Three Ways to Measure Your Marketing Efforts

Marketing should be a significant investment for your home-based care organization, yielding a similarly meaningful return. Spending one to three percent of your annual revenues on marketing should produce a two to four times return on investment. Though, a 10X return is well within reach.

Marketing initiatives take time to realize stable and predictable returns. But, how do you know your investments are having an impact?

Here are three simple ways to measure the impact of your marketing efforts:

• Referrals by Source, Over Time – Most organizations monitor the institutions and physicians who comprise their primary sources of referral. Tracking this performance over time and by disease state is key to tracking and cultivating the long-term value of referral relationship. Aim to continuously improve and streamline the collaboration between the physician group and your organization.

Hospice providers should be paying attention to family\self-referrals. Most hospice organizations receive around 10 percent of their referrals directly from patients or family. With marketing efforts, this number should easily double or even triple.

• Length of Service – Recent data shows that more than 40 percent of patients deemed home health eligible at hospital discharge never receive the benefit. A lack of understanding of home health benefits may be a primary driver. Marketing can increase understanding and help achieve a consistent length of service, as well as reduce rehospitalizations.

In hospice, the average length of stay is a good metric of whether patients are entering the hospice system earlier. According to national benchmarks, most patients receive 14 days or less of the total 180-day hospice benefit. Marketing has proven to increase Average Length of Stay (ALOS) by 10 days or more. Some of our clients have successfully doubled that increase.

• Integrated marketing dashboard – While the other two performance measures are truly lagging indicators, creating an integrated dashboard can provide real-time measures of marketing effectiveness. These dashboards bring together metrics across the spectrum, including call volume, website traffic and advertising performance, among other measures. Clients who have adopted this approach have been able to increase marketing effectiveness and target their spending on the most impactful efforts.

Done right, marketing should be a powerful engine for your organization, helping to elevate awareness, referrals, engagement and culture. Measurement approaches help you know if your marketing mix is working and can provide areas where improvements or enhancements are needed to increase performance. Don’t give up on marketing. Simply use the tools at your disposal to do it smarter and improve every day.