Ep. 139: Relationship-Driven Digital Marketing for Healthcare Clinics

Participant (00:00)
All righty. Well, we have a special episode today. I'm Michael. I have Grace on the today's episode with Walk -Ins Welcome. Nick is somewhere in Mexico right now. Having the time of his life at a conference. He is at a conference in Cancun. He and Heather are having a good time. I've been looking at the pictures. I think they're enjoying themselves really well. They have some really cool speakers on, lot of AI stuff showing up. Met some really cool people. And then Nick's been breaking our number one rule of he's been interjecting himself in Slack.

So there's been some jokes about that to the point where Kim's like, you you might want to disconnect them a little bit. I think because we was like, what do do? And Nick, just you don't have to. We're fine. We don't need to go do what you need to do. Exactly. But so because of that, Nick's not here. So I don't have an episode with Nick, but I have an episode with team member Grace. Grace, welcome on to the show. Thanks for having me, Michael. Absolutely. So we usually kick off with an interview of some sort. I will ask you, what's something that most people don't know about

So I look like I live a very boring plane life, but I am an adrenaline junkie and I love to seek a thrilling experience. So one fun fact about me is I have jumped off the highest bridge in the world. That sounds scary. It was kind of scary, but really exciting and something I'll never forget. Will you do it again? absolutely. The second time you do it, actually at that place, you get to go backwards. So I would definitely do that. I wonder if it's scarier to go backwards

Yeah, I don't know because you can't really see. You're not seeing like the detriment of the dump. So it might be a little less scary, but I would try it totally. So like I've done skydiving. Yeah, I have to hang gliding. that's cool. I would like to do that. Hang gliding is like skydiving, but just more chill. Yeah, I've heard you kind of just kind of like base jumping. kind of just have you based

No, I would do that totally though. I would do base jumping too. scares the crap out of me. I've been watching videos online about base jumping and it does look kind of scary, but I feel like that is one as soon as you jump, you're really happy that you did it. Yeah. And then you watch the people who are like the flying squirrels and then they think they're superhuman and they slam into something. So like a side of a mountain or something crazy, then they'll be coming to your urgent care. Yeah. Breaking bones. All right. Well, cool. So talking now.

You mentioned Urgent Care. So obviously we have a lot of Urgent Care that listen and you are our CSM, which is a customer success manager. And honestly, you're kind of the face of the company to our clients. So kind of tell us a little bit about what that role entails. Yeah. So number one, the most important thing is win -win partnerships. So I really want to build a relationship with our clients and have them trust me and just build a relationship so we can have a good partnership together because

Two people is always better than, well, edit that out. No, we don't edit, we keep going. no. Exactly. But no, you're right. So it's about building that relationship because at the end of the day, we brought in lots of clients that had pretty good results, but they never talked to me. Yeah. So that is actually one of the main things I hear so much with new clients who are onboarding and maybe even just talking to them in a discovery call when they were learning about us is,

I haven't talked to my old other marketing company in a couple months. I have no idea what they're doing. I have no idea what action items have been taken and they're MIA pretty much. So the best thing I can do for that is to have a constant stream of communication with my clients. Even if they're not talking to me, I reach out to them with reporting, with videos, with emails, just checking in. I'm still going to make that effort so they know that I care and I'm around. whenever they do want to come talk.

They know that I'm here for them. exactly. It makes a huge difference for us too on the production side. I say as production, like I help in production world, but you know, you do a fantastic job of that filtering, right? Right. Where I don't, our production team doesn't need to spend an hour on a phone call with somebody about, I say nothing, but you know, typically you come, you'll come back from a meeting that's like an hour long.

and then you have three bullets. Totally, yeah. Which is cool. We all want that because one, the client was heard. Right. Two, you were able to distill down what they were trying to tell you and then we were able to put some action to it, which is nice. That's the best. My favorite thing about my job is going through a productive meeting with a client. Yeah, yeah. Like sitting through, being able to even strategize, answer even questions that are outside of digital marketing.

Is really fun, know just building that relationship so they can ask me, you know, I am having trouble in this area What do you think about that? I know this isn't Google Ads, but and I love to provide that information So going beyond even what we do here really helps foster that relationship and with keeping that retention to I You had a phone call with a client yesterday.

yesterday. Yesterday, I was over some like billing questions and so forth. I think it turned like a like your best friend conversation. it is. We started talking about billing and probably what we need to do moving forward for the first probably five minutes and then the next 35 minutes, we were laughing, talking about this, that the other relating to each other. And at the end, we kind of recap say, okay, when y 'all get back from here and there, we'll get a meeting together sounds great.

You know, the conversation was nice in a really great relationship building way, even though we discussed digital marketing for maybe 10 minutes of that conversation. Digital marketing is just a piece of the puzzle. Yeah, it's kind of a small piece once you think about it. In my world, it is at least. So all right. So one of the goals I wanted with this particular episode is that you get to see the client on the sense of, hey, client, I need these things or could you try this? All these different items.

on our episodes here, we usually hone into a couple of things here and there, but you're on the front line. So like you're asking these questions regularly, or you're getting these questions from clients or from us as production. And I want to know if, I mentioned earlier, if you had all the urgent care clients sitting in a room right now, and you could tell them, please do this, and this will make your life better, not just for us,

for your clinic. What are some of those things that you want to tell people? OK, so I actually had a conversation yesterday with a client who is an urgent care owner. They actually have three urgent cares in Colorado, and he has an insanely low cost per conversion of about $5, which is really great. And he asked me, what makes us have that low of a cost per conversion compared to other people, even your own clients? And I said, the best

Reasoning I can give you is that we are in a win -win partnership. He has provided anything that I've asked from him pretty quickly Even more stuff up front than I even asked for and that has made this account just do really well They response reviews they get reviews. They ask for reviews, which is huge. They send pictures. They send videos I if I need a SS for or whatever it is for verification. They send it over

So just having that vast communication back with me and providing the things that I ask for really makes a huge difference because we do see things on a different lens than our clients do sometimes just because we know the digital marketing world. We know it's going to be effective and everything in between. And sometimes to the client, it might seem, whatever. I don't really think that's going to make much of a difference. I only have three pictures. I don't have anybody, don't have the time to do that. You know? Yeah. The photo thing's real.

Yeah, photos really make a difference. You'd be surprised. we don't talk about professional photos. I mean, that's a plus. If you can spend a couple hundred dollars or a thousand dollars on getting a photographer to come out and do a nice set of photos like stage, whatever you got to do. Cool. But at the end of the day, a photo from your iPhone, because we all know everybody carries an iPhone or I'm the weird Android. Yeah, just the one. But they take good photos.

Anyway, take your phone out. Have, you know, make sure there's not any patients in the area where you're taking your photo unless you got some release forms and just take some photos. It doesn't have to be the best picture you've ever seen. And, you know, there are clients who have been with us for a while who still produce great leads. They rank well. They're doing great. But there are industries that are getting more saturated as time goes on. For example, weight loss.

And weight loss is something that a lot of people are targeting. Urgent cares are targeting, med spas, everyone in between. And there needs to be some updating. When you have a client that is with you for so long and there's people entering the industry at a very fast pace, there's things that need to be updated. So constant revisions, constant new things just need to happen. Content approvals and everything in between.

Things can get approved and things can get sent in. Things perform much better. And that's kind of that key piece to the win -win partnership. If we're putting in effort, you're putting in effort. Also answering the phone. Answering the phone is huge. To peel that back just a little bit, we have a lot of home, we have some home service clients that aren't, you know, aren't urgent cares. Cause urgent care is answering phone. You know, we're pretty good at it. Pretty good. We also recognize that most people schedule online.

But you get a lot of phone calls and y 'all do a pretty good job. But our home services clients, it's like a 50 -50. They'll either answer the call or the best ones are they missed the call and they're like, I don't want to call them back. It's like, come on. And then I feel like the most important piece though to that is the kind of care that you give your patients. Because at the end of the day, if you're not caring for your patients or they're having a bad experience,

There's not much more we can do past that point. And the guy I was talking about earlier that I was talking to yesterday, he gives exceptional service to his patients. He gets amazing reviews. The reviews are amazing. Because I see them come through. I know what you're talking about. And he had like three yesterday come through. they're like, there was one I was I didn't read all of it, but was basically there was a situation where the patient had come in in like an unsafe manner. Yeah. They create a safe place for her. Yes.

That was cool. Yeah, they go above and beyond. They're very personable and they have great branding. mean, that is also a part of it all. They have great branding. They're in a great location. So all of these small things add up to a really great way to give us great information and for us to do great work. Well, you're talking about providing things that we need so we can win and so they can win. We have a great

example at the very moment where we have two companies that are not in the same states, offering the same service and we are running the same style like Facebook ad, right? And so in the Facebook world, video is highly important. we told, so we told client A, like, hey, if you want us to run these, because it's an urgent care and they do all these other things and they decide to add on IV therapy and

We said, hey, if you want to do this, we have to have video. And she said, OK. Couple hours later. Great video. Yeah. Now, I'll give her credit. She looks great on video. Yeah, very photogenic. You can tell that she's done it like she's been on video before. And she just was smooth on the talk. It was nice. Very natural. But it was like we asked for it the same day or night. I think it was same day. Same day. She said, OK.

And she just does like a selfie style. Let me tell you about this and why we do it. we do it. I wasn't terrible. How long do you it was? It was about 24 seconds. 24 seconds. 24 seconds is happening like so quickly. Yeah, it goes by fast. And it wasn't superscripted when I watched it. Like it was just like, let me just. She's passionate about what she does. Yeah. So the passion came out. It looked really great. Yeah. And so we started running ads with those videos. Lo and behold, the video ads ran the best. Dude, it is outpacing the still images.

By far we're actually I emailed her yesterday and asked her for two more videos so we can get rid of the still images and just do video But think about it, right? So Hey client, can you give me another 30 second video which will take you probably 10 minutes to give me? Yeah, totally And by the way, you did that and oh you just made a couple extra thousand dollars Because you gave me a video. Yeah, just cuz give me it's not for us It's for your audience to engage and that is probably the

thing to say is, know, what I'm asking for these things is it's for us so we can do good work. at end of the day, this is all for you. Like we want good results for our clients and we want our clients to be happy and we want our clients money to be spent in a good way and worth it to them. So when I ask for these things and everything and it happens, those results tend to be more consistent and a little bit better.

So then on the other side, so the other client that's doing the same thing, different state, so I recognize that, but super populated state, so it's not a population issue. Hey, this client gave us a video like this, could your wife provide something? we recognize female, looks better. A little natural. right. Can you please provide a similar style video? Here's the actual video we need. OK, great. Yeah, I haven't heard anything. And it's kind of like your

There's dollars being missed out on. Totally. Yeah, that's a great way to look at it, too. Your money could be well spent a little bit better if we had the materials in place for it to be successful. Oh, yeah, absolutely. So all right. So we talked about give us win -win partnership stuff. What about expectations? Because one the things that you do a lot of, if somebody wants to talk to us about potentially become a client, nine times out of 10, they're going to talk to you. They'll talk to me.

and you're the filter, right? Let's put some expectations on this before we say, hey, let's have a sales meeting around it. So what's some, what about misconceptions and expectations that tend to come in this world? Okay. Yeah, there's a few. So misconceptions is that marketing is a magic bullet. Marketing does not work overnight. It's, if it did, everyone would do it, right? Like everyone would plug and play away on their own computers if that were the case.

It really does have to go through a learning process and we have to analyze the data and make sure that we're making the best decisions possible. So with that being said, marketing is great and you'll get, you'll make money, but you have to the effort and a little bit of time in. It is not a one to two week quick fix if you're in a really bad situation. Also misconceptions probably that, hmm.

That's probably the biggest misconceptions that it's really fast and works really great now one question I get a lot that I think other people struggle with a lot is Conversion tracking and making sure that they're seeing the results and getting the results. So let's talk about conversion tracking. Yeah, let's break that down. Conversion tracking and you correct me is Basically where an actions taken. Yeah, and the action for urgent cares tip in our world

phone call is made, a click to schedule now, click for directions. Those are our top three. Correct. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So like, so why do we say conversion tracking? The importance of it is good data in, good data out. So if we can feed Google or we can feed Facebook good data, where that click turned into that conversion, which turned into that patient, please do more of

And Google eats it up, loves it, they want that information. And a lot, and there's discovery calls. One thing I usually do is if they do have a Google Ads account already is say, can I take a look at it? I just want some viewer access on it. Let me take a look at it. And most of the time there's things just like that that are missed or need to be taken care of. Yeah, yeah. And the conversion side was funny because

It's not an obvious piece in Google ads, for example. Like it's inside the options in the settings where they don't want it to be the first thing you set up. They just make a suggestion. Yeah. At the end of the day, they just want your money. Google only wants your money. If you only hear one thing from me today, Google only wants your money. If they send you an email saying these are the suggestions that we give you, do the opposite or don't do it at all. Or if you get an email from a Google rep. my gosh.

This is the most important thing I can tell you. Do not respond to the Google rep. They're here to steal your money. It's not good. And this is the thing. They don't care if you set up conversion tracking because guess what? That feeds them more information and makes you perform better and makes your dollar stretched out more, which they don't want anyways. So when I was saying earlier, when I look at these accounts from viewer access, most of the time people have this crazy cost per conversion. And it's because it's not even set up.

Can you know what to feed Google and what Google likes? know, so that's the most important thing is when I tell people I'm like, look, we'll track everything. We'll make sure you actually know what your cost per conversion is. So you know what you're spending and what it's worth to you. And on top of that, I'll track everything for you. And that is a really great point for new clients maybe coming in. So they actually know what's going on in the marketing world. Yeah, exactly. And it's so funny because.

When we look at those accounts, when you have those discovery calls and they give us access, biggest red flag we always see on Google Ads account is auto apply turned on. If Google suggested, don't do it. Yeah. Generally speaking, Google suggestions like, hey, you can spend more your budget this way. Yeah. We see a lot of that. And then we see a lot of just, a conversion was set up. But what is it doing? doesn't. Yeah, it's not fiery. It's not connected to anything.

What's the actual action being taken? know? So, yeah. But expectations are a huge part of my job. And even with rankings, that's the thing, Google changes consistently. They have new algorithms drop all the time. They have changes. They add things, take away things. They're always changing. So that's a big part of our job, is staying on top of those changes. I will say, one of my more favorite, reverted...

Changes they made is that they got rid of the continuous scroll. That actually is very nice. I was losing my place. I'm like is this client on page one or page two at this point? Yeah, exactly Maybe a month ago, maybe they they dumped a continuous scroll they back to pages Which I find interesting because the whole point I continue to scroll was to get you to engage with the ad by accident Yeah, like when it went to page two their quotes and didn't work.

People probably just, I bet, I guess it's been two years of them doing that. At least. And so I bet they're, I bet their ad revenue just started dipping. Probably. And then they're like, well, I guess people figured out or just never made it that far. I was about to say, most people don't really make it that far. Like they give it a good maybe three scrolls max, but they're finding whoever really is at the top of that page where they can see with their eyes first. They don't, they can scroll a couple of times, but that's all people want to do.

So yeah, so managing expectations too about the changes that always happen because we could be really going after something in our strategy and in our process and then Google get rid of it and then we have to completely readjust. We've had some major changes in our SEO process the past three to four months. this year has been a very... It's been a flip of the script. Totally. There's some core things that just we know is important, but then after that, like we've had to make some

And a lot of it's guessing, like we're not going to lie. it's experimenting a little bit. Experimenting and then we'll see if it works and we'll start doing it for everybody else. And then probably six months from now, I'll be like, well, OK, that's not as effective as it once was. Now what? Exactly. those things happen. It's digital marketing. Technology changes so rapidly. So making sure that my clients know that

looking at things, we're have a careful eye on things and that we're working on working consistently on a weekly monthly basis on things. They feel safe with that and I can you know, make them feel better about all the unexpected things that happen in the industry. Nice. All right. So one of the other questions I want to ask around is I guess it'd be expectations, but it's more maybe on your side of so you have your urgent cares that you work with in your eyes.

an account that's doing extremely well. What does it look like? The account that's doing extremely well has a consistent lead flow coming in on a monthly basis. You know, they're sitting at a good, good number, a couple hundred. Yeah. Cause I know like most of our clients, we want to push them to that.

40 a day, Mark. Yeah, I mean, and that's a thing, depending on we have clients who've been with us for four years, we'll be able to grow them to 400, sometimes 700 leads a month. So it just completely depends. But a good, healthy account to me is someone who is giving me feedback, who I'm in some kind of communication with. That's not to be constant, but you know. some of those. Yeah, I do, which is fine. But, you know, once a month, we're happy.

This looks good. Hey, we just offered this service. What do you think about running a campaign for this? That is great. Feedback of some kind. I need to know that you're doing good and that you're liking the work that we're doing for you. I think that's piece number one. Piece number two is, I guess that would be piece number two. Results and communication. And then piece number three would kind of be piggybacking off what we kind of talked about the beginning of this episode, which is providing

content and the things that I need. But when I go into an account and I see that they're in the map pack, I see that their ads are performing well, they're visible, they're getting shown to a lot of people, the conversion rate's high, the lead count's high. Those are all good signs of a good healthy account. Cost per conversion low. If the cost per conversion is $20 or below, I'm usually really happy with that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, awesome. Well, and so thinking

one of the last questions I have. And then you can, course, add it more if something comes up. thinking about for the ones that aren't clients, but they're urgent carers that are doing their own thing, what are some key things that they should be doing themselves that you see that clients don't typically do? Or when you see them do it, it makes a difference. Also, they're saying, hey, I'm new, I don't have a budget yet, what can I do to make

is work. Because we have some clients that start up world and we they say, Hey, we're not ready yet. We'll do these things to be ready. Like we have a client right now that's kind of stuck with a construction issue. Yeah. And like, and we, you know, here's the things you need to go and start checking as soon as you can, please check off these things. So here's some things that you can help people

So I feel like if you're not having a huge marketing budget, you're kind of a startup kind of getting into the space. You kind of have to go back to a little bit of the grassroots strategy just a little bit, especially getting out in the community. For example, I was talking to a client yesterday, and there's a huge convention center down the road from all three of his locations. And they have

business meetings there, they hold all kinds of events there with all kinds of people from out of town and everyone in between. And I said, you know, you're new, one of the clinics is a very new location. I said, you need to go up there, ask to sponsor their trash cans. That's our favorite. That's our favorite. Ask to sponsor their trash cans. Also,

Bring some brochures, bring some Are you feeling trashy? Come to us. Yeah, literally. No, I said, do you feel like trash? Come to so and so. And I was like, just go get a promotions person, get them to make you huge stickers so you can put on the top of the trash cans where they have to open the lid or it's around the center of the hole or something. like that. Yeah, just get it. Because that's the thing. If they go to that huge convention center, that convention center is going to ask them for thousands of dollars for a sponsorship possibly.

pay for the trash cans. Can I just sponsor the trash cans? Exactly. And they're gonna like the what? They're like, sure, I guess so, you know. What do you want to do with them? What do you want to do with those things? So I said, go ask if you can sponsor their trash cans. Also, go up to that front desk and say, hey, I'm an urgent care that just opened right down the road. We're local. We're in the community. Here are some about us pamphlets. If we can leave these on your coffee table.

or up at the front desk or something, just getting that logo and that branding in people's heads subconsciously is so important because everyone knows marketing is a little bit psychological, especially when it comes to promotions and branding and things like that. So making sure your logo's out there, people know who you are. Also, I said, you know, get those little road signs, you know, the little realtor looking signs that you put on or.

It's like my boy's a senior this year and you put it in your front yard. Like those signs. My boy's a senior. Number 35 for the Wildcats. Friday night lights reference, I guess. Actually, they're the Panthers. Never mind. They're not the Wildcats. getting those signs and saying, you know, urgent care this way from a big, busy place like that. Directionals and everything. So kind of getting creative, especially making sure

for a, from a visibility standpoint, if you're a new urgent care and people can't find you, you need to put some, a tent in the parking lot or some directional signs or some huge banner signing, something to make you visible because most of the time, if people have any of our time finding you, they're moving on to the next place. yeah. And that's a good too, cause, we have episodes that we talk about some grassroots stuff, but then the

as you're saying it like it takes work. Yes. It's not a build it and they will come. There's some of that with urgent care space. I'll give them credit. you're in like the jackpot of a location. If you're doubling down on a location like you're spending a ton of money on location, it's a great spot because you're beside a shopping center. Yeah. I will say it's majority of our urgent care are in shopping centers. A lot of them are. Yeah. It seems to work for them. One of our really popular urgent cares. He's beside a Wal -Mart.

Marketplace. that's a smart place to do it. But even besides like the grassroots marketing that I just mentioned, just being like a member in the community and going out and making those relationships kind of like what I do for my job, making the relationships. Like that is so important because people want to trust their providers.

Because at end of the day, people just go to urgent care. If I find an urgent care that I like, I'm going to keep going there and keep going there and keep going there. Then I probably start calling to my primary doctor on accident. some point, that's kind of the goal, right? So getting out in the community and making those relationships are super important. Yeah. Well, you're talking about people coming back to one of our client, one of our most successful urgent cares. they have I was looking yesterday, I was just still amazed.

over 1 ,905 out of five star reviews. That's great. 1 ,905 out of five. And I was like, I know they got some ones in there. So I did sort by lowest. 1 ,907, right? Seven ones. That is insane. I literally counted. was like, there's only seven. There were like five twos, four threes. It just went down and boom, right back to fours and fives. was just incredible to look at. one of the things, so one of things we've always mentioned and

profile reviews is that it will pick up on what people say and start targeting that as like a searchable keyword inside the reviews and one of them was future. And so it had like over 20 plus reviews that said future. And I was like, I'm assuming what this means. I'll go look at it. And it said wonderful visit. I will come back in the future. And they're just the goal. And piggybacking off of the Google Vista profile.

One of the most important things in the digital world you can do to kind of get ahead if you're new is get reviews. Yeah. Get reviews like especially if you have a brand new website, you have no domain authority, you're brand new in a location, you're starting from ground zero. If you can get reviews from every patient that comes to that, every patient that gets good service to come through that door, then you'll you'll do fabulous. Like that is probably the

most important piece of a Google business profile besides you having your phone number and a website and all the basic things on there and responding to those reviews. So not only do you need to ask for reviews, you have to respond to them, even the bad ones. the bad ones. And it can be as, I'm sorry to hear this. Please contact our office. And we'll love to work this out with Love to talk to you about it. Yeah. Which is generic enough, but at least you're saying because from

public person that hasn't seen you yet, and they come, at least they're being proactive. Yeah, it's not like, you know, bye, we don't care. Like, you left us a bad review, not having a bad attitude You weren't listening, patient. Yeah, like, you weren't listening, or you didn't do this, or whatever. So, because in the past, I have seen urgent cares respond to bad reviews very sassy, and you cannot do that. Be nice. Be nice to your patients. be nice.

Be nice to your patients. There you will leave it at that. All right, guys. Thank you all again for coming on. Grace, thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. I think I think we had a good time. Yeah, I loved it. I'd definitely do it again. Audience, please let us know what your thoughts are. Hello, patient care, Mark Perez dot com. Don't forget to subscribe. I pushed that last time. I'll push it again. I should have done it in the episode, but we're looking at our stats. Only half of you subscribe. So we get a number

listeners only half their actual subscribers need to subscribe please subscribe because we come out every Wednesday we want to make sure you get that notification yeah that's the difference I feel like a youtuber now but that's okay practice yeah it is practice all right well thank you guys and we'll catch you on the next one and don't forget to join our Facebook group yes well awesome thank you see y 'all bye everyone