Get On The Same Page With Your Marketing Provider

You're listening to podiatry marketing, conversations on building a successful podiatry practice with Tyson Franklin and Jim McDannald.

Hi. I'm Tyson Franklin, and welcome to this week's episode of Podiatry Marketing. With me, as usual, is my cohost, partner in crime, super nice guy, big Jim Mac. How are doing today, Jim?

Pretty good, but, you don't know me well enough, right, if you think I'm a super nice guy. No. I'm I'm doing well here. No complaints. I'm back back in The USA, back in the homeland, so no no complaints here.

I said that you the Beatles song just go through my head then. But that wasn't You

don't know how lucky I am?

Yeah. But that's the back in The USSR. But that song just popped into my head anyway. But it's so you're back in The US. What was how long how long are you going to be there for?

Yeah. So I'm spending a year in Eugene, Oregon. So now excited to be back where I practice and back in a community that I know. And, yeah, it's gonna be weird to be around not as many French speakers as I am here in Quebec, but I'm sure I'll make do.

What's the population of Eugene? Sounds small.

I mean, if you count the town next door, it's called Springfield, Eugene's about quarter of a million.

Okay. Okay. Yeah. Well, Cairns only has a 50,000. So Yeah.

We're tiny in comparison.

But it's fun though because I get a get a chance to kinda get out and I went to residency in Oregon. I have some friends and contacts in the podiatry world. So I don't really work with many podiatrists here in Canada. I have one Canadian client currently, but most of my clients are in The US. So it's nice to, you know, maybe make some contacts here in Eugene and around Oregon, maybe go up to California or Washington and see some folks in practice.

So

No. I I know where it is on the map. Never been there. And it's probably somewhere where I will go at some stage during summer.

Yeah. It's not too bad. I mean, I guess it's cold and rainy in the wintertime, but it's not snowy like it is here in Washington.

Oh, that just sounds fantastic. Cold and rainy. Perfect. I'd rather be snowy. So okay.

What are we talking about today?

Yeah. So today we're gonna jump into the kind of some specifics around getting on the same page with your marketing provider. You know, obviously, that's something that I provide for podiatry clinics and practice owners. And I think it's helpful to kind of educate my colleagues a little bit about, you know, what are some things to be aware of and how to kinda get off on the right foot when you're either looking for somebody or trying to reconnect a bit with your marketing provider to make sure that you're understanding what they're doing and also understanding the ways that they can help you grow your practice, help you develop a very specific specialty and get online and real world visibility for the type of care you wanna provide to your local area.

So if somebody wants to what do you mean by getting on the same page? What is it they're supposed to do?

Yeah so I'd say that sometimes there's a misunderstanding when it comes to you know podiatry clinic owners and marketers. I would say that sometimes the podiatry clinic owners, while we use the internet when we're in practice and when we're at home and doing things, we don't always know the fine detail that goes into some of the things that are involved with digital marketing. You know, we're it's kind of the last thing a lot of podiatrists wanna deal with sometimes is the marketing. You know what Google is. You know what some social media channels are, but, you know, podiatrists aren't kinda in there every day doing the optimization of Google local search ads or something.

Right? So there's kind of a lack of knowledge on that side. But I think there's also a lack of knowledge when it comes to a number of different marketing providers. There's not every podi not every marketer works with podiatric clinics and has a knowledge as far as helping podiatrists and the practice owners develop a niche practice or help them get visibility. Because if someone's, let's say, for example, like a product marketer, they might not know how to do things locally to get that visibility.

So there's has to be kind of a a meeting of the minds, and hopefully today's, you know, topic will help, you know, maybe some podiatrists and maybe some marketers find some common ground more easily.

You know, I was only talking to podiatrists yesterday, and whoever they were working with, and then this person was then working with somebody else that was in The Philippines. So nearly everything was getting done by a virtual somebody. And I said to him, so how much are paying a month for this? And they're telling me how much you're paying a month. And I'm going, what do you get from they're telling me this.

I went, so how do know if it's actually happening? Oh, I get this report. I go, and what's so they showed me one of the reports and said, so okay. Does this mean make any sense to you? And they went, I have no idea what any of it means.

I said, did did they go through it with you? No. I said, they're supposed to do this for you as well. Yeah. Are they doing that?

I don't know. So they've been paying a certain amount of money per month, thousands of dollars a year, and we're totally unaware of whether they were getting what they they should have said. They they were definitely not on the same page with their marketing provider.

Yeah. I think that this it's a perfect example. Right? Like, they're kind of the marketing people are talking one language, the podiatry people are talking another language, and sometimes this it's all lost in

and it was all bamboozled. They they showed me their report thing that they get sent to them and what they're gonna do. And I'm reading through it and I go, this is all just BS. I go, they're speaking a foreign language to deliberately try and confuse you to make it they're more intelligent than what they are.

Yeah. No. It's it's it's hugely important to have that kind of baseline of communication.

So what should a podiatrist do if they were talking to a podi to a marketing provider?

Yeah. So I think the first thing is really setting some clear goals and expectations with the marketing provider, kinda understanding and discussing kind of the importance of developing specific and measurable objectives for the marketing efforts. Meaning, you know, are is your goal to get a certain type of patient, a certain demographic patient? Are you trying to get more of a specific type of treatment? Is there a certain area code you're going after patients?

Are you going after senior citizens or, you know, kids for warts? You really have to understand yourself first before you can communicate with the marketing folks about that. So getting clear on what your goals are and then being able to communicate them to the marketing professional is kind of that first step. And you really gotta explore, you know, ways to kinda communicate those goals. Obviously, there can be different ways of doing that.

You know, obviously, having a phone call and discussing with them on a monthly basis. Maybe you already have a marketing provider. Or if you're looking for somebody, there can be some ways utilizing things like an online audit or maybe you you pay marketer a certain amount of money to kinda look over the different types of social channels and online channels you have to kinda get a general sense of how you're doing. But also say, hey. I'm I'm I would really like to do this.

What do you see from the numbers on your side? So when you do that and you can kinda communicate these goals more effectively, it really is an assure that ensure that you're kind of aligned with that marketing provider because you wanna make sure that you're providing, you know, common goals for podiatry practice. Like I said, you know, increasing patient volume, you know, improving kind of, you know, how much visibility there is when people look on Google Maps for your name of your name and also the name of your practice, but also can you know, what are ways that you can engage local patients? So kind of getting in alignment and having clear communication with your marketing provider is that first step.

Like we said, they need to know what their goals are first before they talk to the marketing provider. Because like last week's episode, when we spoke about if you don't wanna do home visits. But if you wanna do more home visits, then that's something you need to let them know. I wanna do more home visits. So that's gotta be part of your marketing.

If you don't wanna do routine foot care, then you gotta make sure that's not part of your your marketing anyway. So I think it's really important to know what you want and then be able, like you said, communicate that to the marketing provider to make sure that's what they're providing, then they're looking at the figures to make sure that you're getting those type of patients.

No. Exactly. And most of them aren't gonna be, you know, not all of them are gonna be knowledgeable about procedures and treatments and those kind of things, but if you and maybe you're just getting started out, right, and you're not really sure what direction you want ahead but it definitely gives them some information to help craft an online presence for you if you know that let's say you want to go into sports medicine or you want to go into pediatrics or you have a general sense of which direction you want to go it's gonna make it much easier for that marketing provider to develop those type of collateral websites, social channels, ads that kind of speak more to that ideal patient. What I find that happens a lot even with podiatry specific marketing providers is that they don't necessarily have this conversation or do an audit with people. So they're just going give you kind of a cookie cutter top 50 diagnosis, top 50 treatments.

And yeah, maybe what you like to do falls within those and you kind of try to take the best advantage of those things. But unless you have someone really craft, you know, a custom website, once you know exactly what you want to do with photos, videos, and content that really speaks to your ideal patient because that's who's going to be on your website. You know, it's not a resume for you. It's for to build trust with those local patients. That's how, you know, by getting that kind of content on your website is how you differentiate yourself from others.

And you know, the website provider or the digital marketing provider won't know how to do that if you don't have a clear understanding of what you want, and then you communicate to that that to them directly.

And plus, even if the marketing provider has worked with, yeah, a dozen podiatrists before, if they are not if they've been a dozen podiatrist clinics that are all very similar and and run poorly, and the podiatrist had no goals in what they wanted, then they're just gonna assume you want exactly the same thing, and that's what they're gonna give you.

No. I mean, that's how they that's how some of these companies have, you know, forty, fifty, or maybe a couple hundred different podiatry clinics. They just kind of have their formula. They have things that kind of worked for a lot of different people, but you're not gonna get that kind of custom tailored approach that is gonna really speak to those ideal patients.

And how how important is it just to have that regular communication, the regular updates? Because like I said, that example I mentioned before, they put everything in place They said this is what you get per month, and then they just never heard from them again.

Yeah. You just don't wanna get that like automated PDF report every single month. I don't think that really count I don't really think that counts as a true form of communication. I mean, it's communication is generally two way. So, you know, if if one person's talking at somebody or sending someone a a wall of data and numbers that they don't know what it is, I wouldn't really classify that as communication.

So and but I would say that you know when you're working with a marketing provider, it is you are building relationship and trust over time. So if you know even if they worked with a lot of podiatrists previously, it's like getting to know someone in real life. You know like even if you have one or two phone calls or Zooms with them, you're still getting to know that person and kind of building that rapport and understanding kind of what they want. So you know as as you get to know them more, you see what's working not working with some of the strategies you're implementing together, you're gonna have better information to really make consistent decisions and better decisions over a period of time. But by you just really wanna make sure you keep those lines of communication over over time.

So I would say, you know, it's okay to like exchange emails from time to time, know, but I think what I find works usually best with most podiatrists and the providers they're working with is a kind of like a quarterly brainstorming session.

Oh, yeah.

It's a chance to really look back at the last quarter about what worked and didn't work, but then also look towards the next quarter and see what you wanna do differently or if there's some other objectives that you have. If you're trying to evaluate, shift course, and change things on a monthly basis, you're gonna be kinda running around like a chicken with its head cut off. You're just gonna be like, you won't have enough data to make good decisions. You're gonna be kinda guessing about what you wanna do next month. And really, it's not enough time to see if there's momentum that's being gained by that relationship in the kind of the the marketing provider has providing you that value.

So on a when it's on a quarterly basis, then you really have that enough data to kind of reflect on, you what's working, what's not working, you know, what are the the objectives for that next quarter, the next six months, and how can you work towards that, and what are those specific types of marketing initiatives that make sense to try to go in and experiment with or to double down on the things that have worked in the past. So I think it's really important that you have that communication, you're discussing the tools and the methods so you know both parties feel informed and engaged. You know, obviously, if you have some quick change on the website or Google business profile, you know, you should have a marketing provider that's, you know, open to that kind of stuff. But I'd say big strategic or budget decisions kind of be more on that quarterly basis and utilizing kind of face to face either video calls or if you can see your marketing provider in real life. But I would just I wouldn't make it all over I would definitely not make it be sending reports or just emails back and forth because that's well, that might be you know, it's just for a quarterly basis.

You can do that on a monthly, every every so often during the month, but make make time to really sit down and both before and after that quarterly brainstorming session to make time to get on the same page and just really reflect and plan for the future.

Yeah. I I like the strategy sessions you're talking about because without them, we've spoken before about the difference between a strategy and a tactic, is some podiatrist, all they're really doing, they have no strategy and they're constantly watching what every other podiatrist is doing, and they see them do something, they go, oh, I need to do that. And then they'll go to their marketing provider and go, I need you to do this for me because I saw it being done over here. But without thinking about, okay, how are they actually applying it? They might have a strategy behind how they're applying this one thing which might be part of five things they're doing, but then you ever see the one.

So you need to be sitting down talking about I do this with my coaching clients is I always wonder what is it they're trying to actually do with their podiatry business. And I've I've had some that will come and just say, oh, I I just wanna get more patients here. I'm like, that's fine. I mean, you can do that, but the the all that is is just patching up one little hole. The the strategy behind everything is what works.

And Dave Freeze used to always say to me, just do more of what works and less of what doesn't. And that sounds really simple, but it's actually that's all parties, your strategic thinking that you do with a marketing provider. You you gotta figure out what's working, what's not working, and do more what's working.

I think it's easier to decide what's not working when you've done something for over three months as opposed to two weeks or four weeks. You know, if you're just dumping from things every two to four weeks, it's gonna be you know, you're gonna run out of things. It's gonna be dizzying. You're not gonna be able to make true momentum. But when you're, you know, building a house brick by brick, maybe you won't see that initial the first month, you won't see as much momentum or it won't feel like it.

But it's it's kind of the actions that keep on kind of, you know, multiplying. It's like compound interest in a way. You you don't see it for the first month, you don't see it for the third month, but after six months, the amount of work that's been put in to build a stable foundation and you're building that house and all of a sudden, you know, six months and and the the flywheel's moving and it, you know, it's it feels like, oh my gosh. We just did something last week to make this happen, but in reality, you know, like like you and you're building your practice, right, it's it's one of those things that takes time to get that momentum going.

Well, it's very different like this I mentioned with coaching. I always tell people when you start, I said, you've got to give me at minimum three months before you're gonna really see a good return on what we're actually doing. And who's we've all seen building sites where they'll have the big walls up, you can't see what's going on, and they're doing the foundations of the building. And all of sudden, it seems like so long that these big walls up, and before you know, it's almost overnight, bang bang bang, the building just starts going up. But without the foundations there, the building will just fall down.

Exactly.

So you gotta do that. Okay. What about understanding and and utilizing, like, analytics?

Yeah. Like I said, I was kinda poo pooing maybe some

Poo pooing.

You know, data.

You were poo pooing.

Yeah. I was like giving data and analytics a hard time, especially when you're sending in PDF reports. Right?

Yeah.

But I think there there is some benefit of seeing, you know, what is the traffic that's coming to your website? Where is it coming from? I'm not sure if I mentioned on a previous podcast, but, you know, sometimes websites have complete irrelevant traffic to what's gonna drive business results for the practice. So, you know, if you're if you're a podiatry practice in the Chicagoland area and over half of your traffic is coming from The UK, it's not not not a great great thing necessarily. Yeah.

Maybe you have a reputation and people find you there, but they're not gonna come they're not gonna book a flight from Heathrow and show up at O'Hare and jump in and, you know, see in your practice.

Yeah. So number one podiatrist in Bangladesh for heel pain, yet you're in California. It's not really gonna work. Yeah.

Exactly. But but I think there can be some benefit of diving into those numbers, but if you don't understand a number from your the marketing provider you are, you know, don't be shy to tell them, like, I don't know what click through rate means. So I don't what are we actually measuring when you say conversion? It's okay to have these conversations and really dig into what are the specific numbers and analytics that they're providing you. And hopefully, they're able to tie those back to things that happen in the clinic and kind of the results you're hoping to have, whether it's to grow your practice or to see different types of patients or to do more of a specific type of procedure.

But the marketing provider should be able to explain these key metrics. And like I said, they should focus things like website traffic, things that how much is it costing to acquire a new patient? They should be able to tie those things back to it. And you don't have to be a marketing specialist, but your marketing provider should be able to help guide you through that and not like I said, don't just send you a report and expect you to be knowledgeable of what all these acronyms mean or these kind of confusing terms. They should be able to help you walk through that and then utilize that data to really refine strategies over time and kinda get drive you know, the kinda data driven insights that are gonna help develop the exact type of practice you wanna build.

Okay. I have a question for you because this comes up a lot when with podiatrists I talk to, unless I oh, my marketing provider is is always updating the SEO on my page. And I'm thinking, can you explain that in a little bit more detail? What what is it they're doing when they're updating their SEO on the page? And if the website only has six pages, how many times do they have to keep going back to it to update the SEO?

So there's two different types of SEO. There's on page SEO, which is really a way of saying the type of content that's on the webs the website or the web page. Yeah. For example, you know, plantar fasciitis, you'd wanna have kind of the best page that describes what it is, different types of treatments, and can be what possible, what would recovery look like from that. Maybe there's some information about other types of procedures that can be done for plantar fasciitis.

So just information or keywords that ideally what patients are looking for, right? You want to make sure that as much information you're giving that's it's not obviously medical advice, but the information you're giving is kind of in the words of what a patient would understand or search for because this search engine optimization or SEO is something that will help drive traffic sometimes to different web pages. But more important than just general SEO is what we would call local SEO, meaning that maybe it's the name of the service you provide and the location you're you're you're situated in, for example. So know, if you're if you're a Chicago Podiatrist, you know, mentions of Chicago Podiatrist or treating patients in Chicago, those types of terms will lead to more visibility in the search engine results is which, you know, whether it's local or just general SEO, you want to do. Also I'd mentioned there's also technical SEO.

So there's kind of the kind of the behind the scene or invisible things that you don't actually see on a web page that's the kind of technical encoding details that go into developing a web page that will sometimes have to be optimized or utilizing like a WordPress plugin or something behind the scenes that's gonna make sure that it shows information to Google in ways that the bots that crawl Google and help rank web pages are you know, it's kind of getting that Google juice, just getting that visibility

Google juice. From search engines.

Yeah. So what will sometimes happen too is, you know, there's what's called internal and external linking on web pages. So Google likes to see a lot of links on a web page basically back to other pages on your website, but also to trusted or notable external pages as well. So there can be a lot that can be done. I don't know if there's, you know, a lot of work that has to be done if you have a six page website.

Yeah. But definitely getting it right the first time is is not by happenstance. It does take a certain level of knowledge and expertise to pull that off.

Yeah. And one but once it's actually set up and all the pages are being optimized for service and locality, the behind the scenes has been done. But I assume they constantly have to keep looking at behind the scenes if Google's slightly changing things, the bots are changing things, and we you wanna improve, as you mentioned, the Google juice, which I think is a fantastic word, Google juice.

But you're right. The the Google is always changing the game. Right? You'll get these Google search updates. Some you know, one of the big ones that's happened here recently is that it's not so much in the podiatry space, but for a long time, a lot of different review websites were very popular.

Let's say you like to surf and you decide you're gonna start this kind of affiliate website where you're writing about you're making surfboard reviews but you're linking back to a surfboard retailer to get a small commission for every sale of a surfboard. Like there's been a recent update to Google that's basically decimated a ton of these review or affiliate sales websites. It could do the same thing for podiatry websites. Sometimes people will say that for example, one thing that's happened is that if the doctor's name is not the one that's written the the blogs Yeah. You can get sometimes get a boost by having the doctor's name associated with the blogs that are written as opposed to either no name or the name of just some random person on your staff.

So there's little things that Google's always changing and and kind of updating that the person who's doing your marketing should be aware of.

But these are the conversations you should be having with your marketing provider. They should be telling you this is like, so when you're having your meeting with them is you should be saying, hey, this is what we changed on your website. This is what we had to update. This is what Google has been doing. So you're totally on top of what's actually happening.

It's not just a fee you're paying every month, and they say, oh, we're doing this for you, and you never hear from except a colorful report.

No. Exactly. You know, every that that every three month, you know, brainstorming session with between the podiatrist and their marketing provider or the practice manager and the the marketing provider, it's a valuable time to share this information so they know what's going on and where the ball's moving to. Google's making new forms of advertising. You know, you know, ChatGPT is something that I think it's only a matter of time before they try to monetize that with some form of advertising.

It seems like, you know, they're only charging $20 a month for the the pro version currently. There's a lot there's a lot of versions of ChatGPT that are for free still that are very powerful. So to me, it and not supposedly, OpenAI who owns ChatGPT is not making a ton of money. So at some point in time, I think they're gonna have to have some form of advertising within that to turn on the revenue for that company. But, you know, staying on top of these things and working with someone that's gonna explain to you kind of where the puck is moving since I've lived in Canada, you know, for thirteen years, I can say the hockey, you know, move where the hockey puck's going as opposed to where it was.

But it's important to have those conversations and if you don't have somebody that's willing to help explain to you why that stuff is important, it might be time to look for somebody else.

Okay. It's been a good topic. Anything else you want to say before we wrap up?

No. I think it's just a matter of like, know, if you're just starting off with a podiatry and marketing provider, know, have these brainstorming sessions, know, if you're working with somebody already, you know, kind of touch base with them. And, you know, if they're, you know, if they're not willing to kinda meet you halfway, it's important that you find somebody that does. So I think a lot of marketing founders are willing to to kinda share this information, but you need to know the right questions to ask. So, you know, if you have questions about what you're doing or you need some good questions to ask your current providers, Tyson provides, you know, excellent coaching services.

I'm a little bit biased. Obviously, I I'm his cohost, and I I know he does a good job I'm

biased too.

Folks that I've I've heard from. And if you if you're not satisfied with your marketing provider, you know, I'm happy to answer questions, not to show myself too much, but I do this I'll I do this as well for my colleagues and happy to take a look and see if there's either way that either Tyson or myself can be happy.

But one of the things really important what you said then though is there's gonna be like, going way back when you said this communication between the two, but I think sometimes the fault may lie with the podiatrist. They set up these people, they go, oh, we're do all this for them. They go, yeah. That's great. And then they just go off to do podiatry stuff.

And then I realize part of the responsibility is on them to reach out to their provider and go, hey. I wanna have at least a quarterly meeting to ask you questions from you to teach me, train me, to show me what's actually happening. Then if they get rejected, then, okay, okay, they're not doing their job. But I think the podiatrist has gotta get off their bum and do a little bit too.

Yeah. It's marketing in this online stuff is something like I said, sometimes you feel like you know a lot of podiatrists feel like they know a little bit about that kind of stuff, and then obviously they're so busy in clinic maybe managing the staff, seeing patients, doing other things, running to the surgery center to do procedures that it's sometimes left on the back burner. But if you're working with and sometimes people feel like, oh, you know, they should know what they're doing. They should be able to read my mind. They've done Yeah.

Know, five or six or a hundred different podiatry websites. But if you really wanna have an online presence that performs for you, that you're happy with and you're developing a a solid relationship with your marketing provider. You're like you said, Tyson, it is up to the podiatrist to to take some initiative, but you wanna find somebody that's gonna meet you halfway and, you know, help you build that ideal practice.

Okay, big Jim. I think this has been a fantastic topic, and I look forward to talking again next week.

Sounds great, Tyson.

Okay. Adios.

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