Understanding Programmatic Advertising for Healthcare Marketing

Need to put your foot on the gas pedal and get more patients in the door? Technology and marketing are besties, and with the rapidly changing landscape of AI and its abilities, there are more ways now than ever to reach new patients. One of the best ways you can get your calendar booked is by taking advantage of programmatic advertising. As healthcare marketing experts, we are here to spill all of our secrets and tell you exactly how we do it. Keep reading to learn more about Programmatic Advertising, how we do it, and how you can get started as soon as today.

What is Programmatic Advertising?

We promise – programmatic advertising isn’t some hugely complicated new marketing concept that is going to take you forever to learn. The concept of programmatic advertising is actually pretty simple, and makes an already-existing process much quicker and easier.

When you buy ads to place—whether online, in magazines or newspapers, on streaming, or on billboards—it is a manual process that can take time, manpower, and money to make happen.

Programmatic advertising to the rescue!

The programmatic advertising method takes advantage of AI technology and gives you access to thousands of channels with the ability to tailor your results to your specific target audience and behaviors. It allows for easier tracking and better results, and is much more cost-effective than the traditional, manual method.

Bottom line: Put your ads in more (and better) places while saving money!

Why Should I Invest in Programmatic Advertising?

Wondering whether programmatic advertising is worth it? Here are a few reasons you should definitely be investing in it:

1. If the old-fashioned way works for you, you’re one of the best candidates for programmatic advertising because it will take you to the next level.
   Taking advantage of technology saves you money in the long run.
   Your competitors are likely already doing it.

These days, it seems like nearly everything is becoming automated. Workflows, email campaigns, and forms are just a few examples of things your business has upgraded and is likely already using. Time to upgrade your ad buying power!

In addition, other great benefits of programmatic advertising include:

1. Real-time targeting. The ability to target an audience down to a granular level is so important, and programmatic advertising boasts this ability. Find your audience through their location by geofencing, using keywords, search history, streaming advertising, and through their other connected devices.
2. Explode your brand awareness. The most important aspect when it comes to getting new patients is to put yourself in front of as many relevant people as possible. This is called brand awareness, and programmatic advertising will skyrocket you to the next level.
3. Data galore. If you were to ask a marketer what their favorite feature of any new automated technology is, it would likely be the large amount of data that can be gathered. You can run data reports on every little thing with programmatic advertising and use it all to improve your overall marketing strategy.

Here’s How Navazon Does It

Navazon has been working with healthcare companies in healthcare marketing for a long time, and we have seen the landscape completely change with the advent of AI and automation. We pride ourselves on staying ahead of the curve, constantly educating ourselves, and becoming experts at all things AI and tech in relation to marketing strategies. As creative and fun as marketing can be, it also takes a wealth of research and knowledge to keep up on. We do it so that you don’t have to!

Our knowledge of programmatic advertising carries over to many other AI-based marketing strategies, such as geofencing, workflow automation, software development, and more. With every marketing strategy or effort we embark on, we always set goals and define the target audience with our clients, develop a creative strategy, measure our success, and use the data to keep improving.

Step 1: Set Goals & Define the Target Audience

Before we start any marketing strategy, we always take the time to set goals and define the target audience. This is an essential piece of the puzzle because it entirely determines the next steps. It determines the creative strategy that will be developed, the campaign settings, and how we measure the campaign’s success.

Here are a few questions to ask yourself:

1. What are my goals? Do you want to increase website traffic, get more followers on social media, get more form submissions, or encourage people to buy something? As a healthcare clinic, the answer is likely that you want to increase your website traffic, get more phone calls, or get more appointment form submissions. Which one of these is most important to you? What does your office have the bandwidth to handle easiest?
2. Who am I targeting? If you are a doctor’s office in Woodland Hills, you may be thinking that your target audience is everyone in Woodland Hills and within a 10-mile radius. While this is partly true, it is important to get even more granular. Does your office perform any specialties? Who tends to be the typical appointment maker? If you are not sure who, specifically, your target audience is, we can help you define that so that you get good quality leads and don’t waste time with potential patients that you cannot serve.
3. What does success look like? If your campaign is a huge success, what does that mean? Of course, you want more patients on your appointment calendar. But, how busy do you want to be? How much can you handle? What would be the ideal number of patients you want to see on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis?
4. How are my competitors doing? Checking in on your competitors with the purpose of doing a little bit of research is always a great idea. Check their website, their ads, their office, and much more to see what they are doing from a marketing standpoint. We can take what they are doing—whether bad or good—and use it to improve upon.

Step 2: Develop a Creative Strategy

Once we have a good handle on your goals and who we are targeting, it is time to develop the creative strategy—AKA: the fun part!

Defining your target audience is the real driving force behind this process because it is essential to understand the messaging and visuals that will most resonate with your target audience.

For example, an older man in his 60’s or 70’s would have very little interest in seeing a pediatrician’s ad. The likelihood that he will not only click on it but go through the process and execute your desired action—such as making a phone call or filling out a form—is extremely low. By now, you have wasted money advertising to him. Filtering out irrelevant channels is essential.

However, focusing the advertising on where local parents are will give the pediatrician’s office the desired results. Geofencing around playgrounds and schools is an easy example. In addition, we would want to keep the messaging light and fun to build trust, show plenty of visuals of children with the doctor to invoke their interest and relatability, and brag all we can about their awards and accolades to build credibility.

Step 3: Measure Your Success

Once the campaign’s creative aspects have been developed and the ads have been deployed, we keep a very close eye on how everything is doing. We will go back to the original goals and KPIs that we established early on in the process to make sure everything is running smoothly.

The 10 most commonly measured, and therefore important, metrics when it comes to ads are:

1. Impressions
2. Cost
3. Clicks
4. Average CPC
5. Conversions
6. Impressions by Campaign
7. CTR by Ad Groups
8. CTR by Campaigns
9. Cost Per Conversion
10. CTR

When viewing data reports, you will see that all of these metrics act wildly differently. Some of them won’t matter to you at all, while some of them are essential to the success of the campaign. For brand awareness campaigns, some of the most important metrics to pay attention to are any that involve Impressions, Clicks, and Conversions. The more eyes that see your ads, the better your brand awareness results will be.

Step 4: Manage and Improve

Ads are never set in stone once they deploy. We can always tweak them! As marketers, we do our best to predict what will happen based on your goals and target audience, but you never know what might happen once the ads have been deployed.

Perhaps the creative content isn’t resonating the way we thought it would, the demographic needs to be played with, or the geofences need to be adjusted a little bit. We will always use the data we are given to improve the ads and make suggestions along the way.

Start Programmatic Advertising with Navazon Digital

Running a healthcare clinic or office takes a large set of skills and the ability to wear many hats. In order to keep your business running efficiently, you need to focus on just that: Running your business. If you’re ready to get the phone ringing and the appointment calendar filled, we are here to help.

Ready to start programmatic advertising?

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 the following visuals that reflect our proven, time-tested methodologies and detailed analytics:

• Targeted graphics
• Videos
• Websites

It is an approach that’s 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.

With this knowledge, we develop a powerful plan, test it, and then 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.