Most providers are, understandably, not experts when it comes to marketing. Not much use for marketing study in medical school. It is also likely that very few have an MBA in addition to their MDs. However, once running a practice, there are a few marketing metrics that it is beneficial to know about; these can help you track whether or not you are meeting your goals of attracting new patients to your practice.

Approaching the business side of the practice can be daunting as a doctor, especially if you have received no formal education in business and marketing. However, you do not necessarily have to do the entire job of a full marketing department to reap the benefits of a marketing strategy but use task management software & marketing project management tools. Just paying attention to a few key metrics can show you how well your marketing efforts are performing.

Keep reading for 3 important marketing KPIs for your practice.

Cost Per Lead (CPL)
Cost per lead is the cost you undertake to attract a single new patient to the practice. A lead refers to any individual that has expressed an interest in availing your services. This metric gives you a tangible figure for how much spending is appropriate for acquiring a single new patient. For practices specifically, this could be someone who reads a blog post you posted, clicked through to the website and decided to book an appointment. Knowing this figure is important for deciding where you put your marketing budget to get the most out of it and where you should be pulling back.

Healthcare marketing is no longer a guessing game where you only know how much you spend and not how valuable that spending was. In the past there was no way to know which patients came into the practice as a result of any marketing efforts. This has changed with the rise of digital marketing, where detailed metrics like CPL can show you exactly what you’re doing right, and what you’re doing wrong.

Now you can know exactly where a patient came from, be that an online ad, an email or even a billboard. The patient can then even be tracked all the way through the practice on their patient journey to collect additional data for future leads and patients.

Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)
This is the next step to CPL. Not all leads will lead to patients actually coming through the door. CPA measures how much marketing budget is required to encourage patients to complete a specific action; in this case that specific action would be booking an appointment and actually making it. Basically, this specific metric measures how much it costs you to get a sale. This is calculated by dividing the total cost of the marketing campaign by conversions that occurred as a result of that campaign.

Learn More: 3 Important KPIs for Your Practice

Return On Investment (ROI)
Calculated by dividing the profit made on a marketing campaign by the cost of the campaign, return on investment tells you how much you made from the investment. This metric is invaluable at telling you how much certain campaigns are making for you, and makes it easier to decide which avenues to continue pursuing and which to abandon.

Conclusion
More than any other time in history, healthcare practices now have the ability to judge the exact effectiveness of their marketing efforts. Easily collected data can inform any expensive decisions you have to make. Not utilizing these metrics means you are passing up on valuable information that could cost you thousands of dollars in unnecessary or ineffective marketing spend.

Understanding metrics like CPL, CPA and ROI will put you in a position where you can begin making confident and data-driven decisions for the future of your practice. The leads you generate will help you grow your practice and build towards to the future.