When you start a plan of care for a patient, you listen to their goals, assess their starting point, create a path for them so they can succeed, and depend a great deal on patient compliance. In order to see an ROI for digital marketing, it needs to be approached just as you would a plan of care for one of your patients.
Just as you need your patient to remain compliant with the plan of care, you will need to follow “suggestions” to improve your ROI.
When Can I Expect to See a Return on Investment?
The answer to this question is also similar to that of one you would give a patient; it depends on your starting point, your compliance, and your commitment to improving your situation. If you keep going out and golfing when your back hurts, you’re going to keep aggravating it. In the same sense, if you continue to make decisions without SEO in mind, you are going to continue to struggle.
The fastest and most cost-effective way to see a greater ROI is to update your website structure to an optimal format; Google’s requirements for websites update monthly, but large updates typically happen about every 12 months. Performing this update will allow your dollar to go further because your website structure is tailored to the search engines and topics people are looking for. While your patient may have trouble seeing their results after a month of hard work, you have been trained to see measurements of success that they might not understand; the same goes for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Digital marketing is also a tax write-off, so if you see one patient or client from SEO, then it has paid for itself.
Two additional factors that influence your ROI timeline are what you’re doing as a business owner to support your business profitability, and your starting point. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has about a month delay, so digital marketing completed this month impacts the following month. With that kind of delay, it’s hard to track success unless you know where to look. Additionally, if you’re not seeing the results you want as fast as you would like, investing more time is key. If you pull back your investment during a time without clients, you could end up with a span of two months without new patients or clients, even if you’re still networking, because the connections you’re making won’t be able to find and recommend you online. That said everyone, even booming businesses, can benefit from SEO, because it allows you to select for your ideal clients.
Creating a Plan that represents Your Goals
Once your goals have been defined, you will want to focus on cultivating and projecting the message defining what makes you different, or your brand. Without this, you risk projecting a message that portrays your business as nothing special; if you don’t explicitly state why you are different or what you truly have to offer, no one will be able to infer that your business would lead to a unique connection.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is what happens after improving the health of your website and online presence, so it is easy to liken SEO strategy to a workout plan or a patient plan of care. Just like a plan of care, SEO will require effort to follow the plan, it has to be representative of your goals, and it has to be realistic from your starting point.
Creating a plan that’s Realistic From Your Starting Point
When writing a plan of care for your website, you need to consider your starting point or baseline before creating a realistic expectation and executing your plan.
Let’s look at an example: three people start an exercise program; one is recovering from an injury, the second hasn’t been working out, and the third has been working out consistently with good form. They all have different starting points and perceived problem areas, and their plans need to be adjusted accordingly to achieve their personal goals; SEO is the same. If you are a new business, we will need to allow time to build your brand before it can be recognized and selected, but you haven’t developed bad habits yet. If you’re an experienced business, but have been employing any of these methods to try to improve your SEO, or aren’t following the internet’s requirements for successful sites, we will have to heal your site before we can improve.
The fact of the matter is that search engine algorithms, like those for Google, are constantly changing, and in order to gain new clients from online means, or prevent a plateau, you need to have your finger on the pulse of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Unless you can devote your career to that instead of maintaining client relationships, you will always feel as though you are one step behind. Coming to this realization can leave you feeling pretty lost, but don’t worry; I’ll tell you what you can do to avoid this feeling!
Digital marketing and SEO aren’t a quick fix, you have to rebuild what needs to be before you can make your site sustainable. Keep in mind, that just as it will not be possible for the person who has a hamstring injury to be running a marathon the next month, you can’t expect to have a 10,000% increase in a month, or even a year. If you’re not following the plan of care, haven’t taken the time to share accurate goals, and don’t allow time for an idea to work before changing course, this will impact your success.
If a patient of yours is unhappy with their progress, how do you explain to them what is hurting their progress? Tell me in the comment box below; I’d love to know so I can better relate to your experience!
Feel Like you’ve Tried Everything?
You may have tried everything, but when it comes to the internet, there are patterns and cycles that should be observed and followed. Like a workout plan, you should have a general knowledge of how your body, or the internet, works.
Your digital marketing plan should be tailored to your goals and starting point. For example, the starting point and goals of an elite athlete will be different from that of someone who hasn’t worked out in years. If you are in a competitive location, you should always be either climbing*, pushing*, coasting*, or (actively) resting* to set yourself apart; also like a workout plan.
If you have a competitive location, say Seattle, WA, you will want to be climbing, or at minimum pushing, 75-100% of the time. What this equates to is if you’re a top athlete, you can’t take a month off and expect to be able to perform at an elite level “off the couch.” What “off the couch” translates to from a digital marketing standpoint is a loss of consistency that results in a drop in viewers and subsequently a drop in potential revenue.
Conclusion
Your website and digital presence need a plan of care, just as your patients need one. To create this plan of care it’s necessary to establish a baseline and realistic expectations to help you achieve your goals. Navigating digital marketing and SEO can be intimidating, but with the help of a digital marketing expert like Whitney from WOW Website Marketing, you can achieve success online.
CRITICAL THINKING AND NEXT STEPS
What does your website say about your business? How does your potential client fit into the story that your website paints? If your website says more about your business than it says about making your client’s lives better, you could be wasting your breath and losing more than a few clients over it. Click here to learn more about SEO, PPC, and SEM marketing.
Definitions
*Climbing means you are actively fighting to improve your reach online and increase your business appointment requests to either sustain growth or start growing.
*Pushing means you are moving in the right direction at a slower pace. You are wanting more for your business, but you could also be testing if you can get away with climbing at a slower rate while still expanding.
*Coasting is riding off the coattails of previous success; putting in minimal effort to try to maintain that success; this is not possible unless there is success to begin with. For example, if you gain five clients one month and “coast” the next month, the goal of coasting is to see if you can get one to five clients the following month. If you can’t, then you’ve started to coast prematurely.
*Resting does not mean do nothing! In digital marketing, you have a “rest” month if patients can’t be seen because you’re too busy, the same way you would rest if you incurred an overuse injury. If you stop entirely at this point, then you won’t be able to climb quick enough to support growth, or fill an employee’s schedule the following month. Resting typically looks like addressing problems flagged by Google, or starting on major website updates, etc.
