Midwifery Advertising: Targeting Your Marketing Efforts
Midwifery advertising poses a fascinating challenge. How do we spend our advertising budget in the right place to get the right reach and bring more clients to care given the extremely tiny window of targeting for potential midwifery care clients? Luckily, digital marketing has opened up so many doors for midwives and birth centers to target their advertising with incredible effectiveness, and we’re going to show you how.
First, let’s define our terms. When we talk about advertising in this context, we are referring to utilizing paid placement of your promotional materials in front of your target market. Advertising dollars are the dollars you are paying to the placement platforms themselves like Google, Facebook, Instagram, etc., not the dollars that you may pay to an expert marketer like Marketing TEA who is creating those promotional materials.
In the past, advertising was a bit of a scattershot process. In traditional marketing (television ads, radio ads, billboards, direct mailers), you didn’t always know who your materials would be shown to. Sure, you might have been able to slightly narrow down that fans of a certain radio show were also fans of your product or that people who drove on a certain road were usually commuting home and would want to pick up food from your restaurant. But as an advertiser, you’d still spend a heck of a lot of money reaching plenty of people who weren’t a good fit for your business. Traditional advertising has its place, but in the world of midwifery advertising with such a highly targeted audience, digital marketing is where it’s at.
If you are a midwife or birth center owner and you’re looking for growth, you need to be utilizing digital advertising. And you want your advertising to be as highly targeted as possible. Here are the pathways we suggest and use for our midwifery marketing clients:
START WITH TARGETED CONTENT
All great advertising starts with great content. Everything in marketing does, really. If you are going to be paying to put promotional materials (content) in front of your audience, then those materials should be absolutely top notch. You know those terrible ads you see on social media? You know the ones – they’re designed poorly, they have typos, they don’t convey the product or the business well. Those advertisers are spending their hard earned money to put that material in front of you. What a waste! Don’t be that advertiser. Make sure your content is top notch. If not, it’s not worth paying for promoting.
DEVELOP A TARGETED AUDIENCE
This is one of the most exciting things for us to do as midwifery marketers. You’ve got a narrow window to hit, and various ad platforms will let you select various targeting factors. Your primary audience for midwifery services of course will be women in a certain age group who may have other coinciding factors going on in their lives. No, you can’t target a setting on digital ads for “pregnant or may be pregnant soon,” as convenient as that would be! You’ve got to make your own algorithm of sorts to determine your target market. And if you offer other services like fertility counseling or GYN well-woman care, you may need multiple audiences. Be as specific as you can in your targeting, it will help you in the long run. We can’t give away our own secret recipe for targeting (sorry) but we’ve found how to make ad targeting to the midwifery market extremely successful over our 7 years as midwife and birth center marketers. But develop your audience and keep working on narrowing it down over time, that’s how you’ll find success.
CONSIDER YOUR ADVERTISING PLATFORMS
Different digital ad platforms offer different options for content usage, different tools for targeting, and require different budgets to serve up ads. Facebook and Instagram are a great place to serve up ads with video content that may create a connection or provide education with your market. Google Ads are a great place to show written copy to people who are searching for topics or services related to yours. With so many advertising platforms out there, it can be intimidating to figure out where to start, but we suggest starting on the platform that you use the most. You’ll find the most success creating ads for a platform that you’re familiar with. Of course, our own team has experts who specialize in the various platforms, brining all the options to our clients!
ONLY INCREASE SPEND WHEN IT’S WORKING
Spending more on advertising ≠ achieving more success in bringing in new leads. We encourage everyone to scale their ad spending over time. Begin by considering everything as an experiment. If you try a little of everything, you’ll soon find which types of content, targeting, and platforms are getting you the best result at the best price. Then, channel your efforts and your budget in that direction! Everything we recommend here is something that we do, and even we are always experimenting with our own ads to develop the best bang for our ad budget.
If you follow those tips and get help where you feel you need it, you’ll soon find yourself achieving much greater success as you advertise your midwifery services or birth center care. Need to run your marketing ideas by a caring ear? Let’s have a chat sometime.