Far from a static industry, healthcare marketing is constantly changing, and marketers have to be able to measure the progress of their campaigns to optimize their overall strategy and evolve to meet the needs of their target audience.
When it comes to leading an effective healthcare marketing campaign, tracking the results of your efforts to maximize your reach and impact is one of the key tenets of long-term success. Monitoring crucial performance metrics can make a huge difference in the success of your campaigns, especially how your channels interact and reinforce each other.
When measuring the progress of your HCP marketing campaigns, here are several key performance indicators (KPIs) you should be sure to track.
Email & Direct Mail Open Rates
Email and direct mail open rates are basic but essential KPIs to optimize your content strategy and identify the right message that resonates with your audience. Measuring your open rates provides better insights into the people you're targeting and what they respond to best.
It’s also effective to conduct A/B testing for your email campaigns, especially if your open rates aren’t where you’d like them to be. Comparing and modifying content, formats, subject lines, headers, graphics, send times, and other factors reveals important data about your campaigns and helps you refine your strategy to pinpoint what works best for you.
Engagement
In addition to website visits, keeping track of your audience’s level of engagement reveals where their interests lie, and what aspects of your site content are effective at leading healthcare providers through the buyer’s journey. Measuring overall site engagement and specific content usage helps you refine your content and offerings to make the best impression possible.
Be sure to measure engagement across all of your channels as well. Take note of how many people click on links from email or paid advertisements or engage with your site after receiving direct mail content. This gives you a better idea of what your audience responds to and doesn't, and how you can better cater your message to entice your ideal healthcare providers.
Website Traffic
Your website is the primary repository for information on your brand, products and services, as well as a major starting point in your prospect’s buyer’s journey. Driving traffic to your site is incredibly useful in attracting and converting leads, and often serves as the first impression you make on a prospective customer.
Tracking the amount of website visits you receive within a given period enables you to better allocate your time and resources to encouraging further engagement and conversions down the line. Follow your site’s analytics to see what features work and which need to change, from page design and content to navigation and general user experience enhancements.
Conversion Rates
This essential metric details what percentage of visitors to your website or landing page convert or take a significant step toward becoming a real customer. Measuring your conversion rates will help you gain a better understanding of where your prospects are at every level of the buyer’s journey, and what aspects of your messaging and nurture campaigns resonate most with your prospects.
Recognizing what touchpoints to measure and how your audience progresses through the sales funnel reveals a lot about the overall success of your campaigns.
The most important conversion rates to measure at each touchpoint include:
- Website Visits & Open Rates to Link Clicks
- Link Clicks to Form Submissions
- Leads to Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL)
- MQLs to Sales Accepted Leads (SAL)
- SALs to Sales Qualified Leads (SQL)
- SQLs to Customers
Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)
MQLs are pivotal KPIs measuring the amount of prospective customers who followed through on a call-to-action or completed a form to receive content. This signals that they’re not only interested in your brand, but actively want to engage and learn more about your content or offering and are ready to become part of your nurture campaigns.
This helps you understand what offerings appeal most to your audience, and how to better curate your content to advance them through the buyer’s journey and convert them to customers.
Return on Investment (ROI)
Last but not least, your return on investment (ROI) is one of the most important metrics into how successful your overall strategy is based on how much you’ve spent.
Sales cycles for the B2B healthcare industry generally require more time and money than most other industries. In fact, the average projected cost of healthcare leads for 2022 is $162—the second highest rate of any industry, according to Linchpin SEO, a web design and marketing company Linchpin SEO.
With sales cycles typically lasting months or even years among healthcare providers, maximizing your ROI is essential to ensuring you aren’t wasting time or money on ineffective marketing tactics.
Calculate your ROI by measuring the time and resources invested in content creation, conversion rates, and sales revenue KPIs to understand the associated cost and sales revenue per lead and how long it takes for leads to convert to customers.
There’s no standard set of benchmark KPIs that apply to the entire HCP marketing industry. Different brands set their own unique goals according to their specific strategy and campaign objectives.
Be sure to conduct a full audit of your audience, analytics and meaningful KPIs regularly, and examine how to improve your campaigns to reach the greatest number of relevant HCPs for your needs.
Partner With PDQ Communications to Monitor Your Campaign’s Progress
Keeping track of numerous data points and analytics across all of your channels is a necessary, but daunting and time-consuming task. Working with PDQ Communications helps you develop and maintain your strategy to expand your reach and produce quality content that resonates with your intended audience.
