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Walk-Ins Welcome · Ep. 254
Ep. 254: The Cost of Digital Marketing in 2027
About this Episode
Are you spending enough on marketing to grow your urgent care, or are you putting money into the wrong places?
As urgent care clinics prepare for 2027, building an effective marketing budget means more than repeating last year's spending. With increasing competition, changing search behavior, and new AI tools, clinic owners need to understand where their marketing dollars can make the biggest impact.
In this episode of Walk-Ins Welcome, Nick and Michael break down how urgent care clinics should approach their marketing budgets for 2027, including Google Ads, SEO, AI visibility, websites, and patient conversion.
They discuss common budgeting mistakes, what different marketing channels cost, and why generating clicks and calls means little if those opportunities aren't turning into actual patient visits.
Don't focus on buying clicks, do not focus on buying eyeballs; focus on conversions
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Episode Transcript
WALK-INS WELCOME — EPISODE 254 2027 Urgent Care Marketing Budget IN: So, um, here's what I want to do is help you focus on what your marketing mix should look like. And, and... OUT: ...So, all right, let's keep it rolling. So, um, here's what I want to do is help you focus on what your marketing mix should look like. And, and it falls into three camps. Awareness, conversion, and retention. Okay. So, what is awareness? These are people that need to know that you exist. They haven't converted. They're not sick yet, but they need to know that you're there. And we use tools like search engine optimization. Um, and simply put, that's just the art of being found on Google. More importantly, we want you to focus on that map three-pack. And that is all based. is those three positions with the map right next to it and it that is where it shows your Google reviews. Um that's where they can get more information on your clinic and and it's been our experience that the vast majority of people that find you on the map threeack convert [clears throat] to patients on the map threeack. They never go to your website. They never go to youruler. Those kinds of well they go to your scheduleuler but they don't go to your website to get there if that makes sense. Um, AI visibility is becoming more and more of an opportunity for clinics, especially going into 2027. Hey, I get it. We all have AI fatigue. I I I I'm actually falling into the camp of AI fatigue. What? I know. I use it all the time. But but it's it's like there's it changes all the time and it's like, okay, you have Google or sorry, you have Gemini and you have Perplexity and everybody knows what ChatGBT is. And now you have a Tesla with Grock. Yeah, I have a Tesla with Grock. So, I'm looking and leaning into Croc at the moment just so I could drive down the road and just talk to my car um and have it working for me. Um but but Muse is is Facebook's I don't want to it didn't exist three months ago and now it's like it didn't exist three weeks ago. No, it's brand new and it is exploding and the people that are using it actually really enjoy it. But it is it came in with a very specific design which is to just be your personal assistant. It doesn't want to do anything else. Yeah. Then we were in Chicago last week and there was a billboard for Muse. That's right. Like they they doubled down. They're going all all in. And we could go into detail there, but here's the thing. Most most companies are structuring their AI for the platform. And the problem is the platforms keep changing. Our approach has changed. We are now structuring websites and content on the website to be platform agnostic. So that as the platforms change, your website, your content, and your answers, and your authority live on no matter what the newest platform is. And I think that AI visibility, you've probably heard it as AEO or GEO. We've simply called it visibility. So, and and the part we have to note too is like it still isn't always correct. Correct. We actually have I had a client last week I was doing a review with and they were trying to show up for a certain keyword. When I did the search, they showed up an AI overview and their competitor showed up, but it linked it back to her site for the competitor. I mean, good for her. Which I laughed at. I said, "Well, you can't ask for much more." But that's still like the challenge with AI where it thinks it knows, but sometimes the common sense hat doesn't work. Yeah. Well, a lot of the awareness is going to be driven through the content that you put out there through your through your website and blogs. And the other side of that is going to be your social media, how you engage with your clients. Um, I would recommend you go back and listen to an episode that we just released around social media where it talks about Facebook is for community. Uh, Tik Tok is for um, uh, influencer. Uh, Instagram is for vanity. Uh, LinkedIn is for professionalism and, uh, Instagram is vanity. So, if you understand what those platforms are doing, then you can use your social medias to build awareness. Let's click uh, click over to conversions for just a second. This is what's going to drive the patient volume for you. Okay. Uh, and thank you Hannah for dropping that episode in the chat for everybody. Um, Google Ads specifically are going to be the thing that drives the patient volume to your clinic. I'll say that again for those on the back. Google ads has to be gotten correctly. You have to deliver that correctly because that is what's going to drive the vast majority of patient volume to your clinic. But they'll never get there if you don't design your website to convert and you don't have a person on the phone that it can competently handle and close patients coming through the door. What is a close, Michael? [laughter] This is our front desk gurus. I'm going to leave it to you. A close is where you actually say, "Can we go and get an appointment for you? Let's go and get your information." Great. I've put you in our system and you know how to get here. Great. We will see you here in 15 minutes. And what is the current close? Uh we close at 7:00. will be here by 6:30. Uh if you want to get in or uh you can just walk in. Just come on in. Do do you take appointments? Yeah. No. Uh no, we do, but just come on in. [laughter] The the clinics that schedule the appointment over the phone will dominate the the ones who don't. And it's not even a And it is so fun because we have some clinics now that we're working with that we've been able to like massage some data with them with their actual patients that came through and paid and what we were aligning with what we did. And oh my word, like it is astounding how much like an actual phone call to a patient can actually happen if they're asking. And I even have some data because I've been doing some more training recently and it even shows where the conversion rate is tremendously higher if they just ask. That's right. It's just it's amazing. So spend a significant amount of time or call us and we'll help you on your Google and meta ads, your website, and your call handling. These things are going to be the the the different deliverables to get patients through the door. Finally, if you're going to get a patient, why not keep them? Well, there's a novel idea, [laughter] right? Let's get them to come back again. A a a patient or a client or a customer, a returning customer is a whole lot cheaper to keep than to get a brand new one. There's a great uh Blues Brothers uh the second Blues Brothers movie, there's a song called It's Cheaper to Keeper. [laughter] So, like this is the perfect song. Should we start playing that now? The intro music. the [laughter] secret keeper. All right, y'all got music 101 by Nick here. Um but but after somebody has engaged with your clinic, they didn't feel good, they had a good experience with you, we need to continue to talk to them throughout the year. Um email, talk to them. What are the seasonalities that you should be communicating? I mean, strep season or flu season, you need to be talking about back to school on both times they do back to school. And we have a webinar on back to school basics. You need to reference that. Absolutely. All of those resources are available to you on the website. Um, if you are doing uh summer sports, you need to be talking about sports physicals. Um, if you see that your community is in a hiring spree, you need to be talking about occupational medicine. All of this stuff can be communicated very easily without any HIPPO violation through email, um, text message or SMS. What a great way to let them, hey, we haven't seen you in x amount of time. Can we do anything for you? Do you need anything? or make an offer to come in for a for a sports physical or just a physical at all, right? Um, always be gaining those reviews because that is something that people are going to remember, oh, I left a review for that company. I'm going to go back there. My name is on it. Um, they're taking some ownership when they put a review. Okay? And then remarketing, I'm going to aster asterisk, however you say that. This one thing, remarketing is talking to people that maybe didn't engage with you that you've tracked. However, we are seeing more and more and more predatory attorneys looking for opportunities to sue clinics that are doing remarketing. The reason I'm putting an aster here is because if you're not if you are not 100% sure that you are that you are doing cookie consent on your website and providing the proper HIPPA uh uh protections for both your patients and your company, I'm going to tell you do not do this. Um, it is an important part of marketing. However, I would leave that to somebody who knows what they're doing. Um, call us, call your attorneys, all of these different kinds of things. I'm not trying to scare you. AI has opened up a door for scammers to legalize scamming and make it super fast and they make it fast and painful, right? And I just don't want you to get caught with that. So, um, we'll continue. All right. Where most clinic budgets go wrong. Okay. This says heavy on ads, light on everything else. Well, technically you should be heavy on ads. Let's talk about the structure of those ads. Most times when we look at campaigns that have been built, people that are want to do business with patient care marketing pros, we see that they have performance max or AI bidding turn on and they have one campaign, correct? And they have all their budget that one campaign and they haven't touched it. [laughter] I talked to an urgent care a multilocation urgent care this week. He's like, "Man, we're getting thousands of conversions. Thousands. Thousands of conversions, but we're not seeing the patient volume." And I said, "Well, my friend, you have Performance Max turned on in your Google Ads." And Google Ads is they are the best at extracting every dollar out of your financials that they can possibly do. They are excellent at removing money from your wallet. The only thing, as I understand it, that's better at that is a daughter. [laughter] So, um, Google, she's for now. Now, um anyway, uh I I'm joking, but at the same time, don't focus on buying clicks. Do not focus on buying eyeballs. Focus on conversions. And that is a well structured campaign. What am I trying to accomplish? That's the campaign level ad set. Who am I talking to? Exactly. Who am I talking to? And who am I not talking to? That's your keyword targeting. And even more important, your negative keyword targeting. Yeah, we actually are now hitting a point where I'm having multiple ads accounts breaking the 10,000 negative keyword Yeah. barrier and it has to start another list, right? Which is so fun to see that now. But that's just the reality. Like we're have account think about it. We have accounts with 10,000 negative keywords and we're still adding more every single day. That's right. And who has time for that? I mean, we obviously do, but like who has time to constantly be doing this? This is a focused effort. If you're gonna if you're going to spend ad dollars, you want those dollars to turn into traffic. So, we want the traffic, the conversion, and the optimizations all as one loop. We want to bring the right traffic, the right patients to your clinic. We want them to convert into visits. And we found across the hundreds of locations that we dealt with, 61%. No, I did not make that up. I have verified that. And then I got challenged on it in a good way. And [laughter] so, I went back and verified it again and it was still at 61%. This is a good thing, right? So 61% of the conversions that are created should be turning into patients coming in through your door. And then we want to make that optimization. We want to make it cheaper over time. And how do we do that? You're taking the traffic that you're paying for and the traffic that you're building organically through SEO. Those should marry up at some point and that's how you get it cheaper. Ads can't fix a site. It can't fix a phone line and it can't fix a follow-up. Those are things that you have to pay attention to. Absolutely. All right. Uh cost breakdown. I'm going to make this as quick as I possibly can. Somewhere to the tune of a,000 to $4,000 a month should be focused uh dollars spent on search engine optimization per location. Per location, right? So SEO again is still the main driver of patients. Well, SEO and Google ads are still the main drivers of of patients coming through your door as I and I still think that's going to be the case in 2027. However, AI is is creeping up there, and I'm going to talk about that in a minute. But SEO is a very slow role. It takes 3 to six, sometimes even 12 months to start really getting traction on SEO. And one of the one of the things that we get the most questions on are is this something I have to pay for forever? Um, unfortunately, it is it is like a utility. It's a yes and no question answer because you don't have to. You don't have to. And then because just because we have these conversations and we've seen it ourselves where you get you get SEO work done, you start to rank, you start to get patients, and it just seems like you're just hanging out at top three spots. Great. And then the question comes, well, you did your job. I don't need you anymore, right? Like yes and no. So, uh, you can cancel today and in about 3 months your competitors are probably also battling for you, right? And they will come above above you. And then when that happens, you come back and say, "Well, can you go fix it again?" Yeah, but it it's not going to take a month to fix it. It may take a couple more months to kind of get that B. It's a battling thing. Uh sometimes it that three-month mark can go a little longer, a little shorter. Depends on your competition. Uh as we can tell, like urgent care is more competitive now than it ever has been. And now, and we were at a conference last week, we were learning that they've the the bad players in the urgent care space have been flushed out at this point, right? And now you have a lot of really strong good players and so now your competition is going to be more intense. So that's where like the SEO part you can you can turn it off and it will keep going for a little bit but eventually you won't stay there. I look at it as electricity powering a refrigerator. If you turn the power off your refrigerator will keep everything in there cool for a couple days but eventually it's going to spoil. Yeah. And and you have to feed it again and you got to go replace all the food. You got to do all the work all over again. So all right I want to take a minute and talk about AI visibility. AI visibility is something that you do not have to have right now. We have not seen a single conversion come from AI. However, we understand uh you know Wayne Gretzky, famous hockey player said, "I don't go to the puck. I go to where the puck is going." Right? So, this is what's this is where the market is going. It will monetize at some point. And I think the ones who get out ahead of doing this are the ones who are going to win in the long term. Um, as of now, it's going to look a lot like paying for something that doesn't exist yet. And I get that. I get that. But here's what it looks like. Typically, somewhere to the tune of 600 to,400 a month. Um, and this is the art of getting found in Chad GBT, Gemini, Brock, Muse, Perplexity, all of these AI clawed, right? Any platform at this point. So, what we do is we build trust pages, we build accurate listings, we continue to garner those reviews, and we measure it against the baseline. That's the foundation. Um there are multilocation uh ways of doing this uh where we have to build several website pages in order to make this work. And then most clinics, they just don't have a line for yet. It hasn't ever been included in your budget, right? And I think really you need to start thinking about uh if if you're doing everything right, I think this is the best way to look at it. If you're doing everything right, what is the next thing? Yeah. Right. One of the number one things that we see from our clients is hey, we're doing everything. What else can we do? Yeah. Right. This is the what else you can do. All right. So, uh it's the same foundation between SEO and AI visibility, but they have two completely different payoffs and that's through accurate listings, real facts, getting real reviews across multiple channels so that you show up when people are asking questions on AI. Yeah. Well, one thing to note too is up until this year, I would say up until mid midpart of this year, you heard AEO and GEO, right? And AI visibility is kind of like the all-encompassing term for it now. Even because we were doing some research and this year AI visibility showed up and now while AEO and GEO still have a strong people are looking for that, AI visibility is like thousands upon thousands of percent increases of people looking for it. So when you hear somebody pitching AEO GEO, AI visibility is like the next layer to that. And so don't just don't just say AEO is AI visibility. It's not quite. It's they're all part of it, I guess. And so, and that's the part where we're saying we can't really tell you if it's going to bring you a bunch more patients because this is still very fresh and we don't have a ton of data on it, but we just we have a plan and we've been uh doing this with a couple of clients just and just to see and we see increases on their what's happening in the AI for them, but are we saying, "Oh, that was the magic bullet for your next I needed that five more patients per day and that's what fixed it." Probably not going to ever say that. [laughter] That's right. Not anytime soon at least. At least not anytime soon. Yeah. So, all right. So, talk about cost here. Um, I'm touching on this part here because website that that was my world forever. Luis has kind of taken that over even. He's done a great job. He has. He's way better than me. And, uh, but anyway, so cost bill wise 3 to 12,000. Why we put such a range on that? Because a website is a it's one of those like it's a customized whatever project. It's not a set price that everybody kind of abides by like it's very customized project. Um, yeah, you could have AI build your website. They'll look pretty good. We can see them a mile away. I'm actually not opposed to it either. Like, if that's if that's where you want to go in and save money, this is a good place to do it. Yeah, you can do that. You know, from our standpoint, even if you had AI design it, like we still utilize WordPress to help power our SEO processes. Correct. And I know we're not the only agency out there that does that. So, put that in mind. Uh, 3 to 12,000. As a side note, you should own your website, too. in in our world when we build you a website you own it. We don't want it. Uh but there's a lot of companies out there that will fine print it and say you don't own it. So just keep that in mind. And then of course there's a monthly cost for everything when it comes to hosting. We put 15600. It just depends on what you're asking for on the hosting side. And as a side note, yesterday was a big PHP vulnerability that was released. Uh we're on a a managed hosting platform. So they already had released the hey we already got this fixed, don't worry about it. Um, but that talking about the AI predatory stuff. This is also what's happening. AI is now because AI discovered it. It discovered the the vulnerability in PHP, which is the programming language for uh your website. By the way, it's called pretty helpful programming, which I thought was funny. People don't know that, but anyway. And so that's where the maintenance comes into play because if you pay the $10 a month to GoDaddy for your to host your website, GoDaddyy's not updating your PHP. It doesn't care. It's just sitting on a server somewhere. um and oh you need to go update your PHP you have to go do it manually and most people including myself don't know how to do that very cleanly and make it work so that's the website uh Google ad stuff so this is interesting here um when we first started out with with urgent cares we said a th00and to 2500 would get you pretty far right and then things have just changed over time and so what we're seeing is this 1 1500 to 10,000 a month this is a perlo mindset for your budget um and we find that once you get past the 8 to 10,000 mark and Google just wants to eat your money, right? And so all of a sudden your conversion costs aren't going up. Yeah. I want to make one comment on this because this can be a daunting flavor here of money. Okay. Um I want to talk about how you should spend this one to 10,000 a month. If you're start at at the bottom and then make sure that you have your conversions completely dialed in, then you increase your budget based on your patient need. Not just, hey, I'm just I'm going to turn on Google Ads. I'm going to throw 10,000. I'm going to beat everybody. No, you're not. You're going to That's the fastest way to lose money on the planet. Yeah. Um you might as well take your money, walk to the garbage can, throw it in there, and drop a match. Well, and so we even tell our clients too like, hey, don't do a budget change for the first 30, 60 days because we want to dial we'll we'll come back to you when we feel like the conversion costs are in a good realm. And also too, commit to the budget change. Yeah. Whatever budget you have, don't say, "I want to run this for one week." Google doesn't like that because you do a shock to the system and it could actually cause a relearning situation. Um, and it just creates all sorts of problems. And so I would say this, if you're like, hey, I have a $5,000 a month ad spend budget and then you're like, I want to go $7,000, but I can only do it for one month. I would say don't do it. Maybe increase the 5500 and keep that going for multiple months at a time. Right? Um that's just what we know. So because we'll even tell any CSMs are trained to say like, hey, I like the budget increase, but you have to be committed to it. I can't do this for one month. It'll probably end up hurting you long term. All right. And finally, meta ads. Um, meta ads is where we we tell you don't touch meta until you have Google ads figured out. SEO, Google ads, all of that because Google is where the demand is because people are sick and they're looking you up. Meta ads like people are scrolling and that's kind of part of the branding piece of it. So like you will get conversions off of meta ads, but as you can see here, our view is the ad spend doesn't have to be as much as Google because you're not going to get all that. Now, if you're running some specialty things that are kind of vanity driven, any type of services like maybe like IV therapy or whatever, um, Botox, med ads makes a little bit more sense, but just having pictures of sick people. [laughter] That's right. They're not necess. So, just kind of keep that in mind. So, that's this is about where we view right now on the ad spin side. So, all right, let's keep it rolling.
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