E705 | Why You Need Predictable Marketing

In this episode, Doc Danny explores the key constraints and challenges that service-based businesses, specifically physical therapy practices, face. He investigates the three main limitations that these businesses encounter, including the acquisition of new clients, the need for sufficient physical space to accommodate a growing client base, and the importance of hiring the right staff to provide quality services.

The focus primarily revolves around the acquisition of new clients, as it is often the major bottleneck that businesses encounter. Doc Danny discusses the lack of predictability in marketing and client acquisition strategies employed by most business owners, who heavily rely on word-of-mouth referrals. While word-of-mouth is a reliable indicator of quality service, it is inadequate for sustaining and expanding a business.

To overcome these challenges, Doc Danny highlights four key areas that businesses must focus on to achieve predictable client acquisition. Firstly, he emphasizes the importance of word-of-mouth referrals, aiming for approximately one-third of new clients to come from referrals. Secondly, he explores the significance of local marketing, including networking, hosting educational events, and building a strong local reputation.

Thirdly, he investigates the significance of creating a strong digital presence, including developing a valuable website and establishing the business as a subject matter expert. Finally, Doc Danny discusses the importance of paid advertising, which offers the most trackable and predictable results in terms of generating new clients.

By implementing solid strategies and tracking metrics in these four areas, business owners can gain the confidence to invest in hiring new staff and expanding their physical space. This confidence stems from the ability to reliably generate new clients to fill these resources.

To conclude, Doc Danny encourages listeners to evaluate their current marketing and client acquisition efforts and seek assistance if they struggle to attain the necessary predictability in their business. He recommends his own programs, the Physical Therapy Business Mastermind and the Clinical Rainmaker Program, as valuable resources to assist clinicians in building predictable and scalable practices. Tune in to gain insights into overcoming the constraints and challenges faced by service-based businesses!

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Podcast Transcript

  In many cases it's very heavily based off of word of mouth referrals, which is not a bad thing. I actually think word of mouth is really important because if you don't have any word of mouth referrals coming your way for a service based business, that means that your service is not very good. 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, cause I'm here to help you.

Hey, what's going on? Dr. Danny here with the PT entrepreneur podcast. And today we're talking about marketing and predictability in your new. Client volume, your new patient volume. So when we look at limiting factors, constraints in the businesses of physical therapy practices or clinical practices in general, these are, really could, this could be any service based business.

There's a couple of constraints. Number one is. The acquisition of new business. So new clients, new patients, whatever you want to call it be getting new people in the door to fulfill on with the services that you provide. The second thing would be the physical space in which people, because with brick and mortar in person businesses, one of the constraints is Do you have the space or enough space to be able to work with the people that are coming in?

And the last thing would be staffing, right? So the actual individuals that are going to fulfill on the service that you are trying to provide. So those are the big three things. It's a new business, it's a space to fulfill and it's people to fulfill those. So when we look at these constraints, the one that I want to touch base on today is Really comes down to acquisition of new business.

So getting new people in the door. And most business owners that I talk to, not necessarily just, cash-based practice owners, but just service-based business owners in general, most of them have minimal to no predictability in their actual marketing, in their actual acquisition strategies.

So they are. Guessing and hoping that some of the things that they're trying are actually working. And they, in many cases it's very heavily based off of word of mouth referrals, which is not a bad thing. I actually think word of mouth is really important because if you don't have any word of mouth referrals coming your way for a service based business, that means that your service is not very good.

That might sound harsh, but that's the truth. Like people it's not a subjective measure. It's yeah, I think my service is awesome. That's cool that you can think that, but if no one is referring anybody your way, your service is not. It's not awesome. It may be average. It may be okay.

It might, it's probably not bad. If it's bad, then they would probably be saying negative things about your business. But if it's just not that great, they're not going to tell their friends about you. They're not gonna waste their social credits on their social equity to, to send people your way for no reason.

You have to be exponentially better than your peers. You have to have such a good service that it's just so remarkable. They can't shut up about you. So when we look at the numbers on this stuff, predictability. In this one area in lead generation in new acquisition is actually the bottleneck that allows people to have the confidence to work on the other two constraints.

So if you have confidence in the fact that you can acquire new business, then You feel confident hiring other people. So fulfillers and you feel confident moving into a bigger space. So the actual facility that you need to be able to house those folks. And if you don't have confidence in new acquisition, then it's very sketchy when you bring on a new person or if you move into a new space because you don't know if you can make it work or not.

You don't know if you can fill those schedules. You don't know if you can actually grow grow into the space that you've maybe put a significant amount of money into two for a buildout and equipment. So when we go back to this one, channel of acquisition, there's really four areas that you have to work on you have to have driving revenue into the business new revenue into the business and The first one is word of mouth, right?

So having a service and a delivery of that service and a customer experience, it's so good. People want to tell their friends and family members about you so that they'll, without you having to pay for marketing, they're going to market for you. They're going around spewing how awesome you are and all their friends and family.

A good gauge of a business and how well a business is doing with this in a clinical practice, at least is that you want to see about a third of your business coming from word of mouth referrals, right? So if you didn't do anything else, you would have roughly a third of the new clients that you could expect on a monthly basis.

would come in from referral. So let's say if you do everything right, you get 60 new people a month new patients a month. If you did everything right. Okay. And if you did nothing right, but you had a great service and you had word of mouth marketing that was happening for you then you would end up with a third of your overall business.

So let's say you could get 60 total. If you're crushing with everything, that means you're going to end up with 20. They're going to come in if you do nothing else. So that's like your bear case. If you were to think of it that way. So the other three areas that really drive new patient volume cumulatively, like all of these do work together, is local marketing.

So that is your reputation in the area, networking with other businesses referral partners, education events, stuff like that in the local setting. That's one area. Lead area that is going to drive people your way. And it's very predictable, especially if okay, if I do this local event and I have 10 people come to it, I can expect to get three new patients out of that, then you can just reverse engineer the math of how many you need to do in a year times, how many people you have to really get a better idea of predictably how many of those do you need to do for the number of new patients you're trying to generate.

Then you have paid ads. So paid ads would essentially, be layered on top of all of this. Because I think for most people, the way that it goes is. Word of mouth starts. They do some local marketing as well. And that's where most people start Paid ads comes last which actually let me talk about that last because the third the fourth thing would be your Website so usually goes away you have a website Most people start with a website doesn't mean it's very good or anybody actually goes to it So you have a website You're getting some word of mouth referrals and you're doing some local marketing that right there can get you pretty busy.

If you do those three things, especially if you have some content you're creating and you're actually like putting out things into your website on an ongoing basis that are going to create you as a subject matter expert for search terms in your area. So people are typically searching for you or solution to a problem on Google usually, And if they can find a blog article that you wrote about runners, knee pain, and stuff that you can do for that, and they're a runner with knee pain there's an increased likelihood that they're going to come in and see you, right?

So content and your website, those are really the big place you'll see that. And I would lump social media in this as well. It's an extension of your digital footprint. Just with on a social media platform, but these three things will get you pretty far. The last thing that you layer on top of that is paid ads, right?

So paid ads, and in most cases, paid ads are the most predictable of all of these things because it's the most trackable. It's hard to track. In person events because you can have people that come and then maybe they don't turn into a patient right away, but they do over time and what's the duration of time you're tracking that so they can get it can muddy that a little bit your word of mouth can be hard track as well because people may not always associate the word of mouth influence on where they came in or not.

It might just be, they may just tell you the last thing that they saw, which might be, Oh yeah, I just drove by here or whatever. And they forget to tell you that like their friend mentioned it. And then they did that a month ago and then they drove by your clinic and they remember their friend said something, but it was like, your sign is what they're referencing.

So a little hard to track search, same thing. You can have analytics on that, but it is hard to tell like how many people just came straight from your website, into becoming a new patient versus when we have paid ads, it is very clear how well those are doing because we can see we spent this much money on it.

It generated this many, calls with your company with your staff or whatever, whoever's talking to people that are interested in working with you. And then of those calls, X number of people came in. And of those people that came in, yeah. X number of those people either are doing a plan of care or sorry for X number of visits, and you can do the math on that and reverse engineer just how effective those are or are not pretty easily in comparison to all of the rest of these.

So when we look at predictability. In your marketing, it's important that we have these four things, working, especially as we're hiring, or if you're scaling aggressively, because if you know that you can imagine it, it's like you're turning on like a faucet, right? Let's say, you just barely turn the faucet on and that's just word of mouth, right?

And so that, that water coming out would be your new patients. So you're getting a slow trickle of like new patients that are coming in and you start doing some local marketing and you turn on, it turns on a little bit more. It's coming out a little faster, right? Maybe you're reinvesting in, doing content and stuff on your website and you're driving more visibility there.

So you turn on a little bit more and then you start layering on paid ads and you turn on Even more on top of that, right? And you also know that if you turn those off, you can decrease the faucet, you can turn the faucet down a little bit. And if you turn them back on and you start spending more money on ads, you can turn it back up.

So when you're going through ramping phases, hiring phases if you're trying to scale, quickly with providers and you have a pipeline of people that are good fits, this is a really good place for you to really look at. All right. I can, Turn the faucet on more here, more predictably here once you have these other things in place.

So again, these are the four things you really have to consider if you're looking at predictability in your marketing. So word of mouth, local events, local reputation your website and digital footprint, as well as paid ads to get in front of. So if you are not tracking any of your marketing, these are a pretty good place to start.

And if you're looking at hiring and you're looking at growing past yourself and you need to think about building into a bigger space, you need to think about hiring more people. And that means more overhead. It is much better. It feels much better to go through growth stages with predictability in mind.

in the probably most important constraint, which is new acquisition of clients and patients. If you have predictability with that, you're going to go into that much more confidently and make the right decision more regularly, more frequently than if you go into it blind, which is most people are just like, yeah, my staff is pretty busy.

I think I'm going to just I'm going to hire somebody else. And. They really don't have a clear idea of where people are coming from and how they can start to increase that besides just, I'm going to bring this other person on and we'll have more availability. So that means we'll have more patients, but it doesn't always work out that way.

And it does suck to have to fire somebody that didn't do anything wrong. Besides they. Decided to take a job with your company and you were unable to actually fulfill on, bringing people in the door to see them as a service based provider. So if you're not tracking this, make sure that you are, if you are confused with what I just said, then you probably need to, Better understand how to run your business.

If that's the case, you should definitely talk to us, go to physicaltherapybiz. com and check out what we have going on. If you have a business already and you're trying to grow it, our mastermind is an ideal fit for that. If you're just thinking about starting and you don't know where to start, you don't know what to do, you don't know how to sell, you don't know how to.

Create plan of care packages or market or get somebody in the door or what systems you should do or how to manage your schedule and all the things that you have to figure out our clinical rainmaker program has helped literally 1000 clinicians start practices all over the country. It's pretty cool program, and we have a very high success rate with that, with coaches that are actively running practices that are working with our clients every single day.

And it's a really unique way to get some help at the start, which is really. One of the hardest stages. So if if you're interested, head to physicaltherapybiz. com, check it out. And as always, I hope this helps you out. I hope that helps you better understand how to have predictable marketing and how to track that.

And as always, thanks so much for listening and we'll catch you next week.

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