Measuring ROI
Dr. Culligan: What’s the best way to track your return on investment?
Dr. Lotze: First for me was to find out what didn’t work in the office and fix that before really promoting my practice. It’s about the global experience for a patient, as Brad mentioned. As a marketing expert, Heather met with me to understand my goals. She then called my office as a patient to set up an appointment and went through that entire office experience. We identified issues needing improvement.
The next step was to develop a working relationship with my webmaster—someone who can help manage Internet image and SEO. Together, you will develop goals for what the SEO should promote specific to your practice. Once a good SEO program is in place, your website’s ranking will go up—although it can take a minimum of 6 months to see a significant increase. To help understand your website’s performance, your webmaster should provide you with reports on your site’s analytics.
As you go through this process, it is great to have a marketing expert to be the point person. You will work closely together for a while, but eventually you can back off over time. The time and expense you invest on the front end have huge rewards on the back end. Currently, I still spend a reasonable amount of money every month. I have a high self-referral base because of these efforts, however, which results in more patient surgeries and easily covers my expenses. It is money well invested. My website traffic increased by 268% over 2 years (FIGURE). I’ll propose that currently more than half of my patients are self-referrals due to online marketing.
Ms. Schueppert: The only thing I would add is training your front staff. They are checking people in, taking appointments, checking your patients out. Have them be mindful that there are campaigns going on, whether it is a social media push, or a new video that went on the website. They can ask, “How did you hear about us?” when a new patient calls.
Dr. Bowman: Unless you are a large university hospital, where the analytics get significantly more advanced in terms of measuring return on investment (ROI), I think you should just be looking at your schedule and looking at your monthly billings and seeing how they change over time. You can calculate how much a new patient is worth because you can figure out how many patients you have and how much you bill and what your profits are.
Dr. Culligan: For those of us who are hospital employees, you can try to convince the hospital that you can do a detailed ROI analysis, or you can just look at it like (say it’s $3,000 per month), how many surgeries does this project have to generate before the hospital makes that back? The answer is a fraction of 1 case.
Thank you to all of you for your expertise on this roundtable.