Local Search: An Easily Missed Advertising Opportunity

posted by Pivotal Health Solutions on Friday, April 24, 2015

If you're like the rest of us, the first place you look for any answer is the Internet. When we're not Googling it, we're searching Yahoo and Bing for new restaurants, where to buy a special gift and even for our health care referrals. 

But a recent study has found that health care organizations may be missing out on an invaluable—and pretty cost-effective—advertising opportunity. If our potential patients are going online to find us, it makes sense to invest in local search ads that tie in directly with what our patients are looking for. So say a patient is searching for pain relief? Your ad is tied to that keyword and will show up in their search, putting your referral literally at their fingertips.

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Health care marketers are missing an opportunity to connect through search engines—Bing, Google and Yahoo—with local residents and visitors looking for services. Industry marketers will spend more than $10.7 billion on local advertising in 2015, representing 7.8% of the $137.9 billion total local advertising market—but only a small portion goes to local search ads.

In fact, health care organizations invest only $330 million of the $1.5 billion to digital and online advertising on paid search, according to from BIA/Kelsey SVP and Chief Economist Mark Fratrik, who heads up a forecast released Tuesday on local advertising spend for the health care vertical.

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This article excerpt, by Laurie Sullivan, originally appeared here: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/246342/health-care-marketers-missing-local-search-ad-oppo.html.