THE NEED FOR DETERMINING THE SUCCESS OF YOUR MARKETING CAMPAIGNS:

Over the past couple of years, the face of healthcare has changed rapidly and marketing is becoming an integral part of practice. There are various ways for medical marketers to put across their campaigns, social networks and digital media. Engaging content has been marketed across social media successfully as more and more doctors now have a website of their own. Apart from online marketing, there are numerous other options of marketing today.

Measurement is required to justify the costs spent on the marketing campaign. If you do not how much revenue you are making in return from your medical marketing activities, then your hard earned money is going down the drain. Measurement makes marketing a science, but it is the only way to determine the effectiveness of any advertising campaign and enables you to analyse which marketing initiative has attracted more patients to your practice. Perhaps the biggest aspect which most medical professionals overlook is that they have no idea of exactly how their marketing campaigns are helping them, neither do they know whether investing money in advertising is generating an equivalent revenue.

SIMPLE AND EASY WAYS TO MEASURE THE EFFECTIVENESS OF YOUR CAMPAIGNS

  • First, it is important for the organisation to set a benchmark or target of what they want to achieve. Once you have set the benchmark, determining the success of the campaign will become much simpler.
  • The next step is keeping a track on all marketing activities. A tab should be kept on the entire cost and materials involved in a particular campaign.
  • If you have invested in online or e-mail marketing, it would be ideal to install a call tracking number which would provide information of the caller and track the number of callers and how many later became your patients.
  • Track the amount of revenue you have made from the patients who have come due to your marketing campaigns. A comparison of the money invested and money earned is a useful indicator in judging the effectiveness.
  • If a seminar has generated more new patients, than you can continue conducting such seminars wherein the money spent is less in comparison to overall earnings.
  • It is important to note that if you are getting a lot of phone calls, it only means that your campaign is working, but whether these calls translate into actual revenue depends on the number of patients who actually come to your clinic. So number of phone calls generated cannot be used as a sole criterion for judging the success of a campaign.

Thus, gauging the success of marketing techniques and campaigns is extremely essential for every medical man. It helps to systemically keep a track of new patients acquired and overall growth in practice over a stipulated period of time. It helps to reduce wastage of money on activities which are of no addition to your practice. This overall assessment also guides us to make modifications in our marketing techniques, making them more appropriate and adapted to individual medical practices.

Contributed by Dr. Rachita Narsaria, MD

REFERENCES

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  3. Tengs TO, Adams ME, Pliskin JS, et al . “Five-hundred life-saving interventions and their cost-effectiveness”. Risk Anal. June 1995;15 (3): 369–90.