Healthcare Marketing: What Do You Measure?
All marketers (healthcare and non-healthcare) say they measure their campaigns, and almost all feel they lack the tools to connect the ROI dots.
Information, we’ve got. We’re drowning in data. Google Analytics can tell us everything about our web traffic, except how much revenue we’re delivering our health systems with each new visitor.
Klout scores (does anyone follow these anymore?) can tell us how cool our social online presence is, except whether or not our coolness is impacting insured patient volume.
In the age of social and web trending tools, our dashboards have become thicker and thicker, yet we know less and less whether what we’re doing matters.
I propose you track less.
Next month, choose one or two things to measure, and that’s it.
Measure the number of new visitors to your system site.
Or…the rate of new Twitter followers from preceding months…or the percentage increase of YouTube video plays, or the click through rates on your search campaigns…
But measure only one or two things. Ignore the rest.
Then, after a month review the results.
You may surprise yourself.
You were successful.
Then, other ideas come to you. Ideas on how to make the results even better next month.
And, the important idea may hit you: what to really measure from now on, what really counts.
Great advice Stephen. Doctors should not be overwhelmed with data that only marketers really understand. If there’s one metric physicians should understand and care about is the # of phone calls generated.
Nice post – in Hardwiring Flow, the authors talk about removing burdons which don’t add value to healthcare. Apple calls it working smarter not harder.
What about ditching nearly-meaningless digital measures all together and focusing instead on how marketing efforts effect the organization’s mission —or at least strategic goals. For instance, can a mammography campaign (it is October after all) increase early detection and result in less costly treatment and move lives saved? That’d be a cool metric!