This post is the third in a series on our approach to performance marketing. Stay tuned for the next blog in this series.

When you’re ready to engage with an agency to make performance marketing part of your revenue generation strategy, it’s important to start by speaking in plain terms about what business problems you’re trying to solve. One of the biggest challenges in these early conversations is that people try to translate the issues they’re solving into the language of performance marketing, something that may not necessarily feel comfortable for them.

Instead of helping to advance the conversation, what it actually does is take away the value that a really strong performance marketing agency brings to the table. A strong agency can help you transform a straightforward business problem, like not getting enough patients into a specific service line, into an actionable and effective strategy.

That’s what you should expect; your agency should be able to translate your pain points and business objectives into clear solutions. If you start doing too much of the translation work before you begin the conversation, you actually lose the insight on whether or not they’re capable of doing that which is really the magical skill.

Getting started

Think about your strategy as a series of concentric circles, each one representing where people are when they’re ready to take action. Paid search is popular because it’s the clearest example of people actively looking for your services — the centermost circle. They’re trying to find you, and you want to be present if they have a condition in your service line. But prospective patients also need to know about you and think of you when they’re not actually searching, and that’s where the upper funnel brand awareness comes in — with each channel and tactic incrementally expanding the audience target until, in theory, you’ve reached everyone in your geographic footprint.

A holistic strategy is a combination of making people aware of you before they know there’s a problem and capturing demand that already exists. When you think about your KPIs, another question you’ll need to answer is how far you need to get into the market for you to be successful — to reach, but not exceed, your capacity.

Is there a best fit service line

With the right mix of data, technology, creativity, and strategy — all of which we have at Unlock Health — you can make performance marketing work for any service line. Insights from your first party data are the most important component of the strategy.

Organizations that have great electronic systems, like Epic^®, have a rich pool of data about who is coming in the door, what they’re doing, who the payor is, and how engaged they are. But there are limits on how you use and deploy that data while remaining compliant in a complex privacy landscape.

Though Google^® or Meta^® data doesn’t allow you to see the specific individuals who are engaging with you, you can make some correlations. You can see who is searching for the services you offer, demographic information, interests, and the type of websites they’re on. It will all contribute to building out a deeper understanding of who they are, and that allows you to determine how to proceed.

The key to performance marketing — collaboration

In most cases, marketing leaders are still leading the charge toward using performance marketing. But the big breakthrough for the strategy can easily come from someone other than the marketing leader. On our largest accounts, we’re often engaging with the CEO, CFO, or a Chief Strategy Officer in addition to marketing leadership. That’s because in those organizations there’s a more 360-degree view of how marketing impacts the organization.

For today’s healthcare marketers, the job is made even harder because achieving your goals has required a roster of agencies — the strategic agency, the creative agency, the tech agency. And yet there’s always been the missing partner — the agency who understands healthcare so deeply that it makes great work easier. Unlock Health is a full-service agency that makes great work easier through a combination of art and science — creativity fueled by data, insights, and deep expertise in the business of healthcare.

Like what you’re reading? Stay tuned for the next post in the series.