These days any effective marketing campaign can be enhanced with good software. There are thousands of options for various specific needs, but here are the 3 basic ones to start with.
- Callrail – a basic account gives you 10 tracking phone numbers for $30. Use these numbers for marketing activities such as postcards, print advertising, Google ppc, Facebook ads, and anything else you’re spending money on! Not only will it calculate the total calls, but it will also record calls so you can do periodic audits of your front desk staff to ensure they are well representing the practice and helping to convert new leads! Since Google values a consistent name, address and phone number (NAP) across the web, we only recommend using call tracking numbers on print sources or online paid advertising!
- Google Analytics – free software by Google that should be connected to every single website. Once set up you can quickly see the number of visitors, what websites they are coming from, what devices they use to access your site, what they are doing while on the website, and a hundred more data points depending on how far you want to dig in. No matter what I think, it’s important for every practice to have access to their own analytics and not rely solely on a marketing company to send a monthly report.
- Mailchimp – email marketing is one of the most important mechanisms to communicate with patients. Mailchimp makes it easy to send a monthly email that relays new promotions, seasonal information, reminders, tips and tricks, and shows off the latest before and after photos or testimonials which is great for patient loyalty, growing your brand equity, and cross promoting various services! We recommend having a professional designer setting you up with a custom template as you want this communication to be impressive and memorable! And best of all, mailchimp is free and then increases slowly as your list size grows!
- SEMrush – this is a great seo software that can do a technical seo audit, review your backlink profile, and show keyword rankings! It is great to keep tabs for what your marketing/seo team is doing. If you want to take it to the next level you can also grade your ppc, social media, and content!
- Survey Monkey – easily set up a survey for patients! A few questions sent to every patient post appointment can help you stay on top of your processes and procedures, what is working, and what is not. Beyond that, giving patients a safe place to vent is always a good idea. Extra credit – add a second survey just to a targeted subset of patients to get specific intel on a unique procedure or age group, send a survey to your staff to gauge employee satisfaction, or send a survey to patients who stopped coming to the practice to find areas to improve patient retention.
- Excel – sounds old school but it’s not. Make sure to keep an ongoing log for top line stats each month. This way you will be able to quickly see trends and therefore adjust your marketing campaign strategically. For example, keep track of email inquiries, phone calls, website visitors, new Facebook likes, new insta followers, Yelp star rating, New yelp reviews, Google star rating, Google reviews, Promotions, email blast statistics, etc.
- Practice management / CRM Software – keeps track of your patient database, appointments, referral sources and sales. Whichever you choose, I would make sure they are mobile friendly, and that you can run a number of reports to support your marketing initiatives, for example a report on referral sources, patients due for an appointment, and patients who came in for a consultation and did not book a procedure.
Ultimately there is zero reason not to utilize the immense numbers of amazing software products available in the market today. There really is something for everything. So whether you’re looking to better manage your teams to-do lists with task/project management software, to managing your employee review schedules and performance programs – utilizing 3rd party software is very often the way to go.