Monitor and Track Vascular Marketing Efforts

In order to determine the success of a vascular marketing effort, it is vital to create a means by which to monitor and track your efforts in advance of the campaign.

Establish a baseline.

The key to tracking vascular marketing efforts in an effective way is to create a baseline of volumes and awareness levels about your program within the community. Then make sure to get all parties involved to agree on the baseline numbers. Develop criteria levels that determine success and measure progress frequently as you implement the campaign. Tracking should be the task of one person with in the hospital.

Utilize tools to help monitor and track vascular marketing efforts.

Call Center - If possible drive all ad traffic to a common 1-800 number and have a call center field the calls. A reputable call center, such as Beryl, accomplishes two tasks: 1. it gets people the information they need quickly and 2. it gathers demographic information about ad responders. Call centers can tell you how many calls were received from a particular marketing effort, where the calls came from geographically, and how the caller heard about your organization. Some sophisticated call centers can event rack the patient who responded to a phone call all the way through the hospital system to determine if they received treatment as a result of the marketing effort.

Data Analysis - Eventually you will need to report whether or not the marketing efforts have increased vascular volume. The best way to do this is to enlist the help of a hospital data analysis service such as INTELLIMED. With this you can look back retrospectively on inpatient data by type of procedure performed, patient demographics, and physician. This is where your initial analysis comes into play. You will be able to compare the number of patients coming from specific zip codes. So if your marketing efforts are targeted to particular geographic areas that did not typically refer patients prior to the campaign and after the campaign you see an increase of patient from those zip codes, you can infer success based on your baseline. Finally take that data and compare it to your competitor's data. Look to see if market trends have shifted.

It is best practice to pull all of these reports weekly or monthly then provide reports to executives.