Patients have access to a wealth of information about healthcare and medical practices online, and many practices have realized that online marketing is critical to attracting the attention of patients searching online. This is especially true for practices in large markets.
The problem is, many medical practices don’t know what their return on investment is for their marketing spend. Due to the nature of healthcare and patient privacy laws, it can be difficult for practices to track website visits and ad clicks back to patients truly interacting with the practice–the true benchmark of how well marketing efforts are working.
As a company specializing in online marketing for medical practices, it is important for us to prove the value of our efforts to our clients, and CallRail helps us point to real results.
In particular, one of our clients stands out for their use of CallRail data in making important marketing decisions. They are a large orthopedic practice with several offices in the northeast. While their marketing budget is higher than most smaller practices, there is still a budget to contend with, and they need to use it as effectively as possible to gain visibility in 3 counties with lots of competition.
How CallRail Helped Us Prove Marketing Value
In marketing for medical practices, our central goal is gain more patient appointments for our clients. Website visits are good, but that metric alone does not help you understand what patients do beyond visiting the website.
In e-commerce businesses, it’s very easy to see how many website visits were converted into purchases. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple in healthcare. Depending on the practice, patients may have a few different methods of scheduling an appointment, including appointment request forms, patient portals, and phone calls. In order to see the true effectiveness of a practice’s online marketing, we must consider all possible methods to schedule an appointment.
In our client’s case, patients could request an appointment by either filling out the form on the practice’s website or calling one of the practice’s locations. We had to help them see how this data could be useful moving forward, so we proceeded with the following plan:
1. Start Call Tracking for All Office Locations
One of the first things we did was start call tracking in CallRail for the other office locations. By only tracking form submissions and calls to the main office, the practice was only seeing part of the picture. The practice wanted to increase online visibility for all of their office locations, not just the main location, so it was important for us to see how often patients were interacting with the individual location pages on the website.
The main practice phone number was listed prominently on the site, but the phone numbers for each of the other locations were only listed on the individual location pages. By setting up call tracking for these numbers as well, we were able to get a sense of how website visitors were interacting with these pages.
2. Strengthen the Value of Location Pages
We wanted to increase visibility for the individual location pages and create unique content for each. The original location pages did not have information about which physicians patients could see, or what treatment options were available.
By adding content that helped patients get the information they needed, we hoped to increase visibility for each location in search results and increase conversions for all office locations.
3. Focus on the Patient Experience Online
Beyond the location pages, we also worked with the practice to focus on pages that patients interacted with the most. We identified relevant information that we provide on each page to help patients meet their needs, whether it be learning more about a particular physician or finding relevant insurance information.
The efforts paid off, and we were able to bring data helped us prove to the practice that investing in better website content, along with the additional marketing initiatives underway, could improve their return on investment on all fronts.
Previous marketing efforts have helped the practice gain more attention in local markets, so our next focus is helping the practice rank for specific procedures and conditions in their specialty. The practice was convinced that this was a good next step based on the conversion data we were able to show them through CallRail.
Conclusion
CallRail helped us build trust with a client by proving the value of our services. In fact, we were able to use our successes to discuss other types of work that we could do for the client and increase the practice’s marketing effectiveness even further.
With healthcare marketing, it is critical to prove value to your clients. Medical practices have strict marketing budgets that they must stick to. If you can help them get the most out of those marketing dollars, you can build trust and foster long-term client relationships.
Scott Zeitzer is the president of P3 Inbound, an online marketing platform designed to help physicians and medical practices attract new patients and grow their practices. Learn more at p3inbound.com.