3 Ways Healthcare Marketers Can Improve Their Marketing Attribution
If you are not tracking phone calls in your marketing plan, you are missing a large part of the sales funnel.
How many telephone enquires does your practice generate each month? Are these enquires converting to consultations? Do you know which marketing campaign generated these leads?
To understand where your leads are coming from and which marketing is bringing in these leads, you’ll need a 360 degree view of your marketing’s performance.
You might think that you already have a sound marketing attribution model but if you’re not tracking calls (one of your business’ biggest response methods) you’ll be severely misattributing your marketing efforts. Leading to misallocated budget and possibly shutting down a key revenue driver.
To gain this crucial insight, more healthcare providers are starting to use call tracking to achieve correct and actionable marketing attribution.
What is call tracking and how does it work?
Call tracking is a piece of software that you can install on your website to help you track both online and offline enquiries, like phone calls.
The software works by assigning unique numbers across different marketing channels so you can track which marketing collateral generated the enquiry, whether it was a website visitor of someone who viewed your magazine ad.
What’s more, with visitor level call tracking technology, which many providers now offer, you’ll be able to see which web pages someone viewed right up until they called and the user journey once the conversation ended.
So, for example, if a user decides to interact with your website by clicking on a paid advertisement, then that assigned phone number will be displayed. This is also the case if a different user opts to interact via a social network referral.
With many businesses reporting that phone calls are their most valuable enquiries, call tracking will enable you to have a more complete view of your marketing efforts. And which areas need addressing.
So why is call tracking especially important for healthcare marketers?
The largest proportion of marketing budgets for private clinics is spent on expensive offline advertising, including TV and print. Although these channels have great reach, do you know how closely targeted they are? In the healthcare sector, mainstream offline channels have seen ROI plummet over the last few years.
In the healthcare sector, traditional methods of advertising are being replaced by digital technology, and with these changes, it’s important that healthcare marketers can correctly measure they’re effectiveness and quickly look for improvements to campaigns. By correctly tracking your inbound calls, call tracking technology will provide precise ROI data on all your advertising.
So if you want to take advantage of these rising marketing opportunities in your sector, here are five ways your practice or clinic can achieve a better understanding of your marketing.
Identify The Source Of Telephone Leads
If you’re not sure which marketing activities are driving people to call you then your budget is being wasted. Call tracking software monitors your campaigns and tracks the source of leads, identifying precisely which marketing channels are producing leads and, more importantly, those that aren’t.
You can take the source of your telephone leads even further, and find out which piece of creative receives the best response rate. In terms of Google paid advertising, you can monitor your keywords too to ensure you’re not paying over the odds for search terms that aren’t generating the best return.
Call tracking software can be used to identify lead source, renegotiate advertising rates, remove advertising channels that are performing poorly, and realign your marketing spend accordingly.
Measure Social Media Response Rates
Social media now plays a critical role in helping prospective patients to decide upon which provider to choose, even more so since cosmetic procedures have moved to the mainstream, together with private healthcare becoming a B2C not B2B market.
Review websites, bloggers and social media connections are now very relevant parts of your marketing strategy. Using call tracking you can track calls which are made directly from your social media pages, ads as well as the calls made from your site which originated from a social media referral.
Taking this one step further, you could analyse the content from which these phone calls were generated and replicate this across your social updates and content marketing.
Understand Mobile Conversations Better
Do you know how many genuine telephone leads were generated from mobile devices? Call tracking from mobiles and mobile sites is vital, especially since 70 percent of mobile searchers have clicked the call button in mobile search results. Mobile search drives more telephone calls and call tracking has the tools available to help you meet this growing trend.
Firstly, call tracking can be configured to identify which website (mobile or desktop) generates calls. Secondly, to make it easy to distinguish your mobile calls you can identify the telephone numbers of mobile callers with each lead and source.
Combined with data available from your other reporting tools (Google Analytics and AdWords), you’ll finally have a full picture of individual leads. You’ll then be able to tailor-make experiences to suit your audience based on actual visits, and drill down into the ‘who, what, why, where, when and how’ of your inbound enquiries.
By following these top tips you’ll be able to understand areas where the healthcare sector is growing and the implications they have on your business.
If you would like to know more about how call tracking can specifically help healthcare marketers, Mediahawk’s recently published call tracking guide for the healthcare industry was a key source of information for this article and discusses more great tips!
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