Every industry niche needs a strong advertising budget if they want to succeed in this highly competitive market of today- the healthcare industry included. When it comes to determining the right amount of money to spend on advertising, many business owners are unsure of how much they can or should spend on their budget.
Marketing is one of the key elements of business growth and success and many books have been written on the topic of medical marketing and budget planning. As nice as it would be to have a magic number to plug into your budget plans there is no cookie-cutter solution. You get out of traditional and digital marketing what you put into it and this is one of those cases where you have to spend money in order to make more money.
Promoting your business through advertising and marketing outlets takes a strong financial commitment and the confidence to make it work in the long run. If your budget is only a few hundred dollars, then the results you get from that marketing effort will reflect that and your actual patient acquisition will be well below your targeted needs. The best healthcare advertising budget is one that is based on a variety of factors which include watching the marketing trends and implementing these four key points:
Reallocation
If you are committing to any type of digital or print advertising, one of the most important things you can do is keep track of your return on investment (ROI) from your medical marketing each and every month. If one of you advertising outlets is not producing results or offering you the return you want or need, that money should most likely be moved.
You can reallocate it to another platform or advertising media that is more likely to give you the ROI you want and need. Two of the key marketing resources all smart business invest part of their marketing budget in is Google Pay Per Click Advertising and Social Media Marketing. For healthcare advertising budgets, these can be some of the most powerful resources you have at your disposal when it comes to reaching new patients.
Trends are changing and more and more customers are moving to a purely online focus when it comes to searching for and buying the products and services they want and need. As a business owner, you need to make sure your name is visible and easy to find in the digital world.
Competitor Analysis
Every business, no matter how big or small and regardless of the industry, has competition that they must deal with on a regular basis. Whether your business focuses on goods or services, it is important to look and see what your competitors are doing and then build from there by looking at their successes and failures.
Learn from their mistakes and do your analysis of their actions and make sure your advertising budget is bigger and stronger and better. If they are having success ranking on Google, or are getting a lot of social media traffic, or seem to be having a lot of a success with a particular platform, you should take it as a cue for how to model your own medical marketing plans.
Work with your team to develop a cohesive marketing plan that will keep you moving forward with your business plans and that will help you with patient acquisition! Having a strong digital marketing effort that you are willing to put into your plan is key these days and while traditional methods still have value they cannot be your sole means of advertising your healthcare practice. Chances are your competitions are going digital and you have to as well in order to survive.
Practice Size
The number of items, products, or services you offer from your business needs to have a direct impact on what your budget for advertising and marketing is. The more items you have to market the more money you need to set aside for advertising budget needs. You want to make sure your patients and future patients know what you have to offer and that they can easily discover what services you offer. Larger practices require a larger marketing budget.
For the healthcare industry, this comes down to marketing your practice as a whole but also ensuring you let customers and potential customers know what all you have to offer. You don’t want your target audience to only know you for the services you are promoting at any given time. In the healthcare industry, you need to market your business as a whole while also ensuring all of your services are promoted- that way people will think about you for all of their needs rather than just the ones they happened to see an advertisement for any given week.
The more you offer and the more patients you work with and the more facilities you have, the more you are going to need to invest in your budget to ensure everything gets the coverage and promotion it needs!
Tracking ROI
In the healthcare provider field, tracking ROI can be a challenger to track and presents more challenges than other markets- this is largely due to the fact that full payment for services is not made the same day the services are rendered. In some cases, full payment takes months, so it is a challenge to track ROI but it should be done as much as possible.
One way to do this is to look at specific areas you are promoting within your healthcare services and see how patient influx reflexes the investment. When you are running advertisements and marketing campaigns focusing on say back surgeries, you need to at the very least look at that area of your practice and see if the number of patients in that area is increasing enough to justify the investment you are making into promoting that service.
You can do this for any and all individual services you are actively running marketing campaigns for. From big time doctors with multiple practices to small clinics and neighborhood physicians, everyone and anyone in the medical field can benefit from smart medical marketing and advertising!
