Case Study: Growing a Small Pharmacy Group through Private Clinic Marketing

Pharmacy Mentor has helped this Pharmacy Multiple for years with marketing, and their Digital Strategy has evolved alongside their growth. This Case Study focuses on the Private Clinic Marketing which has worked so well for them, and how their marketing needs have changed over time.

Before we begin, let’s summarise the process of this Private Clinic Marketing journey, so if you’re short of time, you can skip to the bits most important to you.

Step 1: Growing a Digital Presence & Community

The pharmacy owner is ambitious and set out to grow this multiple, by developing a formula that worked and using that for every pharmacy.

We began running individual Facebook pages for each pharmacy, people engage more to things relating specifically to their community, this grew an audience much faster than a single group page would.

Reaching 1,000 followers was faster by growing smaller pages dedicated to their communities and merging the pages.

Once this community had grown, and the group acquired even more pharmacies, it reached a stage where managing everything through a single page made more sense from a cost/benefit perspective. We consolidated all the individual community pharmacy pages and merged the audiences into one single page, branded as the pharmacy group.

Is Social Proof important for Private Clinic Marketing?

Have you ever discovered a new business, and wanted to check out they were legitimate before booking with them?

Social proof is seeing other people trust the business.  When it comes to booking an appointment for the first time, for example, having a large following on Social Media provides that trust at a glance.

Google Reviews

Google Reviews are another way of encouraging bookings from new patients. This pharmacy has focused on building Google Reviews as they know the importance of them.

There are two ways of getting reviews like this on Google. Deliver excellent service, and then ask for the reviews.

This is just one of the Pharmacy Group’s pharmacies. Don’t tell me that doesn’t cast them in a great light for anyone thinking about using them.

Want a branded poster which boosts Google Reviews for your pharmacy?

Step 2: Building a Website that converts visitors into bookings

They obviously wanted as many bookings as possible in each pharmacy. But how could they centralise and manage all the bookings in one place? They needed a website.

The site was one of our Advanced Pharmacy Websites, built with bookings in mind, as you can see, the highlighted buttons all represent converting the visitor into a new patient.

These buttons take the patient into a third-party booking system which they already used. We integrated the website so it works seamlessly with the third party software.

The website is also fundamental for Step 4. Poorly designed websites which don’t engage visitors won’t rank well on Google, meaning far fewer future visitors.

Step 3: Advertising through Facebook & Google

When it comes to Facebook & Google Advertising, it’s pretty much a factory. Want more output? Put more in.

This shows the results of the campaigns driving traffic to the booking calendar of the Pharmacy’s website between October 2021 and March 2022.

The link clicks follow money spent like a boat rises and falls with the water level. It’s simple. If you want more results, you increase your budget.

Facebook Ads total spend was £1,050.91 generating 2,313 website visitors.

Just going off the average across all industries, the average landing page conversion is 2.35%.

2.35% of 2,313 visitors is 54 people. Even with a lower estimated average margin of £25 per consultation, you’d still be generating £300 profit from your £1000 investment.

The reality is, we know that these pharmacies are experiencing higher than 2.35% conversion rate, as both their Travel Clinic and Ear Health Clinics in particular are busy with multiple appointments across multiple pharmacies every day.

Again, you can almost see the correlation between cost and Clicks, only with Google Ads we also have Calls as an additional objective.

What does this mean? If you have a profitable service with higher margins than your advertising spend, then any money invested is generating profit. Obviously, there’s a ceiling. Not everyone in the world needs their ears cleaning at once, but for services like PCR tests, Flu Jabs etc, that ceiling is higher.

How much did they invest for the returns?

One of the most common questions we get asked is what kind of returns are generated by different levels of investment.

Google Ads are measured by Cost Per Click, (Facebook Ads focused on link clicks are too) because you are only charged every time your advert gets clicked. It costs different amounts to advertise for different words, depending on competition, so those costs vary.

Below is an example of how much this pharmacy spent on Google Ads versus how many clicks their ad received.

Here, showing less than £150, this pharmacy generated around 120 relevant website visitors for their Travel Clinic.

Step 4: SEO for Clinical Keywords

Almost exactly a year ago to this date, (I remember because it was at the Pharmacy Show 2021) I caught up with the pharmacy owner about the benefits of Search Engine Optimisation for the Pharmacy Private Clinics.

We talked about how amazingly this had worked for our clients who’d employed our SEO strategy for PCR tests (link to that Case Study), and this pharmacy owner was interested in doing Rapid Antigen Tests.

In the last 28 days, 2.6k people visited this Pharmacy website, each visitor viewing more than 2 pages on average.

We started work a couple of months later. Developing blogs around service-specific keywords (specific topics displayed in the image below), our aim was generating local traffic to the website from people searching for things related to these services.

Nearly a year on from that initial conversation, and the pharmacy is experiencing continuous growth in both users and page views. You can see in the chart below how many users that is generating for free, compared to the paid campaigns.

How the Pharmacy is doing at a glance

The pharmacy recently acquired a number of new pharmacies, and is rolling out the same successful formula for those pharmacies.

The owner of this pharmacy group also just took our Perfect Pharmacy Scorecard (a self-assessment showing how well your pharmacy scores against Pharmacy Perfection.) The majority of pharmacies taking this Quiz get a Medium score, so we were delighted with one of our clients scoring so highly, especially in Digital Presence.

What’s next for this pharmacy?

The next step for this pharmacy is increased analytics on their website, as well as further work on getting found for more service keywords, bringing in an even bigger audience across multiple locations. Understanding the user behaviour on the website in greater detail means we can fine-tune the marketing for greater effectiveness.

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