Content marketing helps healthcare practitioners engage new patients in a valuable way — while putting a face on your brand. Blogs, articles, guides, and infographics are a great strategy to improve revenue, as you’re educating patients as well as demonstrating your expertise.
But how can you know if your efforts have been worthwhile? Five key metrics can help you determine whether your investment is worthwhile — and provide insight to improve your content.
Social Media Success
With content marketing, the goal is to share high-quality information — and social media is a popular, free source of distribution channels. Social media can also help you analyse the success of your healthcare practice’s content marketing.
Each social media platform has various metrics indicating levels of success. For example, Facebook allows “likes”, comments, and shares. All these indicators can help you determine viewer reaction and help you in your planning. LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram have similar metrics to gauge your content efficacy.
Engagement
Your goal is to improve patient relationships through engagement. What is a measure of engagement? Web traffic has always been considered a useful metric — but look more closely at bounce rate, time spent on page, and number of pages per visit.
“Bounce rate” is a measure of viewers that see one page, then immediately leave your website. “Time spent on page” indicates whether viewers spent time digesting your content — or simply moved on. Engaging content should spur the desire to view more — making “number of pages per visit” a valuable metric.
Email Subscriptions
As a business, your aim is to build a following for your healthcare practice. You can achieve this several ways — including accruing Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube followers. However, email is still the best way to build your following. While social media followers and fans are a valuable metric, social media users can be very passive — and may not even see your published content off the social feed.
Building an email list — with an appropriate call-to-action — is the best gateway to content. A call-to-action (CTA) is a form, page, or pop-up that encourages email subscription. The tease uses language — and explains benefits — that sweeten the deal. If your “free” content is engaging and valuable, users will subscribe to see more, giving you valuable information and a foundation of subscribers.
Brand Recognition
Content marketing is intended to improve your practice’s reputation among patients and prospective patients. SurveyMonkey and similar polling services have packages — including free polls – that allow you to poll users and glean important insight. Their system also offers advanced survey techniques, like randomized response order, to prevent unintended poll biases and deliver a clearer picture. This method, combined with briefer surveys, can help determine whether your content is having a positive effect.
Revenue
An improvement in revenue is certainly the goal of content marketing. But how can you discern content marketing’s role in a positive or negative revenue change? You can ask your patients. Simply asking “how did you hear about us?” can help.
Of course, keep in mind that all aspects of your healthcare business contribute to revenue. Even if content marketing does not directly improve your bottom line, an effort is required to improve that. Monitor the social media sharing of your content on social networks, as well as viewer visits to your website.
Work to build a following and improve brand perception of your healthcare practice. Gauge your success by tracking subscriptions and survey responses. Look for an improvement in revenue. Your healthcare practice is a business, after all, and it’s prudent to adjust your course of action when you don’t meet your revenue goals. Marketing is a learning process, discovering what works, what doesn’t.
Overwhelmed? Let us handle the details
Somnowell Marketing has a team in place to professionally create and execute your marketing and customer communications campaigns. Social media, website content & design, SEO, landing pages, blogs, emails, messaging — they can handle it all, taking the burden off your shoulders. The information is always from respected sources, and will dispel any misinformation. Your online content and social media posts are an investment in your sleep company’s reputation — and that’s undeniably priceless.
