Measuring the success of your marketing program sounds like it should be simple, right? After all, it depends on whether you’re increasing sales revenue or not! Sadly, it’s not that easy. There are several reasons for that:
- Timing – When you measure your marketing is vital, because the dollars you invest today will have an unknown effect on results at an unknown point in the future. You might be seeing great impact from last month’s campaign, but that doesn’t necessarily help you decide where to invest your budget today.
- Marketing Attribution – Marketing gurus believe you need at least seven touch points to convert a cold lead into a client. This differs across various industries, but the truth is you need multiple touch points. This makes it difficult to attribute marketing success to a specific touch point, at least in the short term.
- Client Influencers – The average purchasing division in a healthcare company consists of six or more people, and in some cases can have up to 20 or more influencers. The various marketing channels you use reach different individuals, so determining the primary method or channel used to decide in your favor is complicated.
In addition, external variables could include factors outside your CMO’s control, including economic trends, the weather and the quality of your sales people. So how do you measure your marketing ROI at all?
Getting it Right
Just because it’s difficult doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Having clear goals and objectives helps with long-term ROI analysis, and some commonly used methods of short-term measurement include:
- Single Attribution, which assigns all the value of a contract or deal to touch point in the client’s company.
- Multi-Touch Attribution, which is particularly useful in the case of long buying cycles but requires complex weighing and attribution methods.
- Response Modeling, which helps you to understand how your different customer segments are driving sales. This is especially beneficial if your company has a wide range of client categories, including pharmaceutical chains, clinics and hospitals.
With the right kind of analytics capabilities, you can measure your website performance, lead generation efforts, multivariate testing, plus analyze behaviors through the use of focus groups. With the data you collect, it’s possible to refine your brand message to achieve the maximum impact.
For more insights on measuring the ROI of your healthcare marketing, call Wax Custom Communications at 305.350.5700 or visit waxcom.com.
