Medical Marketing Tip: Use Geofencing for Enrollment

Geofencing for Healthcare Marketing

If you work in the medical field—whether you own your own medical practice, conduct clinical trials, or are otherwise looking for specific types of patients—one of the marketing industry’s best-kept secrets is geofencing. Sometimes, putting yourself in places where people can seek you out themselves won’t always work. Instead, the better strategy may be to go to where your target audience is and show them that you exist in the first place. The best way to do this? Geofencing. Keep reading to learn more about geofencing for healthcare marketing and how you can get started finding new people as quickly as today!

What is Geofencing?

A geofence is a virtual perimeter for a real-world geographic area. A geofence could be dynamically generated (as in a radius around a point location) or match a predefined set of boundaries (such as a hospital, building, or city block).

The use of a geofence is called geofencing, and one example of use involves a location-aware device of a location-based service (LBS) user entering or exiting a geo-fence. This activity could trigger an alert to the device’s user as well as messaging to the geo-fence operator. This info, which could contain the location of the device, could be sent to a mobile telephone or an email account.

The next time you’re on your phone in a new area, pay attention to the ads you may start getting. Some of them may be very specific, such as for a cafe a couple of doors down or a new doctor’s office nearby.

How it Works

Geofencing begins with a little bit of research. What are your goals? Where are you located? Who are your typical appointment-setters or decision-makers? For example, a pediatrician typically sees the children’s mothers making their appointments for them. Their target audience will be any mother in the immediate area such as a daycare facility.

Are you not sure who your target audience is? We can help with that, too. Usually, this involves understanding your business and your competitors and performing an empathy mapping session. We can assign a persona to your target audience, which is a literal personality that we can understand. For example, Mothers with young children are generally women between 30 and 50 years old.

Next, you will want to do some research on where you can find these people. In the case of the pediatrician, some great places to target would be the local school, urgent care, or nearby children’s playgrounds. You can also target your competitors’ office buildings. Mothers also likely frequent places like Target, Starbucks, and the local grocery store—all of these are places you can add to your geofencing list.

Now that you’ve identified your target audience and identified a list of places to target them, it’s time to create ads and build the campaign. The campaign starts by showing users the ads first and then retargeting them 30-60 days after they see the original ad.

As a reminder, retargeting means that the ad will be served to the same person more than once. Sometimes, especially on mobile devices, people aren’t ready to make a decision immediately, and even more so when they are not at home.

Navazon handles all the conversion tracking for the ads. This means tracking all the clicks from the ads, which phone numbers they called, and when they may have walked into your location. To track the phone number that was called, we assign a unique tracking phone number to the geofencing campaign so we know how many calls your receive from your geofencing marketing campaign.

Does It Bring Results? Here Are Our Use Cases

Geofencing is a marketing practice that requires setup, research, tracking, and analysis. While it offers a learning curve, the results speak for themselves. Here are some statistics about geofencing and how successful it can be:

• Mobile ads with geofencing have double the click-through rate than other types of ads.
• Geofencing is compatible with 92% of smartphones.
• The average consumer spends 5 hours a day on their mobile device, especially when they are away from home and want to keep their hands busy.
• 71% of consumers prefer a personalized ad experience tailored to their likes, wants, and needs.
• 3 out of 4 consumers complete an action after receiving a message when approaching a specific location.

Geofencing to Enroll Participants for Clinical Trials

Clinical trial sites are always looking for a large number of volunteers to enroll in their clinical studies. Not every person who signs up as a prospective participant will be right for the study. As such, there needs to be a significantly large number of people signing up to offset the people who are not right for the study.

In order to reach a large number of people, we offered our client the option of geofencing.

At the beginning of the pandemic, we were looking for volunteers for a COVID medication trial. It was for Paxlovid, which is now a widely recognized treatment method for COVID.

To find people who were infected with COVID-19, we geofenced the county’s COVID testing facilities. The county was using large parking lots in stadiums and other places to test people for COVID, so we got a list of all the locations in LA and painted them (geofenced them).

After we geofenced these locations, here’s what happened: When someone drove to the location, they got tagged on their mobile phone. Then, within hours, they’d see our banner ads saying, “If you tested positive for COVID, join a clinical trial to get exclusive access to the latest medication and earn up to $1,750.” This was a widely successful campaign that drove thousands of volunteers to our client.

Geofencing is also useful for cancer trials when they’re looking for certain genetic markers, and we can geofence all the oncology offices in the area. In addition, Navazon recently launched geofencing for a flu symptoms clinical trial, where we geofenced all the urgent care facilities. For a current contraception study, we are geofencing all the women’s health facilities in LA and San Diego. For another Nephrology client, we geofenced all the nephrologist offices in a 30-mile radius to reach those patients with a rare kidney condition.

Geofencing for Medical Practices

If you are a medical practice and ready to take on new patients, geofencing is a great option to get a lot of new patients fast. Not all medical practices have an obvious target audience, like our early example of the pediatrician does.

In cases like this, Navazon can geofence their competitors’ clinics and reach their patients with our messaging. We can target nearby businesses, grocery stores, gas stations, and many more places that see a large number of diverse people in a neighborhood.

Digital Marketing for Medical Practices

If you are a medical practice and are looking for other ways to find new clients and bring awareness to your practice, there are many things you can do in addition to geofencing. They include:

• Maximize local traffic. In addition to geofencing, another way to take advantage of local traffic is through localized SEO campaigns and partnering with local businesses.
• Directory listings. Aside from Google My Business, Yelp, and Facebook, there are a large number of other directory listings you should be on. The more you’re on, the better visibility you will have. Navazon Digital partners with the world’s leading digital networks to extend the reach of our client’s brands, allowing you maximum visibility.
• Visuals. To earn your client’s trust and comfort, you need to offer a lot of visuals. This can be achieved through social media, video production, streaming ads, and digital billboard ads.
• Expand your digital offerings. These days, your website needs to be top-notch, especially when it comes to support. Your website should allow people to book an appointment 24/7, have their questions answered 24/7, and get valuable information. This can be achieved through appointment-making plugins, forms, bots, email marketing, and blogging.

Start Geofencing with Navazon Digital

Ready to jump into geofencing? We are experts in that.

Navazon helps businesses increase profits through data-driven marketing that expands opportunities and reduces risk. As marketers and entrepreneurs, we understand the value of developing a memorable brand through creativity and consistency.

This is accomplished through targeted graphics, videos, and websites that reflect our proven, time-tested methodologies and detailed analytics. This approach has proven effective for companies of all sizes, from start-ups and medium-sized businesses to large firms with an international presence.

We are content creators who listen to our clients so that we can formulate ideas and strategies based on their unique goals and philosophies. Thinking through those goals with our analytics-based approach, we study not only their tendencies but also those of their competition and the market as a whole. Equipped with this knowledge, we develop a powerful plan, test it, and roll it out on a modest scale. Once we arrive at the winning formula, we can scale up rapidly to meet even the most optimistic growth projections.

At Navazon, we do not believe in “one size fits all.” Every part of the marketing plan is customized to address your unique niche and positioning strategy. It’s how we excel. It’s why we succeed.

Schedule a free consultation with us now! Visit us at navazondigital.com for more information.