When deciding to invest money in a marketing strategy, the ultimate goal is to bring in new customers. To ensure marketing efforts are effective, the source of each patient or customer should be tracked. This can prove to be challenging for many businesses, especially when patients recite that they heard about the practice through “the internet.”

Marketing tracking is extremely important for allowing businesses to make smart marketing decisions. By tracking and reporting the performance of a marketing campaign, businesses can measure its’ efficacy and make changes as needed. Yet, when using a variety of internet marketing tactics, such as blogging, social media marketing and search engine optimization, clearly defining where patients are coming from can be challenging.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

The majority of website visitors are anonymous to the business because unless they pick up the phone or fill out a form, no one will ever know they were there. Statistics show that less than 3% of web visitors fill out a form or call the business. This means that 97% of visitors are lost, with no way of knowing who they were or what made them visit the website…that is until now.

Benefits of Marketing Automation

There are valuable marketing automation tools now available such as reverse IP lookup, which provides detailed insight into website visitors. This powerful data can include names, emails and even phone numbers, which can be used to send powerful messages with content that is specific to what they are interested in.

By knowing that a visitor is interested in a particular service, product or procedure, businesses can construct a call to action that is unique to their interests. By sharing the right information at the right time, the opportunity to convert a website lead into a patient is dramatically increased.

Content marketing combined with an effective marketing automation strategy can prove to be a win-win for any business. Especially those wanting to truly understand who visits their website and how to transition them to a patient.

Businesses using internet marketing should consider how they are going to track website visitors. They should also create compelling content that is relevant to the pages visited by prospects. If the manpower or technology to do this does not exist, consider partnering with a company that can provide these services. Getting someone to your website is only half the battle. Possessing the tools and knowledge needed to convert them to a patient is a vital step in any medical marketing strategy.