There is a wide variety of marketing management solutions available to medical practices — an overwhelming amount, even. We recently discussed the many factors to consider when deciding whether to use a variety of digital marketing providers or work with a more multi-capable partner, but let’s take a closer look at one of the most important points for the success of practice owners: data consistency.
Medical practices of any type or size can feel real effects from a marketing plan that doesn’t prioritize data organization. Think about all of the information you deal with — organizing patient information, tracking patient leads, missed appointments, measuring ad campaign performance… if your data isn’t integrated and organized in a way you can see and understand, results will be impossible to track.
Here are some of the real issues to consider:
Data spread out across too many different platforms
- It's time-consuming to collect, organize, and analyze data from platforms that weren’t designed to work with one another. A sufficiently capable marketing partner can bring all of your marketing data together, as well as integrate some practice management tasks (e.g. appointment booking) into that system to provide a comprehensive view of how your campaigns are performing.
Data redundancies
- Using multiple systems can result in tracking the same prospective patient in different marketing campaigns but counting them multiple times, which doesn't paint a clear picture of the online interactions that led to them becoming a patient.
Vendor survival concerns
- If a company that you trust with your practice’s vital data goes out of business, what will happen to that information? The digital marketing world moves fast, and if a tactic you’ve put stock in becomes obsolete, you could be left to build a new pool of information from the ground up.
An integrated, all-in-one marketing solution eliminates these problems by channeling all of your data to a single platform.
At the end of the day, practice owners must decide for themselves which tools are best in their specific situation. In our experience, though, the takeaway is simple: data provided by an all-in-one partner that is organized and accurate is much easier to translate into an effective marketing plan by giving you the information you need to make the right decisions for your practice.
For more information about the pros and cons of using multiple marketing vendors or an all-in-one provider, read this blog post or contact us here.
