You can spend all the money in the world on your digital marketing campaign, but without quality landing pages to back up your ads, you probably aren’t going to see optimal results. So your search campaign targets all the right keywords, ensuring your ad appears at the top of the search results, reaching active patients who are ready to book an appointment. The design and messaging of your ad is perfect, gives users exactly the information they’re looking for, and even connects them directly to your organization’s phone number or address. The user who’s clicks your ad and is taken to a generic and/or confusing landing page that not only fails to answer their questions — it doesn’t make the next step of the process clear either. You can bet that most patients who have an experience like this will be pressing the “back” button on their browser before they dig deeper to find the necessary forms and links they need continue along on their path to treatment. The truth is that most patients researching treatment options are looking for speed and convenience, and if your landing page isn’t 100% clear, you’re likely going to be losing more business than you gain. That’s why landing page design, just as much as keyword targeting, copywriting, and campaign optimization, are crucial aspects of the medical marketer’s job. Let’s take a look at why landing pages are so important, and what you can do to ensure that yours are windfalls for your company and not eyesores for your customers.
How to Create Effective Landing Pages
The best course of action is to develop a unique landing page for each individual campaign, ensuring that the message that initially captured a patient’s attention is aligned with their experience when they arrive on your website. Moreover, each landing page should feature highly-digestible content that is relevant to the condition or treatment being highlighted in the ads that got them there. Here’s a simple checklist to ensuring that your landing page is clearly relevant to its corresponding campaign:
- Headline: Make sure that the headline of your page and the headline of your campaign are aligned with one another — while they shouldn’t match word for word, it’s best that they convey the exact same message so that the patient knows they’re in the right place
- Copy: Beyond being well-written and keyword-rich, the copy on your landing page should make quick work of explaining the chief benefits of your services, along with the main differentiators between you and your competitors
- Credibility Indicators: 75% of consumers report that displaying awards or certificates on landing pages bolsters a brand’s credibility. This can simply be an icon indicating your accreditation or, if possible, your inclusion in a list of top hospitals or practices, like US News and World Report’s Honor Roll
- Call to Action: Each landing page should make booking an appointment as simple as possible — patients should be able to quickly and easily locate your online appointment booking tool, contact details, or any other relevant information.
Again, frequent optimization with different copy and forms of content for each landing page will be extremely helpful in ultimately maximizing your conversion rates. For example, our own data indicates that featuring a video on your landing page can increase conversions by as much as 15-20%. It may take a bit of extra work, but this checklist and a simple template for your design (the look and feel of your landing pages shouldn’t change, just the content) should make it much easier to churn out quality landing pages. Like most things in the world, good things go to those who work for them — and landing pages are just one more vital piece of the digital marketing puzzle your team can leverage for maximum conversions.
