Is your healthcare facility on the hunt for a marketing automation tool?
If that’s a ‘yes’, you’ve taken the first step in what is sure to be a fantastic decision that you’ll benefit from in the years to come.
There are many ways that you can automate the repetitive tasks that are key to developing your marketing campaigns and sales activities, but challenges emerge when you have to decide on the most effective healthcare marketing automation solution for your facility.
There are several marketing automation tools that offer powerful support systems, but ultimately, the tool you decide on will depend on the features that are closely aligned with your business goals.
While it’s important to ask yourself whether your healthcare facility is ready for marketing automation solutions, it’s equally important to ask the vendor a few questions before you decide on a marketing automation tool.
Here are a few questions that you can ask to make sure you’re getting the right solution for your healthcare facility.
#1: What are the CRM integrations you provide?
Unless your marketing and sales teams prefer working in silos, the last thing your healthcare facility needs is two sets of databases that don’t integrate with each other. There are several CRM platforms that can easily help with this problem. By using the right tools—like Keap—you can seamlessly integrate your existing platform with the new one.
This is an important question since it can help the transition go much faster and a lot smoother. If you opt for a CRM that cannot integrate with your existing platform, you may have to spend more time and resources to get through this initial hurdle. Therefore, make sure to ask about the integration capabilities before you determine which tool to go ahead with.
#2: Do you have any additional integrations?
When it comes to integrations, they don’t generally stop with CRM. You’ll want to know how these automation platforms can integrate with other aspects of your healthcare facility.
Aside from a clean integration with your existing CRM, you may have other tools that you want to integrate with your new automation tool. Ask your vendor if their CRM is capable of integrating with these additional platforms. Be prepared with a list of these must-have integrations so that you can clear the field of those who cannot accommodate your requirement.
#3: How does data flow from your platform?
It’s great to have perfect integrations between platforms and tools, but it’s meaningless if you can’t get a complete overview of the data you need to make the important decisions concerning your marketing campaigns.
For instance, your healthcare facility may want to combine data from different systems dedicated to CRM, ERP, and SEO in a way that’s both convenient and accessible using application program interfaces (APIs). You could even have scheduled exports in widely used formats such as “.xls”.
#4: Can reporting be customised?
Reporting is still the Achilles heel of platforms that are otherwise ideal for healthcare marketing automation. There’s no real benefit of a great marketing automation platform if it cannot give you the data and reporting needed to make decisions about existing campaign performances and create better campaigns in the future based on past performance.
Ask vendors about the exact reporting options they offer and convey the type of data and reports you’re looking for that are vital for your operation. If the vendor isn’t able to provide you with the reporting you need, you should probably keep looking for others that can.
#5: Can your automation platform measure success?
If you’re not focused on reporting, tracking, and ROI, it’s time to bring these use cases to the top since they’re the leading measures of success for any marketing campaign. The marketing automation tool you select needs to be able to report, track, and measure your ROI.
Measuring the success of a campaign based on revenue generation is no longer viable as companies need to dig a lot deeper. Maybe your revenue has increased and you’re having more success with getting patients to seek medical care, but which of your marketing efforts is responsible for this shift? And which had the least impact?
Effective marketing automation is generally flexible and has customisable dashboards and reports that can offer you the data you need, quickly. Ask your vendor about the kinds of metrics they offer and compare them with your list of metrics to decide which ones you absolutely need and which ones you can overlook.
#6: Do you provide support?
It seems like a foregone conclusion that any healthcare marketing automation provider would offer support to a new client—especially one that’s new to automation—but that’s not always the case. The last thing that any client would want is a generic customer support email or a phone number that they need to call if they’re having any problems with your platform.
This may be a question that many overlook, but it’s an important one to ask. Get complete clarification on what type of support the vendor offers and obtain details about the hours during which they’re available and if there’s an additional cost for such services.
Healthcare marketing automation—know what you’re buying
When it comes to business process automation in healthcare—or in this case, marketing automation—you need to know what you’re investing in before you make your decision.
Create a list of all the things you’re looking for from a marketing automation solution and run it against what is offered by the different vendors you’re considering.
This is the best way your healthcare facility can get the most effective marketing solutions to ramp up your next marketing campaign and help you reach a wider audience that’s looking for the medical services you offer.