The goal of Siskin Children’s Institute is to make life better for children with special needs and their families through evidence based services and a family-centered approach. They offer a regional developmental pediatric center, assessment and diagnostic services, therapies, home visits and family support services. They serve more than 333 families each month and oversee more than 60,000 visits annually.
Siskin Children’s Institute came to Full Media to help promote and drive volumes toward their Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) therapy across Chattanooga and Nashville, TN. ABA therapy can increase language and communication skills, improve focus, memory, and academic performance, and enhance social skills for children with autism and other developmental disabilities.
As a non-profit, Siskin has limited dollars to invest in marketing. That made a digital strategy the most affordable to drive success. However, this sensitive health category required creativity and diligent analysis to successfully target. Only 2.8% of children are diagnosed with autism, so it was important to determine a targeted strategy to get in front of parents.
Aligning with Siskin’s mission, we also developed an open feedback loop between the care teams and our marketing team to ensure that our ads only ran when there was availability for new appointments, reducing frustration and negative impact on families working hard to find solutions for their children.
Google Display Ads are among the least expensive ways to drive traffic and awareness, but it can be challenging to find ways to target sensitive categories. We focused on building audiences based on individuals looking for autism information online, viewing competitors’ websites and researching tutoring and other schoolrelated topics.
By testing several audiences, we narrowed our focus to the most successful and helped develop a funnel between our Display & Search Ads.
After testing a broad variety of terms, we narrowed our keywords to focus exclusively on those searching for ABA therapy. This drove the lowest cost per acquisition.
We also discovered that it would be valuable to advertise diagnostic services, too to drive ABA therapy. ABA therapy requires a diagnosis beforehand, but many providers in the region have significantly longer waitlists for diagnostics than Siskin does. This helped bring patients in the door sooner.
We know that behavioral health, especially for children, is a high-demand service-line. So, we also developed an open feedback loop with their provider team to avoid patient frustrations and misspent dollars.
By only running ads when there were no wait lists, we were able to ensure families received prompt service and care, and limit wasted budget. This stretched our budget further and allowed Siskin to serve more families in the long-run.
