This is a guest post from Chris Boyer, the director of digital marketing & communications at Inova Health System. You can follow him on Twitter at @chrisboyer.

How much ROI are you bringing into your hospital?

Using Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is the best way to figure out the answer to that question. Not only does a CRM system allow you to analyze your region for marketing opportunities, but it can give you the tools to track data throughout your hospital's marketing campaigns.

Sounds like a good plan, right? But many hospital marketers and communicators have questions about measuring ROI and implementing a CRM system.

Let's take a look:

Isn't building brand awareness about our hospital enough?

Even if you solely engage in brand building, it's important to measure its effectiveness. Focus groups and market studies help, but using a CRM to measure downstream utilization (money) is important to validate your branding efforts.

Don't underplay the importance of focusing on growth areas at your hospital. Using CRM measuring techniques will allow you to find faster ROI by marketing destination services, such as joint replacement, bariatric surgery or even cardiovascular surgery.

We don't have a CRM system. My boss doesn't want to invest in one.

It's an unfortunate reality that the most important tool for healthcare marketers is usually the one we need to fight to purchase. How can you prove that you need it? Start small. Choose one marketing campaign and use an Excel spreadsheet to measure ROI.

This is how you do it:

Input your marketing costs, find ways to measure the effectiveness of your call-to-action, and then measure increases in utilization (or volume). After sharing the results with your management team a few times, bring up the idea again of investing in a CRM. Being a champion for dollars-and-cents value will get their attention.

Math scares me.

Don't worry about learning how to measure--your successor will be much better at it than you are.

Sound harsh? Like it or not, it's becoming a requirement for marketing professionals to know how to measure results. There are a variety of books, classes, and web resources available to help you learn. Start networking and share best-practices with your peers. In the future, knowing how to measure will be a prerequisite for the job.

OK, OK. Let's say we start to measure. And we find out we're failing. Now what?

When you measure, you'll find out the good and the bad of your marketing efforts. For beginners, it's easiest to start measuring after a campaign is over. The information you learn is helpful to shape future efforts.

As you get more comfortable with measuring, you'll eventually be able to keep track during your campaigns, and make changes in the middle of it. That's when you know you've graduated to the pro-leagues of ROI tracking. Our league meets every Wednesday night at the Bowl-ROI-Rama. (Unlike some professional leagues, the use of performance enhancing drugs is banned.)

How do you measure ROI? Please feel free to share your stories.

Our hospital's medical staff falls into two categories:

One: Physicians who unplug their office phones when they want to send in a fax; when a carrier pigeon is unavailable.

Two: Physicians who live and die by their iPhones.

Among these physicians is a core group of younger docs who are dedicated to contributing to our hospital blogs. Especially our cardiovascular blog. So much so that we cartoon-ized our most popular cardiologist for his column Ask the Cardiologist.

As enthusiasm and interest in contributing to our blogs builds among our medical staff, so does the responsibility for managing them. Our marketing specialist, who manages the physician blog posts, has come up with six tips to help you help your physician bloggers:

Invite everyone. Offer all of your physicians the opportunity to contribute. Only a few will, but all should be asked.

Offer a brief orientation about blogging. Some physicians may be enamored with the concept of "blogging," but they may not know what a blog really is. Physicians should be prepared to answer and respond to questions from readers.

Inspire. Send links to recent medical news articles to get them thinking about potential blog topics that are popular with consumers.

Talk about the tone. While physicians might want to contribute to the Journal of the American Medical Association, be clear that the blog should be written for 5th graders--not medical residents

Say 'thank you.' Always remember to share the web stats with physicians. Discuss how the stats are presented, what it means, and how they might be able to drive traffic with future posts.

Avoid TMI. Physicians shouldn't use the blog to answer specific and personal medical questions about a patient, due to liability issues.

Do you have any tips you'd like to share?