One of the hardest parts of marketing your practice is knowing what works. It’s easy to spend money on marketing activity, but do you know what return you have had on your investment? Let’s look at how we can track the results.
Firstly, it’s important to understand why tracking your return on investment (ROI) actually matters. It helps make sure you don’t waste money on poorly performing campaigns, identifies what is lead and revenue generating, and also will often highlight feedback that can help improve future activity. All highly important things to help you manage budget and grow your business.
5 ways to track results
(1) Set your strategy and goals
It’s important to start at the beginning and lay the foundations for your marketing efforts. This means developing a good marketing strategy and plan, with strong, SMART objectives based on your practice’s short and long-term goals.
What is SMART? That stands for:
Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Relevant
Time bound
It also means reviewing any activity you have already done in order to set benchmarks that you can measure future activity against.
You should regularly review the strategy to ensure it remains current.
(2) Invest in good tracking software and systems
You might often hear people say that it’s difficult, or even impossible, to track your return on investment for your marketing activity. While it might not always be easy, collecting as much quality data as possible and analysing it will help you find answers.
Good practice management software, with a customer relationship management element (CRM) is important for your patient relationships. Also, developing robust internal processes to capture how new patients found you is also useful.
To track digital activity, you should ensure you have Google Analytics (or a similar took) correctly linked to your website, to track traffic. You should also regularly collate data from your social media platforms so you can assess the growth of your campaigns.
These systems should all provide enough data to create regular reports on how campaigns and other activity has performed to help you review your sales pipeline and conversion rates.
Worried that you don’t know how to do this? Rockbridge Web can certainly help here as we place a key focus on performance tracking as part of all our digital marketing packages.
(3) Track the impact on revenue, not just leads
When tracking your results, remember to link everything back to your key objectives. It is likely that increasing revenue will feature highly on this list.
If that is the case, it is important to understand what activity actually converts into business. So, a post on Facebook might have hundreds of ‘Likes’, but ask yourself how many of these ‘Likes’ will turn into revenue?
Instead look for quality ROI so you can invest your marketing budget in revenue generating activity.
(4) It’s not all about immediate revenue
Of course, some of your objectives will be longer term aims. Building up relationships with patients and potential patients is as important as quick wins.
Monitoring your brand awareness is difficult, but isn’t impossible. You can ask patients for feedback, commission research, monitor referrals, count enquiries, observe thought leadership or speaker requests, and analyse long-term ROI (i.e. patients returning, increasing the services they use etc).
To build a solid brand that people will remember, you have to get your name and reputation out there. That could be through regular and consistent social media posts, sharing information, PR etc. Anything that will leave a lasting memory and good feeling for future interactions.
Read our related article 5 Ways to Give Your Patients More with Your Marketing Communications
(5) Control variables
It is easy to monitor marketing spend and revenue increases or decreases. However, correlating those and identifying if the increase or decrease is directly related to marketing activity is harder. Understanding the bigger picture of what is going on in the practice is vital.
An increase in visitors to your website might be due to a social media post, or a PR piece, but it could also be down to something else entirely.
Controlling the variables means putting in place measures early on to ensure you can relate activity back to revenue, digging deeper into data and managing internal processes so that you can reliably track results.
Not sure how to get started?
Implementing a good marketing strategy and monitoring the effectiveness of all activity can be timely and requires a lot of work. The best and most efficient way to track results is often to work with marketing experts who have the knowledge and tools to monitor return on investment.
Speak to the team at Rockbridge Web to see how we can help make sure your marketing budget is spent on the right activity.
