When it comes to customer acquisition for your Patient Engagement and Education business, the phrase “it takes money to make money” is very true. You will need to make a financial investment in areas like branding, promotions, and marketing before you start seeing returns. This financial investment is especially high when you are using traditional methods of marketing, like print, trade shows, and ads. Fortunately, you can reduce your customer acquisition prices for your Patient Engagement and Education company using Inbound Marketing strategies. A Weidert study found that Inbound Marketing costs 61% less than traditional marketing. Here are some ways to start Inbound for your business to reduce your customer acquisition costs:
The first step to lowering your customer acquisition costs is to identify exactly who you want to target. Doing this will help you go after your ideal buyers and keep you from spending money on those who aren’t interested. Buyer Personas are imaginary personalities that represent ideal customers that you want to target. For instance, you can have ‘Clinician Calvin’ or ‘Director Daniel’. What are their responsibilities in the company? What are their goals? What are their obstacles? A comprehensive understanding of your ideal customers will help you develop a good strategy to reach them.
From the very beginning, you need to decide what you want to achieve with your marketing goals. For example, if your goal is to get more qualified leads, all of your initiatives should be centered around the marketing toward a particular market, aka your buyer personas. Be sure to use SMART goals (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time-bound). For example, producing 500 leads every quarter is a more specific goal than just wanting to get more leads. It is a good idea to start small and boost your goals as you go.
Developing informational content that your ideal buyers can use is the core of Inbound marketing. As soon as you have identified your marketing goals, you should begin laying out your content strategy. The content you develop must be full of important information to bring in new site visitors and engage your existing leads. This will boost your brand name recognition for both your new and current leads. But don’t start with just a straight sales pitch. As great as your Patient Engagement and Education service or product is, you need to first develop trust with your target market by supplying relevant information about what they are experiencing instead of just marketing your business. Content can be anything from blogs, social media posts, case studies, ebooks, webinars, videos, and whitepapers. Posting guest blogs on other reputable Patient Engagement and Education sites is also a great way to reach a larger target market. To make it less complicated for leads to find your content via online search, be sure to use Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Do some research to find out which long-tail search phrases are used when your ideal customers are searching online. Insert these in your URLs, headers, paragraphs, meta summaries, and alt photo messages. This will boost your site’s ranking in online search and enhance your presence.
Your potential customers are most likely not ready to buy on your first call. They will need time to talk to others, ask questions, and study alternatives. A good Email Lead Nurturing campaign will help keep potential customers engaged until they are ready to make a buying choice. One of the best ways to do this is with marketing automation. You can use CRM software programs like Marketo or Hubspot to automate your emails and social media posts to the right people at the right time. Marketing automation allows you to collect the emails of your target market and send them useful information. This will help keep your brand name at the top of their mind and boost the possibilities of making a sale.
Every once in a while, you should assess how Inbound marketing is working for your Patient Engagement and Education firm. Evaluating your work will help you better understand which strategies are working and which aren’t. There are many tools that can help you check your effectiveness. For example, BuzzSumo will show you how many times your content was shared across social media. Google Analytics will help track metrics like the number of site visitors and their bounce rates. Moz and Hubspot will help you track SEO development. Using your findings, you will have the chance to tweak the Inbound marketing strategies that best fit your Patient Engagement and Education firm.
As the director of all operations, you might have easily overlooked the effects of traditional marketing on your customer acquisition expenses. These marketing methods not only drain your cash flow, but they take power away from your marketing team. With Inbound Methodology, you can bring in the best leads to your firm and nurture them until they turn into customers. We’ve worked with numerous Presidents, CEOs, and Directors to help carry out Inbound strategies with their marketing and sales groups. Don’t hesitate to ask for a complimentary strategy session to help you examine your properties and get free advice on how to lower your customer acquisition costs.