One of our longest-standing clients, Northeast Georgia Health System is a not-for-profit community health system with four hospital campuses and more than 700 beds. Their hernia program was named a Center of Excellence shortly before the pandemic swept through Georgia and the marketing landscape completely changed.
Once elective procedures were opened back up, the health system needed to drive surgical revenue to recover from losses and ensure patients felt comfortable coming in for surgery.
Ultimately, our goals were to:
NGMC and Full Media often collaborate on overall marketing strategy, including traditional and digital tactics. Understanding each of the tactics enables us to build comprehensive custom reporting that can demonstrate how many leads each tactic is driving, including mediums like print, direct mail, streaming radio and more. This enables them to adjust their budget on the go to put their investment in the tactics driving the most new patient appointments and surgeries.
Our Marketing Tactics Included:
Google Display Ads Social Media Ads Google Search Ads Content Creation & Optimization Reporting & Analytics
Google Display Ads
The physician referral team identified the practices they usually targeted for in-person outreach, and we developed a low-cost campaign with a tight geofence around those physician practices to ensure that target medical practices knew about the Hernia Center of NGMC’s expertise.
This tactic turned out to be particularly effective, with an average cost per conversion of $111.
Utilizing Facebook and Instagram’s powerful audience targeting, we built a campaign targeting only internal medicine practitioners in NGMC’s service area.
Google Search Ads
We targeted consumers searching for information about hernia surgery and discovered that many patients are seeking out care themselves, not solely through a referral.
Google Search Ads, a specialty of Full Media’s, was far and away the most successful tactic in the campaign, generating 60% of all of the patient appointment requests during the campaign. Our average cost to acquire a patient lead (phone call or form submission) was just $71.
Content Creation & Optimization
We collaborated with NGHS’s content writers to develop a series of blog topics and FAQs that would help answer common questions and lower barriers that patients had to going ahead and scheduling surgery. These topics we developed were based on the most common search queries in our Google Paid Search ads as well as our own keyword research to determine what topics patients had concerns about.
These blogs have been incredibly successful, outpacing any of the other blogs on the website in terms of organic traffic generated. They also have directly contributed to new patient appointments.
Reporting & Analytics
The overall campaign also included radio ads and interviews and traditional print advertising. While Full Media’s team did not manage or place these additional promotions, we were able to lend our strengths in analytics to build comprehensive reporting that included traditional media.
Through these reports, we are able to track and compare key statistics, like cost per action in each medium. This helped us make key strategic decisions about how to shift our budget over time to schedule more surgeries and increase ROI.
Based on the reporting and our successes in 2020, we were able to confidently determine our mix of tactics for 2021 and set an even greater goal for ROI the following year based on the results from 2020.
Ultimately, enough surgeries were scheduled as a result of the campaign that we paid for the entire marketing budget in just three months in a six-month marketing campaign. That meant that any surgeries scheduled for the remaining three months were pure profit for NGMC because we had already covered our marketing costs.
* We know that these tactics work together and many of patients interacted with a variety of different marketing channels before converting. Ultimately, we partnered with NGHS to analyze a combination of digital analytics and patient reported “how did you hear about us” data to determine which marketing channel resulted in a surgery.
The main factors in this campaign’s success were:
