Opportunity Lost: When Inbound Marketing Doesn’t Work in Healthcare

When opportunity knocks, you’ve got five minutes or less to answer the door or the game’s over. Consider this: The most wasteful expense in inbound marketing occurs when you fail to respond quickly…or at all.

When opportunity knocks, you’ve got five minutes or less to answer the door or the game’s over. Consider this: The most wasteful expense in inbound marketing occurs when you fail to respond quickly…or at all.

Healthcare providers, hospitals and medical practices pump big bucks into content-driven, inbound marketing efforts that engage and entice prospective patients to come to you. They often employ a challenging combination of online search, web forms, landing pages, social media, blog posts and other tools.

The first product of inbound marketing is opportunity knocking via web-generated prospects that reach out for more information, a live person to talk with, or a desire to make an appointment. More often than not, this balloon of this magic marketing moment bursts without an immediate response or reply. Would-be patients quickly go elsewhere.

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Studies confirm that you’ve got only moments—five minutes or less—to respond, reply or call or the moment of interest or need drops from “sizzling-hot” to “no-way or never.” Considering that the Internet moves along with the nano-second speed of a mouse click, a five-minute gateway allowance seems incredibly generous…and maybe unrealistic.

There are startling numbers in an in-depth MIT study of Lead Response Management:

• Prime inbound marketing leads decay rapidly after five minutes, and your odds of ever reaching a web-generated prospect plummets by 900 percent.
• Data from other sources, such as InsideSales.com, confirm that nearly 80 percent of customers buy from the business that was first to respond.

Therefore, the faster you respond to an inbound inquiry, the consumer is better served, the likelihood of success increases greatly, and your investment in inbound marketing has a fruitful payback.

Similarly, we’ve seen six-figure advertising efforts go down the tube when nobody answers the phone, can’t properly handle the call, or the office is “closed for lunch” just when the prospective patient is most interested.

Creating an inbound marketing system…

This five-minutes-or-less advisory is a reminder that your inbound marketing effort is a bottomless bucket without a first-class system in place to capture enquiries and, most importantly, to provide a fast and responsive reply almost instantly.

If you would need some third-party assistance in evaluating your present plan, or help building a new cost-effective inbound marketing system, connect with us here.

Five minutes is an Internet eternity for people searching for an answer to their healthcare need.

Stewart Gandolf, MBA

Author information

Stewart Gandolf

Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder at Healthcare Success Strategies

Stewart Gandolf, MBA, is CEO of Healthcare Success, a medical marketing and health care advertising agency. He is also a frequent writer and speaker. Most importantly, he is happily married and a “rock-n-roll daddy” to two wonderful girls.

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