Healthcare marketing platform SocialClimb raises $8.5M

The company currently services thousands of physicians and practices nationwide

Healthcare marketing is well behind marketing in most other segments of the economy, which means that healthcare entities need help understanding and using marketing technology, which is evolving quickly.

For example, independent practices struggle to add marketing staff capable of using the new digital marketing tools, explained Ty Allen, CEO of SocialClimb, a Software-as-a-Service healthcare marketing platform. The company announced an $8.5 million growth capital round  from Spring Capital Partners and Resolve Growth Partners earlier this week, bringing its total funding to $16.5 milloon.

"HIPAA constraints and historical concerns about marketing restrict independent practices in hiring and enabling marketing staff to use digital physician marketing tools to acquire patients successfully," he said.

Hospital groups, meanwhile, remain focused primarily on building their brand and hoping the brand continues to deliver patients to their digital front doors, but the practices and hospital groups that embrace digital marketing technology efficiently are the ones that have a significant advantage.

"Savvy, independent practices are leveling the patient acquisition playing field using physician digital marketing tools to win search battles to attract patients seeking care. When a patient starts looking for medical help with a Google search such as, 'best knee surgeon near me,' the hospital and a small practice are equally capable of winning that business. Brand no longer matters," Allen said.

"The patient wants to choose a physician they trust, and hospitals are terrible about winning this type of opportunity. As hospitals continue to lose the high-value case to smaller practice, it becomes difficult to keep all services in the hospital open. Finding ways to use the new digital physician marketing tools is key to profitable growth for hospitals. Most of them are just starting to become aware of this."

SocialClimb’s platform fills n these gaps by offering a suite of tools that practices and hospitals can use to replace multiple point solutions. That includes its ROI tracking feature set, which can automatically track and report the actual value, in both patients and revenue, of each marketing campaign or activity.

Even a customer who knows very little about digital marketing can deploy the platform within their practice with the help of SocialClimb's implementation team; as part of the implementation, the company integrates with the practice's management system and connects to their social platforms and Google accounts. The SocialClimb platform then helps the practice team optimize their listings for each location, get thousands of reviews for the doctors and locations, deploy google ads, and track the ROI on each activity.

By using the platform, independent practices are able to build digital reputations, run targeted Google ads, target needy patients in their area, and track the ROI of their campaigns and spend without a skilled marketer on staff. It also allows hospitals to do digital physician marketing at scale.

"Many well know hospital brands have resisted using physician digital marketing because they believe it can’t be done well at the scale of their organization. SocialClimb solves that problem and concern by making scaleable physician marketing easy," Allen explained.

SocialClimb's SaaS platform services thousands of physicians and practices nationwide and the platform has interacted with millions of patients per month to attract them to practices and physicians. It has seen numbers as high as 20x the dollars spent coming back to the practice in revenue. Its marketing ROI report shows that more customers can attract organic search patients for about $15 per patient, while paid search patients are about $100 per patient.

"If those patients are worth between $1,200 and $2,000 in revenue, it becomes clear that the overall ROI numbers are very good," Allen explained.

The new funding, which brings the company's total capital raised to $16.5 million, will be used to continue grow its sales and marketing efforts to expand further into larger practice and hospital groups, while also focusing on product development.  

(Image source: socialclimb.com)