Is Your Content Marketing Investment Paying Off?

Here, marketing expert and Doximity’s Director of Client Success, Liz Kilby, shares tried-and-true strategies for evaluating your strategy’s success.

Does content marketing work?

As a marketing professional, you’ve probably been on the receiving end of that question. Digital technology allows consumers to exercise more control over the purchasing process than ever before. In turn, content marketing has evolved as a way to reach and engage discerning customers by serving them relevant information related to their specific topic of inquiry. This model also works when marketing to physicians. 
In theory, this arrangement is fairly straightforward. However, measuring the returns of your investment is a much more complicated process. Here are four straightforward ways to tell if your bet on physician-focused content marketing is paying off.

1. You’re Reaching Qualified Audiences

At the core of any strong content marketing strategy is the aim to reach a specific audience. Physicians are a notoriously difficult audience to attract. They’re looking for timely, hyper-relevant and informative content that meets them where they are. 
When you’re paying to promote content on any number of channels, there are a handful of ways to gauge whether the group you’re trying to reach is connecting with your ads. For example, increasing views and click rates on your Doximity posts are a strong indicator that your content is headed in the right direction.

Alternatively, low quality scores, such as those you might see on Googleor Facebook, are a sign that you should clarify your message or speak more directly to your audience.

2. You’ve Noticed Increased Brand Awareness

Brand awareness is a key component of effective consumer marketing, as well as an essential aspect of physician marketing. One key indicator of success for physician-focused awareness campaign is a lift in national award rankings.

Using influencers to directly engage target audiences, and evaluating success against the referral source of your traffic, is another way to determine whether brand awareness is increasing.

3. You’re Building a Physician Referral Network

Physicians referrals are perhaps the most sought-after result of content marketing. But how can you tell if a physician referral is linked to your content marketing efforts?

If you have a select group (e.g., an alumni network) at the center of an awareness campaign, target them with content that is specifically geared to their interests in order to influence their opinion about your hospital. You can then evaluate claims data using specific NPI numbers from those who interacted with the campaign to draw conclusions about whether there has been a general lift in referrals.

At Doximity, we also measure the success of patient acquisition campaigns by the corresponding increase in physician referrals.

4. Engagement Is on the Rise

Strategic content can make you more discoverable, but it can also endear you in new ways to existing audiences to build affinity and loyalty. This is best measured through engagement.
The easiest way to tell if content is building a meaningful relationship with your physician audience is to look at who wants to remain involved with your brand. At Doximity, we specifically measure engagement in the following ways: