Is your marketing strategy getting results? This is a question healthcare providers ask themselves over and over when planning their budgets. And for good reason!
If you are not getting a return on your investment–the investment in your marketing strategy–it is time to make changes.
One of the most important things to consider is how to measure your initiatives. Measurement is perhaps one of the hardest thing to gauge; but with the right indicators, you can get a feel for the effectiveness of your marketing communications program.
Community outreach
One of the most important strategies for health care provides is community outreach. It’s also one of the easiest benchmarks to measure. Remember to have a sign-in sheet at each event so you can keep a record of how many people show up a second and third time to your meetings and seminars.
You can also encourage people to leave contact information such as an email address or phone number. Alternatively, you can pass out material that point attendees toward your social media or newsletters to see who is interested in staying in touch or getting more involved.
Website traffic
By now, your healthcare facility most likely has an established Web presence, and that almost invariably starts with a website. But how effective is that site at attracting traffic and attracting the right kind of traffic?
Analytics tools can give you an idea of how many people are visiting your website in a given time period, but more importantly they can tell you who is actually reading your content and receiving your message. It’s not enough to know how many hits your website gets, since many of those people “bounce” or immediately leave the page without really reading anything.
If you have a high proportion of people “bouncing” away from your website, it probably means they either aren’t finding the content they are looking for or aren’t compelled your website strategy.
It should be the goal of your Web team to bring the number of bounces down to a minimum by developing an easy-to-use website full of compelling content.
Social media
Without the right strategy, social media can be one of the more challenging ways to develop new clients, but it provides a unique way of measuring who is engaging with your brand. A lot of brands get dismayed and disillusioned with social media when they aren’t racking up stacks of likes or retweets.
It’s important to remember that it isn’t quantity that matters—but the quality of your content and followers. Just because one brand has a million “likes” doesn’t mean that every person is interacting with that brand in a meaningful way.
Using statistics to measure how many people are actually engaging—sending inquiries, making comments, and generally interacting with your social media presence.
Email marketing
Email newsletters and e-blasts are a great way to get information out to your clients and potential leads. Combined with an effective Web analytics strategy, you can determine who is reading through those messages and following through to your website.
This is often known as a “click-through” rate. If you are providing compelling content and giving people links to useful posts on your website, your click-through rate is bound to go up as interest in your brand develops.
Metrics: how do you measure up?
So are you getting a return on your investment? Marketing isn’t just a money investment; it’s also a time investment.
If you are spending too much time posting on your social media or sending unwanted emails, your potential leads are probably spending too much time scanning and deleting your messages. Overwhelming people can sometimes be worse than not reaching them at all and do more to drive away business than generate it.
Developing metrics and going over the data can give you an idea of how well that strategy is leading to results and generating conversions.
