BLOG: Correlation between radio and internet leads for refractive surgery
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Since 2004, I have been the medical director and sole surgeon of San Antonio Eye Specialists. San Antonio is the seventh largest city in the United States and has more than 2.5 million residents living within the metropolitan area.
Our primary focus at San Antonio Eye Specialists is refractive surgery, cataract surgery and refractive cataract surgery. Over the years, the majority of our marketing was focused on internet and radio. But in recent years, our radio leads (patients who say they heard us on the radio) have dwindled. However, our internet leads have dramatically increased, with no substantial change in budget, in the past few years. This makes total sense as more consumers are searching for LASIK on the internet, but when we tried to cut our massive radio budget, we didn’t get the results we expected.
Because our radio campaign did not seem effective anymore, we decided to cut the budget by half. After all, why spend more than needed if the profit margins are low? When we did this, we saw a decline in refractive leads. The drop in patient volume led to concern. What was different? We were getting about the same number of radio leads despite our substantial media budget decrease; however, internet leads plummeted suddenly. We checked to make sure all of our online marketing was working, links weren’t broken and website landing pages worked, but nothing seemed amiss. Next, we looked at competitors in our market to see if they were doing something different, perhaps a new campaign or an increase in budget (which is fairly easy to find out — ask your marketing agency) and still nothing had changed.
After a few months of the continuing trend, we decided to bump our budget back to its original amount to see if there was any correlation. Sure enough, after just a few weeks, our internet leads returned to normal, and that led to an increase back to our normal (desired) volumes.
How to explain this turn of events?
We deduced, people who heard our radio commercials would most likely remember our commercial and search online for us at a later time. We call this indirect advertising. One venue or source of advertising reinforces another source of advertising. Maybe our name or radio message became more memorable when doing a Google search, or maybe patients literally made a mental note to research us online at another time. In advertising, this is known as top-of-mind awareness, or TOMA. This is basically a strategy to get your name or brand out there in as many ways possible to make it easily recognizable and memorable to the general public with repetitive exposure. For instance, when searching for a new car, someone may consider a particular dealership because they encounter their advertisements frequently on a variety of platforms (TV, radio, social media, etc). Regardless, we were very happy and decided not to make this mistake again. Live, experience and learn.
How to account for accurate referral sources?
When most patients are asked, “How did you hear about us?” they will often only give the first source they recall. Keep in mind, patients don’t always accurately remember the radio station of advertising. Sometimes patients list a station we are not advertising with. They simply recall the marketing source as radio. And note, even hearing competitor ads is beneficial because it causes patients to search general terms on Google such as LASIK. We look at competition as healthy. We suggest listing all your most important marketing sources on your new patient paperwork. So, instead of inquiring how patients heard of your practice, we suggest the patient checks on all marketing sources that are pertinent. For example, if someone chooses both radio and internet, give each source half credit when trying to calculate a return on investment.
It is important, as every refractive surgeon who advertises knows, to track every marketing source and all marketing dollars spent as accurately as possible. Each lead costs $100 to $200, and it is fundamental to monitor what is working to make sure your hefty investment in adverting is sound, effective and profitable.
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