How to Audit Your Podiatry Clinic's Marketing Strategy

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

Welcome back to podiatry marketing. I'm your host, Jim McDannald. Joined as always with my trusty cohost, who doesn't always get his lines exactly right, Tyson Franklin. Tyson, how's it going today?

I'm fantastic today. Big Jim, this is take two of the introduction. How many times have I buggered up the beginning? I I you rarely make a mistake. You are a true professional.

No. I'm the king of the ums and the likes, but I'm decent at the beginning, I guess.

I butcher. I butcher. I reckon 50% of the time we do these podcasts, I stuff at the beginning because my my brain I get sidetracked really fast. And if something just catches my attention, then I lose my train of thought. So I apologize.

Yeah. But anyway,

happens to the best of us.

This podcast is gonna be an awesome regardless of how how badly I started, this podcast is gonna be great, we are talking about I'm not even gonna wait for you to ask me the question. We're talking about audit your marketing strategy. That is today's topic.

Well, it's like they say, it's not how you start. It's how you finish. So I'm excited to jump into this audit.

That's right.

And how we're how you how you think about auditing a a podiatry marketing strategy.

I don't think I've mentioned it on this podcast. I may have when I've spoken about the OODA loop. Have I talked spoken to you about the OODA loop before? I think we have.

It sounds familiar, but you'll have to remind me of what what the o o d a stands for.

Yeah. So the OODA loop, o o d a loop, is all about observe, orientate, decide, and act. So it's really about you wanna do something. So what you do is gather information. When you gather that information, you're you're observing the information, and it's that you can only gather what is basically available to you at the time.

Then you orientate, you look at it in different ways, different perspectives, and go, okay. How how could I look at this differently? But then at some point, you must decide, and when you decide on something, you must take action. Nothing happens until you take action. When you take action, it loops all the way around back to observe because now you have more information.

So every time you act on something, you get more information. And this sort of relates to the auditing your marketing strategy. So at the moment, you may have a strategy in place, and it could be, you know, who is your ideal patient, where are they spending their time at the moment, and then think about, okay, with what you're currently doing, if you put that into the OODA loop, observed it, orientate, decide, take action on it, is how does your current strategy how does it map to the people that or the patients that you wanna be talking to? Are there changes that you need to be making? So if you just stay on the same strategy without stepping back and actually doing a bit of an audit, you could be going down the wrong path or off a completely different track.

And before you know it, it could take you a lot of time or a lot of money to sort of get back on track.

I think that's a great point. I think you have to have that feedback loop. Right? Otherwise, you're just kind of throwing throwing things out there and see if they stick. But until you have that chance to get that feedback loop and really see what's working and not working and have some way to measure these different actions you're taking.

It just just a lot of action without any reflection is gonna lead you down a path that may not be the path you wanna go down.

Yeah. Well, some people will they might do some marketing, whether it's traditional marketing or on some online platform. They put it out there, and because they never stop to actually reflect on that or or or look at the results, like you said, you don't know whether it's working or not. And sometimes they might do something. It may have worked.

And then two years later, they've gone, oh, remember that thing that we did? Did that work or not? So they haven't they haven't gathered the information. I used to keep everything in my marketing folder. So each year, we had a marketing folder and what we did.

And as we were leading into the next year, we would review our marketing folder, all the things we did, what worked, what didn't work, and we didn't make any assumptions on things, and then we would use that information to set a plan up for the following year. And as the years went on, we would have more and more marketing folders that we would go through that had more information that we would plan for the next year. So I think you've gotta you've gotta dig really deep on this and never assume that what you're doing is actually working.

Yeah. Constant feedback and getting that the data around the results and having it in a, like you said, a a place where you can easily find it. Because if something works and you're not aware that it worked or you're not doubling down on it after you find something that is is is making significant traction for you can do for practice, then what was the use in doing it in the first place in a way? So if you have a more of a system setup, then you're much more likely to observe the change, observe the progress, and then find ways to repeat it or make it better in the future.

Yeah. Well, I was looking at a couple of older episodes we had done and we've spoken about Facebook ads, we've spoken about Google ads. And I was on a call early this morning with a group of people in America, that came up in conversation, Facebook ads and and Google ads. And and when I stopped and thought about it, I thought, well, if you're advertising on Facebook, Facebook ads are more of an interruption, whereas Google ads are more of something that people are searching for. Now, at the moment, say, okay, well, where am I advertising at the moment?

Do I need to change certain channels of where I'm trying to do my marketing, or do I need to add certain channels? So if you if you've got a a really good marketing idea, is there something that could go well on Facebook because it will interrupt people while they're on there, you know, talking to their friends and family and seeing what the neighbors are up to. And all of sudden, bang. Your your ad pops up and go, wow. Is that a real interrupt?

Or should you not be doing that and should you be focusing on the Google ads where people are going, wow. Why do my feet hurt when I get out of bed in the morning? And if you haven't changed or added things over a period of time, you're just sticking with that same process, this is where the audit comes in. It's to stop, dig a little bit deeper, and find out if I'm advertising on Facebook, is it really working? I don't know.

I don't know. You probably have a better idea. Do you know too many podiatrists that advertise on Facebook that are killing it?

I would say that people that are advertising on Facebook and Instagram are really trying to, whether it be like shockwave therapy or swift warts or try to get some kind of treatment out there that people may not know that exists.

Yeah. That's, it's that interrupt.

It's that interrupt or is that more of an awareness piece because, know, the common person's not going to understand that there's a painless, you know, way of removing a wart or there's a better way of treating plantar fasciitis. They don't, they're not going to be searching for shockwave therapy or swift wart removal, right? So you have to find some way to introduce these types of therapies to people in a way that they'll understand and to try to get their awareness for this procedure where on the other hand, you know, people know that what heel pain is or they know like what they know where they're located at and the type of person they need to see. Like if my foot hurts, I wanna see my Montreal Foot Doctor they'll search for So like you said, that's more what we call intent based, know, search or intent based advertising where you can put an ad next to that thing they're actually looking for. So search advertising can be a little bit more helpful, but that's the kind of, you know, what's the right mix of those two different things, right?

How much do you wanna make people aware that you do Shockwave versus you just want to go for something that's more, you know you know, Montreal Podiatrist or something. So if you're trying to be, you know, I think with someone who has a niche, you know, it can be a good way to show people that you do exist. But at the same time, like you said, you know, when you're scrolling through finding out what your ex girlfriend from high school is doing on Facebook, are you do you really care that, you know, about a you know, an ad about, you know, heel pain shockwave therapy? You know, there there's different ways to get people targeted with those ads though. Right?

If they have been on a a web page or, you know, they've been searching for things on your own website, like for heel pain, you can make those Facebook or Instagram ads really small and only show to someone that's like, you know, fired that pixel or these kind of tracking codes that are on your website. But that's been a little bit more limited these days, especially with Apple and other web browsers not allowing those things to have happened. But yeah, you're right. What is that right mix between awareness and intent based advertising? And that's one clear example of, you know, you need to think about when you're devising a marketing audit or a marketing system about where you wanna take your practice.

Yeah. Because you you might actually find when you start digging down and asking your patients, especially the question, how did you find out about it? Somebody say, I saw you online. Just try and dig that a little bit deeper, especially if you're the owner of the business. If you got a patient in front of you, have this conversation instead of talking about the the weather or what they did over the weekend, is dig a little bit, oh, when you said online, what did you actually mean by that?

And and then if if you know if you're doing a big Facebook campaign, it's finding out, are people seeing it? Because if they're not, you might find you might wanna take that budget and put it all into your Google Ads if you know that's where people are are coming from. But I know when I'm on Facebook, sometimes I'm biased because if I see a podiatry ad, I do stop and look at it for some for some strange But I also find a video will capture my attention far more than just a static a static scroll really fast. But a video, if it's moving, it sort of it makes me stop. Even if it's something I don't wanna look at, I I tend to stop just to see, oh, do I need another little machine that will make my whiskey taste smoky?

I've seen a lot of them lately.

When it comes to podiatry ads, I think you and I are maybe a little bit hyper aware, hypersensitive of those things because we're Yeah. I'm I'm really curious to see how, even like physical therapists or dentists, how people are kind of putting out their services in a genuine and authentic way sometimes or sometimes in a not so authentic way. But I think another example too is that along with the ads pieces, what kind of content is already on your website, right? I think I've had some clients recently who, they do kind of, there's kind of that spectrum of care between surgical intervention and conservative care. But things like regenerative medicine, stem cells, amnio, different types of injectables now are kind of becoming more known by the general public in a way.

So some of these regenerative medicine type modalities or the B stem cells or amnio and things are being searched more and people are looking for that online. And I've seen a real uptake. And then these are sometimes things you can't actually advertise on Google. But I've seen an uptake with some of the clients I've been working with that, you know, if you're doing that stuff, need to make sure it's visible, you know, through Google and through different types of search engines to make sure that it's ranking and it and you have that on your homepage. Because if you just have eye treat plantar fasciitis on there, there are going to be a certain subset of patients who want to have the newest or the best thing and that are aware of some of these terms.

So it's a fine balancing act.

Well, it is. It's I remember back in 02/2011 when we first got Shockwave. Now if you mentioned any about Shockwave, the first thing that popped into someone's head was Jack Nicholson with a plastic big thing in his mouth and two electrodes on his head. That's what that's what shockwave meant when you heard the heard the word. And when I first heard it, I'm thinking, my god.

That's the last thing I want. I've got a sore foot. I don't wanna get electrocuted. But as time went on and more and more people were hearing about it and investigating it, then, yeah, if you were saying treatment for plantar fasciitis, actually mentioning shockwave treatment for plantar fasciitis would be something that people are actually start started to search for. So, yeah, I think it's it's not just that term, it's getting a little bit more detail into those articles, which sort of leads me onto the one of the other points I wanted to make was if you map out your patient's journey where they are on the journey so a potential patient, there might be people out there who they don't even know you exist.

There's other people out that know you exist but haven't spent any money with you. There's other people that they've come in and they've spent money with you but they haven't returned. There's ones that return on a regular basis, and then there's other ones that not only they're returned, they refer a lot of patients to you. So that's five different people that could be your ideal patient for, you know, a 35 year old female patient, but there's some that have no idea who you are right through to people who refer all their friends to you all the time. So what you wanna find out from these types of people or how you can try and dig deeper is what what blogs do they read?

What events do these people attend? You might find, if it's a 35 year old female, where do these people hang out? If you can find out where they hang out through the patients that already spend money with you, if they spend money with you, then you know there's gonna be another group of people over there who don't even know you exist yet, so you gotta somehow talk to them. And the ones that do know you exist, you've to convince them to want to spend money with you. And using the existing patients you have is finding what social channels are they using.

No point being on Facebook if none of your ideal patients are on Facebook or Instagram or what whatever social platform is there. TikTok. I always like to do the TikTok dance every now and then. If people ever catch you and I, Jim, doing a TikTok dance together and putting it out there, poof.

We're not doing any dancing, but we are podiatry marketing. I I put some of the clips we have from our shows up on TikTok these days, and they do pretty well on YouTube shorts and TikTok. You'd be surprised.

So the last thing I just would say is, yeah, with with the audit itself, it's like, are you where you need to be to generate the results that you're after? If you think about what is it that you wanna achieve from your business, what results do you wanna get each month? Currently, is the marketing getting you those results? And if you don't step back and just think about it a little bit and start making some changes and tweaks, you could just be doing, yeah, this year the same thing you did last year and the year before, and your business isn't growing. And then people around you, their businesses are growing, and you wonder why does their business seem to be doing well and I'm not.

So that's what I mean. Look at all the marketing you're doing. Do a really good audit over it all. If you need help with it, talk to Jim. Talk to myself.

Yeah. Reach out to us and say, hey, I need some help with my marketing. Can you just help us? Yes, we can. So it it's don't just keep doing the same old thing and expect different results.

It's not how it works. You must make changes.

And I would say even myself when I'm looking at how I'm marketing my business, you know, there sometimes can be blind spots when you try to do it all by yourself.

Oh, yeah.

There's certain so I think, you know, not to shill us too much, but I think having Tyson or me look at your website, look at all the different channels while trying to be visible on who's your ideal patient? Are you speaking to that ideal patient on all these different channels in the way that they want to be spoken to? What are the visuals on your social and on your website? It's a lot maybe for someone that's in the clinic nine to five, four days a week and has a day of surgery. It can be tough to do that, but Tyson and I are here to help you out, to make sure that you're on the right track and to kind of focus on those sources of ROI in your marketing that's really gonna help you move the needle and build the type of practice you wanna have.

Because the self audit is a great first place to go and if you're knowledgeable and you can do it, but just you know, utilize the system like Tyson said, this OODA loop can be very, very beneficial to help sure that you are doing those high value activities, getting the feedback from it, and iterating in a way that helps you walk down that path the practice you'll be really, really happy with.

So I love the OODA loop. It's one of my favorite things, the OODA loop. Anyone that's done the reboot with me, though, they I rave about the OODA loop or anyone that's done coaching with you for a period of time, they also have the same thing. I love the OODA loop. I'll I'll tell them, oh, we should do this.

Yeah. Maybe do something. They go, yeah, then we'll OODA loop the shit out of this thing. I said, that's it. I said, that's what you've that's what you've gotta do.

So yeah. So my my final words on this, yeah, when when you're doing your self audit, take it to a you can take it so far. But if you need help and, yeah, if you've made some changes, you're not getting results, yeah, you reach out and and get help from somebody externally. Even if you got another podiatry friend or you've got family, take a look at your website. The amount of websites I go to where there's links broken, spelling mistakes, they've got an image to say one thing but the photo is complete it doesn't even match that image.

And these are people that I know that I just haven't gone to the website for a little bit, and you go in the book, you go, have you seen this, this, this? And they go, oh, I thought I'd fix that already. So it's like I said, you can't see your own bald spot, thank god.

Exactly.

Until there's a camera right in front of you and you can actually see yourself. Okay, Jim. That's that's all I wanted to talk about on this is everyone needs to just order the marketing, and and and things will work out a lot better.

Alright, Tyson. We'll see you next week.

Okay. See you, Jim. Bye.

Bye. Thanks for listening

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