Fertility Clinic Embraces Inbound, Increasing New Patients by 193%
AWARD WINNER HubSpot Q4 2019 | Grow Better Marketing Award
Impact Awards are earned by agencies who demonstrate a unique ability to drive results and impact for their clients. This article won for Grow Better Marketing.
OVERVIEW Fertility Clinic Grows with HubSpot
Kofinas Fertility Group is a multi-location fertility clinic based out of New York with locations in Brooklyn, Staten Island, Lower Manhattan, and the Upper West Side.
The doctors and staff there will do whatever it takes to allow their patients to experience the joy of having a child. They solve challenging problems, overcome obstacles, and truly make dreams come true every day.
But, Kofinas Fertility Group had a problem of their own. They needed someone to step in and take the same approach for them that they take with their patients every day: whatever it takes to succeed.
GOALS
CHALLENGE An Uphill Battle to Increase New Patient Numbers
Kofinas Fertility Group first came to us with what seemed to be a pretty straightforward and standard problem to solve: fix their cookie-cutter website, increase their visibility online, and help them increase their number of new patients.
But we soon learned there was a lot more to the challenge than we had originally thought. And that’s where this success story truly begins.
Our point of contact, Afsana Islam), was hired on to the staff at Kofinas Fertility Group to keep the team aligned on marketing objectives and long-term growth. She quickly realized she wasn’t going to be able to do it alone.
As much as the team at Kofinas desired to keep marketing efforts in-house, they simply did not have the bandwidth or the HubSpot knowledge to make that a reality. They had tried finding an agency partner before, but it wasn’t the right fit and they were left with a cookie-cutter website and a lack of results when it came to visibility and new patient numbers.
When we were first hired, we knew we had to prove we were the right partner for the job this time, and needed to get them the results they desired. We had to help Afsana prove that she made the right choice for Kofinas by hiring us, and we were committed to making her look good.
We quickly discovered a plethora of other challenges that complicated the initial job-to-be-done:
- They were paying for HubSpot but really weren’t using it at all.
- They weren’t sure how they could run targeted marketing campaigns while still remaining HIPAA compliant.
- The front desk staff was tasked with patient outreach and following up with incoming inbound leads manually without a real system in place, leaving the team shorthanded with no bandwidth, no visibility, and lost revenue.
- They had an extreme lack of automation in their marketing and administrative processes, and were operating mainly using spreadsheets causing double data-entry and redundancy.
These roadblocks needed to be addressed if we were going to drive the long-term growth Afsana and our team was tasked with, and we needed to address them quickly.
SOLUTION Building a HubSpot Growth Machine to Overcome Obstacles
We implemented a solution that really focused on two core areas:
- Building an inbound marketing machine
- Reducing friction systematically
Before we could really get going, we had to start with the foundation and address personas and the buyer’s journey. We really focused on putting the Kofinas customer in the center of our strategy.
We realized that regardless of the many different paths that would ultimately lead someone to a fertility center, one thing remained consistent across personas: they needed a lot of education and information since fertility testing and treatment can be a daunting and complicated process, and the experience needed to be personalized and handled with care and sensitivity. They had a unique buyer’s journey that was very involved and drawn out in the attract and engage stages, and we had to make sure we were catering to that.
Keeping this in mind, we redesigned and developed a conversion-focused website in the HubSpot CMS that really allowed visitors to convert quickly and easily once they were ready. We focused on user experience and wanted to ensure that content was readily available and organized in a way that wasn’t overwhelming or confusing to visitors, and allowed them to engage based on their own unique situation and need for information with low access barriers. And, most of all, we focused on portraying the personalized care that Kofinas prioritizes above all else – gone was the cookie-cutter website that did the Kofinas value proposition no justice.
Through the website redesign process, we realized there was virtually no content available to meet the unique needs of Kofinas’ target personas and they were being sent straight to a bottom-of-the-funnel landing page or bust. So, we got to work developing content to place on the site that was engaging and interactive and would help nurture them to a point where they would be ready for that bottom-of-the-funnel conversion. We developed videos, quizzes, infographics, guides, bots – anything that could make the topic easier to understand and consume in a time that is likely stressful and confusing for the visitor.
But that was only a portion of the large inbound marketing machine we were trying to build.
Now that we had a great website and a lot of helpful content ready for consumption, we needed to come up with a plan to ensure the right people were finding it.
We developed a comprehensive SEO and SEM strategy that would not only bring visibility and awareness to the local New York area, but would expand outside of these local markets as well.
For our organic strategy, we focused heavily on on-site optimization, link building and reviews, and executing a robust pillar strategy utilizing topic clusters. We ensured we were getting double-word-score for our ungated guides and blog articles by marrying SEO keyword research with our knowledge of the target personas and the topics they needed more information about. We were writing SEO-backed content that was relevant to search engines and real people alike!
For our paid strategy, we focused on running a variety of Google retargeting and display ads that also supported our organic keyword strategy and utilized the content the marketing team had been putting together. There was a large emphasis on getting the appropriate tracking and targeting in place so we could ensure we were spending ad budget on more qualified traffic and leads.
Now that we had plans in place to get the right people to find Kofinas and we knew they had the right content available to them once they got there, we needed to figure out what was going to happen once they actually entered our inbound marketing system.
This was where we had to really dig in and understand what constraints we were operating under when it came to HIPAA compliance. We knew we needed to reduce friction systematically and automate as much as possible, but we had to be careful about how we were doing it.
We were able to build custom HubSpot properties and a form system that collected information from visitors throughout their buyer’s journey on the website to help us determine lead quality and readiness, without collecting any information from them that was sensitive or would violate HIPAA compliance. We then used this information to segment the database and set us up for some major marketing automation on the backend in HubSpot.
Based on the information we collected, we set up a series of automated smart lists and workflows that were used to streamline previously manual processes and segment the database, which also made it possible to achieve targeted marketing outreach in campaigns. We were able to keep track of these targeted campaigns using HubSpot's campaigns tool.
We developed automated workflows that reached out to leads based on their website activity, content consumption, and topics they wanted more information about. We were able to send personalized emails using branching logic based on personas and the different messaging and content they needed. And, best of all, the front desk staff didn’t need to worry about outreach and keeping track of leads and where they were at in the process because we were doing that for them. We automated previously time-consuming and critical touchpoints and were able to ensure leads didn’t slip through the cracks and were being nurtured appropriately.
We focused on getting leads ready to schedule a consultation, which is the main bottom-of-the-funnel conversion point we were driving towards. Once a lead requested a consultation, we ensured internal automated workflows were built that would hand off the qualified lead to the staff right away and assign them tasks and reminders so they could get their appointment scheduled and no longer needed to use spreadsheets. We were also able to automate the process of prepping someone for their first appointment, again eliminating some of the work that was previously put on the overburdened front desk staff.
Due to HIPAA restrictions, after a contact had their first consultation, we no longer had visibility into their treatment journey as their information is stored in a separate medical system, but were able to develop a simple attribution system that the Kofinas staff was trained to use so we could still track when someone became a new patient.
Finally, we implemented a tool called ReviewTrackers that makes it really easy for the Kofinas staff to see new reviews and respond to them for customer delight and reputation management. This is another area we were able to reduce friction in and automate so the staff didn’t have to manually monitor review platforms daily for multiple locations and it’s a way for us to still keep the entire flywheel in mind even with HIPAA restrictions.
RESULTS Delivering Results (and Bundles of Joy)
We started this journey in January 2018 with the goal of increasing visibility online and increasing new patient numbers, with long-term growth in mind.
And we delivered.
On top of that, there has been an 821% increase in leads generated from paid media since we have been working with Kofinas and 99% of these leads are qualified and are either ready for treatment right away or will be within 1-3 months. All while maintaining the same ad spend.
Increased visibility online? Check.
Increased new patient numbers? Check.
Growth year-over-year? Check.
And, while we don’t have complete visibility into exact revenue numbers due to HIPAA restrictions, we can tell you what we do know based on the amount of initial consultation requests we’ve generated (over $930,000 the past two years), which is the step right before a patient enters fertility treatments.
And that’s just revenue generated from the leads that went through with scheduling their first consultation – that doesn’t even account for the revenue brought in from the leads that entered into actual treatments after!
Kofinas has seen the ROI on their partnership with us, even simply based on those initial consultation revenue numbers alone.
IMPACT A True Partnership
But, like we mentioned at the very beginning of this success story, the real hero here is our point of contact, Afsana Islam. None of these results could have happened without her, and she has been a phenomenal partner. We get the best results when we have partners like Afsana who clear the path for us, enable us to do what we know is best, and inject their own expertise along the way.
Hear from Afsana herself about the impact the marketing machine we’ve built and the systems we’ve streamlined have had on Kofinas Fertility Group the past two years.
We can’t wait to see what big results next year has in store for our teams! Kofinas Fertility Group is at the forefront of the 2020 Fertility Mandate and with their new surgical center now open (1 of only 4 total in the country), they are ready to help make even more dreams come true for anyone ready to embark on their journey to building a family.