Mental Healthcare, while considered a niche market, covers a vast range of areas and services, making it incredibly diverse. Each niche has its unique characteristics, nuances, and challenges.
In our blog, Marketing in Healthcare: How is Healthcare Marketing Different from Marketing in Other Industries?, we highlighted this article that indicates that 90% of Americans look for health-related information on social media platforms. And this is a big deal, full of nuances that really matter.
Let’s dig into why.
Why Does a Digital Marketing Benchmark Matter for the Mental Health Industry?
Each industry’s goals and personas vary substantially. As our Strategy Director, Kande Hein, likes to say:
“Identifying your ideal client is crucial to your marketing efforts and to do that you must know where that client is searching for you.”
For this reason, digital marketing benchmarks are critical in every industry. Knowing how you compare to your competitors in the current market opens opportunities for strategic analysis and the ability to pivot your digital marketing strategy. This helps to ensure your efforts are focused in the correct areas and assists you in hitting your business goals.
Additionally, niche markets like mental healthcare often struggle to find relevant benchmarking data from existing industry reports to compare apples to apples. They can’t rely on digital marketing standards from unrelated industries such as retail sales.
Contributing factors like regulatory matters also differ across the Healthcare market — causing the data presented to be largely irrelevant for mental healthcare providers.
The bottom line is, that misalignment of benchmarks can set your marketing strategy up for failure. For example, you may never be able to reach the click-through or conversion rates you’re looking to achieve based on unattainable trends from a different industry.
Beacon Media + Marketing Partners with Databox
At Beacon M+M, we believe in creating successful digital marketing strategies for our clients by coupling our industry expertise with an array of key performance data points to make data-emphasized decisions.
As part of our strategy, we’ve partnered with Databox for our client reporting needs across the board for several reasons, including our mutual operations and expertise in niche markets such as healthcare, mental healthcare, and overall wellness. Utilizing the power of Databox across multiple digital channels, we’re able to identify areas where our clients excel in their industry — and the areas where strategy refinement may be required.
According to Emily Miles, Beacon’s Databox Specialist, “Databox’s ability to pull data directly from platforms we use in our digital advertising efforts like Google Ads, META Ads, search engine marketing and other social media marketing platforms and then benchmark our marketing activities against other relevant companies in real-time has only increased our ability to create, implement, and manage a successful digital marketing strategy custom to each of our client’s market needs,” she says.
This approach to digital benchmarking empowers our team to review, track, and monitor key performance indicators for each client within their specific industry and make data-informed suggestions for pivots in their digital strategy.
Key Performance Indicators: Which Metrics Are Actually Important?
KPIs are variable, based on your marketing strategy, business goals, and industry. In this example, we will look at social media advertising performance, using a template from Databox for a hypothetical business.
The example report above shows the results of a social media campaign over 30 days. It provides valuable insight into how the results of the digital platform increased or decreased based on each campaign they ran.
In this example, the business can see how cost-per-click has been performing and how effective its marketing campaigns are.
Key Performance Indicators for digital marketing campaigns can include, but are not limited to:
- CPL (cost per lead)
- CPC (cost per click)
- Ad spend
- Impressions
- Engaged Web Sessions
- Bounce Rate
All of these data points and more can be tracked and used to refine your marketing strategy to ensure your performance is as cost-effective as possible.
How Does Benchmark Data Differ?
Benchmarking data is taking the previously mentioned KPIs and reviewing them all in one place while also comparing your performance against your industry as a whole. Benchmarking data allows for a strategic analysis of your marketing performance, which leads to understanding what is attainable and reasonable for your industry.
Ideally, benchmarking against your direct competitors would yield the greatest return, but it isn’t likely that you’ll be able to access their data. Instead, consider looking at the brand’s online visibility, such as LinkedIn or other social media platforms they’re using to promote their business. Because when it comes down to the brass tacks, viewing data from a competitor’s digital landscape offers valuable insights that can influence your own marketing strategy.
Databox makes benchmarking your data simple: It helps you set meaningful goals that maximize your digital marketing budgets. Additionally, Databox’s benchmark tool allows comparison of your performance anonymously — and with data collected from companies identified as similar to your own monthly — making the data you’re benchmarking against fresh and relevant to your current market and business objectives.
Benchmark Data in Action
Get ready for a sneak peek! Shown below is Beacon’s benchmark performance regarding active users on our website. The median value for our industry group, shown with a gray line, is compared to our performance value in blue. The orange graph shows the data curve of gathered values from over 10,000 contributors participating in this benchmark group.
This snapshot clearly and quickly defines how Beacon performs against similar companies in our industry. This is invaluable for our continued efforts to offer value to our audience by improving our digital landscape through our blogs, The Beacon Way Podcast, and The State of Mental Health Marketing Report, to name a few.
Databox’s tool also allows us to review and adjust our digital marketing strategy by tracking our performance over time. Historical tracking of website performance data is a powerful tool when considering the implementation of or changes to search engine optimization.
Is Competitive Benchmarking For Me?
Well, it definitely should be! Implementing Databox’s Benchmark groups is a true game-changer for any industry. At Beacon, we’re excited to be early adopters of new technology as it will ultimately ensure that we are in front of the learning curve for our clients.
We all know that tech is constantly evolving — and our goal is to be the expert so you don’t have to!
What’s next? We invite you to join our Benchmark group today and we’ll then provide a FREE consultation based on your results!
