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Measuring Your Practice Marketing and ROI

Each year aesthetic practitioners spend thousands of dollars on marketing to attract new patients. However, tracking marketing efforts is not always easy. In this interview with Miami, FL based plastic surgeon, Adam J. Rubinstein, MD, he discusses with Aesthetic Insider™ how he has built a successful plastic surgery practice in a highly competitive market, and how keeping track of ROI is the key to his success. One of the integral components of Dr. Rubinstein’s management efforts is the partnership he has developed with Red Spot Interactive, a software solution and marketing company whose platform is based on accurate ROI reporting, patient scheduling, patient retention, and overall practice marketing. Dr. Rubinstein explains how Red Spot Interactive takes care of his practice marketing and ROI, so he can take better care of his patients. To learn more about Dr. Rubinstein, visit www.dr-rubinstein.com. To learn more about Red Spot Interactive, visit www.redspotinteractive.com.

Dr. Adam Rubinstein, Miami, FL.

Why do you measure ROI in your practice?
I feel you should measure ROI in everything, not just in medicine. If you are doing any kind of marketing, and you are not tracking your return on investment, then you are most likely wasting money. Many of the aesthetic physicians I know spend a lot of money on marketing through many different channels, and if they don’t follow and analyze what it’s doing for them, then they have no idea what is going on and no idea how they can further maximize performance, or improve their practice. I measure ROI to ensure my money is being spent on avenues that yield a return, as well as to learn how we can continue to improve a patient’s experience with our practice. Measuring ROI is critical to my success as a business owner. The cosmetic surgery industry has become extremely competitive in the past decade and the market has been commoditized. To keep up, stay ahead of the competition, and grow an elective healthcare practice, you have to be actively marketing your practice. ROI is an essential metric in gauging the effectiveness of not just marketing activities, but the overall efficiency of the patient acquisition process. If something is not working, I need to know so we can re-allocate our marketing investments or internal resources.

How do you measure your marketing return-on-investment?
For starters, you need the right technology and software for automated tracking. It’s possible to calculate ROI manually for your practice, but with too many competing priorities as is, you are much better off using automated technology for this task. Your patient and marketing data need to be integrated, using third party platforms and software. My plastic surgery practice uses Red Spot Interactive’s patient acquisition and retention platform, which allows us to integrate the data from our practice management system (patient information, scheduled and attended appointments, and purchases associated with the patient) and the marketing data we collect. This integration allows us to track the ROI for our entire marketing program. I think looking at the reports, just getting numbers, is good, but having a thorough and precise understanding of those numbers is crucial. Whether you are using a marketing firm or you have someone in house that’s tracking ROI, it should be a really simple business process to be able to review reports that show you the actual performance of your website, print ads, social media campaigns, etc. It is important to me to know how many consults we get from each area of marketing, and we are able to do that with our tracking system.

How did you choose Red Spot Interactive?
Red Spot Interactive has been instrumental in the growth of my practice.  I vetted them for a long time. I think they will tell you probably too long, but I looked at them, I spoke to their other clients and I was really slow to commit because there were so many other competing business decisions I needed to make. I finally took the leap and I’m really glad I did because it has changed the way I look at my practice. If I ever want to evaluate something, or we are starting something new, we can obtain real, accurate data that comes from the management software Red Spot Interactive provides.

Are marketing efforts segmented, or do you measure marketing ROI as a whole?
Using Red Spot Interactive’s platform, we are able to measure the ROI for each individual marketing channel. This allows us to determine which channels are most effective and which channels to discontinue. All of your practice marketing efforts must include some type of tracking method and response generator. For example, your website should have a unique tracking phone number on it, as well as a lead form whereby a prospective patient submits their first name, last name, phone number, email address and procedure of interest. Similarly, any email campaigns, print ads, digital ads, etc., should contain their own unique tracking phone number. I’ve increased my revenues significantly while decreasing my marketing costs at the same level. Utilizing this approach over the last 3 years, I have ultimately grown my profits. At my practice, our marketing is segmented in many different ways. We segment by electronic versus digital versus analog. So using print, radio and TV as a traditional analog medium, and website and social media as our digital medium, we can easily measure dollar for dollar how each one is performing. In recent years our social platform has seen a huge increase in ROI and we can easily track Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook, as well as our website response, etc.

Are there other important metrics that a plastic surgery practice should be measuring?
Yes, you need to measure KPIs (key performance indicators) for the entire patient acquisition process. I understand, in detail, the key performance indicators associated with my marketing, lead management, patient scheduling, and patient retention. Similarly, your website visitor-to-lead rate is an essential metric for a plastic surgery practice. It measures your website’s performance and lead generation level, but this metric just scratches the surface. In order to understand the ROI from your website, you need to be able to take it a few steps further (i.e. which of those leads scheduled appointments, which of those appointments were attended, and which of those attended appointments converted into purchased treatments). From there, you can determine the revenue generated from that lead and the overall ROI for your website. KPIs are difficult to assess without proper management software. Prior to Red Spot Interactive, I tried to do it myself but it was difficult and the information I get now is far more accurate.

In what other ways has Red Spot Interactive helped your practice?
Red Spot Interactive does more than just ROI calculations. They help with marketing and design, and most importantly lead management and call in-take. They take a lot of pressure off my front desk staff  who get far less phone calls thanks to their call center services which is one of the ways they track ROI more accurately. The Red Spot Interactive team can determine based on the numbers where the calls are coming from and which campaign  prompted the patient to call. They can then track those phone numbers to identity where that patient heard about the practice. The information integrates into their system and that data is easily available to me for review when needed.

Which of your practice’s marketing channels is the biggest revenue driver?
Aside from marketing to existing patients and acquiring their referrals, my website is where we see our biggest return-on-investment, especially for new patients. However, my social media has definitely risen in importance to my overall marketing strategy in the last year, and I expect it to compete with my website in the coming years.

What types of business decisions are you able to make by measuring your marketing ROI?
It allows me to allocate my budgets as effectively as possible, across my entire practice. Being able to properly track and record the ROI for my practice’s marketing efforts allows me to know what is working and what is not. If my website’s visitor to lead rate is high, but the ROI is low, that alerts me that there is a breakdown in the patient acquisition process. More specifically, if I’m getting a lot of leads from my website but only a few are converting into purchasing patients, then we are losing them somewhere in between. And in the event that I were allocating a lot of money to a new ad source, but not seeing a positive ROI, I would be able to make an informed decision to discontinue that marketing channel, saving the money or putting it into a more effective media buy. It’s a real game changer as in the past I might have known generally what was happening, but without really looking and measuring in the way that Red Spot Interactive now allows me to, your decisions can only be based on assumptions. Now I can really make better spending decisions based on facts. It is just a far more sophisticated way of running my practice.

 

To listen to Dr. Rubinstein’s interview at Aesthetic Insider™ Radio, CLICK HERE!

 

Dr. Adam Rubinstein is an award winning plastic surgeon who practices in Miami, FL. He is Chief of Plastic Surgery and Vice Chief of the Department of Surgery for Jackson North Medical Center, a 382-bed acute care hospital in the Jackson Healthcare System. Dr. Rubinstein is a clinical assistant professor in the Department of Surgery at NOVA Southeastern University, clinical faculty for the Department of Plastic Surgery at Florida International University (FIU) School of Medicine, and clinical faculty for the Cleveland Clinic Plastic Surgery Residency Program in Florida. He can be reached at (305) 792-7575 or www.dr-rubinstein.com.

Red Spot Interactive was founded on the principal that doctors should be able to grow their businesses profitably by understanding their return on investment down to the penny across the entire patient acquisition spectrum. Technology, creative and professional services, along with domain knowledge traditionally only afforded to Fortune 500 companies should be readily available to practices at an affordable price and provide them a strategic advantage against their competition. In addition, these advancements in technology should bring scale and transparency to the key performance indicators of the practice and patient acquisition spectrum. To learn more, visit www.redspotinteractive.com.

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