7 Steps to Help You Create More Effective Lead Nurturing Campaigns
Many practices have found that marketing automation is the key to their success in gaining and retaining patients. After you plan and implement different personas, you can develop marketing strategies to ensure you’re reaching patients. The problem for many practices is that they have plenty of marketing strategies and ideas, but no time to execute on them. Marketing automation delivers step-by-step content based on activities that nurture your prospective patients through a journey that ends with your practice!
If you’re considering implementing a marketing automation strategy, here are seven steps to help you simplify the process.
- Determine priorities and objectives. The success of your practice depends on reaching goals, and your goals are determined by business objectives. Do you want to increase your patient billing? Bring on a certain number of new patients? Use this information to break down how many new consultations you’ll need and go from there.
- Discover your ideal patients. Depending upon the type of practice you have, there is likely a persona that is a typical patient. Explore your current patients to understand who is most likely to leverage your practice. This will lead to a predictable decision-making process that those patients follow. Use your understanding of these steps to create content and touch points that address their motivations.
- Create conversion paths. Once you better understand how patients progress from awareness to decision-making, you can create paths that guide those patients to each stage. Consider procedure-specific content (before & after photos, Q&As, blog posts), practice-specific content (events, special offers, etc…), and patient-specific content (financing options, virtual consults, etc…). Also, “social proof” will be important to prospective patients – things like video testimonials, online reviews, and case studies establish trust and credibility.
- Craft interesting content. In order to build out effective workflows, you’ll need to create different types of content for each step. There are so many types of content you can include in any particular workflow, but think about items like: social media posts, customized email messages, blog posts, landing pages, or downloadable resources like checklists. You can also repurpose existing materials like brochures and published articles.
- Develop automated workflows. Now comes the part that is going to set you apart while also making your life so much easier! An automated workflow is a sequence of actions that is triggered by a certain behavior. You can consider certain actions lead generators, and then plot marketing that will immediately follow. For example, if you are able to track marketing sources, make sure that any people who fill out the form on your Mommy Makeover landing page are dropped into a procedure-specific campaign. From there, create a series of emails and text messages that will automatically be sent to these individuals over time providing more information about this procedure. If you’re using a system like MyMedLeads, you can also add outbound call reminders to the workflow that will remind staff when it is time to make a follow-up call. You may choose to end the workflow with a special offer like 10% off surgical fees or free Botox when they book surgery. Ideally, this type of campaign will nurture prospective patients through the process of choosing your practice more efficiently.
- Make sure to measure results. While you can plan some workflows using a homegrown email system, a sophisticated program will combine sales, marketing, and digital activities for a robust lead nurturing environment. Make sure to take advantage of an end-to-end lead tracking system like MyMedLeads to monitor progress and measure results. Build dashboards to see important KPIs at a glance, which will help you with the next step.
- Use data to optimize programs. Once you have some data to work with (meaning you’ve let the programs run for a while), you can apply what you’ve learned to make your campaigns even better and maximize return on investment. Try testing things like subject lines, calls-to-action, and further customizations. Check for areas where people tend to drop off in the campaign, or end up calling into the office. Tweak your creative, copy, or send times to adjust for those factors.
No matter the stage a prospective patient is in, there are marketing activities that can engage them. Automated marketing will help you to plan campaigns for every stage of the sales funnel, without adding extra work for a staff that’s already at capacity. Comprehensive marketing automation solutions tend to pay for themselves within a short amount of time, allowing practice leaders to better focus on current patients while gaining new ones at the same time.