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If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.

Many have heard the phrase, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” Nowhere is this more true than in tracking lead conversion and marketing effectiveness. If you are not currently tracking your patients from first contact through successful surgery day, and making note of specific points in the process where prospective patients seem to be dropping off, you may be missing out on opportunities to improve your processes and conversion rates. 

It can be very challenging, even for seasoned marketing professionals, to predict how a market will respond to each marketing message in all the mediums being utilized. This means that you should expect that some of your efforts will pay off but not all of them. With that in mind, it’s so important to engage your entire team to help with tracking referral sources and, by extension, the effectiveness of marketing programs. This will help you gather information and recognize those staff members who do the best job at keeping the ball rolling. By analyzing data about your efforts and not making assumptions, you will be able to make informed decisions about how to spend your marketing dollars. As you continue to study your market’s responses, you will get better at predicting where your efforts will pay off…. and where you should be more conservative.

Performing a strategic marketing analysis will help you form a clear set of realistic goals and objectives. You can then identify key marketing metrics that help indicate marketing performance. For instance, you should be able to answer what sources the most calls come in from, and how many calls came in for each channel during a given period of time. Every person who contacts your practice should be asked how they heard about you. There are a number of call tracking systems and companies that can help you track and follow up with patients.

Your analysis should also encompass points about the patient experience as customer satisfaction and loyalty are paramount to word-of-mouth referrals. And don’t just pay attention to the positives, if customers call or come in but don’t convert, you need to know that, too. Having this information available at a glance will help you identify strengths and weaknesses that need to be improved. A monthly tracker that helps you keep track of incoming calls, consults and procedures, split apart by all your current lead sources such as your website and social media, to satisfied patient referral or optometric partner. 

Once you have identified your average call to consult and consult to procedure ratios, you’ll be able to set annual goals by month for procedures, and will know how many calls and consults are needed to meet your goal. Add in some metrics related to average selling price, and you’ll be able to prove ROI and justify future budget requests. Armed with all of this information, and not just with assumptions, you’ll be able to select the channels and programs that are the most likely to deliver the results you need to be successful.  

If your budget is limited, or if you would prefer to get your feet wet before making a financial investment in a tracking system, we suggest you try the easy to use tracking spreadsheets located on the “USE” tab of the Metrics section in Sightpath’s Customer Resource Library. 

 

– By Rachel Rickert, Creative Marketing Manager for Sightpath Medical 

If you’re interested in learning more about how you can benchmark your marketing efforts and patient conversion, contact us today for more information on our comprehensive marketing solutions. All Sightpath  Medical customers receive access to a full range of practice-building resources. From staff training and sample forms, to video tutorials and monthly webinars, we are here to help. Customers, click to access our Customer Resource library. Additionally, Sightpath Creative can help create interactions and energize a referral network to drive procedures, with ongoing practice development support on a variety of levels. Sightpath Creative would be glad to help assess, create and deploy messages for you all year long. Learn more about Sightpath Creative.