Connecting your marketing dollars to your business initiatives
From all the lingo like CPC, CPA, CTR, Impressions, and Reach, to all the dollars you spend monthly, one can only assume digital advertising is beneficial for your business; because other practices are doing it; right? Well, WRONG.
When you don’t understand your KPIs and throw your hard earned resources into it because other high performing companies are doing it, you set yourself up to be like the 95% of small business practices that fail.
Tangling yourself up in a mess of conversion data and information you don’t understand, only to keep funneling resources towards it. Understanding your marketing budget an its correlation to your overall business success should be the primary driver behind your marketing decisions.
Let’s dive in to how it works successfully.
Determining an ad budget for your practice
When deciding on a budget to run your ad campaigns, one must understand the importance of the pace of your budget, and how fast the resources run out throughout the campaign. For example, in an ad campaign running for $5K over six weeks, you can calculate your pace or spend per day to see if that specific dollar amount is worth getting a patient to come through your doors.
Example: There are 42 days in a six-week ad run; divide that by the total ad spend budget of $5K , and you have roughly $119 per day to spend every day for six weeks to get a conversion.
Is it worth it?
Determine if your campaign is worth it by running your ads for six weeks and measuring out the number of leads (MQLs) that come into the site versus how many of those leads eventually turned into new practice patients. From there, you can calculate the cost per acquisition (CPA) to determine if the revenue you earned from the new patient outweighs the investment to bring that patient to your website, contact form, and eventually your practice doors.
determining your marketing budget
Take the total budget of your media spend then divide it into four, giving you your quarterly media budget. The rule of thumb is to take 15-20% of your total annual revenue and invest it into your marketing initiatives. From this, you can approximate how much you should be spending on marketing each year. From there, you can take another 15-20% of that budget to allocate for your media ad spend budgets. These are the budgets you need to run ads on Facebook, Instagram, Google Search etcetera. Optimal ad campaigns run between 4-6 weeks in length. Divide your media budget accordingly per quarter.
why your marketing budget is important
If you can’t get a web visitor to convert and schedule a consultation with your practice, then the next best piece of information you can gather from the audience members is their behavior. We know we can track many psychosocial, behavioral data using website analytics to understand the consumer better. The more we can understand your patients, the better we can tailor these marketing budgets to help bring more intrinsic value to your potential and future patients. Your marketing budget allows you to gauge how many new patients you need to continue your practice growth. The more budget you have, the better conversion data you can collect to make more robust and better marketing decisions moving forward it’s a win, win for everyone.
How your practice can get the best out of your ad campaigns
create a media plan
Develop an intention for running your ad campaigns. If you are running Google Search, determine what timeframes you want to run the ad and how you want to structure your testing. Media plans show which platform, campaign run dates and provides a brief description of the target demographics. Your media plan gives you the visibility to craft an omni channel approach to your marketing. Allowing you to optimize your funnel and get the best bang for your buck.
create a campaign brief
Write out your campaign brief to include more details about your target demographic and the specifics of your ad copy and general landing page layout. The brief helps keep everything concise and in order with the overall campaign goal.
build out landing pages
Gather meaningful insights into your procedures and treatments by determining preferences and content interest from strategically placing text in specific, landing pages to measure overall traffic and page engagement. Structuring your campaigns with landing pages provides flexibility and variety to test out different assumptions about your target audience.
test! test! test!
To get the best out of your marketing dollars, you need to know your audience and then begin to verify your assumptions about the audience through your data. Use all the components of an ad campaign to prove a theory. It helps create a buyer persona based on real time data making your marketing decisions in the future more solid and factual.
There are many ways to develop marketing strategies and ad campaigns. Still, all these strategies have in common the value of conversions and conversion data on behavior. If we want a higher ROI from an ad campaign we look at conversion volume, the data, and the test results from a past A/B test to better understand the target audience in the future.
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