This post is the first in a series on our approach to performance marketing. Stay tuned for the next blog in this series.

Historically, marketers have been focused on reaching an audience and creating visibility. So, as they set KPIs they tended to center on metrics like impressions, open rates, and click-throughs. Since they weren’t really focused on the downstream impact of their work, they didn’t invest in the infrastructure to understand it. However, there is a link between marketing strategy and revenue success.

The most successful organizations are those that don’t see marketing as a cost center, and the ones that do struggle to do marketing effectively.

The Magic of Performance Marketing

Unlike other forms of marketing, performance marketing is highly granular and specific. Not only can you set a goal to acquire a certain number of patients, but you can also hone your marketing to reach very specific prospective patients. These capabilities, along with increased sophistication in marketing measurement naturally open the door to discussions about who you actually want to reach and how should you be using the data from your campaigns to inform your strategy.

Let’s use geographic targeting as an example. Organizations with multiple locations deeply understand where prospective patients are in relation to their location footprint. People in the organization outside of marketing, especially CFOs, then wonder if it’s possible to optimize the cost basis of individual locations or individual procedures within those locations. Over time, the data has become so good that translating those hypotheses into real financial outcomes has become possible.

Using performance marketing, healthcare systems can identify the highest risk patients in service lines with capacity and connect them with the care they need.

Good CMOs Think Like General Managers

We need to broaden the view of what it means to be a CMO, even if many of them still aren’t fully comfortable in the world of finance.

CMOs are the stewards of how people find an organization and get in the door. They also need to think about how initial engagement with advertising or other touchpoints influences all of the experiences patients ultimately have with the organization. And they need to understand the financial implications of these interactions. Using performance marketing principles of measurement and testing can help CMOs quickly identify tactics that are underperforming so they can invest in initiatives that successfully drive revenue for the organization.

Marketing is an essential part of the organization that creates a good feedback loop and relationship with patients. It can inform how products, services or offerings evolve over time, improving what they have to offer and communicating about it better, which then goes back to the advertising they do.

Let’s Consider a Real-World Example

A national optometry and eyeglass chain had reached a plateau in their digital marketing effectiveness. They were struggling to align new patient acquisition with provider capacity. They were also experiencing volatility related to patients scheduling online and not showing up for appointments.

Their marketing organization was led by a team of VPs who were not only siloed from finance and operations — receiving only one-way reporting — but also from each other. A new CMO joined the organization and not only unified the marketing team but quickly built relationships with the CFO and senior leaders on the operations teams.

They formed a bi-weekly working group where everyone met to discuss the full patient journey from appointment booking all the way through to appointment completion and any subsequent eyeglass purchases. Unlock Health helped them build the infrastructure to support a shared view. While doing that, we discovered there were many opportunities to amend the marketing strategy. It could not only better serve the existing location footprint but could also deliver insights to inform plans for future locations.

They were able to obtain a more full-funnel view into the patient journey all the way to the revenue event. They also discovered that by amending certain aspects of their strategy, they could significantly improve appointment show rates, and thus, significantly improve marketing ROI. Creating this tighter correlation gave their CFO the confidence to fund new marketing initiatives.

Having a marketing leader who not only looked at marketing but also how it interacted with the financial and operational picture drove significant results.

In six months, they went from a slightly negative year over year growth trend to a more than 9% year over year growth.  

Look to Unlock Health

Unlock Health can develop strategies and build infrastructure that effectively demonstrate the power of marketing as an integral part of the revenue generation mechanism of your organization. Our patient acquisition experts manage more than 2,000 campaigns every month, delivering sophisticated and compliant paid, organic, and industry-leading conversion solutions to drive growth.

Like what you’re reading? Stay tuned for the next post in the series.