5 Important Tips for High-Conversion Landing Pages – More leads from the traffic you already attract

Digital marketing and advertising costs for elective medical and cosmetic services has reached an all-time high.  Physician-owners/managers are spending more than they ever thought they would.  According to Wonder research, the advertising spend for plastic surgeons focuses on digital advertising and ranges between $5,000 to $15,000 per month, where the average monthly budget in the US is $6,677.

In fact a recent article on Search Engine Journal highlighted this point when it comes to Google ad algorithms and performance of campaigns with ad budgets under $3,000.

With marketing budgets increasing, it is key for practices to not only get more visibility and traffic from the marketing dollars they invest, but convert more of these visitors into engagements, leads and consultations.

“It’s much easier to double your business by doubling your conversion rate than by doubling your traffic.”  – Jeff Eisenberg

Here are 5 easy tips that can help you improve your conversions and generate more patients, without spending more.

1. Longer Landing Pages – Don’t limit your landing pages to short, above-the-fold call-to-action pages. Early on, it was assumed that landing pages that were minimal and offer-driven were the keys to high conversion rates.  But those were largely focused on e-commerce campaigns.  Many studies (Marketing Experitments), even early on, showed longer landing pages convert as much 220% more leads than “above-the-fold” CTA landing pages, particularly for more sophisticated and higher cost services.
2. Leverage Instant Digital Communication – We live in a consumer market that is now driven by the maturing Millennial consumer. This audience has grown up with and embraces digital technology and communication. In fact, many prefer digital communication with businesses over picking up the telephone, where businesses have impersonalized the process with automated phone trees and virtual attendants.  Live Chat and Text Messaging have added a new communication option for these visitors and provide practices an important new conversion opportunity.  I have found that these conversion elements typically increase lead volume around 20% – 25%, and up to 40% in some cases.
3. Remove Full Navigation (particularly for retargeting) – Sending paid visitors to the home page, a target page within your website, or cloning a page from the website to create a customized landing page is a very common practice. However, having the full set of navigation options and distractions can lead visitors to wander and not take the action your landing page intended.  A HubSpot test showed conversions can increase by 16% to 28% when removing navigation from landing pages targeting “middle-of-the-funnel” visitors. In another case study, VWO showed a 100% increase in conversions.
4. Consistency Leads to Conversions – I have seen practices, or their agency develop very compelling paid ad titles and descriptions that generate a high volume of clicks, and then send visitors to the corresponding procedure page of their website. Sure, this drives more traffic to key pages, but in most cases, much of the messaging and even offers/promotions in the ads are not found on the procedure page.  There is a disconnect with visitors who are expecting to follow-through on the ad and don’t find the thing that got them to click in the first place.  When making changes to your ad copy, make sure to update your landing page to create a synergistic flow that turns into more conversions, not just more traffic.
5. Focused Offerings – Another issue with sending visitors to target procedure pages of your website beyond not having the same offer is that most of these pages have evolved into longer, more varied content pages that now have offer a wide variety of links, calls-to-action, offers, promotions and “next step” action elements. In the case of conversions, having more offers is not necessarily better.  In fact, Wishpond indicates that landing pages with multiple offers get 266% fewer leads than pages that have just one offer or promotion.

By focusing more on conversions and not just on getting more traffic, your practice will experience higher lead volume without having to buy more traffic.  Of course attracting the right traffic at the right time will also help increase conversions, but that will be addressed in a follow up article.

In the meantime, learn more about What to Expect from a Digital Marketing Assessment.