It's next to impossible to prove that the billboard on the highway convinced X-amount of patients to schedule procedures at your hospital. You can ask new patients how they heard about you until you're blue in the face, but you will never know for sure. To find real, true, honest-to-goodness ROI, marketers have to turn to the Internet. The Chester County Hospital recently launched a campaign promoting an online risk assessment tool—and the ROI would make any healthcare marketer's mouth water.
The 220-bed Pennsylvania hospital launched the "Heart Tracks" tool and campaign in March 2010 with the goal of driving patients into its cardiology service line. The measurability of the effort was an added bonus.
"ROI is such a big component of what we do and it helps justify our department and all of our campaigns, but sometimes really measuring the impact and effect of marketing and who's hearing what where is often hard to do," says Colleen Leonard Leyden, director of corporate marketing and public relations at TCCH. "That was one of the reasons we thought this campaign was unique."
Marketers also created a traditional ad campaign to promote the tool, consisting of a 9,000 direct mail piece, outdoor, print, radio, and online. By directing consumers to the heart assessment tool in the ad copy, saying "that billboard on the highway drove X-patients to the hospital" just became a little more realistic.
Two weeks after launching, about 1,200 people visited the Web site and began the test, 414 have completed the test, and 112 have submitted the test for another action, such as receiving a call from a cardiac nurse navigator or receiving an e-newsletter.
Normally, when organizations run an ad or radio campaign, they really don't know the impact those messages have on consumers, says Leonard Leyden. "But with this tool I can demonstrate over 400 people have taken the assessment and have spent five minutes with us engaging in our risk assessment," she says. "I can drill down to see where they've gone after that five minutes. But to have five minutes of someone's attention with the goal of helping them understand their heart health is remarkable to me."
Because Heart Tracks users are asked where they heard about the tool, marketers can determine which ad elements were most successful in attracting consumers, as well. They've found that the biggest driver is online advertising on search engine sites, such as Facebook, Newsweek, The New York Times, and others, which are responsible for 117 users. Radio is the second most successful, with 101 users, followed by the hospital Web site with 65 users, print newspaper ads with 21 users, "from a friend" with 18 users, and direct mail with seven users. Another 81 people selected "other" when asked how they heard about the tool, and Leonard Leyden says she is investigating what that may represent.
ROI like this proves that having an online element to a campaign isn't optional anymore. And there's so much more out there than microsites; There's social media, blogs, online surveys, pay-per-click ads, and much more.
Even if you don't have pressure from leadership to prove the impact of marketing efforts, this kind of information is invaluable when strategizing for your next campaign. It's rare to find a consumer product marketing campaign that doesn't have an online component, and this needs to become the norm for healthcare too.
By tracking potential patients' behavior online, marketers can better adjust their messages and media choices in order to target exactly who they want. And that is exactly what hospital marketers want.
Marianne Aiello is a contributing writer at HealthLeaders Media.