Once you’ve decided to hire an inbound healthcare marketing agency it doesn’t mean your work is finished.
To be successful, you need to work with your marketing agency to make sure that you are on the same page, and working towards the same goals. A good healthcare marketing agency will ask many questions about your business to get a sense of what you want and how they can serve you better. If you do hire a medical marketing agency, here are the questions you should be ready to answer during meetings with them.
Medical Marketing Strategy
What business goals does your medical practice have for the upcoming year?
A healthcare marketing agency is not going to be able to do their best work if they don’t know what they are working towards. Be clear about your revenue goals and even ask the agency if you can approve any marketing strategy they devise to meet them.
Do you have a medical marketing strategy already in place?
A results-driven medical marketing strategy must be documented and referred to on a regular basis. A solid strategy can increase your revenue immensely. Otherwise your healthcare marketing will be diluted and lack focus and consistency. If you lack clarity on a targeted medical marketing strategy, then you can ask your inbound healthcare marketing agency to devise one for you.
Who are your ideal patients?
Understanding your audience is about more than just their basic demographics. It’s about what they want in life, what they enjoy, what questions they have regarding your medical services, what content they might respond to, and what their frustrations might be. These are characteristics that are shared by a large cross-section of your most ideal patients.
Have you created buyer personas defining your ideal patients?
Provide these to your medical marketing agency right at the beginning of partnering with them. They will probably ask how successful you’ve been with them, and when they were last updated. You should update them no less than every 2 years or so. If you do not have buyer personas that you have defined and documented, then your agency should be able to help you develop and document them. You need the right buyer personas to target the right prospective new patients for each high-niche medical service that you offer.
Medical Practice Brand Positioning
Why do your customers choose your healthcare product or service over the competition?
You should be getting this information from your patients on a regular basis. You can have your sales team ask after each successful sale, or you can hire a third-party to provide a survey. You need to know what sets you apart from the competition so that you can identify areas for growth and get some successful results right away.
While you may feel you have the answers on how and why you are better than your competition, you will be more than surprised on what you missed once you start getting this feedback from your patients as to how they value your brand equity in comparison to your competition.
Why do patients pick your competition over you?
The next most important question when it comes to patient choices is why they choose your competitors over you. There is a reason why they won’t pay your price, and it could be one of several factors. You need to figure out what your weaknesses are, and what the strengths of your competitors are. Fixing and doing away with your weaknesses is the best way for you to start highlighting your natural competitive advantages.
Are There Improvements You can Identify That You Can Make to Bring In More Business?
These improvements can be new services or products, or other things that will get more people to convert. This could be something simple like asking your prospects in the appointment scheduler, “Which keywords did you use to search for us?“. And then adjusting your marketing strategy to target those keywords that are proving to naturally convert into paying new patients for you.
By identifying these opportunities (and a lot more), you can make the best ongoing plan possible for your medical marketing strategy.
How Much Can You Spend For Marketing For The Next Year?
You and your marketing agency need to know your budget to be able to properly strategize for the coming year. This is an extremely important question that you need to think through. Opting for the cheapest marketing agency offering you an entire of gamut of medical marketing services might be tempting, but such an approach could only lead to further frustrations through wasted time and energy and not any tangible benefits in terms of enjoying an increased bottomline through sales.
At our healthcare marketing agency, we only work with established medical practices who can can invest a minimum of $5,400 a month and it takes a minimum of 12 months to start enjoying results, although the work is ongoing and the best results can be enjoyed beyond the 2 year mark.
Your Team
What Is The Size Of Your In-House Marketing Team?
It’s important to understand how many of your current staff are able to help with marketing, and what skills and capabilities they have. It’s very helpful for an inbound healthcare marketing agency if they have an idea as to whether your team is completely inexperienced or have enough experience having dealt with multiple of your ideal patients to know their daily questions, frustrations and queries.
Do You Have A Full Time Sales Team?
Do you have a large team, or is it just you who handles everything? Or maybe it’s just you and a team of 2 – 10 employees. A medical inbound marketing agency will be able to better help you if they understand the structure of your business and who handles what tasks and decisions.
Our medical marketing philosophy is centered on both marketing and sales working together in harmony as the same team as opposed to working in silos. Marketing needs to be well-informed through all the crucial data-points from your sales representatives, whereas your sales representatives need to be aware of how their understanding of key patient queries, frustrations and pain-points allow them to craft targeted marketing campaigns.
What Are Your Capabilities?
There is a lot that goes into inbound marketing and digital marketing. Make sure to assess your current team to see how capable your team is with its components. Give them a grade, so you can decide what you will need the most help with, and what should be easier. These components include web design, web development, content copywriting, graphic design, technical SEO, digital PR, lead generation, conversion rate optimization, tracking analytics and much more.
Is Leadership Involved In Creating and Contributing?
Your entire team must be involved and committed to providing and contributing to content. This includes your leadership. If everyone is onboard, you will find more success. Nothing is more off-putting for your ideal patients to arrive at your medical practice website only to find cookie-cutter content that fails to communicate your niche-specific medical expertise, authority and unique insight.
What Will You Do After A Year If You Aren’t Getting The Results You Are Looking For Yet?
You should give your inbound marketing agency an idea of what your expectations are, and what you will do if they are not met. However, by hiring an agency, you should be willing to play out the process and see how it goes. Inbound marketing is not about quick-fixes. It involves a process that takes a minimum of 12 months to fully realize the potential.
At Inbound Medic, we are consistently able to deliver at least a 3X ROI within 12 months. This means that if you invested $5,400 a month over 12 months, then we are able to quantifiably measure and prove an extra $16,000 a month minimum in monthly revenues through new patient acquisition (and this is not counting the lifetime value of the new patient, but just your average sales generated at your first encounter with the new patient). In general, our medical marketing services deliver a consistent ROI of 5X – 10X.
Check out the screenshot below from one of our clients who generated an extra $42,795 through our services for the month of August 2020. And this has been consistent right through the pandemic (we only had a down month in April 2020. May, June and July of 2020 were all at a 6X ROI). Given what is happening in the world and the sheer volume of businesses going bankrupt, it is deeply and quietly satisfying that we are able to still help our clients win through these extremely challenging times.
Medical Marketing Content
What Type Of Content Does Your Medical Practice Produce Currently?
There are many different types of content, such as blog posts and articles, video, email marketing pieces, service pages and infographics. Are there certain types of content that you already do well? What do you struggle with that an agency may be able to assist with?
To give you an idea of the volume of content you need to really move the needle at a business level, you need a minimum of 100 blog posts that are 2,000 words of rich media in-depth high-expert content versus generic cookie-cutter fluff. It takes time to develop such an evergreen lead generating content asset-base. Even if you wrote 8 blog posts a month (which is a lot), you are at about 96 blog posts after 12 months.
What Type Of Content Have You Not Produced But Would Like To?
Is there something you’ve wanted to do but haven’t? It might be because you didn’t think your team had the skills to produce it, or you didn’t think you could afford it. Let your inbound marketing team know and they will see if they can make it happen if it works for your strategy.
Medical Practice Website
How Do You Think Your Website Is Performing?
To answer this question, you need to ask yourself what function your medical practice website is meant to perform. Are you using it to grow your brand? If so, then you will want to track how many people visit your site through branded searches. Or are you most interested in driving sales and creating an evergreen lead generating asset?
If you want to use it for generating leads, then you should track how many qualified prospects come through the website and convert into paying new patients.
Using this information, your inbound marketing agency can develop an on-site strategy specifically to get the most out of your website.
What Do You Like and Dislike About Your Website?
Ask your entire team this question. There may be different opinions, but that is good, since you can get a range of perspectives and ideas.
Are You Aware Of All Your Top Competitor Sites In Your Medical Niche?
The best medical practices generate 90% of their business through online channels. As such, if you are just getting started with your digital footprint or lack a robust digital strategy, the best place to start is by analyzing your top competitor websites to unearth exactly what they are doing well. This is not to copy them blindly, but more to form an understanding of what is working and why.
Unless you have a concrete standard in your head that you want to hit, it becomes difficult to hit anything concrete.
New Patient Acquisition
What Percentage Of Your New Patients Comes Through Your Website?
Are you getting any new patients from your website, or are they coming mostly through word-of-mouth and referrals? Do they get to your website via highly targeted searches in Google? And are you able to measure and analyze this data in a clear and quantifiable manner?
Break down how you are earning your sales to help your agency develop your medical marketing strategy.
Where Do Your New Patient Leads Come From Other Than Your Website?
Find out the percentage of new leads that come from other sources. For instance, this can include your referrals, ZocDoc, print ads, billboards, television advertising, and conferences / events.
From our experience, the internet outperforms every other channel by a significant margin.
What Is Your Average Sales Cycle?
Marketing strategies will differ depending on how long the sales cycle is.
Do You Use a Healthcare CRM?
It’s important to use a CRM that suits the specific needs of your medical practice. You absolutely should use one, but make sure to find the right one.
Do You Have A Process For Handling Leads?
You need to have a process to move leads from the marketing stage to the sales stage. Otherwise they can get lost in the middle somewhere without someone following up in some way. You should have a documented process that shepherds prospects to the sales team.
Do You Have A Well-Defined Process For Sales?
You should record the procedure for every sale. This includes the sales cycle length, the timeframe between follow ups, and how it all relates to how the sales develop from leads. If you don’t have a documented procedure, then ask your marketing agency to help you develop one.
What Steps Do Your Prospects Take Before Becoming New Patients?
Create a map for your marketing agency to outline what steps a prospect takes, from first contact to conversion, before they are paying for your product or service.
How Do You Measure The Performance Of Your Sales Team?
Your marketing should be based on how you are measuring the success of your sales team. This means that if you want your sales team to to drive new business revenue for example, then your marketing strategy should reflect that.
Does Your Sales Team Use Web Tools To Gain Data About Prospects?
There are several tools that a sales team can use to gather intel about potential new patients and the types of prospects you could target. These include things like your Google Search Console, Google Analytics and your Google My Business (to name a few).
Patient Valuation
What is your Lifetime Patient Value?
You should be able to provide the value that a new patient generates for you during their lifetime with you as their provider. This calculation can be made by multiplying the revenue of the average sale by the number of times a patient purchases on average. For example, if you get a new patient for botox and they spend $1,100 every visit for a treatment you offer and does it 6 times a year for 3 years {($1,100 x 6) x 3}, then the LTV of that patient is $19,800.
Do You Solicit Patient Feedback?
It’s crucial to get patient feedback so that you can gain insight into what is working and perhaps what isn’t. This can also help with patient retention, since you can address any and all issues.
Do You Focus On Your Online Reputation Management?
Your online reputation is crucial to your success as an elite medical practice. The healthcare industry is extremely competitive with too many providers competing for the attention of your ideal patients. And your ideal patients who actually have the money to afford your high-niche high-value medical services are those who tend to be picky and digital-savvy. There is a good chance they are searching for you and factoring your online reputation before deciding whether to schedule an appointment with you.
Do You Have A Patient Referral Program?
Since word of mouth is powerful, a patient referral program can be incredibly valuable. You can use your existing patients to do further fuel your marketing by offering them bonuses and benefits.
Technology
Are You Using Medical Marketing Technology?
There are so many tools you can use to gain insight and data into your marketing performance. Google Search Console, for instance, is particularly powerful for your medical website data and to gather potential queries to target. Your marketing agency can suggest the ones that will work best for you.
Which Tools Do You Currently Use That Your Team Loves?
If you are already using some of these tools, then let your agency know which ones have been effective for you. This will give them an idea of what you are comfortable with, and what kind of information and insights you find valuable.
Do You Use A Tool To Automate Your Marketing?
There are several powerful software options out there that can automate much of your marketing tasks. Let your agency know which one you use so that they can cater your marketing activities to that software platform.
How many questions are you able to answer? There are a lot, but the more that you can answer, the better your agency will be able to help you. These questions can serve as a valuable starting point to what could be a very profitable partnership.
