Case study

Client since 2020

New marketing ideas attract new patients

Illinois Bone & Joint Institute hired TBH Creative to help them stand out in Chicago’s competitive orthopedic provider marketplace. They needed help creating a strategic plan bolstered with fresh marketing ideas to fix user experience and tech debt issues left over from previous efforts.

Within our partnership so far, we have initiated paid campaigns to promote targeted service lines, established reporting systems and captured baseline metrics, created four comprehensive service line campaigns, and designed a new website that serves as a conversion hub. Our experts also audited their website content, trained their internal team on SEO best practices, rewrote and expanded top level service pages, and optimized historical content for search engines.

Marketing goals—

Develop foundational assets for integrated marketing campaigns
Create new traffic-generating resources
Lead marketing automation strategy and execution
Manage paid advertising campaigns
Establish sophisticated reporting to guide activities and show ROI
Fix website technical debt issues
Optimize website service pages for greater conversions
Design new page layouts for a streamlined patient experience

Results—

At the time of writing, we are entering into year four of the partnership. Here is a snapshot of the progress so far:

Year over year increase in online appointment requests with 35% increase the first year, 101% increase in the second year, and 25% increase in the third year
300% increase in calls per month

4x Gold Aster Award winner; 1x Silver Aster Award winner

Read a Q&A with the client

Services

Collage of IBJI web pages and persona preview

How do you prioritize (and where do you start) when everything needs work?

Challenge—

The IBJI marketing team reached out to TBH Creative under duress and had stopped all advertising due to wasted spend and lack of results. Without a strategic plan and reporting to help guide advertising efforts, they were “putting out fires”. IBJI knew there were things to fix and foundational assets to create. They needed support and a new approach.

Solution—

TBH Creative started by auditing all of IBJI’s existing marketing materials, researching the competition, and talking to stakeholders about priorities and patients about their needs. Then, we worked with IBJI to develop a three year plan to promote their top service lines and opportunities, all within the defined budget. The strategy included completing upfront work to fix critical issues and “quick wins,” setting up reporting systems and establishing baselines, and preparing for longer-term plans. We worked side-by-side with IBJI’s internal team, and we split the workload to complete the objectives.

IBJI content offer sample – knee pain guide

How do you get patients to make an appointment?

Challenge—

Every patient is different. Sometimes people have injuries that require immediate care. Other times folks live with pain and delay getting treatment. We developed a flexible marketing strategy—based on persona research—to reach (and help!) individuals, no matter where they are in their patient journeys.

IBJI Facebook Ad – Avoid the ER – family

IBJI Facebook Ad – Avoid the ER – worker

IBJI Facebook Ad – Avoid the ER – children

IBJI Facebook Ad – Avoid the ER – elderly

IBJI Facebook Ad – Avoid the ER – winter

IBJI Facebook Ad – Avoid the ER – physician

IBJI Facebook Ad – Avoid the ER – youth basketball

IBJI Facebook Ad – Avoid the ER – youth hockey

Solution—

TBH Creative helped IBJI establish paid advertising to promote their OrthoAccess locations that provide care to people with injuries and other acute conditions. For chronic pain treatments, we worked with IBJI to plan and execute comprehensive campaigns for the orthopedic practice’s top service lines. Our work included search engine optimization and inbound strategies, as well as the development of assets to support patients, including:

blog posts
pillar pages
downloadable content
marketing automation
email nurturing
advertising

Results—

Double impressions, clicks, and contacts at a lower cost per click with an 80% ad spend increase in 2022
300% increase in monthly calls to office locations
41% average email open rate and 22% click-through-rate for all automated nurturing emails
28% landing page conversion rate across campaigns

The national average healthcare metrics for emails is 23% open rate and 5% click-through-rate. The national average healthcare metrics for landing page conversion rate is 6%.

When you have a well-established patient base, how do you talk about a merger?

Challenge—

IBJI’s nationally-renowed group of surgeons has served the Chicagoland area for over 70 years. The practice’s growth model includes the acquisition of established and reputable smaller orthopedic groups in the Chicagoland area. As part of this plan, Hinsdale Orthopedics became part of IBJI in 2020, and the communication to patients about the merger required care, consideration, and clarity.

Solution—

The solution took time, coordination, and lots of communication. The first step in the process involved adding all of Hinsdale Orthopedics’ providers and locations into the IBJI website. Beyond in-office communication, signage, and other touchpoints at the business level, TBH Creative helped IBJI use social media to build brand awareness about the merger with Hinsdale Orthopedics’ current patients and the local community.

Additional work to establish domain authority and integrate Hinsdale Orthopedics’ resources into the main IBJI website are in our plans to tackle next.

IBJI Facebook Ad – Introducing Hinsdale location

IBJI Facebook Ad – Services – Hip & Knee

IBJI Facebook Ad – Services – Shoulder & Elbow

IBJI Facebook Ad – Services – Back & Neck

IBJI Facebook Ad – Services – Hand & Wrist

IBJI Facebook Ad – Services – Foot & Ankle

IBJI Facebook Ad – Services – Hinsdale location

IBJI Facebook Ad – Services – Hinsdale now part of IBJI

How do you fix major tech debt and improve user experience on a budget?

Challenge—

When TBH Creative started to work with Illinois Bone & Joint Institute, its website was still relatively new, but when we took over its management, our developers noticed critical issues with the build. New bugs were identified monthly and the core plug-in that the IBJI site was developed on was no longer being updated or supported. Additionally, our team noticed a significant drop in organic traffic with the release of Google’s 2021 core web vital search engine optimization ranking factor.

Video— Website Launch Promo

IBJI website services page tablet preview

IBJI’s website needed work to ensure everything kept stable while its upgraded website was developed to address core functionality problems and other critical issues.

Vulnerable technical infrastructure
Hard-to-use pages not designed for mobile
Slow-loading web pages
Poor web core vital scores
Weak, incomplete page content

Solution—

TBH Creative’s content work on the website included creating mobile first designs for key pages, restructuring the confusing resource system, improving the layout of physician profiles, and rewriting (and expanding) top-level service line pages.

On the technical side, our website work included recoding the site to remove tech debt and problematic plug-in dependency, as well as improving speed, incorporating accessibility best practices, and developing new responsive layouts.

IBJI’s site launched in late September 2022. To date, all analytic base metrics are up (with increases of 10% or more across the board) compared to all periods of the former versions of the site.

Results—

No bugs since the site’s “go live”
Launched the project on time and on budget
Improved all core vital scores
Reduced website load times by 50%
Reduced plug-in usage and dependency by 65%

Making additional feature improvements and creating deeper content assets are the next priorities.

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“We’ve really come to fully trust the TBH Creative team, their recommendations, and their overall strategies when it comes to our digital campaign initiatives. They’ve taken the time to get to know IBJI, as well as our distinct challenges and objectives, to craft campaigns that are not only based on best-practice knowledge but also fine-tuned to get the best results with our specific targets in our region.”

Maggie Sketch, Former Senior Marketing Manager

About Illinois Bone & Joint Institute

IBJI’s physicians help patients in and around Chicago move better and live better using the most cutting-edge technologies and modern orthopedic techniques.

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