Did you know the amount of healthcare data generated doubles every three years? Analyzing it appropriately can clearly provide major value to healthcare professionals and organizations.
That said, knowing this is not the same as fully understanding how to leverage healthcare marketing analytics to your full advantage. To better appreciate how you can use marketing analytics effectively, consider this essential advice.
Healthcare Marketing Analytics: Knowing What to Measure
It’s important to not analyze data blindly. To take full advantage of marketing analytics, you need to follow the following steps to understand which data points are most worthy of your attention.
Determine Your Goals
You need to know what your specific goals are before you can determine what data points you want to measure. For example, perhaps you’re looking to reduce costs by going digital. Thus, you might analyze the current rate of online bookings and create a campaign to boost those numbers. This may seem like a basic step, but it’s an easy one to overlook. You can only make sense of data when you understand how it relates to your goals.
Consider Market Trends
Data points don’t exist in a vacuum. When analyzing your own data, you also need to consider how it relates to general industry trends.
For instance, perhaps you want to know whether your campaigns have reduced the cost of patient acquisition by helping you promote a healthcare practice in a cost-effective manner. To fully understand the degree to which a campaign has been thoroughly successful, you can’t just measure your own cost of patient acquisition. It’s also necessary to compare it to the average patient acquisition cost in your niche. This is key to learning if you’re truly getting a valuable return on investment.
Measure Demand
Data points that often go overlooked (but absolutely should not be) are those related to future demand for specific products or services. By analyzing past trends, you can tailor your future marketing campaigns accordingly.
For example, maybe you’re handling marketing for a pediatric clinic. Marketing data analysis could indicate greater demand for physicals as summer draws to a close and the school year approaches. Thus, you would plan your marketing strategy to promote this service during this time of year.
That’s an obvious example. Most pediatricians probably know students need to get physicals before the school year starts. The main point to remember is that analyzing past trends is key to understanding what patients will demand in the future, and when specifically demand will rise.
Compare Data Points to Results
Don’t forget that data alone may not tell you everything you need to know about the strength of your marketing campaigns. To leverage data to its full potential, you also need to compare it to the results to which it corresponds.
For instance, maybe your analysis indicates a new content marketing strategy has attracted significantly more readers than your previous strategy. However, have those new readers also become new patients? Has the new strategy corresponded to increased revenue? Has it increased online bookings?
Once you’ve selected your data points, it’s time to build an analytics dashboard so you can monitor your progress over time.
Don’t worry if you feel that making sense of all this seems intimidating. You can always coordinate with experts who understand healthcare marketing analytics. They’ll help you not only develop a proper strategy, but also analyze data to confirm it’s delivering the desired results.
