After qualified and compassionate care, nothing matters more to a practice than successful marketing. The red flags of a failing marketing effort aren’t hard to spot—languishing social media; empty email inboxes; no increase in patient inquiries. Conversely, an opposite response is the most obvious indicator that your marketing is effective. However, there’s more to understanding practice promotion than those two extremes. Let’s look behind the scenes at successful practice promotion.
Delve into Digital
Let’s start with your website. A good hosting package allows you to see various analytics and metrics and, if your marketing is strong, you should at least notice an increase in visits to your site. Two further success metrics are the number of pages viewed and how long the average visitor spends on the site. The higher those numbers, the more successful your marketing is.
If the visitor count, time spent, and page rates are low, it’s time to reconsider site layout, design, and content. Informative articles, expert blogs, special offers, and video testimonials are all proven ways to engage an audience and make a marketing connection. Optimizing the site for cell phones is also key to reaching and retaining a wider digital audience. An under optimized website can lose you droves of potential visitors and patients.
Are You Successfully Socializing?
The second pillar of online marketing success is social media. Sluggish social is a dead giveaway that your marketing isn’t generating interest. Platforms don’t always tell you how many people are visiting your pages and viewing your content, but they do offer them a means to approve of what you’re doing via likes and shares (or show they’re not engaged by avoiding those).
Again, quality content increases the chances of social marketing success. Just remember to focus devotedly on a few social platforms rather than trying to be everywhere online with low-effort marketing material.
Successful social media can give your business a wider local, national, or even international reach. If you’re getting interest from regions you haven’t marketed to, it’s likely your digital marketing is working well. However, an unresponsive local audience indicates a serious need to reassess your social marketing plan.
Analyze ROI to Gauge Marketing Success
Always keep an eye firmly on each marketing effort’s return on investment. If your email campaign is costing you $1,000 a month but only bringing in $500, it’s time to review that strategy. This inflection point is where it literally pays to focus on only one or two marketing efforts at a time; any more than that and it’s hard to accurately connect measurable results with expense.
Ask digital and physical visitors what brought them to you. Knowing if an email campaign, online ad, website, or outside recommendation made that connection helps you gauge what efforts are having the most and least marketing effects over time. Such a survey lets you know where you need to rethink and spend your money differently.
Keep Current with Your KPIs
Measurable goals are crucial when rating your marketing’s success. Every practice shares common needs such as more visitors and more revenue, which are linked to key performance indicators (KPIs). Marketing efficiently hinges on knowing what these KPIs are (both universally and for your practice) and then watching them accordingly.
You’re setting your marketing up to fail if you can’t easily list general and practice-specific KPIs. For example, exactly what percentage of new income would you like to generate over the next quarter? “More” isn’t a good measuring stick; “10%” is. If you invest in marketing and see that 10% increase within three months, you know you’re on the right promotional track.
Your practice may have other KPIs you would like to add that are tailored to your particular corner of the chiropractic profession. Only you know what these are. Just remember the “SMART” rule: all KPIs must be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely.
Sticking to those criteria, perfecting your online presence, and scrutinizing ROI are powerful steps toward evaluating the success of your clinic’s current marketing plan.
There are 4 KPIs any chiropractor can use to quantify marketing success over the short and long term:
• Revenue growth
• Customer satisfaction levels
• Client acquisition, retention, and loss rates
• Revenue generated per client
Dr. Ray Foxworth, DC, FICC, is founder and CEO of ChiroFlealthUSA. For over 35 years, he worked "in the trenches," facing challenges with billing, coding, documentation, and compliance, in his practice. He is a former medical compliance specialist and currently serves as chairman of The Chiropractic Summit, an at-large board member of the Chiropractic Future Strategic Plan Committee, a board member of the Cleveland College Foundation, and an executive board member of the Foundation for Chiropractic Progress. He is a former staff chiropractor at the G.V. Sonny Montgomery VA Medical Center and past chairman of the Mississippi Department of Health.
