E746 | How To Attract More New Patients To Your Cash-Based Practice In 2024

In this episode of the PT Entrepreneur Podcast, Dr. Danny dives into a crucial topic for cash-based physical therapy practitioners: attracting new patients. As part of their ongoing mission to educate and empower clinicians, this episode not only transforms a detailed YouTube training video into an audio format for on-the-go learning but also provides actionable insights that can significantly impact your practice's growth.

Dr. Danny shares the incredible success stories of their clients, who have collectively welcomed 65,000 new patients over the past year. This remarkable achievement underscores the effectiveness of the strategies he will discuss, which are designed to be implemented across diverse markets with relative ease.

With a focus on helping clinicians scale their practices, Dr. Danny emphasizes the importance of developing patient acquisition skills as a fundamental component of running a successful cash-based clinic.

Key Highlights:

1. Four-Part Strategy: Dr. Danny outlines a systematic four-part approach to patient attraction, beginning with a fundamental component that can be adopted independently before layering on additional tactics.

2. Simplicity in Execution: Attracting new patients, while a vital skill, is often more straightforward than other significant challenges faced by clinic owners, such as hiring staff or managing clinic operations.

3. Proven Tactics: Listen in as Dr. Danny reveals specific, tested tactics that have contributed to the influx of new patients for their clients, with the aim of enabling listeners to replicate this success.

4. Scaling Your Practice: By the end of this episode, you'll be equipped with a clear, actionable plan to enhance your new patient acquisition efforts, helping you meet the demands of a growing practice.

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Are you a member of our free PT Entrepreneur Facebook Group? Join today!

Ready to elevate your practice? Book a call at the link below with one of our expert consultants today and start your journey to delivering unparalleled physical therapy.

Podcast Transcript

Danny: Hey, real quick, if you were serious about starting or growing your cash based practice, I want to formally invite you to go to Facebook and join our PT entrepreneurs Facebook group. This is a group of over 6, 000 providers all over the country, and it's a pretty amazing place to start to get involved in the conversation.

Hope to see you there soon. Hey, are you a physical therapist looking to leverage your skill set in a way that helps you create time and financial freedom for yourself and your family? If so, you're in the right spot. My name is Danny Matei, and over the last 15 years, I've done pretty much everything you can in the profession.

I've been a staff PT, I've been an active duty military officer physical therapist, I've started my own cash practice, I've sold that cash practice. And today my company physical therapy business helped over a thousand clinicians start growing scale their own cash practices So if this sounds like something you want to do listen up because i'm here to help you Hey doc.

Danny here the pt entrepreneur podcast And I wanted to drop a little intro on this podcast for you to let you know. This is another one of our YouTube training videos i'm going to take the audio of it so that you can listen to it on the go wherever you're at If you want to watch the actual training, and there are some models that I draw out and some things that I go over that would be helpful to have the visual of you can head over to YouTube and go to our PT biz channel.

We have more and more videos we're putting on there every single day. And really what we're trying to do is create an education platform as well as share our clinic tours, which are my opinion. They're just, they're really fun. They're super cool to see what. Yeah. Cash based clinicians are doing all over the country.

This has been a project in the works for us since literally 2020 got shut down. Our goal was to take a videographer and travel around to clients of ours all over the country, different. Different cities, different demographics, and really share what their story is, what they're doing, what their clinics look like, what their vision is, and be able to really show what's happening that we get to see, obviously by working with these these clinicians, but, you may not see the trend and the growth that is happening.

In this non insurance based clinical world, especially the performance based or movement world that we work. So with so many clinicians that have functioned in that role. Head there and you can watch all this today. I'm going over the the way to attract more new patients to your cash based clinic and.

In 2024. So what is going on right now? And, to give some, social credibility to this, the clients that we work with in the last 12 months have gained 65, 000 new patients. So they've generated 65, 000 new patients for their practices combined over the last 12 months. So what I'm going to talk about works, it works in Basically every market, some are a little different than others, but this generally will work in any market.

It's a fairly easy to manage. That's the goal. Like we, there's many complex marketing things you can do. This is probably this the least complex, but yet effective way for you to really scale a practice past yourself. And the goal for us is to help people really grow past themselves.

And if you need to get. 30, 40, 50 new patients in a month. Sometimes more than that. I just spoke to a practice the other day and they had 85 new patients in July, and that was like a PR month for them in honestly, one of the slower months for the year. And that's a lot. That's a ton. If you have a cash practice and you need, you got eight clinicians that you need to help fill their schedule.

So how do we do that? I'll go over it today. There's four parts to it that you can implement. You can start with just one. You don't have to do all of them at once. You can start with just one and just say, okay, cool. I'm going to focus on this. Once I get the style in, I'll layer on these other things.

And hopefully this helps you organize some of it, because one of the bigger problems we see with people is just how do I get more new patients? It's constantly something that we hear, but what happens when we get a chance to work with people is once we get dial in this new patient acquisition side of things, it's really about.

Hiring it's about your space and it's about becoming a great leader. And these are, in my opinion, they're much harder problems to solve those than to attract new customers, which is a skill in its own right, but definitely one that you should be able to dial in in a relatively short period of time, and then focus on these more important things that are really going to grow the business.

So hope you like this one. Thanks for listening to the podcast and I'll catch you in the next one. Today, I'm going to show you how to attract cash paying clients to your practice. In 2024, my name is a Matei. I'm the founder of PT biz. And in the last 12 months alone, our clients have generated 65, 000 new patients, and I'm going to show you exactly the framework that we are using with them, that you can plug into your own practice as well and get a better idea of how to consistently and effectively do what many people consider is the hardest part of these businesses, which is to actually generate consistent new patient volume every single month.

And more importantly, to be able to grow past yourself in a consistent way and be able to hire other staff members. And that doesn't happen without enough patient volume. That's a true fact of that. So today we're gonna talk about the four parts of a marketing strategy that go into actually developing your cash pay.

Patient volume to a point where you can scale past yourself to how many providers it is you decide that you want to be able to hire. Let's go over these four areas and we're going to keep this super simple. And there really are the four of this local marketing ads, content, and then referrals.

So I'm going to go into each of these four in a bit more detail, but what you have to keep in mind is that each of these each of these are in their own will generate a certain amount of. New patients, but when combined together they're going to work even better, right? They're going to increase your throughput, increase the likelihood that you have more new patients.

And if one starts to maybe not do as well that month, the others are going to be there as well. It's the concept is really imagining you're fishing and you had one pole that you could use versus if you were fishing and let's say you had four and You know, that's going to increase the likelihood that you actually catch something by a significant amount, because you just have more bait in the water.

You have more chances to actually catch something. So as long as you can pay attention to all four of those, let's put it that way. So you don't want to do so much and take it to an extreme where it's literally, you can't even track and optimize things effectively. Or hand those off to other people to do you want to be able to track these things.

And these are the four that we find have the best ROI of your time. Again, it's local marketing. And again, these are going to go straight into your practice, right? So local marketing, I'm gonna get into that ads is going to drive to your practice. Referrals is going to drive to your practice.

Content is going to drive to your practice. And all of these together are what's going to form your marketing strategy. This is going to lead to you having consistent new patient volume. So if we look at local marketing, let's start with that because this is the one that I think most people are the most familiar with, but also it's one of those things that it feeds everything else.

Your physical footprint. Now I've seen people. that have cash based practices that do nothing besides this, and they generate 20, 30, 40 new patients in a month because they're really good at it. And it's a huge part of what they do. You could live off of just one of these and if you were to pick one by the way I would pick this one and the reason I say that is You have a local business.

You have a local service business that works with other people and those other people Talk to other people in your area and they go to community events in your area And they're part of clubs or they're going to school events or a game or something like that And for a very long time, business, service based local businesses, any type of local business, whether it's a restaurant or a physical therapy clinic or whatever, that a big part of the marketing strategy is just to be a part of your community, right?

That's a big part of it. And that's what we're talking about here with local marketing. That's a portion of local marketing. And for me, I like to break this up into four subcategories of local marketing, and some people are gonna be better at, Others then others add different variations of this, but the first one is workshops.

Okay. So workshops when we look at that. This is

Workshops is a big one. Okay, so workshops is education events That's where you go and you teach about something that you have some sort of subject matter expertise with and your ability to educate people on What their problems are puts you in the position as a subject matter expert, which means you probably can solve their problem Okay, that is what happens with workshops for instance Let's say you go to a running store and you talk about You know the ankle and the problems with the ankle that lead to plantar fasciitis and achilles problems, right?

Common running related injuries you talk about training methodologies how the foot works things people can do to You know pre post run, really help alleviate that and you engage with them about this common running problem And then afterward you talk to people about the injuries that they have going on And you sign some of them up to become clients and come in and see you even better.

You collect their information, their name, and their their email and phone number, and you follow up them afterwards, right? That is the way in which a lot of people can generate consistent patient volume. And it's not, it's very low tech. It's something that you probably are pretty good educator to begin with.

It's a reason why a lot of people will actually trend this direction to start with is because they feel comfortable with it. They know a lot about what's going on. The profession, they know a lot about how to work with people and they show that at a live event and it works typically to get patients that we see somewhere between like on the low end, 20%, on the high end, I've seen as much as 60 percent of people come in and book a visit.

Okay. So somewhere between 20, 60 percent is what you can expect. Let's say you have 10 people that show up, two to six people will turn into a new patient. If you're good at running a workshop. And there's definitely nuances to doing this correctly that we don't have time to get into today, but a good workshop is very different than just going and doing an education event.

There's a lot around it, how you set it up, how you follow up with people and then how you relay information because you have to make sure you're talking to non clinicians. The biggest mistake that I see is clinicians. Speak as if they're talking to their clinicians and it's too high level of information and people don't actually understand what you're talking about.

The second thing is community events. So a community event, this is going and being a sponsor of a race a local like wellness workshop that's going on, or this could also be you volunteering your time with, A high school, let's say you want to be the assistant strength coach for a high school or you want to coach at a club soccer team or something you have a unique interest and advantage of understanding that world You've coached it before maybe you're a high level athlete in whatever capacity yourself And you want to share that information you're in a position as a coach as a leader within the community And that is actually a really powerful thing it's not, obviously the only reason to do it is not to get patience.

You want to really want to do it as well, but if you put yourself in that position, you're more visible. People know what you do. They know more about you. It's really about more, more about how many people know who you are than anything else. That is what a local reputation is. And there's people, like I said, that are amazing at this, that are business owners that have, bulletproof, multi seven figure businesses and many different types of businesses that strictly are all built off of this.

And they're great at it. The negative is it's time intensive. It can take a lot of time to be involved in a community. It can take a lot of time to teach events and set those up. The negative is that it takes a lot of time. The positive is it is really effective and it's very hard to screw up if you're doing the right thing for people longterm.

The third thing would be injury screens, which are not the same thing as workshops, by the way. They're, they look like they're the same in, I guess in theory, you're in person with a number of people, but it's a one to one versus a one to many, shorter. You're basically establishing some sort of testing some sort of screen you want to take them through.

And you're going to let them know the findings of that, of what you feel like is going on and what they need to work on. So this is much more, I think of workshops like planting seeds, right? So you're farming, you're planting you're they'll, you'll harvest it at one point, but it's not right away.

For a large percentage of people that maybe come to an event like that, same thing with community events. It's very much farming, you're planting seeds, works or injury screens are, that's hunting. People are coming in. They're saying, I want to get checked out for this. You do an assessment, diagnostic assessment, whatever that is.

There's lots of variations of this, depending on your niche and your background, but then from there it's, Hey, here's what I've found. Do you want help fixing this? Or do you want to try to figure it out on your own? The conversion percentage on injury screens is. Much higher than workshops. Workshops will help build a brand a bit more and Drive people to eventually come into a injury screen.

Not to say you can't get patients from those but injury screening is a lot more direct It's gonna be a lot more, one to one shorter And then move to the next step of whatever that is. In most cases is going to be come in. Let's take a look at this more hands on. Let's get some more time and let's really solve this problem.

The root causes problem, right? So those were great, especially in conjunction with workshops. The fourth thing would be networking events. Now our local networking, and this is things like. BNI groups, local chamber of commerce, things local entrepreneur groups. These can be hit or miss. I've been in like local chamber of commerce groups.

That was complete waste of my time. I've been in local networking groups that were amazing and literally drove a ton of patients my way. But it just depends on the mix of people. It depends on, who's there. The things that they're interested in and for what I found is local entrepreneur groups or even something like a BNI group, which is like a business networking group, which is not necessarily entrepreneurs.

Sometimes it is, sometimes it's like professionals that are just like working for other companies. That can be a great fit. If the right mix of people is there, if it's the wrong mix of people, it doesn't mean that the networking doesn't work. It just means that maybe it's not the right mix and you maybe need to try to go and find a different group.

For some people they kill it with this. Absolutely crush it. Absolutely. We had, we drove a lot of business with these type of groups, these networking groups, very much worth my time to be a part of those. And you got to keep in mind as a, as the owner of your practice, your goal is to basically build the business.

And that means, leadership hiring people and driving people, into your space at a certain point, like that's the most important that you can possibly do to help fill the schedules of everybody else. So these networking groups can be a really good fit locally, and it really does help increase your brand because more people are aware of you, which is always an important thing to keep in mind, like brand is really important.

The number of people who know who you are, and in particular have positive things to say about you. That is really important. And it works in the background. You don't see it happening, but it does affect everything else. And I'll talk about that in a second. So that's local marketing. Again, if I was to pick one and he should say, only pick one of these, that's the one that I choose.

I think it's the most important, effective thing you can possibly do for a local business. And it's the least technical one of all of them, you don't need to know landing pages and ads and whatever else. You just have to be a part of communities. You have to share your knowledge with people and then follow up with them.

And it's simple, as simplified as that sounds, it can be a hard thing to do at scale in particular. So second one is content. Content is. Basically sharing your knowledge in a curated way on different platforms, right? You can do this in a lot of ways. You can do this on something like this, like YouTube.

You can do this on your own site with blog posts. You can do this on Facebook, Instagram, you can use Twitter or X, whatever it's called. You can use a lot of different platforms to share your information. What we found with cash based practice is the number one currently is going to be Instagram.

So Instagram is for many people, the most user friendly, it makes a lot of sense for our profession because we can share what we're doing. We can share a few different things in the actual office, which is really cool. So if you think about it, you've got. educational content that you can share. So you can actually share, Hey, this is what the knee does in the squat, or this is, how the shoulder should look when you're doing a pull up, or this is what we commonly see when somebody has a pain in this area. You can share those things or you can share. Exercises that people could do for certain injuries, right? So here's two exercises to do if your neck is hurting to alleviate some pain right away, right? Go straight into that and it's a really effective way of doing that You've also got patient case studies, which are really cool.

Think of this as like behind the scenes You get to show your clinic you to show what you're doing get to show the people you're working with What movements they're going through that you're actually working with people, which gives you some social credibility with that. And all of that together is really engaging for people.

People like to see that they like to see the behind the scenes of stuff, like to see the reality TV kind of side of things. And that's, that is a easy thing to do because you're literally doing this with patients all day. So you can curate that pretty easily without having to think about what are you going to share with people?

It's basically documenting What the day looks like in the office. Okay. As long as your patients are okay with it. That's really important. Don't do this without asking them. The second or the third thing is show your brand personality. So this is what your space looks like. Again, it goes hand in hand with this, but it could literally be, what your team is doing.

It could be, the culture of your clinic, the things that you're into that are. Unique to you, whether that be health and fitness stuff or it's, you like the team likes to go out and they like to play pickleball together or something like that. Showing your personality is really a good way of doing that on Instagram as well.

It's because it's a really user friendly platform that a lot of our patients are on and that a lot of the clinics can use like pretty easily. The last thing is that you can interact. With professionals and potential patients. So you can interact with other people within the space that are trainers, clinicians people that are potentially, complimentary in terms of the industry that you're in.

Also potential patients that might follow your account and you can reach out and say, Hey, How's it going? Interested in any specific content or something specific that we can help you with? Like you can actually just touch base with somebody. You can share information as well. You can engage with other people, like their posts and comment on it and share that.

You can be part of a digital community, which is, I just view this as an opportunity to have digital marketing, local marketing, basically like digital, local marketing in Instagram and share your thoughts at the same time, which is very similar to what we're talking about on the local marketing side.

It's just happening on a application. That is digital. It's a digital community. It's no different as far as the rules of the game. It just happens in a digital world versus a physical world. And the best part of it though, is you can share your thoughts, your views, your unique expertise and show the personality of your, yourself as well as your clinic, which is very powerful.

So the two of these work really well. So like digital local marketing and in person local marketing. Are great. And you're already probably able to curate some of your thoughts. It's a great way to share it and see what sticks and what messaging sticks. It's a really easy way to test some of these things, especially before you look at anything like.

Like ads the, which is the third thing. So ads, if you want to really build your practice up I believe ads has to be a part of that strategy at a certain point, especially when you're working to build clinical schedules past yourself and maybe one other provider. So the thing with ads is there's a lot that can go wrong with ads.

And there's two variations. There's branding ads and then there's like call to action ads, which would be traditionally what most people think of where it's like, Hey, book a call to talk to our team about working with us, whatever. But when we look at branding ads, so branding ads, the best place for this is really Facebook and Instagram.

And what you're doing is you're paying Facebook and Instagram. To put your best content, most cases is going to be some sort of video in front of a specific audience of people in a specific area. So ironically, this is funny. Like back in the day when we started athletes potential the first ad strategy I ever got into was literally this, and it was.

It was called a video view campaigns back whenever we run this. And this is, keep in mind, this is like eight years ago which in digital marketing terms is, it is basically ancient, it's generations ago. So previously what we could do, and there's variations are similar to this today, but previously what you could do is you could take your best content and you could say, I want to create a video view ad.

So I just want to pay to get views on eyeballs on this. I only want it in this set area. So within a few miles of where my clinic is with these demographic sort of characteristics of the people that are, the age demographics, the interest, things like that. And those are the people that I want to see this content.

And there's no other, there's nothing else there. They can't do anything. They might be able to click to link the can embed in there. But for the most part, it's just Hey, here's a post that we think that you would like. It's suggested for them. That's what they call it now.

It's like suggested posts, basically. And what was cool was back when we were running these, like it's it's a very cheap, easy way to get visibility to your brand. And it's something that we do to this day, even with the companies that we have currently. And what we like about it is it allows us at a very cost of, in a very cost effective way, get visibility on.

Content that we know is engaging and we know is helpful to people. And that is a, that is basically like taking a step forward in the likelihood of that person is going to become a client because they need a certain number of interactions and a certain number of, a certain amount of trust before they decide they want to work with you.

So if you can help them in some way, if you can share something that they may find valuable. The next steps are think of it logically, right? If you watch something and it's Oh man, that was a helpful video on dealing with my neck pain. I tried these couple little exercises out. It actually seemed to help.

I'm going to look these people up and the next steps are they look at your website, they go on, they look at your social media profile product first, actually see what you have going on there. So don't run ads. If you're not doing any sort of social media profile content sharing or any of the other things we just talked about, as far as.

Instagram is concerned because they're not going to see anything and then they're going to think that this is a scam or you're brand new and probably not very good. So you're, they're going to do that next. You're going to look at your social accounts, then they're going to look at what's linked to go to your website.

Maybe they look at what referral or what testimonials do you have? Do you have any Google reviews? Things like that. And from there they'll make a decision of, Oh, maybe this is worth me reaching out to them or they'll forget about you. But then, a couple of weeks later, maybe they talk to somebody that they know that are talking about their neck problem.

That person says, Oh man, I went to this clinic. It was really good. It was called this is the name of it. It's the name of the video. They saw these things click all of a sudden they make an appointment and they're in the office. You don't know necessarily how these are going to connect.

You can't see how they're happening in the background. You can't follow these people around and know exactly what conversations they're having, but they're, it's going to happen. And if you can put content that you know is helpful and that people are engaging with, the best content that you're sharing, so you're basically sharing here, you're saying, okay, my educational content or this stuff, this is like really clicking for some reason.

And let's say it's an educational video. Like we're talking about this neck pain video. If you can share that, and then all of a sudden you realize, Oh, this is getting exponentially more organic views than anything else. That's what we want to do is take this and we want to bring it down.

And then we want to make a branding ad out of that. That's how you know, which ones to pick because your people already telling you that you're testing it for free. And then you're putting ad spend behind it because, it's being, it's a helpful video and it's something people are engaging with and they like.

So that's how you test these. And then you're putting money behind your best content, right? And what's cool about this is the most cost effective way that you can do any sort of paid advertising. It's the least trackable. That's the challenge. It's not as trackable. So you can't have this very definitive return on investment that you can estimate, or you could, you can calculate out.

You just have to understand that if you can get somebody to watch one of your videos, let's say it's a minute. And it's costing you 50 cents to get them to watch it. If you could give somebody 50 cents on the street, that was your ideal customer, and they lived in the area that you live, would you do it?

Like probably it'd be worth it for you to do that. And then they get an interaction with you at a very low cost, but it's building a brand, right? You're building awareness of your company, which is very different than ads that are gonna be more call to action ads Because that's not building a brand if anything You need a lot of brand equity for that to actually work because there's a lot of that out there and people are constantly inundated with these, right?

You probably see this constantly yourself. So you've got to build a brand that people trust and know that if they work with you, they're going to get a great outcome and that you're going to do the right things for them. You have high integrity and you do what you say you're going to do. These are all things that a brand builds and a call to action ad cleans a lot of that stuff up for people that are showing that they're more interested.

So the, this, the second variation would be this, which is. We have found at this point, we have run millions of dollars of ads. And not just like for other clients, but for ourself and other clients combined millions of dollars of ads, which is a lot and a lot of information you get from that about how ads actually work and what we found is if you have a cash based practice, the cost per lead.

Is going to be higher on Google, lower on something like Facebook and Instagram, but the intent is much higher on Google and much lower on Facebook and Instagram. The reason is if you think about Google, people are searching for a solution to a problem. They're actively searching. Best Physical Therapist Atlanta, or Knee Pain Specialist Atlanta, or whatever, right?

They're searching locally for a solution to a problem. In Facebook and Instagram, they're looking at pictures of their friends vacations. They're looking at pictures of their friends kids. They're, whatever, they're on there looking at funny videos. They're not necessarily searching for a solution to a problem, so they're scrolling through stuff.

You have to get them to stop and get enough interest, and they're like, yeah. I want to do this thing this call to action, whatever it might be. And that's, that is a less less of a high intent individual than somebody that is actively searching for something. So what we found is seeing if the intent of this is to get new patients, the easiest thing to do is to start by looking for the people who are actively searching for a solution to their problem.

That means they know they have a problem and they know that they want to get help with it. And that's typically Google, not to say that Facebook, Instagram don't work, but what we found is. That's better for branding. It's better for building your brand and sharing content and information. And then for you to actually clean all those things up, it's when people are searching for something in Google and, or if you want to go the route where you're using Instagram and Facebook for actual like call to actions, what you're going to end up with is more leads, but a far lower amount of those people that are actually come in and less qualified from what we found as well.

So if we have to pick one and try to make this as simple as we can, We prefer call to action ads actually happen on Google and branding ads actually happen on Instagram and Facebook is the way that we like to break it out. So again, they're searching for a solution for the problem. They're qualified to some degree.

And it makes it, this makes it much more effective. Like I said, as far as. The number of people that you're going to have to engage with. So the way it works is basically this, and this is it with no matter what platform you put it on, but you have an ad and your ad is saying, whatever, get help with your knee pain.

Click here. Let's just say it's as simple as that. They click to a page, right? So there's drop off points in all of these, your ad could suck, right? So like your ad could be the problem. Like this could literally be. Terrible conversion. So this is one drop off point is right here.

We've got the second one is the landing page, the opt in page, the conversion rate, which would be the fourth one. Conversion percentage in office is six and conversion percentage from the show rate to in office would be the fifth one as they're transitioning. So all of these spots, it starts here with the ad.

So the ad is basically a call to action for them to take the next step, which would be go to the landing page. To then learn more about what we're talking about. So let's say, is this an ad to get on a discovery call with your team to have a discussion for 15 minutes about, what's going on with their knee and if you can help them.

Okay, cool. Landing page is the next step. So let's say you have a hundred people that see the ad. Hey, sorry to interrupt the podcast, but I have a huge favor to ask of you. If you are a long time listener or a new listener and you're finding value in this podcast, please head over to iTunes or Spotify or wherever you listen to the podcast.

And please leave a rating and reviews actually very helpful for us to get this podcast in front of more clinicians And really help them develop time and financial freedom. So if you do that, I would greatly appreciate it now back to the podcast And let's say that 10 10 people go to the landing page.

That's a 10 drop or 59 percent drop off rate or 10 percent conversion percentage to the landing page, right? So cool. Maybe the ad needs a little bit of help. Maybe you need to split test some things, but the landing page is the next step. So now let's say 10 people get there and let's say one person moves over to the opt in and they actually scheduled.

That means you have a 10 percent conversion from the landing page to the opt in. These are all areas where we can start to optimize and improve, but what we want to see is the highest throughput of people that are going from the ad. To the landing page to actually opting into talking to you about something.

That's the key I want I don't care how many people actually click from the ad as much as I care How many of those people are actually doing what I want them to do? I would much rather have if I have 100 people click from the ad And only one person does what I want them to do, but I have 10 people click from the ad But eight people do what I want them to do.

I'll take that all day because that's far again It's far more efficient number one with my ad spend but also my team and my resources with people that i'm going to have You know follow up with so you want to make sure that you are Efficient with your ad spend and not just going for Not just going for just a bunch of lead generation of low quality leads this is one of the bigger mistakes I see with ads is people just oh, man, i'm getting like 50 cents cost per lead.

I'm killing it. Yeah. But how many of those people are turning into clients like zero, that means you have poor targeting. That means your ad is not reaching the right people or your messaging is off, right? So you've got to look at this all the way through the entire funnel. The other big drop off percentage you're going to see is opt ins from when they schedule to actually showing up to talking to you.

Okay, that comes down to the messaging you have that comes down to the availability. You have how quickly you can talk to somebody and who they're talking to. If they're talking to your admin versus they're talking to the owner of the business, the show rate is going to be very different. That's important to know.

So you want to know how many people are coming through, right? As high of a percentage as possible is really important. I can tell you for sure from what we've seen. When we split test the heck out of this and all these different markets is that if the owner of a clinic takes the call, the show up rate is going to be way higher.

The other thing that's interesting about that is the conversion percentage, which is next is what percent of these people that are getting on the call, let's say 10 people get on the call. Eight people say, yeah, I want to come in for a visit, a paid visit. That's an 80 percent conversion rate. We can scale the hell out of that.

If 10 people get on a call and three people come in for a paid visit, That might be a problem for us We may not be able to actually make ads work at that percentage depending on what you're selling But you've got to be as high as possible what we're seeing is if you can get to 70 percent of this rate.

So this Show rate of a call to actually coming in for a paid visit You can do really well with that as far as return on investment is concerned. That's the benchmark we want to see with people coming in from cold traffic or from these direct from these ads. So the conversion percentage at that point is going to be coming in for it for an actual visit.

And how many actually show up? That's another one. So eight said they're going to come in. Five showed up. That's not great. If eight said they're going to come in at eight and eight actually come in, that's awesome. And a lot of this has to do with the messaging that you have around the entire funnel, the ad and how they're being followed up with the communication you have, the really the client success side of making sure they get what they need and they know what the next steps are, because that's all going to lead to the ultimate thing.

What we care about, which is the in office conversion. How many people go from this? So your ad to this,

that's it. How do people go from the ad to becoming a client? That's what we care about. But in between there's a bunch of steps where things can get lost and people can drop off. Now, this is really important. The reason I just walked you through all that and hopefully didn't confuse everyone.

If you're not running any ads, it may make, Like not a lot of sense to you tangibly, cause maybe you haven't done that or seen any of those, but this is very important. All right. You have so many drop off points. You have so many things that can go wrong. The one thing that you have that can really help improve your ads is your local reputation.

And I've already talked about this and that would be here. This is your local marketing. All right, you build local reputation Here it's through your branding. It's also frankly your outcomes your client experience, which i'll talk about in a second as well But your local reputation Can either dramatically help or dramatically hurt your ability to run paid ads.

And think about what I just said in terms of the life cycle of somebody that sees one of your pieces of content and then talks to a friend, here's what can happen. They can say, Oh yeah, I saw this, this video or whatever, help my neck. Have you ever heard of this group? No, I haven't.

Or yeah, I've heard that they're sketchy or yeah, I've heard they're awesome. These are the things that happen from a local reputation standpoint. People talk to their friends. People trust other people more than they trust people advertising on the internet because there's a lot of sketchy stuff that happens on the internet.

Like I get that, I'm apprehensive to trust ads on the internet as well. And your local reputation lives in the background. And it is what can make or break your advertising campaigns. This also includes things like social proof. So if you don't have any Google reviews, if you don't have any sort of reviews at all, that's a weird thing for a business.

Like you've got to start to chip away at those as well. So people can see that. And that again is your local reputation. It's people saying these people are awesome. I validate them. This is my name. This is what I experienced with them. That's gonna be part of the process of anybody coming from an ad.

Nobody just goes ad, landing page, gets on a call, call to come in the office, buys a package. They go ad, let me check these people out. Are they legit? Look at their content. Look at their reviews. Talk to a friend. See if I can find anything else about it, maybe look at some other options forget about you come back See the ad again.

Oh, you know what? They seem legit. I think I have some time I'm gonna go ahead and set this up. They go to your landing page. You have the weirdest landing page ever they don't book and done or You go to they go to your landing page You have a great landing page the ability for them to self schedule they pick a time that's convenient to them talking to the owner You All of a sudden now they're coming in and they become a client.

Like these are all the things that can drop off with this, which is one of the reasons why, when we look at ads, this is something that we want to layer on and a slightly later stage. If you're a brand new business, this can be hard for you to get a good ROI because you don't have some of these other things.

So you haven't built the infrastructure of the business. You haven't built the foundation for the business to then layer things on top of. And what I've seen with people that go straight into ads. A they either think I don't have to go and engage with human beings in the real world So I can just sit here behind my computer and I can just run ads and they think that's all that they need And they're probably like, you know Maybe a bit more on the introverted side and that's not what they want to do and it gives them some anxiety Which I understand it's not my favorite thing to do either but Even if they are the most skilled digital marketer in the world, you still can't Hide from the fact that you have a local service business.

Like you have to build some of these other parts of the marketing system that actively feed into your ads and their ads would do better if they did these other things as well and layered them in with what they're doing. The other thing that I see, and frankly, this is something that's huge within our profession.

I see a lot of people that market just like that ad solve everything and that you need to do their ad system or learn their ads approach Or buy their ads program and then all your problems will be solved and that it just doesn't work that way It's just one part of it. It couldn't be a skill It can be a beneficial part to the business But it has to be in conjunction with the other things that we're talking about.

Otherwise your outcomes are diminished the effect that you have from the dollars that you're spending in that are diminished and you would get a better ROI from that and frankly have a better business, a more robust business and a far harder business to kill than if you're just running ads. Keep this in mind.

In the last 10 years in particular that I've been doing anything with digital advertising, I have seen four major changes in algorithms, both with Google, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube. Major changes that screwed up businesses that are completely dependent on ads. And that happens from time to time as these big platforms do what is best for them.

And they'll make adjustments. There was a time when Facebook pages were killing it. Your Facebook page could get amazing organic reach. And then all of a sudden they decided they didn't want to do that because they wanted people to pay for it. And then it tanked. And a lot of people had these huge Facebook pages with hundreds of thousands or millions of people.

All of a sudden they were worthless overnight. So you've got to keep in mind that like these digital things can be taken away from you. Local things cannot be taken away from you very easily, unless you frankly screw it up yourself. Like you just are doing the wrong things for people over an extended period of time.

If you're not doing that, it's very. Easy to maintain a solid reputation. If you have a good product service and you're doing the right thing for people on an ongoing basis. So ads should be a part of it, but it should never be the only thing that you're doing. It can definitely layer on top of what you're doing and accelerate your ability to grow schedules, but you need both.

You've got to have ads. You have to have a local. Reputation to go along with it because they improve each other. And if you pick one local, it's going to be better for you than just ads. It's going to require more time and effort, but it's also something that can't be taken away. Like it just can't be taken away.

And look, I ran my practice through COVID. Here's what I can tell you about COVID, COVID showed us right away, whether people thought your company was worth a shit or not, like for me to have people locally reach out and ask me if they could pre purchase packages. Did they know they weren't going to use just because they want to make sure that we had cashflow in a time when they knew we were shut down.

That doesn't happen. If you just run ads, it doesn't happen. If you just have a digital presence that happens, if you meet people and you engage with people and you build relationships with people and you actually are part of a community, that is the power of it. And what a perfect example of something that we had merely no control over whatsoever to be able to run our business and saw a massive drop in our business because we couldn't see people for a period of time.

And to have our community come together and really support us that way meant that we had built like an actual brand, a company that people wanted to see succeed. And that's what I'm talking about with. building brand and building local reputations that goes hand in hand with other things like ads and content creation and all these other things you can do digitally.

But don't forget the infrastructure and foundation of your practice has got to be local marketing and reputation that you have from being a part of The lives of people that live in the area that you are supporting. That is that creates a bulletproof business. In my opinion, it's something that you cannot skip.

So the last thing is this is referrals. And the thing with referrals is referrals have to be earned. People refer people to businesses if they think they're doing an amazing job. Okay. You cannot be average and get referrals. There's something called a NPS score. An NPS score is a net promoter score. So a net promoter score is one question and it's how likely would you be to refer a friend or family member to our business, right?

It's on a scale of 0 to 10. 9s and 10s are considered promoters. So if you're a nine or a 10 is really good. So nine to 10 promoter, a seven, eight is neutral. And anything six or below is what's called a detractor. Okay. So this is not good. This means that they don't like your business. These people don't have anything really positively or negatively to say about your business, but they'll probably still come maybe, but they're not going to go out of their way to refer anybody.

Nines and tens are the ones that love what you do. They love it. For us, within our own company with PT Biz, our benchmark is 9. 5. We want to see a 9. 5. We want to be here on average across the board for the people that we work with. That means that we have a really high customer, a great customer experience and that they're getting what they have signed up for.

We're getting what they, what they want as far as why they want to work with us. But they're also getting a good experience along the way. And that's the key. So if you want to get a referral, you have to have strong service, great service, which would frankly be your outcomes. It means you have to have a great product and service, have great people that are fulfilling, that they're showing up on time, that they know people's names, that they're organized and they're following a system and that they're getting people outcomes.

But on the other side is you have to have a great client experience. They, your space looks nuts. It's branded. Your people are friendly. Your communication is prompt. It's consistent. They know what to do. They know what to expect. All these things, maybe it's, you surprise them with things that are, they don't think you're paying attention to, we would do this all time.

And for good things and for not so good things. If someone had a family member or a close loved one that died, we would send them flowers. If it was somebody's birthday, we would get them a little gift. If we knew somebody was. Running a race or something like that. We would get them something in support of that whether it's you know a shirt or a hat or whatever something that they could wear in training or at their race We would pay attention to what people were saying and with minimal money, but a lot of effort We would be able to create amazing customer experiences for these people.

Cause we understand what they're doing, what their goals are, and we're listening to them, that's key. We're listening to them. That is your client experience. That's this, your client experience is so important. It's literally 50 percent of the reason why somebody would refer somebody your way. The outcomes are the other 50%.

Here's a good scenario. If you have somebody that literally is mediocre clinician, but man, people love that individual. They think that they're awesome. They're such a nice person. They listen to everything you say. They remember everything about your life. Whatever. They may not have anything bad to say about you, but they're probably not going to refer somebody to you because you're not really getting the outcome that they want, right?

If you have somebody who's an amazing clinician, but they are an absolute dud of a human being that has no emotional intelligence, this person gets you a great result, but you hate spending the hour with them every time that you do. No one's referring to you either. You need a combination of great outcomes and a great client experience, which isn't just the clinician.

It's also the ecosystem around it, that the business provides those two things together, equal referral. You can incentivize these things. Through prompting people to do different things But if you don't have these two to begin with if you don't have these two things to start with You're not going to get the referral.

It's not going to happen and referrals are awesome they're one of the best things that you can track and engineer into your business because They are the best clients. They're pre sold essentially They're culturally going to be a great fit It also it is a, it's a great feedback loop. Like it's this flywheel of one great person sends another great person who sends another great person who sends another great person, and it compounds on itself.

It's very important to keep this in mind that you have to have amazing service and you have to have amazing client experience and go above and beyond for people. That's it. You have to work really hard to be awesome at what you do. You have to work really hard to be the best in your area at what you do.

But if you are, you have an unfair advantage because your marketing all of a sudden becomes way easier. If half your volume is showing up because their friends and family are telling them to come in every single month, you have half the people you need to meet the minimum for the growth trajectories that you have.

What a great place to be. Now, all of a sudden you can spend less time and effort on the other areas, or if you spend more time and effort on those, and you have this great referral network, you're going to grow even faster. And then your problem turns into staffing and space and not where do I find enough new patients, or I don't have enough revenue.

This is way different and way better business problems to solve than just getting enough new people. So the big thing for you is service plus client experience. Transcribed That's going to equal you getting the referral You also you got to keep in mind. You need to ask people to send folks your way occasionally like You can engineer this into the client experience by thinking about when someone has a big change when they have a when they have a big outcome, Change whether it be symptomatically or they got back to an activity Like, for instance, let's say you're working with somebody that wants to play recreational basketball and they haven't been able to because of an ankle issue they have going on.

Let's say their ankle pain is gone and they just got back into their first pickup game where you're managing, I don't know, you're like, all right, we're going to play 25 percent as much as you normally would. They play, they get back to playing their first game, no pain. They felt good. They felt like they could move around well.

They're excited. This is when you're going to ask a referral. So when is the best chance to get a referral? It's when somebody has a big outcome or a symptom change and they're so excited. They're like dude, this is so awesome I haven't been able to play basketball in a year. I finally played basketball.

I feel good. I feel like i'm making progress That's awesome, man. I'm so excited for you. I know this has been a lot of work. You put a lot of work in effort i'm so happy to see you're back To the things that you love to do, Hey, I've got a big ask for you. If you're okay with it, if you know anybody else like yourself who's struggling to get back to playing basketball or just an activity they love to do a friend of yours, family members, anything like that, I would really appreciate it.

If you connect me with them, like we're a small business, we don't have a huge marketing budget. And we really enjoy working with people like yourself that are getting back to an athletic goal. So if you have anybody, just let me know, that'd be awesome. You can connect us via email or text. And I'd love to.

Chat with them and see if we can help them as well. Like just a honest ask of do you know anybody like yourself? I love working with people like you and They may say I'll think about it. I don't know. Let me think about it Or they might say yeah, dude, my buddy Brian has been complaining about his knee.

I see him at basketball You know Let me connect you with him after we get out of here and you can see if you can help him out as well what you have to keep in mind with the referral is A referral is not something you're going to get unless they're very confident that you're going to do the right thing for their friend or family member because they got to be in the fantasy football league with that person.

They got to see that person at dinner occasionally. Maybe they work with that person and if they send them to you and you don't fulfill on what you say you're going to do, then they're going to get blamed for that. Okay. So that you either get 100 percent of the blame for a bad referral or you get 50% Of the credit for a good one 50 percent of the credit is going to go to That person that referred and 50 percent is going to go to me if i'm the business owner or clinician That has fulfilled on what we say we're going to do But if you send somebody somewhere and they suck You now get 100 percent of the blame and you get labeled as somebody who is untrustworthy That is actually terrible if you look at the psychology of that if you are an untrustworthy person You are like you're out of the tribe, man.

We can't trust you. This person is telling us to go, Oh, go eat this berry. It's not going to kill you. And then somebody dies. Don't trust Brian anymore. Brian's got terrible referrals. Like he's not good for the tribe. Like psychology, psychologically, we very much, Want to maintain status is something you can't buy and if you are a are if you're somebody who's trustworthy and your opinion carries weight You can't buy that you can't buy that is from you curating people for other people And making sure that they have the right experience and that they have the right outcomes or they're with the right person And that can go a long way.

A lot of people are very they safeguard that they don't want to lose that They don't want to share that if they don't have to, so they'll make referrals based on if they're very confident that somebody is going to get what they want. So you've got to get the outcome, get the customer experience down, and then ask them at the right time.

This can't be, they had a little setback and you're like, Hey, do you know anybody like yourself that would like to work with me? Hi, that's not going to work, man. Like they just had a setback. They just re sprained their ankle and now you're asking them. No, it has to be whenever they're on the upswing.

Like when they're doing something great and they're super excited about it, they're far more likely to actually refer somebody your way. But even if you don't ask, it still comes down to service and the actual client experience. Those are the two most important things. People will talk about you when they're not around you, regardless, whether they say something really good or really bad.

Most people fall into this, the seven to eight, and they're neutral. They're not going to say anything bad about your business and they're not going to say anything great. Very few people fall into the nines and tens, but if you do it right, the vast majority of your clients should be in that category and that will dramatically increase your referrals.

So if we go back to our. Example, right? So we have local marketing ads, content and referrals, right? And if you are looking at this and you're saying to yourself, all right, I got it. I got to account for 40 new patients this month, right? That's the goal. All right. All right maybe you get 10 from referrals and that's not a bad spot to be so 25 to 50 percent of your client base is coming in referrals pretty good, right?

Let's say you get another 10 ads. So you're spending, it's called a thousand dollars a month on ads that drives 10 new people into the business. Awesome. Local marketing. Let's say this is going to get you another 15. This is a big part of what you're doing. And then five are coming from your content strategy.

So you actually, Engaging with people on social media and then interacting with you and then setting up like a time to connect with somebody and see if they're fit to come in. But instead of you just saying, how am I going to find 40 people from local marketing this month? Or how are we going to get 40 referrals internally from our patients?

You got to think about spreading it out a little bit more, but saying, still being able to track the ecosystem of everything. And what gets really cool with this is when you say, all right what if we can make like a 10 percent improvement across the board in all of these categories, right? A 10 percent improvement.

If you look at a 10 percent improvement in ads, right? This is going to get you one more person, right? So 10 percent here. This is one 10 percent here. This is going to be this is going to be another one person that's going to come in here, right? 10 percent here is half a person. We'll just call it one, right?

And then we're going to do one more person coming from local marketing. This would actually be two. Now, if you can just make a 10 percent improvement. Over a quarter, you'll go from 40 people a month to all of a sudden, you're going to be 44, 45 people a month, and on the front end for you, as you look at that each quarter, if you can make a 10 percent improvement in each of those, by the end of a quarter, you can have double digits, more new patients per month that are high quality people as you're growing your practice.

And the key is. If they're going into a business model that is not just going to get them in and churn them after two to three visits, like you are getting them in, solving a root cause problem. And ideally you have something that is a value that they want to continue to stick around and work with you on things proactively or work towards.

Physical athletic goals that they have that then turns your lifetime value or the amount of work you get a chance to do with a client and the amount of money they're spending in your business increases Exponentially which we can talk about in a separate video, but this is just the front end This is how we get people into the business itself Is just as important, obviously, in terms of how you're working with people because of the back end side of the business, the compounding effect of that and how that snowballs and grows.

And that's really, are you delivering value over extended period of time? And are you providing anything to people that they see value in and wanting to do for a long time and proactively? Because we just, we don't want to necessarily just wait for people to get hurt again. That is a it's a silly model, right?

It's just like why don't we wait until your car breaks down before you then go and actually do some preventative maintenance, right? Why don't we wait until you are like you have such terrible cancer that it's uncurable? Like it doesn't make sense for us to wait and be reactive versus proactive The only reason that we do that is because insurance doesn't pay for proactive work the way it does for reactive work It's a sick process Caught care model, not a healthcare model.

And for us, if you can work towards a proactive model that honestly, a lot of people want and are turning that direction anyway, now all of a sudden we can take all this front end effort of all the marketing that we've done, and you can plug them into a system that is very efficient and providing longterm amazing outcomes for people that's compounding that new patient volume in a recurring way that adds a lot of security, stability, and honestly, enterprise value.

To your business that doesn't happen unless you have a great business model that you're actually having people move into. So hopefully this helps remember the four areas are local marketing. So local marketing ads, content, and referrals. Those are the four that we found. That are the sort of least complex the most effective for this business model.

And if you're struggling to get new patients in the door, if you're struggling with your practice in general just trying to figure out how to grow your practice, how to actually run a practice like this this is just one element. You're talking, sales, we haven't touched on that marketing people, processes, finance, all of these things that you need to understand on the business side.

These are things that, we can absolutely help you with. These are things that you can learn on your own, like with things like this, or you can get help from people that have helped practices all over the country, scale up and use these effectively as well. It's up to you.

You decide, take this information and run with it. Or the other step for you would be jump on a call with our team and let's take a look at what your business actually looks like. The thing that we like to do is if we have a conversation with another business owner. We want that hour that we have with you to be the most valuable hour you've ever had of somebody looking at your business.

The way we do that is we show you exactly what the benchmarks are for what we see across the hundreds of clinics that we're working with, which is an amazing advantage for us to be able to have that much data and see where do you stack up? Where are your inefficiencies? Where are your weak points that you need to improve?

And even on that one call, you may say, I don't think this is the right time, I don't think it's the right fit, whatever, that's totally fair. You will leave that call with. More Clarity of where your business is and what you need to do Then you've had at probably any point in time of owning your business.

That's our goal. Our advisors talk to hundreds of businesses every single year just like this And the goal is that you know exactly where your weak points are what you need to work on If you want us to help you implement that awesome If you want to do it yourself, you want to try to figure it out.

That's cool, too We just want to make sure that we're providing value to you. So if you're interested Click the link below. You can apply to jump on a call with with our team. We'll dig through your business with you. We'll take you through our proprietary assessment where we actually look at this, with you and share what's going on.

So you have a really clear idea of where your business stack or where it stacks up against the benchmarks that we see. And you'll have a really good idea about where your business is and what you need to do to go to the next level. So if you want to chat with our team, we'd love to have a conversation with you.

I hope this helps. And as always, thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next video.

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