It is no secret that healthcare has made a migration towards the Internet. Between the abundance of online information and higher insurance rates, hospital Between the abundance of online information and higher insurance rates, hospital revenue growth has been on the decline. In fact, 2013 revenue growth dropped to 3.9% from the previous years growth of 5.1% (Moody’s Investor Services). This has left hospitals and other healthcare providers scrambling to attract attention through digital channels in order to stimulate their patient levels. Ad Age recently posted an article detailing the importance of digital marketing for the healthcare industry. The article states that hospitals, clinics, and medical centers spent about $1.8 billion on U.S. measured media last year, and a lot of the media spend is being designated towards online marketing.
Healthcare Marketing Shifts to Digital
Healthcare marketing has transferred its focus to digital media channels, and for good reason. Instead of going straight to a doctor, tremendous amounts of people are first performing Internet searches in an attempt to diagnose their symptoms. The Internet is not always the most accurate diagnostic tool; so many people still end up seeking out an opinion from a professional.
The next step becomes finding the right physician, clinic, or hospital to visit, and social media has had a huge impact in this process as well. Online healthcare listings and reviews have become a huge source of new patients for providers. Driving appointments through online marketing has become one of the most successful channels for medical practices. With the amazing popularity of smartphones, a significant number of online medical information is being found through mobile. Between mobile search and the popularity of healthcare apps, patients are finding a care provider on their smartphones.
Online Marketing for Healthcare Drives More Appointments
Thanks to smartphones, people are responding to online marketing by calling doctors to make appointments more than ever. Google reports that 61% of mobile searches result in a phone call. Getting a potential patient on the phone is one of the fastest ways to convince them to schedule an appointment, and in turn drive more business for healthcare providers. Knowing where those calls are coming from is incredibly important for optimizing online marketing efforts and understanding which online sources are driving calls and appointments.
Marketers tasked with lead generation for healthcare providers have an easy enough time tracking prospective patients through online channels, but when that prospect picks up the phone to call in for information or to schedule an appointment, they are lost to the marketer. In order to remedy this issue, marketers have turned to call tracking. Call tracking allows marketers to attribute each and every phone call back to its original source, enabling marketers to optimize the marketing efforts that drive calls and appointments, as well as providing the ability to prove the impact on the bottom line.
How Vitals Uses Call Tracking
One company that has found huge success through call tracking is Vitals. Vitals’ websites, which include Vitals.com and UCompareHealth.com, are the source of highly credible reviews and valuable research on healthcare providers. Vitals’ enhanced listings promote their clients’ healthcare services on prominent sections of their websites. With roughly 10 million monthly visitors to their websites, Vitals drives a lot of appointments for their clients.
For Vitals, proving to their clients the volume of calls they are generating is a top priority. To do so, they turned to DialogTech’s call tracking solution. Vitals uses call tracking numbers on their enhanced listings to prove that each call came from their enhanced listings, regardless of whether the caller dialed the number on a landline or called from a click-to-call link on their mobile phone. Call tracking data is then integrated with Vitals’ own custom reporting system so they can present their clients with robust analytics and truly demonstrate the ROI they provide.
In order to further enhance the value they provide their clients, Vitals also incorporated IVR (interactive voice response) into their services. They use IVR to qualify inbound callers and then route them to the appropriate place. This makes it possible to weed out the people who want to schedule an appointment from those who are just looking for information.
Using call tracking, Vitals was able to demonstrate how their clients experienced a 7.5x increase in call volumes and appointments. To learn more about how Vitals uses DialogTech to drive results, check out our case study: Vitals Uses DialogTech to Prove How They Drive 7.5 Times More Appointments to Healthcare Providers.
