Segmenting your medical practice’s digital funnel and routinely checking its effectiveness is a starting metric for explosive patient growth.

Utilizing digital marketing is a given in 2021. Now that most of your major competitors are optimizing on digital marketing, here’s what you can do to make your strategy stand out. The key? Understanding your marketing funnel.

understanding your digital funnel

If you understand your prospective patient’s digital journey, you can create a credible relationship with them through each phase of your funnel.

What is a digital funnel, you might ask? It’s a three-tiered system that describes where your end-user ends up. Your marketing funnel also describes the probability users will convert compared to the actual conversion number.

Breaking down each piece of your funnel and associating it with powerful ad platforms can grow your practice by 10 times in a surprisingly short time frame.

funnel stage: awareness

The first step in your prospects’ journey through your digital funnel is awareness. In this stage, the prospect could be in your target audience but they are probably still shopping around.

For plastic and reconstructive surgery clinics, a woman visiting the abdominoplasty (tummy tuck) page on the website but not clicking around or engaging with the page is in the awareness stage. She is reading to see if the procedure is right for her. She also wants to find out if the surgeon is someone she would want operating on her.

funnel stage: consideration

The second step in your prospects’ journey through your funnel is consideration. This is when your prospective patient engages areas of your website that reveal more about their intent.

This could look like a woman going to the botox filler page of your website and selecting “schedule now.” This shows a greater intent in booking your service. Many practices forego this step in their tracking process, but doing so means they lose out on behavior data that could help them sort out issues with their funnel.

funnel stage: action

The final part of your prospective patient’s journey is action. As each end-user navigates through your medical practice’s funnel they can fall off or “drop off” at any stage. This leads to a decrease in prospect volume as a user goes through the funnel phases.

For example, let’s say 20 women are interested in your neck lift operation. But after analyzing the data throughout the month, you see that out of the 20 women only 8 of them entered the consideration phase, and then only 2 ended up taking real action.

This decreasing cascade pattern is very typical because as commitment increases, prospect volume decreases over time. The action part of the funnel means that a prospective patient has submitted information to you and has expressed interest in receiving communication from you.

Throughout the entire funnel strategy, you can identify specific ad platforms to increase the effectiveness of your funnel.

Best ad platforms for Awareness

YouTube Ads
- With costs as low as $0.05 per view, YouTube ads are a mainstay in brand awareness-focused campaigns. Such a low pay-per-view (PPV) rate means you can get in front of the most people in your target audience in the shortest amount of time.
Google Display Advertising
- When powerfully utilized, your Google Display campaigns can generate a ton of buzz for your brand. With a higher average pay-per-view rate than YouTube, Google display advertising garners its extensive Google network so your ads are continually shown to the best possible audiences.
Facebook Boosted Posts
- Any tactic that requires engagement metrics like “reactions” or “views” is a brand awareness-focused tactic. Facebook boosted posts are meant to amplify your reach. (This, by the way, is the very definition of awareness.)
Facebook Ads
- Another powerful tactic in the awareness stage is to run video ad campaigns with an objective set for video plays or views.
Linkedin Ads
- By targeting job titles and utilizing all of the details per profile shared on LinkedIn, you can create a highly effective brand awareness campaign to help communicate a simple message to your decision-maker.

Best ad platforms best for consideration

Google Search Ads
- High-quality Google Search campaigns help your medical practice increase its efficiency in the consideration phase of your digital funnel. By launching this kind of ad campaign, you target people who could potentially be your patient as they are actively performing keyword searches highly relevant to your practice. This level of “consideration” pulls these prospects further down the funnel since they initiated the connection to your practice by searching on Google and selecting your ad. This is a much warmer type of lead than brand awareness conversions.
Bing Search Ads
- Bing search ads are very similar to Google Search campaigns. By promoting more of this “intent-based marketing” you can increase the quality of your web traffic. As a result, the people who are taking action on your website are more likely to book a consultation with your practice.
Third-Party Ad Purchases
- Many of the tactics under the umbrella of consideration are ad platforms that provide you with more targeting parameters to qualify your prospective patients. This could look like buying ad space on different ad networks that have an entirely new target audience for your brand to tap into. This is typically a great option for high-performing medical practices that already occupy good market share on other ad platforms.

Best ad platforms for action

Facebook/Instagram
- A shopping catalog can help drive quality traffic for lower-hanging fruit offerings like your practice’s skincare or recovery skincare lines. The goal of this tactic in this stage of your funnel is to convert a user into a direct sale.
Google Search Ads
- By searching a specific keyword in Google, a prospective patient can also see Google shopping campaigns that drive traffic to the retail areas of your practice. An example of this could be a supply or skincare e-commerce store that complements the practice’s medical spa.
Website Traffic and Analytics to Show You Behavior Data that Converts
- By reviewing your website traffic regularly you can start to track the ebbs and flows of the website. As a result, you can gauge the quality of the traffic coming from your ad platforms. Then, you can track drop-off rates and outliers in the data to help you fix problems in your funnel and further optimize. The end result is converting more users from prospective patients to booked consultations.

Let Us Help

Understanding the journey you expect your audience to take is a crucial part of your digital marketing strategy. Need more assistance in learning how this blog relates to your medical practice? Do you need a mobile-friendly website?

Schedule a performance marketing audit. Alternatively, you can simply contact us with any questions.

Caledon Virtual is a digital marketing performance agency serving clients in the medical and healthcare industries.