Healthcare Marketers: Check Your Vitals
Get ready for a world-class patient acquisition strategy to crush your business goals.
Download a shareable checklist with all of these tips.
Before getting started with this checklist, make sure you’re equipped with these marketing toolkit essentials:
An up-to-date articulated differentiator of why a patient should choose you over your competitors.
A defined target audience. This could be geographic, demographic, and/or psychographic, but any inclusions and exclusions to this targeting should be decided in advance of campaigns.
An understanding of the pain points and motivations of your patients as they navigate the decision-making process, reflected in your messaging as problems your organization solves or your value proposition.
Important note: If your answer to any of the above is more than a year old, we strongly recommend revisiting your brand positioning this year. Massive shifts in consumer trends in 2020 have required nearly every industry to realign with new target audiences, and you’ll want to have a firm understanding upfront of what that change means for your brand.
Once you are armed with the above, congratulations! You are ready to employ a world-class patient acquisition strategy to crush your business goals. To benchmark your current efforts, use this checklist as a guide for opportunities to make your digital marketing program even more effective and revenue-oriented.
Campaign Strategy and Setup
Does your organization have different programs/brand units that impact your overall business goals differently?
Not all departments or services are created equal from a revenue or margin standpoint. Your campaign setup should reflect your willingness to pay for a new patient or touchpoint in a given program based on the impact to your bottom line.
Are you leveraging your first-party CRM data to focus your media targeting and reach current or prospective patients?
Partners like Liveramp allow you to target groups of individuals from your CRM in a PII-compliant way, and can even create “look-a-like” audiences to help find new patients. These tactics also can exclude existing patients from targeting as warranted.
Messaging and Creative
Does your audience experience your ads in a way that feels validating and/or relevant to their pain points?
With audience-first campaign creation and targeting, you can reach specific segments of your target audience with dedicated creative and resonant messaging, relevant to their needs.
Is your website leveraging best-in-class UX to convert visitors to patients?
Your digital front door is one of your brand’s most important assets in patient acquisition. Helping your audience understand your services while standing out in a sea of sameness is a must. Reach out to Rise to learn more about our Customer Experience services and be on your way to making your website one of your strongest weapons in securing and retaining patients.
Data-Driven SEO-Optimized Website Redesign Drives 13% YoY Increase in Find a Physician Conversions
Measurement and Optimization
Do you have an integrated view between your CRM and media data to understand which keywords and ads are driving conversions that become actualized appointments?
You need a media strategy that invests your dollars toward keywords and ads that generate revenue-producing appointments. Out-of-the box media configurations are often only making spend decisions based on raw leads and do not factor in lead quality, resulting in missed opportunities and wasted spend.
Do you know your lead-to-patient rate for different marketing channels and tactics?
It’s important to understand which digital efforts are generating appointment requests that ultimately convert to realized patients. In the setup phase, make sure you have a reporting infrastructure that shows the impact of each dollar you are spending. Likely, you’ll be working in lockstep with your finance team to connect revenue metrics back to media platforms in PII-compliant ways.
If you’re heavily relying on call tracking, take advantage of the innovation happening in that space. Rise was named Partner Collaborator of the Year in 2020 by Invoca, a conversation intelligence provider and valued Rise partner. Read more about opportunities to level-up your call-to-conversion strategy.
Do you have automated notifications enabled and customized to alert you to real-time opportunities for media optimizations?
Each of the major tech platforms will have its own email settings accessible in your account. Additionally, social listening tools can fill in the gaps on organic mentions of your brand.
We’d be remiss not to tell you about Connex Alerts— Rise’s automated notification system that proactively alerts marketers to opportunities to maximize media impact and revenue, in real time. Our proprietary media optimization platform, Connex, not only integrates performance data from every marketing channel, it also enables our team to make agile marketing decisions based on customized alerts sent via email, SMS, and Slack.
Closing the Loop on Patient Acquisition
As consumers are exposed to a growing number of healthcare options, healthcare organizations are faced with increased competition for share of voice. As greater investments are being made across the industry, it’s vital that healthcare marketers understand the impact of their advertising dollars and maximize areas of greatest opportunity.
Feeling inspired? Rise has an abundance of marketers who are experts at building healthcare digital media strategies to convert leads to patients to revenue. Speak with us about your marketing roadmap today.
Originally published in 2021; updated in 2023.