How do you know if your medical practice’s digital marketing is actually paying off?
You have to measure your results. Only then will you know whether your marketing dollars are going to waste or effectively generating new patients and revenue for your practice.
The possibilities for the performance metrics you can track are endless, so the process of measuring your marketing may feel overwhelming.
But don’t let that deter you.
When you keep your eyes on the right metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs)—and optimize your marketing based on new insights—it will pay off in the end in the form of more leads, appointments, and new patients.
Effective measurement is the KEY to optimizing marketing results and maximizing your return on investment (ROI).
That’s why we’ve put together this list of four ways to measure your medical marketing results...
1. Ask your patients
Many medical practices neglect to ask patients how they learned about or chose the provider’s medical practice. This is a missed opportunity to check in on the health of your marketing efforts.
Advise your staff to ask each patient how they found your practice, and make sure they’re recording the answers. This information can provide valuable insights into which of your marketing channels are driving the most exposure and highest volume of leads (and the best leads) for your practice.
However, keep in mind that patients may only cite part of their journey in finding your practice. For example, if they read 10 blog posts you created and then later decided to search your practice by name online, they might simply say they found you on Google.
So, take your patient feedback with a grain of salt and be sure to consider ALL of the moving pieces in your marketing strategy and how they work together.
2. Check patient engagement
Look at the various ways patients are engaging with your practice or organization online:
- How many people are visiting your website each month?
- How much time are people spending on your pages and blog posts?
- If you’re posting videos, what percentage of the video are they watching?
- How many likes, comments, and shares are your social media posts generating?
This information is especially helpful for evaluating how your practice is appealing to potential patients in the earlier stages of their searches for medical providers—the “awareness” and “consideration” stages. These are the stages where potential patients are doing initial research into their medical needs and possible treatments, and where they’re first becoming acquainted with your medical practice’s “brand.”
You can boost patient engagement by producing high-quality digital content (blog posts, articles, videos, podcasts, etc.), and promoting that content across various digital channels (Google, Facebook, YouTube, etc.). Content marketing done right provides value to existing and prospective patients while building your practice’s reputation as an industry leader.
Review your engagement metrics on a regular basis to help you assess what is and isn’t working in your content marketing and social media strategies, and then make adjustments as needed.
3. Measure your conversion rates
While patient engagement is important, remember that conversions are what matter most.
You can get all the clicks, impressions, likes, and shares you want and still never make money if your marketing doesn’t result in calls, appointments, and new patients.
For each marketing campaign, look at the action you want the prospective patient to take (conversions like calls, website form fills, live chat sessions, new appointments set, etc.) and measure those. You can check your overall conversion rate by comparing the number of conversions by a baseline number (e.g. page visitors, impressions, ad interactions, etc.) to see what percentage of your prospects are becoming new leads or patients.
Once you know your conversion rate, test different marketing strategies to try to improve it and increase your overall ROI.
4. Conduct cost-per-lead analysis
New patient leads are great, but they don’t add a lot to your bottom line if you’re paying an arm and a leg to acquire them.
To lower your patient acquisition costs, you first need to be aware of how much you’re spending to attract each lead and new patient.
When running a digital marketing campaign like pay-per-per-click advertising (PPC), pay close attention to your cost per lead (CPL) and cost per acquisition (CPA). Remember that your leads refer to potential patients who contact your practice, and an acquisition refers to a lead who becomes a new patient. Once you know your costs, you can then compare how much you’re spending to how much you’re earning back in financial returns.
To calculate CPL, divide your total marketing expenditures in a given period by the number of leads generated in the same timeframe. You can do the same with new patients acquired.
Consider expert help
It may sound like measuring marketing results is a lot of work, and that’s because it is.
While there are plenty of tools available to help you track your marketing data (like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Facebook Ads Manager), logging into numerous systems on a weekly or monthly basis can be time-consuming, and it can take away from time with you spend with patients.
As a result, you may want to find a way to streamline the data management process. Find a reliable marketing partner that not only offers a digital platform where you can track all your marketing performance data in one place, but also a support team that can handle every aspect of your digital marketing for you.
To learn how you can take the stress out of your measuring your medical
marketing results,
contact Scorpion at
866.622.5648 or
message us here.
