Getting any campaign up and running successfully takes time and consistent effort. There are very few agencies and professionals out there who would be able to get campaigns right the first time around. For most businesses, digital marketing campaigns are central to their lead generation efforts, and getting the best results from these marketing efforts is very important.
Medical marketing campaigns are none too different when it comes to this. Healthcare organizations have also shifted to digital campaigns to target new customers. Their digital marketing strategies have also evolved with time. This is in line with the trends we are seeing across all industries. The potential customers are doing their research and due diligence online before making a decision. For a very sensitive industry like healthcare, this is even more true. No one wants to put their health in the hands of sub-par medical organizations.
How you would determine if a campaign is a success or a failure is something that is hotly debated by the industry as a whole. At the end of the day, the number of leads and the business that is generated is what matters, but accurately determining this may take a while and it could be too late by the time you get there. Here‘s where key performance indicators or KPIs matter. It gives you a clear sense of how campaigns are performing.
In this blog, we look at KPIs in some detail and understand how to determine if your medical marketing campaign is performing optimally. It will help you know if your marketing budgets are being utilized effectively and if your metrics are pointing in the right direction. Let‘s go!
How to Determine if Your Campaign is Performing Well?
So, you want to know if your digital marketing campaign is doing well. Metrics, benchmarks, and goals are your friends here. We will discuss which metrics and how to look at them shortly, but a word on benchmarks and goals first.
Why Goals and Benchmarks are Important in Understanding Marketing Performance
Imagine your digital marketing agency sends you a report for your marketing campaign which says that you have a conversion rate of 7%. There’s absolutely no way for you to accurately determine if 7% is a good number or if it’s not. That’s where we love using benchmarks and pre-determined goals.
At FVG, whenever we kick off a campaign with any client, one of the first things we do is to get a handle on what the goals for the campaign are going to be. These will derive from the overall business goals. We also determine the various digital marketing KPIs we are going to chase and what numbers are we expecting on each of them. We also ensure that we do not just look at an end-of-the-year number. We break it down into milestones and this helps us and the client get a better understanding of the campaign and how it is going.
The process of goal setting and determining the digital marketing metrics helps when you have to look back at the end of a quarter and see how the marketing activities have performed. What we also do is have a mix of lead and lag indicators so that we cover the results as well as the process of getting there. It’s also advisable to make all the metrics you choose measurable so that you can attach a number value to these.
Lead indicators are metrics that help us understand how the campaign is performing while it is running. Lag indicators are numbers that will be clear at the end of a campaign.
These serve different purposes and both are equally important. Your marketing campaigns will have the number of qualified leads being generated as a metric. This is a perfect example of a lag indicator. You can only know this number at the end of a period. However, take a metric like website visitors. It indicates the number of customers that are being targeted by the campaigns visiting your website or landing pages. If you need lead conversions, you need a good number of website visitors before it. So, the website visitors become a lead metric that tells us if our campaign is going well. The next step is to get them to convert into leads and this is what the lag metric tracks.
When you are creating the campaign with your marketing team or your digital marketing agency, look at the various metrics being tracked. Segregating these into lead and lag metrics and having targets associated with each will be a great start. Benchmarks can also be derived from various sources within the industry. It tells you what is a good range for a metric for the healthcare industry and it will also help you further sharpen your understanding of any metric.
What Metrics to Consider?
Now to the crux of the matter. What are the important KPIs to consider to know if your campaign is doing well? We like to divide the KPIs into a few buckets so it’s easier for all to understand. Typically, here’s how we categorize the KPIs:
- Revenue KPIs
- SEO and content marketing KPIs
- Social media and email marketing KPIs
- Paid marketing KPIs
Let’s take a look at these KPIs in some detail.
Revenue Related KPIs
- Customer Acquisition Cost
The total cost of acquiring a customer through the marketing funnel. This is the total cost of the campaign divided by the total number of paying customers that came through these campaigns.
- Return on Investment (ROI)
Determines how well your campaign has performed vis-a-vis the total investment. This can be determined from the total revenue generated from the new leads and determining it as a percentage of the total campaign cost.
- Customer Lifetime Value
Depending on your average revenue per customer, you can also determine the customer lifetime value generated by your campaign. This figure would need your retention rate and churn rates if you are to be accurate about this.
SEO and Content Marketing KPIs
- Organic Search and Traffic
The website traffic that was generated via your campaigns excluding the paid traffic. This will help you understand how well your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts are paying off and how your content is performing. Through proper attribution, you will also be able to understand how many of these visitors will be converting to leads and ultimately customers.
- Conversion Rates
The ultimate objective of any landing page or content you create is to get new leads for your sales teams to chase. Conversion rates will tell you how efficient your pages are in getting users to fill a form or respond to a call to action (CTA) on the page.
- Returning & New Visitors
Having a good ratio of returning visitors to new visitors is important in helping you understand how engaging the content you create is. If your healthcare blog is doing well, you will likely see a greater number of people return to it to consume more content.
- Bounce Rates
A bounce is when a visitor does not engage with a page at all and leaves the website. This is a great metric for understanding how good the content is and how relevant the traffic is from any source. While you are chasing marketing qualified leads (MQLs), it‘s important to understand what sources are giving you the most high-quality traffic so that you can double down on these sources.
- Keyword Ranks
Your SEO efforts are usually targeted around a few keywords that you have determined. Keyword rankings indicate how your page ranks on these keywords on the search engine results page(SERPs). This is a very important metric in understanding how your SEO efforts are progressing.
Social Media and Email Marketing KPIs
- Social Media traffic
It shows how many people are visiting your website from your social media pages and the links you post there. Google Analytics will give you a good breakdown of the traffic from various sources and social media traffic will show you how well that marketing channel is performing.
- Social Media Engagement
More than just the number of followers, looking at the engagement you generate on social media will be a good idea. Engagement shows interest in the content and this will give you a good measure of understanding of what‘s working and what’s not.
- Open Rates and Click-Through Rates
For email marketing, open and click rates are the most important numbers to look at. The total number of people opening your emails and the number of people clicking on the links in the mail indicate how good your email subject lines and content is.
Paid marketing KPIs
- Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)
This metric gives you the total PPC advertising cost you have incurred in converting a lead.
- Click Through Rates (CTR)
Click-through rates are a good indicator of the quality of ads you are running. a higher click-through rate tells you that more people are engaging with the ads.
Closing Thoughts
So those are some of the major metrics we at FVG love when it comes to determining digital marketing success. It’s not tough to get a hang of these metrics to have an informed conversation with your marketing team or your digital marketing agency. However, making sure that your overall campaign is performing well is a bit tougher than that.
Metrics are great at helping you understand the health of a campaign. But if you are to determine the brand awareness of your healthcare brand within the industry, it cannot be judged from just one or two metrics. You will have to create your way of understanding it.
Whatever your marketing goals be, having a clear understanding of what you are chasing and what is a success will ultimately help you get better results.
Not sure if your campaign is working well? FVG’s work with leading healthcare brands has helped them meet their inbound marketing goals better and save costs while doing it too. Talk to us today!
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