At Surefire Local, we strive to improve optometry marketing ROI for local practitioners by way of making online marketing easier so you can increase your profitability. We provide local optometry practices with a proprietary marketing intelligence software and other tools that are accessible everywhere you need them to be. Our marketing software is designed to help you attract more local patients while increasing your profits all from one convenient dashboard.
Let’s take a look at how the Surefire Local Marketing Platform can help you pull all of your online marketing activities into one place. But first, let’s review how to accurately measure ROI.
How to Measure Your Practice’s Marketing ROI and Why It’s Important
The return on investment you get from digital marketing campaigns can be significant. That’s why it’s so important that you understand, track, and measure every facet of every campaign. This will give you a complete picture of your patient’s journey. It will also help you to identify and track your key performance indicators (KPIs) confidently.
Knowing versus guessing what’s working and what’s not, will help you avoid frustration and lower your stress levels. You will also be able to automate your insights and optimizations across all levels of your practice so you can ensure you are making your budget count.
All optometry practices should invest their resources wisely. And that means making sure you are effectively allocating those resources. Everything matters; your employees, marketing, tools, and even the partnerships that help take your practice to the next level. That includes getting more local patients without wasting or losing money on things that don’t work. You want to make a profit…right?
Understanding the Expanding Patient Journey
The marketing challenges and the ability to effectively track your ROI are greater than they have ever been, especially in today’s digital world. This is because the patient’s journey has become much more complex. Not to mention the many ways in which a patient searches for what they need is more complicated as well. Additionally, your practice also must deal with the rise in patient demands for any given service and them wanting “on-demand” answers to their questions 24/7/365.
Growing and Maintaining Your Optometry Practice’s Digital Footprint
The wider your practice’s digital footprint is, the more local patients will be able to find and learn about your practice. Therefore, it’s imperative that you invest in and manage your online presence. Here are just a few assets you can use to broaden your digital reach.
- Digital marketing
- Social media profiles
- Digital advertising
- Online review sites
- Patient referrals
- Search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing
- Content marketing strategies
- Email and text message marketing
- Business directories
The Art of Tracking Your ROI
Yes, there’s an art to tracking and measuring ROI. As you can see from the above digital marketing options, it’s not easy to consistently and effectively track, split test, and manage them all. Consistency is extremely important; however, it takes an exorbitant amount of time to do it right. Your efforts need to be consistent, especially in the following areas:
- Proper keyword selection and usage
- Effective lead sources
- Phone call lead tracking and measuring
- UTM codes
- Landing pages
- Patient follow-ups and surveys
The Complexity of Your Digital Footprint Makes Tracking Extremely Difficult
With so many digital assets, marketing tactics, channels, and tracking methods, it’s difficult for most to develop and maintain a clear picture of their digital marketing ROI. Many business owners find this puts them in the uncomfortable position of having too many tools and too many different vendors to manage. So much so that they don’t feel confident when it comes to relying on others to handle everything properly and consistently. This usually ends up with a business owner not knowing what course of action to take.
You, as the practice owner, obviously want to invest in the best possible solution. One that will build your practice and improve your marketing strategy. Additionally, what is considered a “good” marketing ROI will vary from industry to industry. However, there is a simple general formula you can use.
(return – investment) / investment
But of course, the impact of marketing tactics will be weighted differently. For example, the impact of your practice’s local search engine optimization will be different from the return you get from a paid ad campaign. That means you might have to use another formula to help measure your practice’s ROI. Those might include:
Your sales growth – your marketing spend
Time spent versus the money you generated
(ad spend / new patients) x patient lifetime value
[((number of leads x lead to patient rate x average sale price) – cost for marketing) / cost for marketing] x 100
The Steps for Improving Your Practice’s Marketing ROI
Here are five steps you can take to simplify and improve your practice’s ROI strategy.
Step 1: Define Your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
The metrics you decide to track are what will help you determine whether or not you are reaching your defined goals. Therefore, determining and aligning your KPIs is what will guide your efforts when it comes to tracking your ROI. You might consider tracking KPIs such as:
- New patient sales
- New patient leads
- Increases in traffic
- Higher patient retention rates
- Higher practice profit margins
Step 2: Focusing on Multiple Digital Marketing Channels
There are plenty of digital marketing channels from which to choose. It’s best to use the ones your patients are most likely to engage with, such as email, digital marketing, advertising, reviews and testimonials, business directory listings, social media channels, and, of course, your website.
Any of these will enable you to focus on and track the patient’s journey and what leads a potential patient to take action. Everything from your messages and your content should be consistent, tracked, measured, and adjusted accordingly. This is the only way you will be able to determine how to best manage your digital footprint throughout all your different marketing channels.
Step 3: Split Test Everything
Consistent split testing of every facet of every marketing campaign is paramount. You won’t get the same results each time; however, testing is what will help you gain more insight and control over the results. You have to determine what’s working, what’s not, and what is performing the best out of what is working. Among the things you could test are your content topics, all messaging, images, colors, fonts, ad copy, website copy, and email copy.
Step 4: Measure Everything
All that split testing won’t mean a thing if you don’t measure the results. Having the right tools is what will help make measuring your results much easier and stress-free. Having the right local marketing tools will also help make the most of your budget. By focusing on the right marketing channels, you will be able to attract more patients, so you don’t have to spend time and effort on those metrics that aren’t moving the needle.
Step 5: Committing to Your Digital Marketing Strategy
There will always be room for improvement no matter what you do. However, changing your digital marketing strategy too often won’t allow you to use the insights you’ve collected or time to use those insights to improve your practice’s brand value. Therefore, making decisions and sticking with them for a given amount of time is the only way to get true, meaningful data.
The Near Impossibility of Performing All Five Steps Manually
The sheer number of digital marketing assets most businesses have makes it nearly impossible to do all five of these steps accurately and consistently. The only way to handle all your digital marketing efforts is to leverage software, preferably an all-in-one marketing intelligence platform. Marketing software can make tracking your ROI strategy easier and automatic across all your chosen platforms.
Digital Marketing ROI Made Easy
Surefire Local’s all-in-one marketing platform will help you measure your ROI easily, accurately, and automatically.
The Surefire Local ROI Dashboard
The Home tab of the Surefire Local platform will provide you with a single dashboard that you can use to check your near real-time performance data such as your patient leads, reviews, star ratings, and even your online visibility. Our platform will also enable you to quickly and easily track the sources of all your new patient leads, whether that is through your website, online ads, etc. All of this will give you more control over your marketing spend.
Clicking on the Home tab will also provide you with clear insights while enabling you to see how many patient leads you have generated in any given time period. Then you can compare those against your past results. This will help you gauge your true growth metrics.
You can even monitor your email campaigns and text messages in a centralized inbox. The Surefire Local platform will allow you to view your metrics like email open rates, clicks, and engaged contact lists all using one single local marketing tool. How easy and convenient is that!
Stay Current with All the Google Tools
The Surefire Local platform helps businesses to determine how accessible their business is on Google Search and Maps. It will also help you analyze how your patients found you through Google search, whether that was a direct search, discovery, or through a brand search.
Our platform will also help you analyze the actions that a potential patient takes after looking at your Google Business Profile (formerly called Google My Business or GMB). This will help you identify missed areas of opportunity. And this, in turn, will help increase clicks, direction searches, and phone calls.
Surefire Local will also enter all your Google and Facebook Ad information into a tool so you can keep all your data at your fingertips. This will help you see everything at a glance, so you don’t waste time, money, or effort on channels, campaigns, or ad copy that isn’t working for you. With these insights, you will be able to track your ad performance, engagement, reach, and your costs all from one platform. It also gives you the ability to compare visibility and lead generation from patient to patient.
With our platform, you can also access the metrics from your Google Analytics dashboard. This will give you insight into how your marketing campaigns are working when it comes to searches, click conversions, your Google traffic sources, and how much traffic your website is getting. It also has a word cloud feature that pulls in words from common keyword searches. It can also help you measure your reputation compared to your local competitors’ reputations. And it can help you manage your Google Maps results as well.
Manage Content Creation and Social Media Pages
The Surefire Local platform can help you manage all your content creation workflows from a single dashboard. It has the ability to facilitate the process from your initial ideas all the way through publication and analytics. With this feature, you can write, schedule, and publish your key blog content, keeping your website fresh and relevant in the eyes of the search engine algorithms.
Our platform also helps you manage all your social media pages and platforms all from one place. That means you won’t have to skip from platform to platform just to publish one post. You can also schedule your posts and stream your updates to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram all within the Surefire Local social media management tool.
Surefire Local also gives you the ability to create your posts and share them on Google. This will help you engage with potential patients directly on Search and Maps. That includes any new updates, special offers, events, or anything else you might want to use to attract new patients.
Manage Your Online Reputation, Reviews, and Relevant Information
It’s imperative that you manage and maintain a trusted online reputation, as well as consistently get new patient reviews. It’s also important that you respond in a timely manner to each patient review, good and bad. The Surefire Local platform will provide you with a newsfeed of all your review platforms, such as Yelp, Google, and Facebook.
The Surefire Local platform can also be used to keep your relevant information accurate and current across all directory listings. This will help build trust and attract new patients interested in your services. Here are a few of the things you can view and update from our platform:
- Patient services and available products
- Business hours and location
- Business photos
- Service area
- What payment methods you accept
- Business description
Surefire Local Platform Can Be Everywhere You Are
Having the right tools for your practice that can be used anytime and anywhere you need them is essential. You want local marketing tools that work on any device, whether it is a PC, Mac, Android, iPhone, or tablet. And Surefire Local is capable of just that. Our local marketing software provides you with the tools you need to grow your practice whenever and wherever you need them, all from one convenient and easy-to-use platform.
Our goal is to improve optometry marketing ROI for your practice. So if you aren’t a customer of ours yet, we’d love the opportunity to show you what Surefire Local can do for your online marketing and ROI tracking. Request a demo today!
