E29 | 5 Strategies For Getting More Patients

What if you could do 5 simple things that would get you 5 more patients this month? Luckily you can! Just check out Episode 29 of the P.T. Entrepreneur Podcast to hear my 5 Strategies For Getting More Patients. These are easily actionable and something that will get results right away.

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Episode Transcription:

Danny: What's going on guys, Doc Danny here with the PT Entrepreneur Podcast, and today I want to get into a topic, excuse me, that I've gotten a lot of questions on from the mastermind group that I work with. So I started a mastermind group. And I closed it by the way, so it's not open right now. So if you are interested, sorry, there's no, there are no slots currently, but this is a small group of cash practitioners that I wanted to get together.

We could do some kind of education mentoring. And then, also, Come together and do a mastermind event together to where they all meet each other and engage and learn from each other. And I, I've gone to these, and I still go to these, and I just get so much out of it that I wanted to do one for this specific group.

Now that being said, what it's also allowed me to do is spend a good bit of time with ours. The population is a kind of entrepreneurial practitioner population in this cash model and delve into some of these significant problems that many practices run into and across the board. Every single person that I've talked to you in our group has had the same problem, and I need more patients per month.

I think this is a common problem for any practice of any source, whether they take insurance or not across the board. It could be a dentist, a surgeon, a physical therapist at whatever. How do I get more clients, patients, whatever you want to call it, in your door every month? And in many cases, it's how do I get the right people to come to see me too?

Because. Getting a bunch of the wrong people can create so many problems for you. They don't see value in what you do there. You know it's needy, and they don't. They don't want to pay for anything. Or you don't want clients like that. You want people that value what you do. They think you're fantastic. They want to tell everybody else how awesome you are.

And that is who we're looking to work with. So the question is, how do I get more of these people into my business every single month? And, so I sat down, and I wrote some, some kind of—areas out of where, where we get patients from and clients from. And, and, and I want to talk about those of you guys on this podcast today.

And if you like this, I honestly think that I could probably go into every single one of these areas on a podcast themselves. So if you like this and you want to know more about it. You know, shoot me an email. I'd love to see what you think. It's [email protected]. You know, and give me an idea of if you'd like to learn more about that or share this with somebody that you think could pick up a couple of nuggets of information about how to get more clients in their door.

So let's get started with it. So number one, I would say the number one area, and this applies to people that already have a practice is the reactivation of—past clients or patients. Now, I think this is highly overlooked in most cases, in cash practices, in particular, the groups that I work with and I've been consulting with, because when you look at getting somebody new into your door.

There's a process there where they're sort of vetting you. Maybe they had a friend tell them about you, but they don't quite know you. They've never paid you for anything. They've never spent time with you. They don't know what your patient experience is like, but people that have worked with you directly know.

What kind of person you are, what sort of PRI, service you have, what type of experience they've had, and it's very much more comfortable to reactivate those people than it is to try to build that relationship with somebody brand new, which, which is also essential. You're going to need to do that, but don't overlook your past patients.

That is a gold mine of potential revenue generation and, and, you know, visit production that you may just be completely missing. So I'll give you a good example, and this is something that. We recently did, we went through a reactivation campaign, with our practice, this past week. And, you know, we sent a couple of emails out and kind of delved into like, who we, who we had seen, who we thought would be a good fit to come back in.

And in particular, this was more looking at some kind of maintenance space kind of packages that we were offering for this, for this reactivation campaign week. And we've done this now two years in a row, last year. We mainly did this because we, we saw a trend that in cash-based practices, there tends to be a seasonal downturn at the end of the year, kind of, mid-November through December where, you know, it's the holidays, people are traveling, there's less, less disposable income.

It's that most people have met their deductibles, too, right? So, If they're if they have a drug deductible question and maybe they've already achieved that. So usually, that's a hectic time for medical practices that take insurance. For us, it's the complete opposite. So I wanted to try to shore up some cash flow through the end of the year.

So we looked at trying to reactivate people that we'd already seen, and in terms of really prepaid visits. So we did this last year and had like, I've got a good, a good—turnout on it. We ended up reactivated and quite a few of our old patients and ended up generating about. Nice. 15 to $20,000 in revenue, in a week, which is, which is a lot of money, for anybody, you know, for the most part.

But really for our business, that was great. You know, at the time, that was maybe a little less than a month worth of revenue. So we generate that in, in a week, reactivating ours. Prior patients and we don't have to go out and find new people. We just got in front of, got in touch with the people that we've already seen, and maybe they just kind of forgot about us, or they're like, you know what we mean to call you?

And now that turned into revenue for us—this year. We had an even better turnout. We did this last week. We also picked a bad week because we didn't realize, but Atlanta public schools were on fall break. So many of our clients that have kids were probably out of town. And so anyway, regardless of that, we were able to reactivate more than we did.

The. The year before that and actually between the packages that we had generated around $50,000 in revenue in a week for our, for our business, which is a significant amount of money in terms of prepaid visits and a huge spike for our cashflow. Which would be celebrated through the end of the year, cause we know there's going to be, you know, less visits where people are going to come in compared to the beginning, like six months of the year.

And that's a great cause that's sure up our cashflow at the end of the year. We reactivate people over a longterm period and. These are people that already knew us. I mean, the marketing costs, the cost for acquisition, acquisition for this was zero. I mean, we didn't spend any money on advertising any money on any paid ads, any kind.

It was, it was emails, a couple of emails and some calls, and that was it. And you know, shit, $50,000 later. That's pretty awesome. If I had to try to generate $50,000 in revenue with some sort of paid advertising or some kind of in-person work, man, that would be expensive and time-consuming. It'd be tough to do.

So do not undervalue the value. I guess there's an excellent way to put it of your previous. Clients and patients, right? They are the most comfortable people to get to come back in, and they already know, like, and trust you. Maybe they've just kind of forgotten how awesome you are or they've been meaning comes to you with, and they've gotten busy.

So reaching back out to them is one of the best ways to go about it. Now, number two is in-person events. This is something for us, it's a staple of our, of our practice. We do in-person events consistently. We tried to do a few every month, and every time we do a new in-person event, we get patients from it.

But we also develop relationships well with this because we're teaching these people actionable high-value things. It's not like we're just going in and pitching them. We're going in, and we're educating them on something for an hour, and then we hang out when we talk to them. If you have any questions, and we're developing a relationship.

So even if they don't come to see us right away, I mean, we've had people that come in. Two to two and a half years later, they just follow our newsletter that finally, you know, they tweak something. They wanted to be seen for it. And we're the first people they thought of because we've developed this relationship with them.

So events are significant. So you can get out to, you know, local gyms. You can go to local businesses, and you can teach in different groups. This kind of community groups. You see, you can be creative with this. We've shown anywhere from like florist shops. It was a group that was here locally in Atlanta that was having.

Back pain issues would pick it up like buckets of water with flowers in it, all the way, all the way up to corporate facilities in terms of corporate gyms where we've talked to their trainers about injury prevention staff or whatever it is. They want us to come in and talk about it. And anywhere in between and every time that we teach, I can't say that it's ever been a waste of my time to go and show them where even if it's a small group because I get in front of people, I get to leave an impression on them and develop a relationship with them.

And it always comes back to you eventually. If you give people your time and you help them, and it'll come back to you eventually as well. And in most cases, that is in. Visits and patient volume. Okay. So in-person events are kind of the second area that you need to look at. Number three would be content.

So you've heard this probably in the past, content is King, and if you're sitting there and you have more. Time. Then you have patients. It means you have time to develop content, to put content out. And this can be a delayed gratification in many ways that people get frustrated with when they write one blog post, they hit upload, and it goes live, and they just expect that they're going to get 20 new patients from this one blog post that they wrote about knee pain.

Well, that's not necessarily going to happen. And, and that's okay. I mean, you have to look at this from your standpoint, like when you're making a buying decision, in particular, a buying decision that involves out-of-pocket expense and potentially something that's going to be uncomfortable. You're probably not going to make a fast decision on that, you know, unless you're right there ready to buy, you've already done your research, and you know you're, you're ready.

But that's, that's a tiny percent of people. That's estimated probably 3% of the people that are going to seek out some sort of help. So if you were to look at, let's say a hundred people went to your website, three of those people are probably ready. To work with you, that doesn't necessarily mean they're going to call you, but they're probably around that stage where they're prepared to leave their information where or contact request form or give you a call.

Now, the other 97% of those people, they're not. So what do they do? Well, they go to your about us page, and they read about you, and they look at what you offer, and client testimonials, and then they look at your blog, and they want to know a little bit about your philosophy. Maybe you've got some videos, and I mean, they're, they're Google searching the heck out of you.

So anything you can have that is. The relevant to them. It improves your chances of having that person feel like they trust you, and they want to work with you and come in and pay you to work with them, which is the result is the end goal, right? We want to generate revenue and have a.longterm functional business that requires us to see patients and get more patients in the door.

So content in many ways is sort of just like laying the foundation for relationships so that you can develop trust with people over a long period. Now, this can be blog posts. This could be a video, and this could be a podcast. Like what I'm doing right now, we don't have a local podcast for patients. I know of other people that are doing that.

I'm not quite sure how that's working out for them or not, but definitely, this is a medium that. Develops a relationship pretty well. Like you probably, you know, if you're listening to this, you're committing to looking to this for, I don't even know how many minutes I'm going to talk for, but more than ten now.

So, and if you're listening to this and you've listened to every single podcast. That I've, that I've done with the PT entrepreneur podcasts and shit. Maybe you've listened to the 220 something doc and jog podcast that we've done at this point. You probably feel pretty comfortable with me. You know, you probably feel like I'm not a sleazebag, and I'm not just trying to scam people.

Right. And, and. And that's because we've had an opportunity to develop a relationship. Well, that's the same way people are looking at your business. You know, they're skeptically optimistic. They want you to be the right fit for them. They want you to be helpful, but they're not sure if you are, and potentially they've had some bad experiences with medical staff and providers in the past.

So you have to look at it from that standpoint and be patient with these individuals because. They're not always going to be ready to come and work with you right away. And if you forget that that's the case, you're going to miss out on the 97% of people that are just not ready to work with you at this time.

So contents huge. So you can put videos out, YouTube, Facebook, Facebook videos are high right now. You can link back to these things via blog or blog post to your website and always trying to drive people back to your site. Is. A good strategy, but the content is something that can help build your, your brand, make your reputation, trust factor, and ultimately get more people in your door.

Okay. The last thing, and this kind of encompasses part of what you would need with content, is digital marketing, and digital marketing is an exciting arena because. It's relatively new. I mean, you have to think about marketing has been around for a long time. sales and marketing, it's probably been around for as long as people have been selling things, but digital marketing has only been around since the the

You know, gain popularity on the internet and social media in many ways in particular, but the big ones are Google and Facebook. Okay. So Google and Facebook, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple. Pretty much like around the world at this point. Right? But the two of them, Google and Facebook, from a marketing standpoint, digital marketing standpoint, those are kind of your two primary veins of digital marketing.

That is kind of the gold standard at this point now fit what Facebook does. It allows you to get information in front of a particular group of people. Okay. So you could say, I only want to put this blog post, let's say it's a blog post about. Knee pain. Okay. Knee pain about tennis, we'll make it specific.

So this tennis related knee blog post in front of women age 35 to 55 that live in this geographic radius of like two miles that like tennis, but also happen to make more than a hundred thousand dollars a year. And you could do that on Facebook. We do that on Facebook. We use Facebook every month in our digital advertising campaigns, and it allows you to get your message in front of the right people and to build that relationship.

Now you can have called to actions in there where you ask them to opt into things or to give you a call or to set up some sort of phone consultation or whatever. I mean, there's plenty of ways you can do that, but the main. The utilization of it initially for practice owners like us is getting the right information in front of the right people at the right time.

And it's relatively cost-effective in terms of your ability to get the right people to your site. So you would need some sort of content to send them to, or you would need to have a video or something that you put together to put on Facebook to have them watch, and you're paying to have them watch this. So Facebook is useful.

And can help you get a lot more reach to people. Besides you kind of focusing on friends and family, sort of, you know, talking you up or people that you've worked with tell, telling their friends and family about you can, the other section of this that I would say it would be Google, so Google has called ad words and Google ad words are paid to advertise.

That you can put in front of somebody in terms of looking at search terms, so, okay, let's say. You live in Atlanta, Georgia, right? And you want to work with people that have back pain that you know are there in a particular area, less specific geographic region. Well, when somebody searches back pain, you can have a paid ad get put in front of them.

That puts your link at the top of the page or the head of the map section. That increases the likelihood that they're going to want to. Click to your page and then from there, hopefully, they decide, Oh, I like this person a lot. They give you a call, or whatever it is, they turn into a lead somehow.

So Google is, is very, very accurate as well. And let me think about it. You probably Google search damn near anything that you. Look, you're looking up. I mean, it went from the name of a software search engine to it's, it's a, it's its word. I mean is, Oh, I Googled this, I Googled that. If not, why internet search this, that's how profound of an effect that Google has had on our society.

I mean, they literally, you could Google stuff now because of that. So. When you look at Google, and this is where it can get a little complex to the complexities in the backend of using, using Google and Facebook. You can, you can do it wrong and it'll, it'll waste your money, but it's, that's user error.

That's not necessarily Google and fake Facebook's fault because. I mean, they just do what you tell them to, right? So if you ask them to put an ad in front of the wrong person, it's still going to do it, and you still have to pay for it, but you're not going to get any return on your investment. Right. Which is what you have to look at.

But the, the cool thing about these, and this is if you understand what the lifetime value of your client is, or at least the initial value of your client with regards to how many. Average sessions you tend to see them for and what the average cost per session is with them. So let's say your average person is worth $500 to you initially because you charge $100 an hour, and you see them five times.

Okay? We'll keep it real, kind of simple. You know, round numbers. And so let's say it's $500 and you could go on Google. And let's say you could pay $100 to have an ad put in front of a specific subset of people that have, let's say, back pain again, and that you know that you would get. Let's say five leads from that, and one out of five converts to a patient with you.

Okay? So you've now paid $100 to get one patient, which, which is pretty high. Like we don't necessarily are our usual, cost as much, much lower than that. But I'm just using this as an example. Let's say 100 bucks, but you know, you're going to see that person five visits, and you're going to make 500.

So that's a. Pretty damn good return. So like what if you and I decided that we're going to play this game and the game was I give you $1 and you give me $5 back. Like I would want to play a game all day, right? Well, what if you were me and you gave me $1, and I gave you $5 back. You would want to give me a dollar every chance that you got.

If you could continue that process indefinitely, and with digital marketing, if as you get better at it. You can be very consistent in terms of how much, and you're putting out to how much you can expect to get back and project that into the growth of your business. Right. Which is very. A critical thing to be able to do in terms of saying, I know I'm going to see this many people this month. Because of that, I know I need to hire this many people, or I needed an administrative assistant to answer these many calls and scheduled this many people. A lot of that is predictable, much more predictable when you're doing digital advertising in particular.

Now, one last thing I would say too. And I guess I would lump this into a, and I think like a fifth vein of getting more patients in your door. This should be in there. I take it back. It should be five instead of four. So referral marketing is the fifth one. That's that. You know, I neglected to kind of add into this list initially, but referral marketing is also a way that you can.

Get new clients without having to spend a ton of money and go looking for them, sort of with like digital marketing, which isn't quite as complicated. So you are having some kind of system in place where you try to get people that you see to send you more people like them is useful. And you know, there's a couple of ways to do this.

They're straightforward. You know, you can just. Honestly saying, you know, Hey, I appreciate working with you. Let's say you're discharging somebody. I would appreciate it if you. Recommended us to anybody that you know that's like you, that wants to be active, pain-free, and do more than just kind of sit on the couch.

It's just looking to get more of their life than that. They want to live life and be active, and you know, we're a small company. We don't have a big marketing budget like some of the other big clinics around here. I would appreciate it if you knew of anybody like that. If you send them our way.

And it could be that simple, right? Maybe there's some sort of reward process you have in place for clients of yours. It sends somebody your way. You see that, and after a certain amount of people, they send your way, they get a comp visit. I mean, you can be pretty involved with this, or very simple. You know what?

The referral side of things is essential. You should be asking for referrals, you know? And you should ask for it honestly. Don't be creepy about it. And you can also be as complicated as you want, where you could have some sort of. System dialed in where people are going to get incentivized. You know, I know that 24-hour fitness, the heck's Hexa called lifetime fitness, big ass lifetime fitness gyms.

They're enormous. Do you know? Have you ever been to one of these? They have a few of them down here in Atlanta and these guys. It's a pretty expensive gym comparatively to two other kinds of as a sort of more corporate global gyms. But, they do lifetime cash, I believe is what it's called, where if you refer somebody to, to the gym and they sign up, you get like 50 or a hundred bucks of lifetime cash, which you can use to pay for your memberships or, massages or your kids in little camps that they have or whatever else.

The food at the food court they have that's there. So they do this referral program that's based on that. And I mean, I know people that go there, and they're all about this damn lifetime cash. Like they don't, they haven't paid for anything for their kids ever because they just send all their friends there, and they get this lifetime cash in.

They use it on their kids. So that's a referral system. That's a pretty complex one, and it's a big company, but Hey, we can learn a lot from people like that as well. So think about that as well. Do you have people that you see currently that you could ask, Hey, do you know anybody that's like you?

You know, I don't want to see, I don't want to see your grandma. That doesn't want to be active, right? I don't want to see your brother. That's just content to play video games. You know, give an idea of who you're looking for. People that are like you are active that want more out of life and more out of their body than the average person, and that's who we work with, and we'd love to help.

Then if you know him, please send them our way, you know? And, and that's about all that you need to say, you know? And, and be consistent with that. And that will also help drive more patients into your business. So I hope this was helpful. I said four, but there are five kinds of elements to this. Get more people in your door standpoint.

Like I said, guys, if you like this stuff, if you want more of it or you go kind of more depth in some of this, just shoot me an email, let me know. And, if you like the podcast. Man, do me a favor, head over to iTunes, leave us, leave us a review. That does help quite a bit in terms of getting us in front of more people.

I just looked at our numbers today. I was talking to a podcast host, and we're tracking to hit over 10,000 downloads this month, which is pretty cool to see that. I mean, you know, we started in. In August, so it's been less than three months. So we're going to be over that 10,000 download downloads per month, a number of this month, which is, which is excellent.

And if you like this. Share it. You know, if you know somebody that is a practice owner or thinking about doing it, you know, share it with your friend. You know, tag them on social, on social media, email it to them, whatever you want to do. Get this information out. Because I think it's so essential for us to have more viable, profitable cash practitioners in this country because of what we're doing.

Is changing the way that our profession kind of does things in a very positive way, in a way that allows us to work with people the way that we should to, to make a good living, to be better with the patients that are coming to see us get better outcomes, develop longterm relationships. And it's just a positive trend that I see in our profession.

So if you're on the fence about doing practice or particular practice, I hope that eventually, you decide to do it. I know it's kind of scary. I've been there, you know, if you know somebody that is thinking about it or just started, you know, police Sheriff's information with them, you guys are the reason why I, I put this stuff out and I would love to help more of you.

So share it if you've got an opportunity to, if you know somebody, I appreciate your time so much. Thank you for listening to the PT Entrepreneur Podcast today. I'm Dr. Danny. Thanks so much.