The orthodontic market has fluctuated significantly over the last few years. When Hedy & Hopp first began working with Southern Orthodontic Partners (SOP) in 2022, the orthodontic landscape was experiencing a downward trend after seeing record growth in 2021. Across the industry, new patient calls decreased by 2.4% in single-doctor practices and remained relatively flat in multi-doctor practices in Q1 of 2023.
While the industry at large may have been cooling, SOP was still laser-focused on acquiring new practices and growing patient volume. H&H was brought in to take over paid media and establish a campaign strategy focused on delivering net-new patient appointments, which could also be quickly scaled and efficiently managed across a growing roster of 35+ orthodontic practices.
After much collaboration, H&H and SOP were able to align on a search campaign strategy that delivered quality leads at a fraction of the cost. H&H developed a “High Priority” campaign strategy that involved dramatic cuts to campaigns’ keyword footprints and focused on only the top keywords that had historically delivered conversions across four topic areas within each respective campaign—Orthodontics, Dental Issues, Invisalign®, and Braces & Aligners. From here, bid strategies focused on driving leads at the highest volume but lowest cost possible. With more targeted campaigns and direction, significant improvements to efficiency and ROI were made possible.
SOP’s previous search strategy focused on chasing maximum impression share in order to raise awareness in practices’ markets. The thought was that by outcompeting the market, their practices would get all of the leads. However, this approach simply spread budgets too thin across too many keyword sets, thereby increasing cost-per-click and focusing Google’s algorithm on impressions and not leads, all of which ultimately hurt performance.
With H&H’s new “High Priority” strategy, campaigns across all accounts focused only on the best keywords and removed the extra fluff and experimentation. Furthermore, to align with the SOP’s goal of only acquiring net-new patients, brand keywords were excluded and added as negatives for all practices and campaigns.
An additional benefit to the “High Priority” strategy was its ability to scale quickly across a growing roster of 35+ accounts. The consolidated nature of the campaigns makes maintenance, optimizations, and reporting more manageable, turnkey, and efficient across such a high volume of practices.
Looking at year-over-year performance between Q2 2022 through Q2 2023 highlights clear improvements in overall lead volume and search campaign efficiency. During this time, H&H’s new campaign strategy led to a 64% reduction in cost-per-acquisition, a 75% increase in conversion rate, and a 394% increase in high-quality patient leads. Furthermore, this was accomplished while spending only 79% more budget. All the while, H&H also successfully onboarded 14 new practices in this new strategy with minimal ramp-up and learning periods required.
With current trendlines, month-over-month performance continues to show steady improvements. Since December of 2022, CPA has continued to fall to historic lows, while CVR and lead volume continue to reach all-time highs with each passing month.
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