Ep. 132: Adapting to Changes in Healthcare Marketing - Interview with Chris Brandt from EW Motion Therapy

Patient Care Marketing Pros (00:00)
All right, guys, welcome back to Walk -Ins. Welcome to the podcast all about medical marketing and how to increase business for your practice. But we have a special guest today. Nick's not here, by the way. I'm just waving at an empty spot. He's just not here today. He's had some things come up. Also, we like to kind of mix up the podcast from time to time. But we have a really cool guest today because this is the guy that worked in a practice, really was there as, you know, the medical side. And there's an opportunity to move to the marketing side.

And we're going to talk about that transition, the challenges though. But today we have Chris Brandt with EW Motion Therapy. He got his degree back in 2011, started working at EW Motion Therapy. And then up until about, you know, 2019, they shifted him from a PT to director of marketing. So he got to do all the marketing during COVID, which I'm sure was an absolute blast. But Chris, welcome on. And then a quick icebreaker here that we'd like to ask, tell us something that would surprise us or nobody else knows.

Chris Brandt (00:58)
Thank you, Michael. So one thing that really nobody else knows, my mother grew up in rodeo and I as a child, that's all I wanted to do was become a professional bull rider. Yeah.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (01:12)
Okay, that's kind of cool. So how far did you get in the bull riding world?

Chris Brandt (01:17)
I took classes when I was probably 10 years old and then quickly realized that football was more my thing. So we kind of moved away from that. And so.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (01:20)
cool.

mean, wrestling bulls, wrestling, you going after football. I mean, I get it.

Chris Brandt (01:32)
They collided a little bit, but no, that's my one thing.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (01:37)
Nice, very cool. So I mean, I tell you, I was like, I was telling you before we started, like we get all sorts of interesting, I think that's the first bull riding one I think I've heard. So that's pretty cool. And imagine if you kept going, because it's funny, because you're on the PT world, which is like fixing people to probably did some bull riding they shouldn't have.

Chris Brandt (01:47)
Thanks.

Right, yeah, I've had a couple of rodeo people, but I think that my injuries from football are bad enough that my injuries from bull riding, I just don't even want to even go down that route. So.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (02:10)
Yeah. yeah. All right. So let's talk about you. So in this scenario, so a couple of backstory things here. So full transparency, EW Motion Therapy used to be a client of ours. They're actually here in the same city that we are. They were a client years ago. Still have a relationship obviously, we brought Chris on. But they left us and they went to the they ask you answer world. And I'm sure Chris has lots to say about that.

And we have actually brought on, they asked you to answer on to this podcast. We brought on one of their team members to talk about its process because we believe in it too. We're big fans of it. But so I'm curious because I feel like most PT people have a pretty interesting story as why they went for PT. So tell me why you went for PT.

Chris Brandt (02:36)
yeah.

just to start out. So when I started in school, I had this dream of being a glorified orthopedic surgeon, especially with my sports history. And I got to my senior year and did some shadowing and realized I didn't really like that model of care. I didn't really like to see the patient one time.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (02:55)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris Brandt (03:19)
fix them and then you're done, pretty much. Not everyone's like that, but that was the experience I got from that. And I had a couple other classmates that were going into PT. And literally my senior year in college was a great time to decide that you wanna choose a totally different path than what you've been spending four years on. Yeah, it was a rough conversation, but it worked out.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (03:38)
Yeah, don't tell your parents, right?

You

Chris Brandt (03:43)
Then I wanted to be a PT and so I ended up graduating from Alabama, got a job as a personal trainer and had to take some extra classes and then got back in after that. So that's really my route to becoming a physical therapist.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (03:58)
Awesome. So you've been in physical therapy, you've been hanging out with EW for a long time. So I have to wonder, how did that conversation go where you were, you tell me, were you approached by the owners or by managers saying, Hey, we need somebody to be this marketing person and we like you for this. How did that conversation roll out?

Chris Brandt (04:18)
So really was kind of an organic situation. I started in our Tuscaloosa clinic. We have six locations between Birmingham and Tuscaloosa. And the Tuscaloosa clinic got off as a little probably a little bit slower than we wanted it to be. We had two PTs working, the director and myself. And so in my spare time when I wasn't treating, I was out just going to doctor's offices, trying to have a better presence on social media for us. So I started kind of doing just.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (04:32)
Yeah, yeah.

Chris Brandt (04:48)
marketing just out of necessity to give myself something to do and try to attract patients to the business.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (04:54)
So you were just doing it, and I don't say out of desperation, but like I need this to work and I don't care what they're doing up top. Like I got to make this work for me because I, you know, I want to see more patients. I guess they took notice of it.

Chris Brandt (05:08)
That's right. Yeah. So it started there. And then we realized we, I mean, from what I did on our social media, we needed to expand our presence on social media. So I started running our main accounts there. And then that kind of turned into us talking about writing blog articles. And, and then as it just kind of, as you talked about, I think y 'all were our main marketing team at the time. And,

We decided that I'd kind of taken this role on and that we wanted to bring everything in house. So.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (05:40)
Yeah, when we were with you guys, we were doing, I think, SEO work in Google Ads. I think that's where we lived. But yeah, I do remember all that. But, well, cool. So it's that classic. So if people are listening, so if you have somebody in your area that's like, I'm going to go our clinic .gummit, pay attention to them, because they're the ones that are having, honestly, at the end of the day, when it comes to marketing, a lot of it's just having the desire to get it done. Sometimes it's not about the magic.

Chris Brandt (05:46)
Mm -hmm. Yep.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (06:09)
It's just about getting it done.

Chris Brandt (06:11)
Yeah, just literally just sitting there figuring out a plan and doing it.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (06:14)
Yeah, I mean, we tell people all the time we're more about executing stuff than just like becoming the magicians or the are we get the annoying I say it's annoying, but we get the challenging phrase where the gurus I don't like being called the gurus because that assumes that you have to some magic potion that fixes makes marketing easy and it's just not it. It's consistency over its longevity. Like it's not something you throw out there for a minute and hope it works. Like you got to stick with it for a while.

Yeah. So, all right. So, tell me about the chat. Okay. Were there any challenges transitioning from that to just director of marketing where you're not necessarily seeing patients all the time and now your patient is the actual practice and taking care of it? How did that transition? What were some of the challenges there?

Chris Brandt (07:03)
Yeah. So, starting out in this role, I really felt like I didn't know anything, although I probably, I mean more than I thought I did, but really I knew anything. had some friends recommend some books who do work in marketing. So I had started reading. and I was probably about six months into it. just trying to figure out, you know, what we were going to do with the websites and how we were, you know, what is, what do ad campaigns look like and.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (07:07)
Okay. Yeah.

Chris Brandt (07:31)
At that time we didn't really have a salesperson either so I was going to doctors offices and doing events and Trying to do the marketing all at the same time

Patient Care Marketing Pros (07:41)
yeah. You were fulfillment and the productivity. You were a little bit of everything.

Chris Brandt (07:47)
Yeah, it became is like what's more important like building the marketing or the relationships and there's like it's figuring out, you know where you need to live for that. And I think we quickly found out we're going to need. A bigger team so that that was a big part of success here.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (07:59)
Yeah.

So I'm curious, building relationships and so forth, were you doing some of the, were you also not only marketing to get new patients or hopefully referrals and things like that, were you doing any marketing to get new therapists in? Was that part of your mix as well or were you just on the patient side?

Chris Brandt (08:19)
So at that point, not really. We had done a little bit. We go into, you know, as much as maybe career fairs or something like that, that I would go to. But recruiting, what's really nice in the PT world is there's a lot of PTs wanting jobs. And so it's a flooded market on that side and there's not a ton of jobs that people want. So that's easier for us to do is recruit new PTs. But...

Patient Care Marketing Pros (08:21)
Okay.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Chris Brandt (08:47)
No, most of our job is getting doctors to understand why we're different, why you want to refer to us, what the perfect client is for us. And that's majority of that sales relationship building that you want to do.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (09:02)
So tell me a little bit more about the referral thing because we've been, so like for us, like when we go do marketing for medical clinics, we do a lot of urgent cares, but like we're aiming the patient, right? We're aiming at the patient. You know, we don't work as much in the referral world, but we have urgent cares that do a lot of ocmed. Like they want to do ocmed, and with ocmed, like you have to build those relationships and look for those opportunities.

What's been some key things on the referral side or some unique challenges that people don't necessarily think about?

Chris Brandt (09:35)
You know, I think in a lot of instances we found...

We always went after the doctor, I think is where we always started out with when, you know, and I referred to team earlier and helping me, most doctors and most practices, especially in the outpatient orthopedic world, have a team. And so making sure you're targeting their scheduler, their nurse practitioner. A lot of times those people have more contact with the patient than the doctor does. So, and so making sure you're building those relationships as well.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (09:44)
Yeah. Yeah.

That makes sense. Okay.

Chris Brandt (10:12)
so that they know what you offer and they know how you can affect a patient's life is almost just as important as the doctor knowing who you are. So that's been a change for us as well.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (10:24)
So, and that's interesting too. So like, because you naturally think the doctor would be your primary go after, but the schedule makes, because we talk a lot about like the front desk advantage and how important is that front desk person is because there's so much interaction with the patient. And so this makes total sense here. So I'm curious on your mix, unlike patients coming in the door, how many are referral based? Like you made that relationship with that doctor's office versus I found you online slash I know you're

I live near one of your clinics.

Chris Brandt (10:56)
Yeah. So I would say that kind of organic growth from people finding us online has really grown in probably the past two to three years, but still we still have a strong reliance on doctor referrals. So I'd say we're probably in that 65 % doctor referral and the rest either self -referral, referral from another patient or found us online.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (11:07)
Nice.

Okay.

So I'm curious, so, and we can say you're the reason why you have so many referrals, right? Like they're coming in. There you go. But ultimately you're part of that mix. And so that's important to note. So, all right. So I can kind of paint the picture here. I have to ask though, do you miss just treating patients?

Chris Brandt (11:29)
My team has helped a lot, but yes.

Thank you.

There's some days where I wish I wasn't doing marketing and I was just treating patients. And there's some days where I wish I was just doing marketing and not treating patients. I still treat. I still help. I like to mentor our new PTs too. I've been here so long that I like to keep that interaction going and I still see people when that needs to happen. So I try to keep a mix to keep myself.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (11:47)
Hahaha!

Man, I can feel that sometimes.

Yeah.

Chris Brandt (12:12)
still as much a part of the day -to -day of the clinic as I can because I think that's very important in my role that I still understand what's going on in the clinic and with patients.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (12:24)
Yeah, and I'll say too, I think there's a neat parallel between marketing and physical therapy where physical, it's all about the long term, right? Where you can't, I can, for instance, full transparency here, I'm currently in physical therapy. Sorry, I'm not at EW, I do apologize. I did aim for location and there's one three minutes from my house, so I went that route. It is, especially when you're like, it's 6 .58, I need to get to PT at 7 .00.

Chris Brandt (12:43)
I'm

That's important.

Sorry.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (12:54)
That's happened this morning. but so the, where I was going with that is, you know, I've been having some, lower back issues. Like I have a L four L five bulge that's pushed against my nerves, blah, blah, blah. so, you know, I go to spine surgeon, spine surgeons, like, I really don't want to operate on you. I want you to do PT and some shots and stuff and kind of see if we can get that corrected before we consider surgery. So I did the pain stuff and they gave me shots and like, I didn't, I even told the pain. I was like, that didn't.

do anything. And that was like a quick, like literally like a four minute procedure. I was kind of amazed, honestly. And, but you know, they, but I kept on the PT and I didn't realize how much progress I made in PT until they started doing my checks every couple of weeks. And they're like, you know, you went and you may understand this more than me. So when they had me lean my lean back to check how far I can lean backwards type of thing. The first day at PT, I hit a three.

Chris Brandt (13:29)
Mm -hmm.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (13:53)
And then last week hit a 25. So yeah, and I was after like 10 sessions or so. So that being said, it took progress. I didn't even notice it, right? Because I just didn't think about it. And then, there's some real progress here. And I seriously think marketing's in that same boat, where getting that quick injection of stuff, it doesn't last long slash it may not work, but that long term.

Chris Brandt (13:55)
There you go. Range of motion greatly improved. That's good.

Mm -hmm.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (14:20)
on working on things over time, improving that marketing muscle, essentially, really does make a difference. We tell people all the time, you really can't judge marketing in 30 days. Like, it takes some time. Like, you do get that occasional hit. Our favorite thing that if you need a quick hit, it also fizzles out really fast. It's like a reactivation campaign where you fire off a text to your existing customers or patients and say, hey, we have an offer coming up.

Chris Brandt (14:42)
Mm -hmm.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (14:48)
blah, blah, blah, like that act that works. But then it five days later is fizzled, right? Like it just went in and hopped out. But anyway, I just I was thinking about the parallels there for sure.

Chris Brandt (14:53)
Try it. Mm -hmm.

Well, it's funny you say that. So we kind of have done this campaign of probably the last three years, especially with our new hires and that them understanding, yes, I'm the director of marketing and we have our little team that does marketing things, but really our PTs and our front desk are our marketing team and our sales team because they're the ones interacting with the patients and much cheaper to keep the patients who are in the doors already.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (15:19)
Yeah.

Chris Brandt (15:27)
from a marketing standpoint than it is to go get new clients. So making sure they understand that they're part of the marketing team and everything you do treatment -wise is marketing to keep that patient coming back, keep them wanting to refer people to us is just as important as me doing any sort of email campaign or anything like that.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (15:29)
Absolutely.

Well, and so like we like to call those people advocates, right? Like you want them, you want your patients to be advocates of your brand. And, and what that means is like one, they love you because you did all the right things. You're doing, you know, you're meeting expectations of the patient and they love the experience and they want to keep using you as long as they can. And because of that, they now become that referral source of like, Hey, I went to UW and it was an amazing process. You really should check them out for your PT. Yeah.

that type of thing. And it works because you're right. It's a whole lot cheaper to keep a patient than to find the next one. Like so much cheaper and predictable. I it's so like I'd rather hang on to a patient for 30 sessions, you know, 30 different sessions based on insurance versus grabbing them for eight sessions and then they fizzle away because they don't believe in it or they're not seeing what they want or they weren't educated correctly on what the expectations were. We see that all the time, right? Like,

Chris Brandt (16:23)
Yes.

Mm -hmm.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (16:47)
trying to meet those expectations because typically if you're upset with me or I'm upset with you because we missed each other's expectation. And so going back, you know, like that eight week is a whole lot more expensive to replace than the one that does the full 30 weeks or whatever sessions are. So, but cool. So now we paint in the landscape here. We understand like where your roles are in everything. But I'm curious, because part of the reason why we're talking,

Chris Brandt (17:04)
Mm -hmm.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (17:16)
You had reached out to us two months ago, maybe, and you had reporting questions. And it's funny because like, well, we haven't worked with EW in a couple of years, but yeah, I'll talk to Chris. I don't know much about Chris, but we'll talk. So we talked about reporting and GA4 and all the things. So I'm curious from your standpoint, what are your KPIs? Like, what are the things that your people are expecting out of you? Like, what numbers matter to you? And like, what kind of progress are you putting on yourself that's important?

Chris Brandt (17:46)
You know, probably our biggest indicators. And since I've started here, we've now hired a salesperson and we're about to hire a second salesperson. So she's really taking over those key doc referrals we talked about earlier. And so for me and my team, I've hired a videographer and content manager. And so our, everything we do is about really an online presence, organic traffic, and trying to grow people's knowledge about.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (17:58)
Yeah, yeah.

Nice.

Chris Brandt (18:15)
you know, what they can do for themselves and how they can be best empowered to take care of their own health. And so from my standpoint, our number one performance indicator is organic traffic turning into actual customers. The conversion is probably our biggest one. And I love to see, you know, someone that came in on a blog article and then...

Patient Care Marketing Pros (18:32)
Okay, so the conversion. Yeah.

Chris Brandt (18:43)
you know, converted into a patient right now because we're just brick and mortar. That's probably our biggest indicator of good things that we're doing. And we hope to grow that in the future to maybe more of an online presence where we can see a bigger conversions from people that don't live in our area. You know, and then just trying to figure out what website traffic is important to us and how we grow.

now so that when we do do something like that later, you know, we already have that base of traffic.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (19:16)
So I'm curious on the website traffic, what metric matters to you when it comes to website traffic?

Chris Brandt (19:22)
that's a great, that's a, it changes. It's supposed to change based on who's asking and usually it changes. Okay. Yeah.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (19:25)
Yeah. Okay. So let's pause right there. It changes on base. Who's asking, right? Where you have an expectation of a metric that matters, but the person above you or who's, who's ever asking has a different expectation on a metric. Cause I know this, I know working with a lot of owners and so forth. Some people just care about the traffic number. How many visits did we have to the website? Like that's like, are we growing that number? And like,

Sure, that's a good number, but it doesn't mean anything because you could have 5 ,000 people a month on your site. You could have 50 ,000 and none of them turn into customers. Who cares? Because we had this conversation internally just the other day about Google Analytics or GA4 and how at the end of the day, Google Analytics is a marketing platform.

Like it's not there just you can pull metrics all day from it. But the idea is if you're pulling metrics because you're trying to see measure if your marketing is actually effective or not. Are you seeing things change? Because we know we get that question time and time. Can you shook? Did you guys the changes that you made in SEO? Can you show that you had an increase in organic traffic to your website? Like, sure, GA for Google Analytics is perfect to show that. And we can show that it's pretty easy. But then today, do we have an increase in leads or patient volume? Like.

Chris Brandt (20:41)
Mm -hmm.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (20:45)
did what we did actually make an impact or not.

Chris Brandt (20:48)
Yeah. So what, and that was kind of why I reached out to you to see how y 'all presented it because I knew that I want to start seeing more of a journey of this blog article is performing really well and seeing that journey to conversion. Well, if nobody's converting off that article, is it really doing well? You know, and so we have, we have one blog article that's about a stiff upper back.

that, and we have a video on YouTube, both are, have exploded, probably our hottest PT topics, as far as like organic traffic goes. And I think we have one conversion off that article. So is that article really doing well for us right now versus one that was about falling that I was kind of looking at before I got on here, that we've had five conversions off of, and it doesn't happen much traffic. So making sure that I can represent that to.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (21:26)
Yeah.

Chris Brandt (21:43)
whoever's asking about organic traffic.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (21:46)
Well, because then it becomes a split test, right? Because marketing is all about split testing and fine tuning. And so now you take the article that produced five conversions with low traffic, and you say, OK, I need to make a new version of this article or expand on the conversion rate on that page. How can I convert these people a little bit better? Should I slip in an offer on that page? I don't know what that would be in the BT world, but the mindset of maybe your first session free, don't know if that's even allowed, but just the mindset of it.

and see if I can help my conversions. Because one of things that we do internally here, when we run like Google Ads for our client, we run into landing pages. Because then we can see exactly what's working and what's not. And then we can do very specific conversions. So anything that comes off of it, we know there's no other way they could have gotten to it except through an ad. And so we clean up our data a little bit. Organics is a little more challenging, because they may hop in, hop out, hop in, hop out, and then call you.

a week later off your Google business profile. Cause they remembered you cause and you can't fully connect every dot. I wish you could like and get really close, but like back in the day they had the Google beacons and that was about as close as you could get. And then, but those were all baited and are gone now to my knowledge. And so like that was a cool idea that didn't last. That's the way Google goes. But anyway, but no. So I think, so if I think talking to our audience here,

Chris Brandt (22:47)
Mm -hmm. Yeah.

Yep.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (23:15)
Numbers matter, but conversion numbers matter probably more than anything at the end of the day. Does that sound like a safe assumption?

Chris Brandt (23:20)
That's right.

That's safe. I mean, you want growth in both, but if you're trying to demonstrate progress to a goal or you're trying to demonstrate like a positive change in your business, conversions is definitely what you have to be tracking.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (23:40)
No, yeah. All right. So what so changing gears a little bit here. So I have two two questions left. I want to cover real quick. One is now you've been I mean, you've been doing the marketing director role for five years now, which is awesome. Good time. And is there something that you wish you knew then that you know now?

Chris Brandt (23:57)
Yeah.

man, that's a great question. I think.

I think my biggest thing is probably that there's no right or wrong way to do it. I think when I started, I mentioned earlier about just, I was reading books and I was reading this, I was reading like a marketing, I think it Marketing Made Simple. And I was like, I have to do everything that this says. This is the right way to go.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (24:27)
Yeah.

Chris Brandt (24:34)
And then my, our CEO was handed the day I asked me to answer book and, at a Vistage meeting and he got me on that. And then we met with the guys from Impact who y 'all have talked to before and ended up going that route. And then once I read that book and got with them, I was like, well, we have to do everything that they say and that they're doing. And, and so I think what I've learned is you need to take pieces of every single thing that you read and every single thing that you learn.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (25:00)
Yes.

Chris Brandt (25:03)
and reach out to people that you know, even your ex marketing firms, and try and build, you know, everything that you have, build it from the ground up so that you can, you know, have ownership of it and you're not just copying somebody else's stuff.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (25:19)
True, you know, there's a lot of truth in that because I don't think there's a true marketing Bible out there that's like, this is 100 % truth, you know, mindset where, cause I mean, it's kind of like, it's kind of like all the business books out there where you give it a couple of years, we'll start contradicting each other and like going back on what they said. The only one, the only book, there's, there's a few foundational ones that kind of influence most business books like the,

Chris Brandt (25:25)
Mm -mm.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (25:45)
how to win friends and influence people. Like that's kind of like a core book that most people should read in the business world because it does make a difference. But at the end of the day, like if you hook into this brand new concept and that brand new concept is terrible later, now you're stuck. But when you kind of, and also sometimes a concept just doesn't fit the company. Like there are times where like that makes a whole lot of sense for a pull company, which is what.

you know, that entire book's based on his experience with a pull company, his pull company. And granted, that stuff is fantastic and it works and it works for lots of people, but it's not always like, I think you would admit it too. This isn't a one size fits all situation. Like there needs to be adjustments for sure. But, but it does roll me into the other part of the question. What are you seeing right now in your world on the trends and tech that's out there? I know AI is now become like the standard. I'm like, like AI sounds mean.

Chris Brandt (26:13)
Thank you.

Now.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (26:39)
AI is almost like the snake oil right now of the industry where it sounds super awesome, but then it's kind of a mess when you start to really try to use it.

Chris Brandt (26:46)
Yeah, that is the truth. And I see it on both sides, both people in healthcare trying to treat themselves using AI. So it's like almost worse than WebMD was for a little while there.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (26:53)
my -

That's fascinating. That's actually kind of sad in a way too.

Chris Brandt (26:58)
Yeah, you start asking chat GPT why my back hurts and you can go down some rabbit holes that you don't want to. Yeah. that's how it always ends. Yeah. Yeah. And then, you know, I guess from the other side, we've seen, we saw probably the biggest, we had really good traction with our blog articles, with everything that was going on there. And then.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (27:05)
And then and then end with cancer, right? That's ends with cancer.

Chris Brandt (27:28)
I look back and kind of look at our traffic and it took a giant dip right at the same time. And I just, I could not figure out what was going on. And I was digging into everything that I thought I could. And we, we lost, you know, a lot of conversion rate off that as well. And.

I finally figured out it was like the same time that Google turned on their AI features. So then they started answering the questions that we were answering with our blog articles and we were on page one or two and we were still on page one or two, but no one was scrolling down past what Google was answering the question with.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (27:54)
Yeah.

That's super true, because I've seen that a lot now. But I think you did, you told me that chat GPT now reference your articles for certain things. I think you told me that.

Chris Brandt (28:15)
Yeah. Perplexity is one of the AI tools that actually gives references and we, they've actually sent people to our website now. So just so recommendation off that is stick with it. Like we didn't stop producing the same amount of content we normally did. We didn't freak out as new that the water was going to level at some point. You're not going to able to keep up with a personal experience and personal touch. And eventually people will start to realize.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (28:20)
Yeah.

And that's cool.

Chris Brandt (28:43)
There is a difference between what AI says and what a person says. And we've seen it rebalance and then we're going forward bigger than we were before that dip. So.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (28:48)
yeah.

I tell you, Google is fantastic at trying to scare people, but then their algorithm changes. They don't even know what's going on half the time, because we've been doing a lot. Like the most recent change in their algorithm that they announced is that we can now filter out AI content. Like, no, you can't, because there's only so many ways you can write a sentence, be it a person wrote or AI. It's even to the point, I had a friend recently that was a

Chris Brandt (29:16)
Thank you.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (29:26)
They were in a class of some sort, and they got accused that their paper was AI written. And they're like, I wrote it myself. But they threw it into a tester and it said AI written. But English language has a limitation to it. And so when you're producing millions of articles a day, it's going to all sound the same at some point. I mean, just get rid of the magic words, and that's half the battle, it seems, with AI. But no, it's true.

Chris Brandt (29:40)
That's right.

That's true.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (29:54)
That's the long haul, right? Like don't freak out when everything seems like it's falling apart. Just keep pushing. And it is fascinating that you say like, you know, people are hanging out on the, on Google and reading the suggestions and not clicking. And that's true. Google's ultimate game is that they want you to stay on google .com or they, and that's, and that's a couple of things interacting with the search results. So like interacting with the AI, cause now you have to hit a button that shows it and stuff like that. So, you know, they're tracking that.

And then interacting with the Google business profile, because they want to capture, Hey, look at me phone calls we generated for you. Don't you want to spend money with us? Because then ultimately money is running Google ads, LSAs and all the things. And that's where they make their money. So if you can write, you know, a quality ad, have quality content on the pages and all the things like they win because those people clicked. And so they made their money.

Chris Brandt (30:44)
That's right.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (30:46)
So like they don't want people to go off to a website and stay there to get their answer. They want their answer to reside on Google. And I think people just simply forget that sometimes. Yeah, Google's a business. It's a wonderful tool. Our entire business is based on it basically. So it's like, we can't hate on it, but we can be annoyed by it. Yeah. Well, all right, man. So we're past our time. So I just...

Chris Brandt (30:54)
Mm -hmm.

Yeah, that's right.

That's also true. Yep.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (31:16)
Thank you again for coming on. Is there any last tidbits you want to give our audience or how they can connect with you? Because I bet there's a couple of people listening that are in your position right now where they were treating patients, now their patient is the boss or the owner or whatever in the marketing world. What's the best way they can reach out to you?

Chris Brandt (31:31)
Mm -hmm.

Yeah, so our website, ewmotiontherapy .com, we have a fantastic learning center. We're publishing three to five articles a day in there and we're continuing to grow that. And, you know, if anyone has any questions about how they can do that, we want to encourage people to do that because our business model is around teaching and empowering people. It's not about just gaining as many customers as we can.

That's a nice side perk to trying to teach. More than more than can reach out to me at chris at ewmotiontherapy .com.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (32:11)
Awesome. Well, thank you, Chris, for coming onto the podcast today. Audience, thank you all for taking a listen and we'll see you guys on the next one. See ya.

Chris Brandt (32:21)
Thank you, Michael.