Healthcare marketing is changing, and if you’re not tracking your medical marketing spend, you’re not spending efficiently.
Desert Orthopaedics Center, located in the Las Vegas area, is often the first search result to come up when medical consumers search for orthopedic care in that area. But that hasn’t always been the case.
SocialClimb and Desert Orthopaedic Center have worked together for several years. Before they found SocialClimb, however, DOC’s social presence did not match the great reputation they had earned in their community. Focusing on the reputation management aspect of their medical marketing efforts changed their situation drastically.
Mike Pendleton, their CEO, has been thrilled with results over the years as he orchestrated DOC’s rise from online obscurity to dominate search results in the area. You can read about the beginning of their journey in our case study.
I’d like to give you an update on where they are today since reaching the top of online search in their area. At SocialClimb, our three-fold medical marketing strategy focuses on building your reputation, targeting the patients you need with predictive analytics, and measuring the results of your medical marketing spend. This article picks up where our Desert Orthopaedics Center case study leaves off: when they began implementing targeted marketing.
Targeted Marketing
With their reputation solidly in place, DOC started sending Boost Ads, or targeted ads, for two of their doctors. The results were fantastic. One of their doctors, Dr. Hanson, was looking to do more ACL repairs. He started seeing more ACL patients immediately after we began sending out the ads.
The other doctor DOC started on Boost Ads was new to the group. He wanted to focus on joint repair, and with Boost Ads working for him, he was able to focus on his specialty in under a year. In the past, other new DOC doctors had taken two to five years to be able to reach their specialty.
With Boost Ads, we send targeted ads to prospective patients identified using predictive analytics. If you want to see patients with joint pain, for example, our model will find which zip codes in your area have high concentrations of people at risk for joint pain and send ads to those areas. These targeted ads can be sent through Google, Facebook, and Instagram. Read more about our Boost Ads here.
The ads show up at the top of search results when medical consumers search for care, and the rest is history.
Measuring PAC and ROI
Here’s where the story gets really good. Our platform can measure the effectiveness of your Boost Ads and your Google My Business (GMB) listing. Our call tracker feature identifies whether a call is coming in from a patient clicking on an ad or a standard GMB listing. I’ll illustrate using Dr. Hanson’s results as an example.
Dr. Hanson’s marketing report from January 1 through March 31, 2020, shows his results. Note that the data is real, though the names and phone numbers have been changed to protect patient identity. Your marketing report will show you actual patient names and whether they made an appointment using your GMB listing (Reputation) or your Boost Ads.
You can see from the report that Dr. Hanson received 104 calls from his GMB listing and 64 calls from his Boost Ads. The calls resulted in 18 appointments from the GMB listing, a conversion rate of 17%. His Boost Ads led to 25 appointments, a 39% conversion rate. The higher conversion rate resulted from careful targeting of prospective patients who needed the care he provided.
Desert Orthopaedics Center gave us an average patient value of $1,100 per patient, and we plugged that into the report. With this number, you can see on the marketing report that Dr. Hanson’s revenue from the GMB listings was $19,800, with $27,500 coming from Boost Ads.
Patient Acquisition Cost
We include the patient acquisition cost (PAC) on the marketing report because it is one of the most valuable metrics in medical marketing. The PAC is calculated by dividing the money spent on specific marketing efforts (whether GMB listings or Boost Ads) by the number of appointments made.
In the case of Dr. Hanson’s targeted ads, it would be $1,300 / 25 = $52. Knowing his PAC allows Dr. Hanson the freedom to turn on his Boost Ads for a month or scale back depending on what he wants his schedule to look like and how he wants to direct his medical marketing spend.
Return on Investment
Our marketing report doesn’t show the return on investment (ROI), because we want you to focus on the PAC. But the ROI is easily discernible. You can see on the marketing report all the numbers you need for calculating the number. You subtract what you spent on your marketing efforts from the revenue you brought in. Then you divide that number by your medical marketing spend, multiply by 100, and voila.
From Dr. Hanson’s report, the ROI from his Boost Ads is ($27,500 – $1,300) / $1,300 x 100 = 2,015%. A return on investment of over 2,000% makes a pretty clear case for the direction of his marketing efforts. What’s more, with the success of those two doctors, DOC has increased their use of Boost Ads to include several more doctors.
Of course for you, the numbers will vary based on where you live, who your patient base is, and many other factors. The point is, it is imperative to know your PAC and your ROI so you can be efficient in your medical marketing spend.
Mic Drop
We’ve had dozens of medical practices make use of our predictive analytics, call tracker, and Boost Ads over the last year or so since the options have all become available. And those who try it out quickly grasp the benefit of the strategy. It’s telling that those practices who have started out with one or two doctors soon expand their use. Once they try it, they’re hooked. They increase the spend on their Boost Ads because they can see how effective it is.
Knowing the impact of your medical marketing spend is essential in today’s digital environment. You need to be able to pinpoint where to invest your efforts to keep up with the ever changing landscape of an online environment with computer-savvy medical consumers. SocialClimb is the only organization that provides the complete package of reputation management, targeted ads based on predictive analytics, and accurate ROI and PAC measurement to grow your practice the right way.
Read more about predictive analytics.
Learn about our Boost feature.
Set up a demo to see what we can do for you.
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