This is the story of how we turned a dermatology center’s slowest month into their best month ever with just $1,000.

Back in the summer (of 2018), a new client came to us looking for help. They’re a group of dermatology offices in south Florida, and they were looking to attract new patients to all of their offices, including a brand new location.

Before we even began working with them, they started off with some advantages that let us know we could do great things for them:

• They were very popular with their existing patients and had great online reviews
• They were using an online appointment booking platform that made new patient sign up easy
• They had great social media management and always responded quickly to comments and questions on their posts
• They had a newly-updated website and a great backlog of quality image and video assets

Most importantly, though, was the offer that they approached us to advertise for them:

Free skin cancer checks for new patients at any of their locations – and yes, the checks really were free.

So, we had a great new client with an offer that seemingly nobody could refuse.

But how could we make sure that offer was urgent enough for people to act on it and redeem it?

The answer: emphasize the C word (or, rather, the M word).

Now, we don’t like to be in the business of fearmongering. That’s not who we are. In this case, we were really just trying to encourage people to get a free check that could potentially save their health, if not their life.

So, in our design for our landing pages, we asked visitors this question:

“Do you know what skin cancer looks like?”

The question appeared with four unlabeled images of moles. Three of the four were cancerous, and only we [DME Digital] and the skin center knew which.

For curious readers, the second lesion from the left is the benign one. The rest were cancerous.

The thought was that any layperson looking at the landing page would see these moles, realize they had no idea whether any of the similar lesions on their body were dangerous, and decide to book a free skin check to be safe.

The landing page didn’t end with the moles.

Below the fold, we used space to build trust for the dermatology center using high-quality assets and social proof.

We focused on one doctor in particular for this design in order to prevent confusion. Most of the reviews featured her name specifically, and we included a video of her explaining the skin check procedure that also featured shots of the interior of the office.

(It didn’t hurt that their videos were well-produced and their facilities were very good-looking)

For the page’s call to action, we directed users to the online appointment scheduling portal, but also gave them a phone number to call.

Desktop users would see the link to the portal most prominently featured, while mobile users would see a click-to-call link more prominently.

Of course, the landing page wouldn’t be the first thing our audience would see. To get to it, they would have to go through a Facebook ad.

We tested four image variations of an ad, all with less-aggressive messaging than the landing page:

• A woman doing yoga on a beach
• A dermatologist examining an adult woman
• A dermatologist examining a small child
• A man carrying a surfboard on a beach

Each ad variation got an even split of $600 of the budget.

Ad copy focused on the number of skin checks already performed, and emphasized that the check was absolutely free with no strings attached.

The winner was the image of the dermatologist examining the adult woman, so that was the ad we ended up running for the remainder of the campaign.

For this ad set, we targeted certain English-speaking women over the age of 25 within a 25 mile range of the dermatology practice.

Among the interests we targeted for were Beautiful Skin, Dermatology, and Health & Wellness.

Our thinking was that women would be more likely to be concerned about dermatological issues and, therefore, more likely to book an appointment with a dermatologist.

We also thought that married women in the group would be concerned for their partners’ health and book appointments for them as well.

With the money left over from the split test, we continued to run the winning ad until the end of the campaign. We knew it would be successful, but we didn’t know how it would compare to the client’s other marketing endeavors.

It turned out to be the most successful campaign they had ever run.

Here’s the breakdown:

The Ad Variations

• reached 25,944 people
• got 56,491 impressions
• got 78 comments
• earned 127 shares
• and earned 185 likes/reactions.

They totaled a 4.53% CTR with an average $3.73 Cost Per Lead.

The Winning Ad

• got 21 likes
• got 3 comments
• and earned 6 shares.

The Landing Page

• Attracted 671 views
• had about a 40% conversion rate, not including phone calls.

The Whole Campaign

• generated 268 website leads
• led to 28 phone calls
• resulted in 128 skin checks booked through the online portal

96 of those bookings were new patients worth over $30,000 to the client in the first year.

Oh, and all of this happened in the month of September.

It’s usually the skin center’s slowest month of the year, but our work turned September 2018 into the highest traffic month in the history of their practice.

Needless to say, the client was happy.

Before we met them, the folks at the skin center were doing almost everything right, they just weren’t optimized for generating new patient interest.

They already had lots of elements of success in place: a solid website, well-produced assets, well-run social media, and hundreds of existing happy patients.

All they needed to turn their slow months into dynamite were a few digital pushes from an agency who knew how to get peoples’ attention and lead them to convert.

The path to success was straight and smooth, all they had to do was decide to take it.

How is your path to success looking? Need some help setting yourself up for success? We can help.