In 2022, the hospital industry in the United States spent an estimated 6.3 million U.S. dollars on advertising, underscoring the importance of marketing in healthcare.
It’s clear that hospitals spend big money on marketing every year. What’s not clear is whether this substantial investment pays off. Merely spending money isn’t enough; it’s crucial to demonstrate the marketing ROI. To maximize efficiency, every marketing dollar should be accounted for, and every patient visit should be attributed to the marketing campaign that was its catalyst.
On the other hand, HIPAA-induced challenges often prevent healthcare marketing executives from comprehensive reporting, thus endangering their position and bringing into question their valuable position in the team.
If you’re nodding along, we see you.
As a healthcare marketing executive, you need to show how your strategies translate into patient acquisition and palpable revenue. So here’s how to prove your worth and rock your next board meeting by providing powerful evidence that your healthcare marketing strategy is, in fact, making a difference.
Apply Patient Attribution Models
Patient attribution models are essential for linking marketing campaigns to patient visits. Multi-touch attribution models can help you understand the entire patient journey and show the impact of each marketing touchpoint on the final outcome.
This is not brand new information to the majority of healthcare marketing executives, and yet, many struggle to apply patient attribution successfully in the healthcare landscape. Still, allocating credit for conversions accurately gives you a holistic view of how various marketing efforts contribute to patient attribution.
Actionable Tip: Rely on healthcare marketing software that supports multi-touch attribution and provides detailed insights into the patient journey, from the initial contact to the appointment booking.
Mainstream marketing and sales platforms will hardly cut it due to the lack of HIPAA compliance measures, so consider finding worthy healthcare-friendly CRM alternatives. Regularly update and refine your attribution models to ensure they accurately reflect the patient journey and adapt to new marketing campaigns and strategies.
Implement Compliant Tracking Mechanisms
Ensuring every campaign is fully trackable is challenging for healthcare marketing executives, considering that many no-brainer tools and extensions we use for these purposes across other industries are not suitable for healthcare.
So, while tracking UTM parameters in Google Analytics 4 isn’t really an option, one can still think outside the box to ensure the tracking mechanisms are secure and compliant.
Actionable Tip: Implement QR codes and HIPAA-compliant call tracking into your marketing campaigns to track their impact and attribute value. Develop a comprehensive dashboard that consolidates all tracking data and offers a clear visual representation of your campaign performance—or simply rely on tools that’ll do that for you.
Don’t forget to check your tracking systems regularly to ensure data accuracy and compliance with data privacy regulations.
Leverage Data Analytics
Find HIPAA-compliant data analytics tools and hold onto them with your dear life! Do forgive us, but as a healthcare marketing executive, you know this dramatic exaggeration is absolutely called for.
Healthcare-specific marketing platforms that seamlessly integrate with your hospital’s PM/EHR systems can provide critical insights into patient demographics, conversion rates, and marketing attribution.
Actionable Tip: Regularly craft detailed reports highlighting healthcare marketing KPIs such as Patient Acquisition Cost, Patient Lifetime Value, ROI, and ROAS. Use data visualization tools to create compelling, easy-to-understand graphics, and rid your reports of any fluff: let the numbers and growth graphs speak for themselves.
Schedule regular report reviews with your team to identify trends and make data-driven decisions to optimize future campaigns.
Focus on ROI 
Ultimately, the board wants to see a positive return on investment, no matter which charts and colors you choose to present it with. Track and report ROI for each campaign and marketing channel and use other KPIs to support the findings.
A high healthcare marketing ROI reinforces the value of your strategies, demonstrates efficient use of the marketing budget, and opens up space for higher marketing investments (and if that isn’t every healthcare marketing executive’s favorite news, we don’t know what is!).
Actionable Tip: Leave your vanity metrics in the break room and present clear and concise ROI data for each major campaign. Break down the ROI by campaign type to show which strategies are most effective. Regularly review and adjust your marketing budget allocation based on the collected ROI data to maximize your marketing efficiency.
And, oh, well, once you’ve done a really good job at it, throw in some viral shares and likes at the end of the report if you really must! While they can’t make a cake, these metrics surely do make a pretty cherry on top.
Align Marketing Goals with Hospital Objectives
Your marketing goals should align with the hospital’s overall objectives, whether it’s increasing elective surgeries, improving patient retention, or expanding into new markets. This alignment ensures that your efforts contribute directly to the hospital’s strategic goals.
Actionable Tip: Always be on top of the hospital’s strategic plan and adjust your marketing strategies accordingly. If there’s no clear plan, you must insist on creating one (every marketing executive has been there at some point in their careers).
Schedule meetings with key stakeholders to ensure your goals remain aligned and get feedback on your marketing initiatives. Create a marketing roadmap that outlines how each planned campaign supports specific objectives of the hospital and then track progress against these goals to prove the efficiency.
Invest in Predictive Targeting in Healthcare
Predictive targeting in healthcare uses machine learning and data points to identify and reach prospective patients in need of specific healthcare services in a HIPAA-compliant way. This method enhances marketing efficacy, reduces costs, and increases ROI by focusing on high-value patients and services. Predictive targeting leverages extensive data, including demographic information, online behaviors, and financial details, to create precise predictive models.
Actionable Tip: We’ll let you in on a secret: SocialClimb is the only platform on the market that offers predictive targeting tools that attract high-value patients effectively while maintaining HIPAA compliance.
Implement targeted marketing campaigns using these models, focusing on both digital and traditional channels, such as online ads and trackable postcards, to reach the intended audience for preferred medical procedures. Track your conversions and test different messaging approaches to improve your campaign effectiveness further.
Showcase Your Success
Highlight specific case studies where your marketing efforts have led to significant outcomes. Use real-world examples to make your data more relatable and impactful. Showcasing success stories not only validates your efforts but also builds confidence in your strategies.
Highlight specific case studies where your marketing efforts have led to significant business outcomes. Use real-life examples to make your data more relatable and impactful.
While this may seem silly at first, showcasing success stories creatively goes beyond validating your efforts and builds confidence in your strategies, firmly establishing your position as a trusted healthcare marketing executive.
Actionable Tip: Create a small portfolio of success stories to share during your presentations, including quotes, reviews, or testimonials from satisfied patients and statistics that underline the campaign’s impact. Be creative: use before-and-after comparisons in an unexpected way, and include staff feedback, and, of course, detailed metrics wherever you can.
Regularly update this portfolio with new success stories to keep it fresh and relevant.
Choose The Right Healthcare Marketing Platform
Selecting the right platform is crucial for integrating all these strategies seamlessly. SocialClimb offers comprehensive solutions including predictive targeting, reputation management, and detailed analytics to help attract high-value patients and improve ROI.
The key to successfully addressing each of the points we’ve discussed so far and integrating these strategies seamlessly is just this: choosing the right healthcare marketing platform. Look for a platform that goes beyond reputation management and provides robust data analytics.
Actionable Tip: Consider SocialClimb, a comprehensive marketing platform that provides HIPAA-compliant predictive targeting in healthcare, centralized reputation management, local SEO features, streamlined online advertising, and automated patient surveys. Compliant PM/EHR integrations allow for holistic healthcare marketing tracking and reporting on the main KPIs, therefore ensuring both your hospital’s marketing success and your professional success as a healthcare marketing executive.
In taking the deciding step towards a comprehensive approach to healthcare marketing, we can only say: choose wisely!
