New year, new resolutions! Much like we do with ourselves, it’s critical to stop and assess the health of your digital marketing. Analyzing data and results on a regular basis will help you keep the finger on the pulse of your company’s success; more so, it’ll allow you to quickly identify opportunities to adjust your strategy and continue on a path towards success.

Establish a Baseline of Health

As with our health, establishing a baseline is the first step in understanding the health of your marketing campaigns. What is “normal?” What is an average month like?

To start, think about what a “healthy” business means to you. Does this mean more appointments on the books? More calls made to the clinic? Here at Beyond Indigo, one metric we like to keep track of is new clients (if you’ve ever heard our CEO, Kelly Baltzell, speak, you’ve likely heard her talking about bringing tails through the door!).

No matter the area, start keeping track today; the idea is to be able to collect enough data to be able to make a comparison to a similar timeframe. This can be month vs. month, quarter vs. quarter, or year vs. year; this will give you a better idea of what “healthy” is for your business. Starting with something as simple as 2017’s average monthly number of (insert area of focus here – appointments, new clients, calls to the clinic, etc.) is just fine here. Keep in mind, given high and low seasons in the veterinary industry, quarterly averages may give you a more meaningful comparison when looking at it against 2018 in real time.

If you or your marketing company aren’t already, Google’s free tools such as Google Analytics and Google My Business are excellent tools to bring in supplemental information about users visiting your website, submitting forms, and making phone calls to your clinic. Not only are they useful, they’re free, and they’ll keep track of the data for you to be able to make these temporal comparisons.

Set Goals and Track Results

Now that you’ve established a baseline, it’s time to start analyzing! You have an idea of what an average month looks like – given the tools in your marketing toolbox, what might be a stretch goal to set for the month? The quarter? The year?

Make sure to set attainable goals and track your progress towards them using real time data. Analyzing this data regularly means that you’re able to quickly identify a strategy that isn’t working the way you’d like for it to, and adjust to get things back on track. Likewise, keeping an eye on this data means that you’re able to easily see which strategies are working and bringing in results.

What Are Results?

At Beyond Indigo, we define results as quantitative data that can be directly connected back to your bottom line. For example, if you see 150 potential new clients visiting your site in a month, connect this back to your Average Transaction Charge to determine how much potential revenue this amounted to; this effectively allows you to assign a value to certain marketing strategies to assess which are healthy additions to your marketing toolbox, positively impacting your ROI, and which aren’t cutting it.

Comparing these results to your baseline also allows you to measure growth. Good results improve your bottom line and move you towards achieving your goals. However, be sure to keep exceptions in mind; things like weather and special events that impact your hospital will also show up in data. Outliers can occur, but having the big picture available to review will keep things in perspective.

For more information on the marketing tools that can help bring your practice results, please contact us for a consultation.