Marketing best practices change every year. To make sure your promotional efforts are effective, analyzing every piece of your marketing strategy is helpful to ensure you’re getting a good return on your investment. But which behavioral health center KPIs are best?
What exactly should you be tracking when it comes to your behavioral health center’s digital marketing plan? Should the metrics to evaluate performance change as often as the marketing does? And which metric is most important?
Every marketer should ask these questions to maintain a dynamic, effective marketing strategy. Measuring efficacy and, ultimately, ROI is the only way you’ll know if what you’re doing really works. But with so many different types of digital marketing initiatives and techniques—each one with its unique set of key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure success—there are literally hundreds of KPIs you could measure in thousands of different combinations.
The 3 Behavioral Health Center KPIs You Need
Sounds overwhelming, doesn’t it? Well, we have good news for you. Figuring out if your digital marketing strategy is working as intended isn’t all that difficult. Here are the top three KPIs you should put in place to measure marketing ROI.
1. Growth
Growth is where your behavioral health center’s digital marketing success starts. Growing your e-newsletter subscribers, growing your social media followers, and even growing your website visits are separately and together reliable indicators of digital marketing success.
In terms of email marketing, assess your subscriber list. Look at the net subscribers you attract each month. Are there months you consistently fall flat or grow? What are you doing differently in the months when you sign up a significant number of subscribers?
The same goes for your social media. Evaluate your net new followers each month and see if you identify any trends. Do you get more followers when you post more or less content in any given month? What topics prompt a surge in followers?
In terms of your website, you need to know how many users are visiting each month. Even more importantly, you need to analyze and understand where those leads came from. Learning whether you’re getting most of your visits from organic search results (like prospective patients performing a Google search for “drug rehab near me” or “local detox centers”), people searching for your treatment center specifically by name, through a paid ad, or even a random backlink will help you prioritize your digital marketing efforts to make the most of those user funnels.
2. Engagement
Engagement is one of the most important behavioral health center KPIs. Users sign up for your newsletter, or they follow you on your social media page. But how are they interacting with your treatment center’s content? That’s what engagement measures.
For social media, measuring engagement is pretty easy. Your likes, shares, and comments are excellent indicators of engagement. Again, don’t just notice when engagement is happening. Step back and ask why your audience is engaging with a particular piece of content. Are your users partial to videos or infographics? Do they follow when you post how-to articles? Maybe they prefer when you simply share your expertise in a less formal format. Understanding the reasoning behind the engagement is essential to creating a successful digital marketing strategy.
Calculate your engagement by dividing your likes and comments on a single post by your total number of followers.1 Multiply by 100, and you’ve got an engagement rate! Aim for an engagement rate of 3% or higher. That’s considered above average.
On your website, one way engagement is measured is by assessing page views per session, which shows how many pages a person looked at during their entire visit to your website. Most users will view about two pages per session, but adding internal links can help boost that number.2
To evaluate your email strategy, assess how many people are unsubscribing per month. The average is about 0.17%, and that’s okay!3
Unsubscribes may leave a bad taste in your mouth, but they’re incredibly valuable to your overall strategy. An unsubscribe takes a low-value lead off the table and helps you narrow your audience demographics. And this means you’ll have more time and energy to spend on clients who are actually interested in your services.
3. Conversion
The goal of your behavioral healthcare center’s digital marketing strategy is to connect your program and services with the patients who need them. A good metric to understand how well you’re meeting that goal is measuring your conversions. In marketing, a “conversion” is when someone visiting your website or engaging with your digital presence takes a predefined action. For your program, this could look like scheduling an appointment or touring your center.
Calculate the conversion rate by dividing the number of conversions by the total number of users and multiplying by 100. On your social media page or email communications, this could be the number of people who click a specific link. Or on your website, this could be the number of people who fill out a contact form.
Whatever your conversion goals are, use that metric to determine just how well your digital marketing strategy is performing.
Interested in learning more about the best metrics to measure your addiction treatment center’s digital marketing plan? Dreamscape Marketing can help. Schedule a strategy session with us by calling 888.307.7304.
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