Marketing across email, print, web, social media, phone calls, and events can greatly expand your reach and visibility in the community. However, without a plan to track the leads that each of these avenues brings to your business, you have no clear indication that the return on any of these investments is less than needed to bring in revenue.
Measuring the success of your Medicare marketing efforts starts with defining success, then finding your baseline, setting a goal, tracking your numbers, and analyzing the data to see each measure’s performance.
Define Marketing Success for Your Agency
What does marketing success look like to your business? What are your goals for your marketing campaign? Define what successful Medicare marketing efforts look like for your agency, whether that means increased views and traffic, higher revenue, better client reviews, great stats, or many others.
Set a Performance Baseline and Benchmark
Look back at your historical marketing campaign data. Without knowing where you were before you started the marketing efforts, how will you know what to compare it to? While you are in the growth phase of your business, it can be good to reach for industry average returns, but your best bet initially is to outperform your own efforts.
The goal you create for your marketing efforts should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. You can work with other stakeholders in your business or peer agents who have some experience being in your shoes or working in a similar market. Ask these business owners what healthy success looks like based on your investment thus far, and use that to make adjustments where you find any shortcomings or underperformance.
Specific Metrics to Watch
In business, your numbers are often called key performance indicators or KPIs. There are so many to choose from when it comes to measuring data, but here are several that might serve as helpful in evaluating your Medicare marketing efforts.
- Return on investment
- Cost per sale
- Cost per conversion
- Cost per lead
- Cost per acquisition
- Sales growth
- Customer retention/repeat purchase rate
- Customer lifetime value
- Churn rate
- Website traffic
- Impressions
- Sessions
- Average session duration
- Page views
- Bounce rate
- Exit rate
- Traffic by source
- New vs. returning visitors
- Social reach
- Social engagement
- Email open rate
- Click-through rate
- Cost per click
Track Data
Track your KPI metrics before, halfway through the time frame, and at the end of the marketing effort. More data points will help your team create a clearer picture of trends they may see in the data.
Retrieve and Store Your Data
Use a consistent time frame to track your data. When you pull data each month or each quarter, you can more easily create comparisons. Reviewing the data shortly after you pull it gives you a better chance to recall events that may have caused dips or spikes in traffic.
Learn more about building a successful business and marketing compliantly with the resources at Magellan Healthcare.
