Internet Marketing for a Professional Marriage Counseling Practice in Philadelphia
The first client Reciprocal performed services for was a small professional marriage counseling practice in Ardmore, PA. (acenterformarriagecounseling.com)(ACMC). Reciprocal offered a free service to the marriage counselors purely to research the efficacy of the Google Adwords system for the purpose of investing in the stock of Google. They set up a test site and an Adwords campaign. Within weeks, a primitive website was launched.
Almost immediately, the site realized significant return on investment. Within one month, they were able to drive the cost of acquiring a new client down from $400 dollars with traditional forms of advertising (i.e. Yellow Pages ads) to under $100 dollars with Google Adwords. As a result, the cost of advertising was recouped from the first counseling session. Because the typical client will return for 2 to 10 sessions thereafter, the incremental profit margin on each client was substantial. Today, through constant improvements, that same Internet campaign has lowered the advertising cost for obtaining a new client to less than $50 dollars. Reciprocal has been able to simultaneously drive lead costs down and volume up. Even though keyword costs were escalating, we were able to drive the cost of new leads down by concentrating on conversion rates. In this example, conversions are new patients booking appointments with a therapist in the practice. By using creative techniques such as audio interviews with the therapists, the campaign has allowed this small practice to dominate their local market.
In April, 2005, Reciprocal launched an anxiety website for the firm. This site does not produce as many leads, but it drives about one or two good leads per month for a nominal cost of less than 200 dollars per year. Even though the campaign is not a raging success like the marriage counseling site, it still produces good results and has a phenomenal ROI.
Reciprocal optimized all aspects of the client interaction for the firm. We established internal tracking systems in the counseling office to monitor how leads (potential new patients) converted to new patients. We also set up a compensation plan to provide cash bonuses to the receptionists for converting leads to patients. In any service industry, the process of handling lead calls is critical in obtaining new clients or patients. Reciprocal set up a method to track email leads as well as arranged to place new phone lines specifically to track calls. With multiple lead delivery systems, leads are rarely lost and any available therapist answers calls from the "lead lines" promptly.
Reciprocal further leveraged the value of the website by providing educational materials for existing patients. This included the creation of an email campaign that supplied the existing clients with a monthly newsletter. At present, the campaign is so successful that the firm has hired additional therapists to handle the volume.
Only eight months after starting the website, ACMC captured multiple top positions on searches in Google and Yahoo for keywords such as "Marriage Counseling in Philadelphia."
The net result is that everywhere the users search, they get exposure to ACMC's site. This has become the goal of Reciprocal in its web advertising placements. We want the person searching exposed to our client's firm everywhere they search on the web. Unlike many other web marketing firms, we do not focus on just one aspect of the web. As keyword prices fluctuate and rankings change, Reciprocal is not obsessed with one source of traffic. We seek overlapping sources of traffic so we are never dependent on one source. The benefit of this strategy is that the firm that is advertising with us is presented as the dominant player in the market. After 12 months, the ACMC website no longer gets much natural search traffic on Google despite having a high page 5 rank. Nevertheless, traffic to the site has doubled in the past 10 months from Pay Per Click ads and the many directories the site is listed on. The website is even more ubiquitous now as many of the directory pages that list the counseling site show up high in many search engine rankings.
Reciprocal optimized text on the site for converting site visitors to leads by focusing on classic copy writing methods and the utilization of compelling headlines. We also used proven techniques for improving conversion rates such as limiting the size of the header and using long ad copy. We gathered statistics at all levels of the interaction with the client to determine successful practices and to improve upon the ones that were lagging. These statistics allowed for instantaneous feedback and the ability to identify click fraud immediately. We took advantage of the multimedia aspects of the web by adding audio recordings of the therapist talking about relevant topics of the practice. We also tailored specific landing pages that addressed specific aspects of the counseling practice.
The net result was that Reciprocal was able to drive costs down and bring more people into the office. Often, potential new patients calling the office were so informed about the therapist and the practice that they simply asked the receptionist for an appointment, rather than inquiring about the practice. Utilizing other methods of advertising, a potential patient who had not talked to a therapist had never asked to schedule an appointment on the first call in the 20 year history of the practice. Feedback from new clients shows that they listen to the recorded audio on the website several times. More than once, therapists have been told that the audio recordings on the website were like receiving "a free counseling session."
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