6 strategies for healthcare execs to maximize marketing dollars

From ad revenue to patient reviews, hospitals and healthcare companies rely on key metrics to measure the costs that come with marketing and advertising. But culling through the growing list of measurements, dashboards, and reports can be overwhelming. In this webinar, Carter Hallett (Director of Strategy at R2i), Rachel Curasi (Director of Media Strategy at R2i), and Marc Hansen (Director of Enterprise Marketing at Podium), share the six key marketing metrics healthcare executives should be tracking. 

Here are the key takeaways from the webinar:

1. Focus on patient metrics. 

Measuring patient-specific metrics—average patient acquisition cost and the marketing percent of patient acquisition cost—are key to assessing the effectiveness of your marketing strategies for patient growth. The average cost for a healthcare lead is $286. If your patient acquisition costs are increasing as you try new marketing techniques, it could be time to revise your marketing strategy and try new channels to lower your patient acquisition costs. Digital tools, such as texting and web chat, can be used to improve both of these metrics. 

2. Set benchmarks for the average cost per patient. 

As with every industry and every individual business, it’s important to set personalized benchmarks for success, especially as it pertains to average cost per patient. Healthcare leaders should compete against themselves as they measure these costs. Rachel shared, “It varies so much by the service line and the actual hospital system or healthcare company—it is really important to set benchmarks and track against yourself—to continue to see improvements against your own cost over time.”

3. Use Google’s tools. 

Search results and reviews are critical to growth. 94% of patients use online reviews to evaluate a provider and 84% of consumers trust reviews as much as personal recommendations. Strategies to ask for and encourage online reviews will improve your total number of reviews and ratings.

4. Encourage reviews and patient satisfaction scores fast.

Requests for patient reviews should be sent shortly after a patient visit. Marc shared that while it varies by business, it’s typically best practice to send the review request 30 minutes to one hour post visit. “But ultimately, it should be the same day. You don’t want to wait more than 24 hours…[if you wait that long] you lose the recency,” said Marc.

5. Strategize engagement with patient reviews. 

Defining an escalation and response strategy for feedback is critical for healthcare leaders, especially with negative patient reviews. “The goal here is to be authentic and honest,” said Carter. “We absolutely never want to bury or delete reviews, but we do want to take them as opportunities to answer and clarify and also invite the patient or whoever left the review to contact us via email to further that conversation through a customer success team instead of doing it publicly through reviews.”

6. Pay attention to return on ad spending.

ROAS is the amount of revenue received for each dollar of advertising. Healthcare leaders should focus their efforts here on the conversion value of different types of patients. This figure can be improved by tracking the revenue generated per patient by channel and optimizing strategies that bring the highest ROAS.

To hear more about each of the key metrics, listen to the entire webinar here.