5 Pieces of Marketing Data Your Practice Needs to Start Tracking Now
Our marketing team has been working with companies in the healthcare field and beyond for over ten years. We’ve seen entrepreneurs and medical professionals who are full of vigor and motivation for their businesses to succeed. That passion is great, but if you spend all your energy and your funds on one marketing campaign after another without taking the time to see if they’re actually working, you have no way of knowing if you’re making smart investments.
They key to getting consistently strong results is data tracking. Where do you start? What type of information do you need to gather and analyze to make 2019 your best year yet? Start with these essentials.
- Referral Sources
One of the most vital things you need to know is how your new patients are hearing about you. Every time you have contact with a new lead or new patient, ask how they found you. Perhaps your practice came up in a Google search or you popped into their social media feeds. Maybe an existing patient referred them. Regardless, you need to know which of your marketing channels are most successful.
The tricky thing about tracking referral sources is that this isn’t information you can go back and find from the past. It isn’t someone you can check in your Google Analytics or your Facebook Insights. You need to train your medical office staff to ask every person the first time they have contact with them, whether it’s a phone call, email, or walk-in visit.
- Click-Through Rates
If you’ve designed and written your website well, there are links on every page that will take a user to the next step. For instance, you might end each blog with a link to your contact page or a button that lets users send you an email. To find out which ones are the most effective, compare the click-through rates (or CTRs) for each of those calls-to-action.
As you’re doing this, you want to look at the wording that seems to be the most effective. For instance, do you seem to get more clicks when you link the words “contact our medical office” or “schedule an appointment”? Or is your CTR higher on buttons rather than text links? You also need to consider the pages whose calls-to-action have the highest CTRs. For example, let’s say you’re a dermatologist and you notice that more users click over to your contact form from your page about acne than your page about psoriasis. This tells you that either your acne page’s content is more compelling, or you have more users who want acne treatments than psoriasis treatments. All of this can inform how and what you choose to market in the future.
- Social Shares
Social media isn’t slowing down as a source of information for the general public, including your target audience. That’s why you want to know which of your blogs or other types of content are being shared around the web. This tells you which types of content are the most engaging and “share-worthy”.
Don’t forget to look at non-conventional ways people “share” your posts too. For instance, include the number of times people have tagged their friends and family in the comments of your posts, because that is one-way social media users share a post with someone who would enjoy it.
- Sales Trends
Chances are that you’re already keeping an eye on your overall sales numbers, such as comparing your revenue for January 2018 to January 2019. But are you looking as closely at the details as you should be?
Trends change in every industry, and healthcare is no exception. Pay attention to which procedures patients schedule and products they buy. If you see that a certain treatment is growing in popularity, it’s a great place to invest some marketing funds.
- Patient Retention
You’ve probably heard the rule that it’s far cheaper to retain an existing patient than to convert a new one, and it holds true. Your existing patients are all opportunities to keep your revenue reliable for years, but you won’t know if you’re missing out unless you know how many ongoing patients you’re retaining.
Take a look at how many of your patients have kept returning to you for a year, three years, five years, and beyond. According to The Hearing Journal, the average healthcare company loses between 10% and 30% of their customers or patients each year. Even if you’re within that window, there’s room for improvement. To take it one step further, consider organizing a survey for those patients you’ve lost to find out why they haven’t returned.
As an administrator, owner, or practice manager, you’re striving to keep day-to-day operations running efficiently while also working toward a more successful future for your practice. You can’t manage everything on your own, so get your office staff on board with your data collection process. Training them on what questions to ask new patients and how to handle follow-ups can go a long way toward maxing out your marketing strategies and giving your practice a strong future. If you’re ready to improve your data tracking strategy, call our healthcare consulting and marketing strategy experts.