It's a tragic and extremely costly story - and unfortunately one that we see all the time.
Perhaps it has even happened to you.
Every day, hospitals and healthcare organizations across the USA invest hard-earned money into marketing, yet see zero new patients from their efforts.
Weeks and months of solitude go by, until finally their frustrations boil to the top:
"Stop everything. Marketing doesn't work!!!!"
Careful. They (and you) can easily make a very costly mistake here.
While poorly conceived and executed ads will generate zero results, oftentimes the problem lies not with the ads but with how the resulting calls are handled.
Wasted opportunity: Poorly handled phone inquiries may be costing your business many thousands of dollars in lost revenue each month
Here's a true case history to illustrate our point. (It's one of many, including hospitals and medical providers of nearly every stripe.)
A group we work with in the Southern US was utilizing external advertising to grow its medispa services.
However, when the ads hit the streets, the people at the front desk reported zero phone calls, and zero new patients. Of course, that's never good news.
Suspicious, we inserted unique tracking phone numbers into their ads, so that we could independently assess what was really going on. Our objectives:
(See our article on this exciting new tracking technology Tracking the Source of New Patients to Maximize Your Advertising ROI)
As we suspected, the ads were in fact generating calls, but the front desk was dropping the ball. Here's what we found:
At our live 2-day meetings, we often refer to these kinds of problems as "kinks in the hose."
No matter the volume of water (inquiries) that is trying to get through the hose (your front desk), nothing comes out the other end (new patients).
As is common, this particular location had a lot of kinks, so it took a few months and a couple of on-site trainings to fix them.
Fortunately, this particular practice was very coach-able, motivated and worked diligently with us to attack their problems. We are still making refinements, but here are some concepts we've successfully shared and implemented with them.
The astounding total cost of poor inquiry handling
Our aforementioned practice discovered its problems and tackled them head-on. We're not completely finished yet, but most of their biggest problems have now been solved, and almost all inquiries now result in a new visit. And that will have a BIG impact on their bottom line.
Lots of kudos to them.
However, the vast majority of practices out there who gave up on marketing unknowingly suffer from a "quiet disaster."
They don't even know whether their problems were due to ineffective ads or poor inquiry handling. They just know it "didn't work," so they stopped marketing all together.
And that's tragic because their wasted advertising expenditure was peanuts. Their real cost is the opportunity cost.
For example, let's say a given practice invested $10,000 in advertising that should have generated $50,000 in long-term profits. Or that $50,000 in advertising should have generated $250,000 in profits. Or their $250,000 marketing budget should have brought in $1 million in profits.
Because they quit, they walked right by a huge revenue opportunity that could have paid big dividends year after year after year.
As you can see, this is an important issue, so we highly recommend you take action to ascertain whether or not you suffer from these problems, and if so, begin fixing them right away.
The cost of inaction is just too great to bear.
If you'd like our help, call (800) 656-0907.
Note: See also Phone Skills Can Make or Break Your Practice and Tracking the Source of New Patients to Maximize Your Advertising ROI
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