Here’s an interesting medical marketing trend that will still affect your business in 2023…
There will be no more silver bullets. Everyone will have to optimize for marginal gains.
Hi there, It’s Huyen here and welcome to OMD TV & Podcast show, the place to be to grow and scale your practice.
In this episode, I’m going to talk about Why It’s Important To Know Your Numbers. There is a saying “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.” And this is correct in all aspects of running a business, especially in marketing.
In the past, you could pick one or two main medical marketing channels, which were your silver bullets, and you could live off of those to get you the patient leads.
You needed to run a successful practice, but that’s just not the way it is anymore. There’s just too much noise in the world. So as an example, I came up with this list of marketing channels and I did this within a minute and they’re in no particular order. And I’m sure there are plenty more, but just listen to this.
You can do Google Ads, SEO, forum advertising, articles, videos, podcasts, practice newsletter, TV ads, or radio ads, public speaking, you can run Facebook and Instagram, TikTok ads. You can do direct mail, text marketing, patient events, press releases, sponsoring local patient events.
I mean, isn’t that crazy? You are never going to have enough time, money, or energy to use all of these patient marketing channels, but that’s not all, there are also way too many technology choices that need to be considered carefully.
And there are also too many generational differences since you may be catering to patients in their twenties all the way into their seventies. So, what do you do? How do you make sense out of all these variables? So, you invest your resources wisely.
So, here’s my advice. Know your numbers, the answers you are looking for are in your numbers. When you collect and review your day. You have such a better picture of what is driving your success, but this cannot be anecdotal. Take the emotion out of it, and just look at the real data that doesn’t lie. So, the fastest and easiest way to follow your successes first, you know?
So, in other words, follow the money. There’s no need to get all fancy and go off on a tangent at this time. Just review your revenues, where they are currently coming from, and then go back for more. And then you can always do more later. But right now, just stick to this. So, for example, revenues by procedure, start by running this report called revenues by the procedure.
Now, this is going to show you, which of your procedures are more profitable and which should be re-evaluated since they don’t bring in the revenues worth the effort. Sometimes, the way to go drop the busy work that is not bringing in the revenues. So, you can redirect your focus to the procedures that are.
So, for example, I did like the surgical pie chart for a practice and I broke out the revenues by procedure and it was showing that the big hits were injectable, Coolsculpting and facelifts. Now that’s good to know when they’re considering their marketing plan. However, their skincare was the loser at 1% of their revenues.
Yet I watched so many practices put a ton of effort into this, thanks to their skincare reps. But is that the best use of your resources given the. Maybe, maybe not. Now another report I love is revenues by referral source. This tells you how your patients hear about you. Now, this data is crucial to know, so you can allocate your time and money to only those marketing channels that are directly attracting new patients to you.
As you can see on the screen, for every client we work with, we track number website visitors and enquiries coming through every month and draw a graph for the client see the improvement and relation between the traffic and the number of enquiries, we even track the number of enquiries for each main procedure that we are promoting for the client and the value of the booking.
As you can see in the table below, this is one of the exercise we work with the practice to track conversion percentage in each step of the sales process, when users contact practices, phone enquiries, and initial consultation and procedure booking so you know out of 1000 website visits, how many potential bookings we can generate and the cost per enquiry, cost per consultation and cost per procedure booking. Once we know the number it will be easier to determine if the channels that we are promoting right now are effective and should we spend more or less on them.
It’s important to know the patient lifetime value and the current patient referral rate as you will be able to calculate the total lifetime value of the patient and compare it with the cost of new patient acquisition and then it will be easier for you to make the call as to how much you are willing to pay to acquire a new patient and set the right KPI for your team or marketing agency.
Again, the referral source is not so cut and dry in today’s technical age. Now, what I mean by that is when you ask a prospective patient who calls your office, how they heard about you, they’ll oftentimes say something like the internet or social media.
However, as they get to know you better and open up the answer can change too. For example, this prospect’s girlfriend mentioned you, so then they checked out your Instagram and that led them to your website. And that’s why they said the internet. If that happens, just be sure to update your data for. And also, with that practice that I ran this report for, they were at about 50, 50 internets versus relationships via current patients returning for more and referrals from existing patients.
And so that’s good to know that. Half external, half internal, but I also noticed the social media was only 1% of their revenues and magazine ads were 0%. So, if I were consulting with them, I would probably recommend they take the magazine ad budget and then reallocate it to digital marketing.
Now, there are a lot more numbers to know, but you see how knowing just these two data points will give you such good Intel to make better business decisions. And what you’re trying to do is decide where to invest your time and money on marketing, certain procedures, and then which marketing channels do you use to get to patients who want those certain procedures.
Okay. So now let’s talk about data tracking tools because in order for you to accurately track data, there are lots of tools and technology available today. That’s the good news. If we have to fiddle around with all this technology, at least it’s collecting data.
Now your practice software is the control tower that collects all the data for our practice. Just please be sure you choose a CRM. CRM is customer relationship management. Just be sure you choose one. That is data-friendly when it comes to entering data, as well as retrieving. Because oftentimes we can enter the data, but can’t even get the darn stuff out of the computer.
So, you really needed to have a format that tells you vital information and that’s the reporting. Now, the good news with all this technology at your fingertips is that it really is tracking all your clicks and links. So, get familiar with Google and social media analytics. They have lots and lots of data for you.
Also, phone calls and lead tracking platforms are super helpful to track data or at least use Google sheets to collect data that can be updated regularly by all parties involved. Now I’ll leave you with this motivating quote, “Keep going because you didn’t come this far to only come this far”. Of course, if you need help, please reach out to me at www.onlinemarketingfordoctors.com.
Okay. That wraps up this episode. So please do me a favor and subscribe to our channel, so you don’t miss new episodes coming up. And if you feel so inclined, please share this with your staff and colleagues, and then you can always follow us on Social Media.
No Comments
Add Comment