Results-driven patient acquisition for clinics

The Impact of AI on Google and SEO: Are Local Search Dynamics Shifting? In recent weeks, there’s been significant buzz about how emerging AI-driven search engines, like SearchGPT, could impact Google and SEO. Gary Vaynerchuk even compared today’s evolution in search engines to the disruption that web crawlers caused to traditional yellow pages—a big shift in how people find information.  What?!

In the fast-paced world of private healthcare, clinics often struggle with marketing agencies that fail to deliver tangible, measurable results. The relationship between marketing agencies and private healthcare clinics is frequently strained due to two significant issues: 1. Inaccurate Attribution of New Patients: Nearly 40% of new patient enquiries come from phone calls. Many marketing agencies lack the necessary tools to track these accurately, leading to incomplete and unreliable reporting. 2. Narrow Focus on Specific Marketing Channels: Many agencies excel in only one or two areas, such as Google Ads or social media funnels. While this can drive growth in those areas, it often leads to overlooked opportunities, such as website optimisation, which can severely hamper the clinic's overall growth success. Clinics are also often locked into 12-month contracts, wasting valuable time on a revenue growth that needs to be fully aligned with their growth objectives. This causes stagnation, with only the marketing agency benefiting in the short term. Clinic owners are frustrated and hindered in their long-term growth.

Quick Article Stats UK Search Engine Market Share in October 2024 Google: 93.61% Bing UK: 3.91% Yahoo UK: 1.37% DuckDuckGo: 0.6% Worldwide Search Engine Market Share in October 2024 Google: 90.01% Bing: 3.95% Yandex: 2.34% Yahoo: 1.35% Baidu: 0.81% DuckDuckGo: 0.65% Quick summary: Google continues to be the most widely used search engine in the UK with a market share of 93.61% despite the numerous privacy-related controversies, antitrust investigations, and other problems it has faced such as the feedback from the release of AI Overviews. As of October 2024, Google commands a 93.61% share in the UK, which is lower than the 94.42% held in August 2024, suggesting a very small decline in market share. In February 2024 Bing held its highest-ever search engine market share at 4.22%, It has steadily declined monthly to 3.38% in August 2024, before slightly picking up in October 3.91%. Google's growth over 2023 and continuing into 2024 is extra impressive after the release of ChatGPT 4.o - In early May 2024, Microsoft introduced a new version of its Bing search engine, which came equipped with an innovative ChatGPT feature. It will be interesting to see the impact of SearchGPT on Google's market share in the coming months.

It's all very well launching marketing campaigns that will bring in new customers, but if you don't know the cost to aqcuire a patient, how do you know what is working? And if you need to know what is working, how do you know where to spend for future growth? Put simply, you don't. Understanding your patient acquisition cost (PAC) is the most critical metric for clinics and their marketing agencies to increase their clinic's bottom line. It's common in healthcare marketing : ag encies invest in marketing campaigns without the necessary systems to accurately attribute their success. For instance, adding a chat widget to a site without clearly understanding which chats lead to conversions or labelling all calls from Google ads as 'leads'. This lack of precision can lead to misguided spending and missed opportunities. Identifying the leads that successfully convert into patients is the key to understanding what's truly effective in your marketing strategy. Without this knowledge, your spending may not be directed to the most beneficial areas, leading to wasted resources and a missed chance for sustainable growth. What is patient acquisition cost? PAC stands for Patient Acquisition Cost (PAC), which represents the amount spent on acquiring a new patient for your healthcare practice. You or your marketing agency must be well-informed about these figures to ensure sustainable clinic growth. It serves as the primary metric for evaluating the effectiveness of your marketing spend. The goal is to minimize this cost relative to your customer's lifetime value (CLV). It also serves as the foundation for your clinic's growth, as understanding exactly how much it costs to acquire a patient enables you to plan your clinic's growth effectively. How do you determine patient acquisition cost? It is essential to define the elements that contribute to deciding on PAC. Cost per lead (CPL): The cost to acquire a lead. Patient Conversion Rate (PCR): Your lead-to-sale conversion rate Patient Acquisition Cost (PAC): The cost to acquire a new patient To determine your patient acquisition cost, you use this simple formula: Cost Per Lead / Conversion Rate = Patient Acquisition Cost Clinics that partner with Klatch often experience a cost per lead (CPL) of about £25, resulting in a patient acquisition cost of £35.71 with a 70% lead-to-sale conversion rate. This informs you that if you spend £700 on marketing next month, you'll bring in an average of 20 new patients. If your customer lifetime value is £500, this will result in £10,000 of new business. Future planning and marketing spending becomes much simpler when you know your true PAC and can adjust your marketing spending based on your growth goals. Why is getting an actual patient acquisition cost so difficult for clinics? This all begins with setting up the correct lead attribution. You can only obtain a valid CPL if you track new leads effectively across all routes, including calls, forms and emails. With a valid CPL, it's possible to determine your clinic's PAC. This is the primary reason we have set up our unique lead tracking software : to enable clinics and their marketing agencies to obtain a valid CPL by tracking calls, forms, emails, chat widgets, etc. Once this is in place, you can determine your valid PAC. How can understanding your actual PAC fuel growth? When you understand precisely how much revenue you generate from your marketing spend, your marketing actions become much more accountable. It becomes more of a 'put this much money in' to 'get this much money out' scenario. It's a very nice scenario for a clinic owner and much less arbitrary than most current approaches. On top of that, you can start to decipher channel performance MoM and plan accordingly. Let's say your Google Ads PAC increases 20% to £42 MoM. As a marketing agency or clinic owner, this is extremely powerful as you know exactly where your previous month's inefficiencies lie and can plan accordingly. This ensures that lead figures are much more stable and sustainable over time. At Klatch, we use PAC as our clinic's north star metric, which enables us to understand marketing performance and truly build sustainable clinic growth.

Many clinics come to Klatch because they need to acquire more patients. Acquisition is often called the first stage of a customer's journey, followed by activation, retention, referral, and revenue. These stages are proposed here as subsequent stages of a simplified marketing funnel, sometimes referred to as the AAARR framework in marketing. One of the most immediate and impactful ways to grow your clinic's revenue is to acquire new patients. Building out your clinic's growth process has three phases: High-level strategy Quarterly planning In-quarter execution Stage 1: High-Level Strategy When starting with Klatch, the first and crucial phase is defining your growth model, mapping your customer journey, and identifying your growth channels. By mapping growth metrics to the customer journey and adapting channels and tactics accordingly, clinics can create effective marketing strategies to fuel growth. Klatch's expertise in all growth channels makes us uniquely positioned to leverage our knowledge and focus in the right places to grow your clinic. When looking at acquisition for clinic growth, which is usually the biggest opportunity to grow revenue for clinics, we're focusing on the channels and tactics you use to introduce patients to your service and make them convert: SEO PPC Social Media Website optimisation (CRO)