Here’s how the conversation went, “Have you tried any direct mail or newspaper inserts lately?” The answer, “We tried both, they didn’t work.” Next question, “What was the (return on investment) ROI for each?” The answer? “I don’t know.”
If you don’t know where your patients are coming from and how much it cost you to get them in your door, then you have no idea if your advertising and marketing campaigns are worth repeating.
Advertising and Marketing tend to be costly items in everyone’s P&L. Ideally you want to spend as little as possible to get the number of patients needed on a monthly basis. Too often you run ads, inserts, email campaigns, open houses, etc. with little thought as to why a prior ad piece or event was or wasn’t successful.
Experience may teach you how to better manage the event, but tracking the results in as many ways as possible will allow you to make better decisions about where to put your marketing dollars.
A minor change to an ad piece can significantly impact the ROI of any ad. For example, the same ad run on a Monday may have a better or worse response from the public than an identical ad run on a Friday. Another example might be an ad that you ran in color. You may end up with a lower cost per lead even though the ad was more expensive.
Investing time in establishing a tracking system will pay dividends in the long run in other ways. Each month when you start putting your advertising and marketing plan together you’ll have historical information that will make planning your marketing and advertising strategies quicker without sacrificing quality.
Patterns will develop if you carefully cultivate and store information from the patients who respond to your advertising and marketing, particularly those who purchase. After all, they’re the ones you want to make sure keep coming in your door.
