Fertility and IVF clinics that are willing to invest in marketing are poised for growth. Potential patients are primed to interact with your practice through digital channels and more willing than ever to research and find a physician online.
Do you have a fertility clinic marketing plan to acquire new patients?
If not, keep reading to find a complete guide on the strategies we use to grow new patients for IVF practices.
Case Study: How RUNNER grew Fertility Partnership IVF cycles to their highest month ever!
Ready to Get More Patients?
Complete Guide to IVF Marketing Strategies
This guide will explore 10 IVF marketing strategies. Some of these strategies are essential to growth. But in contrast, the others are explicitly designed for those looking for a system to achieve above-average growth.
1. Invest in Your IVF Clinic Brand
Relative to other practice specialties, building a solid brand and reputation for your fertility practice, doctors, physicians, and staff is key. Your logo, photography, site design, and messaging all have an opportunity to build your brand promise and create credibility, authority, and trust as an IVF provider.
Some essential tips include the following:
- Use natural photography, rather than stock, wherever possible
- Create empathy in your copy
- Make your patient the hero, not your physicians. These patient stories will build your brand as an IVF provider.
- Make information about your physicians accessible, and talk about their motivations, not just their experience
More like this: The Power Of Empathy In Medical Marketing in 2022
2. Maximize Google Ads Spend for Your IVF Clinic
Google Search Ads are still the most targeted way to drive new patients for your fertility practice. It targets ONLY those actively looking for fertility or IVF treatment, and you pay only when they click on your ads. Patients are highly active in researching IVF and fertility treatments, so the search volume for these terms is very high.
Case Study: How RUNNER grew Dallas IVF’s new patients by 30% using paid advertising
Key tips for IVF and fertility marketing with Google Ads include:
- Buy search keywords specifically for the IVF treatments you’re looking to drive. For example, you want to include the range of keywords related to your treatments – IVF, IUI, ICSI, egg freezing, etc. Get specific, as patients heavily research fertility, and they will often search for particular treatments they’ve discovered.
- Send all Google search ads to landing pages targeted towards those keywords. You need specific pages created for each treatment or condition. This ensures you’ll receive the highest landing page relevancy score in Google.
- Make sure those pages include social proof in the form of patient testimonials. Showcasing the fertility journey of your patients can motivate site visitors to become leads.
- Spend enough budget to maximize your impression share for those keywords. We wrote a blog post to help you understand how to determine a budget for your practice marketing, and more recently, we wrote a detailed blog with a template that shows how to measure the potential ROI of investing in IVF marketing strategies.
- Your conversion tracking must be set up correctly, or your ads won’t optimize properly. You have to be able to understand what’s really driving not only new patient leads, but IVF cycles.
Check out how we helped Dallas IVF get 41% more qualified traffic with NO CHANGE in ad spend.
3. Expand Your IVF Marketing Strategies to Social Media
Social media is more critical for fertility clinics and IVF providers than other medical specialties. This is because there is more patient sharing around positive IVF outcomes.
A foundational strategy would include a solid organic and paid social media ad efforts. This includes regular posts and engagement on your Facebook and Instagram profiles and paid advertising on Facebook and Instagram.
However, fertility practices looking for opportunities to grow should explore the following:
- Increasing paid advertising spend on Facebook and Instagram
- Engagement with IVF or Fertility Facebook Groups
- Creating a practice or physician Youtube channel
- Exploration of organic and paid strategies on new channels like Tik Tok
- Example: Broadcast live on social media channels to engage with potential patients through live Q&A
More like this: Think Your Content Doesn’t Need Paid Social Promotion? Think Again.
4. Showcase More Patient IVF Success Stories
Patient testimonials are a key for any IVF or fertility practice to show potential patients what life could look like. Yet many practices don’t do a great job showcasing these testimonials or bringing them to life. Here are a few considerations to better showcase your fertility practice testimonials.
- Bring patient testimonials to life with video.
- Create a higher volume of testimonials and update them more often.
- Create testimonials targeted towards different patients and services: example, egg freezing, sperm freezing, IUI, IVF, LGBT, etc.
- Showcase testimonials on your homepage.
- Distribute testimonials to other channels – Facebook, Google My Business, etc.
Need help putting your testimonials to work for your fertility practice? We’ve got you covered.
More like this: Online Reputation Management for Doctors Your 2022 Guide
5. Optimize Your Site for Core Web Vitals
One must-have strategy for every fertility clinic website is optimizing your site towards the Google Page Experience Update that happened in 2021. This was a major algorithm update that focused on the user experience of websites using Google’s “Core Web Vitals” signals.
Core Web Vitals includes 3 primary dimensions:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – how long it takes the most significant element of your page to load.
- First Input Delay (FID) – how long does it take for a user to be able to scroll and click.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – how stable is the page layout when loading.
Fertility clinic websites are often at risk because they generally have lots of photography and big images. Therefore, you must closely understand the above three Core Web Virtals dimensions and optimize your site specifically to address any challenges.
This is why we built our Practice Right Websites – to provide websites for fertility clinics that are better at converting site visitors to new patient leads, and are optimized to perform well against these 3 Core Web Vitals dimensions.
More like this: SEO for Fertility Clinics
6. Track Beyond Leads to Measure OVs & IVF Cycles
Most IVF clinics don’t have tracking figured out to understand how marketing is impacting patients and revenue. That’s because most fertility practices aren’t using a CRM that tracks potential new patient leads from first touch through scheduling an appointment and completing a cycle.
For our IVF clients, we have them use Front Office Helper, RUNNER’s HIPAA-compliant CRM system. With this system, we’re able to tell what marketing channels new patient leads come from, and if they become OVs or eventually, IVF cycles. This tracking is essential both to understand which marketing efforts are driving ROI, but also to provide a valuable feedback loop into optimizing your marketing efforts.
7. Find Ways to Compete With Online IVF Alternatives
We’ve also seen new competition for fertility practices with the telehealth opportunity. Several new fertility clinics have been competing for your patients in recent years. No longer are you competing against just other local IVF clinics; you’re also competing against many other online brands for diagnostic testing and other fertility services.
This trend has been accelerating and will continue to grow.
- Are you protecting searches for your brand name with paid search advertising? Because competitors will buy your name.
- Are you investing in paid ads to grow brand awareness?
- Are you clearly differentiating your fertility practice from these new competitors?
- Are there opportunities to innovate your service model to future-proof your business?
8. Partner With Influencers
Your patients are your most important influencers, but influencer marketing is a growing social media advertising opportunity that many medical practices are not taking advantage of yet.
Fertility clinics have an opportunity to partner with influencers to educate potential patients or showcase experiences with treatment and distribute this content through social channels.
Influencers provide an authentic voice and outside perspective that will help build trust with many potential patients. In addition, using these videos or assets in your ads can result in higher performance.
9. Explore New IVF Patient Lead Generation Pathways
A phone number and a contact us page aren’t enough. You’re missing out on new patient leads that you can drive through a variety of other means, including things like:
- Schedule a Callback
- Website Chat
- Online Booking
Check out how we helped Dallas IVF get 25% more website conversions.
10. Move Fertility Clinic Marketing Events Online
It’s common for IVF and fertility practices to use educational seminars to educate potential patients about fertility treatments. However, if you haven’t been conducting these educational events online, you’re missing out on a unique opportunity to drive leads. It’s easier than ever to run a virtual event online, and patients are more willing to participate.
Participation in online events has grown significantly in the last few years, and most of your potential patients will be familiar with attending and engaging in them. We’ve found that the leads you get through these online events are far more likely to convert into patients.
Conclusion
Growing patients and revenue for your fertility clinic is easier when you’re working with an IVF marketing agency who has experience building IVF clinics and driving services like egg freezing and IVF cycles.
Request a consultation with a RUNNER IVF marketing expert and create your clinic growth plan.
More like this: 45 Ways to Attract New Patients to Your Practice
