It's a reality in healthcare that no single organization can cater to everyone's needs, and I believe that this should be taken a step further - no healthcare organization should aim to help everyone because each healthcare journey is unique.
If a healthcare organization is not a good fit for a patient, neither the patient nor the organization will achieve the best outcome. Unfortunately, many healthcare organizations excel at reaching the wrong people, and one reason for this is poor lead quality. Often, the marketing team generates a high volume of leads, but the quality is low, resulting in patients who are not a good fit and are unlikely to book appointments. This leads to wasted time and money for the organization.
If you offer healthcare services that require more consideration before making a purchase decision, such as senior care, addiction treatment, or behavioral health, you are likely to understand this situation. To address this issue, here's what you should do.
A Five-Step Approach to Improving Lead Quality
Healthcare organizations that are successful in generating leads have a strong strategy in five key areas. Firstly, they have the ability to assess leads accurately, using important metrics such as customer acquisition cost (CAC). Secondly, they take measures to prevent the typical causes of poor lead quality. Thirdly, they have a framework in place that accurately tracks conversions and ensures that the leads are of high quality. Lastly, they are proficient in managing and nurturing leads, not just creating them.
Let's examine each of these components in more detail.
1. Understand the Leads You’re Already Creating
“Measurement is the path to understanding,” a Very Wise Person once said. To better understand your lead generation process, you should start by analyzing your existing lead data. This will help you identify which leads are valuable and which ones need improvement. By examining the data, you can also determine what successful and unsuccessful leads are searching for and what steps they take during the journey. Furthermore, you can determine where the leads come from, such as PPC, Facebook Ads, or organic search.
When analyzing the data, you should look for trends that may suggest opportunities for improvement. For instance, if you notice that many profitable surgery leads fail to convert, you may realize that they need more information on post-surgery rehabilitation care. To achieve this, several critical metrics can offer insights, including the length of the buyer's journey, click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate (CVR), customer acquisition cost (CAC), and revenue contribution.
Another way to gain insight into the patient journey is to examine your call logs. You can use call tracking and analytical software like Call Rail and Liine to identify the cause of poor lead quality. By analyzing call recordings, you can recognize common patterns that result in a mismatch between you and a prospect, leading us to the next point.
2. Know How to Spot the Signs of Suffering Lead Quality
As part of your evaluation, you’ll want to look for the common signs and causes of poor lead quality. The three most common causes that we see are:
Mismatch between what the lead wants and what you offer
How well do you know your ideal customers and what they want? If you’re not meeting their needs and intent at each stage, your lead-generation metrics will suffer.
Messaging either over promises or inaccurately describes your solution
Expectations are everything. If a lead enters your pipeline expecting to consult with a surgeon but can’t get an appointment for six months, you might have a problem. Or your website says you offer a service that you really don’t.
Messaging doesn’t provide enough detail about your solution
One common example is the healthcare provider that doesn’t offer insurance information on their website. What happens when leads come in that may need a different type of insurance or payment option? Insurance is a widespread objection.
3. Hone Your USP and Strengthen Your Ad Creative
Some call it a recipe for improved lead quality. We call it a framework. Either way, you need to make these three disciplines an embedded part of your lead-generation strategies:
Research the Ideal Patient
You need to understand what your ideal patient is actually looking for so you can appear on searches for those keywords. One way to go about it is to build a comprehensive keyword strategy. Your keyword strategy is the foundation that determines the success of your advertising and SEO strategy. Both rely on your ability to target the keywords your ideal customers are using.
Where can you source that information? Try customer surveys of past patients for a particular service or product, for one. You can also tap into (or conduct yourself) larger market research. One-on-one patient or customer interviews can also provide valuable insight.
You might also rely on customer data analysis and call tracking for your research purposes. The latter is an interesting tactic, as you can listen to recordings to identify common problems, yet another way to understand your customer in their own words.
Define Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
In How to Define Your USP and Improve Your Healthcare Marketing, I go into great detail on the importance of a crystallized USP. The strength and specificity of your USP will differentiate you in crowded and competitive markets. It can help improve lead quality by engaging and persuading your ideal patient.
To define your USP, you can use many of the same avenues you use for keyword and customer research. Generally, think about the unique capabilities or services that you offer. Special equipment or technology? Training, experience, or credentials? What about your patient experience? These are common differentiators for healthcare providers.
Invest in Good Ad Creative
Good ad creative is key to helping you attract the right people through digital advertising. We see a lot of generic, cookie-cutter digital ads in healthcare. While this “spray and pray” approach might generate lots of impressions, clicks, and even leads, lead quality and cost tend to be poor for a couple of reasons:
- No differentiation in terms of messaging and branding
- Doesn’t resonate with the people who want what you’re offering
What goes into differentiated ad creative? First and foremost, the messaging ought to embody your USP in creative and engaging ways (time to hire a copywriter!). Yet, your graphics and linked marketing assets (blog posts, testimonials, etc.) are another opportunity to articulate your USP and show your value to your ideal customer.
4. Train the Algorithms
Another more technical way to improve lead quality from your ads is to tell Facebook and Google algorithms what happened to conversions (form-fills and calls). This means pushing patient data back to Google and Facebook to “train” those algorithms with better data.
When the algorithms know which forms-fills and calls turned into real patients, they can then optimize to find more people like those using machine learning. Here’s how we share that information using CallRail, as an example:
5. Sharpen Your Lead Management Processes to Improve Conversion Rates
You can improve lead quality considerably by focusing your efforts on lead generation. You can also do so after the fact—after a lead comes in through form-fills or calls. What’s preventing those patients from booking appointments? Sometimes, it comes down to a lack of quality “touches” from sales, marketing, and practice operations.
To that end, monitor the sales process in terms of the volume of calls coming in, as well as the quality of follow-up. You might find that messages and calls aren’t getting returned due to staff shortages or a broken process. I’ve seen situations where leads just get lost in the CRM because they’re not tagged properly. As leads advance through the funnel, it’s so important to track progress using your CRM system.
Then there is your lead nurturing. As they say, out of sight, out of mind, especially for healthcare decisions that take a long time (plastic surgery, for example). This is why you need to nurture leads with routine communication. At the very least, new leads ought to be put into bucketed nurture sequences (email or text) that keep your solution top of mind.
In the End, It’s About Narrowing the Focus and Working Smarter
The common theme across all four parts of the approach we’ve laid out is two-fold:
- Be far more efficient with the leads you already have
- Be a lot more intentional about your target audience and their pain points
You don’t increase your win rate by bombarding the entire internet with ads. You do it by getting the most of your existing lead pipeline and addressing your audience’s pain points with greater efficacy. To that end, here’s John McAlpin, our SEO Director, in our webinar on how to build successful SEO strategies:
“One thing better than keyword research is your actual patient. If you’re the provider, talk to the people answering the phone and booking appointments. Find out what the difference is between someone booking an appointment and not. A big one in healthcare is insurance. Find out what that barrier to entry is and make that prominent on your website, in your campaigns, etc.”
If I had to put my money down on why your lead quality is suffering, I’d say the answers are already there. You just need to know where to look for them.
