Where are your patients coming from? - Measuring the Return on Investment in your Marketing

Despite its importance, marketing ROI is one of the least understood, least measured functions at many practices. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve seen boat loads of money spent on advertising campaigns without anyone ever stopping to ask- is this bringing me new patients? More often than not, practitioners have a vague idea of how new patients enter their practice but no real numbers on which to base their marketing decisions. What I hope that you understand is that by using data and analytics you can ensure that your budget is allocated to the best use of your marketing dollars and move some resources to marketing activities that yield a higher ROI.

Calculating your marketing ROI can be quite simple:

ROI = Profit/Investment or ROI = new patients/marketing campaign cost
The easiest way to get started with measuring your marketing is by asking every new patient how they heard about you. You can build this into to your new patient phone call or your initial consultation or interview. I always teach keeping a tracker that tells you each month how many patients you are getting from each source – website, referrals, sign, ad in the paper, etc. Then, I recommend taking the new patient numbers and looking at the treatment that was presented to them, what was accepted, and completed. These numbers let you know if the marketing tactics you are using are reaching your target patients, (those that are eager to do business with you.) At the end of the month or the year, you can clearly evaluate the most productive marketing strategy and make plans to do more of it over the next period.

You can also track ROI on your website by monitoring the site hits. If you haven’t looked at these reports before, call your site host and ask to see the numbers. As you make updates or changes to your site continue to watch the numbers and look for fluctuation in the number of unique visitors.

If you are using email campaigns with your patients, pay attention to open rates, and click-through rates (CTR). These numbers will provide you with a metric to use in developing your skills at crafting compelling messages and subject lines that grab your patient’s attention.

Knowing what to improve and what is working is vital to establishing realistic performance targets for your marketing and making the most of your budget.

Do you know where your patients are coming from?

If you would like a copy of my FREE marketing ROI calculator, send me an email at sarah@focus-evolve-succeed.com with ROI in the subject.