The beautiful thing about healthcare marketing in a digital world is that you’re rarely left wondering if you’re getting it right. Long gone are the days of guessing the effectiveness of a promotion or channel. With tools ranging from vanity URLs to event tracking, heatmapping to website analytics, we have access to more data now than ever before.

But data in and of itself doesn’t do a whole lot for you. The real value lies in what you do with it.

Give Context to Your Numbers

For data to be truly useful, you have to take the time to analyze it. And when you do, don’t forget to dig deep. For example, don’t just look at which traffic sources have the highest volumes. Take it further and identify which traffic sources have the highest engagement levels. After all, a high amount of traffic may not matter if those users aren’t engaged.

Take tracking the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts. If your primary goal is to build brand awareness, you could closely monitor your online reputation and social media mentions to see if your efforts are making an impact.

Or, if you want to directly tie your content marketing efforts to appointment requests, implement trackable phone numbers and appointment request forms. From there, determine how many of those requests came from users whose first touchpoint with you was a content marketing asset. To push it one more step and really prove the ROI of your efforts, combine this tracking with an integrated CRM to map your downstream revenue.

Act on What You Learn

After your analysis, use your new-found knowledge to drive thoughtful observations about your users’ behaviors. Then, compare that to the expectations you had about what your users would do in your digital spaces: social media, search results pages, your website and much more. Finally, make changes based on your discoveries to improve your digital experience and meet users’ needs.

If you aren’t optimizing your efforts based on data-driven learning, your digital presence isn’t any better off than if you weren’t gathering the data at all.
The digital world is always shifting, and that means we have to be ever watchful of how users interact with our online content. Knowing when and how behaviors shift helps you adjust your efforts in a timely manner. It ensures you’re always on top of the changing digital landscape and on the leading edge of providing users exactly what they need, when they need it.

And it helps not only your users but also your bottom line. Could you ask for anything more?