In order to stay competitive and grow, independent practices must leverage every tool at their exposal to attract and retain patients. However, sometimes even the practices that are at capacity struggle to grow and expand—seemingly, even a substantial number of patients fails to boost the bottom line sufficiently.
One effective strategy to overcome this problem (that some might describe as “good-to-have”) is to analyze your marketing campaigns through the lens of patient mix.
Understanding what kind of patient each campaign brings in can provide valuable insights that help refine your marketing strategies and improve your healthcare business profitability. The way to achieve this is through healthcare marketing attribution.
Why Is Healthcare Marketing Attribution Important?
Marketing campaign attribution is a high-value approach for healthcare practices. By attributing new patient visits to specific marketing campaigns, you can find out which strategies bring in which type of patients, determining their effectiveness, both in terms of ROI and number of new patients.
For example, your marketing attribution efforts may show that postcards generate a high percentage of hip replacement patients, while digital ads attract more patients seeking cortisol shots or flu vaccines.
But do we really need to go into that much detail? Yes, absolutely, because it allows you to understand the financial impact of each campaign. Knowing which strategies yield high-value patients can help you allocate your budget more effectively and prioritize campaigns that help refine your patient mix.
Understanding and Refining Your Patient Mix
Your patient mix—the variety of patients and the procedures they seek—directly impacts your practice’s revenue and resource allocation. By analyzing your marketing efforts, you can gain a clear picture of your current patient mix and identify areas for improvement.
Identify High-Value Services
First things first, you need to determine which healthcare services and procedures generate the most revenue for your practice. This involves analyzing your practice’s financial data to see which procedures contribute the most to your bottom line.
You can do this by reviewing your financial statements and analyzing gross revenue and net profit to understand which services are both popular and cost-effective. Additionally, consider procedure volume and complexity, as high-volume procedures can be very profitable if their individual cost is lower.
Finally, consider the resources required for each procedure: high-revenue services that rely on fewer resources are more valuable to your practice.
Apply Marketing Attribution
Applying marketing attribution is crucial for understanding which campaigns bring in high-value patients more successfully. By analyzing your data, you can pinpoint which marketing efforts are driving best results and optimize your strategy accordingly.
To effectively conduct attribution, you can apply three different marketing attribution models:
- First-touch attribution: the model that attributes all the credit to the first interaction a patient has with your marketing;
- Last-touch attribution: the model that assigns all the credit to the final interaction before the patient converts; and
- Multi-touch attribution: the model that distributes credit across multiple interactions.
Using these different marketing attribution models allows you to build a comprehensive picture of your marketing efforts.
First-touch attribution highlights the most effective channels for generating initial interest, while last-touch attribution shows which channels are best at converting patients. Multi-touch attribution provides insights into the overall journey, highlighting how different channels contribute to the patient’s decision-making process, allowing you to apply different strategies for different stages of the patient journey.
Adjust Marketing Strategies
Using healthcare marketing attribution insights, you can fine-tune your marketing strategies to focus on the most effective channels and touchpoints, ultimately refining your patient mix and maximizing your practice’s profitability.
Here’s how you can leverage these insights for better results:
- Shift your marketing resources to high-performing campaigns to ensure more of your budget is directed towards strategies that generate the most revenue.
- Don’t stop at one campaign: experiment with different channels and formats to see which ones resonate most with potential patients and increase the number of high-value patients.
- Use the data from your attribution models to refine your targeting criteria and tailor your future ads to focus on specific demographics, leading to better engagement and higher conversion rates.
- Align your content with attribution models and stages of the patient journey to enhance patient engagement and trust and make sure you’re promoting the right content at the right time.
Monitor and Optimize Your Marketing Campaigns
If there’s one thing we convey relentlessly, it’s that marketing is not a set-it-and-forget-it endeavor. Regularly monitor and review the performance of your campaigns using marketing attribution data. If you notice fluctuations in performance or a drop in the effectiveness of a previously successful campaign, analyze more closely and adjust your approach to further optimize your patient mix and maximize revenue.
Use marketing automation tools to streamline your efforts, nurture leads, and keep potential patients engaged. Healthcare marketing technology can help you manage, centralize, and scale your marketing strategies more efficiently.
Tracking is Key
Consistent and accurate marketing tracking is the foundation of refining your patient mix. Without accurate data on where your patients are coming from and which procedures are the most popular among them, you can’t make informed decisions about your marketing strategies and investments.
Although healthcare marketing tracking has a notorious reputation due to (mis)alignments with HIPAA regulations and healthcare privacy laws, there are designated healthcare marketing tools that can help you make the most of contemporary marketing technology in a compliant way.
Implementing call tracking, conversion tracking, and patient surveys will provide the data you need to make these critical decisions.
Here’s how you can implement tracking through practical steps:
- Use call tracking: assign unique phone numbers to different marketing campaigns to track which ones generate the most calls and appointments.
- Implement QR codes: adding QR codes to your postcard marketing will help you learn how patients engage with this specific (and otherwise untrackable) marketing medium.
- Leverage analytics platforms: use healthcare-specific platforms to integrate your PM/EHR systems and successfully track conversions and KPIs.
- Conduct patient surveys: Use automated electronic patient surveys to find out how patients found your practice and how likely they are to come back and to recommend it to others.
Healthcare Marketing Analytics: The Future of Scalable Growth
Analyzing your marketing campaigns through the lens of the patient mix is essential for optimizing your practice’s profitability and efficiency. By understanding which campaigns bring in different types of patients and refining your strategies accordingly, you can ensure that you are making the most of your marketing budget.
Remember, tracking is key to this process—you must know your patient mix before you can optimize and refine it.
SocialClimb’s healthcare marketing analytics platform unites all crucial tools and features for successful and compliant healthcare marketing tracking in one place. Our automated tracking and reporting features allow you to generate marketing reports in a few clicks and easily analyze the collected information to make data-informed decisions.
Additionally, SocialClimb’s predictive targeting in healthcare is the only HIPAA-compliant targeting tool on the market that allows you to identify at-risk patients for high-value procedures and track conversions and ROI, adding more high-value patients to your mix and further optimizing marketing spend and outcomes.
One final piece of advice for you today: don’t wait too long to implement these comprehensive tracking mechanisms to continuously monitor your results and stay ahead in the competitive healthcare market.
