In our first blog post in the PPC series, we provided a baseline of understanding about the world of pay-per-click advertising.
Now that we’ve gotten our toes wet, it’s time to figure out if your home health business should even be considering online advertising as a marketing option. It might not be the best fit or it could be the perfect answer.
Well, What’s Your Business Goal?
In our role as consultants, we work with businesses nationwide to help them overcome marketing challenges to reach their business goals. What are some common goals we hear?
- We need caregivers (a very popular one right now)
- We have low brand recognition
- We provide a very specific home care service
- We have great website traffic but aren’t getting new clients or job candidates
- Our social media posts don’t reach many people
- Our return website visits are low
- We want to reach a new geographic market
- We can’t find new clients
Online advertising can help with all of these goals. It shouldn’t be your only method and isn’t the silver bullet, but it can be a really, really effective part of your marketing strategy.
Wait, Online Advertising Can Help with All of Those?
Well, the same strategy won’t meet every goal. Facebook ads won’t meet the goal that a Google Remarketing campaign accomplishes. Google Adwords won’t help your business reach the goal of a LinkedIn ad.
So why is online advertising a good solution for your home care business goals?
- Adults spend 11.5 hours per day online, at a desktop or laptop or on a tablet or mobile device.
- 85 percent of searches for products or services take place online
- 54.5 percent of people can’t identify online ads
- People spend 50 minutes per day on Facebook. The only things we do more are sleep, eat/drink and watch TV
We’ll stop at four, but those statistics are impressive. If people are spending a lot of time online and half of them can’t identify advertisements, it sounds like a perfect opportunity for your home care business.
Cost Is the Kicker, Right?
Well, yes and no. An online advertising budget can be whatever you want. A lower budget works better on Facebook, which is the most cost-effective online advertising solution available.
Facebook is the perfect answer for home healthcare and private duty home care and to recruit caregivers. We have seen a lot of success targeting job candidates.
On Google and LinkedIn, cost can be a different story. Remember the Google AdWords we talked about last week? (Hint: The text ads that show up at the top of your search results.) Those can be very competitive and expensive. You’ll be competing with large home care agencies and other national companies.
Should Google AdWords be avoided? No – 3.5 billion searches take place on Google each day. However, Google AdWords has to fit into your budget and be the right option to meet the need of your business goal.
The same can be said for LinkedIn. That online advertising platform is as expensive as anything available in the online advertising space. On LinkedIn, the cost per click could be anywhere from $7-$100 where on Facebook, that cost per click is under a dollar (sometimes around $0.25). It can work especially well in the B2B space (think referral sources). But for light industrial for finding clients directly or recruiting caregivers, that won’t be the answer.
Yes – Online Advertising Is Right for Your Home Care Business
If I just wrote that at the top of this blog, it puts the cart before the horse. There is no cookie-cutter solution for your business to use online advertising as a marketing solution to meet your business goal. We’ll dig deeper later in the series into each of these solutions.
Working in the space every day, I am biased and think every home care business should have some sort of online advertising campaign. It’s hard to dispute the number of people online every day and the amount of time they spend on computers, laptops, tablets and mobile devices.
Will PPC ads be the right fit? Will Google AdWords help your company? Should you be on Facebook? The answer comes in examining your goals, target audience and budget, and finding the right solution for your business. But…the is yes.
Next Time in Our PPC Series – Search Engine Marketing vs. PPC
Does your home care company need both? Should it only focus on SEO? Should you dump all of your budget into Facebook ads? Should you ignore SEO and just try to be in the top spot of Google AdWords for the terms your target audience is searching for? We’ll touch on that next time.
