How to Increase Healthcare Marketing ROI and Decreased Cost Per Patient

Healthcare marketing

How Call Tracking Drives Your ROI and Cuts Costs

As a healthcare marketing expert, you’ll likely employ a number of solutions to get your clients in front of potential patients. But how do you know which of these solutions will work the best?

This is where call tracking comes in. Tracking and analyzing calls made by prospective patients will let you know which marketing methods are the most effective. It will also help you better understand the customer experience. This will clear up any potential confusion and let you easily and accurately optimize your marketing strategy.

Why Use Call Tracking?

A study by Google and Kantar Media shows that even though a vast majority of patients use the Internet when researching healthcare options, 56% of them will use a phonecall to schedule an appointment. This makes the telephone one of the most important tools in a healthcare marketer’s arsenal.

Because of this, it is essential to know where the potential patients found your company’s phone number. This can be an important indicator of which part of your marketing campaign is driving the most conversions. Thanks to this information, you will be able to allocate your marketing resources more effectively and thus improve your return of investment.

The Benefits of Call Tracking

As we mentioned above, one of the main benefits of call tracking is the ability to accurately gauge where the calls from patients are coming from.

As a part of a comprehensive marketing strategy, you are likely to place ads for a healthcare provider on a variety of marketing platforms. Each one of these ads will have a varying degree of effectiveness and will drive conversions at a different rate.

Having the ability to determine which of these ads drive the most conversions and which are underperforming will help you better manage your marketing budget. You can go into even more detail by tracking which keywords attract the most calls and use this information to better target your audience.

One of the main reasons such a high number of patients choose to schedule appointments by phone and not online is the chance to interact with another human being. When choosing a healthcare provider, patients are likely to have many questions. It can be reassuring to have someone at the other end of the line who can answer them.

Call tracking can help improve this aspect of healthcare marketing too. Most call tracking solutions are able to automatically record and transcribe calls. These transcripts can provide further insight into the advertising channels that attract the most patients. They will also help you evaluate how well your current call handling protocol works at converting calls to sales.

Integrating Call Tracking

By now you know how useful call tracking can be for optimizing your marketing strategy. All we need to do now is find out how to integrate call tracking into our marketing and sales.

Easier Calls Lead to More Sales

Before you start using call tracking, you’ll need to make sure you are fully prepared. This means having a call tracking solution to gather and analyze call data.

First, you’ll want to make sure that the appropriate phone number or ‘call us’ button is prominently displayed in your ad. This will make it far simpler for a patient to contact your company, cutting out unnecessary research.

Second, if you are using vanity numbers, you will also need to include the full numerical form so that the patients can quickly select and call the number from a mobile device.

Dynamic Numbers Give You Better Insight

Dynamic numbers refer to the practice of having a separate phone number for each online source that can lead visitors to your website. Once the visitor makes the call, the number they used is sent to Google Analytics. This way you know exactly where each call came from.

By using dynamic numbers with a call tracking system, you can easily find out which online marketing platform is bringing in the most calls. This kind of insight can prove invaluable when deciding how to allocate your marketing budget.

You can take this a step further by using dynamic numbers to track keywords. This is fairly easy to do with targeted Google Ads, and it will let you know which particular keywords drive the most sales. The added benefit is that you can also use these keywords later as a part of your SEO strategy.

Tying It All Together

Now that you have your dynamic numbers and call tracking in place, it’s time to integrate these elements with the tools in your marketing arsenal. This way, you’ll get a comprehensive and holistic overview of the patient’s experience that you can use to drive your marketing decisions. You will also be able to better reach your audience with well-placed targeted ads, leading to even more potential patients.

Conclusion

With all the competition in the healthcare industry and the large sums spent on marketing, it’s more important than ever to get a leg up over the competition. Call tracking can give you that essential edge that will help you craft a comprehensive marketing strategy and make sure your patients have the best customer experience possible.

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How to Improve Your Return on Investment (ROI) Using Call Tracking

return on investment (ROI)

How to Improve Your Return on Investment Using Call Tracking?

All marketers and business owners know that the most important metrics for any business is “return on investment” (ROI). They also know that calculating ROI is very difficult, especially with digital advertising. Or at least, it was until call tracking was invented. 😉

Call tracking can help you measure the return on investment of your ads as well as streamline and improve your marketing efforts. 

But before we dive deep into how call tracking does that, we need to establish what exactly is call tracking.

What is call tracking?

When you talk to a sales or a customer care person in some business and they ask you “How did you hear about us?” – that’s basically call tracking. 

Call tracking is the process of measuring the impact and effectiveness of marketing efforts (usually online) trough offline conversions (phone calls).

Today, most businesses rely on emails, chats, and social media to get inquiries from potential customers. Measuring conversions that come from these channels is easy. However, some businesses still rely on phone calls to close deals. Measuring conversions that come from phone calls is a bit difficult. I’m sure we can all agree that simply asking all potential customers “How did you hear about us?” isn’t effective – and that’s before you take into account the sheer number of phone calls some businesses get every day, as someone would have to write down all the phone numbers and the channels they came from.

That’s why call tracking is so good – it automates the entire process, and you know from which online source the call came from, down to each visitor.

How do you optimize your call channels?

To get the maximum benefits of call tracking, you need to optimize all your call channels so that they collect data properly.

First, you need to make sure your business listings are consistent – all of them should have your name, address, and phone number. You have to this consistently at all levels, starting from Google My Business, Yelp, and all the way to other websites that potential customers are able to see. Of course, you need to make sure that the phone number listed is a tracking phone number that forwards to your main phone number. A call tracking tool like INVOX can do that.

Other than your digital marketing channels, you need to make sure that your offline marketing channels are still tracked. We’re talking about TV and radio ads, billboards, newspaper ads, signage, and company vehicles all of which can bring in a significant number of leads. Identifying which of these channels has the largest impact tells you which one is the most effective and helps you maximize your ROI.

How do you calculate ROI with call tracking?

If you accurately attribute each lead back to the campaign that was responsible for generating that lead, you can precisely estimate how much revenue each campaign generates.

This will help you calculate real ROI. By having a complete view of all the leads your marketing efforts have generated – this includes online and offline efforts – you’ll be able to identify which of your channels are most profitable and which of your channels should be discontinued.

Calculating the ROI of your marketing efforts can be done even more easily if you integrate your call tracking software with your CRM platform. And if inbound phone calls are an important part of your sales journey, then it’s imperative that you do integrate your call tracking and CRM platforms.

How does calculating ROI help my marketing efforts?

Whether you are a marketing agency or you have an in-house marketing department or you even do marketing on your own, calculating the true ROI can help you determine which campaigns are successful and which are not. By tracking your calls, you can be sure that there are no missing data from potential customers that managed to bypass your website tracker and called directly.

All of this data can then be used to adjust your marketing campaigns based on the one true performance indicator – lead generation. If people aren’t picking up the phone and you’re sure they saw your Facebook ad, you need to adjust the ads to make sure people do ring your phone. Also, if you see that people are calling you because of a Google ad you did, make sure you continue with the ad, as it’s most likely going to generate even more leads and potential business.

Conclusion

A call tracking platform helps you track and manage inbound calls to your business more effectively. With insights that can’t be found anywhere else, like your caller’s behavior and demographics, you’ll be able to make smarter, data-driven decisions that will optimize your marketing campaigns. 

Each call that goes through a call tracking platform has all the information about your potential customers and the general target audience. Call tracking platforms can be integrated with other marketing, business, and analytics solutions like Google Analytics, Google Data Studio, various CRMs and ERPs which allows you to have access to the most advanced metrics that will help you control your ad bids and spend and at the same time empower your PPC decisions while improving the overall customer experience. 

About INVOX

INVOX is a call tracking software that gathers valuable behavioral and demographic phone call data that helps you make better data-driven decisions about your marketing efforts, no matter the marketing channel the calls are coming from.