2018 Surgical Practice Marketing Resolutions

With the new year finally here, how will you make 2018 better than 2017 for your business?

Surgical practices are often a fast-paced environment. Patients and procedures keep teams busy and on the move – sometimes to the point where core business functions like marketing get neglected. And while that’s understandable, it’s a new year, so why not make every effort to re-dedicate yourself to marketing your practice? After all, the right investments in surgical practice marketing pay long-lasting dividends for businesses.

Kospath’s 5 Surgical Practice Marketing Recommendations

If you’re not sure where to start, below you will find five 2018 marketing resolutions we recommend for surgical practices. Each of these resolutions are practical and represent a big opportunity.

1. Set marketing goals and evaluate progress more often.

Setting marketing goals for your business may sound obvious, but many businesses do not take the time to do it. In fact, more than 80% of small business owners do not keep track of business goals.

Goal setting is important because it helps establish a marketing vision, determine the right strategies (to achieve specific goals), and define success.

Some areas you may want to set goals for are: leads, appointments, surgeries, cost-per-lead (CPL), conversion rates, gated content downloads, time on page, repeat visitors, online reviews, organic search traffic, email clickthrough rates and subscriber growth.

Once your marketing goals are established, next comes the process of evaluating your strategy and progress against these new goals. This is an area where businesses often wait too long. Evaluating progress and making adjustments should be done as often as possible. Quarterly is better than annually, monthly is better than quarterly, and bi-weekly is better than monthly. The point being, why wait 12, 4, or 1 month to review and adjust your strategy if you can catch an issue in two weeks’ time? Reviewing progress against goals early and often saves time and money.

2. Give your website a facelift.

Your surgical practice’s website is the most important marketing tool you have. A good website will establish trust and credibility with prospective patients, attract organic traffic from patients conducting research online, and serve as a mechanism getting patients to pick up the phone or submit an appointment form online.

If your business’s website is outdated, however, it can become more of a liability than an asset. Below are a few telltale signs (along with the areas they affect) that your website may be due for a facelift.

Thin content (SEO, conversion rate)
No, or few, calls to action (conversion rate)
Image-heavy (technical, page load time)
Heavy use of text within images (SEO)
Over-use of animated graphics or Flash (SEO, conversion rate)
Outdated information (SEO, conversion rate)
Not mobile friendly (technical, SEO, conversion rate)
Font inconsistencies (conversion rate)
Broken pages (technical, SEO)
Low organic search rankings (SEO, conversion rate)
Slow page load times (technical, SEO, conversion rate)
Outdated stock images (conversion rate)

3. Re-dedicate yourself to the marketing metrics that matter most to your practice.

While followers, likes, shares, retweets, impressions, pageviews and email opens are great, they don’t necessarily get your patients any closer to scheduling a consultation or moving forward with a procedure they need. Re-dedicate yourself to the action marketing metrics that matter most: click-through-rate, time on page, repeat visitors, gated content downloads, cost-per-lead, cost-per-acquisition, and return on investment.

4. Collect the right data points to improve personalized communication.

Personalization is growing in importance. More and more patients expect tailored experiences from the doctors they are seeing or evaluating. This means in order to communicate effectively with patients, a practice must speak to them directly. Broad emails and generalized webpages designed to attract the masses are becoming less effective. To stay ahead and continue to achieve your marketing goals, your practice must personalize its communication.

Now, there is a good chance your business is already personalizing content to some degree. Common forms of personalization include using the patient’s first name, last name, email and phone number. But in order to take personalization to the next level and truly connect with your audience, you must collect additional data to personalize more effectively. Data like age, location, primary procedure interest, secondary procedure interests, lead source, lead quality, sex, insurance, last appointment, and favorite activities are just a few points you can collect to make your marketing communications richer and more personalized.

To be clear, you don’t need to share all this information in your marketing communications (after all, you must be HIPAA compliant), but knowing these data points will allow you to thread the needle and deliver content that your audience will care about.

5. Re-evaluate your marketing budget and where you are spending it.

Over the course of a year, a business spends money in a lot of places. For surgical practice marketing, these places could be Google advertisements, brochures, social media content, blogs, ebooks, PR, website updates, email marketing, and SEO. The issue is that not all of these channels are equal when it comes to your cost-per-lead (CPL) and return on investment (ROI).

The new year is always a great time to survey your marketing efforts and put the focus on driving your CPL down and your ROI up. Assuming your surgical practice doesn’t have a big fat budget for ‘branding’, every dollar counts and every effort should help introduce new patients to your practice. Take time to understand what your 2017 CPL was for each of these channels, along with how many consultations and procedures they led to, and begin shifting budget away from under-performers an to over-performers. The methodology is easy–collecting all the data is what can be challenging for some practices.

Need some extra help?

If you want to improve your practice’s marketing and online presence but don’t have the time or expertise to do so, drop us a line or call 877.846.5768 today. We’d love to learn more about your business and introduce some of the ways we can help.