Over at Hospital Impact, Jenn Riggle recently blogged her impressions from last month’s Mayo Ragan Healthcare Marketing & PR Social Media Summit. She shared some nice insights into defining ROI in social media — an oft-debated subject at healthcare conferences everywhere.

One of her points caught my eye.

“CRM is the secret to generating ROI. The C-suite is always looking for a return on investment, but the problem is marketers often don’t have hard data. Instead, they have warm and fuzzy numbers that don’t speak to the bottom line. That’s why it’s so important that hospitals have a customer relationship management (CRM) system to determine return on investment. If you don’t have a CRM system, you need to get one; and if you have one, you need to use it more.”

While Riggle’s focus was on social media ROI, her comment hits at the value of CRM for marketing measurement in general. As she says, it’s about the hard data. When proving ROI in dollars, you have to connect your marketing efforts to utilization. CRM offers that single view of each patient and the services they used, so you can actually crunch the numbers.

It helps to look at an example. Let’s say you run a direct mail campaign that guides people to personalized landing pages where they can request a physician referral. If the person hits their landing page or requests that referral, you know you drove that response. But, it’s just an activity. The real value is seeing if that first response leads to service utilization down the road. Your CRM can tell you that — tying that result to your marketing efforts. (At CPM, we use control groups to ensure we’re counting real ROI by seeing how many people might have taken the action anyway.)

Of course, it’s not just about measurement. CRM is a full-brained strategy that offers a strategic way to find opportunities in your market to connect with people and drive them to action. With the marketing mix changing and growing to include social media, CRM offers many opportunities to track the downstream effect of your campaigns.