Calculate Your Medical Practice's Social Media ROI

I often get asked, "What is the ROI on social media marketing for my practice?"

Return on investment is a pretty popular metric because it is really versatile and relatively simple to calculate. Let's look at how we can apply that to determining the ROI for social media in your practice.

Here is the formula: ROI= (return-investment)/investment

First, we will begin with the steps to calculate your return. This can be where the waters muddy a bit because your "return" can mean so many different things to different marketers and different practices.

Step 1: Choose a goal

Determine what your goal is related to social media:

• New followers?

• Clicks on links?

• New patients?

• Signups for newsletter?

• Downloads?

All of these have value, and all of these lead to the ultimate goal of new patients coming to the practice.

Step 2: Track your goal

Choose one or more of the above goals and track it. All of the metrics in my example are easy to track. Followers, clicks, signups, and downloads are calculated for you on social-media platform insights and metrics. New patients garnered from social-media efforts are more difficult to track because there is a human element involved and many practices fall short in the follow through required to track them.
Tracking new patients is as simple as asking every patient who calls or comes in the door, "Where did you hear about our practice?" In order to accurately track this information, staff must understand that this question is just as important as "How will you be paying?"

Many practices fail to see the importance of this information, but if you are spending time or money on social media and other marketing efforts, and not asking where patients heard about your practice, you are potentially wasting valuable resources.

Step 3: What's it worth to your practice?

Once you have your goal and you have tracked your goal, it's time to add the dollar value to what you have achieved. There are a number of ways to do this:

• If you are tracking new patients, you can assign a lifetime value that you will get from the average patient. (One new patient typically covers the cost of a moderately aggressive social media campaign, when done well.)

• If you are tracking followers, clicks, signups, or downloads, you can assign a dollar value based on what it would cost you to get that kind of exposure through other advertising means such as pay-per-click, radio ads, TV ads, or other advertising areas.

Step 4: Tally up your investment costs

Basically, you are going to look at a couple of numbers: your time or the cost of having a service like ours do this for you; your social media tools, for example, Buffer is costing you $10/month; and your advertising spend. Add these up to get your investment.

Then simply calculate via the formula ROI= (return-investment)/investment.

You can then compare that number to other areas in your practice and other advertising methods you are investing in and the return you are receiving in those areas.