IVF Fertility Marketing for Your Clinic's Success

IVF Fertility Marketing Strategies: Where to Start

The global IVF market keeps growing year over year. However, the demand for in vitro fertilisation hasn’t undergone significant changes in Canada since 2015. Under such circumstances, Canadian IVF clinics need to create and carry out marketing strategies to successfully compete on a tight market.

dNOVO medical marketing experts created the IVF Marketing Guide to help clinics navigate competitive landscape, keep up with complex market dynamics, attract more leads, and gain more patients.

Understanding Canadian IVF Market

According to Global IVF Market Insights, the global IVF market has been steadily growing over the past decades and is expected to reach $39.12BN in 2032. The growing demand is no surprise. According to WHO Infertility Estimates Report, one in six individuals experiences fertility issues during their lifetime. IVF procedures can help overcome these issues.

Despite the global market growth trends, Canada seems to lag behind. Unfortunately, we don’t have much IVF-related statistical data for Canada. It’s hard to find a market report dedicated to this topic. The last stats published online by Canadian Fertility & Andrology Society (CFAS) date back to the mid 2010s. We collected all the stats we were able to find for Canada in this infographic:

Most of this data is outdated by almost 10 years. The recent information about the number of IVF clinics and the number of annual IVF procedures in 2023 were taken from this article.

While it might seem that the number of in vitro fertilization treatments has grown, in reality, it remain almost at the same rate compared to the population. In 2015, 0.04% of Canadians gained IVF treatment compared to 0.5% in 2022. The percentage of US citizens who got IVF treatment has increased from 0.07% to 0.11% over the same period of time (2015 global IVF data vs. 2022 US IVF data).

One of the probable reasons of IVF treatment market size remaining almost the same is the lack of reimbursement policies as well as the wealth gap between older and younger generations.

Understanding IVF patients

Understanding potential clients is critical for planning your marketing strategy. Marketers would often create ideal patient personas to plan the campaigns.

Check out an example of IVF-related digital content aimed at single parents by choice (we love how they have links to support groups for single parents):

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Ideal Patient Persona would consist of three parts:

1. Demographics
2. Pain points and needs
3. Obstacles to purchasing solution

Now, all your patients will have one common need, a miracle baby, and one common pain point, the inability to conceive. However, there will be pain points and needs that will be different depending on the demographic data.

A single male and a same sex male couple will be in need of a surrogate mother to carry their child, while it won’t be the case for heterosexual couples, single females, or female same-sex couples.

We suggest creating at least 3 separate personas based on the relationship: single parent, 2SLGBTQIA+ couple, and heterosexual couple.

Check out the frequently asked questions section on the 2SLGBTQIA+ IVF page:

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You can see that the clinic understands the pain points of their target audience and is ready to address them.

Medical Marketing Materials

Want to learn more about medical marketing and gain valuable insights? dNOVO Group marketing experts prepared a series of guides teaching how to build digital marketing strategies.

• Medical Marketing Guide
• Plastic Surgery Marketing Guide
• Dental Marketing Guide
• Chiropractor Marketing Guide

Effective Digital Marketing Strategies for IVF Clinics

As a marketer, you’ll need to achieve several goals, like increasing the number of leads, improving conversions, and working with retention of the clients who failed at the previous cycle but are psychologically ready for the next one.

The effective IVF marketing strategies include creating and developing a website, starting a blog with regular postings, social media marketing, PPC campaigns, and email marketing. We will discuss each of these strategies in the next sections.

In our experience, the best working strategies are website, content, and SEO. SMM, PPC, and email marketing can give a lot of support to SEO by driving traffic, increasing the target audience outreach, and helping with retention.

When doing multichannel approach, the biggest challenge is consistency and building a truly multitouch outreach rather than scattered strategies.

Website & Content Plan for IVF Marketing

Website and content are the pillars of IVF marketing that can help your clinic gain more patients. We have a comprehensive guide on medical website design. In this section we discuss the basics of content strategy for IVF marketing.

IVF Website Design

There are several ways IVF clinics can go about website design and content:

1. The promise

Create the website that focuses on the photos of babies and pregnant women. Talk about the results of IVF treatments and other types of assisted reproductive technology you have to offer your clients. The drawback of this approach? Some people who have undergone many failed attempts, lost pregnancies, and IVF cycles might be overly sensitive around baby pictures.

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2. The path

Showcase the couples and the process they undergo together to become parents. This works especially well for 2SLGBTQIA+ community as the imagery can reinforce the impression that your clinic is safe for them. However, single parents by choice might find it a bit pressuring.

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3. The expertise

In Vitro Fertilisation is a complex technology that requires extensive expertise and knowledge that potential patients would expect from the clinic. Demonstrate it using the imagery that includes gametes, lab equipment, and the process of artificial fertilisation. The drawback is the “coldness” and “sterility” of the lab, the medical personnel and the whole process.

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Essential elements of IVF website:

1. Main Page
2. Services – to list the treatments your patients can get your your clinic
3. Doctors – to give “human face” to your treatments
4. Special pages for same-sex couples or single-parents by choice
5. Book an appointment page or widget with an option to tell their issue in advance
6. Blog to educate your potential and existing patients and give them valuable insights into the treatments

Check out the example of the booking page in in one of IVF clinics. It offers people to choose their age and goals of consultation. We also like how they provide an option to ask for help with this website functionality:

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Content Strategies for IVF Marketing

Once you’ve published your website and created all the main pages, you can focus on the content strategies for your blog, social media, and videos.

Content strategy for your blog will be tightly tied to your SEO strategy and keyword research that we discuss in the next section.

Check out this post with global trends for fertility care in 2024. Many people are searching for information about the new opportunities for fertility treatments. This post is intended for them.

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The content strategy for your website must attain the following goals:

1. SEO ranking for the major keywords.
2. Address the major fears and concerns of your clients surrounding IVF.
3. Provide valuable information for your potential and existing patients.about the clinic and the services.
4. Educate on the steps of fertility treatment and patients’ options, as well as answer frequently asked questions.
5. Provide the supporting resources for patients (e.g., the links to psychological services, parent groups, etc.).
6. Help build buyer journey from the first touchpoint to service pages to appointment booking or call.

We talk about Social Media Marketing goals in the section below.

Video content strategy goals include:

1. Create reusable content that you can share acorss multiple channels
2. Inform your patients about the IVF and other fertility treatments/
3. Share the success stories.

Regardless of the type of website design and content you choose, there’s one thing you need to remember. Your target audience is probably in the most vulnerable and hard period in their lives. They’ve already had a rollercoaster of their hopes getting high and then crushing down.

Some of them have lost a child. Some of them are frowned upon because of their struggle. Many of them blame themselves for not being able to conceive or carry to term. Many of them have spent all their savings on treatments. Many of them are scared they will fail (again).

You need to be empathetic, loving and caring in your delivery. You must also be frank and inform patients about their perspectives. Stay positive, supportive, and reassuring but don’t overpromise and never push, lie, or bend the truth.

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IVF SEO Strategies

SEO is one of the key drivers of your lead generation. You can have the best content in your field, but if your website doesn’t rank in Google, few people will find it, read it and convert to patients. 

SEO strategies help you get high positions in SeERP Google and other search engines for certain keywords. It’s hard to get all the aspects of SEO in this one guide. Read our article on medical SEO.

What to remember about IVF Fertility SEO strategy

1. Project timeframe

It will take time to get to the top of Google ranking pages.Think about 6-12 months to get first results. One way to go around it is to run PPC and email campaign to gain more traffic.

2. Team

It’s work for a SEO-specialist, content writer, link builder, webmaster and in certain cases marketing manager. Having an inhouse team can be costly, and many clinics opt for outsourcing their SEO and even digital marketing to an experienced IVF marketing agency..

3. Resources

You will need tools for successful SEO strategy. These include Content Management System, Google Analytics, SemRush and/or Ahrefs, Google Search Console, and others. The cost of most SEO and content management tools is one of the reasons why many clinics choose an agency, since the price of tools is usually included in the services.

4. Regularity

You must do IVF SEO continuously and regularly (like constant generation of new content, website monitoring, backlink requests, control of SEO ranking, etc.)

5. Google

Google has become Google because of the 20 years of war against web masters and SEO specialists who have been trying to abuse loopholes in its algorithms. The sudden change of the said algorithms is the norm for experienced SEO experts. You need to be ready for it too.

6. Results

Traffic doesn’t necessarily translates into new patients. Poor website buyer journey, low quality of content, bad CTAs or no CTAs at all, errors on a book appointment page and other factors can impact the website conversions negatively. 

Keyword Research

Keywords are the gates to your website. The higher your website ranks for a certain keyword, the higher are the chances that people searching for it will actually find your website.

The key indicators of keywords:

• Volume (how times users search a word in a particular region per month)
• Difficulty (how hard it is to get to the top of SERP, measured in percentage)
• Intention (informational, commercial, transactional, or navigational).

In the example below, you can see that the keyword IVF has informational intent, meaning Internet users are trying to learn more about this fertility treatment.Many of them do not have fertility issues at all, they just want to know more. The keyword has 9.9K searches per month and is very difficult (91%).

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Types of keywords:

• Short-tail (one word or a phrase)
• Long-tail (a sentence)

Below is an example of a long-tail keyword “can you choose gender with IVF?” It’s a good keyword with medium difficulty and decent volume. This is also a common question of many parents who are looking to “balance” their family with trying to control baby gender.

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Sources of keywords:

1. Your services (e.g., fertility treatment, IVF clinic, IVF, single-parent IVF, fertility treatment options, 2SLGBTQIA parenting).
2. Your direct and indirect competitors website and blogs
3. Frequently asked questions or expressed concerns from patients.
4. Questions people ask on forums and social media groups dedicated to IVF.

First research keywords on your own. These will be the basic keywords for your website pages. Then look at the keywords in categories 3 and 4 in the list above. Use the most interesting and valuable for the pages, take the rest for the blog. Next look at your competitors for the keywords you might’ve missed. You can also use tools like SemRush for researching your competitors and keyword gaps.

Website optimisation

Google and other search engine will not only look at the keywords that your website and website pages have, but also on the user experience they deliver.If search engine find that your website doesn’t deliver, it will lower the page rankings.

Check out one of many examples of SEO tools analysing a website performance for a New York fertility clinic on mobile devices:

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Here are some examples of bad user experience that will impact your SEO negatively:

• Your website downloads slowly
• there are no links between the pages
• the navigation is hard and tricky
• there’s no mobile version
• the links are broken
• the pages that used to rank go 404.

You need a dedicated person to monitor these things as well as a good webmaster to fix them.

One more important aspect of website optimization is on-page SEO. Carried out by content managers or web masters, this process require accurate allocation of keywords on individual pages. It will signal to Google crawlers that this page is indeed dedicated to a certain topic.

For example, if your keyword is IVF Toronto, you need to place it in:

• First level header (H1) and at least one second-level header (H2)
• Pictures alternative texts
• Meta title
• Meta description
• Paragraphs. 

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You will also want to think about synonyms for your main keywords and use them across your page.

Link Building

Links are the paths that connect your pages between each other as well as your website with other websites. 

The key goals of links are:

1. Provide navigation for your users
2. Please Google
3. Create a buyer journey to facilitate the conversion
4. Point to pages and website where the website visitors can find more information and continue their journey.

The tree types of links are:

• Internal (between website pages).
• External (on your website referring to other websites).
• Backlinks (links pointing to your website from other websites).

Good interlinking can improve website navigation and user experience as we mentioned above. Links to authoritative websites can tell Google and your visitors that you cite evidence-based data. It is especially important when doing marketing for medical institutions.

Finally, backlinks tell Google about your website’s authority. If your website points to shady businesses or if the website of shady businesses point to your website 

In the screenshot below, you can find an example of Ahrefs free tool for backlinks analysis for a fertility clinic IVF page:

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Local SEO

Local SEO is optimising your website for local search. Usually fertility clinics use their city or province. Apart from this, most medical facilities also create Google Business Profile.

The benefits of Local SEO:

1. In many cases, local keywords have lower difficulty than more general ones.
2. The keywords often have commercial or even transactional intent.
3. You have less competition for the spots in the top of Google SERP.
4. People usually start their search for treatments by searching local clinics.

The benefits of Google Business Profile:

1. Your clinic will appear on the Google maps
2. Your potential customers will see your contact data, website, and opening hours.
3. Patients will be able to leave reviews and rank your clinic.
4. People will be able to leave photos of your clinic right in Google Maps.
5. It’s free. All you have to do is spend some time on authentication.
6. When people are googling your business they will see a special panel dedicated to your clinic in the top of Google search:

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing can become a great aid in your IVF marketing. Once you know how to play the game.

Benefits of SMM:

1. Helps connect with your patients on a more personal level.
2. Helps build community around your fertility clinic
3. Gives backlinks to your website.
4. Drives traffic to your website.

We suggest getting accounts on at least two Social Media Platforms for IVF Marketing. Facebook and Instagram will be your primary choice, as these platforms are especially popular among millennials (your primary target audience).

The goals of Social Media Marketing strategy include:

1. Provide traffic and backlink to website
2. Receive patients feedback and work with it.
3. Build a safe and supporting community for your patients.
4. Provide valuable information for your followers about your clinic and services.
5. Spread awareness on important events.

Check out this example of social media post, in which the clinic calls the followers to sign a petition:

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The topics to share on social media:

1. Doctor’s opinions

This type of content can help you build rapport with potential patients and also educate them on various topics.

2. Support content

Many parents are going through hard times. It’s great to give them materials that help can alleviate the stress and the pain. It can help patients to see you understand them

3. Success stories

It’s always great to learn how people succeeded with IVF treatment and became parents. It can give people the hope they need to continue going this hard path.

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4. Educational materials

You can help your potential patients to learn more about IVF and other fertility treatment.

Pay-Per-Click for Fertility Marketing

PPC or Pay-per-Click is a digital marketing strategy. In a nutshell, PPC is demonstrating banner advertising for Internet users that match certain criteria. If the user click on the link, the advertiser needs to pay to the PPC provider.

For example, this banner ad is shown in the top of the Google Search when a user looks for IVF Montreal.

Google SERP isn’t the only place to put your IVF clinic banner ad. Here’s the full list of sites where your ad can be displayed:

1. Google SERP.
2. Websites that live off banner ads (like news portals).
3. Mobile applications including games.
4. Video platforms like YouTube..
5. Social media websites.

Banner advertising is much better than regular offline banner ads for multiple reasons. First, to an extent you can control who sees your banner ads. You can choose their age, location, gender, behaviour patterns. For example, you can only show ads to people who previously researched fertility centres. It will give you a higher probability to target your potential clients.

Second, the ROI of banner ads easily reaches as much as 200% since ads are shown to people who are already interested in the services.

Third, banner ads drive traffic to your website. It can be especially helpful when SEO strategy has only begun and the rankings are still low. Not only the traffic from banner ad will help you drive more leads it will also boost your SEO.

Email Marketing Strategies for IVF Clinics

Email marketing is usually used for conversions, customer retention and upsell. Client retention and upsell are problematic for IVF treatment since clients can churn due to reasons that you cannot control like running out of money or not having enough psychological resources to continue the struggle.

Some clients who succeeded would contemplate giving it another go, but majority will probably be happy to have just one miracle baby.

Luckily, you can use client segmentation and sent more personalised emails to different category of clients.

The topics we suggest:

1. Appointment reminders
2. Announcements of new treatments.
3. Blog articles that are relevant to a specific segment.
4. Requests for feedback and sharing success stories.

IVF Marketing with dNOVO Group

Running digital marketing campaigns can be difficult and time-consuming especially if you have a small marketing department, low budget for tools, and no time to build a team. Many IVF clinics choose to delegate IVF marketing to dNOVO Group.

dNOVO has long-term experience in medical marketing. It has a team of professionals in website development, SEO, medical content writing, PPC, email marketing, and SMM. 

Ready to get more patients?

Book a free one-hour consultation