The client literally cheered when they saw the results: The amount of new revenue was roughly double what they spent on the campaign.
Last fall, a client of Infinity Marketing had a question that’s all too familiar for agencies: How do we know if the money we’re paying you is actually helping us make money?
Infinity was running a geographically targeted campaign for the client, who is in the healthcare sector. The goal was to drive more patients to some of their new or underperforming locations. Each location had a dedicated landing page and phone number that was linked to digital ads that Infinity placed.
The Greenville, SC agency could show those ads helped create leads. But they had zero data that could prove those leads became patients that contributed to the client’s bottom line.
The client didn’t have a traditional CRM system to store lead data, so they didn’t know when or if leads were converting to become new patients.
And that was a big risk for the marketing budget, said Meghan Dimas, Infinity’s senior manager of analytics and insights.
“We obviously have to prove that the investment is justified based on the return. Clicks are great, but the C-suite cares about the bottom line,” she said. “We have to say, ‘Here is what the ROI is, here’s what the cost is to acquire each new patient from marketing.’ Otherwise, they simply don’t get approval to go and do these really targeted and integrated campaigns.”
So Meghan and her team got to work. By the end, the client was literally cheering.
THE SOLUTION: Connecting media investments to leads to new revenue in one ROI dashboard
By using a little lateral thinking, Infinity found a workaround to the lack of a CRM as a central source of truth that could connect all client data together at the individual lead or patient level.
The agency coordinated with the client to get appointment data inclusive of phone numbers, but stripped of any other sensitive information. Using Alight’s ChannelMix platform, that data was then moved via SFTP to an encrypted data warehouse alongside performance data from the agency’s media campaigns.
Infinity matched those confirmed patient numbers from the client’s electronic medical record system to the ones they collected through the campaign’s landing pages, webchats, contact forms and call tracking software. It was the missing link between leads and paying patients.
But they didn’t stop there. Using Tableau, Meghan and her team created an ROI dashboard that showed how paid media led to incremental web and phone leads, and then how many of those leads ultimately became patients as a result of paid media efforts. The dashboard lets the client filter marketing performance by individual locations, marketing channels, lead source and other factors.
“What it came down to is, if we get specific questions, we want to be able to give specific and definitive answers.”
Meghan Dimas, Infinity Marketing
The dashboard runs on multiple datasets created with ChannelMix.
ChannelMix automated the collection of campaign data from more than eight different sources, including paid digital media sources like Google Ads and The Trade Desk, alongside Google Analytics web data, call-tracking data, and contact form and webchat reporting. Alight’s data strategists gave advice on the best way to integrate that data in a sustainable way.
In collaboration with ChannelMix, Infinity was able to create a single source of truth that is updated automatically each day. It gives the team at Infinity an accurate, automated data foundation to perform more advanced analysis for the client and provides near real-time updates on how their campaigns are performing across each stage of the funnel.
“We used ChannelMix where we could to facilitate all of the automation and all of the updates,” Meghan said. “Without a CRM system or another single source of truth on the client’s end, this was the most logical and the cleanest way to avoid human error and other sustainability or scalability issues long-term.”
THE RESULTS: The agency’s investment in media doubled new patient revenue within the first campaign window.
In the dashboard, Infinity could even provide a rough estimate for how much revenue their campaign generated, using the estimated first-year EBITDA for the average new patient.
This was visibility that neither the client nor Infinity was able to get to previously — something that will surely be used to drive strategy for future marketing campaigns!
The amount of new revenue was roughly double what they spent on the campaign. The client’s leadership team cheered.
(Even better, the dashboard has built-in flexibility. If the client gets more refined revenue numbers later, they can easily update the dashboard to calculate their return.)
The client is already embarking on another campaign with Infinity, and Meghan is excited to apply the lessons learned from this ROI dashboard to their other healthcare clients.
“This next campaign will hopefully yield even stronger results,” she said. “As long as the client makes their initial investment back and then some, they’re going to continue to work toward doing more targeted marketing campaigns across a media mix that drives in leads at every stage of the funnel — hopefully at a consistently higher budget.”
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