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How Healthcare Providers Can Reduce Their Cost-Per-Lead

Alana Jenkins, Marketing Manager | Posted on June 26, 2019

How Healthcare Providers Can Reduce Their Cost-Per-Lead

New patient acquisition plays a central role in every healthcare organization. Whether you are using inbound marketing strategies, paid advertising, blogging or a mixture of tactics, it’s important to monitor your cost-per-lead to ensure you are optimizing your resources.

What is Cost-Per-Lead?

In healthcare, cost-per-lead (CPL) refers to how much it costs a healthcare provider for someone to show a clear interest in becoming a patient. Prospective patients are considered leads once they take a clear action, like providing their contact information to unlock a piece of content or responding to a Facebook ad by signing up for a webinar about sleep.

Here’s how to calculate the cost-per-lead of an advertising campaign: Once you determine how many leads you obtained from that campaign, divide your total cost by the number of leads and you’ll have your cost-per-lead.

But what about leads that don’t come from a paid advertising campaign? Those can be harder to identify. Imagine someone chose to give you their email address to access a digital guide. Web analytics and CRM data might be able to help you understand where this person came from, whether it was an online ad or organic search results. Beyond that, it’s hard to know how much of your organization’s content they consumed. They could have read every single blog post on your website, or they could have gone straight to the sign-up bar.

You can calculate your total cost-per-lead by dividing your entire marketing budget for a set time by the number of leads you got during that same time period. If that number is higher than you’d like, here are some ways to decrease your CPL.

Ways to Reduce Cost-Per-Lead

Do you really know your ideal customers and clients? If you don’t already have them, you need to create buyer personas for your ideal customers. Buyer personas help you get inside the minds of your patients so you can provide them with relevant ads and content that appeal to them. You can create a buyer persona based off of your current patients and their behaviors as well as psychographic and demographic data.

Once you have more specific information about the ideal patients you want to attract, you can optimize your ads and content based on their preferences. Ask yourself: are you writing blog posts that your prospective patients actually want to read? Research effective keywords and ask current patients what they’d like to learn. Then, do the same for your ad campaigns. Make sure your ads appeal to your ideal patients. Otherwise, they likely won’t convert.

Once your content is ready, focus on targeting. Note who is seeing your ads. Don’t cast too wide a net; effective patient acquisition strategies are narrow enough that ads are only going to prospects who could benefit most from them. It might be counterintuitive, but it’s a better plan to narrow your targeting (and pay a higher cost-per-mile or cost-per-click). By doing so, you’ll be reaching more ideal patients who are more likely to convert.

Psychographic Segmentation & Cost-Per-Lead

We mentioned psychographics briefly earlier, but this data deserves its own section since it plays a critical role in decreasing your cost-per-lead. Psychographic Segmentation goes into your ideal patients’ preferences, values, lifestyles and choices to motivate them to take an action. PatientBond uses a proven and proprietary model that categorizes patients into five segments so that you’ll be able to see what factors drive their behaviors. Ultimately, it helps you create accurately targeted ads and messaging.

For example, Self Achievers are a proactive segment. They respond best to messages that acknowledge the fact that they are actively working toward their health goals. Direction Takers, on the other hand, are a reactive segment. Consumers in this group respond better to messaging that highlights the authority of doctors’ recommendations and explains how they can easily fit a particular test or treatment into their routine.

By integrating psychographic segmentation into your patient acquisition strategy, you can ensure that you’re focusing on the best possible messaging. Optimizing your copy, images and targeting can all make an impact in helping you decrease your cost-per-lead and attract new patients.

For more on psychographic segmentation and how it can bolster your patient acquisition efforts, download our case study.

How Psychographic Segmentation & Digital Marketing Boost Urgent Care Patient Acquisition



Topics: Psychographic Segmentation, acquisition, patient acquisition, amplify engagement, cost-per-lead

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