You can’t measure the success of your marketing efforts without metrics. Data and analytics give healthcare providers key insights into the reach, impact, and return on investment of their healthcare marketing strategy – showing where to double down, course correct, or try something else entirely.
Here’s what healthcare providers should be measuring.
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Cost Per Patient Acquisition
The cost to acquire a patient is a key metric for healthcare providers. While acquiring patients in this space can be costly, the revenues a long-term patient can bring in can be well worth it. You can get a rough idea of the overall impact of your marketing outreach by dividing your marketing budget by the number of patients acquired. But digital metrics let you get more granular by tracking leads as they journey from an ad or social media post to your contact or sign-up page, allowing you to invest in the customer journeys with the highest-performing conversions.
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Patient Retention Numbers
With patient acquisition costs being high, it’s usually a better strategy to keep patients coming back than to invest in acquiring new ones. New patients require extensive onboarding and paperwork and may not necessarily return. In contrast, loyal patients spend more in the long run and can help bring new patients to your practice as well. To measure retention, track overall patient numbers, and monitor specific instances of attrition to see if there is a common theme involved. Invest in campaigns that invite patients to return – but also make sure you remove patients who have moved away from your outreach lists.
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Communication Response Times
Healthcare is about human relationships, and patients expect a certain degree of care and communication. Patients who get stuck on hold or who fail to receive a timely follow-up to an inquiry or appointment request will look elsewhere for their care. Monitor how long patients wait to speak to someone and your average email or social media response time. These figures don’t just matter for customer service staff: physicians should also respond promptly to patient requests.
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Campaign Engagement
If you’re investing in content such as social media, newsletter marketing, blogs, or eBooks, carefully monitor your engagement using Google analytics or a campaign monitor such as MailChimp. Are people reading your blogs, opening your newsletters, and responding to your Tweets? Make sure that your metrics stack up against your internal goals as well as industry benchmarks. If they don’t, adjust, finesse, and test your efforts until they do, and consider cutting outreach efforts that still aren’t gaining traction.
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Your Search Engine Presence
Ranking high on both traditional and local search is crucial for healthcare providers. Perform an audit to see which search terms you should be targeting, then revise your web presence and local listing to make sure you’re capturing vital keywords. Leverage metadata, headlines, subheads, and body text to make sure that you’re ranking where you should – and keep your website and Google My Business listing updated. Google ads can also help expand your reach.
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Know Your Marketing Goals
This isn’t a metric as such, but more of a caveat. Marketing metrics are meaningless if they don’t tie into a larger business goal. Before you start diving into the numbers, develop a strategy that outlines exactly what your organization wants to achieve from your marketing efforts and what success looks like. Once you have something to measure against, those metrics become more than just numbers on a screen.
At Gittleson Zuppas Medical Realty, we know how vital data-driven marketing is to the healthcare industry. We use it to identify ideal locations for physician tenants, analyze service demand, and gain an understanding of market trends. To see the power of our healthcare marketing metrics in action and find the right healthcare space for your practice, get in touch!