From 2005 to 2015, I served as CEO and chairman of the board at Laser Spine Institute (LSI), where we worked with an amazing and performance-driven team to grow the company from a single-facility organization with nine employees to a robust, seven-facility organization with over 1,000 employees across six states. During this time, we helped over 75,000 patients find long-lasting pain relief from chronic back and neck pain.
Laser Spine Institute was one of the first industry names in the field of minimally invasive, outpatient spine surgeries for people living with neck and back pain. Our outreach related to the benefits and cost advantages of outpatient spine surgery helped improve the lives of thousands of patients every month. But what were the factors that led to our stunning growth and national recognition?
First, we made sure to have the right Marketing and Patient Acquisition team surrounding me. Briley Cienkosz, Gary Mancini and Patrick Foote are industry professionals with vast experience in performance-driven marketing and sales. And second, our strategy centered on performance-based marketing campaigns combined with an efficient patient acquisition cycle that nurtured and converted quality leads into patient treatments.
Throughout my years in the health care marketing industry, we’ve seen providers waste valuable dollars on marketing campaigns without having trained staff in place to follow up with prospective patients. This type of marketing is vastly inefficient, because a quality lead goes nowhere without someone to nurture and convert these leads into patients and treatments. Having a well-trained call center staff is a critical component of the patient acquisition process. A call center team can drastically increase conversion rates because that’s all staff does — convert patients all day, every day.
My team accomplished amazing success at LSI with this integrated approach to marketing. It’s why we founded NewGen Marketing, a performance-driven health care marketing agency headquartered in Tampa, FL. We recognized there was a growing need in the marketing field for agencies that invested just as much effort into acquisition as they did into outreach and lead generation. NewGen Marketing utilizes experienced, well-trained call center staff to take quality leads and convert them into patients for our providers. Our goal is to help other health care companies achieve growth and success using a non-traditional approach that directly ties marketing performance to patient conversions and treatments.
Keep reading to learn more about our past success story with LSI and how it helped NewGen Marketing become what it is today.
How Did Performance Based Marketing Contribute to LSI’s Stunning Growth?
As chief marketing officer (CMO), Briley Cienkosz was responsible for implementing and driving national outreach to generate qualified leads. She and her team used traditional print (direct mail, magazine ads), direct-response TV commercials, and digital marketing channels to launch highly targeted campaigns that directed potential leads to an inbound call center.
At LSI, we did not use outbound sales techniques — instead, we relied on multi-channel advertising and performance-guided marketing to send interested leads to an in-house sales team. Patrick Foote helped advance and refine customer relationship management (CRM) software solutions that collected customer data, identified audience behaviors, demographics, and patterns, and filtered and qualified inbound sales leads.
Cienkosz, Foote, and the rest of the marketing team tracked and analyzed all marketing sources to determine the volume, type and quality of customers they were generating from each source. They used this performance data to drive improved audience segmentation for campaigns and effectively allocate budget resources into the channels that produced more quality leads, conversions and sales.
But marketing outreach was only the first step. As VP of Patient Services, Gary Mancini worked tirelessly with the patient coordinator staff to provide in-depth, hands-on training for converting quality leads into treatments. Mancini understood the value of patient-centered interactions, and staff training focused on how coordinators could educate, inspire, and build relationships with potential patients. Coordinators were taught how to ask qualifying questions that helped patient coordinators identify pain points and personalize each patient’s experience for their specific needs by using a customized CRM. The management team utilized training tools like call recordings, mock calls and sit-ins to identify areas for coaching and improvement.
As a result of my team’s efforts, LSI’s sales skyrocketed, the brand gained national attention and recognition, and thousands of people received life-changing pain relief from LSI’s services.
Are You Ready to Partner With a Marketing Agency?
Today, the NewGen marketing team has taken the skills they used at LSI to help other health care companies grow their business through performance marketing. If your health care business is looking for a marketing agency to help advance your growth and sales goals, take these cues from the LSI case study.
1. Partner with a performance-driven agency. The agency you choose should be able to prove marketing ROI using metrics that link campaigns to website traffic, leads, conversions and other actions that are important to your business. A performance-driven agency like NewGen Marketing can show exactly where your marketing spend is going and link advertising dollars to patient conversions and treatments. The basis of performance marketing is that you only pay for the leads and actions that marketing campaigns generate — meaning your marketing dollars are an investment into patients who are more likely to convert and receive the treatments and services they need.
2. Seek an integrated approach. Look for a partner with in-depth knowledge on growing traffic, spreading brand awareness, and generating leads and sales through multi-channel strategies like organic SEO, social media, paid digital advertising, and traditional print mediums. The agency you choose should be able to directly correlate marketing campaigns with your business goals and produce the metrics to back up how successful each campaign is at meeting these goals. NewGen Marketing achieves success by integrating multi-channel marketing campaigns with a proven acquisition process that leads to patient conversions. Understanding and developing the link between lead generation and acquisition is what sets NewGen apart from other agencies.
3. Demand digital. We live in a digital age — and your marketing agency should too. Invest in an agency like NewGen Marketing that is well-versed in designing, launching and monitoring digital marketing campaigns, analyzing metrics, and adjusting budget and strategy as needed to allocate more marketing dollars into the channels that are seeing measurable results. NewGen pairs digital lead generation campaigns with proven call center follow-up protocols. After a digital campaign drives potential patients to fill out a form for more information, an outbound call center follows up to nurture, educate and convert quality leads.
4. Invest in customer acquisition. New customer acquisition drives sustainable business growth. The NewGen team has a track record of implementing acquisition cycle and call center strategies to generate quality leads and nurture them through the conversion process. Without an acquisition strategy in place, your marketing dollars aren’t being spent as efficiently as they could be. All too often, agencies focus exclusively on lead generation and fail to allocate adequate time, resources and budget to lead nurturing and conversion. The NewGen team understands that lead generation is only effective if the right acquisition strategies and the right people are in place to inspire, educate, and ultimately convert patients.
5. Ask for proven performance results. Laser Spine Institute isn’t the only company the NewGen marketing team has helped grow through performance marketing. They’ve spent decades driving marketing, revenue and sales growth for industry-leading health care brands. Call NewGen Marketing today and our executive team will be happy to walk you through past and current successes and proven performance results.
When you’re ready to invest in the strategies and performance-driven teams that will drive more to your bottom line, contact NewGen Marketing to schedule a free consultation.