How a top dental provider increased total patient volume 75% without taking a big budget hit
Sage Dental
When Sage Dental signed on with Cardinal Digital Marketing in 2018, their aim was to take their digital marketing and advertising strategy to the next level. More specifically, Sage needed a marketing partner to execute a well-optimized, highly targeted search, display, and social advertising strategy that not only drove a high volume of qualified new leads, but converted those leads into new patients—all without bloating their existing marketing budget.
Since the beginning of this partnership, Cardinal has worked closely with the Sage Dental team to introduce a full suite of search, social, and display advertising strategies. To date, these strategies have created nearly 75,000 new leads, more than 64,600 of them coming in the past year. In fact, 2019 alone saw our partnership create an estimated 34,950 new patients. Here’s how we worked together to achieve these impressive results.
Full-funnel acquisition across search, social, and display advertising
There’s no question that the ways people seek dental care have changed significantly thanks to the proliferation of digital channels. To reach the right people at the optimal time—where and when they search for dental care—our teams introduced paid search (PPC), social, and display advertising strategies for Sage Dental starting in 2018.
Our goal was to aggressively feed the top of Sage’s patient lead funnel using strategies that directly targeted specific demographics. At the same time, we strove to drive more ad impressions to capture eyes and ears during the consideration page, a critical precursor to lead generation and conversion.
Targeted paid search (PPC) advertising
So much of digital advertising is knowing who your target audience is. We designed and optimized PPC campaigns based on the probable location of Sage’s prospective new patients looking for dental care, including those people within a specific radius of each location. In addition, we created a tailored target keyword list based on Sage’s services, promotions, and specialties, then optimized our advertising for these keywords using our proprietary keyword bidding tool.
Since introducing optimized PPC for Sage, cost per acquisition (CPA) has dropped 62%
Engaging display advertising
With display advertising, our aim is to drive value. That means delivering strong ROI. In the past year alone, Cardinal has helped Sage reduce the display ad cost per acquisition (CPA) for new patients by 17%.
How did we do it? By using real-time bidding optimization, alongside well-designed, highly persuasive targeted for specific audiences. In a word, we optimize display advertising based on hard data, meaning we can expand reach and impact without driving up advertising costs.
Timely social media advertising
Again, our goal with social media advertising is to drive value, meaning hard ROI that Sage Dental can hang its hat on. That means well-designed, well-placed ads deployed to the platforms and devices that Sage’s future new patients use to connect, consume media, and share.
Once our social media advertising advertising campaigns were introduced alongside optimized display advertising campaigns, new patient volume improved by 15% despite the fact that budgets decreased.
Conversion-optimized landing pages
Getting optimized, targeted, and persuasive display ads up across search and social was just half the battle. We also needed to convert those clicks once we captured them into leads and appointments. To do so, Cardinal worked with the Sage Dental web development team to optimize their existing landing pages to drastically improve conversation rate (CVR). We did so by optimizing for mobile and creating continuity throughout the patient experience, from digital ad to landing page and beyond.
Looking forward to an even more integrated marketing strategy
Perhaps the most remarkable result of our work with Sage Dental was the 75% increase in total patient volume from 2018 to 2019, which we delivered with only a 10% increase to total marketing budget. Given the success of this engagement, our next step is to pass our marketing data to and from the Sage Dental electronic medical record (EMR) for yet another layer of personalized marketing strategies and campaigns.