3 Questions to Ask If You’re Feeling More Busy Than Profitable

A man is feeling busy as he holds a stack of coins and points to a graph.

While it’s certainly a good thing to have a full schedule as a healthcare provider, sometimes it’s possible to be fully booked up but still seeing not good profitability. If you find yourself feeling this way, there are changes you can make with your marketing to help get more out of the time you spend booked up. Here are three questions to ask yourself as a starting point to figure out where your marketing might be causing more busy work than profitability in your healthcare practice. 

1. Are you booking enough of your most profitable procedures?

One of the most important metrics for healthcare practices to calculate is called patient lifetime value (LTV). The formula is fairly simple:

Average revenue per visit x annual visits x years with practice = patient LTV

The idea here is to increase the first variable by booking more of your most profitable procedures. This increases the average revenue per visit for your practice, which results in a higher LTV for your practice. 

How do you target and book more of these specific procedures? The answer is marketing, from the content on your website to your local listings to your paid search and search engine optimization (SEO) campaigns.  

2. Are you bringing in high-intent website visitors? 

Another common problem you might be experiencing is a lot of incoming website visitors who aren’t particularly ready to book appointments. Understanding what the searchers who visit your site are looking for is critical, because not all searches are created equally. The differences are referred to as high- and low-intent, and it’s as much about meeting patients where they are as anything else.  According to Wordstream, 50% of all searches now include more than 4 words. Search engines are trained to understand user intent, and users have subsequently learned to get as specific as possible with the queries they use to search for healthcare information and providers. What are examples of this in action? 

Searching for “dentist,” which would be considered a low intent keyword, becomes significantly higher intent when you add “dentist near me who takes Guardian.” Understanding which high intent keywords are bringing patients to your practice – as well as which keywords are good opportunities for you to potentially rank for – will help you tailor your marketing strategy around them. 

3. Have you audited your marketing strategy lately?

Ultimately, too much work and not enough profit indicates that your marketing isn’t performing the way you want it to. If you haven’t audited your marketing strategy lately, it’s worth taking a look at every touchpoint and strategy you’re running to make sure things make sense and are working properly. Here are a couple things to look for specifically:

Changes or Underperformance

As you survey your marketing, keep an eye out for dips and downward trends in performance that indicate something is wrong. Routinely auditing your marketing can help catch these dips before they become a bigger problem. 

Broken Things

Another benefit of regular audits is catching things that break before they stop visitors from becoming patients. Test the elements on your site like forms, buttons, and other interactive elements to make sure they’re all working and doing what they’re expected to do. 

We Can Help

If you’re looking for more help optimizing your marketing, you’ve come to the right place. MyAdvice has been helping practices like yours for more than 20 years. Book a complimentary consultation with one of our digital marketing experts today for more information.

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