PracticalDermatology

There was a time when medical professionals could rely on word of mouth alone to grow their practices. This is no longer the case, as we live in the age of social media now. Smartphones have virtually become an artificial appendage for most people as they are hardly seen without one. A majority of these people also rely on the internet to find information they need—from what kind of diet to follow to which dermatologist to consult.

Medical professionals today can benefit enormously from having a strong online presence. It can particularly be beneficial for dermatologists, as this field is intensely competitive. One of the best ways to market your services to potential patients is through inbound marketing.

Inbound Marketing: The Method to Find New Patients

Inbound marketing is a strategy to attract potential clients without chasing after them. It involves creating valuable content and offering it to your target client base using various methods, like search engine optimization, content marketing, and social media marketing.

Inbound marketing differs from traditional outbound marketing in the sense that it does not badger potential clients with advertisements, which many people find annoying. Instead, it creates and offers informative and interesting content to potential clients through various channels and makes it easier for them to find you.

It uses a four-step strategy: Attract, convert, close, and delight. The first step deals with attracting potential leads. The second step deals with converting them into clients. The third step deals with turning them into loyal clients. And the fourth and final step deals with creating a delightful and positive experience for end users at every step of the process. This helps ensure that they not only remain loyal clients but actually become advocates and promoters of your dermatology services and products.

The Need for Call Tracking in Inbound Marketing Campaigns

There is no point in creating a high-quality inbound marketing campaign if there is no mechanism in place to track and analyze how well the campaign performs. Moreover, if you aim to reach as many potential patients as possible, you need to run multiple online marketing campaigns through a variety of different channels. Unless you track and analyze each and every campaign, you have no way of knowing what works and what does not. This is precisely why call tracking is required.

Call tracking provides you with important, actionable data about the people who call your business. Ask any marketer, and s/he will tell you that callers are the hottest leads for any business.

The conversion rate (from leads to clients) is much higher among those who call a business compared to those who respond to a campaign via email or social media. This is why any campaign that you create to market your dermatology services should include a call tracking mechanism.

How Does Call Tracking Work?

A call tracking system can be used to assign a unique phone number—commonly called a tracking number in online marketing lingo—to each of your campaigns.

For example, if you plan to run five different campaigns or the same campaign on five different mediums to gauge the response from your target client base, five unique numbers can be assigned to each campaign. All five of these numbers can be connected to your main business number.

When people call your business, you can see which tracking number they are calling from. Based on the number of calls you get through each tracking number, you can easily determine which campaign is getting good response.

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“In your face” marketing is a thing of the past. Learn three strategies for successful inbound marketing in this Ekwa.com Educational video.

Benefits of Call Tracking

Call tracking is an inexpensive option that offers several benefits:

• Using call tracking, you can find out the specific source of each phone call you receive from a prospective client—be it a particular PPC ad (pay-per-click), landing page, blog post, or whitepaper. You can use the data to narrow down the methods that actually work and the ones that do not. You can also find out which social networking website brings you more call traffic and what kind of blogs, articles, e-books, and whitepapers garner more attention from your potential clients.
• Call tracking systems show you when and from where people are calling you. By analyzing the data, you can find out if people are more likely to call your business on weekdays or weekends, if you receive more calls at a particular time of the day, if you receive more calls from a particular area, and more. Based on the information, you can schedule your staff's work hours and make sure the best person is on the job during peak calling hours.
• One of the biggest advantages of call tracking systems is that they can record incoming calls. Call recordings can give you valuable information about your potential clients, what kind of problems they have, what their concerns are, what kind of solutions they are looking for, and many more.
• Call recordings can also help you assess the performance of your staff and manage them more effectively.
• If you analyze the call recordings, you might be able to notice a pattern in most cases. People might ask certain questions repeatedly, they might want to know certain things about you, and they might be more interested in certain products and services. You can then provide your staff with all the required information so that they can handle the callers better and answer all their questions in a satisfactory manner.
• Call recording provides you with information on the geographic location of your potential clients. Using the data, you can find out where most of your potential clients are located, which areas are untapped, and which locations give you the best return on investment with respect to your marketing efforts.

Inbound Marketing and Call Tracking— Keys to Success

The combination of inbound marketing and call tracking can help you market your services to potential clients more effectively. Armed with an extensive amount of data on your potential clients, you can fine-tune your marketing campaigns to address their needs. As a result, you can get a better response from your target client base and better returns on your marketing investment.

Naren Arulrajah is President and CEO of Ekwa Marketing, a complete internet marketing company that focuses on SEO, social media, marketing education, and the online reputations of dermatologists. With a team of 180+ full time marketers, www.ekwa.com helps dermatologists who know where they want to go, get there by dominating their market and growing their business significantly year after year. If you have questions about marketing your practice online, call 855-598-3320 to speak one-on-one with Naren.