As a dermatology business, you have many different functions that need to be fulfilled in order to achieve your goals, grow your business, and satisfy your patients. Marketing is an important part of gaining new business and promoting your brand, but marketing activities can often get pushed to the side to focus on other tasks. That means that your marketing program might not be working that effectively.
Having the right solution like Surefire Local can help you manage your dermatology marketing and track the effectiveness of your campaigns. Knowing how well your marketing campaigns are working is essential to figuring out your return on investment, or marketing ROI. When you know how well your marketing programs are working, you can better plan and create strategies that work for your budget.
Measuring Marketing Return
Your dermatology marketing ROI is important to understand and measure the success of a marketing initiative. If you can’t track your ROI, you don’t know for certain whether your marketing dollars are being used effectively or if there are areas for improvement among your strategies.
Tracking your marketing ROI gives you a big picture look at your campaigns, strategies, and initiatives. It gives you the confidence to move forward without the frustration or stress that comes from not feeling as though your marketing is being effective. You can also automate new insights, find areas of optimization, and track your budget dollar for dollar.
However, without the help of a multi-channel tool like Surefire Local, manually tracking dermatology marketing ROI can quickly become complicated. There are several factors that can contribute to ROI that are hard or impossible to track using manual methods and ineffective tools.
The Complexities of the Customer Journey
The customer journey refers to the path your customers will take when deciding to visit your office. There are many steps along the journey as a customer realizes they need a dermatologist, starting with researching different options in their area and then finally deciding on who they want to go with. The rise in complexity makes it hard to track every touchpoint in the customer journey and attribute your ROI to those steps.
Staying Relevant with a Digital Footprint
Having a strong digital presence allows search engines like Google to know that your business is relevant and should be ranked high on search engine results pages. However, when you don’t have a strong digital footprint, it can be hard for customers to find you and make getting your investment back in marketing activities more difficult. Channels to use to stay relevant online include:
- Website listings
- SEO
- Content marketing
- Search engine marketing
- Reviews
- Referrals
- Digital advertising
- Social media
- Digital marketing
Tracking ROI Takes Skill
Knowing how to capture data points and measure your ROI isn’t a skill that just anyone can do. After all, there’s a reason there are highly developed software and entire agencies of individuals working to track ROI and run marketing campaigns. Marketing is hard work! And tracking the ROI on marketing activities requires someone to be consistent in areas like:
- Follow ups and surveys
- Landing pages
- UTM codes
- Phone calls
- Lead sources
- Keywords
- Social media
- Content marketing
Layers of Complexity
A marketing campaign is much more complicated these days than it used to be in the past. With so many different channels, tactics, tracking methods, data, and touchpoints, your dermatology business exists in a world full of complexity. And if you aren’t sure which vendors or tools are most useful to you, it can make it even more difficult to understand what your position is and what your real ROI will be.
However, having a strategy in place to track your business and marketing goals is essential to steady growth and sustainability. The impacts of different tactics are weighted differently, so having a software tool like Surefire Local on your side will make all the difference in calculating your dermatology marketing ROI.
5 Steps to Measure the Effectiveness of Your Marketing
Now that you understand the challenges that your dermatology office faces while dealing with marketing ROI, let’s talk about some of the steps you can take to improve your process and enhance your marketing ROI tracking methods.
Step 1: Select Your KPIs and Set Goals
KPIs, or key performance indicators, are the specific metrics and data points that you can track and measure success with. A KPI helps you set your goals and determine what it is that you want out of a marketing campaign. After all, if you don’t know what your goalposts are it can be hard to figure out if an initiative was successful or not. Common marketing KPIs include:
- New leads
- New sales
- Traffic increases
- Higher margins
- Higher customer retention rates
- More views
- More clicks
- More conversions
Step 2: Use Multiple Marketing Channels
Just writing a social media post on Facebook or sending out a single email won’t be enough to bring in the results you are looking for. Modern marketing depends on a multi-channel approach that combines elements like emails, digital advertising, reviews, directory listings, social media, websites, content, and more into a single, cohesive strategy.
When you have a multi-channel approach, you can reach more people at different points in their customer journey and guide them along the path to becoming loyal customers more effectively. You can also use this method to increase your digital footprint and become more relevant in the eyes of your audience and search engines.
Step 3: Test Everything
Testing different approaches and methods helps you determine what types of campaigns, initiatives, messages, and content will bring in the best results. Without enough testing, you could be spending your marketing dollars on things that aren’t as effective as other methods. For example, if you only post on one social media platform and never try out any others, you don’t know if your posts are reaching the largest audience that they could be targeting.
Step 4: Measure Your Results
Remember those KPIs you set at the beginning of a campaign? Those goals won’t serve much of a purpose if you don’t measure your results and see exactly how close you came to your set goals. This allows you to see if your methods are producing the results you need or if more testing is necessary to ensure that you achieve your marketing goals and run campaigns that meet the KPIs you set.
Step 5: Commit to Your Marketing Strategies
While it’s important to test different strategies, it’s also important to see your marketing strategies through to completion. This ensures that you gather meaningful data and discover whether things are effective when seen through. If you stop a campaign before the end, you’ll never get a true sense of whether it would have been successful or not and what areas could have been improved.
However, all of these steps can’t be accomplished without the help of an all-in-one marketing intelligence tool like Surefire Local on your side.
Using Surefire Local’s Software to Measure the Effectiveness of Your Marketing (And Improve ROI)
Surefire Local is an all-in-one marketing platform that helps you measure the effectiveness of your dermatology marketing and track the ROI you have from different campaigns and initiatives with ease. Surefire Local lets you keep all of your data in a single source of truth, rather than spread around on different platforms and sources that make it difficult to gather hard data on your marketing initiatives.
Surefire Local also makes it easy to run campaigns and share content across multiple platforms without needing to log into every account or website. By managing your content and social media from one place, you can cut down on unnecessary time-wasting tasks and frustrating repetition to focus instead on helping patients and growing your business.
The Surefire Local platform also gives you access to Google tools to help manage your online presence and SEO, giving you unparalleled control of your brand identity and local marketing. You can also update reviews and relevant information that keeps your Google Business profile active and ensures that search engines know you are relevant. That includes things like:
- Photos
- Location data
- Hours
- Products and services offered
- Payment methods
- Business descriptions
Surefire Local is an all-in-one platform that goes where you are. You can sign in from any device and gain access to your all-inclusive dashboard from anywhere around the globe where there is internet service. Our tools make marketing easier for dermatologists and other professionals so you can accurately track your marketing ROI while working on other tasks essential to your business. Get a demo of the Surefire Local platform today to see what we can do for your small business.
