E676 | Building A 7 Figure Marketing Plan With Jeremy Dupont
Jan 17, 2024In this episode of the podcast, Doc Danny and Jeremy Dupont delve into the importance of developing a marketing plan for the year. Jeremy, who grew his practice Ripple PT, shares his journey into marketing and how he learned about branding, marketing strategies, and creating customer avatars.
One key takeaway from the discussion is the significance of having a calendar to map out your marketing efforts for the year. Jeremy provides a template that outlines quarterly marketing campaigns, local events, newsletter timing, and more. This proactive approach prevents being reactive and helps you stay organized.
The hosts also emphasize the importance of crafting messaging around the problems your target audience is facing. For example, Jeremy discusses how to leverage New Year's resolutions in January to attract patients. Additionally, he shares valuable insights on collecting attendee information during local events and following up with emails, texts, and evaluation offers. These strategies significantly improve conversion rates.
Furthermore, this episode stresses the importance of layering newsletters, local events, and campaigns. By building your email list through events and engaging newsletters, you can then effectively run marketing campaigns to attract new patients. It is also highlighted that advertisements work best when combined with solid marketing fundamentals such as local marketing, follow-up, and quality content. The hosts emphasize that ads require sales skills to target cold leads effectively.
Lastly, the episode concludes by emphasizing the importance of setting goals and developing a plan to achieve them. The hosts suggest using a calendar to map out patient goals and marketing tactics. They also stress the importance of tracking metrics, such as aiming for 8-10 new patients per month per provider. To mitigate risk and ensure long-term growth, the hosts recommend developing multiple marketing "poles" such as referrals, content, events, ads, and more. By diversifying your marketing efforts, you can continue to grow your practice for decades to come.
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Podcast Transcript
Danny: [00:00:00] Hey, real quick, if you are 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 skillset 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's 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 to date, my company, Physical Therapy Biz, has 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, what's going on? Dr. Danny here with the PT Jon Snow podcast and I want to tee this one up to you or for you today And this is a conversation that I had [00:01:00] with Jeremy Dupont Who's the owner of patch patch is a clinician specific marketing company that helps people dial in both digital marketing and content marketing and layer that in with your local marketing so we can have this really effective ecosystem that is Essentially bulletproof when it comes to having multiple channels of marketing and has really helped many of our mastermind members scale their practices up really quickly, especially as they're bringing on multiple providers today.
He shared a document in our, uh, PT bid or our PT entrepreneurs Facebook group that, uh, is his. Marketing calendar that helps you get organized and auto populates all these different events you're going to do throughout the year so that you can track yourself and make sure that you're staying organized with your marketing efforts through 2024 and we get into a number of different things.
So what is a newsletter? How to write an effective newsletter. You know, where to start, what are the elements of that, how to be more effective with your local marketing, especially leveraging technology to help with your local marketing. Many of you are [00:02:00] probably doing local marketing, whether it be workshops or injury screens or, you know, different events that are local.
But are you really getting as much out of it as you should? He shares some best practices for how he's helping his clients do that. And really, it's just people he's working with all over the country now, which is really cool to see. You get this aggregated information of what's working best. Um, and the last thing is really looking at how you're going to run quarterly.
Marketing campaigns to people that are on your email list, people that are in your ecosystem to really help give them a reason why to come in or come back in and really clean those people up. And between all of these, this is where we see people really be able to predictably grow a, a base of patients, new patients, recurring patients, and be able to get to a point where they.
I'm not just like scrambling to say like, Oh, I got any more patients this month and now I got to, can I have to fulfill on all these people so I can't market and now I have to go find more people and you, you stay on this sort of hamster wheel of new patients that just really is, it sucks and being able to have a, uh, well put together marketing plan that you can stay on track with is huge.
This is going to be [00:03:00] incredibly. Valuable if you want to get a copy of this marketing, um, tool that Jeremy has, which is really cool because it auto populates everything for you to help stay organized. Just head to PT, the PT entrepreneurs, Facebook group. If you're not a member, go sign up to join. Um, and this is a live stream from January 5th.
So you can search for that. It's probably going to be towards the top of the feed and it's just a 2024 marketing plan. Is the, uh, the title of it. You can go in there and leave a comment in there. Just type calendar in the comments and Jeremy is on that post and he will send you a link to where you can actually download, uh, this document and then you can use it for your own business as well.
So enjoy this one. I think you're gonna get a lot of this. One of the better marketing conversations I've probably ever had, especially talking about local, uh, running a, uh, actual. Business actual practice and the marketing specific to that. And I think you're going to get a ton out of it. Hope you enjoy it and take Jeremy up on his offer to go grab this marketing calendar.
It will be incredibly helpful. Keeping you organized in your business 2024. Hey, what's going on? PT [00:04:00] entrepreneurs. Dr. Amtay here with Jeremy DuPont. And today, this is a good one. Beginning of the year, we're talking about developing your. Marketing plan. And let me ask you a question real quick before we get started.
Do you actually have a marketing plan? Have you ever put together a marketing plan where you looked at what you want to do for the entire year? I can tell you up until probably my fourth year in business with my cash practice. I did not do that at all, and we just assumed, you know, we would do the same things over and over again, and we would get patients from it, but there was no predictability.
And I can tell you, as we started to get more organized with our business, man, everything got way better, just less stressful, more predictable. Um, and we can kind of talk about mistakes that happen and what that leads to as well here in a second. But if you're listening to this on the podcast, I highly recommend.
You go to the Peachy Entrepreneurs Facebook group, even if you are a member already, [00:05:00] because Jeremy has been gracious enough to share an internal document that they use with his marketing company, Patch, that they use that auto populates, it helps you organize your marketing efforts for the year. And you can get a copy of it for free.
All you gotta do is go to the Pete Gentner's group, go to this post and calendar in the comments, and he'll go ahead and shoot you a link. So you can make a copy of your own calendar that he uses as well. If you're listening to this right now and you just want. Uh, the marketing calendar, Jess comment calendar.
And when this is over, Jeremy will shoot you a, uh, a link so that you can get your hands on that calendar as well. But we're actually going to go over that today. It's going to be a part of, he's going to share a screen and actually share what this looks like, why it's helpful. And it's a really cool way for you to stay organized, um, for the year and really make sure you're focusing on the right things.
And hopefully the goal is that you, you PR your new. Uh, patient volume really just by putting a bit of effort in on the front end and then following a plan and sticking to it the whole time. So, um, before we [00:06:00] jump into everything, Jeremy, I think it'd be cool. Cause I don't know, you know, we really ever shared too much, uh, recently at least with your background, but, um, I'd love it if you can take a couple of minutes and just, uh, share your background with ripple in particular.
So your, your practice, uh, and how you really started to dive into marketing, why you started diving into marketing and, and kind of the difference you saw when you really started to get. a bit more organization around
Jeremy: what you're trying to do. Yeah. Yeah. I think that, um, That's a perfect way to talk about the calendar and making a plan and I think it's really Like the reason I got into marketing and I really so yeah I think like I think this is a pretty common problem that like a lot of owners run into is like they do their own Thing it's all very and then they get to the point where they hire another Therapist and all of a sudden you've got another mouth to feed and I know like at least for me in my clinic I was like, oh crap.
I better figure out how to market and learn how to market and get more people in the door. I think, you [00:07:00] know, I can feed myself. I clinics in downtown Boston. I had been in Boston for a few years, uh, before I opened up my own clinic. And, you know, I built like a solid niche of, of people in there. So word got out just from my service being sought.
Solid that like, you know, I was able to fill, fill my on a, on a space in downtown Boston and hiring new employees and really like trying to build an actual business. I was like, I have no idea how to do any sort of marketing. And I think like, I've always enjoyed that side of it now that I can like kind of take a step back and reflect on a lot of that.
But, um, you know, I think like the, my biggest motivator was I need to fill these people's schedule. I don't know how to do that. So I better figure out how to do it. So, you know, I just, you know, took in every mark, I read every Seth Godin book that you could find. I read every story brand book that I could find.
And I really just dove into it. And I, I [00:08:00] loved it. I really liked the, like the copy aspect behind things. And, you know, being Like being able to like portray a message via, you know, newsletter, I really like that was like an outlet for me. And I started to enjoy that side of it more than even the the patient care side.
So I, you know, took a even bigger step back, we hired our second employee. And, you know, that was when I kind of like Stopped patient care and didn't really do anything. Um, in clinic, other than running the business and in leading into marketing. And I think that's where like this planning really came into play.
I, you know, I leaned into building our customer avatars and what does our buyer's journey look like? And I really like leaned into that side of things more and. As soon as I did that, um, that's when we really took off and I was like, this is, this is just as fun as, you know, seeing somebody get out of back pain of like, if I can fill this clinic up and, you know, the, my problem solving now is how do I, [00:09:00] Take, you know, whatever time of year it is and create a marketing campaign behind that.
So, you know, I guess long story short is it started with, you know, I'm trying to build a business and I have no idea how to do this, so I better figure it out, uh, because I now am paying a salaried employee. Um, and then I just really loved it and enjoyed it and leaned into it. Um, I really
Danny: like it. Yeah.
It's interesting. I had lunch yesterday with a guy that's a veterinarian that just sold his practice. And he said something to me that I thought it was interesting because that resonate, it resonated quite a bit with me. He said, I went to school to become a veterinarian. When I opened a business, I realized I was a business owner that just happened to be a veterinarian.
And he just really, um, was fascinated with the business side of things, right? And it's, it's no different. [00:10:00] It, I guess not everybody is, is gonna be fascinated with that. Maybe it's out of necessity. You know, they're like, I just don't want to work at this high volume clinic. I'm gonna do this thing. They want to be.
The best clinician they can be, you know, and they learn business because they have to, in order to be able to do what they want to do on the clinical side and sort of grow a clinic that is, you know, towards the vision they have for how they want to see people be, you know, addressed and, uh, worked with in their area.
And, you know, I think for some people, yourself, myself. It's like, this is awesome. Like the business side is actually what we really enjoy. And we had no desire whatsoever really to learn about that and go to school for that. We just were fascinated with the systemization of helping people get back to activities and things that they like to do.
So, you know, it's funny how you come to it in a really organic way. And that's what I actually liked the most about the way that you look at this is. It is, you know, a clinician first started a business, great, uh, product [00:11:00] service that you had. And then you fall into this, uh, I guess category of now, what do I do?
Do I just stay small and I have a wait list and I just do that. It's just me and I don't have to worry about any of these other people or developing marketing and sales and all these things. Or do you want to impact more people? Do you want to challenge yourself in a different way and learn how to, uh, grow a business, which requires new patients?
It's the number one question, the number one sort of pain point that we get. And if you're listening to this, it's probably you too. It's like, I need more new patients. And we constantly are it. It is true. Almost every business. Could benefit from more new customers of some capacity. There's a lot of other nuances to that in terms of what are you doing with them?
Once they're through the door that make up really the most important part of the business. But if you don't, if you have the best system in the world and you have zero new patients, it doesn't really matter, right? You got to get those people through the door. So what have you noticed [00:12:00] now with, with patch in particular, now that you're working with.
You know, all these businesses all over the country that are, you know, essentially you're running the back end of marketing for them. What have you noticed, if anything, through different markets, uh, size and demographics or fundamentally, would you say the basics of marketing, like kind of what we're going to talk about today, like they apply kind of no matter where you go.
Yeah, I think, I think
Jeremy: the biggest thing is, you know, how frequently are you speaking to your list? I think that's one of the biggest things is we do, you know, most of the things on the digital side of things. And, you know, one of the biggest things we'll kind of go over this when I, you know, map out the, the, the year long marketing plan that I think everybody should be doing, but Um, you know, it's really tricky to run an email marketing campaign each quarter if you're never sending an email out to your list at all anyways, or you're not like, you know, I think most people do [00:13:00] a pretty good job on social media, but like if you're not nurturing your list and then you all of a sudden say, Hey, I have this open enrollment campaign.
Please buy it. Um, you know, half the list will know what you're talking about and they'll understand, but the other half, maybe you collected some leads, uh, over last year through workshops or local events. And if they haven't heard from you in six months, since that, that, that event was put on, then, um, you know, that's.
It's just, they're not going to buy anything for me. It's going to be, or it's going to be very hard for them. They've got to be in some pretty legit pain in order for them to, uh, to actually purchase. So I think again, lowest hanging fruit in what. What, what the clinics that I see do the, that are the most successful with their marketing are people that are on our schedule, like reaching out to their list.
So they have their weekly newsletter, you know, it may not be like the, the craziest most in depth newsletter ever, but, um, they're reaching out to their list every single week and they're doing it [00:14:00] regardless. Um, I think that's super important, um, because then again, it tees people up for when you actually are going to run this marketing campaign.
Uh, Um, they've, they've heard from you and they know what's coming and, you know, I think that's, I think that's really important. So, you know, I think, I think people have to start there for sure. And just mapping it out. And I think this is where you just talked about the system side of things of when are you sending this newsletter out and are you doing it?
Decide if you're going to do it monthly, if you're going to do it bi weekly, are you going to do it weekly and just do it and make sure you do it because then when you go to try to sell something, it's going to be that much easier. So, you know, the clinics that are most successful are the ones that are They have a system and, um, you know, they're, they're executing on that system.
Danny: Yeah. You know, I'll give you a good example. I, I got a marketing text from a gym that I went to like four years ago, uh, like a long time ago and probably longer than that, five years ago. And I got a text that was just like, [00:15:00] Hey, we're looking for 20 people to change their life or whatever in the next six weeks, like text us if, if you're in.
And I'm like the heck, man, I had to, I had to remember who it was. Uh, cause it had been so long and it's not like they've been sending me, you know, information on. Nutrition or training or something of value, you know, for a period of time and I'm paying attention to it and, and I'm reading it. Um, they just basically probably just hit up everybody they had on some old list and, uh, just blasted everybody, right?
Like a good example of not the greatest marketing. They may catch some people with that, that maybe are newer or more aware in their system. But like, if you really want to do a good job, you have to. An ongoing basis, maintain a relationship with your, uh, clients. And this is something that most people do a really bad job of on the newsletter side or just a weekly email.
And it doesn't have to be that complex, right? Like it could be as simple as a [00:16:00] good example would be like a Tim Ferriss style email. He has what's called a five line Friday. Um, you know, so. So if you want to see what that looks like, just go look up Tim Ferriss, uh, five line Friday. You can sign up for it.
And it's literally five things. He sends out every Friday. They're just bullet points of things that he found interesting, maybe a book, an article he read. It could literally be a phrase that he thought was interesting. Um, probably doesn't take him much time at all because it's basically just like stuff that he's found interesting and it vastly, you know, it varies, uh, significantly.
So it could be something as simple as that. It could be highlighting your own content if you're doing that videos, things like that. It could be. You know, really just, um, trying to curate other people's content and provide helpful content to whoever your niche is, your avatar, the main thing is that you're providing value to people on an ongoing basis so that when you do some sort of structure campaign like we're going to talk about, you've developed a lot of reciprocity and you've curated a relationship.
Over an extended period of time, it makes your outcome significantly better, and it doesn't [00:17:00] really take that much time. If you actually, you have to plan it out. The problem that we see is people are very reactive and this is a big mistake in marketing. I know we kind of touched on like. Well, what happens if you don't do these things right prior to us getting started, uh, which by the way, Hey, we're going to jump into this marketing calendar here in a second.
If you want this marketing calendar comment calendar in the comments on this post and Jeremy, I'll send you a link for it. Uh, but if you don't get organized, here's what happens. I call this the new patient hamster wheel and I've been on, I have, I was on this hamster wheel for years and it's not a good place to be.
So you go out, you do all this local marketing or you're, you're doing like really hard, you know, uh, social media marketing. You're really pushing, pushing, pushing your schedule gets saturated. It gets busy because all of a sudden you have more patients that come in, then you stop because you are fulfilling.
Now you're fulfilling on all these new people. And while you're fulfilling, you're not prioritizing marketing because you don't have the time for it, or you don't think you have the time for it. So then, as you [00:18:00] fulfill, all of a sudden, you have no new patients coming in, or very few new patients coming in.
So now all of a sudden, your schedule gets a little thin, you start to freak out a little bit, you get back out there, you start teaching workshops, and doing injury screens, and writing, you know, blog posts, and, and, uh, you know, doing all these Instagram posts, and all of a sudden it starts to build back up, you get busy again, and then now you focus on your clients, and then you drop off again, and you're constantly on this hamster wheel of, Having to, like, really try hard, get new people in, fulfill on that, and it's a really, really challenging place to be, and in particular, you talk about hiring, and that's actually where I think it gets very sketchy for most people, is they, uh, don't, it's, it is stressful when it's just you, but when you have another human being that is depending on you to pay their mortgage, it's, To buy food has kids.
It's like I've never felt more, um, stress for another person in my entire life than I did whenever I brought employees on. I feel very, very, uh, [00:19:00] obligated to provide a good opportunity for them, a good job and predictability. And that was on me as a business owner, right? So if you're feeding your business with new clients and this is a huge part of it.
It is really like up to you to take the time to focus on building a plan out, sticking to that plan and, and giving them the predictability that they deserve. Otherwise. The likelihood of them sticking around is also very low because they're going to view it as, Ooh, this is a dangerous place to work. I'm not sure he's going to be able to pay me next month.
I'm out. Right. And you see high turnover associated with that. So it does. It does create a lot of problems. You see anything else with, uh, with your business or with other businesses where it's like, this is another secondary problem associated with just lack of organization when it comes to marketing.
Yeah, I
Jeremy: think the, the other thing that comes to mind and, uh, this is top of mind for me, cause we just hired a new PT at ripple. So I'm kind of going through this like marketing sprint, if you will, of, you know, again, we're lucky because we're nurturing our, our list at all times and I can create [00:20:00] a campaign and.
I, you know, the next thing that comes after that, and I think again, I have a handful of clinics in mind that I know the clinic owner does a really good job of this, but they they're tracking when, um, you know, patients fall off and if they haven't been in the clinic in the last. Some some people track it to like the in the last week.
So if they haven't been in the clinic in the last week So, you know, they've they've taken like a couple weeks off Or what most people end up doing is they'll track Current patients that have a package of sessions. They have they have sessions remaining If they haven't been in the clinic in the last 30 days in the last 60 days, and they're just, this is kind of manual.
Um, but they, we, we pull that list and they reach out to those people individually. And that's, you know, it kind of kills two birds with one stone. It's, you know, you're, you're getting people to fulfill on that first package. I think that's super important. Um, but it's also a chance [00:21:00] to reach out to people again, like we're utilizing this now for.
Our new PT that's coming on board is, um, you know, I've kind of tasked my staff members, we were able to pull a list of all previous patients and people that just like, maybe they were away for a month or they're traveling or work out crazy. Um, and we're just trying to reactivate those people. So it's, you know, you pull that list, you send a simple text message that says, Hey, Um, you know, happy new year.
Just wanted to see what was going on. Do you need anything? Just wanted to let you know, we have this new PT on board. My schedule is crazy, but we'd love to get you on her schedule. Um, you know, we'll get you in for a session. It's 50 bucks. Um, don't worry about it. And you know, just, just something new to, to get you back on board in the new year.
Um, and we'll do that every single time we have a new, new staff member on board. Um, we just, that she's our, our, our fifth PT. Um, and. It's just a tried and true process and it, you know, I could again, spin my wheels and try to go find 50 new people for her to see this [00:22:00] month, the ads are running all these workshops, which does work.
That's a part of our plan for sure. But I've got all these people that are already warm. They know what what our deal is, if I, you know, if I if I offer them up, you know, a pretty substantial deal, which You know, our normal session rate is 300. This is only 50 bucks. Um, most people are going to jump on it.
And then I have the opportunity to sell them a package, build this new PT schedule up. Um, so, you know, we do that super well. I'm like fairly maniacal about that. Like tracking when people are falling off. Um, and I think that's kind of rubbing off on some of the, the, the patch customers as well. Um, and I think people just see how well it works.
Um, and it's, again, it's a little time intensive, but if you do it once a month, you know, that should be part of your marketing plan for sure.
Danny: Yeah. No, that's great. Getting, getting people on someone else's schedule that's new. It's, it's, it's huge. It's such a time saver. Uh, it also is great for you bringing them on where they feel like, Oh, wow.
Like they really care about it. [00:23:00] Don't help build my schedule up. It's great. Um, one thing before we jump into this calendar, we're answer a quick question. Also shout out Jimmy McKay is on, uh, on the live stream PT pine cats. If you don't listen to it, go listen to it. Guys, we have an awesome podcast. Uh, but Taylor has a question.
She says. My husband and I are both PTs and have different, uh, slightly different niches since I do pelvic health and he does not. Do you make two different newsletters? I want to be able to address pelvic health in this email, but it won't all be relevant to his patients. So what would you do in that scenario with, with, uh, two sub, I guess, sub niches within the same, uh, same practice?
Yeah,
Jeremy: I think this is a great question. Super common. You can even do this with like different hobbies that people have. And if you want to get really specific with your, with your messaging, but you know, what I would say for that is because, you know, people, people in the pelvic niche, maybe those, those, those, uh, potential patients or past patients, they probably don't want to hear about the running series that you're putting together or, you know, [00:24:00] something more orthopedic style.
So usually what I recommend for those people is to first off, you have to Organize that list properly. So you have your your list of all of your pelvic floor patients. You have your list of all your sports orthopedic people. And it can be as simple as that. Um, and then you're sending messaging to those people specifically.
And, you know, I think like Curating custom content like that doesn't need to be on done on a weekly basis say, right? So I think like, you know, this is where the plan comes into play of week one One you send a newsletter to everybody on the the pelvic floor list week two It's a little bit more in the sports orthopedic side.
So you're sending it to that list week three Maybe you're doing like an all encompassing You know, here's what we got going on at the clinic. Um, here's what, you know, highlighting your Instagram, uh, posts that you've done recently. Um, and that way they're like, they're getting fed specific content for them in the pelvic space, but then they're also getting your more general, here's what we got going on at the clinic side of [00:25:00] things.
So they're not getting hit with a bunch of golf content when they're like, you know, I'm in here for, you know, you know, sensitive information. Problems and, um, you know, I don't want to be receiving your, your golf info. So I think that's where just, um, just, just systemizing that and organizing those people is, is very important.
Danny: Yeah. And I can chime in on this. With, uh, we, we've, when we have, we've had multiple like women's health specific pelvic floor providers that we've had in our practice and they were much more allowed, we consider like movement based, uh, you know, like they were, they did internal work, but then they really were, it's like, Hey, here's how we're going to control things in, you know, under, under load or with running or whatever it was, uh, that they were working to get back to.
And so what was cool was for us is like, And I wouldn't say women's health. I would say pelvic. I always get corrected on this. Pelvic health because we got pelvic floors too. That's true. [00:26:00] And it's not like we don't, you know, males don't have problems with that, right? So I think there might be an opportunity for you here to Share information that could be relevant for the male population as well, uh, that maybe doesn't even think of that as being part of a problem that they might be having.
And for us, we would always just sort of highlight both. We did produce a lot of content, you know, so like, let's say we had videos you put out. They were going to be specifically on, you know, public floor stuff, but it was really more like. I would say like performance based active, you know, sort of return to sport things, uh, as far as public floor is concerned.
And then for the other niches we have, like we saw all kinds of stuff, uh, we would have general content that we would put out or we would share somebody else's post we thought was cool. Um, if you really want to drill down and let's say it's like vastly different, you can segment. So meaning. Um, within different, uh, platforms, marketing platforms, you know, like for us, we use HubSpot.
So in HubSpot, I can say, all right, well, this [00:27:00] person's interests are in pelvic floor or this is a pelvic floor patient that came in. So I'm going to segment them and just say, all right. If I click this button, they're basically going to get categorized as public floor and let's say your husband's niche is golf.
So these are categorized as golf and then you could have two separate chains of communication. That probably is actually going to be the most effective, but more work. So you don't necessarily have to do that, but you could and you could segment those people. Then it's just a very direct message, a very specific message, um, but it would require more work on your end in order to do that.
I would say if you're not. Sending out a weekly newsletter of any sort. Do not try to start by segmenting, you know, it's just not worth it. Start by just getting consistent and putting a weekly newsletter out there. And what's funny is like. It just that alone, if people would do that on a regular basis, you know, you give yourself six to 12 months of doing that, like consistently, and you're going to notice that you have more patients coming back [00:28:00] on a regular basis, more referrals, and you're going to have a hard time tracking where they're coming from because what you don't realize is if you're consistently touching base people and it's valuable, they're going to be sharing your newsletter with other people.
They're going to be talking about you more, and it's because you're more top of mind. This is what People consider branding with most businesses, right? Why does Coca Cola put up billboards all the time? It's not like people don't know what Coca Cola is. What is, what does Coca Cola have to do with polar bears and Santa?
Like nothing, right? But why do they do that? It's because it's a marketing branding campaign where they want you to not forget about them. And this is the same thing. They want you to not forget. We want them to not forget about us as clinicians so that we can eventually work with them to solve whatever problems come up long term.
And if something comes up again, We're the first people they think of, right? So we, they end up wanting to come back and want to work with us. So, um, good question. Appreciate that. I think it's like a couple options for you, but I would start with just trying to be consistent and share relevant information.
Um, let's do this, man. Why don't we go ahead and, uh, have you share, share your screen and let's get into [00:29:00] this, uh, this marketing calendar and we can kind of go through the different component pieces of it. And we'll talk through, uh, we'll talk through that as we, uh, as we go.
Jeremy: Yeah. Um, so yeah, so anybody that was looking for access for this, this is, um, this is kind of built off of what I utilize for ripple, um, and how basically like I just mapped out.
When we were doing certain things and, you know, again, I, I went down this crazy rabbit hole for, you know, you know, mapping out our customer avatar and buyer's journey. And along with that was when am I sending specific messaging at certain times? So, you know, I would kind of utilize something along these lines with, you know, this.
Kind of bigger calendar. Um, you know, I call it the, the big patch calendar. Now it's kind of, uh, I don't know if anybody sees Jesse Itzler has his big calendar that he maps his whole year out with. Um, you know, some along the same lines of that. And I really liked that idea of, you know, really what I'm trying to do here is being able to see like, what is my year look [00:30:00] like at a glance?
Cause you know, even if we're in January, I should be able to see like, what do we have going on in March? And, you know, what do, what is, what does the calendar look like in, in June and July? Um, so, you know, how I started this was I would just take something like this and I would take, you know, each day and just say, I'm going to run this, you know, uh, fall campaign here.
It's in October. Here's the highlighted dates. And you know, the purpose of this is just to show, um, you know, Um, there's messaging happening on these days here. So my marketing is taken care of for the most part with my list, at least, um, you know, based on when I'm creating these campaigns. And again, I think Danny, you talked about it, but I think the, the, the reason people fall into a trap with their marketing campaigns is they're like, Oh yeah, I'm going to run this campaign on February 1st.
I'm going to do it. Uh, you know, I have this idea, January 31st rolls around. And they're like, I didn't do anything for that, you know, I [00:31:00] have nothing put together and, um, you know, now I'm on the day late and I'm going to send one email out and, you know, that's going to kind of be it. So I think this gives you just a little bit of foreshadowing of, you know, if you have a Friday afternoon off and you're looking into February and you want to put this campaign together, you're, this calendar is going to show you that you got to get this done.
So. Kind of the way it works. I usually start with the quarterly marketing campaign first. Um, I think that's the most important thing to map out each quarter. Um, so you can see like, we've got date here and then campaign name here. So if I say, you know, most people are, you know, putting together a new year campaign.
This is what we're doing for, for patch. Um, And we're running it kind of, you know, at the end of January, a little bit of looking into, into my brain, you know, I put myself into people's shoes right now. I think everybody's trying to do their new year's resolutions themselves right now. And they, they're not like reaching out to find a coach to help them.
So [00:32:00] we're going to start this campaign up, you know, the week of the 15th of the week of the 22nd. Um, so if I put. 1, 22, 24. That's going to highlight now the days that I have the emails going out. So I know like my list is being messaged to on these two weeks here, um, you know, there's marketing happening there.
Maybe I don't need to put like a ton of effort into creating a newsletter that week cause it's already taken care of that list is, is being nurtured. Um, So, you know, I would map that out, you know, for each quarter. So if you go into Q2, I'll do the same thing. Maybe we're looking at a Labor Day campaign.
We do the same thing. You type in May 27th. You'd spit out the two weeks worth of of campaigns there. And, you know, that's how you can start mapping things
Danny: out. Hey, sorry to interrupt the podcast, but I have a huge favor to ask of you. If you are a longtime 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 [00:33:00] podcast and please leave a rating and review.
This is actually very helpful for us to get this podcast and really help them develop time and financial freedom. So if you would do that, I would greatly appreciate it. Now back to the podcast. Let's talk like real quick about, well, actually. Before we, we kind of give a bit more, uh, sort of detail on these marketing, these quarterly campaigns, um, Mallory has a question about if she doesn't have a newsletter email going out at all.
Uh, would you recommend starting with a weekly or start with monthly, bi weekly, what's the best cadence that you would recommend if somebody's not sending a newsletter at all? Where should they start? Yeah, I think you've
Jeremy: got to start, start with a monthly newsletter, monthly. Here's the, here's the, here's the month wrap up of what we did this month or foreshadowing.
Here's what we got going on this month. Um, You know, start there. That's obviously the easiest way to do it. Um, I think you can look at it in the other sense too of, uh, you [00:34:00] know, what works super well for me and how I'm able to do a weekly newsletter is that I have Monday mornings blocked every Monday morning for an hour and I sit down and I craft my newsletter that goes out on Tuesday mornings.
So if you have that ability to block time and get it done, um, Then, then you, then you figure out your cadence from there. Um, but again, obviously once a month is better than no times a month. So I would start there. It's easier to, you know, pull a couple of Instagram posts, talk about what events you have coming up, send it out there.
Um, you can even highlight, uh, you know, uh, a new year's deal in that email if you want to. I think there's lots of, there's lots of different ideas to make that copy very easy to get it out there. Ideally, you're sending something once a week, but
Danny: I think once a week is the best, but you got to do what you feel like you're capable of doing first.
And it's sort of like, uh, it's no different than the clients that you work with, right? You [00:35:00] know, if everyone is busy, you know, okay. If we said, Hey, I need you to do this home exercise, you know, seven times a day. Okay, does that maybe equate to a better outcome? Possibly, but like, what's the likelihood of them actually doing it?
Probably zero, you know, and then what happens? Then they feel frustrated and then they give up and they're like, God, I suck, you know, and then and then they don't do anything. So, don't put yourself at a place to fail by taking on too much, because listen, we, we get it. And, and you gotta think of it, it's so, for me business is so similar to uh, you working with patients.
Like the way that we get to work with people at PT Biz is no different than how I view working with patients. You have to meet people where they are, okay? Some people, let's say that they're, you know, they, uh, it's just them. Uh, they have, they have, uh, let's say they have a spouse that has a great job, they have stable income coming in.
They they're like, you know, they have nobody else that they really have to worry about taking [00:36:00] care of. They can work longer hours. They're totally cool to do it. Like, okay, maybe they can take on more if you have three kids and you know, your spouse works, uh, works a lot as well. And you, you don't have nearly as much time then, all right, now all of a sudden it's like, well, take it down a notch.
You don't have to, like, you're running a different race than somebody else. And it's the same thing with people that anybody that we work with, where are they at? Like, what are they actually able to do? And then it's about being able to hold accountability to the standard that they're able to set for themselves and to be okay with running the race that they're running and not trying to run somebody else's race.
Cause that's where we get screwed up. Like for instance, PT, BIS, we send out five emails a week. Like five emails a week been sending out, okay, I can tell you five emails a week has improved our business as far as like growth of our business, more than one email a week. It's very obvious. It's like very directly tied to it, as well as pieces of content, all kinds of, we do a lot of stuff.
You shouldn't feel like you five emails a week and two podcasts and all these Instagram reels. Are they like? [00:37:00] Where are you at? Like start where you're at and focus on just starting to build some consistency. So even if you can just do one a month and it's a wrap up of how that month went and, you know, the things that you thought were cool that you were learning about, whatever it is, you're still relevant to people in some capacity.
You're still saying top of mind, getting to that point where you're at once a week, though, I do think is the best, um, long term cadence. Uh, but you know, you may not be able to get there right away now for these quarterly marketing campaigns. Um, Let's kind of talk about this first for a second, because let's say, you know, obviously, if someone wants this done really well, and they don't have to do it, you're the guy, right?
Like patches. Awesome. You guys do a great job. But if somebody is like, no, I want to do this myself, but I don't know what you're talking about with a new year's campaign. Like what would the angle like we talk about marketing, there's angles that people are taking in order to, uh, provide. Value, entertainment, education, whatever it might be.
So when you say New Year's campaign, is it like, Hey, do you eat too many Christmas cookies [00:38:00] over the holidays? And your knee hurts. If you're trying to get back in the gym, let's talk like, what, what are you, what do you think that has been shown to work the best with, uh, all the patch clients that you work with when it comes to these quarterly campaigns?
And we kind of talk about the New Year's one in particular.
Jeremy: Yeah, I think, um, I think it varies by demographic to be totally honest with you. And that's where like, there's no just copy and paste template for the stuff that's you've got to, you know, I always talk to, and like when we're, when we're creating these quarterly marketing campaigns in patch.
You know, I'm, I'm gathering a ton of information to understand, you know, what is the demographic and what does their demographic, like what, what problems are they dealing with? Um, cause it might be very different than what my demographic of people in Boston are dealing with. Right. I think in general it's, you know, orthopedic active adults.
I think that's what most of this performance niche deals with. Right. But you know, I think when, when, when I put these together each quarter, you know, I set some time aside and it's [00:39:00] exactly what I do is I just kind of, you know, sit there and think of my avatars. I know who my avatars are in January. What, what are the problems they're dealing with?
And, you know, obviously. New Year's resolutions are top of mind for everyone. Um, you know, ton of motivation coming out of the holiday season and, you know, lucky enough for me, I've been working in the industry long enough and have run the business for the last three years. We've seen like, uh, you know, an uptick in phone calls, evaluations, everything at the end of January.
Um, so that's, you know, like kind of like some of our, some of the information that, that we've received. And I think like I've pinpointed that back to being, you know, January 1st week of the first week of January, everyone's got that new shiny gym membership. Everybody's super motivated. Everybody's prepped their meals for the week.
Um, But then that motivation [00:40:00] wanes and, you know, or they're, they're consistent in the gym, but now their knee hurts and now they skipped one of their gym sessions and, um, now they're gonna skip their second gym session and that's obviously a snowball effect. So, you know, we take all of that thought process.
And, you know, again, specifically the problems that we think people are dealing with, and we put messaging behind that and try to speak to our demographic. So that's, you know, when I say quarterly marketing campaign, the, the, the meat of that is an email campaign. It's a nurture sequence that goes out and we're trying to solve these problems for people.
We're trying to tell them why physical therapy. is probably the answer to the problems that they're dealing with. Maybe if they didn't even know it, I think that's a lot of what I've realized we have to do for people is convince people or educate people that regardless of, you know, if you're trying to just get back in shape or, you know, you have this longstanding injuries.
A PT is the perfect person to help you with your, your, your health and wellness. I know you say it all the [00:41:00] time, Danny, it's, you know, quarterbacking your health and wellness. So we really leaned into that. Um, and we replicate that again, each quarter as we sit down, think about, you know, what are the problems people are dealing with?
Um, in patch, we run like custom marketing campaigns for people too. So it doesn't have to fit like this quarterly theme. Um, so again, whether it's, you know, a new, we're trying to highlight a new PT on board. Or maybe they're, they're raising the rates. Uh, we have a couple of different, different ones that, that, um, come up often and all right, here's, here's the product that we have.
What problems is our product solving for people and how do we convey that message? Um, you know, that's how we, that's how we look at the marketing campaigns and you know, why they work, I think.
Danny: Yeah. And I think what you, what you brought up with, you know, what, what we call copywriting. So if you're listening to this or watching this, um, copywriting is just.
It's just words. It's just like a fancy term for saying you wrote an email or you wrote a [00:42:00] blog post or whatever you're typing up whatever you're trying to get across and this concept. If you can understand this concept, marketing is going to get a hell of an easier for you. So if. If you can describe the problem that somebody is dealing with to a, in a, in a, as much detail or more as they can even understand, you inherently become the solution to that problem.
This happens with what we do with, uh, business owners all the time. Why can I describe? Exactly what you're dealing with when you're sitting in a subleased office all by yourself with nobody on your schedule for the day and you don't know what to do. Because I've fucking done it. And it sucks. And I know what it feels like.
And, but because of that, I can describe this scenario in such great detail that people that are hearing that, people that are like, reading that, and they're [00:43:00] sitting in that office and they're like, this sucks, I feel like a failure. Now I gotta go home. And I've got little kids and a spouse and I, I didn't do anything, you know, it's like you, you don't feel like you've accomplished anything that that's a shitty feeling, you know, and to, but to understand, well, here's what we have to do to not be there right that that now inherently I have credibility to become the solution to that problem.
I'll tell you something I found interesting is a lot of times physical therapists. Uh, many of them, the best physical therapists that I know, especially when you start working with very specific types of injuries, have had that injury themselves. How many ACL specialists out there, if you're listening to this, you're an ACL specialist, it's probably highly likely that you had an ACL tear yourself.
And you went through the rehab, and you know exactly what it's like, maybe you had more than one surgery, and you know the pain associated with it. Nothing worse than, uh, the only thing worse than an ACL tear is re tearing your ACL. Right? Like, And you don't want people to do that. And you can relate to them on such a level that it's so [00:44:00] compelling that they want to work with you.
That is copywriting. So if you can think of your, this is why you have to understand your avatar. We talk about your avatar. That's your, your customer, your client, the, the unique person you're trying to help. Who are they? What problems do they have? What do they think about whenever they're Stressing about something, you know, what blog posts are they trying to read?
What YouTube channels are they subscribe to? Like what information do they find valuable? And if you can better understand the psychology of that person and you can start to frame that in these, in these emails and these conversations, you're going to have such a better response to that because you understand that they feel understood and you understand them because you honestly like either have done what they're doing or you can put yourself in their place because you are an expert of working with that population.
And that is marketing in a nutshell. The best way also to actually get better at these things, if you even want to, which this is a better question, do you actually want to get better at marketing or do you want more new patients? Because like for us, obviously we want to get better at this. [00:45:00] And we spent a lot of time at it, but for a lot of people we work with, they just want more new patients.
They actually don't care about this. Me and Jeremy can nerd out on this all day, but if you actually want to get better, the best thing you can do is subscribe to other people's newsletters that you like and start to like really realize what are they saying? Even write out what they're saying and subconsciously you'll start to.
Understand the way they're phrasing things and your own copywriting will start to improve because of that so you can put time into this. It does take a long time. I would say it's a skill is taking me probably the longest to get good at. Um, but it's very powerful and it will help your marketing tremendously because there's a big difference between organize a quarterly email campaign that sucks better than not doing it at all.
Or you organize a quarterly email campaign. That is great. And it converts a bunch of people and it changes your business. That is the difference of the skill of actually like copywriting. It's me. So
Jeremy: fired up talking about all that stuff. You're such a nerd, dude. Talk to your customer [00:46:00] avatar, go to a marketing bowl.
Let's go. Yeah. I want to create a marketing campaign right now. That sounds awesome. Um, but yeah, I think it's like, you know, this isn't something that I just kind of like Like snap my fingers and we, we figured it out. Right. It's, you know, took me a solid year of, like you said, subscribing to every newsletter out there and reading every blog post and listening to all the podcast and, you know, I used to still do like take copy that I think is really good in hand, write it out.
Like I was, that used to be my daily habit that I used to do. Um, so it's, and again, I feel like you, I think like he said, too, it's super important of accounting as part of my business as well, but I'm not trying to do my books. For my business, you know, I outsource that and I think like we got to look at marketing the same way.
No,
Danny: I, I agree. I mean, look, I mean, we are heavily involved in marketing with the PT biz, but we use outside vendors to help with it because unless we were to bring somebody [00:47:00] on, there was full time that was doing all this, which even at the size coming that we have, it really probably doesn't make sense.
Like it's, it's. It's bolting on support for it that with people that are fractionally giving you their time that are way better at it than you, uh, for the things that you're doing. It's no different than accountant bookkeeper. It just has to do with, with marketing. Um, we got another question from, from Ben here and he says, um, Hey guys, how does this newsletter strategy change?
If the avatar is high school athlete who likely doesn't check emails, should he be writing these newsletters to their parents? I'm going to take a stab at this one first because when we worked with, uh, with a big soccer group. Not club, I guess the right soccer term here in Atlanta and a big youth soccer development group.
And what we found was, and this is probably anybody with youth athletes is you do not want to market to the youth athlete. You want to market to their parents. And the reason is the youth athlete doesn't care. About most of them don't care about whatever it is you're [00:48:00] doing. Uh, they're too busy thinking about what, you know, their girlfriend thinks of them or what homework they have to do or whatever they're doing that weekend.
Their parent is thinking about his little Jimmy going to get a scholarship. I don't want little Jimmy to get hurt. His little Jimmy's friend doing something that's going to get him better than little Jimmy. And now, like, he's not going to start at whatever position. So your marketing efforts. Should not be directed towards the youth athlete as much as it should be directed towards education of the parents.
Um, that is a harder from what we found group to market to digitally. I would say in person. What's nice is if there's like Uh, uh, this soccer club, for instance, we could do, uh, local events where we're talking to parents about, you know, Hey, what, what are the basics you need to understand from concussion, uh, protocol standpoint?
What do these things look like? You know, what do you want to know as a parent just to make sure your kid doesn't have a head injury that goes undiagnosed? Uh, what's some basic stuff that you, they need to understand about ACL prevention? You know, what's the, is it, I think it's a [00:49:00] FIFA 11, like, uh, exercises that they do that really decrease ACL.
Uh, tears like let's talk about these things and now all of a sudden you're educating the parent and the parent is also the, uh, the person that's paying for it, right? So you want to market to the parent more so than you want to market to the youth athlete, uh, on a number of levels, you might be able to get in front of them and that's cool.
And they, and, and you probably should to some degree. But, um, one thing that we did, uh, that I would say was really effective from a local standpoint was we did triage hours at local soccer clubs. And we just, we got to a point where we realized we need the parent there, not just the kid. And they would have, they have multiple fields, and they would have all of their athletes that had injuries that were going on.
They could come to this, the main field, and we would take a look at everybody and just triage out what was going on, give an idea if they could play that weekend, if they needed to go get like imaging, if it was something that maybe we could help them with or not. And, uh, the parents at a certain point, we were like, this is not helpful.
I have an eight year old that's telling me their ankle hurts and I don't know where their mom [00:50:00] is or dad is. Uh, so like, it's just the telephone game at a certain point. And this is where you want the parent there. So if you're going to do anything from a market standpoint, make sure the parents there get their contact information and then you can start marketing.
To the parent. Yeah,
Jeremy: you have a buyer avatar there, which is the parent. And then you have a fulfillment avatar, basically, which is the kid. So you're, you've got to look at it in two different ways. But I think it's the same process though, right? Of like, here's who you're speaking to. What problems are the parents dealing with?
Like what's in their brain? How do you speak to them? Uh, because you're right. I don't think a 16 year old's opening a year email up, unfortunately. Yeah.
Danny: And you got to think of it. And this is what I find so interesting about marketing is. It's really psychology. I, I've always, I've always thought of it as like fishing for human beings, right?
And in, in you, you have to understand that not everybody's in the same place. Uh, there are different stages of making a decision. There are different stages of pain potentially in terms of what [00:51:00] state they're in or trying to move towards. And if you can really, uh, put yourself in the shoes of that.
Whether you have kids or not, maybe you were an athlete yourself at a certain point. How did you feel? Right? How did your parents feel when you, uh, you know, you had an injury and they were worried about whether you were going to lose a starting position that you've worked so hard for or something like that.
Like, these are the things that if you can verbalize those, and this is what's so interesting, even in person. If you can do this at local events, which we're going to talk about in a second. They're going to convert a shitload better because everybody's thinking certain things, but very few people are willing to say those out loud because for whatever reason it makes them feel slightly uncomfortable or they don't know how people are going to take it.
But if you can start to actually convey. The thoughts that people are having in real time and letting them know the path forward to resolve these issues, they may even be able to articulate it as well as you can because they, they, they, they don't know why they feel [00:52:00] stressed about it. Uh, you know, but now all of a sudden you say something about, you know, whatever their youth sport team, uh, the social demographics associated with that.
Like, Oh, I mean, are you worried the little Timmy's, you know, his buddies aren't going to invite him to birthday parties now because he's not on the team anymore. And that really is going to stress him out. And he's like depressed going to middle school. And it's like. They're thinking these things, you know, and if you can really start to like bring that together in a way where they feel like, Oh my gosh, people understand me and you really have to try hard to understand.
You can't fake it. That's what I like about good marketing. Um, I say it back. Some people are really good at being just like psychopaths and faking it. So you have to be careful of those people. But most people are honest and they can't fake it. They honestly care. And the only way they can care is take the time to really learn that or have gone through something similar to what you're going through.
Um, so let me just let's segue into you. Local events because we can talk about that and how that feeds these other things because they all overlay each other I think that's important is you have to realize One local event one quarterly, you know marketing campaign one newsletter [00:53:00] It's not really going to do anything But if you can if you can organize these in a way where they layer on and they feed each other Now we have a system now we're running something that is really going to create a massive change in your business over an extended period of time.
And once you get used to it, it's like getting something moving. The hardest part is getting started. And then it's like maintaining that gets a lot easier.
Jeremy: Yeah, exactly. And I think that's, that's like the point of this calendar too, is to look at, you know, so what I would look at is I would pre plan this and say, You know, I know I'm going to run this marketing campaign at the end of January.
So we're, you know, we're pretty much taking care of there, right? Like I don't maybe necessarily need to worry about newsletter. Cause they're going to be receiving these, this messaging here, depending on who I'm sending it to, but, you know, you know, kind of what I would look at next is, you know, and I think it's like the.
Probably the most important thing but second on the on the totem pole in terms of like planning things out are these these local events here so, um, you know, I guess like before, like talking about the local events, you know, I look at local events a [00:54:00] lot differently. In terms of running them, I think people host these events.
Um, and then they don't do anything afterwards or there, there's really not nothing beforehand or after, um, you know, the beforehand is, is kind of, you know, uh, frosty on the cake, but I think thinking about the followup process. After a local event is where a lot of people miss, and I think they get stuck in the cycle of doing a workshop every single week, um, and it doesn't seem to be working, or they're on that, like you said, that hamster wheel, just new people coming in the door, um, but, you know, the, that's where planning this out becomes really important, so if we kind of look at the calendar here, and we know, like, say we're doing a, um, you know, a resolution injury screen, and, You know, at the local gym, um, and the date is going to be, we're going to, we're going to do it on, on January 5th, because we know Saturday morning, the gym's going to be cranking.
So we're going to host that injury [00:55:00] screening on the fifth, and there's going to be a follow up process for the next week after that. And I think this is super important because for, you know, most people say you have 10 people show up for one of these local events. You know, chances are you're going to have three or four evaluations that schedule on that day, which is awesome.
Um, but you know, the way I look at it is how do we go from 30, 40 percent conversion rate to 60, 70 percent conversion rates. If you can go from three evals scheduled out of this to six, then you don't need to do another one of these at the back half of the month, because you've got the new people in the door already.
And I think like, you know, what we're seeing, especially with patch is that people aren't converting until they're reached out to like, A third time or a fourth time, it's never usually on that first reach out. So, you know, the way I look at this with the, the local events is we're going to host that event on Friday the 5th, but then on Saturday, the 6th, there's going to be an email that goes out that says, Hey, thanks for coming yesterday.
Um, you know, Happy that we were able to [00:56:00] take you through this injury screen. Um, if you need anything, let us know. But then, you know, within our CRM, a task also gets created on the 7th that says, Hey, Jimmy came to the injury screen on Friday. Make sure you shoot him a text message and just see, you know, if he's, if he's working on the exercises you guys went over.
Um, so there's another touch point. So that's, you know, 1, 2, 3 touch points. You know, maybe on Monday, the 8th or the Tuesday, the 9th, another email goes out that says, Again, putting, putting ourselves in, in their shoes. Um, you know, a lot of the copy that we do after these events is, um, geared towards like, Hey, if you don't do anything about the results that we found in this injury screen, nothing's going to change.
So you got to come in for this evaluation so we can do a little bit more in depth. Um, but really the point, right, is that we have. Of all of these days of just reaching out to these people. So it's super important to know that they're nurtured. We're getting reminders to reach out to these people. And that's how we kind of go from [00:57:00] converting to from 30.
40 percent to 70, 80%. And that can really change your business, um, over time. Like, I think that's super, super important.
Danny: Yeah. Yeah. I love that. You know, like the idea, we should always say if nothing changes, nothing changes, like it's so simple, right? It's like, okay, do you want to just keep doing what you're doing?
And. Um, you, you want to keep avoiding things that you really like, that's going to keep happening. You know, do you want to, do you want to help with somebody that can actually help get you back to these things? If so, like, let's get together. Right? So you can get more direct, uh, as you, you know, have more, more touch points, but even something as simple as this, um, there's a couple of things to keep in mind, I would say with, with these local events and this is how they kind of all feed into each other.
You have, um, you have these local events, right? And please don't make the mistake that I made for the first year that I did local events. I didn't take anybody's information down. None. And I did like, [00:58:00] uh, probably three a month. Okay. So I did, I did like 30 to 40 workshops, anywhere between 10 and 50 people that would come.
And I didn't collect any of their information. Zero. Um. That's a terrible idea. Please don't do that because let's say that you just do one workshop every single month and like Jeremy said on the low end, let's say 10 people show up. You've now increased your email list size by 120 people. If you are doing a good job of sending out a newsletter.
These people go through this followup sequence and then they get punted over to your value based newsletter. So now you're providing value to them in lots of topics that they may directly have interest in. Someone else might have interest in. I, I noticed this when we started actually track these things, there was a lady that we had and she was one of our like top refers that we could [00:59:00] track referrals back to you.
I'm talking like a dozen people and she never, ever came and saw us as a patient. Never. But she came to one workshop that we taught on, it was basically a hip and lower back thing. And whatever we went over with her was like, hit the nail on the head. She's like, Oh my God, like, I feel so much better. This is like, this thing I've been dealing with is basically resolved after just this stuff you showed me at a workshop.
Never ever came and saw us. Opened every single jingle email I ever sent. And she probably sent us like, I don't even know how many tens of thousands of dollars of business from this one workshop. And I wouldn't even known if we weren't tracking these things, right? So please collect their information.
And then if you, if you do that, you really have to follow up with them. Otherwise it just sits there and it's useless versus continuing the newsletter. So local events can be the newsletter. As the newsletter grows, the quarterly campaigns clean those things up because this is a reason why [01:00:00] campaign, these are reasons why people are going to come in.
This is all based around the development of a list building activity of some sort. This is local stuff. You could also do this digitally, but this is where we all have them weaving together symbiotic way that compounds because let's say this is year one. Now, all of a sudden, you've got 120 people on your list and say, you don't get it from anywhere else.
Well, let's say you get better at these. Now, all of a sudden, the next year, 20 people are coming to your workshops every month. You count. All right. So now you get 360 people by the end of that year. That are compounding where you do these quarterly campaigns, you clean it up, you end up cleaning up more and more and more people and their friends and their family.
So like, it's not a short window of time. I think this is what people really get stuck with is they're like, Oh no, I need like more patients right now. It's like, Nope, I that's awesome. I get it. But your marketing efforts snowball and it's like a wave forming and it takes like 60 to 90 days to really start to see that take effect.
And then you have to keep it going. Otherwise, You have to restart all over [01:01:00] again. And that is where people get really frustrated.
Jeremy: Yeah. And I think it's like, you know, you, you brought up a great point there and I've seen it way too often of people are doing all these events, but they're, they're gathering people's name on a, you know, a piece of paper or square space form or something like that.
And then it's not getting into their MailChimp list. So it's like they're collecting all these names. They're doing the work there, but then, you know, because their, their tech stack is scattered, then, you know, they're not actually, not only are they not following up after that event, but then when they go to run this.
Quarterly marketing campaign. They're not even in their, their email list properly. So I think that's where, you know, again, you know why we utilize the CRM we do. It's, you know, our landing pages are, are through our CRM. Our email sequence goes out through HubSpot. Everything is, is, is in one spot. Just makes everything so much easier.
Um, and, and like what you were talking about there too, Danny is like, you know, why they, why, why I like looking at the calendars of this event on Friday. [01:02:00] And say we send out a newsletter on the 16th, so they're going to get all of this messaging here. They're also going to get hit with our newsletter on the 16th.
Then they're going to be enrolled in this quarterly marketing campaign. So like that's three different touch points, three different reasons why, um, they're, they're, you know, we're reaching out to them. Um, and it's not any extra work either. So I think that's where, you know, again, like mapping all this stuff out and say somebody comes in for this event on January 5th.
Maybe they purchase in your Q2 marketing campaign, but that doesn't actually happen unless you have those systems in place. That's why this is so important.
Danny: Yeah. So it can be a long runway. Not everybody's ready to buy right away. You know, it's really probably 20, 30 percent of people that are, they're like, I know I have a problem, I know I need somebody to solve it and you're the person I need to solve it.
You know, then you have like another 20, 30 percent of people that know they have a problem, but they don't really even know you exist. This is why. These, uh, these local events can be so beneficial, right? You might catch, you know, three, four people out of 10 that ended up becoming a, becoming a [01:03:00] client. Well, now you have all these other people.
You just informed that now they know they have a problem. And now, you know, they might think that you're the person to help them, but they may not be sure yet. There's a lot of people that are going to fall into that camp. And that's where we really look at. You know, long term, if you're willing to play a long game, it might be three, four months until somebody decides to come in, um, you know, and it's just, it's hard to say what drives that.
Maybe it's something you said in one of your emails. Maybe it's just something that they finally were like, okay, I got a little breathing room in my life. I'm ready to deal with this thing because you've got to realize it requires work on their end to do the same thing. And sometimes it's not you, it's them.
You know, not to sound cliche, but like they literally, maybe they haven't done well previously with some sort of, you know, injury, you know, rehab specialists that, uh, they just, you know, they failed the, you know, the treatment that they were trying to do to help. Uh, so now they're jaded and they don't know if it'll work.
And you got to get past that, even though you have nothing to do with that. So this is where it gets challenging. But I think if you can, if you can distill this down to like, uh, Uh, digestible [01:04:00] number to, to really focus on what we found across the board is if you're running a solid, uh, front end and back end in your business, in terms of your, your understand how to create and sell a plan of care, you have some sort of ongoing offer for people that a percentage of the people we work with will fall into, you really need about 8 to 10 new patients per month.
Her provider, especially early on, sometimes if you have providers have been around for longer, that number is going to drop, uh, where they don't need as many new patients because they have so much recurring volume, but you need about, on average, 8 to 10 new people. So if it's just you, that means you need to find, let's say 10 people a month in order to really grow your schedule to where you hit saturation in a relatively short period of time.
If you have four providers, uh, that means you need to find. 40 people a month in order to be able to have, you know, a clinic where everybody's schedules are busy and they're not wondering if they need to go find another job, right? So the last thing that I would say, and we'll layer into this is ads. [01:05:00] And, and, you know, ads are something that a lot of people want to start, uh, just with like, all right, I'm just going to run.
Facebook ads and I'm going to get all these leads and, and, um, and, and not to say that like digital ads definitely work. They absolutely work. Um, but I think it's like foundationally, there's a few things that you need in place to really be able to do this. And, and this is something that patch does as well, you know, on a high level with really high return on investment, as far as dollars spent.
But if you're not, if you're not doing the fundamental things. Right, like, like I'm coaching my kids basketball teams this year. So I've got two basketball teams. I'm developing practice plans for and I'm dealing with like fourth and sixth graders. And when we start practice, like we work on fundamentally dribbling a basketball, you know, we work on, uh, defensive positions.
Why? Because if you can't dribble a basketball, you can't win a game. It doesn't work that way, right? I can't just go straight to like teaching you how to shoot a three. Uh, you got to learn how to get the [01:06:00] damn ball up the court to begin with. So we got to look at, well, what's the fundamental base of your business that no one can ever take away?
Uh, that's these things we're talking about. So if you're not fundamentally doing some local marketing, you're not doing some follow up marketing, simpler things, and you think that like digital ads is going to be easier, is going to be like faster, and it's going to be easier to track and No chance. Like it's, it is more technically difficult.
You got to build a skill set and then you layer it on top of it. And this is where it feeds everything else because it feeds your email newsletter, feeds your follow up content marketing. It drives people to local events. Like these are things that we can do with ads that help, uh, improve your, uh, your, your time efficiency.
Cause you don't have to be out there doing everything. And it works best whenever it's layered on top of a business that is fundamentally set up from the ground up, right? So, for you, with ads, like, where do you see the biggest, um, benefit from layering on ads on top of, uh, a well structured marketing plan?
Jeremy: [01:07:00] Yeah, I think you, you said it perfectly there of, you know, ads work the best for clinics that are already doing everything else. Um, ads are, can be super effective in their, their own right as well. Um, you know, I think, you know, we've got plenty of data on it now to to show like ads work it. They just do work if they're set up correctly.
And, you know, again, kind of going after, you know, what your target market is looking for. Um, but the the clinics that see the highest ROI on their ad spend are the clinics that. You know, do not need, I need 20 people this month. Can we go find that with ads? It's the people that are, you know, it would be nice to have a bump in, in patients.
We got these marketing campaigns set up, um, so not like, you know, we're, we're not relying on it. Right. Um, so I think that because like you said, somebody, you know, an ad is probably the coldest lead you're gonna, gonna receive. Um, even though like, you know, we still consider, especially [01:08:00] Google ads, warm leads, uh, because they are searching, you know, physical therapy, Boston, and they're coming to my website and they're filling out a form.
That's a pretty hot lead if you ask me, um, but it's going to be colder than a, than a local event lead obviously, but you know, that person might've just like had a really Bad night's sleep and their back is killing them and they searched and they filled out the form and then four o'clock rolled around and they're actually feeling better.
So, um, again, you collected that email, which is awesome. Um, you know, how, what are you going to do with that person for the next three months, basically, and clinics that. Look at it in that sense of understanding that this is the long play and are doing all the right things. Those are the most successful.
They're the ones that are seeing the, you know, the, the much higher multiple. Um, you know, I think, I think, you know, Google ads layering it in, in any sort of marketing campaign, regardless of the size of the business you're at. Is a smart idea. Um, I think I've grown that's, you know, transparently for everybody.
That's how I grew ripple was [01:09:00] through digital advertising. Um, you know, we did everything else I did all of the, you know, we'd mainly leaned into the digital side of things. So emailing nurture sequences that did, you know, digital marketing side, but. Ads is where I was able to go from two providers to five providers.
Um, but we'd set it up properly. We understood the investment at the beginning. It wasn't always going to be, you know, this massive ROI number, but you know, if you can get to that point, that's where, you know, it becomes fun. You're shooting threes. Um, that's, you know, kind of like what you're doing with ads, um, instead of just practicing, bringing the ball up the, up the court.
So, um, yeah, that's really how I look
Danny: at ads. Yeah. And the digital footprint you have makes a big difference too. Right. So having a website that is, uh, is good, it converts well, um, having Google reviews, especially running Google ads, you know, being able to also understand the backend of it, because anybody can set up an ad, but like being able to actually effectively follow up with people is probably 80 percent of it versus the 20 percent on the front end.
And that's, I [01:10:00] think where people, um, really misunderstand the utilization of it, or maybe they try it and they get frustrated. They don't realize they're like. You know, maybe you don't know how to talk to somebody that is a cold or lead from an ad. It's harder if it's a Referral from your patient and it's that person's brother and they have been raving about you Like it's not hard to tell that person to come in and work with you and not use their insurance, right?
You talk to somebody from a Google ad, you know, and they're like I was hurting for physical therapy Like why don't why don't you take Blue Cross? What's up with you? you know like that is completely different in terms of Uh, the ability that you need to have to be able to sell, uh, in your own business.
And if you can't Then your conversion percentage on your ad spend is going to be very low. And if it's low, then your return on investment is going to be low. And you're going to think they don't work that well. Versus if I take that same ad and I put it into a clinic where somebody can, they can sell, they have a digital footprint.
All of a sudden they might be at a five to 10 X ROI on ads. And you might be [01:11:00] at a negative ROI for ads. So there's, there's like, there's a bit more to it than just like. You know, as, as simple as people might want to make it sound, it's not that simple. But once you get these other things in place, it is like rocket fuel on, on your business, because it allows you to get a lot of your time back and to leverage this big platform where people are actively searching for a solution to a problem in your area.
Like it's great, right? So if you can do that, then all of a sudden it just multiplies your reach and that's where you can really scale. To be able to get more providers in, right? So this, all this stuff working together, we talk about it as like multiple poles in the water. We do this with, you know, our businesses as well, and we want ads.
We want a great product that drives referrals and we want to have content. We want to have marketing from, from emails. We want to be able to do. We can't really do local events with PT biz, but we can do local, like sort of digital congregation point events that are similar and all these things, they feed into building a [01:12:00] list, providing value, creating content over a long period of time.
And, uh, and, and all of it together is what really drives a. Not just a good marketing plan, but a marketing plan that won't get screwed up because of maybe a tech change. I saw this happen first hand when we were running a lot of Facebook ads a few years ago, and all of a sudden they changed like that part of the algorithm.
And we went from, you know, doing really well to all of a sudden, what the heck happened? And it was when an iOS update occurred and Apple devices were really changing some of the standards that people had. And if your business solely ran off of just that, You were shit in your pants because that is like, you don't know what to do.
There's nothing you do about it. And you have no control over anything besides this digital marketing, um, ad spend. That's a tough place to be. Nobody, no investor is going to want to see one channel of acquisition. They view that as a complete liability versus if you have multiple, if one breaks, let's say that accounts for 25 percent of your new business, we just dropped a [01:13:00] 75 percent versus zero.
Uh, which does happen to people, especially like businesses that are e commerce or all online. A lot of them went out of business during that time. You know, so you got to think about this as not just how can you scale quickly, but how can you mitigate downside risk? Because if you want to have this business for decades.
Grow it like that, right? Don't grow it. Like you're trying to scale it really fast and sell it because what goes up fast goes down fast as well. So keep, keep that in mind as you're building out a marketing plan and looking at the scale side of it. Yeah. I think you, you
Jeremy: brought up a good point there, you know, if you're thinking about running ads, you know, I think you need to assess.
Um, and, you know, whoever's going to be taking these calls, those, those sales skills as well. That's a big thing of what we do inside of patches. You know, we have a, a Google sales course inside of patch. This is like, Hey, you know, you probably understand how to sell and during an evaluation or someone's on the table, you're doing your thing.
This is a whole different ball game. There's a different script for this. Um, [01:14:00] and. Like you said, ads aren't going to be successful. You're going to have a really low ROI if any, um, if you just, you know, someone says, Hey, do you take my insurance? And you say, Nope. And then that's the end of the phone call. So you got to have some conversation there.
And there's got to be, um, you know, again, you've got to, you've got to, we have to educate people on what we're doing with physical therapy because PT is changing, but most people don't know that. Yeah. They're not like us. They're not living in it every day. So we've got to educate people on like, just, just hear me out here.
This is what we do. This is why it's awesome. Um, you know, let's get you in the door and I'll just give it a shot. So, you know, that's good. It's a whole different
Danny: mindset shift. You want a 0 percent conversion rate. Hey, you take my insurance. Nope. It's okay. Bye. And it's over. That's it. Uh, what would it is?
Let's go ahead and stop sharing your screen and we'll go ahead and, uh, we'll wrap it up. Hey, real quick again, if you're just joining, uh, if you are listening to this or watch us in the Facebook group, if you want a copy of this marketing calendar, we 2024 [01:15:00] dialed in. Just type calendar in the comments.
Once this live stream is over, Jeremy's going to, uh, follow up and reach out to everybody and, and, uh, and get you a link. So you can download that and make a copy of that calendar yourself. If you're listening to this on the podcast, head over to the PT optioners, Facebook group, and just look for this live stream, right?
So this is January 5th. And it's our, uh, 2024 marketing plan live stream. You can go in there, do the same things, type in the comments and we'll, uh, we'll be able to send you a copy of this, um, as well. So, um, Jeremy, any, uh, any last advice for people as they're putting together their, you know, sort of game plan for 2024, at least when it comes to, to marketing.
Yeah, I
Jeremy: think, you know, the reason that I leaned into this calendar is because, you know, I think most people don't have a plan for their marketing. They'll map out treatment plans, and they'll map out kind of everything else with the business. But marketing fuel sales, you can't make sales unless you do [01:16:00] marketing.
So you got to plan your marketing, you got to treat the marketing side of your business. Like a business and really like have some have some systems behind that. So, you know, utilize the calendar, you know, or that thought process of, you know, here's what I need to do in the next three months. Here's how am I going to execute it?
Here's what all this looks like. So start there. And then, um, you just doing that, you'll be successful.
Danny: Yeah, that's it. So one of my favorite quotes, a goal that a plan is a wish. I forgot who said it the other day when I said to somebody, they're like, who said that? I don't remember. Uh, but it's true. A goal that a plan is a wish.
So if you have a goal of a certain number of new patients this year, which by the way, like if you have a business and you haven't done any sort of annual planning for your business, what are you doing, man? What are you doing? Like it's more important than just floating around trying to, you know, hopefully getting the result that you want.
Um, you got to sit down and really figure out. What am I trying to do? How many new patients does that [01:17:00] require? What metrics do I really need to be tracking? These are really important things. And it's no different than going into an evaluation with a system and structure for what you're going to do to make sure that you don't miss something, to make sure that you're getting people really good outcomes.
You're taking them through the progressions that they need to in a systematic way. This is what makes people great clinicians and great business owners come from, um, being structured. Having systems and actually running a business, not necessarily, uh, and doing so in an organized way, not necessarily in just a, you know, nonchalant way where you're just assuming I'm going to be okay.
I'll figure it out as I go. Um, that's how I was for years. And I think it's just a terrible idea. Uh, it took me a long time before that. So hopefully you, you can realize that before it's too, uh, it's too late. But I think. For, um, everybody that's listening to this, like I said, a goal and a plan is a wish.
Get this marketing calendar, go ahead and, uh, make sure that you, you know, use it, fill it in. Um, uh, Brandon, [01:18:00] Brandon hit me up with, is that who really came up with it? I don't even, I didn't even know that. I thought it was Herm Edwards. Herm Edwards is, uh, you know, one of the Colts, the Colts, uh, uh, head coach there for a while.
Apparently I've been saying Herm Edwards. I've been, I have been giving him credit forever. So, all right, well, I'm going to go ahead and. I don't even know who that is. Saint? Who is it actually? Antoine de Saint. I don't even know how to pronounce that, Brandon. Uh, so, let's go ahead and just give Herm Edwards credit, uh, from here on out.
Yeah, I believed
Jeremy: you when you said Herm Edwards, so, yeah. Yeah,
Danny: I thought that's who it was. Anyway, great correction. Uh, either way, it's true no matter if it was a French poet slash, um, what is this guy? Writer or Herm Edwards. So get yourself organized, get yourself ready for the year and make this the best year that you can have.
And that comes down to following a plan. So hopefully you guys like this one. If you do let us know, uh, we will do more of these. If you really liked this one. [01:19:00] You know, let us know, leave a, uh, a review in iTunes or a comment on, uh, uh, this, uh, this Facebook post. If you want Jeremy to come back and share more marketing knowledge, we can definitely have him come back in.
So as always, guys, Jeremy, hey, thank you so much for your time. And thank you so much for watching this and listening to the podcast. And we will catch you guys next week.
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