Marketing Metrics – Which metrics matter (and which don’t!)

Join us to learn which marketing metrics physical therapists should be measuring, and which they should let collect dust! One of Co-Kinetic’s core values is to help you navigate your way through the maze that appears to be marketing, save you time, and help you to drill down to the small number of marketing activities that can actually move the needle for your business.

We say “the maze that appears to be marketing” because marketing isn’t as hard as most people think it is; as long as you focus on the right things. What can be confusing is understanding the numbers that go hand-in-hand with your marketing strategy. You need to decipher these numbers so you can measure your marketing, and plan accordingly to get the results you need, in the most cost-effective way possible.

Good marketing is about doing more of what works, and ditching the stuff that doesn’t, but to know that, there needs to be an ongoing process of testing, measuring, adapting, retesting and re-measuring. And we certainly can’t afford to waste time on measuring things that don’t matter.

Let’s start with the UNimportant marketing metrics…

While there are several things you do need to be tracking, there are also many metrics you don’t need to track! So firstly, let’s vanquish the vanity metrics!

In short, vanity metrics are things that don’t serve an actionable purpose, or in other words, they don’t directly drive a business goal. This article by Michael O’Neill is great, and describes vanity metrics including social media likes, website bounce rate, social media followers and organic traffic growth.

These vanity metrics do not correlate to revenue in any way. They’re useful to measure brand awareness of course, but there are more important marketing activities to be investing in and prioritising before you throw money down the brand awareness drain!

And now onto the important marketing metrics…

There are metrics that you need to know in order to answer the question: If I spend £100, how much can I expect to get back? This is essential to know when it comes to planning your ongoing marketing strategy.

1. Average search position for buyer-intent keywords

Buyer intent keywords – these are search queries which show that somebody is actively looking to make a purchase (they’re ready to buy from you). It’s worth employing some SEO (search engine optimisation) input to help you find out what these queries are to help you optimise your SEO! For example did you know that sports injury gets twice as much local traffic as back pain, and ten times as much as neck pain or sciatica? Knowing this is key, if you’re going to get found on the search engines. Chris Dann from Marketing Your Cinic Online wrote a brilliant downloadable e-book which he provides free through his website (https://www.marketyourcliniconline.com) and which has been written specifically for physical and manual therapists.

2. Email leads collected

As you’ll know, I believe that growing and nurturing your email list is arguably the single most important marketing activity you can do. Collecting new email leads is one metric that can correlate with revenue. Once you’ve collected these email prospects, they can (and should) enter an email nurture process, based around sending regular value-adding resources, like links to the patient leaflets that we provide through Co-Kinetic. Building and nurturing your email list helps you build trust, establishes authority, strengthens relationships and ensures you stay at the forefront of your prospects’ minds, ready for when they reach their ‘clinical tipping point’ and need to seek your help.

3. Lead magnet downloads

Providing people with free, helpful, downloadable resources (often referred to as lead magnets) is one of the best ways to collect marketing-qualified leads ie. email addresses for people who are genuinely interested in the services you offer. This is why you need to use an email lead collection form to offer these free resources (we provide pre-built/hosted/designed forms exactly for this purpose through our Social Media and Clinic Growth subscriptions). Not only does this help you build your email list, but it also means you get a better understanding of what information your prospects want, meaning you can get even more targeted about what you send them in the future. Better targeting means better open and click rates (engagement) and better engagement means an increased chance of those people becoming customers.

4. Marketing-qualified leads

A marketing-qualified lead (MQL) is someone who’s demonstrated an interest in your services based on marketing activities you’ve put out there. This could be anything from lead magnets they’ve downloaded, to web pages they’ve visited on your website. Essentially they’re demonstrating an early interest in the services you offer. The goal is to turn a MQL into a sales-qualified lead…

5. Sales-qualified leads

A sales-qualified lead (SQL) is someone who’s demonstrated a greater investment or effort in you, and has engaged at a deeper level with your marketing activities. Better engagement means a greater chance that they’ll become a customer. For example, attending an educational workshop or webinar that you’ve delivered shows more engagement than downloading a lead magnet.

6. Conversion rate

Your conversion rate is the number of prospects who become paying clients divided by the total number of prospects entering the top of your funnel (for example email sign ups). Say you collect 100 email leads and through your excellent nurture process, you convert 10 of those into paying clients, your conversion rate is 10%. The quality of your nurture process ie. building trust > strengthening relationships > offering incentives to become a paying customer, is key to a good conversion rate.

7. Customer acquisition cost

This is one of the most important marketing metrics and tells you how much it costs you to acquire a new customer (surprise surprise!). At the very simplest level it can be calculated by dividing all the costs spent on acquiring customers (marketing and sales expenses) by the number of customers that were acquired in the period that money was spent. Whenever you run campaigns, make sure you keep track of any costs you incur. Bear in mind that you may still get a new customer from a marketing campaign that you ran several months or even years earlier. So it’s impossible to be 100% accurate.

Ideally a marketing campaign would have 3 steps:

1. Run a social media awareness campaign offering a lead magnet, and designed specifically to help you collect email addresses of people interested in your campaign (pay to promote some of these posts to really accelerate your email lead collection)
2. Nurture these prospects with additional relevant emails and resources – always focusing on adding value, and ideally not pushing for sales
3. Run an event or make an offer for something exclusive to these well-targeted/qualified leads. For example, run an educational workshop, and then give attendees (who have at this point become sales-qualified leads demonstrating genuine engagement in your services) a priority/incentivised-opportunity that’s not available to other members of the public, to convert to becoming a paying customer.

Keep a record of all the costs involved in this process and then divide that by the number of customers generated to get your customer acquisition cost. You should then look at your customer acquisition cost relative to your customer lifetime value (or customer episode value).

8. Customer lifetime value (CLV)

This is the metric that indicates the total income you may reasonably expect from a single customer throughout the lifetime of their business relationship with you. For example, how many treatments would you expect to provide per episode (injury/condition/issue) and how many episodes might they see you for, during your business lifetime.

Disappointingly, most people don’t have good enough tracking to account for the number of different times a customer might see you for a different issue, but at the very basic level you need to know the average number of treatments you would expect to provide per customer. In most cases this is between 4-7 treatments per episode. If your cost per appointment was £60, this would make your customer episode value between £240-£420. By comparing this figure with your customer acquisition cost, you can see whether you’re getting a good ROI from your marketing efforts (ie. your CLV is significantly higher than your customer acquisition cost), or a poor one (ie. the CLV is not significantly higher than your acquisition cost).

So there you have it; some of the key marketing metrics that you do and don’t need to pay attention too!

What’s Next?

In this article we give you step by step instructions for Building and Implementing a 12 Months Marketing and Sales Plan including a downloadable spreadsheet you can use to help you track the metrics above. You can find that article and spreadsheet here.

And if you’d like to delve into this topic in greater detail, we have a longer version of this blog post at this link.

About the Author

Tor Davies is a former-physio, turned publisher who founded the peer-reviewed translational journal, sportEX medicine in 1999 (which given she still thinks she’s 25, makes her a child-prodigy)! She went on to develop Co-Kinetic – an easy-to-use marketing solution for Physical Therapists which includes automated social media, a huge library of tried and tested marketing resources, email templates, nurture funnels and much, much more. Tor, by her own admission, is obsessed with efficiency, automation and creating user-friendly technology that helps business owners do more, with less. She is constantly looking for ways in which she can apply the 80:20 rule to whatever she’s doing! She loves making new connections – you can find her on Facebook and LinkedIn or if you’d like to book a chat with her to discuss your marketing you can do that here.