Ep. 222: The 90-Day Clinic Rescue: Marketing Tactics That Work

Patient Care Marketing Pros (00:09)
Hey, what's going on walk-ins welcome family want to welcome you to this episode. It's a special edition episode. Recently, Michael and I had the opportunity to attend the Xperity urgent care connect conference where we were invited both to be speakers on all about how to turn a clinic around in 90 days. So this content comes directly from Xperity and we wanted to share it with you. Take notes. It's a good one. We have great actionable items that you can put right into place into your clinics today.

We hope you enjoy it. Hey, welcome to the 90 day clinic rescue clinic turnaround clinic startup. If you're in a startup mode, my name's Nick. This is Michael. We'll introduce ourselves formally in a minute, but I have to start by saying thank you because I know you're about to go into lunch and for you to show up and listen, you're either really bored or we're actually going to be able to help you. And I'm excited about that as well. So who here are clinic owners or operators? Okay. Because some of those vendors and all that, right? So in startup mode,

Okay, so we are talking to people who need to turn around, get patients through the door. We're gonna spend a fair amount of time doing that today. A pilot and a vegan and a cross fitter walk into a bar. And you know that because they told you within 30 seconds to walk it in. So I'll go ahead and break that ice right now. I am a pilot. I love to go fly my planes. Michael and I fly a lot of places to events. We go and fly and visit our clients sometimes.

But what's fun about making parallels between being a pilot and being a marketer or running a company, when you're on the runway and you're doing what's called fuel management, you'll learn that as you start that plane up and get ready to take off, from the time you take off, push everything in, the throttle in, to make it to the altitude that you're going to, you will burn as much fuel in that 10 minute climbing to your altitude as a full

hour of flight at cruise. You're going to expend a lot more effort getting up to altitude than you will maintaining an altitude. So how does that fit into a clinic? Well, if you're in a turnaround or a startup mode, you're going to have to expend a lot more dollars to get to where you need to be so that you can get to a cruise altitude in your company so that you can just start setting your throttle.

setting your mixture, making sure that you can just keep the steady flow of patients coming in. And we're going to talk a little bit about that today and how to get that plane off the ground, if you will. If you're in, say I'm in. I got a few ins, man. Let's go, Michael. Next slide. Yes. So we're going to quick introductions though. So basic care marketing pros is who we are. I've been a VP of operations for a while. Been in the care space, what, five years? Something like that. Five years. I've been the webbed up before that for 11 plus years. And now on the

newest things that we're doing with urgent care is we're also doing front desk training as well. Front desk matters. I can encourage that all day long. That's where I live on that side. are you. Love it. Nick, been in the game, the marketing game for close to 20 years now. We have been patient care marketing pros for the past going on six years. We'll celebrate that on April 1st. Digital marketing for eight. ⁓ We started in the urgent care niche. So at this point, we only do marketing for urgent care clinics. That's where we live. That's what we love.

And it's simply because during the pandemic, while everybody else was canceling services with us, our urgent cares invested in us. And we're like, you know what? We're gonna match their energy. If they're gonna go all in on us when we need them most, then we'll go all in and help them most. And that's how we found our way into the niche. We're not doctors, nothing like that. So ⁓ anyway, we're both out of Birmingham, Alabama. I'm married, he's married. We've got a bunch of kids between the two of us. All right, next. Here we go. ⁓

Here's the reality. I think we all feel this ⁓ clinics. Well, really not clinics, but but patient volume. We're starting to see a decline in patient volume and I'm not just talking about patient volume from the standpoint of we're coming off of covid. I'm just talking about people are watching their dollars. They're paying close attention to those. ⁓ It's not a copay. What is the the you have to meet this deductible? Thank you. I'm glad participation participation from everybody have to meet those deductibles, right? ⁓

They're paying close attention to it and they're trying to decide, hey, can I just go and get some Nyquil or something like that, or do I really need to go and see a professional or a medical? ⁓ It's harder to get into a primary care, so urgent care is very important, but when you're watching all of your dollars, you see a decline in patients. So we have to be creative around that. ⁓ When those patient volume start dropping, I think we can all relate. Somewhere between the tune of 22 to 25 patients per day, you need that to break even.

So if you're not even seeing that on a regular basis, your clinic is bleeding out, right? And we see the common issues over and over again for clinics that are trying to turn their clinics around is they have poor visibility, right? They're just not showing up. Everybody spends a lot of time, money, and effort to pick the right location for your clinic, yes? Right? Because location, location, location. What they don't understand is your placement on Google is your digital.

storefront, it is your digital location and making sure that you're spending as much time, money and effort to get that right is as much of an importance as getting your clinic in the right location physically. Support visibility, missed market fundamentals. Anybody have challenges with their front desk? Yeah, okay. I hear the giggles out there. If you're on the front desk, go ahead. think some sad but real facts is that there's an exception that a 70 % missed call rate is okay.

It's not okay. We can tell you right now when you're at what the clinics do the best or the ones that well trade in front desk that convert every call into that appointment. Who in here believes that you're a walking you're you take appointments but you're in staff believes you're a walk-in only clinic. Couple of nods. Yeah. We literally will hear calls where no just come on in. We don't take appointments and like you have a scheduler right in front of you. But that's a big thing though. It's like we will talk about mostly the markets up there but just that reminder.

Doesn't how good your marketing is. Doesn't matter how much effort and money you put into it, your front desk can throw it away unintentionally, but it does happen. So just that hard reminder. If you're like, I think my front desk is fine. Just cold call your front desk today. Pretend to be a patient that doesn't want to do an appointment and see what happens. that would be so much fun to do on the spot. We'll spare you all that. I was pulling numbers from one of our clinics who was telling us that their patient count was off.

And they had received a little over 1,500 phone calls that we had tracked just through our services, not their direct. And when I went, I was like, well, the call volume's there. And due to HIPAA, we try not to dig in too much. All the passwords, we don't want to see that. But I'm like, well, you only answered 231 of those 1,500 calls. So I mean, if you just answered your phone, your patient volume would be there.

And then I went listen to the calls and it was catastrophic. But that's another story for another time. And then weak local engagement. I was having a great conversation with somebody earlier. I don't know if you're in the room, but we were talking about grassroots marketing and we'll spend a minute. Yeah, there you are. We'll spend a Aaron. Yes. Talking to Aaron. We were talking about some grassroots capabilities there. We'll spend a minute on that. Go ahead. Let's move on. ⁓ So here's what we're going to cover today. Michael. Yes. I mean, the idea here, we understand that clinics are struggling.

We have a 90-day turnaround, so we're breaking into 30-day sprints, and we'll actually give you some strategies to utilize you can use for yourself. Our goal is that we understand we're an agency, we love to work with you, but also you can do some DIY stuff yourself. We're trying to give you some guidelines, because there's a lot of misconceptions out there of what you should be spending and all the things. I have a slide just on spending. So you know, am I spending too much? Am I spending too little? Well, we can help identify that for you, because we have clinics from New York to Hawaii, so we see all the trends from everywhere in between.

Then we have a couple of case studies to show you what that looks like. And then like at the end of the day, you'll have a general idea of how to build a growth engine, where your next steps are, especially if you're just stalled right now. we're not doing anything new. What can we do new? Well, hopefully you'll get something little new out of today. Love it. You already get started. Let's get going, man. Next slide. All right. So here's the thing. The good news is that that slow patient count, that lower volume, it's a fixable thing. Right. You guys, y'all aren't broken. Your systems are broke.

And I think that's fair. I don't think that's like a pointed beat you up type comment. I think if you're anything like most businesses, you just don't know what you don't know and you haven't copied what you need to copy yet. So let's give you some framework here. Slide. ⁓ So we're going to introduce this this 90 day game plan. Here's what I want to do is I want to give you a big picture overview, not a granular detail that you can't go put into action right this very minute. What we will tell you is if you go to our website, we have completely free no sales. We're not looking to do any of that.

We just want to resource you with the things that we're talking about today. If you need that, hop by our booth and we'll get those resources over to you. All right. And that is the playbook on here's how to do it yourself. Cool. All right. We want to stabilize, accelerate and sustain that growth that we built. Next. So right, going right into the cost of things right here. So this budget area that you're seeing right now, so that we're telling you is mostly towards spending on ads and so forth. That's a monthly budget, by the way.

So to kind get perspective, that first stabilized visibility and conversion, like you mentioned earlier about the idea of getting the plane to take off, you spend a lot upfront to get that ball moving, especially if you're a brand new clinic or you just added a new clinic, because that's the thing too, I think people forget when you add a new location, you're kind of hitting the reset button, because you're not going to get that 30 patients or 40 patients per day that were used in your other clinic, you may get two.

or five. And that is going to frustrate the fire out of you. Yeah, because you're like, it's a process. I've done this before. Why am I having to redo the whole thing? Well, it's because nobody knows you anymore. Like it's a whole new market. So anyway, so that first day that you're spending a lot of money there, then you start seeing how can I get involved with the community as well and some retargeting pieces. And then from our standpoint, SEO is your long term bit. So that kind of goes on from there. So making sure SEO is working because SEO is one of those things that we all know, like showing up on the map three pack, showing up when people do a search for urgent care.

near me showing up on the Google Maps, but those matter. But if you ignore it and let it go away, you will slowly fall down the list because your competitors will step in. Just to kind of give you guys a warning, it's like, I don't need SEO. I'm ranking number one for everything. Give it 90 to 120 days later when you quit making the effort and you will no longer be ranking like you thought you were. Just we see it all the time. It's a real thing, especially with a competitor stepping in because you do have new competitors every single day.

So it's that hard reminder you can't give up and just assume it will be fine. Just like anything in business. Once you quit focusing on it, it's silly unravels. So, all right. I like to tell people for those, we'll throw acronyms around SEO is search engine optimization. And at the most fundamental way to say that it is simply the art of being found on Google. That's the best way to say it. Okay. Let's go ahead and hit the next slide. All right. So phase one is going to be that first ramp up period days one through 30. If you're in startup mode,

like you haven't opened your clinic up, this is where you're going to back out 30 days. OK, but for the turnaround, this is where you're to start measuring, drawing that hard line in the sand for that first 30 days. And the one thing that we want to do is you're probably already running your Google Ads. OK, and I think anybody who is running Google Ads also understands that they've raised their prices. It sucks. I don't know what to do about that, but it is what it is. It used to be the benchmark.

for our agency anyway, would be a $10 cost per conversion. Okay, what's a great conversion? A conversion is somebody called my clinic, somebody hit the online schedule or somebody looked for directions to the clinic. That does not necessarily foot traffic in the door. But what we have found over time that when done correctly on Google, like specifically with Google Ads, is 61%. No, I'm not making that statistic up. 61 % of those conversions turn into people coming in through your door. Okay. Now you should be aiming for a 10 to $15 cost per conversion.

That's a number worth writing down if you're looking for it because what you want to do is you want to go back to look at your ads account when you have some time and say, are we hitting these measurements? You should also be seeing a 20 to 25%. Go ahead. look at the end. If you did a chat GPT search right now, what is the injury standard for conversion costs for urgent care? It will say 30 to $45, which is wrong. It's just not that. That is if you're just not trying hard enough. Google's really

Here's a fun fact, if you go into your account and you see performance max turned on, you need to go fix that. Because it will make your conversion costs look cool, but it's actually wasting your dollars very quickly. We know that. anyway, so at $10 to $15, that's our benchmark. Like I said, we work with urgent care across the country. That's where our goals are. Doesn't always happen that way. Sometimes we get into the $20 because it's a reality, especially if you switch over to focusing on immigration, physicals, or something outside traditional urgent care. But just that note, like,

Google or a chat GBT will give you a much higher number because people don't publish these numbers and like we're one of the only ones in the country that works exclusively with urgent care so we can see the differences. So just kind of keep that in the back of your mind if you're looking at your own stuff. Fun fact and not in the slides, if you need a cash infusion, start running immigration physical ads if you're able to do this by the way. Very lucrative. Optimize your Google business profile. I talk about this kind of ad nauseam. Your Google business profile is

as much, if not more important than even your website. Google rewards profiles that give you so much information you never have to leave Google. They don't want you to leave their platform. So if you give everything that you need on that Google business profile, fill out everything that you can fill out. Put the online scheduler if using I know Xperity, which we love, digs right into with clockwise right on your Google business profile so people can schedule right there.

⁓ The longer you can keep them on Google platform, which isn't ultimately your goal for branding purposes, but the longer you keep it on there, the more you're going to rank, the higher you're going to rank on that map three pack. Okay. So spend time effort on your business profile. ⁓ We say use upfront scripts. Why do I bring that up? We just had a little nice conversation about our front desk, not answering their phones, but when they do, are they being butt holes? Right. Hello. Or yeah, you can just walk in. Can you just hold a minute?

How many of have heard this? I'm not making this up. This is me real work. I see some nods over here, right? So if you made no change at all and you did these two things, one, you answered your phone. Oh my goodness. And two, you smiled when you answered your phone. And three, you actually asked them for an appointment. If you just fixed those three things on your front desk, you don't even have to spend another dollar. All of this money just saves. Fix your front desk. So we talk about that.

And then update your local listings. I just recommend you use an app like BirdEye, ⁓ Yext. Has anybody heard of Podium? ⁓ Jenny, does Experity have listing management in there yet? Seemed like a weird thing for Experity, but I thought I'd ask. I doubt they do, but I was like, if you have it, use Experity. ⁓ But that is a simple way to manage your Google Business Profile and then all of the directory listings that come along with it. Here's the way I like to say that.

Google is a five-year-old autistic child, which at one time I had a five-year-old autistic child. Now he's 15. But I was at a family reunion one time, and I'll never forget him saying, my wife would call me honey, my dad would call me son, my sister would call me bubby, that's what she calls me, and my other kids would call me dad, and Heather would call me Nick. And I'll never forget his beautiful little eyes looking at me and going, who are you? If you don't get your directory listings,

on all across the internet, correct with the name, address and phone number, it will look at you like a five-year autistic child and go, who are you? And they'll move on to the next listing. Who knows who they are. And you guys are the worst about changing your hours on the fly. And so when you have a listing that you are, just in case y'all didn't know, we see it all the time. when you change your listings on Google Business Profile, because hey, we're changing hours for next two weeks because the provider can't show up or whatever, or entering summer hours, we get it.

If you don't go update your other listings, you're creating slow confusion across the board. It just happens. Like you can't get around it. It's just the reality. And what that does, like you said, makes it where it's more difficult to verify things. And so Google is like, is this what I need to know? And you probably may have experienced changing something simple in your profile and it shut down or suspended the profile. Well, that's because it had nothing else to verify again. So it kind of red flagged it real quick for you. So just keep that in the back of your mind. Listings are one of those things that have been around forever in the digital world, but they matter.

quite a bit in your industry because you are changing things up pretty regularly. Right, right. All right, let's hit the next slide. We'll keep it going. Are we there? Phase two, we want to get you to 18 patients per day. That's giving you hope at this point, right? So typically you're under 15 patients per day if you're trying to turn around your clinic. At 18, you're starting to see a little bit of momentum and some hope. ⁓ I may break even in the next month or so, right? And that's where we really want to get you is to breathe a little bit, right? Not have to worry about where.

payroll is going to come from or whether or not that payer is actually going to pay on time, know those kinds of things. ⁓ So what we're going to do is we're going to launch retargeting ads. I want to be very careful when I say launching retargeting ads. I'm not telling you to go put a Facebook pixel on your website. That is a HIPAA violation. If you do it incorrectly, do not do that. What I am saying though is use Google Analytics 4, GA4, and run retargeting ads inside of your Google Ads account in a display ad.

So you can use visual images to follow them around the internet like a crazy ex-girlfriend. And they will just follow you everywhere. Anybody done that? You clicked on an ad one time, and now it follows you all over the internet? You can do that properly with GA4. So we are talking about retargeting ads. ⁓ Partner with local influencers. There's a guy, Noah. Hannah, do you remember Noah's last name? He's missing an arm and a leg. He's a war veteran. I know his name is Galloway. Thank you. All right, I did that for myself.

So Noah Galloway in Birmingham is a local influencer and you can pay him to come in and brand for your business if he believes in what you do. But there's a lot of those little influencers in your community that you can sync up with and they can run ads for you on their platforms, TikTok, Facebook, y'all know what I'm talking about. Run a review push. At our table, if you come by, we'll show you how to set it up. We have these things, you've probably seen Zappi cards.

but lower the barrier of entry to get reviews. Experities clockwise has an amazing function that I highly recommend if you're using an Experity that'll just ask for reviews for you. Turn it on. You need it. Reviews make you more visible in Google. Now, let me give you the other side of that. Respond to those reviews. Don't leave them out. Some of you are afraid to violate HIPAA and not respond to your reviews. All you have to say is, let me ask you a question. Who has core values in your clinic?

Okay, good. Just a few. The way I would do this is just simply say, thanks for coming in. It is our core value to do X, Y, and Z. You're not acknowledging that they had an ailment. You're not acknowledging the other thing. Thank you for the review. It's our core value to serve you this way, or it's our mission to serve you this way, right? So you can be super generic, but Google likes the fact that you responded. It increases your relevance, and it's a signal to Google that you're a relevant business, all right? And then...

I respond to all of them. I respond to all of them. what a great, that's a great point. When you're responding, you're not responding to that person, you're responding to your audience. Okay, so even the negative ones, the way, does anybody, is anybody like me? And you go to the thousand reviews and you filter for the one stars. Anybody? I mean, that's all I read anyway, right? But one, because it's fun. Love to do this on Amazon. One, it's fun. But two, I like to see how the owner responded to it.

Right? Wendy's is my favorite. They will roast you. Right? So anybody follow Wendy's, they're the best on the planet. Go follow them on X or just look at any response you review. They are the best. However, don't do what Wendy's does. ⁓ Go read Wendy's, but don't do it. ⁓ No, you want to read, how did this company respond to a negative response? Did they get defensive? Did they seek to understand? Did they pay attention to the need? How you serve that customer when they're being negative visually

will represent your brand. So, hey, it looks like we maybe didn't get it right here. Why don't you call up to the clinic and see if we can't get this right for you? Hey, we can understand this would be super frustrating. I don't see it in our system. However, we want to make sure that we serve you well. You name it. You can respond to a negative review in a positive way. And just recall, it's not for that customer or that patient. It's for the person that's going to be reading it. cool. Slide. This is traffic ads.

Okay, because Jenny is one of my good friends. Will you ask that question very quickly in that microphone so she has it recorded and then I will answer. No, you're good. Yeah, I was curious if people people put PHI their own PHI out there oftentimes in the comments and you feel a little handcuffed to respond. you know you touch on the PHI. It's a HIPAA violation. I was wondering if you had any idea about 100 % or if you're allowed to even address what they said specifically. No, you are not allowed to address it. No.

So you are not allowed to acknowledge their PHI.

but they did put it out there on their own and therefore you are allowed to respond to it and say, I, we can't address this here or Hey, let's take this. Give us a call so that he's called a Like don't acknowledge. Yeah. I see that you broke your leg in our system. Yeah. Don't do that. Right. Like don't do that. Yeah. I see that this is your address attached to your name. Dead. You're gone. Right. That's $50,000 right there. So no, you can address the review, but you have to be super generic. I actually recommend this prompt.

anybody using any kind of AI like GPT, Claw, Gemini, anything like that, is simply, help me write a HIPAA compliant response to this and copy and paste the review and it will do that for you. Did we lose it again? ⁓ just got hot. The projector got hot. Okay, well, we're going to operate off of this now. Hold on. I can't read now. Okay, Michael, you're up, buddy. up. Timing of that. All right, so what you can't see is that phase three, so we're looking on the community side of things. So let me just ask you, who has active involvement with their community?

Okay cool, give me an example. What do you do in the community? Sports. High schools. Yes, high schools. else? Scholarships.

Anibal, did you have one? Yes, actually we partnered with the school and we gave folders for the homework for the kids. And it has the school logo and our logo in the information inside those folders. Nice. So 2400 folders for you to the school.

There you go. Perfect. Yeah, so here's the fun fact in the world of digital. We cannot legally run ads on top of schools. Can't do it. It's not legal, but you know what you can do. Just like Anna was said, you go into the school as a partner in the community and I may be involved like giving out stuff. One of the best examples we ever heard was sponsoring water bottles for the school and then putting your label on the inside for a free for sports physical that they could bring into the clinic. Works beautifully. It makes total sense, but those things that we told him talk about. So you have schools, you have churches, you have gyms, you have all.

these different things that they already have your audience and so you're trying to get involved with it and it died.

But anyway, so you want to get involved with that. Like the gym, example, free clinic day type thing. You're part, you're partnering with the gym and you're actually giving out free health screenings of some sort, something like that, right? Where they already have hundreds of people that you may have never seen that come through and they're like, that's pretty cool. And then you make sure you make sure to have something when they leave and so forth and some type of incentive to come back to you. So just remembering that. Make sure you're like we said, sponsoring things, sponsoring local events, showing up on the bill, unlike the baseball fence type stuff that you're involved in.

capacity. think orthopedic places do a really good job of that from a standpoint. for sports. Yeah. And then when you're also when you're building your content, so we talked about doing the DIY stuff, SEO content on your website. Market around local things that are actually happening because they want to see that it not only helps with some of the rankings but it helps with like the legitimacy of your business that you do care about your business and your community and you're not just there just to take patients and just ignore rest of the community. So those little things do help and they're great blog articles you can write.

You can also have guest posting. Another thing that people don't do is that you do have a chamber in your area. Go attend some events. Who in here goes to chamber events? Couple, right? I'm actually encouraged to see that. Yeah. So chamber gets you connected to the right places. So don't just think chambers just for business. Like it's there to make those relationships and you can find additional ways to sponsor and go beyond just the chamber. That's what I did personally, building a business where the chamber was my starting point and it got me into other areas. So I really encourage that. Just showing

up for a luncheon once a month is not participating in the chamber. Sorry. know some of you, I know some out there do that. It's more than that. And then finally, so you have patients coming in. What about some video testimonials, especially like local leaders, local influencers where you know they have a big name in the area. Maybe you helped them out with something that they weren't expecting. And so getting some type of video testimonial, going through that and kind of showcasing that, putting on your website, putting on social, running retargeting with that type of stuff. All that does matter over time because you are

in the heart of your community and you need to make sure you're showcasing your community as often as you can. Love it. My addition to that part of it is if you're going to sponsor, which we highly recommend, sponsoring local charities, those kind of things, the ask on your part is to say, I need a link from your website back to mine.

Yes, we call it a backlink. But that is really good SEO fuel on a local SEO level, right? There's national SEO you're just trying to find organically, but those backlinks from those community type situations, those have real gas on a fire right there. Absolutely. All right. So next slide. It's still blank, but it is case. Yeah, the projector did die. So case stage talking about some things that actually happened. So you can't see this. Can't see the logos. But I can talk about it.

They're out in Santa Fe, New Mexico. They've been with us now for about five years. They came to us where...

They were dying. We didn't know it. We didn't know. They didn't tell us. And they had exhausted things and they were running ads. They were doing all the things, but it wasn't working. So case study on that is that we switched them out. Like we brought them all over. They need a new website. By the way, if your website is over five years old, you probably need a new website. If you get onto it with your phone and you're like, this is a little clunky, you probably need a new website. Those things do matter because people go there. So anyway, we were able to shift them where they're actually.

We kind of laugh like they have some of the best conversion costs out there, five to seven dollar conversion costs all day long and they are maxed out. What's interesting though is he he still takes primary care as well. So I'm curious who in here does primary care in addition to urgent care? Couple. I'm fascinated. I want to hear from the crowd because my next one is about primary care, but we're seeing a trend upward for primary care. Are you seeing that as well?

Little bit of show. See a head nod here. Yeah. So our other one of our other case studies, Superior Family Care. So they came to us on the primary care side and they were 28 patients a month.

don't know how you survive off of that. A month. A month. so within 45 days with what we were showing you guys, we got them up to 119 patients very quickly in primary care patients. So it all does work. You just got to focus on it a little bit. And then we had restructured everything on the site. We had done complete restructuring of those ads. But it doesn't matter. So what we're trying to tell you is don't ignore Google. Don't think I've said it forget it it's going to be fine. No, are definitely ways you can make it work. ⁓ And then one of the other ones, the other one we had, this is one of my favorite ones.

This is an AFC out of Texas and he came to us. He was 13 patients per day or 11 patients per day. He was the owner to answer the phone.

He also and we got onto him. He answered the phone said, okay, I will send you a link to the schedule. Let me hang up. And he texts them. Well, that's never going to work. They're not going to get that. And he was answering why he's driving down somewhere. It's like, you can't do that. So and but he was running at he was running Google ads. He was running $10,000 a month in Google ads and he was still only getting 11 patients per day. And because he was bought into the belief that 40 to $50 cost per conversions was OK. And it just was not. Anyway, so we took work with him. He's been with us now a year and a half.

Last summer, he was the number one AFC in Texas. He had hit 83 patients per day. That was his big day for him and he was super happy with that. He's about to open his second location in about two weeks or next week. That's right. So all we're saying here though, like this does matter. I need you to go look at what you're doing right now and evaluate because if you haven't looked at any of your stuff in a few months, it's time to look at it again. That's right.

But anyway, so those were the case studies. So coming back to the bonus tips on the. Well, I can't read that from here, so I'll just talk to you for a second. So that phase one is all about simply gaining traction and getting patients through the door.

The second phase of that is to stabilize through your community. Okay, we're going to start getting found ⁓ in Google Maps. We're going to start getting found on the internet and we're going to start using and leveraging social medias, things like that that are going to start building the brand. So ⁓ build a funnel of patients coming in, start working on your brand and then build the community aspect of outreach and become a local community partner. ⁓ The bonus tips that I have to come over here and read is ⁓ one, don't cancel your ads, optimize your ads.

Right? ⁓ Thing number two, your front desk. We talked about that. Your front desk, okay. Your front desk is in answering phones and pushing paper. They are your sales team. I think there should be a shift in this. I'm going to make a very quick note about this. We interviewed one of our longtime clients and she hires people that have master's degrees. Yes. And she pays them how much an hour or a year? They make only six figures. Yeah. An absurd amount of money.

She is booked out three and four weeks. can't handle the volume that she gets because she has a front desk that actually gives her crap.

They're paid well to give a crap. So get on camera. I love this because most doctors and most ⁓ nurse practitioners, most teams in the medical industry are afraid of the camera. What I would tell you is that camera is going to build a connection between you and the people who use you. I like to tell people there's a one hour a week method. Spend one hour a week and just cut some selfie videos. Hey, we saw some patients this week. It looks like RSV has picked up. ⁓

We saw some changes in the healthcare industry that may affect your ⁓ insurance. Call us if you have any questions about it. It could be a stupid short video, but if you put that content consistently over time, you're going to grow your audience and they're going to connect with you and it is going to bring you new patients. One thing I was going to add on the don't cancel your ads piece. So if you're in a spot where, we got to the patient volume, we want, maybe we need to turn things down or whatever. Never fully pause your ads. Here's why. Your platforms,

they rely on constantly being fed. And this is just a known fact that if you pause your Google Ads, for example, if they're paused for more than 10 days, you just basically cancel your account because it will not be able to replicate what it was doing as to go through a re-learn period, which may take up to a month. And so that 10 day pause turns into two or three months of recovery. And you have to acknowledge that. So what do we recommend is that turn down your ad spend, don't turn it off. And on the flip side, if like, hey, we're doing pretty well.

increase ad spend, don't shock the system and triple your ad spend in one day. We even have our team train like, you want to go from 5,000, 10,000 a month. We're going to increment that up over a couple of days or a couple of weeks because when you shock the system, it will go back into a re-learning and then you have the same problem again. So just that nice reminder, if you are running ads, be careful and don't just be up and down. Like any marketing, consistency over time creates the result. And when you're sitting there just chopping at it, trying to make something happen instantly, it just doesn't work.

hard reminder on that. Very good. Slide. Yes. Turning off the ad piece of it. Yeah, Mr. Jim, get talking to that mic. ⁓

We're always running the ads, but then we'll throw seasonal things in there. Those we do turn off. That's okay. That's okay. Separate campaigns. We still have the platform. Yeah, those are ad groups and different things like that. And that's another thing too, if you're doing seasonal items or you're adding a service, don't take away from your other budget that's already there. Add to your budget for those items. We get it all the time, like, well, we're going to do weight loss now. Can you take away our $5,000 budget, take $2,000 of it toward weight loss? No, we will not. Give us $2,000 extra in

loss because you don't want to burn up your account by switching stuff over. Also as a side note, if you're running weight loss ads, there's a good chance your account will get flagged at some point unless you have a legit script involved. That's for the medical weight loss. Does that answer you? Yep. Separate campaigns, you can add or remove campaigns. I can't think of any good reason you would pause your urgent care specific campaign. Those are for ancillary campaigns. Good. All right. What happens if you do nothing?

Well, y'all tell me what happens if you do nothing about this.

You're probably 90 days away from closing your doors, right? So we genuinely want you to be successful. We all are in this to make sure that our patients are getting amazing care, right? And if you don't exist, it's going to be a blotch on your community. So what you do matters. We want you to get it right because you're making an impact on your community. And if you don't make a change, if you're under that 15 patient per day mark, and you don't make a change, you will eventually bleed out. All right?

I thought you had a question. All right. You don't need a marketer. I love this. ⁓ You don't need a marketer.

⁓ You, I think, need to learn this skill. And so what we have done is put together tons of resources on the playbook that we run for our clients so that you can go poke and prod and play with it. Right? And it is a free resource, a totally free resource. We just wanted to be a gift to the Experity Conference. We don't want anything in return for it, but it is our playbook. This is what we put into action for our clients. So ⁓ we want you to take action and we want to resource you to do it.

Take us out, Yeah, so take home points. So we're trying to say, here's the things to recognize up front. Here's your three phase plan over the 90 days. We talked about results and the reality of it, all of it is, you know, this is doable. If your clinic is suffering, there is a way out. You can't just give up and say, I can't do this. This isn't going to work. You can do it. For the clinics that we've seen actually close, like did not make it, did not work out, whatever. They have some external environmental issues that we could not control. Marketing could not fix it.

anything marketing made it worse because it created more confusion overall. It's a side note too, if you're opening a new clinic and you haven't picked a name yet, do yourself a favor and this is just a hot tip, do yourself a favor and name it the City Urgent Care if it doesn't exist already because here's why. I wish I had a slide for this photo.

⁓ It creates what we call a position zero opportunity in Google. So when you say we are here in Nashville, if there wasn't a Nashville Urgent Care, that would be great, but we know that those probably are out there. But you can say Nashville Urgent Care, have an LLC tied to it. And Google, when people search for Urgent Care near me, Urgent Care in Nashville, you'll show up with very little effort to start showing up. So it's a little hack, but it does work. But you do have to back it up with actual documentation. What does Google ask for in a business profile? They'll look for a utility bill that says

name. So if you don't have that, they will shut down that profile real quick. Well, in closing everything out here for us, I want to take just a second and thank Xperity for having us. I know they're not here, but ⁓ I want to thank them for having us. One specific reason I want to bring that up is clockwise. I know very little about Xperity, the EMR, but I can tell you as a marketer, their online scheduler is key to success, in my opinion, because they allow you to do one thing that no other scheduler allows us to do, track conversions.

I can't tell you how important that is as a marketer, especially if you're doing your own marketing. Who wants to know where their dollars turned into more dollars for them? Right? Well, you have to have that last click attribution. And what that is simply following the person from the click to the patient. And that is the only online scheduler that I'm aware of at this point that offers that. So if you're not using clockwise as your online scheduler, I do want to do a shameless plug and say, please go look at that as a marketer. It's foundational to the success of a key. Yeah, they're the only ones that openly.

let other companies do that. So there are some that do proprietary but they're actually open to it. Love it. That's good. Hey we want to open up the floor to questions. Jenny are you coming up? Okay cool. So you spoke about making Google the foundation in many ways.

Are your thoughts on the trend in beginning searches for urgent care and many other things in chat, GPT, vis-a-vis Google? I love that you brought that up. I didn't know if it was going to come up today. So we are adding one simple snippet. ⁓ Well, first of all, answer the original question is it hasn't taken root yet for immediate need businesses, right? So urgent care all day long, it's an immediate need business, but you need to plan for these systems. Here's the thing. Nobody really knows where AI is going yet.

Okay, so you can spend a lot of time, money, and effort trying to rank in these large language models, what we'll call an LLM, and you should be focused on that, but we have not seen customers, patients, come from those as a source yet.

Now, if you want to be a resource for the community, that is where you can shine with large language models. We follow what's called the they ask you answer method. It's Marcus Sheridan. He's got the book. And they ask you answers to simply find out what your community is asking and answer those questions on your website. And you're going to rank in a large language model. And it takes lots of content to get there. Correct. Lots and lots of content. Any other questions?

you

I have kind of a two-part question. First, you said not to confuse the system with our hour changes and things like that. What would your recommendation be when we do have those changes that affect our patients? And then B, if you were going to make a long-term change, like you were going to change your hours earlier, things like that, how would you present that to the public early enough that they're aware but not causing confusion before you make that change? OK, I can't answer this, but I don't want to talk the whole time. So when I was making that reference earlier,

If you're making your changes regularly and you're in charge of your business profile, don't have an agency working with, utilizing like a Yext or something that can do it for you is huge. As a company, we utilize software to help do that because it's going to connect to 30 or 40 plus directories. So with one press of a button, it can push it to all of those really quickly. That's how you should approach it because chances are you may have made a Yext account five years ago and you haven't touched it since then, but this can connect it for you and just push that information each time. So that's how I would recommend if you do plan on changing hours.

regularly on your business profile. You just connect it all to one software and push it out. Second phase to your question, communication times. Our team reaches out to our clients for Easter hours, Christmas hours, holiday, you know, Fourth of July. We reach out to them one week before so that we can push that information out to their patient load and make those requested edits. I think if you do it about five to seven days before that event is going to happen, you can do it through your social media as one. That's important.

And then also have it scheduled. You can pre-schedule all of your social media posts, pre-schedule a post for that day to go out that morning. We're closed, right? And that way it gets out. The other way is you have an email list. Hopefully they've checked a box saying that you can email them. Like I said, five to seven days before, hey, we're going to give you the hours for 4th of July. We just wanted you to have it in advance. Come in before, come in during, come in after. And if you can get there, can text them that too. That works even better. Yeah. So I know Experity will do that. But don't be afraid to repeat yourself because people

don't listen the first time or the second time so don't be afraid to put out there a couple of times. Friendly reminders. What if you were changing your generalized hours? Okay so you're talking about permanent.

The good news, bad news, right? The good news is that you're an immediate need business. The bad news is nobody cares until they need you. So you literally, five to seven days, hey, we're making a permanent time change. It's not like people were waiting three months from now to schedule a time with you, right? So five to seven days is still fine. Thank you. You're welcome.

the statement. Wait, get your question first. I work with them. Hannah's like, I got a question. do y'all do? Hi, thank you. What about the flip side of that? ⁓ I'm expanding our hours from 8 7 to 8 to 8 across all the clinics in Tucson. I want to make sure that the market is aware of these extended hours. And really, how can we capitalize on that? So how far in advance should I start marketing that to the community? Where should I start marketing it?

They're, well, one, it's a promotion. You're promoting something that's going to be a benefit to them, right? So I think when you're promoting a ⁓ solution, we're expanding on our hours. You can go a little deeper into that. ⁓ However, it doesn't change what I was talking to you about in that they still don't need you till they need you, right? So they may not even care. Now, from a pure marketing side, is this something that people have been asking for?

Yes and no. Great. but but still this is hey, you've asked for it. We've answered. mean, right. One thing that we recommend if you have a billboard that's above your location, we listen new hours eight to eight and you're pointing down like that works. So we have some clinics that don't look like urgent cares and it's a struggle, but we see in their business profile. There's a billboard right there. Please buy. That's not our money. Buy that for you know, for that part of the marketing because they'll see is like, OK, I know where that is now. But just saying we listened or we understand new hours.

Yeah, but same thing social media email blast text message if you're using a plot platform that'll let you do that Again, you don't want to acknowledge HIPAA is at the forefront of everything right if you're gonna put in any communication out even if it's isolated Where you're using a first name tag just make sure there's no hey, we saw you come in three weeks ago I just want to let you know about our new hours. No, we don't do this Yeah, when we listen and we don't judge is that what they say? Yeah, and respect the time it is 1 45 but Hannah you got

Mine's super quick. And I have never gotten a straight answer from marketing, but I never spoke with a marketing team just for urgent care. We do billboards, television, radio, mailers, sponsor school events, lots of SEO. ⁓ Every channel we invest in, and I can't get someone to tell me, stop doing billboards, that's a waste of time, or put all the money to SEO. Are any of those things, or probably other ones we do that I forgot to mention, just totally a waste of money, and we should really hyper

focus on two of those or three of those? What is your daily patient count? ⁓ In a site?

It varies a lot. Okay. So any site that is under 23 or your break even point, I I use 23 as a general rule. Anything that is under break even, you don't need billboard, television, radio, print, anything. You need to run more Google ads. You need to increase your Google ads to match the demand. Once you have hit that break even point to profitability, then you can start looking at branding. What you named off there, billboard, television, radio, print, all of that is branding. That is not an immediate call to action. They don't need you yet. So that's

So you're spending your extra marketing dollars. I would say if I have a 100 % marketing budget, 20 to 25 % of that budget is for branding purposes. The rest of it is patient generation until I am at, we like to say at 40 patients per day, you're a healthy clinic. You're making money. You're starting to make decisions on whether or not I want to add another provider, another service or another location. So once you start thinking at that, now you're looking at branding, but you're at multiple locations. What is your thriving location?

per day count. Beautiful. That's where you start investing in. I'm running Facebook ads. running because Facebook, believe it or not, y'all, Facebook is branding, right? They were there to look at pictures of their grandkids and they got sort of an urgent care ad. Right. So let's just be honest about that. ⁓ So that is branding. That's mind share. So now you're working on how you want people to think about your clinic, not call to action to totally different things. And also to don't work on your branding if your experience is bad. If you haven't cleaned up your experience where

Roll the thumb, if you're a Google review, average is below four, you have an experience problem and you need to fix it. And you know there are certain clinics that have it some that don't. But the branding side will just make it look worse. What do we say around the office?

We've been open for 70 years. Google doesn't have ground. Did you say 70 years? see 160 people. Sky five right there for that. That's amazing. I'm going to piggyback off of this. So A, the Google reviews are hard because a lot of those before we were there. the current Google reviews are amazing. But we had some pretty awful ones that have now been in existence for 15 years that are pulling us down. So that's number one. Number two, would be the question because we also focus our marketing on a very large area. Do I need to be doing that?

at this point from seeing 160, 180, sometimes 200 patients a day? Or do I push that to the summer when my college campus disappears and now only seeing 110 patients a day? Well, you know what? Michael's got good insights on this, please. Well, so the Google question part, if as long as it's above a 4.0 average, you're fine. You don't worry about a 5.0 average. Do you know what your average is? 3.7. 3.7. We can work on that.

Right, you still need to work on it, right? ⁓

The one of the biggest problems that Urgent Care has is that they have thousands of reviews, right? Where it's a numbers game. But you have to bury the bad ones. And so you have to focus on that. That's where the experience matters, right? So like we're talking about front desk and all the things. Your providers may be great, but the rest of it may not be. And that's where that lower review is coming in from. So you need to analyze that. Use Chat GPT to analyze your reviews, see where all the problems are. It's helpful. But on the branding side of things, yeah, if you're at 200 patients per day and you feel like you're at capacity, yeah, there's good reason you don't have to be marketing.

marketing all the time, but marketing when your low times are coming. Summer slumps, what we always say, last summer was kind of weird. But summer slumps where if you know they're coming off, like we're going to be losing 60 pages per day because of summertime, you start advertising in April to get that ramp to back up because marketing does not work in one night or one week. It takes a little bit of buildup time. So don't start marketing June 1st. It's too late. It's not going to make the effectiveness that you want. It'll probably fill it at the end of July, but summer's already over. Last comment.

I know we're wrapping up, people are squirming, ready to eat. What you focus on expands and what expands typically improves. So if you just spend some time and focus on the problem of getting new patients through the door, it will get better, but it takes focus. That's all I wanted to say. And I really appreciate y'all's time and effort and energy. It means the world. Thank you.

Awesome. I hope you had a chance to dig into the material from the Xperity Urgent Care Connect Conference that we put here for you. The content, it was fun to present to that crowd. It was fun to be a vendor at that event. And it was so much fun to connect with all of the urgent care clinics there. If you have any questions about how to turn your clinic around, reach out to us, Patient Care Marketing Pros. It's hello at patientcaremarketingpros.com. We'll do a free audit of your clinic if you'd like. Until then, we'll see you on the next episode. Thanks.