Small chiropractic businesses need to invest their resources wisely to make a profit. You want to build a strong marketing strategy to help you bring in and attract more local patients without losing money on your efforts. And this means selecting the right tools, tactics, and partnerships to bring your practice to the next level.
But how do you know which parts of your digital marketing program are serving your chiropractic practice?
The answer is by tracking, measuring, and understanding your marketing return on investment (ROI).
Your ROI measures the amount you spend on different elements of your marketing campaigns against the amount you generate with said campaigns. Once you understand your marketing costs, you can make better marketing decisions that will help your small business grow.
However, we understand that tracking ROI can be a challenge for many chiropractors, especially if you are new to digital marketing.
So, today we are going to look at how can chiropractors improve marketing ROI by using a simple five-step process to measure and optimize marketing performance.
The Challenge of Measuring Marketing ROI
Understanding the Modern Customer Journey
The customer journey has become much more complex in the digital age. For instance, a prospect might initially turn to their social media network, asking for recommendations for a trusted chiropractor. Next, they look up these different recommendations on Google Maps to see who is closest to them. Then they filter the results to “5-star” businesses and read the reviews. If they like what they read, they call and schedule an appointment.
As you can see from the above example, no single marketing channel was responsible for the conversion. It’s like in basketball. Even if it seems like a single player makes the winning dunk, ultimately, it is the entire team strategically working together that creates the conditions for victory. However, as you can imagine, this makes tracking ROI more complicated. You need a way to measure how each channel contributes to the conversion process.
Building & Maintaining Your Digital Footprint
As you saw above, there are many, many ways prospective patients might find your chiropractic practice online. This means you need to invest in various tactics to strategically build your presence across the web. Doing so ensures that your business is visible wherever and whenever your target audience is searching for your services. These tactics include:
- Posting to social media
- Running digital ads
- Getting more online reviews
- Optimizing with local SEO best practices
- Publishing content to your website
- Engaging with prospects and customers via email, text message, and website chat
- Claiming your business on the top directories
- Optimizing your online presence for voice search
Setting Up Lead Tracking
Setting up systems to effectively track leads across all of these different channels requires a certain level of technical skill. For instance, you need someone on your team who can set up:
- Keywords tracking
- Lead source attribution
- Phone call tracking
- UTM codes
- Follow-ups and surveys
Without these data tracking systems in place, you will have no way to accurately determine your marketing ROI.
Knowing How to Measure Marketing ROI
As a small business owner, you’re likely familiar with the basic ROI formula:
- (return – investment) / investment
However, this formula is not always the best choice for measuring digital marketing performance. Imagine you start two different marketing tactics at the same time: a digital advertising campaign and a content marketing campaign. At the three-month mark, you use the simple ROI formula to compare performance, and you see that digital ads generated a 30% ROI, versus the 20% for content marketing. It might seem like a good idea to reallocate funds from content marketing to your digital ads.
However, some digital marketing tactics need time to get established before they start showing strong results. Suppose you wait until the one-year mark to check your results. At this point, you might find that digital ads have an ROI of 30%, compared to the 50% of content marketing. If you had reallocated funding at the three-month mark, you would have lost out on a lot of revenue.
As you can see, different parts of your marketing strategy need to be weighted differently. You also need to take your business model and specific marketing goals into account. This is why there are several formulas digital marketers use for measuring ROI, including:
- Time spent vs. money generated
- Sales growth – marketing spend
- [((number of leads x lead to customer rate x average sale price) – cost for marketing) / cost for marketing] x 100
- (ad spend / new customers) x customer lifetime value
Make sure you understand how these formulas might apply to your specific situation to ensure you get an accurate marketing ROI measurement.
How Can Chiropractors Improve Marketing ROI
Now that you understand the challenges, let’s look at five steps you can take to simplify and improve your marketing ROI process.
Step 1: Build Your Digital Presence Strategically
While it is important to grow your digital presence, part of optimizing marketing ROI is realizing you don’t need to be everywhere online. Rather, you should select digital marketing channels that help you connect with your target audience and meet specific goals. No need to waste resources on channels that don’t serve a strategic purpose.
Step 2: Choose the Right KPIs
To accurately measure marketing ROI, you need to select key performance indicators (KPIs) that align with your business goals. Common KPIs include:
- Increased traffic
- New leads
- New sales
- Customer retention rates
- Profit margin
You must pair the right KPI with the right marketing objective. For example, using “new leads” as a metric to measure a customer retention campaign will mess up your ROI calculations.
Step 3: Test Everything
To improve your marketing ROI, you need to narrow down what appeals most to your target audience. This means conducting marketing tests to gather real-world data about customer behavior. For example, you can use A/B testing to try out different content topics, ad copy, images, fonts, colors, and delivery times. By learning from what does and doesn’t work in these tests, you can optimize your campaigns for maximum effectiveness.
Step 4: Track Data Accurately
Marketing automation and AI are invaluable when it comes to collecting accurate analytics and measuring performance. They can provide data-based insights that will help optimize your marketing strategy and maximize your ROI. In addition to helping you make the most of your marketing budget, automation tools also save you time and remove the frustration of manual campaign management.
Step 5: Commit to Your Strategy
Consistency is key to running an effective marketing strategy. Certainly, you should test and make incremental improvements to your tactics. However, avoid dramatically altering your strategy every time you encounter a potential roadblock. Otherwise, you will not be able to collect the accurate, long-term data you need to optimize your strategy and maximize ROI. So, commit to your strategy long enough to gather sufficient data to see the big picture so that you can make informed decisions.
Surefire Local: Marketing ROI Made Simple
At Surefire Local, our mission is to help small businesses grow profitably by making online marketing easier. So, we have created an all-in-one marketing solution that helps you accurately measure ROI.
Our platform helps you get a complete picture of your customer’s journey, track KPIs, and attribute success with confidence. It handles analytics and reporting, so you do not have to deal with the stress and frustration of manual data entry. It provides automated insights and optimizations across all areas of your business to make sure that your marketing budget counts.
Omni-channel Tracking
From a single ROI dashboard, you can look up near-real-time performance metrics, like lead generation, reviews, star ratings, and online visibility. The platform tracks the source of all leads generated through your website, email campaign, social, and digital ads. This allows you to compare visibility and lead generation from channel to channel, and customer to customer. The Surefire Local platform also integrates with your Google Business Profile and Google Analytics, so you can analyze how your patients find you through search without needing to log into a separate site.
Centralized Content Management
The Surefire Local platform streamlines the content management workflow by allowing you to do everything from a single place. No more writing an article in a word processor, copying it to your blog, then manually logging into your various social site to share a link. Instead, you can write, schedule, and publish everything directly from the platform.
Reputation Management
Building a trusted reputation online is critical for attracting new patients to your chiropractic practice. Surefire Local provides a centralized newsfeed of all your review platforms, like Google, Facebook, and Yelp, so you can keep your relevant information up to date and respond to reviews promptly. Contact us today to learn more about how Surefire Local platform makes online marketing and ROI tracking easy for your business.
