Developing Micro-Pillars within Your 6 Pillars of Marketing

You're listening to Podiatry Marketing, conversations on building a successful podiatry practice with Tyson Franklin and Jim McDannald. Welcome to Podiatry Marketing. I'm your host, Jim McDannald. We're the show that, you know, helps you grow your practice, helps you learn about the the latest and greatest in podiatry marketing. Joined by always my cohost, Tyson Franklin.

Tyson, how's it going today?

Good morning, Big Jim. It's great. It's I always say great to be alive because your alternative is is pretty grim. That's why when people complain about life, I go, hey, you're still breathing. There's a lot of people who aren't who would love to be.

So get over it and just get on with it.

That's a positive way to look at it. I think we're all lucky to be here. I'm lucky to, you know, be talking to you from across the world. So I look forward to each Tuesday when we record.

Hey. You know what's interesting? It's I was at a conference once, and there was a guy there who had met this old, like, was, like, his late eighties. And this, like, best attitude. And he said to him, yeah, why are so positive?

Yeah. What what makes you so positive? And he said, well, he said, when you get to about 70, he said, any day of the week could be your last day. He said, every morning when I wake up, as soon as my eyes open up, he says I say to myself, ho ho. Got another one.

And he lives that

to look at it.

Yeah. He lives that day like it could be his last. Who does he wanna talk to? Who does he wanna reach out to? Is there something he wants to read or somewhere yeah.

A trip he wants to do. And every day, he just faces it that way that, oh, yeah. Got another one. And I'm thinking it's such a good attitude. And it's not that he's thinking that, yeah, I'm not gonna wake up in the morning, but when he does wake up, he just realized he's got the whole day of pedo and make make the most out of it.

Yeah. Every day is a gift. Right? So you just gotta you gotta make the most of it like you said there. I think that's a that's a good way to go through life.

But back to, like, podiatry and the marketing. Oh, podiatry. That's uplifting message. Yes. What are we gonna be talking about today?

Today, we are talking about developing micro pillars within the six pillars of marketing.

Okay.

I think before we get to that, I'll just go and do a quick review on the six pillars of marketing. Not that I'm sure everyone has been listening to the show for a while, and if they've read the world's greatest podiatry book, it's no secret. There's money in podiatry. I've actually sold a fair few on Amazon lately. Considering it's been out for eight years, I'm surprised it still sells pretty well.

But in in the book, I talk about the six pillars of marketing, and and we've spoken about them previously on this podcast. We did them as separate episodes. So on episode 15, we did professional referrers. That's pillar number one. Pillar number two is nonprofessional referrers.

That was episode 17. Pillar number three, which is internal marketing, that was episode 21. And oh, no. It was episode 19. And it just went through from there.

So if you go fifteen, seventeen, 19, 20 one, 20 three, and 25, you'll get professional, nonprofessional, internal, external, verbal marketing, and online marketing. So it's a bit of a review of what the six pillars are. A micro pillar is a smaller pillar within the pillar, pretty much.

Nice. I'm looking forward to get into those today.

So people now, now they know what it is. They go, oh, I can switch off. I don't need to listen to anything else. But no, hang around. You you you might learn something.

So give an example. So professional referrers, that is the that's the major pillar. And and also just to touch on something too, when people say, why do you need to have so many so many pillars? If you think back to Parthenon in Greece, I think it was, I don't have the notes in front of me, was built in April. Now it's two and a half thousand years old.

You can go and look at this thing, and it's still a recognizable structure. And it's got this massive roof on it. But you have a look at lot of those structures that were built in those days, and they all had these really massive pillars. And the and the and the buildings that had the most pillars are the buildings that are still standing today because if one pillar happened to fall down, there were all these other pillars there supporting it. So that's the basis of why you need to have multiple marketing pillars supporting your business.

And picture your your business is like the roof of the Parthenon, you know, like an old structure, and all your marketing pillars and your referral sources are the things that are actually supporting your business. And if one of them falls over, it doesn't matter. You've got you've got multiple other pillars there. So what I'm looking at is if you look inside each pillar, the idea is to have a whole pile of little micro pillars that make up the overall pillar. So an example would be professional referrers might be the pillar, and I know some businesses really rely on a lot of referrals to keep their business going.

Whereas other people, that pillar isn't as important. But if you break down that major pillar, you've got your local GPs and doctors, your chiropractors, your physio physical therapist, anybody else that's sort of in the health industry that is treating your patients for maybe some of the problems that you treat, that is a micro pillar within the pillar itself.

That that's a great way to look at it. I think, like you said, if one of these little micro pillars goes away, that's not a big deal. You know, you have probably more micro pillars in the community that I go after and look after. But I think it's it's really important to kinda break it down into those those micro pillars because maybe you haven't, you know, looked at massage therapist or found someone else in sports medicine or a physio or a physical therapist. You know, these are all definitely different avenues and different opportunities for people to kind of build those pillars in the practice.

Yeah. Well, the way I like people to look at it, even if you if you've got rope or, yeah, wire that you know, like a a wire cable. Normally, it's made up. It's not just one piece. It's made up, like, say, wire cable or rope of all these other fibers that are wound together to actually create it.

So that's why you'd be watching a movie, and it's getting exciting, and there's tension on the big wire rope, and you see the each one of the smaller wire bits going, ping, ping, ping, and popping out. And it was going, oh, are they gonna get are they gonna make it or are they not gonna make it because it's about to break? If it was just one piece and it broke, they're dead. But having all these little micro pieces that make up the hole, if a couple of little ones break off, it's better than the whole thing just breaking itself. But even when you look at, like, a whole pillar, when I first started my podiatry clinic, referrals was such a an important marketing pillar.

When I sold my clinic, it was probably the least important marketing pillar that we had. It just didn't just didn't generate as many referrals as it used to. All the other pillars sort of overpowered it a little bit.

Yeah. So when you identify these micro pillars, you know, what kind of goals or what kind of objectives did you make regarding these micro pillars?

The whole idea with the micro micro pillar is to set a goal to actually have as many as possible. So you might you know, if if we stick on, say, professional referrals, for example, you might have, yeah, four or five doctors that refer a lot of people to you or three or four physios. Just keep building those relationships and keep adding more people and adding more people because you never know when one of those micro pillars within a pillar is going to break and and no longer be there. An example I give in my book, and I've mentioned it I don't think I've mentioned it on this podcast before, but it's like if you look at nonprofessional referrers, shoe stores, health food stocks, law offices, accounting, any other business that could refer somebody to you. I had a really, really good working relationship with The Athlete's Foot at the time on the Gold Coast, and they used to refer all these people to me.

I've got tons of patients. And, oh, I used to go in there on Thursday night, I see him doing it. It was good. And all of a sudden, the referrals started to dry up until the point I wasn't getting any referrals. And I was going from, like, maybe five to eight a week to nothing.

And I've got that's a huge change, like, in a matter of, like, six or eight weeks. So I went down there, and I went to the guy's names, and I said, hey. I'll call him Douglas. Douglas, is there something wrong? You're not referring to me anymore?

They went, oh, there's a a new podiatrist that's opened up in town. And I went, yeah, but I've been working with you for, like, two years. Went, oh, yeah, but have you seen how good she looks? And and then, yeah, she's got she's built. She's she's really nice.

So I had an option right there and then. I could either go and get breast enhancement or I could just move on and find somebody else. So that's what I decided to do. The point the point of that story is sometimes the relationships can break down with a micro pillar or referral source. It it's out of your control.

They they were totally looking at, oh, they wanna they wanna have a relationship with the young female podiatrist that was attractive, not the wildly youthful looking younger podiatrist as I was at the time, but I was male. And I did jokingly say to him, you know, when I see your wife next, I'll just bring that up. So it's important. That's why you wanna create as many as you can because it's out of your control when they choose to no longer no longer use you. You could have a doctor that could refer a lot of people to you, but then their brother graduates and is a podiatrist.

They're not gonna refer to you anymore. It's out of your control.

I think you bring up a good point. It's, you know, some of these things are not on our in our control. So we have to find alternative ways to track down some of these many pillars when it comes to, you know, referrals. Maybe it's, you know, different people and and different specialties or, you know, different people and non referral and non professional refers. Just kinda keeping your mind open as far as where those, you know, different categories of referrals could come from and just, you know, kinda building those up and trying to find as many as you can.

Because like you said, when you have enough of them, one person walking away or not sending you patients while not ideal isn't gonna be break of the business or a huge thing to overcome.

Yeah. And that's where in some podiatrists, they sit back on their reputation or previous successes or previous relationships, and they forget they've gotta keep nurturing those relationships. It's like that wire cable. If you just have a wire cable there and you don't respect it and look after it, it will rust. It can it can start to break.

Yeah. Some of those little fibers will break, which is why on cable cars, they tend to check things. They don't just put it up there and go, we assume that wire ten years later is gonna be okay. They are always checking it because if they see a couple of breaks in there, they know, we need to take some action here and fix this up before the whole cable breaks. And that's what you wanna do with your pillars is you wanna keep maintaining a little micro pillars of the relationships.

And even when it's, yeah, internal marketing, what are all the ways that you can actually talk to your patients? When it's external marketing, what are all the ways that you can actually connect with people externally with your with your marketing, your advertising? Verbal marketing, what are all the different methods that you can actually communicate through voice that your business exists. And then online marketing, my god, it's just endless on the things that you can actually do there. But if you neglect it, you're you're sort of I don't know.

I think if you neglect your pillars and the micro pillars, you're just asking for trouble long term.

Well, I think also you kinda isolate yourself. Yeah. Right? I think you if you get successful enough and you just feel like it's always gonna be this easy or it's always gonna come to me in this way, you're setting yourself up for the you know, for a big a big fall in the future because, like you said, you have to have those kinda open lines of communication, not only for you to communicate with those people, whether it would be, you know, referral letters or advertising or marketing to them, then also, you know, be open to the other form of communication coming back from them. How can you get feedback from them?

How can you get their ideas about the type of, you know, patients or, you know, what's working for them in their business or in their clinic and just having kind of a a two way form of communication which continues to build and grow that bond over time. Because if you're, like you said, if you're just gonna sit in your clinic, things are good, you know, it just kind of, you know, it's it's not always gonna flow like that. Yeah. So you have to be, you know, constantly hustling and and and building those relationships in a, you know, in a way that is productive, but also is a win win on both sides of of the table.

Yeah. And that's why when I've done my marketing workshops or the one on one coaching, I will I really push home this this idea of what I call marketing pillar rotation. And it's really about each whether you wanna do it, I don't think weekly. You could do a fortnight, but I usually say monthly. Look at each pillar.

Now you always should be doing something in every pillar without any problems at all. And online the online pillar, I actually believe now is probably one of the most important pillars compared to all the rest. When I when I wrote, yeah, the world's greatest podiatry business book, it's no secret, there's money in podiatry. When I wrote that, I actually said that all pillars were equal. When I wrote my next book in 02/2017, I said that they weren't or that, yeah, they basically weren't all equal.

That I I think online the online pillar is something that you must be constantly working on in so many so many different areas. But the other five pillars are quite equal. I try and encourage people to do what I call marketing pillar rotation where they put a lot of they put hyperfocus on one pillar each month with their team. And they say to the team, this month, our, yeah, our hyper focus is gonna be on verbal marketing. So they all sit down as a group, and when they're having their weekly meetings and talking about things, everyone's plan is to try and come up with some more ideas where we can go go and do some talk somewhere, or can we get on a podcast, Or is there some audio that we should be recording?

Or even video because I class video as being part of that whole verbal marketing. Anything where you're talking is is verbal marketing. Really put some hyper focus that month into new ideas that you can add some more micro pillars to the overall pillar. And then the next month, you take your focus off of that. It's still going, but you put your focus on to the next pillar.

And the next pillar might be professional, and the next month, it might be nonprofessional. So if you keep rotating it, every five to six months, you should be putting a lot more focus and adding new ideas on top of the existing ideas that are already there. And that's like the maintenance on the rope. On it's the maintenance on the wire cable. It's having a look at it on a regular basis.

And by constantly fixing things up or adding new stuff to it, you you make the you make the cable stronger and you make the pillar stronger.

Well, I think you also you take some lessons learned from that as well. Right? Do you understand, you know, by I mean, I kind of rotating like that. You're you're also kind of you're learning lessons in each of those different pillars, but then you're also keeping it relatively fresh in the minds of patients or prospective patients. So you're not just, you know you wanna find things that are working, but a little bit of, you know, diff difference, you know, a little bit of changes now and then will help spark interest, will keep their attention.

So, you know, by getting better all of these different pillars, you're keeping their attention, you're growing kind of the audience of people you're getting in front of, but also you're learning that whole time about what works for you and your practice and the kind of practice you wanna build.

Yeah. But I I think with verbal marking, for example, you might be going, okay. Let's put some focus on getting more talks in the community. So you start sitting there. And if it's just you by yourself thinking, what talks are gonna do?

You might go rotary, Apex, Lions. These are common ones here in Australia. But we have another big one called the Independent Retirees Association, and they're a group of retirees who cannot get any funding from the government because they make too much money. Great patients to have, the ones that have too much money. And so that's another talk.

I used to do that every year without fail, and I guarantee half a dozen patients would come from that talk every single time. So but but when you sit there as a group and you go, hey. This is what we've done in the past, so let's make sure we've got them locked in. What else can we do? So then one of girls will go, oh, and this is where and the other part that and this is something that's also not in my first book and not in my second book either is there's a there's a crossover between the pillars.

So you might be thinking verbal marketing, but verbal marketing also means talking in front of doctors, organizing doctor's visits. So even though your focus might be, oh, what can we do for verbal marketing this week? This was just why don't we try and organize more talks with the doctors? That ticks two it's two pillars at once that you actually tell. So there's a there is a big crossover between what you're doing on one pillar will always have an effect on another pillar because you might be doing something, some form of external marketing because that's your focus that month, but what you're doing in the external marketing may work really well online as well.

So you're doing two at the same time. But the focus is on one pillar, how you use it, you can do it any way that you actually want.

Yeah. It's good to mix and match those around. It sounds like like killing two birds with one stone with a focus in one specific area can definitely be yeah. Like I said, can be helpful, but also, like you said, you're taking lessons learned from this and you're kind of developing a base of things that work for you. And then you, you know, you can kind of iterate on those things or imagine what we did.

We know these four things are really good for us. So what are two areas this month or this cycle where we can kind of experiment a little bit? Let's go talk to this other group we hadn't thought of before or something. So I really like the way you framed it there.

Yeah. And what's funny is so marketing pillars are one thing, market pillars are another thing. It's also like and we've mentioned before, you know, developing a a marketing plan for the year. So when you look at your your plan for the year, you might put these marketing pillars might be part of your overall marketing strategy for the year, what you're gonna work on. But I know back in the early days when I probably lacked business experience, it'd be, oh, foot health week is coming up.

Do they have foot health week in America?

They always have these, like, know

There's always some week.

Different kind of like themed week. Right? You know, it's a it's a pretty common thing.

Smile. I wonder if they have wonder if they have testicle week?

It's a good question. I mean, they have like Movember. Right?

They have Movember.

Is like the testicle.

Yes. It is. That's testicle week, also known as Movember. It's one of those things though that see, in Australia, we have foot health week. A lot of inexperienced business owners will think about foot health week the week before foot health week or foot health month, and they're running around and go, oh, it's foot health month next, yeah, next month or in a week's time.

What are we gonna do? And they're all sitting there trying to think of what they're gonna do for that particular event. Instead, they should be they do they go through foot health week, and when it finishes, write a plan of if we did this next year, this is what we'd do. So when it comes around to it next year, you're thinking of your pillars. How can you use the pillars in foot health month?

But you already got the strategy there that you used from last year and then use that and build on it and to add to it instead of trying to think on the fly all the time. That's why when you're doing all this stuff, it's it's documenting it. It's if you list what you're doing in a particular pillar and you keep a record of that, when you go to look at it the next time, you already know what you've done. You should know what's worked and what hasn't worked. This will sound funny.

Do more of what works and less of what doesn't work. I know. What? Profound, isn't it?

Say that one more time?

Yeah. Do more of what works and less of what doesn't work.

That's a that's quite a novel idea. I think I think some of the listeners will will get some feedback about that, but I I think it makes a lot of sense. But, yeah, I think that that's a great point. I really besides, you know, doing what works, I think there is this you know, it's really easy to try things. Yeah.

You know, just do bunch of things. But I think what you're really touching on there that I really resonate with is that not only do you need to try those things, but you need to have kind of a written record of how it went. Yeah. Yeah. Because I think some of the best learnings happen.

Well, while we don't wanna fail necessarily, but, like, you learn a lot of things either through success or failure when you take the time to have a debrief or a post mortem about what worked and what didn't work. Otherwise, it's gonna feel like magic or it's not gonna feel like it's repeatable. But by doing you know, by gathering data, by writing it down, by reviewing it when it's done, then it could be repeatable. But until you do that, it's gonna seem like a one off every single time.

Yeah. And when I first started in business, that was always the case. We would do something. We would get ready for an event. We go and do it.

We come back from that event, and everything we get put back to where it was. And the next time an event came up, we're going, oh, what do we need? And And then eventually, you know what would be good? If we actually had a list of what we actually take to an event and we kept a copy of that, the next time we go to event, we print out that list, and there's a checklist to actually go through. So it's and this all just comes with experience.

It's just the experience of to me, if you if you're doing the same task over and over again, then you need to put a system in place to make sure it happens, and your marketing sort of falls in there. The last concept I just wanna talk about before we wrap up is a thing called the red queen the red queen hypothesis. I don't know if you know what that is, Jim.

I think we've talked about it a few times, but I'm I'm not always the best listener. I'm not gonna lie.

So the the Red Queen hypothesis, and I I might butcher this a little bit anyway, but it's it's a theory in nature. It's a hypothesis in nature that in nature, everything is over proliferated. So trees will create hundreds of thousands of seeds and drop them down because it knows not every seed is going to turn into a mature plant that will reproduce. Turtles, when when a turtle lays eggs, very few make it to adulthood. And I think that it is every thousand turtles that are eggs that are laid, only one turtle makes it to adulthood, which is why hundreds of thousands of eggs are laid year after year.

So because this happens in nature, because in nature, everyone's competing for the same space. So they gotta over proliferate because they know not everything's gonna make it. Your marketing is exactly the same thing. You've gotta over proliferate your ideas, which is why you need to hyper focus on things each month. Come up with all these ideas.

It doesn't matter how stupid they are, but the idea is to kill them as fast as you can. Is to put them out there, test it, try it, doesn't work, get rid of it. This works. Do more of what works, less of what doesn't. And but just keep pumping the ideas out there, and eventually, you will keep finding the ones that actually work and mature and become the adult turtle of your marketing.

I like that. And I I think you're breaking up a really good point, though. I think it is, you know, getting these ideas and then doing some repetition of them. I think when you're the clinic that's doing it or like with with me, you know, if I do my own marketing or if I if I do something, you're gonna see it every single time. Right?

So you almost feel like I'm repeating myself. Like, oh, I don't wanna like keep saying the same message, but people are busy in the world. Right? So whether it be, you know, a LinkedIn post or a blog post, something on a similar topic with a similar message is actually helpful for people because you're staying true to what you offer and putting that message out there in a way that's approachable. And maybe someone doesn't see it on LinkedIn, they saw it on your blog or they heard it on a on your podcast, but not, you know, on that Google search ad or something.

So we get much more tired of hearing our own selves say things Yes. Than other people do because there's so much stuff that's going on in the world. So I think when like you said, finding these great ideas, repeating them, and don't being don't be shy about it because, like you said, you know every time you say something, but it's a noisy world out there and a lot of it gets lost in the noise sometimes.

Yeah. I remember a sales rep coming up to me once and said, Tyson, when are you gonna change this radio ad that I had at the time? I said, oh, it's simple. I'll change it when it stops working. Anyway, but you've had the same one for two years.

It's boring. And I went, but it works. But that's that was the thing. That was one of those ones that we tried and tested a pile of things. It worked.

Do more of what works and less of what doesn't work. What she wanted me to do is go, oh, I'm bored hearing it even though it's working for your business. So I want you to come develop another one that doesn't work. Or or may yeah. It may have worked better, but the idea is it was working.

So why change it? I had a print ad that we used to run that made me a lot of money over a number of decades. And the reason we kept using it is because it kept working. And I talked about this concept also about finding black caviar. I might talk about that the next time I do my session.

We're talk about finding black caviar. That was the name of racehorse Nice. By the way. Otherwise, I otherwise, I'll talk for another half hour. Yeah.

I'll talk for a nut. So I it's definitely gonna be my next topic is gonna be finding black caviar, which was at the time the world's greatest racehorse.

Alright. That's a lot of good plan.

Okay, Jim. I think we've covered this topic, and I look forward to talking again next week.

That's all a good one, Tyson. Thanks a lot. And for all the listeners, if you're listening this far, please head over to iTunes. Leave us a review. A rating would be appreciated.

Know, tell this to a podiatry colleague of yours that thinks you think could maybe use some of this helpful information that Tys and I are are laying down. So thanks a lot for listening, and we'll see you on the next one.

Okay. See you, Jim.

Bye, Tyson. Thanks for listening to Podiatry Marketing with Tyson Franklin and Jim Mcdonald. Subscribe and learn more at Podiatry Marketing. That's the website address, podiatry.marketing.