How to get leadership to see your marketing budget as a marketing investment.
Your success as a marketer at an urgent care company depends upon your ability to win support from senior leadership. Without their buy-in and investment in your marketing budget, you won’t have the resources you need to successfully execute your marketing plans.
Our urgent care clients have achieved tremendous results using a data-centric approach to marketing. This strategy delivers a clear marketing ROI[amsive_tooltip term=”return-on-investment”] by giving you the insights you need to focus your marketing dollars on the most lucrative patient segments[amsive_tooltip term=”segmentation”], service lines, marketing messages and communication channels.
This approach is also a great way to prove marketing’s value to your urgent care center business. As part of this effort, here are seven easy ways you can tangibly demonstrate the importance of a data-centric approach — and convince leadership to back these marketing initiatives.
Step 1: Define the Revenue by Type of Visit
At the heart of making the right marketing decisions is developing a comprehensive understanding of the visits your urgent care clinics receive, and the value of each visit. What revenue and profits does each visit type generate? Which visits drive repeat visits? Which help enhance lifetime patient value[amsive_tooltip term=”lifetime-customer-value”]?
Chances are that you already have a good working revenue number by service. This is a foundational input to help you understand your patients and their lifetime patient value.
Step 2: Define Lifetime Value
While revenue per visit is an important metric, it is the lifetime value (LTV) of your different patient segments that should be the focus of your patient acquisition and engagement strategy. You can calculate this by multiplying the average number of appointments per year for each segment by the average value of each visit and by the average number of years those patients will visit your practice.
You should understand how age and demographic attributes affect the LTV and be able to look beyond individuals to also understand the LTV of the entire households you serve.
Our urgent care clients have achieved tremendous results using a data-centric approach to marketing.
Step 3: Identify Your Market Opportunity
Knowing the revenue by visit and LTV of your patients helps you identify your most promising patient segments. But you also need to know how many potential patients in your market area fit these desired customer profiles.
This information helps you further define both your projections and the most promising segments of opportunity. A strategic modeling[amsive_tooltip term=”modeling”] program can integrate your patient data with consumer demographic data, healthcare industry data, and data relating to consumer interest, purchase activity and intent. This provides a stronger foundation for reaching the people in your market area who have the greatest propensity to need your services.
Step 4: Determine Your Campaign KPIs
Every marketing campaign you strategize should start with the identification of your business goals, or key performance indicators[amsive_tooltip term=”key-performance-indicator”] for the campaign. These can include:
- Revenue benchmarks
- Strategic growth goals
- Specific growth, revenue or profit metrics by patient type and visit type
These benchmarks are important for guiding your plan and for ensuring that your marketing initiatives are aligned with the objectives of senior management.
Step 5: Align Your Marketing Mix to Your Plan
Once you understand your customer segments, their LTV and the segments of most opportunity, you have the ingredients to build a highly strategic plan. It should include acquisition of new patients for long- and short-term revenue growth. It should also engage existing patients, driving them to additional service lines to boost revenues further while increasing their LTV.
You can tangibly demonstrate the importance of a data-centric approach — and convince leadership to back these marketing initiatives.
Step 6: Choose the Most Cost-Efficient Channels
Using the right modeling and data tools, you can identify the channels that your patient segments prefer and identify the most cost-efficient and effective channels and messages by segment and visit type. With this information, you can more precisely predict marketing return on investment in the budgeting stage of your campaign.
Step 7: Measure Your Value
When data drives your campaign, you can get closer to clear attribution[amsive_tooltip term=”attribution”] of marketing impact by marketing touchpoint to each patient visit into your facility. You can identify which specific marketing messages, channels and tactics brought patients in. You will have the dashboard and tools to demonstrate your strategy, your execution, and your impact on your bottom line.
You also be equipped to analyze your results as you go and use these insights to continually optimize improve and refine your creative and your channel strategy throughout the campaign.
By harnessing the advanced power of patient and consumer data, you can understand your patients and their value to your business better. You can learn which potential patients are most profitable. You can reach them via the most cost-effective channels they use, with messaging that resonates. And you can improve your marketing as your insights into your customers and into the activities that make your urgent care centers most profitable continue to grow. This approach equips you with powerful data to show and prove the impact of marketing on your bottom line. It also enables you to effectively demonstrate the results of your efforts and prove your Marketing Return on Investment (MROI) to the internal stakeholders who matter most.
