical practice.
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is one of the most powerful tools in a healthcare marketer’s repertoire. As more and more patients flock to search engines for information about treatment options, healthcare marketers have an opportunity to reach new audiences with well-designed PPC ads.
However, achieving a worthwhile return on investment with PPC ads isn’t as simple as creating compelling ad copy or choosing the correct search terms to target – even the best ads will fall flat if they lead to unsuccessful landing pages. An effective landing page is the cornerstone of successful online marketing and the main driver of conversions.
Here are six tips for creating landing pages that turn clicks into patients:
The best landing pages are the ones that keep your users focused on conversion. Each landing page should have one message and one goal – preferably that mirror the copy in your PPC ads. While your organization or practice may offer multiple services, you should have a different landing page for each.
For example, look at this landing page from MailChimp, an email marketing company. Although MailChimp offers a wide variety of tools and services for marketers, its landing page is simple and streamlined, asking users to do only one thing: sign up free. There are no links to other pages or additional calls-to-action to distract the user from signing up.
You certainly want your landing page to be visually appealing, but its main goal should be to drive conversions, not encourage staring. Buttons should sharply contrast from the rest of the page, and the page should look and feel like a simplified version of the rest of your brand.
In the medical field, we tend to use calm, soothing colors. While there’s no inherent problem with that, make sure that the most important parts of your landing page don’t blend in with the background. Look to this landing page from Squarespace for an example: while the colors are muted, the call-to-action button stands out.
Good landing page design doesn’t just encompass what a potential patient sees. It also includes how the page operates on the back end. Load speed is a critical factor in whether your landing page succeeds; after all, just one second of extra load time can result in a 7% conversion drop.
On landing pages, the best way to quickly communicate your message is with a strong and concise header. You need to explain your value proposition clearly and quickly, before visitors lose interest and leave. Your header and subheader provide a key opportunity to do just that.
This example from ConversionLab gives the value proposition of the landing page clearly: get higher conversions on landing pages. The subheading and the CTA text use similar language, clearly guiding the user to a conversion point.
No matter how punchy your header or how attractive your landing page, you’ll quickly lose potential patients if you require them to fill out a lengthy and complicated form. While you certainly want to acquire contact information to generate leads, you’ll be hard-pressed to get a single phone number or email address if your form takes more than even just a minute to complete.
Be very selective about the fields on your form — you can gather more information later, if necessary. For now, you just want to get your foot in the door, so get the bare minimum information that you need to move forward in the patient relationship. Once again, Conversion Lab does a great job of modeling this; clicking their “Get Help with Landing Pages” button leads to this form, which makes smart use of drop-down menus to make it even easier for the consumer to fill it out.
In the case of a medical practice, all the information you need is first and last name, email address, phone number, and available appointment times. From there, staff should be able to follow up via email or a phone call, getting the patient closer to visiting your practice.
If your medical practice is young or relatively unknown, or if your services are groundbreaking or unfamiliar, it’s a good idea to add a testimonial or review to your landing page. Whether it’s a positive review from a customer or a write-up in a publication, any indication to potential patients that you’re trustworthy and reliable will go a long way. In marketing, these indicators are called “trust signals,” and they’re especially important in medicine, since many patients rely on word-of-mouth to find good providers.
For example, this landing page from the e-commerce flower company The Bouqs lists press mentions at the bottom of the page, lending a sense of legitimacy to a company with a somewhat unusual product offering. Healthcare providers may want to consider creating a similar effect by adding scrolling positive reviews from patients at the bottom of their landing page.
As medical marketers, there’s a lot of half-rate stock imagery at our disposal; resist the temptation to use cheesy or tacky stock photos in favor of more realistic imagery. Keep the photos on your landing page human, genuine, and compelling, and ensure that the composition is simple and emotionally powerful.
If you don’t feel confident in your ability to find and select an appropriate image, you may want to consider featuring your practice’s employees on your landing page or steering away from pictures altogether. However, if you do want to use stock imagery of “patients,” take a cue from Stanford Medicine’s Center for Fertility and Reproductive Health: this beautiful image doesn’t read as cheesy or disingenuous in the slightest.