Whenever practice owners claim their marketing isn’t working, we always respond with the same question: “Are you tracking your marketing activities?”
There are so many marketing tools available such as call tracking, Google Analytics, or even our Direct Mail Calculator that can help you be more strategic and deliberate with your marketing efforts.
Tracking is no longer optional—it’s essential. Executing a successful marketing plan requires taking a deeper look at results to gain insights and direct you on how best to market in the future.
So, let’s look at the different ways tracking your marketing initiatives can benefit your practice and offer some guidance to help set you on course for success.
Tracking Your Marketing Mix
Use your practice management software to track which marketing activity drove a patient to your practice. It is important to gauge what your current marketing mix consists of, how many leads each activity is driving, and where there is room for improvement.
A healthy marketing mix includes activities that target new leads from the community, taps into your current patient database, and secures a continuous flow of referrals from current patients and physicians. Identifying segments that are missing from this mix helps direct your focus towards future forms of marketing that will directly impact your schedule and bottom line.
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Establish an organized process for how you are labeling your opportunities in your practice management software. Create unique sources to detail exactly which activities your patients are responding to daily. Some practices even add secondary sources to capture a further level of detail. For example:
| Primary Source | Secondary Source |
| Physician Referral | Doctor Name |
| Community Outreach | Sunrise Nursing Home |
| Digital | Google – PPC |
To ensure accurate tracking, make sure staff members who are responsible for inputting this data are all on the same page regarding what each referral source represents.
Adjusting Your Marketing Strategy
Taking a close look at the results of a marketing campaign can help you course-correct any missteps in current marketing strategies. The primary goal of any marketing effort is to make the phone ring. If your tracking data indicates that you are falling short of industry benchmarks for call response rate, then there may be an issue with the audience you are targeting. Identifying this variable, via the data, alerts you that it’s time to reassess the variables making up your target audience. Often, this fix is as simple as readjusting the profile of the target audience – maybe you aren’t marketing to people in the right demographic, or are reaching out to areas too far from the office location. Tracking can help you identify these types of “red flags” and aid to steer you in the right direction strategically.
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Don’t wait until the end of the quarter to officially log your tracking notes. Keep a spreadsheet handy and equip your front office personnel with the right online tools to capture and appropriately track leads as they come in.
Improve Organizational Efficiencies
It’s important to own the patient experience from initial call/touch-point, to pre-and post-appointment, right through to purchase and beyond. Identifying where certain patients are getting trapped in the sales funnel can help your team members focus on their individual roles in generating more sales.
For example, are you seeing calls come in from a direct mailer, but they are not converting into appointments? Maybe it’s time to sit down with your FOP (Front Office Personnel) or Office Manager to understand how they are handling incoming calls and discuss the best ways to get the schedule filled. Are completed appointments not converting into sales? It might be time to meet with your providers to discuss best practices for closing sales. [FYI: the CQ Employee Development Program provides free training for your staff year-round.]
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Tracking can provide valuable details on where patients are in their hearing health journey, so you can tailor future messages directly to their situation. Instead of a generic message, reach out to your Tested Not Sold (TNS) audience with personal phone calls asking why they haven’t purchased and follow up immediately with your Cancel/No Show audience, communicating that you’re sorry they missed their appointment and it’s important to you that they reschedule to meet with your provider.
Send Your Data to CQ Partners
Once you’ve collected your marketing data, the biggest challenge is, of course, figuring out what it all means and what to do with it. Our marketing team can explain the data in real-time with quarterly marketing ROI reports to help you continuously refine your marketing strategy and drive more quality leads to your practice.
If you don’t already have a marketing plan in place for 2019 or if you have any questions about tracking your initiatives, reach out to your Account Manager today.
