Marketing in behavioral health and addiction treatment is a multifaceted and increasingly data-driven endeavor. Success requires a wide range of skills, from digital advertising and content creation to SEO strategy and data analytics. But one of the more complex and often overlooked elements is understanding how to allocate the salaries of your marketing team to attribution costs.
Attribution in marketing refers to assigning value to various touchpoints that lead to conversions, such as phone calls, form fills, or admissions into your program. However, as marketing strategies become more intricate, so does the task of attributing the costs associated with those efforts, particularly when it comes to the human capital behind your campaigns.
This blog explores the complexities of allocating marketing team salaries to attribution costs, why it matters, and how behavioral health facilities can navigate this challenging aspect of their financial and marketing management.
Why Allocate Marketing Salaries to Attribution Costs?
In simple terms, the cost of your marketing efforts is not limited to ad spend, software subscriptions, or creative production. A significant portion of your marketing expenses is tied up in the salaries and compensation of your marketing team—whether it’s your in-house staff or an external agency. Allocating salaries to attribution costs can provide a more accurate picture of your true marketing ROI (Return on Investment), helping you identify where you’re getting the most value and where improvements are needed.
Understanding how much of your marketing team’s salary goes toward driving conversions allows you to:
- Calculate a more precise cost per lead (CPL) and cost per admission (CPA).
- Evaluate the effectiveness of your team’s efforts across different campaigns.
- Justify budget allocation for team expansion, raises, or additional resources.
- Improve overall marketing strategies by understanding which efforts are paying off the most in terms of patient admissions or referrals.
But while the benefits are clear, the process of allocation is anything but straightforward.
The Complexities of Salary Allocation in Marketing Attribution
1. Multifaceted Roles and Tasks
One of the biggest challenges is that marketing professionals rarely work on a single task or project. For example, your SEO specialist may spend time on both website optimization and working with content teams to create blog posts. Similarly, your PPC manager may split their time between running campaigns, analyzing data, and participating in strategy meetings.
How do you assign a portion of their salary to one campaign or specific conversion effort? This is especially difficult when a single role touches multiple channels or influences multiple aspects of the patient journey.
Solution: One approach is to allocate salaries based on time tracking. Have team members log their hours spent on specific projects, campaigns, or platforms. While this may not be perfect, it allows for a more data-driven allocation of costs.
2. Cross-Channel Marketing Influence
In behavioral health marketing, the journey from lead generation to conversion is rarely linear. Potential patients may interact with your facility across multiple channels—searching for treatment on Google, engaging with social media posts, watching a YouTube testimonial, or reading an email newsletter.
The challenge here is assigning salary costs when marketing efforts are spread across channels, especially if multiple team members contribute to various touchpoints that ultimately drive one conversion.
Solution: You can consider using multi-touch attribution models, which assign value to different touchpoints in the patient journey. This allows you to allocate portions of salaries based on which channels your team members have influenced.
3. Shared Responsibilities
In smaller behavioral health facilities, team members may wear multiple hats. For example, your marketing director may also handle patient outreach, event planning, or even admissions work. Allocating salaries for team members who share responsibilities across different departments adds another layer of complexity.
Solution: For shared roles, facilities can allocate salaries by department. If your marketing director spends 50% of their time on outreach and 50% on marketing efforts, divide their salary accordingly. Additionally, clearly defined job descriptions and role delineations can help create clearer salary allocations.
4. The Role of Non-Revenue Generating Activities
Not all marketing tasks can be directly linked to conversions or revenue generation. For example, brand awareness efforts, thought leadership content, and long-term SEO strategies don’t immediately result in admissions but are crucial to a facility’s long-term success.
The challenge lies in determining how much of a marketing team member’s salary should be allocated to activities that support, but do not directly generate, leads and conversions.
Solution: Establishing separate cost buckets for direct revenue-generating activities (e.g., PPC campaigns or lead nurturing emails) versus long-term brand building efforts can help keep salary allocations organized. Recognize that certain roles, like content creators or SEO specialists, contribute to multiple stages of the patient journey and plan to distribute their salary across both short-term and long-term marketing efforts.
How to Implement Salary Allocation for Attribution Costs
While there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to salary attribution in behavioral health marketing, here’s a basic roadmap to get started:
1. Start with Time Tracking
Encourage your marketing team to track the time they spend on each campaign, project, or channel. This data can help you distribute salary costs more accurately. Time-tracking software like Toggl or Harvest can streamline this process, providing you with a breakdown of where employee time—and by extension, salary—should be allocated.
2. Identify Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Determine the metrics that matter most for your facility—whether it’s cost per lead (CPL), cost per admission (CPA), or return on ad spend (ROAS). By defining your KPIs, you can create a clearer framework for attributing the costs of different marketing roles based on their contributions to those metrics.
3. Leverage Attribution Models
Choose the right attribution model for your facility. A first-touch model might work if you want to emphasize lead generation efforts, while a multi-touch attribution model could provide a more balanced view of your marketing efforts across the entire patient journey. Tools like Google Analytics or HubSpot’s attribution features can help you implement these models.
4. Use Software Solutions
There are advanced RCM (Revenue Cycle Management) and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platforms that integrate with your marketing data, helping automate the attribution process. These tools can help track salary allocation more seamlessly by tying employee tasks to specific campaigns and revenue outcomes.
5. Plan Regular Reviews
Salary allocations should be revisited regularly. Roles evolve, strategies change, and new campaigns arise. A quarterly or semi-annual review of how salaries are allocated will ensure that your attribution process remains aligned with the actual work being done by your marketing team.
Why Salary Allocation Matters in the Behavioral Health Industry
Behavioral health and addiction treatment facilities operate in a highly competitive, high-stakes industry where every marketing dollar matters. Misallocating salary expenses—or failing to account for them in your attribution models—can lead to inaccurate metrics and poor financial decision-making.
Properly allocating salaries to attribution costs allows you to:
- Gain better visibility into your true marketing costs, including the human capital behind your campaigns.
- Justify your marketing budget and make data-driven decisions about team expansions or hiring new specialists.
- Optimize your marketing strategies by identifying which campaigns or channels provide the highest ROI when factoring in both ad spend and salary costs.
How Growth Sherpa Can Help
At Growth Sherpa, we specialize in helping behavioral health and addiction treatment facilities make sense of their marketing attribution models, including the complexities of salary allocation. We provide the tools, insights, and expertise needed to track your marketing efforts accurately and maximize your ROI. Whether you need help with time tracking, multi-touch attribution, or refining your digital marketing strategy, we’ve got you covered.
