Measure What You Care About in Your Marketing Efforts

You learn throughout your life except for a short break in school, said George Bernard Shaw. This struck me as so true as I was sitting in the  patient’s chair of Dr. Alan Glazier, CEO of Shady Grove Eye & Vision @eyeinfo on Twitter). Dr. Glazier’s Twitter efforts have won him awards from the NVTC ( Northern Virginia Technology Council). Discussing social media with him is not new. In his book Searchial Marketing: How Social Media Drives Search Optimization in Web 3.0 he credits our conversations as the inspiration for his social media efforts.

I know Dr.Glazier is very efficient and I was curious about  what methods and technology he deploys and how he measures the results. In in his view, a very planned structure and strategy is important to prioritize which online tools to use and how much time to spend on them. Dr. Glazier’s strategy:

• Search Engines:
• As consumers’ usage of search to find  businesses increased, he moved his marketing budget from offline efforts to online.
• Focus on where the business appears on search results.

• Social Media: His social media efforts are focused on
• Helping his business appear in search results for extremely local search terms
• Connecting with customers
• Learning and conversing with the community
• Creating word of mouth for the business

• Employ good-quality personnel even if it is expensive
• Dr. Glazier’s business is not only dependent on providing great quality eye care but also on ensuring satisfied patients, beginning with the front office systems. His human resource costs are higher than the norm in the industry but he attributes the growth of his business to his employees.

• Measure:
• How many existing customers have come back
• How many new customers you got and how many referrals you get

Over the past couple of years, Dr. Glazier found existing customer retention rates were leveling off  and new customer growth was slow–untll he started using social media. Along with the results of new patient growth, Dr. Glazier also saw another benefit:  thought leadership. As his peers have not started using these tools, he is often asked to speak at conferences on marketing in the new media. He was also interviewed by Small Biz Trends radio a few months ago.

How are you measuring your success of your marketing efforts? What new media has worked for you?

Image by Flickr user jamiesrabbit (Creative Commons)

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 17th, 2012 at 9:00 am and is filed under small business, social media, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.


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