Measuring Return on Marketing Investment
By Kevin Wilhelm
As the owner of a marketing agency in eye care , I spend most of my week talking to practice owners about what we can do to help grow their patient acquisition numbers , their average patient value and their overall practice revenue . Through every single conversation I have with a prospective client , the same question arises – almost like clock work : How can we measure the effectiveness of our marketing ? Now , I love this question because the answer has become amazing . But before we get into the answer we give today , let ’ s review what the answer to that question has been over the past few decades .
When the television was invested and produced for mass consumption , big brand marketers could measure the effectiveness of their marketing investment based on the correlated sales of their products within a day or two of their commercial going live . Agencies would buy more commercial time if they saw a spike in sales and they would grow market share .
For small businesses , television marketing wasn ’ t an option and so they relied heavily on word-of-mouth . Do a great job with your customers ( and in your case patients ) and people would tell others and those people would show up . Sometimes they would take an ad out in the local newspaper and watch for an increase in foot traffic that week ( the shelf life of a newspaper ad is one week maximum ). Believe it or not , measuring your return on marketing investment was quite easy decades ago as the options were limited and consumers spent the majority of their time engaging with only a select few platforms .
Only until recently has marketing been difficult to measure . Looking back to the mid- 1990 ’ s , consumers were diversifying their free time across numerous platforms , more than ever before . In the same day , a person could be exposed to advertising through newspaper , radio , billboards , bus advertising , bench ads , direct mail – to only name a few . As a business owner , how were you supposed to know which of these initiatives were generating the highest ROI ? Were any a complete bust ? Where should I spend my next marketing dollar ? All of these questions were valid and marketers had to use instinct and deductive reasoning to figure out the answers .
16 EYE FOCUS | June Digital 2017