How a renowned senior care organization used PPC to dramatically increase lead volume
Company Overview
In business since 1995, Centers Health Care is a well-respected skilled nursing, rehabilitation, and senior care organization that offers the largest post-acute care continuum in New York. As a long-time community asset, Centers has many connections within the Brooklyn community and beyond, including an official partnership with the Buffalo Sabres.
Senior care is a local service. People want their family members as close to home as possible, which is why most look for nursing homes nearby. This makes local visibility crucial, something Centers Health Care needed to improve to build a much stronger lead pipeline. Centers approached Cardinal Digital Marketing to help achieve the group’s top business objective: rebound from the COVID-19 pandemic by replacing their physician-referral pipeline with a direct-to-consumer digital marketing strategy.
“Centers needed to create its own pipeline, rather than relying on lead aggregators or in-person hospital referrals alone.”
Challenges:
As with many senior care organizations, the COVID-19 pandemic hit Centers particularly hard. At the time, their main source of referrals was hospitals (terminally ill people or people who needed a long recovery time). When the pandemic hit, lead volume plummeted. So the organization decided to pivot to a direct-to-consumer digital marketing approach to drive a high volume of high-quality admissions. Because Centers is new to digital marketing and direct-to-consumer efforts, they needed help scaling up PPC with far greater efficacy and efficiency.
Goals:
Move from referral-based lead generation to
direct-to-consumer marketing.
- Overcome inexperience with launching efficient PPC campaigns.
- Dramatically increase monthly admissions.
- Build brand awareness.
Solutions
Cardinal stepped in to handle PPC management for one of Centers’ nursing homes and five skilled nursing centers. At a high level, we anchored the paid media strategy around the goal of delivering a high volume of quality leads (leads likely to convert into admits). Here’s what that strategy entailed:
- Audited and adjusted account structure to make better use of Google’s Smart Bidding, increase ad relevance, and improve quality scores.
- Segmented campaigns by location, which enabled unique targeting and messaging tactics.
- Grouped campaigns using a shared budget and shared Target CPA bidding strategy to pull back spend in certain areas, or to be more aggressive in well performing areas.
- Prioritized bottom-of-funnel traffic that were the strongest converting and most cost-efficient keywords.
- Optimized demographic bidding adjustments to ensure that campaigns were being seen by the correct groupings for target age range.
- Ran frequent Search Query Reports to add negative and high-performing terms to appropriately bid and budget towards the best converting traffic.
- Reviewed non-converting, high-cost keywords and adjusted bids as needed to efficiently drive the best-performing keyword traffic.
- Created responsive search ads (RSAs) to leverage machine learning and rotate out poorly performing assets.
Google Ads and Optimized Landing Pages That Generated a Consistent Volume of High-Quality Leads
Cardinal has helped consistently deliver high-quality leads
To date, our PPC management has effectively integrated all campaigns within the Centers Health Care Salesforce instance and call center. This gives them complete visibility into campaign performance metrics, lead status, as well as insights into the locations that might yield more patients (and thus require new campaigns). Overall, Cardinal has helped consistently deliver high-quality leads. Results include:
- 32% increase in conversions
- 11% improvement in conversion rate (CVR)
- Monthly improvement in overall conversion volume
- A rising trend in conversion rate over the past five months in highly competitive markets like New York and New Jersey
