Most pregnancy centers have a limited marketing budget. Meaning, they don’t have enough money to saturate their market with their message. Saturation requires using T.V., radio, billboards and other print ads in addition to a strong online presence with a website, blog, social media, video, and search engine advertising like Google AdWords. Without this kind of money what do you do? Can you still reach enough women to keep your advocates and nurses busy helping women to have their babies? Answer: Yes, by developing a total internet marketing presence.
The best way to maximize the use of your marketing dollars is to prioritize your spend with your entire budget year in mind. The formula we need to remember when advertising is ‘right message + impressions = calls.’ CompassCare’s experience shows that the vast majority of abortion-minded women are online (and mostly with their smart phones). Happily for us an online advertising presence is the most cost effective means of reaching those women.
How do you reach them? Step one: Assemble your online marketing team (preferably volunteers). Step two: Assess your center’s online status and performance. Step three: Identify areas of improvement. Step four: Prioritize those areas of improvement and align them with your budget. Step five: Develop an online editorial calendar to drive content development (Click here to download an Editorial Calendar template ). Step six: Assign content development tasks to team members. Step seven: Publish content online!
Bottom-line: You have to be there when they are using the search engine! For example, when they are searching for “How much does an abortion cost?” your center’s website, blog, or AdWord should come up. So how do you make that happen? Consistent, relevant content development over time. That means you and your online marketing team need to be continually developing new content that not only uses the key words and phrases these women are using but also provide quality content that addresses those key words and phrases in a relevant way for her. Translation: She has to click on and read what you wrote, listen to your audio, watch your video, etc. Google sees this behavior and uses that information to increase your center’s natural search engine ranking. If all you are using is AdWords it will work for a little while and then your results will begin to taper off.
Warning: If you are using a third party to manage your online presence, it is important to note that they cannot do the work described above to keep your center performing well. Also, be very careful the advertising message is consistent with the services you provide lest your center be ‘blacklisted’ by the search engine, and patients can’t find you at all.
