E742 | Marketing Drop Off Points That Are Killing Your Clinic

In this episode, Dr. Danny takes us on a journey into the world of marketing for physical therapy (PT) entrepreneurs. He introduces a vital concept—marketing drop-off points—which represent critical inefficiencies in converting potential clients into committed participants in a plan of care. Understanding these drop-off points is essential for any PT practice looking to grow and thrive.

Key Takeaways:

• What are Drop-Off Points? Dr. Danny explains that drop-off points are areas in the marketing process where potential clients disengage or do not proceed to the next step. Identifying these points allows business owners to address underlying issues and streamline their client acquisition process.

• The Detective Approach: In the episode, Dr. Danny encourages PT entrepreneurs to become "detectives" in their marketing strategies. By pinpointing the "lowest hanging fruit"—the most significant drop-off points—owners can implement targeted solutions that yield the highest return on their efforts.

• The Log Jam Analogy: Using a powerful analogy, he compares marketing inefficiencies to a log jam in a river. By identifying and removing the main blockage, the entire flow will improve. This principle underscores the importance of tackling the most pressing issue first to facilitate overall progress.

• Visual Learning through Mini-Trainings: Dr. Danny emphasizes the value of his upcoming YouTube mini-trainings, designed to provide visuals that enhance understanding of these concepts. This structured approach will help PT entrepreneurs apply the same level of dedication and expertise they have in clinical practice to their business operations.

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Podcast Transcript

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

Hope to see you there soon. Hey, are you a physical therapist looking to leverage your skill set in a way that helps you create time and financial freedom for yourself and your family? If so, you're in the right spot. My name is Danny Matta, 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 therapist 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.

Cause I'm here to help you.

What's going on. Dr. Danny here, the PT entrepreneur podcast, and I'm dropping an intro for you today on this podcast, because this is another one of our YouTube mini trainings that will be coming out over the next few weeks. And this one has to do with your marketing drop off points. This is a really important training to understand where you can have inefficiencies.

In the processes of people leading up to becoming a actual client in your office and deciding to, do a plan of care with you. So there's a few drop off points that I'm going to talk about that are really important. And the key with this is if you can figure out which area is the lowest hanging fruit for you, right?

The area that is the most efficient. That's the best place to start to try to solve a problem. Oftentimes you don't know what your problem is. So hopefully this is something that can help you be a a better detective and be diagnostic about where your efforts are going and maybe where the drop off points are, because in my experience at this point with business, what I've found is there's really.

Data that needs to be tracked that tells a story of how a business is doing and gives you a very clear idea as to what areas need to be improved. And if you can understand those and you can start to apply effort in the right places it's very efficient. It's if you have a log jam, you understand which log is the one that's, that is creating the jam.

And it's the one that you got to get. Freed up all of a sudden, everything starts to move, right? And there may be other areas that you need to improve as well, but if you can start with the area that is the most efficient, it can have the biggest overall impact on the business, especially when you're looking at, something like marketing.

So hope you enjoy this one. Like I said, we're going to have these trainings are going to drop on. On YouTube with visuals. If you want to look at these more as far as studying this stuff is concerned and understanding what we're talking about with your business, and if you can take the same skills that you have, where you learned how to be an amazing clinician and you went to school for a long time, you passed a lot of hard tests and you learned a lot of information.

Even when you got out of school to become a better clinician through continuing education, you have this, the skillset, it's just a matter of having the information, have it broken down correctly. And that's what we're trying to do with these. So anyway, hopefully you enjoy this one. I'll look out for the YouTube videos as well, and I'll talk to you soon.

Paid marketing and the metrics and really the KPIs that you need to be tracking very closely and why they can make such a massive difference in your practice, especially over an extended period of time. So for those of you who don't know me, I'm Danny Matei. I'm the founder of a company called Physical Therapy Biz, which is a company that helps cash at hybrid practices.

Really starting scalar practices all over the U S and Canada some internationally, but mainly in the U S to date, we've helped over a thousand practices, both start and scale. And we really helped you is help clinicians understand how to actually not just be great clinicians, but be great business owners as well as great clinicians.

So today, what I'm going to talk about is really understanding. Some basic information, some basic numbers when it comes to your marketing. Because if you want to dip your toe into the world of digital marketing, which is great, cause it can very very much help you scale new patients. There are plenty of things you need to understand about that, but probably the most important thing is to understand what numbers you need to track, right?

There's no different than like for me, I always equate what we do in business to what I would do as a clinician, so I wouldn't necessarily just subjectively just track how somebody is doing. Hey. How do you feel today? Comparison to last visit, which is fine. That's a great metric to have.

I would also want to see some quantitative data as well, right? Some objective differences in terms of what they're physically able to do. Maybe it's a gamut of tests we're doing. If we're getting back to like return to sport or something to that effect. And you're going to have a lot more effective outcomes with somebody, if you're actually tracking things objectively and subjectively.

So when we look at marketing. Digital marketing. One of the nice things about it is very objective. We can see metrics in a way that you can't with local marketing as well because it's more brand development versus this is very much, you're trying to find people and you can tie Revenue or ad span I should say money you're putting in to revenue you get on the back end versus let's say I am You know doing local networking with folks.

I might be able to say Oh that person came from this relationship that I have But sometimes that is difficult to say because there's a lot of touch points and factors associated with it So that's more brand development and what I consider more farming, right? So you're like planting seeds and those seeds are going to grow at some point and bear fruit But with digital marketing, it's more hunting, right?

So you're going out and actually like trying to find people that can work with you and the mixture of the two, it works really well. But the mistake I see with people with digital marketing is they actually just, they spend money. Maybe they outsource it to another company, which there's nothing wrong with getting somebody else to do that for you, assuming they know what they're doing, but they're not necessarily tracking anything.

So they don't know if it's effective. So they're doing one of two things. Either they turn something off. That maybe isn't working, but maybe it is, which would suck because if it's working and you turn it off because you don't know it's working that's really not a good place to be. Cause you could have scaled your new patient volume through that, or you don't know if it's working or not, and maybe it's not working.

You just keep it running. Cause you're not sure. And you don't want to actually just turn it off because maybe it is working right. But you don't have to guess with these things as much as be good at tracking things. So somebody told me one time is that one of my first mentors I had in business, especially when it came to marketing.

They said, good marketing is more about being a good detective than anything else. You're basically figuring out the right things to track and what areas you need to improve because, the lead generation side of it, there's some complexity to that, but really it comes down to, are you looking at the right numbers to make the right decisions?

So there's a few KPIs. That's I want to go over that. We'll keep it very simple. And imagine if you're, if you look at the screen share of this imagine that your marketing is like a funnel, right? And there's people who are going to come into the top of it and they're going to drop off towards the bottom based on different interactions.

They have both digitally and then with people. So let's say that you have a webpage that you're sending people to via traffic from whatever source you want, Google, Facebook, Instagram. Whatever. And let's say on that page, you get the call to action is to talk to your team to see if they can help you with, the thing that you have that's bothering you, right?

So whatever it is, and however you want to set that ad up to target those people, you're getting them to a page where they can basically book a a time to chat with you, or they can call your staff, or it is maybe it's a special offer of some sort, whatever it is. In this scenario, we're going to assume that it's going to a discovery call where they're talking to somebody on your team.

In most cases, it's either going to be administrative individual. Or it's going to be the owner of the company. So in this scenario, let's say we're spending 2, 000 in ads. Okay. So this is what's going in. We're spending 2, 000 and that's going to this platform. It's going to put my advertising in front of people, key people that hopefully can target pretty well.

And let's say on average, I'm getting. A discovery call book for somewhere between 75 and a hundred dollars. Now, this is a metric that we like to look at because ultimately I don't care it, what a lead costs. I care what it costs to get somebody on a discovery call, because I know that is going to typically lead to the next step.

A lead, if I'm doing more like lead generation, let's say I have content that I have, that's like a lead magnet. Okay. You can grow your list and that's fine. You might want to look at your. Cost per lead, but in, in a cash or hybrid brace hybrid practice, you're going to have not a ton of lead volume. Like you're not going to have hundreds and thousands of people opting into your content every single month.

You want to actually focus on getting people, into a conversation with you or taking the next step. So I like to track. What does it cost to get somebody on a discovery call? And what we're seeing is roughly 75 to a hundred dollars, depending on the market and the ad spend and things of that nature.

So we'll just use a hundred dollars in this example. Let's say it costs a hundred dollars to get somebody on a discovery call. So this next step, they've gone to the discovery call. They're talking to you or somebody on your team. So you've gotten 20 people that have gotten on a discovery call for that 100.

Now you may be able to book them for less than that, but we're talking about people actually talking to you for a hundred bucks. So let's say it's maybe 50, 75, but you have some drop off from there. So we want to know, all right, how many people are actually on the phone with you for that 2, 000? And let's say it's 20, so a hundred dollars per individual.

Now you have those conversations and they. Could go one of two ways. Either they go good or they don't go so great where people are dropping off. And, if you can't handle the, do you take my insurance question? Or what do what does this look like? Why would I come see you over somebody else?

If you can't actually handle those questions, like this is this percentage of conversion is going to be really bad. So what we're seeing is the owner, the actual clinician or another clinician, they're going to convert. Way higher in most cases than any sort of administrative or office manager and front desk individual.

And the reason is. Their depth of knowledge and their credibility associated with their actual like degree and the level of information that they understand. So in this scenario, let's say that the actual owner is taking the call and they're going to convert it 70 percent throughput. So 70 percent is going to be the next.

Sort of step of people that are moving to the eval. So from a discovery call to say, hey, can you help me? Awesome We're going to schedule an eval So they schedule an eval to come in and see you And to see what's going on in person with yourself or one of your staff So 70 as people come through that means 14 people end up coming in for an eval from the 20 You talked to six dropped off six didn't convert whatever the case is, you convert at 70%.

70 percent are going to come in for an eval. Now let's say another 70 percent of those people move from a discovery, an actual like eval to doing a plan of care with you. So 70 percent are going to go eval discovery call to eval. So here, and then from here, 70 percent are going to become A client and want to do a plan of care meaning a package up front or spaced out payments Whatever it is you're going to do but your drop off now from these 14 people is going to be 70 of those 14 people So your 70 conversion of people in office then wanting to commit to solving a problem is going to leave you with 10 people That are going to commit to a plan of care.

The other four people are probably going to see you for a couple visits You know here and there maybe it's only a handful Maybe they're acute and they don't need to see you for a plan of care. Whatever it is You This is going to be your drop off percentage. So you're at 70 percent of each of these steps.

So what we want to see is these numbers are really important to track. So what percent of people are coming from a discovery call to an eval and what percent of people are going from an eval to a plan of care, because that's going to dictate what our ROI is going to be on our ads. As well as what you're charging, right?

So most people that we're working with for a plan of care and a mid sort of term amount of time for a package or a plan of care is around 2, 000. So 2, 000 per person. And there's 10 people. That means you've generated 20, 000 in revenue in gross revenue for the clinic off of 2, 000 in ads. Okay. So if you take these two numbers.

So 2000 and 20, 000 and you divide 20, 000 by the ads you put in, you're going to have a 10 X return on ad spend or a R O I return on investment. Okay. So that's great. That's actually a phenomenal ROI. And we see a lot of people that we work with. And we help get set up for running digital ads. They're at this or maybe even higher, depending on how much they're spending in their market.

But really it comes down to these numbers right here. Do they convert well at the discovery call to eval, the eval to the plan of care? That's going to make a massive difference and i'll show an example of what it looks like when we see more drop off here Okay, so let's say you have the same exact scenario.

But in this case, let's say that you're spending two thousand dollars You're getting the same cost per lead. So same exact audience same ads, whatever you're getting 20 people on the phone Hey, sorry to interrupt the podcast, but I have a huge favor to ask of you. If you are a long time listener or a new listener, and you're finding value in this podcast, please head over to iTunes wherever you listen to the podcast, and please leave a rating and review.

This is actually very helpful for us to get this podcast in front of more clinicians and really help them develop time and financial freedom. So if you do that, I'll greatly appreciate it. Now back to the podcast, but you're only converting at 50 percent from here to here, right? So from here to here, you got 50%.

That means you get half these people are dropping off. How these people are not even coming in for an eval. So you've gone from 20 to 10. Now let's say from a conversion standpoint, you're going from 70 percent to the 50 percent compared to the last example, that 50 percent drop off from here to here, that leaves you with five people that are going to commit to a plan of care.

The other five are going to, whatever, a couple of visits, whatever, we're not even adding that into your ROI. But in this example, you have five that decide to commit to a plan of care. So that leaves you with 10, 000 off of. 2, 000 in ad spend. So again, if I take this number and divide it into this number, that leaves me with a five X ROI.

Okay. So that means I generated five times the amount of money that I put in on the front end for my ad spend for my business. Now you can actually scale at these numbers. This isn't ideal for local service businesses. If you're bigger and you're aggressively trying to grow, you can actually scale at these numbers.

Like we, we've seen people, most people can scale it. Three to four X of ad spend at scale. That's if you're reinvesting a ton of money back into growing the business. This isn't the skit. This is a sketchy way to grow, to be honest with you. I've done both and I don't prefer to do this way because it's such a, every percentage matters so much.

That a five X ROI is really not ideal. And the drop off for the most part is coming from these areas right here. Okay. So let's assume ads are doing fine and you're getting a call for 75 to a hundred bucks that get on the phone with you. Then it comes down to your percentages of how you're doing in these areas.

I recently spoke to one of our clients yesterday, actually about some of these percentages where they're at. And the owner had gone back to taking the initial calls to compare to their front desk. And they went from a 50 percent conversion from discovery call to eval to a 90 percent.

Okay. Nine out of 10 people. So that means of the 20, 18 people came in and they're converting an 80 plus percent here. So that means they got nine people that are coming in. They're converting at 80 percent here. Like they're, they kill it on moving people to a plan of care in office. Okay. That means almost every single person that's coming in is going to actually commit to a plan of care.

So let's say 15 people out of 13 convert They're generating thirty thousand dollars in ads 30, 000 in revenue from ads on the front end. Now, this is an example of just effectively trying to improve one drop off point. And if you have a funnel like this, let's say this whole funnel here, right? You start to look at this and instead of it being your discovery call, let's say it's 50 percent and you bump that up to 90.

So just like we did here, and everything else, let's say is, 80 percent you're going to kill it. If you can find the constraint, this is why I said it's important to be a good detective. You need to figure out where your drop off points are and then implement a plan to try to change it and track it, right?

That's basically it. It's no different than making a physical change with somebody. If somebody is trying to lose weight and they're struggling with, whatever, if you have them start to track their food intake, all of a sudden we can say, Oh dude, you're drinking a ton of soda. If you cut the coke out, then let's see how your body looks.

Let's see how you feel. And then all of a sudden we can change a variable and see how somebody feels physically. And this is what's so interesting for me with the clients that we get a chance to work with. They're all clinicians. Me too. And if you can associate a skill you already have, which is getting physical outcomes with people and understanding how to actually go through a set process, stick to that and be able to understand how things interact, Like you can crush it with this if you understand that it's just you need to reframe the way that you understand how to use your skills on the business side, if you're trying to grow a business.

So on the marketing side, it all comes down to the objective, measures that you're seeing the actual outcomes from the inputs that you're putting in versus, I think my marketing is working pretty well. I think my ads are doing okay. I think my practice is doing okay. This is what we typically hear.

And, hope is not a strategy. It's just, it doesn't work that way. I don't really care how you feel about your business. You need to see what your business looks like in an actual like KPI, standard manner to see if you're actually doing as great as you think you're doing, or maybe you're doing great in an area that you could reinvest more money into.

And that's a really important thing to know as well. So on the marketing side, this is what we want to see from a standard standpoint is that we see 70 percent throughout this entire funnel where your discovery calls are converting 70 percent to an eval to a plan of care, 70 percent across all your staff.

Now that key difference might be that you need a clinician. Or you need a, an owner to actually take that discovery call. That's the hardest call of all because they're skeptical. They've seen you from an ad. They don't maybe have as much of a warm introduction as a referral. So this is a drop off point that we see a lot of people struggle with.

And eventually they may have to take this over or train a staff member to take this as a part of their job. Maybe it's a clinic director or somebody like that. But being able to have a clinician take those calls will definitely increase throughput there. And then once they get to eval and plan of care, that's really training your staff on an ongoing basis.

As far as sales is concerned, how you're having conversations with people about the problems they're trying to solve. But if you can do this correctly, now, all of a sudden you can layer on a predictable marketing approach to generate a 10 X ROI. I would be ecstatic with it. Honestly, if I got a six X ROI, I would be so ecstatic.

That's a great return on investment for damn near any type of marketing. But if you can get a 10 plus, which many of the people that we're working with are, they're spending a thousand, 2, 000, 3, 000 a month. That's a game changer for your business because then the constraint is not new patient volume, because you have to think you don't just have ads, right?

So you'll have ads is driving to the business, right? You've got referrals.

And then you also have. Your local marketing. So this is coming from like people, word of mouth, sending people your way. This is coming from you being involved in your local community and all this is going into your clinic. It's all going to your business. So you might get, 33 percent from all of these and then it's going to add up.

A huge percentage in comparison to just doing ads or just doing local marketing, or just hoping that people are going to refer people your way. Cause if you get 10 people here, 10 people here, and 10 people here, now, all of a sudden you've got 30 new patients that are coming into your clinic.

And it's also broken up in a safer manner where it's not all coming from just one area, right? Like one actual marketing. Approach that maybe that doesn't work all of a sudden for a number of reasons especially ads can change For a lot of reasons that you have nothing to do with right when algorithm changes big company decides they're going to change You know how they want you to set up ads or whatever and you're trying to figure those things out It's a hard thing to continue to keep up with which is one of the reasons why finding a good vendor to do that Can make a lot of sense for a clinician, but it puts you in a really stable position with your clinic Where now you have a lever where you can really focus more on that.

It's hard to drive more referrals, more word of mouth referrals. You can definitely engineer that in, but you can't really change human behavior sometimes, what people are going to do. Local marketing sometimes can happen in bursts. Maybe you have more workshops or you have more local events or you're sponsoring more local, races or whatever it is that you're doing at different times throughout the year.

And this is something that can help stabilize a lot of that throughout on a month to month basis for new patent, a new patient volume as well. So keep that in mind. If you're going to run ads, these are the really important things to keep in mind. How many, what's it costing me to get any a discovery call?

How many of those people are moving over to an eval and then what is my conversion percentage to a plan of care and how much does that cost? And then you can start to back into what your ROI is for your actual marketing. And this is where you get really predictive and where business starts to be a hell of a lot less stressful when you know.

If I spend, a hundred dollars on ads, I'm going to make a thousand dollars back. That's a game that a lot of people would love to play. They'd love to be like, Oh yeah, a hundred dollars in thousand dollars out. And it may not be as predictable as that, but if it gets pretty close to where, over the course of a year, it levels out to that, man, what a great place to be for you to build scale your business.

So this hopefully at this point makes sense to you. Hopefully if you are running Ads and doing marketing. This gives you a really good idea of what numbers you should be looking at, what percentages of drop off that we want to be able to see at scale and what you should be tracking. Cause now it should be very clear as to what you should look at and what you need to improve.

If you're not doing any of this and you want help figuring out how you can actually implement this stuff into your practice and track the right things and make sure that you're not just wasting your money by putting it into Facebook, Google, Instagram, whatever it is that you're doing, We'd love nothing more than to help you actually get to that point.

Just head to physicaltherapybiz. com. Take a look at what we're doing. Learn about our company. If it makes sense that you want to jump on a call with us, we'd love to talk to you. And when we get a chance to chat with you, it'll be the most valuable hour of your time. Like we'll dig into your business, see where you're at as far as our KPIs are concerned, the businesses that we work with.

And that's good. We've helped over a thousand. So we consolidate that information. We can tell you best practices, where your business needs to be and where you fall on that, right? Maybe you're doing great on certain things and not so great on other things. So that's amazing to know that lets you know what you need to focus on.

And if it makes sense for us to help you get there, awesome. If not, that's totally fine too. You'll leave with a lot of information about where your business is and what you're doing well, and maybe what you're not doing so well. So if you're interested in that head of physical therapy, biz. com. You can book a call with one of our advisors, or you can just download some of our free resources and learn a little bit more about what we're doing.

So I hope this helps. I hope that it helps you clear up some of your marketing with your cash based and hybrid practices. And as always, thanks so much for watching. I'll catch you in the next video.

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