Marketing isn’t just about fun slogans and fluffy content–its job is to bring clients through your doors and money to your bottom line. Ads, blogs, social media, websites, and more should be precisely implemented to increase dollars in the sagging areas of your profit and loss ledger. And it is extremely important to keep track of these numbers when making marketing decisions for the future. 

Numbers Matter 

First, here is a list of numbers that should be reviewed on at least a quarterly basis, or, ideally, monthly. 

• Profit & Loss Sheet (P&L)
• Reports from your practice management software
• Data and reports from active digital marketing platforms and campaigns
• Telephone tracking data (if used)

What exactly should you do with this data with regard to marketing? First off, you must  know your demographic. When combing through reports, jot down some notes on who your clients are.. Items to note about clients are:

• Gender
• Age range, by decade
• Income range 
• Geographical area
• Interests
• Average transaction charge
• Shopping/use behavior
• Engagement

Trends and Baselines 

Next, when reviewing the data, it helps to look at trends and baselines. Marketing is supposed to move the needle to the positive. However, you have to know where the needle is starting to figure out if it is moving in the right direction. Don’t forget to cross check client caseload per doctor and service availability to make sure there is capacity to grow. The last thing a marketing program should do is push people to a service that is already booked out weeks in advance!

Keeping Up with Marketing Trends

In the past, digital marketing meant completing “to-do” lists each month and then hitting repeat month after month. Why? Because it wasn’t as easy to access real-time data on how marketing dollars were working. Now, it is. This means that every hospital needs to act as a more educated consumer of marketing. Questions to ask a marketing company or internal marketing employee are:

1. How are you going to increase the hospital’s bottom line and show me the results of your marketing efforts? 
2. How will the return on my advertising dollars be tracked?
3. How will you choose what to focus on in my marketing campaigns? Will you focus on my general brand or something specific? If it is specific, how will you make that decision?
4. What type of reporting will I receive? Will it be tied to the results you are trying to achieve? 
5. Will you watch reports for upheaval in the form of social unrest or weather-related issues that would adversely impact pre-planned marketing? Will you be able to adapt quickly so the hospital doesn’t look bad? 
6. Will you watch trending data and what that means for my company, and can you translate that into English for me to understand?
7. Why should I trust my business to you?

Moving Your Marketing Forward

After reviewing the data and mapping out a plan of action mapped out that targets the demographic that you serve, you can devise, implement, manage, and measure  campaigns. You can review this process every three months to keep it up to date. The needs of the hospital shift and change and so should the plan of attack for a practice’s marketing initiatives. How do you know if your practice needs to start thinking differently? 

Below are some real life examples that hospitals have reported to us here at Beyond Indigo Pets. You DON’T want this to happen at your practice:

• The same Google ad running as long as you can remember and nobody knows or talks about the results it is generating.
• The practice has paid for the exact same digital marketing deliverables every month for longer than a year.
• Nobody has discussed what service needs the most marketing help and how to fix the problem.
• Zero discussion about results generated by your marketing program and the costs to generate the results.
• The hospital has no idea what it is paying a marketing provider or person to do.

Marketing Dashboard

Beyond Indigo Pets has a live-time Marketing Dashboard powered by VetSuccess to help you stay on top of all your marketing results. The dashboard allows you to see the results of your marketing campaigns as they are happening, gain access to detailed analytics, and help you create new data-driven marketing strategies.

If you want a collective of people who understand this complete marketing cycle and can drive results to increase your bottom line, Beyond Indigo Pets is here to help you. Our full-service marketing plans and Marketing Dashboard make it easy for you to maintain a relationship with your current clients and reach out to new clients so you can grow. The plans adjust as your goals shift, which allows you to see results. We are here to help whether you are open, reopening, or adjusting to the new normal. Call (877) 244-9322 ext. 100, or click here to contact us.