Ep. 178: Why Relying on One Marketing Channel Will Fail Your Urgent Care (and What to Do Instead)

PCMP (00:00) Hey, you're listening to Walk-Ins. Welcome with Nick and Michael. Glad to be back for another episode with you, where as always, we're here to help you get more patients, deliver better care, get repeat visits, scale your clinic, all the things. Michael, what's up, buddy? What's happening? You know, we, feel like this feels we haven't had a normal Thursday recording in a while. I right? I don't know why it's just been that way. Well, I the last one we did was about airplanes and the VFR IFR clinic, but like even still that one felt weird. Yeah, exactly. Not our normal day. So I want to get back and like shift back toward the focus of the podcast, which is marketing. You know, we always want to talk about that. Sometimes we go off into operations, we do interviews, all the things. Well, let's bring it back to marketing for a minute, right? So here's something that we know, we've talked about this, but we've also been experiencing some of this internally. And it's simply that if you rely on one channel for all of your marketing, it's not going to always work. I've called it building your house on someone else's property. Yes, especially in the paid ad space for sure. But yeah, so we talk about, know, we're digital marketers, we're going to promote digital regularly. We get that. And we can tell you right now, like if you need a bump in your business, Google ads will typically give you that bump. But if you strictly rely on one source, it will fail you at some point. Or it's gonna cost you. You know, it's funny, I was listening to a conversation the other day and in full disclosure, it was Dave Ramsey. I'm going through his book, his newest one. And this isn't a plug for his book, but so far it's been pretty good. But one of the things that he talked about is, you know, he's always been a believer in it, that the message is what's important. The method in which you deliver that message is going to change a thousand times over the years. Yes. Right. Oh, And this is where the elephant is the great example. That is a beautiful example. And I've never been more excited for a company to not be around anymore. Right. Just nightmare fuel in the digital world, just the way they treat their people. But anyway, no, but like having all of your eggs in one basket, one, we don't even as a marketing agency, like we stay in our lane. We want to be a piece of the pie. We don't want to be the whole pie. No, no. I mean, we have been plenty of times at this point, a I would say like a steroid shot, you know, where you're basically like, need some help. I'm in pain. We can help you. But at the end of the day, if we are your only thing, you're losing out a little bit. You just are. It's funny that you say that because I look at the way you say that as like, I see the steroid shot as like ads. Yeah. And I see like SEO is like a vitamin. Yeah, exactly. Anyway, but sometimes you got to go to the gym. Branding is a vital. Yeah, sometimes you gotta go to the gym and work out those muscles and the vitamin doesn't do that for you. That's right. You're right. So but anyway, so all these little analogies, what are we saying? So at the end of the day, you want to be omnipresent. So omnipresent is the ultimate goal of marketing. Where what does that mean? Well, you know, it comes from omnipotent and all these things. Basically that you are everywhere and you can think of any large company. They're everywhere. They're not just digital. They're not just radio, billboard, print, TV. They're all the things. And some of them cost a lot of money. Some cost no money, just time. Community building, right? So that's one of the things I wanted to just hook into. Like we know when we work with our different clients, the ones that have established branding tend to do better. Right. It's less of an uphill battle. Any of the large, like people know their community. already, basically if we have a company, like we've seen this too. So we've had Clients come to us, they have no presence. They have a website, a logo, and a building, and that's it. And they don't do anything else. And so like it is a long hill battle for us sometimes. Like we're just sitting there kind of fighting things for a little bit. And then eventually with reviews and in the community kind of catching on because we're getting more patients, it slowly builds. And all of sudden we can see the effectiveness of what we're doing even greater. We talk about all the time. We love it when even in our intake, we're like, what other marketing are you currently doing? And when they list off, they say, Perfect. This is helpful to us because we can hook into that. So that's goal of today's episode is just to kind of talk about the different avenues and we'll always promote digital. But at the end of the day, it's just like, you know, having all the ingredients makes a better pie, not just having sugar. You know, it's funny. Digital gets a lot of credit and it should. It does good work. OK, I'm not taking anything away from it. But, you know, in my radio days, ⁓ we would be driving the brand. of a company and Google would get all the credit. Google would get all the credit. ⁓ Because what would happen is somebody would hear an ad, well, it's not like they're going to stop their car or whatever and just call right in the middle of it. But what would happen is let's just say it was a roofing company, for example, they would hear the ad, we would sell them on why they need the roof and why this company is the right company. And they're not calling right then. It's not an immediate need for roof. But when they do and they do that Google search, if that that if that roofing company that they heard the ad on was there. Let's just call it. Nick's roof. Yeah, right. Man, I heard that radio station talking about Nick's roof. I already know all about this company. I know their brand. I know their messaging. I know about them. I'm just going to click on that and I'm going to call them first because of that branding. I knew what they're about. And it's one of those, you may not know that much about them, but you're like, have a trust factor with them because I've seen them around. That's right. Like generally speaking, people will go toward the brand. They recognize even though they may not know much about them, but they recognize that's right. We'll naturally live that way. Well, and think about it this way. When you're driving down the interstate, do you do it's one thing to try new restaurants in your city. You don't try new restaurants driving down the interstate. No, you know, you don't go off the beaten path and go to a Bubba's Burgers. Now you're looking for a McDonald's, a Hardee's or something. Wendy's something that you know, Mindshare, right? Like they have spend enough money to get your attention because they've built that predictable, stable, know what I'm going to get type brand. Yeah. Like for better or worse. Yeah. When it comes to like the restaurant fast food stuff, it's very, I know what my expectations are. So I'm cool with it. then if it's not a known brand to me, I'm taking a risk. and people naturally are risk averse. And so that's where it all comes into play. But one of the things that when I was building out the notes for this, I thought that was a great like little line here. Technically speaking, when it comes to paid Azure renting space, what happens if the rent doubles or goes up? Can you keep affording those ads like right? Or do you have to rethink the strategy a little bit? I know what was it? The Facebook slap? We had the Google snap and the Facebook slap. Yeah. So back in the day, back when Nick the Marker was his infancy. Facebook ads would be dirt cheap. ⁓ you could do some damage with some Facebook ads with a very small budget. TikTok did it for a while until they went into all like influencer marketing. Yeah, exactly. Or yeah, like the little sell the product thing, which is just so funny to me. But no, so like it's all blue now. Depending on who you are. That's all I see now. all I see is that Vivo, which is the online version of Harbor Freight. OK. Lots and lots and lots of cheap tools. right. Anyway, wait a minute. Anyway, so that's where it kind of goes that path of like what happens if platform changes like Google changes all the time? What we're doing now versus what we did two years ago is quite a bit different. And we've recently had some we all know about GLP ones and all that stuff. Well, a year and a half ago, two years ago, it was a wild west. You could just run ads on that. Nobody seemed to really care. And then about six months ago, they're like, now we're going to regulate that all of sudden. And then boom, we lost ad accounts that got shut down because they weren't properly regular, know, regulations kicked in. so that, mean, that's the shift you have to play with. Cause like you said, building someone, building your house on somebody else's property, building it, that sand castle is just sitting there at somebody's backyard. It's not yours. And we, deal with that ourselves because we're digital marketers. You know, we don't own Google. We don't own Google ads. We don't own Facebook or Facebook ads. We don't own any platform, honestly, except the website it's sitting on. That's about as far as your ownership goes. Even your Google business profile, you don't really own. You're just leasing it. Well, I'll make the argument that we are digital marketers today. Yes. Right. Because our goal is to deliver patients to our clients. Right. I don't care how. we deliver patients to our clients. I care that we deliver patients to our clients. And if Google stops performing, we're going to still deliver patients to our clients. We're going to find the medium that's going to work best. I'm going to laugh when chat GPT comes out with a ad base version. Please don't ruin it. Yeah, like so they have a paid version of 20 bucks a month per user. That's not a lot of money. not many people do that. Advertising to me, Michael, is a necessary evil. It's a necessary. If it's something free, that's very useful. And you know that the usefulness goes away if you want to if you want to charge for it. Like the popularity goes as is the only option. So let me give you an example. I hate ads until I need something. Yeah. Ads are amazing when I'm great when I need something. Right now, I need somebody to come fix my in-ground sprinkler at my house. I need somebody that is not working because those people aren't running ads and I can't find them. You need to like pick a brand. Yeah, well, there's not one. Rainbird. Well, OK, great. Rainbird. I need to write that down. The point I'm trying to make, though, is like everybody hates ads until they want it and everybody hates targeting until it works. And here's what I mean by that as well. I am not a female. I don't wear bras. So if you're showing me lingerie and bras, I don't care. don't want that. That's not relevant to me. And that, to me, is the difference in broadcasting and targeted advertising. Unless it's Valentine's Day. OK, fair enough. We're past that. Yeah, are. We're way past it. Now I'm getting flower ads because Mother's Day is coming up, Exactly. So timing and relevance, right? But anyway, like I was going somewhere with that. was going to be good. I completely misled you there. That's OK. But it's all about the targeting side because if you're getting the wrong targeting, I'm never going to interact with an ad. I'm annoyed with the ad. Why are we seeing this ad versus perfect targeting? actually is very interesting to me. And I say it all the time because like I get tons of camping stuff and like, oh, that's a really useful get, you know, gadget. I have a camping trip scheduled. You know, I don't do this a lot. Yeah, I've got nothing but how does it know I'm getting 10 ads like crazy right now. Did you book a reservation somewhere for a campground? No, we're talking. Oh, all of a sudden I kind of get it. Who owns Group Me? Is that Microsoft or something? Probably. Yeah, that's where it is. There you go. I found it. You can't get away from it. Oh, we were talking about Necessary Evil. Yeah. That's what it was. But anyway, so it goes back to just like that's digital. We got that established. And we can tell you right now as an urgent care, if you have some patient volume and you're looking for that push to get to the next level, digital does a really great job at that. Right. And we know that we can preach that all day. But. Here's the minor things that you need to make sure you're doing as well. and here's the thing too, we've learned this internally ourselves where we've checked a lot of these boxes internally and they all trickle in new potential clients. And then recently we spun in some Facebook ads that actually worked. And I say actually because this is our third try or fourth try really. And the first three tries did nothing, just burned dollars. And so this time it actually worked. We're very happy with it. Yay, Philip. Thank you so much for taking the initiative and we love talking to our urging ears. Anyway, but there are other pieces of that pie because just like I said earlier, the Facebook ads are doing really well. One, because they're set up well and we have good content for them. But two, you can't freaking escape us. Like we are your resource. We are the toolkit. We are the, we actually can't, we know we're talking about type of thing. Hey, we have a podcast. mean, that that could be left up for debate. I'm sure maybe ⁓ we have web. We have a monthly webinar. We have a weekly podcast like you. ⁓ If you're looking for anything urgent care related, you've probably seen our name at this point because we've doing this for a couple of years. So then all of a it starts to make more sense. like for the urgent. So taking that mindset, that's to take that mindset. So looking back at your actual urgent care. So. Word of mouth is one of the things that we always talk about, right? It's one of the hardest things to replicate. And the cost is time. It's rarely like a hard cost of like dollar amounts, but it's your time. Or it's simply how do you create a program that encourages word of mouth? And so word of mouth is still at the end of the day, it's one of those, it's like, if I say, Nick, go to that urgent care, I had a great time. It was fantastic. You're probably going to go. Most likely. Yeah. So it's a very easy conversion, very, very easy. You can mark it as referral, right? Like it's a straight referral, it's very straight to the point. But the challenge is, that's me saying it one time to somebody. Probably gonna end there until you decide to do that. Or I may go after somebody else and say, hey, by the way, this was great. But the reality of it is, like as an individual, I may produce one other patient for you. Well, that's not sustainable. It's a one to one. Yeah, right. Yeah, it's not sustainable. The ROI, one to one, that's all you get. So keep that in mind, like word of mouth, it's going to bring a couple. So it starts to add up. So, you know, we know like 20 to 30 patients per day is that breakeven point for most single location urgent cares, which means you have about 600 to 900 patients a month that you need to come in. they all new patients? No, necessarily. You may have some repeats mixed in there, but you know, six to 900 patients. So word of mouth may have gotten you. 20 that month, maybe 30. Well, that's a good starting point, right? Like that covered a whole day potentially if you had it all up. So take that. It's like, OK. And then we have digital that may have thrown in another 150 of them or 200 of them, depending on where your budgets are. So now we're moving closer to 200 patients for that month. What else can you do? So we talk about grassroots and community where you hook into that school, you hook into your other providers in the area that you could help as like a referral source. We even have one recent urgent care that we picked up that they actually have an on-site MRI machine or just x-ray. Anyway, they were actually being referred by other urgent cares because they had a service that no other urgent care had. That's huge. And that didn't just It was only $10 million for the machine. Right, right. And a dedicated person to do it and all that fun stuff. But the reality of it is, they don't... There's something they remind you of. If you want the opportunity, you gotta go get it. You can't just rely on that. Hey, those competitors should be sending us patients because we have this. one, do they know about it? Two, have you talked to them and built that relationship? Three, have you sent them anything? Yeah, right. Reciprocity is a huge, huge return on investment. it is. And if you really want to work with someone or you see them as like a potential, like they could really send us a lot of stuff, you gotta make the first step every single time. And make sure it's a real step, not a fluff. I'm actually dealing with some of that right now with a person that gave me a bunch of fluff up front. I took the bait for it because it seemed pretty good. And now as it's being revealed, there was nothing, there's no meat to it. There's no substance. And I called the person out on it and I said, you told me this and that conversation disappeared the second you started talking to me. And now you've never brought it back up. And now haven't got a response for them. So imagine that. I'm sure it's awkward. It is. So that's a big reminder. And I know it's difficult to call on someone and it feels like a cold call and it's like really awkward. But you just say, hey, I'm your friendly, whatever, urgent care down two blocks, a mile, whatever. By the way, I want to let you know we have this machine and I didn't know if you guys had that or not. And we'd love to have a conversation. Can I take you to lunch? That's a good one. It can take you to lunch, just kind of chat and just see how things are going. Because at the end of the day, with our urgent care, yes, you have your competitors, right? We get that. But you're also only competitors up to like two or three miles. Outside of that, you're kind of free range because people aren't willing to travel more than 20 minutes unless they just have to. I think one of the coolest examples of this that I've ever seen is Ronald McDonald House Day at McDonald's. ⁓ I don't know if this was nationwide. But I know it happened locally in Birmingham, the entire market. So I'm assuming that one company owns all the burger, one guy or one company, one girl, whatever, owns all the Burger Kings. Because on, on that day on their national, where they raised funds for the Ronald McDonald's house at McDonald's, all of the Burger Kings closed. ⁓ they put a sign up on their door that said, go to McDonald's today. You can eat real food tomorrow, but They're trying to support the Ronald McDonald House. That's really cool. And that to me was like, I'm not a huge Burger King fan, but they went through the roof with me in Mindshare. Like I'm like, that is first class. That is what that is. You call it stupid if you want, but I would, I've never really considered Burger King a lot, but now I think about it. Yeah. Right. And I will go there and I'm thinking whoever owns these. is a first class person. Well, that's thing too. And you know, deep down, they didn't just do that, right? They probably communicated with the McDonald's and said, Hey, we're going to do this because we believe in what you're doing. And it's not going to hurt us to close for a day. Well, the Ronald McDonald house is a legit program. Yeah, I've been in the Ronald McDonald's. And I know it because I'm from Memphis and they have a huge thing with St. Jude. That's right. Right. So ⁓ anyway, Like the fact that Burger King shut down their locations again, I don't know if it was national, but it was definitely here and they shut down and they said, go to McDonald's and support the Ronald McDonald's house. That's so that's a really cool story. I thought it was awesome. But that's a great example of competitors. They're rough competitors like their dog. Yeah, right. mean, they're not the Wendy's. That's right. That's right. You know, we have a competitor in our space. Yes. Right. Just the one really. Surprisingly. And I'm not going to mention their name anyway. The point I'm trying to make, is it's like we have sent them business because it was going to be better for our client. And I wanted them to win, too. Like, I don't have a problem with them winning. My goal is to put other people out of business. You know, that's a this is a good point. So think about your urgent care. Think about your competitors and think about what makes different because we ask this question all the time. What makes you different from your competitors? Well, I have this, this, this. What makes your competitor different from you? Yeah. Right. And so a good example, if you close at six o'clock every day, is there an evening ⁓ urgent care that you could send people to? Right. Because if they and you could do it just for walk ups. So you can have something on your side that says we're closed at six o'clock, but please visit this location for quickest service. Right. You just take the sign off in the morning and no harm, no foul. But you have that conversation with that urgent care. Now, urgent care may not open in the morning and they may have a sign that can go up and say, hey, We're only open in the afternoon or evenings. Please visit this urgent care if you need care right now. But anyway, you're good. That's why you kept looking. I was like, no, I wanted to just make sure we're good. The timer has fallen off of our show. Oh, it's all good. Anyway, so I glanced up and I'm like, where is it? Yeah, typically. But anyway, so like there's those parts where you make those connections. And once again, it's it's another small feeder that may send you another. 20 or 30 or 40 patients over a month to your clinic. And so when that happens, now you're pushing up to that 400 or 500 mark. And so you're getting closer and closer. And so all these things kind of add up because at the end of the day, it takes all the effort. But when you get to omnipresence, if one channel decides to just take a dump. Like it just falls off the air for it, right? Right? Just fall steamy pile. Yeah, for no good reason. Like, here's a good example. You want a great example of this? Your Facebook ads account got shut down. Mm That's happened. And guess what Facebook doesn't care? Because they're making billions. They don't care about your $1,000. And it may take them a day may take them a week may take them a month or never to turn that ad account. Or Google asks, you know what your verification is trash turn off and it just shuts you down. So all of sudden that that fell. The other items now keep you moving, right? Keep you moving, keep you moving. So it's just something just to keep thinking about. And another thing that I'd mentioned that would be pretty good. Obviously you want to talk about reviews and keep those reviews because that's an important piece of the puzzle, because that is a trust factor. But then also take a look at your actual staff. Your staff are believers in what you do, hopefully. Hopefully they may hate you. don't know. I took a peek at our glass door. There's nothing there. But for some, for some reason that came up on a training session I was doing today. Oh yeah. And I was like, I wonder if anybody said anything about us. And so I went to chat GPT. This is review related. I promise. And it said 3.7 stars. Well, it got me confused with some other Nick. Oh yeah. But anyway, I was just fascinated by that. So I think I've seen a previous employee posts on one those. I haven't seen it. I went and looked today and couldn't find anything. So somebody posted their job salary, but that was the extent of it. Maybe that's what I'm thinking about. But anyway, so you have your staff and you know, they're important pieces of the puzzle. One, they're for the experience, right? So if you have a bad staff member, doesn't matter how much effort you put in to bring that patient into your door, if they just screwed up the whole process and you're never going to see them again. So that's the one side of a staff is make sure to experience them. Well, the other side though is let them be the ambassador for your company. Like let them Be those like, hey, this place is great. I know I work here, but let me tell you, like we're doing things different or we actually do care about our patients and all that type stuff. Or we have this brand new service. Like you may have five to 10 staff that can be just talking heads. Yeah. And then you use them on social media. We had an interview a long time ago on this podcast with Brenda Bates. Mama Bear. Mama Bear. She's awesome. But like she represented like what you want a urgent care manager. look like, mean, office manager person, and she was fantastic. She loved on her staff, and then she would kick their butts if they were not doing what they're supposed to. And so I think that's just that example of like, she almost could be the mascot of that particular urgent care because she was so good with it. But that's who you want to embellish, right? Because ⁓ being the doctor, yes, we understand that doctors matter. And the urgent care owner matters. Some urgent care owners don't want to be known. We get that. But if you do, you know, obviously you're going to be up there in terms of like when you're out and about and then be in your networking, because you still need a network. I'm sorry. Chamber events, grand openings, all these things still matter. They're, they're actually bigger than you think they are. Yes, exactly. It's one of those, it exposes you to some key people in your city that get to know you a little bit better. And then they naturally may refer you. Once again, they are not the magic bullet. I got a, got a text the other day from Mayor Bricado. yeah. From Leadership Hoover, right? So, but that's a perfect example of, and I promise you I'm not name dropping. What I'm saying though is that that relationship was from a closed door that was open through a network. And freaking Leadership Hoover. Anyway, it's another story for another time. It is. But no, yeah, I mean, but at the end of the day, those are networking opportunities. Sometimes you're networking, you make strategic networking opportunities. So we've seen this with a couple of urgent cares. Well, they will purchase or partner with a service or a company that expands who they are. And they don't just do it just to add a service. They do it because there's an access to another type of patient they've always wanted to get in front of. Could be aocmed, could be laboratory, could be maybe physical therapy related, right? Or even IV therapy, weight loss. Like these are the networking opportunities, you know, Maybe you partner with them where you do a trade of some sort. So it's not just pure money that you bought them. But all these things add up over time because when you start breaking, like best thing you can do right now, take a look at, do a census data on your patients. Where did they come from? If you, if you can figure that out and then like pull up zip codes, pull up effort, like what kind of effort you're putting out in those certain areas and see if you can connect the dots because you'll start to see like that person came through. we can see that came through online because we can track these things. And I actually remember seeing them at this event I did or whatever. So like all these little things add up and we know that here too, because we live and breathe it. We do a lot of different things right now and they all start to add up. Just this past week, we've had three or four urgent cares talk to us because of Facebook ads that we ran. We had two urgent cares talk to us because they've seen our stuff. And we had an urgent care talk to us because they have been watching us for three years. Actually, I'll tell you, they've been watching us and telling our marketing consultant to talk to us. So cool. So and this has all happened like a week and half, which is fantastic for us. But guess what? If we just ran Facebook ads and did nothing else, only two or three of those would have come through, not five. Right. And so that is at the end. It turns something from good to great very quickly. But you got to be consistent with it. If I can say anything at all, any marketing you do, what we just went through today, it has to be beyond just one month. If you say, me just try this one time, it's not going to actually do anything, but just waste your time. And I'm talking about just digital marketing. You're like going to an I'm going to go to one networking event and that's all I'm going to do. Nobody's going to remember you. That's right. You're absolutely right. Or I'm just going to do one grassroots community thing. That's not going to help anybody. Like, oh yeah. I kind of I don't know who you are and they move on and like, you're no, you're the we have one of our clients. You're the cotton candy guy. And they give all the cotton candy guy, you know, like that's the community outreach. And now he's known for that. And people flock to him. Cotton urgent care, cotton urgent care, CC urgent care. think the best like takeaway from all of this in my mind is just simply. The number of new patients you get or I'm going say the sales that you make is in direct proportion of the number of. offers that you make. You're never going to build a 60 patient per day clinic if only 30 patients per day even know you exist. Yeah, exactly. Like they don't know you exist. So you have to be in all these different channels just so they know who you are, that they can raise their hand when the time is right, when they need urgent care. Well, I think one thing too, if you tell yourself, there's just not enough demand. You are living in a dream because that's not real. Health care is explosive. Well, there's one reason that's one reason why we went into urgent care. So, you know, in our past with generalist stuff, like we had gone down the home service routes with the problem with home services, there are certain home services. There's not a search for right. People just demand is low or right now in the HVAC space. It's a tough time in Alabama because this has been like the chillest weather we've ever had. Like I've never seen right. Fifty five to 80 degree weather for weeks at a time. It's brutal for a for the HVAC out there. But in the urgent care space, even in like summer, you still have thousands of searches for urgent care health. Like as long as you have an actual population in the town that you're in, you're going to have demand and volume no matter what. It's never going to be, there's just not enough people out here to support this business. That's just not the case unless you're just in the most rural area where it's you and a bunch of farmers. That's good, man. That's a lot of good info. Yeah, yeah, just pure marketing today. Yeah, no, that's good. I love it. Like we want digital to be a piece of the pie. Make sure that you have a grassroots program. Make sure that you have a way for people to track the word of mouth. And what I mean by that is just like, hey, how'd you hear about us? That's a good way to do it. Yeah. Right. And you can put that on the bottom of the form. How did you hear about us? And don't let the default one be digital or whatever, because they're going to choose it every time. I you really want to make it a win. If somebody says my friend Janet referred me over here. Janet who Janet Smith great pull up Janet Smith profile and send her a thank you note. Yeah. That's how you can control your word of mouth anyway down different rabbit holes. Michael this is a good episode that you put together today man. I to sneak in on this one I was doing a training so I was happy to come in on this and thank you for putting it together. This is good content. All right. Well cool. All right guys we'll catch you on the next one. All right we'll see you.