It’s getting close to the end of the month, and you realize you are nowhere near your monthly target. You have many theories about why things didn’t turn out how you wanted.
Perhaps it’s because the summer season is approaching, and no one is considering buying during the summer. Or maybe it’s because that new clinic opened in the neighbourhood, taking away your customers.
These are all speculations without any data to back them up.
Very few people can run a business with excellent service alone and hope people will come with little to no marketing. Those who can be in such a position are often lucky. They operate in an area of little to no competition, and customers demand their products or services daily.
For the rest of us who don’t have the luxury of such perfect conditions, it’s a hard lesson you’ll eventually learn. Especially when your monthly target has not been hit, and you don’t know why.
You can’t run a business because you have excellent services and hope people will come. Unfortunately, the world doesn’t work that way.
The best way to know the effect of your audiology marketing is to look at your metrics and track your audiology marketing efforts.
Tracking techniques you need set up for audiology marketing.
If someone was in a buying mode for hearing aids and they saw your business on local news, then later on, they searched your website to find out what you are about.
You had already added a tracking pixel on your website, and you could retarget them with an ad on Facebook.
They click the ad to see your online reviews and then decide to book an appointment online.
How do you decide which marketing deserves the credit for getting the client to reach out? Was it the Facebook ad or the TV news coverage, or would it be your captivating website, or were the reviews that made the deal?
The answer is all of them.
In marketing, we have a metric called attribution to help us understand how each point of contact with our marketing content makes an impact.
To figure out and calculate your attribution, start with the following steps.
Step #1 – Identify the cost of getting one new customer or customer acquisition (CAC).
You will need to add up all your marketing expenses for a particular month to get this number.
So, add up all your marketing and sales costs, including the salary pro-rata based on how many hours you or your team perform on marketing. You will also add software you use to help with marketing or sales. You may even have marketing training costs to add. Add everything you spend relating to marketing and sales.
You then want to collect how many paying clients you received during that time.
Take the total marketing expenses and divide by the total number of customers for a particular month to get the customer acquisition cost or the cost you need to spend to get one customer.
For simplicity, we will say the CAC is $100 to use as an example.
Step #2 – Take stock of all of the point of contact set up intentionally to drive business
If you’re implementing a marketing strategy, you would have constructed a strategic plan for acquiring customers. Make a note of those points of contact or channels you used.
In the example here, we have the following:
- PR – TV news
- Website
- Facebook ads
- Customer Reviews
- Online Booking Form
Step #3 – Collect the data around your point of contact
For each channel, there will be metrics to help with your analysis.
The TV station will have a good idea of viewership to help you understand how many people were watching the news when you or your clinic was featured.
However, we can only correctly assign the PR to new clients if there is a way to track it. Either you ask in a questionnaire or provide a code that can help you make a connection that these clients saw you on TV.
You can tally up the number of website views during a particular month.
You can track the conversion rate of people who saw your Facebook ad and visited the website.
You can review what web pages brought people to your customer reviews and online booking form.
For example, perhaps you noticed that more people came from the customer review pages when they booked online.
Step #4 – Access the value of each channel
Divide the monthly metrics for each point of contact by the CAC.
If we had 1000 website visits and our CAC is $100, then it cost us $0.10.
If we had ten online appointment booking forms, then it cost us $10 ($100/10 bookings).
Based on the data, we can test various things to reduce the cost of each website visit or your online booking to see what variables contribute to bringing more people to make an appointment.
This is an approximate, not 100% accurate.
There are so many variables that make people buy. It’s impossible to know all of these variables exactly. However, we can get somewhat closer by collecting and measuring data.
The critical thing to note is that you will have a clear idea of what impacted your low sales, with a consistent overview of your marketing campaigns and how each point of contact impacts one another. You won’t be left to guess why things are not working.