How to Know if Your Marketing is Working

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 by my trusty cohost, Tyson Franklin. Tyson, how's it going today?

I am fantastic. Very big. Jim, how you been doing?

It's Canada. It's, you know, November, snow, cold weather. The kids and I about froze going Halloween trick or treating a little while ago. So, yeah, it's just kind of bunkering down and getting ready for a long, cold, exciting winter here in in Montreal.

It's funny. We were at a local shopping center just down the road from where we are, and the shopping center itself no. It was not massive shopping center, but it's it's a decent size. And they decided to put on, like, a trick or treat thing within the actual shopping center. So instead of kids having to go out in the streets and doing well, they actually did it inside the shopping center from about 03:30 in the afternoon right through to, say, 06:30 when it closed.

There we were there just doing our normal shopping. There were so many kids there, all dressed up, having an absolute ball, but we're surprised how many parents were were there as well. Everyone was having a great time.

Yeah. Well, there's a street in our neighborhood that just, like, insane. Right? Like, it just probably 30 or 40 houses on that street have, you know, candy and sometimes little little types of Halloween entertainment. So it's a fun time of year to get out and see some neighbors and, you know, hopefully not totally freeze.

But

Did you get dressed up?

That's that's life up here. I did not. I my my daughter was Hermione Granger, and my son was a red ninja. So I was just I just keep an eye on them, making sure they weren't running, you know, two blocks down and getting lost or thinking we forgot about them and stuff. So they're still pretty young and gotta watch over

them. Yeah. You'll get snatched by a black van or something like that.

Exactly. But enough of that, those those happy stories. Are we gonna jump into today?

Today, we're gonna talk about how do you know if your marketing is working. And the reason I wanna talk about this is because there's a lot of times when I talk to different podiatrists, some of them like marketing, some them say they don't like marketing, some understand it, some don't understand it. But the biggest thing is understanding whether it's working or not. So even if you don't like marketing, you need to know if your marketing is working. So if you're doing it yourself or even if you're working with a third party that's helping you with your marketing, is you need to know what's working and what's not working.

And it's really funny. A friend Dave Fries always says, yeah, do more of what's working and less of what's not working. And he says it sort of makes it's common sense, but

Sound advice.

But it's surprising how many people will be doing something. They might, for example, be spending a certain amount of money to advertise in a school newsletter, for example. But then if you ask them, so what how many patients did you get from a school newsletter? I have no idea. Like, what do you mean you have no oh, I I couldn't tell you.

I just I just know we've been doing it now for a couple of years. And then probably spending could be a couple hundred dollars a year. It might be a thousand dollars a year. But I'm thinking if you're going to spend money in any way when it's got to do with marketing, you need to be able to measure the results. So it comes back to, like, testing and measuring everything that you're doing, And and then along the way, making these small little tweaks to try and improve things.

And sometimes you might change something. It doesn't mean it's gonna improve. It might make it worse. But if you're not measuring it, you wouldn't know.

Yeah. If you're just kind of there's no measuring stick, you have no kind of basis to make these decisions. It's it's tough to tell what's working and not working. I know that even when I'm, you know, doing marketing for clients or marketing my services, you know, you have to kind of focus on on what's working. And the way you do that, like you said, is what are those metrics or what are those ways of measuring that you can make sure that that you're getting the most out of what you're doing?

Because it is that kind of return on investment and just really kind of trying to make sure that you're investing in your marketing and the things that are gonna help grow your practice.

Yeah. And it's it's goes back to there's a guy, Patrick McFadden, and he always says that marketing just amplifies what you already have. So if you're not happy with the type of patients that are coming into your business, then you need to change the way that you're marketing. Because whatever you're doing now is attracting a certain type of person or a certain type of patient. And if you look at them and you just wanna give them an elbow half the time because you're going, oh, I like these patients.

Yeah. Just a nice straight elbow. And you go, no. It's well, then change what you're doing. And then as you change your marketing, you'll notice that the type of patients that you're seeing will change.

Now if they're changing for the worse, then you've you've done something wrong. But usually, they'll start changing for better once you actually understand what you're doing with marketing.

I think the most important thing you talked about there is is, like, understanding who you are and who you wanna treat and then kind of, you know, finding the the type of marketing or the channels of marketing that that work right to attract those types of patients. Because marketing, I think, is one of those things for, you know, busy busy podiatry practice. You know, a podiatrist knows about marketing or maybe has heard about Google Ads or heard about certain things, and it's sometimes easy to kind of get excited about what that next thing is or, you know, just just experimenting in a channel that you don't know a whole lot about. But it really takes, you know, an expert or someone who's who's do done a lot of different types of channels and different types of marketing to help guide, you know and maybe a practice owner after a period of time, if they've done enough of it, they can kinda get a general sense of what's working, not not working. But sometimes one way of kinda fast forwarding, you know, through some of the, you know, the the kind of not improper, but just kind of, you know, sometimes wasting a bit of your your ad budget or wasting a bit of your marketing budget.

You can kind of sometimes get rid of that that wasted spend by, you know, working with someone who worked with podiatrists who are looking for sports medicine patients or trying to do more surgery. There's ways to, and there's certain channels that will help facilitate more of that kind of patient as opposed to kind of a either a scattershot approach or just testing things out on your own. We don't really know what will attract that type of patient to your practice?

Yeah. Because I know a lot of podiatrists, when they first start out, they purely just watch what everybody else is doing, and they just copy it. So they'll see the podiatrist down there and, oh, they advertise in this, yeah, this school newsletter, or maybe I should advertise in that one. Or they'll see them advertising or doing something on on one of the online platforms, and they go, if they're doing that, that means I need to be shooting videos doing something yeah, explaining a podiatry problem. Or some of them, they'll see they're doing videos and they're they're dancing and doing something stupid.

And certain podiatrists can get away with that because that's just who they are. They're quirky. They're a little bit funny, and the patients expect that. But if you're not funny and you're not quirky, and then actually, you're trying to do a funny video, and I've seen some people do that, and, oh, they're very it's very uncomfortable.

It's awkward.

Oh, yeah. You're watching me go, oh, please don't. Yeah. It'd be like you and I doing a dance video together. It'd be just there's there's some people that shouldn't do it, and you and I are are two of those people.

Unless you

I don't know. I'm pretty good at some I'm pretty good at weddings. I don't know. I'm I'm not gonna toot my own horn here, but I'm I'm a decent dancer.

Hey. I must admit, like, my daughter is still impressed that I'm the only parent, like, from a dance school and that could still moonwalk. She goes, I can't believe. She goes, you and your yeah. You're, like, fifties now, and you can still do the moonwalk.

I said, it's a skill. You never lose it. It's like riding a

bike. No.

But but if you can't moonwalk, I've seen people try and moonwalk who do it who try it, and it's really bad. And you just you just don't do moonwalking if you can't do it.

Definitely not. Yeah. Give it up.

Just give it up. So so when it comes to testing and measuring things, it's like it's making what whatever you're currently doing, and if if you wanna improve upon it, it could be the headline in an ad that you're doing. But it's it's just changing one little thing at a time. It's don't throw out the whole ad that you've created, whether it's for online or offline. Don't just toss the whole thing and start something new.

It's look at what you currently got, and you'll know that every time a patient comes in your clinic, if you're not asking the question, how did you find out about us, you need to slap yourself now. But I assume nearly everybody is doing that, and you need to take note of what they usually tell you isn't always the truth. So when they're in the room with you, if you have the time, and only the business owners will do this, anyone who's working for you will not do this, even if you tell them to, because they won't. It's just you just gotta accept that. But as the business owner, when people walk into your clinic and they write down, oh, saw you online.

But what does that mean? So if you happen to be in the room with them, just dig a little bit deeper. Oh, you you write down here online. What was what were you doing? What did you search for?

And then find out the process of how they really found you. Because you might have someone say, oh, yeah. My doctor sent me doctor Smith. You go, okay. So when you were with doctor Smith, he said, you should go and see Tyson because he is the best podiatrist in Cairns.

I go, oh, no. He just said you need to see a podiatrist. Okay. Well, how why me? Why did you choose my podiatrist?

Oh, well, then I went online and I typed in podiatrist in Cairns that that deals with a particular problem, and you popped up. So then I read this blog article, and that's what made me decide to come and see you. You go, great. So that's not the doctor. So it's digging deeper, finding out the referral sources.

But once you figure that out, is wherever the patients are coming from, it might be you might written a a blog article that is fantastic, but the headline might be terrible. Or the photo that you've got in that picture might be so generic. As soon as people see it, they go, oh my god. There's this guy that Nikki Judd and I joke around, we call same guy. And it's this it's this all to do with gray hair and a white coat, and he's got, like, a stethoscope around his neck.

And he turns up in a lot of medical type vlogs. And, yes, we preferred him the same guy. There's a girl that could be called same girl as well. But you'd find that, Jim, where you've gone to someone's website, and all of a sudden, there's a stock photo there, and straight away you go, oh, that's just that's repulse. Not not that the photo's repulsive, but it just straight away the trust level just drops because of that photo.

Yeah. It just doesn't have that authentic feel. You know? Like, if it's, you know, the the practice owner that's in the in the image treating kind of his ideal patient, it just builds kind of a it's a it's a strong nonverbal signal to patients that, you know, that guy that person, that man, that woman is the expert, and they're they're treating someone like me. And that's so much more attractive than something you pull off of a $2 stock image of somebody with a stethoscope and, like, got their arms crossed and they're, you know, given that, like that doctor look like they, you know, they went to, you know, eight years of school and six years of residency, whatever.

Right? So, yeah, stay away from those because it just it says it says a lot about your your practice of having to write anything down.

Yeah. Because you might be writing blog article. You've got a section on your website, for example, about Shockwave. And you can have the stock standard photos that the Shockwave company have sent to you, where it's a photo, it's got a whole pile of pretty people all standing there, and you just know straight away, it just looks fake. They know that's not your clinic.

Or you can have a photo of you or a team member and it's got your logo or something in the background. They can just tell that is your clinic using that equipment. That is a lot more authentic. So you might change a headline. You might change a photo and make them more, yeah, more trustworthy photos.

You might change the copy. How you write, especially these days with all these AI programs that are around, you can take something that you have written, put it into AI, and say and and ask them to improve upon it. Change the style. Add a few different things to it. Look at what they write.

Always reread it because they like to tell lies. And but that might be a a better quality. That's why, like, I use Grammarly all the time to help improve my writing, and then sometimes I'll put it back into Grammarly and go, hey. Can you change this but make it friendlier? And all of sudden, it'll it'll change the style for me.

But even just the the colors of different things in any sort of ad online and offline, what what you're doing. Certain colors attract people, certain colors put people off, certain colors create a certain emotion. So it's just it's being aware of that, and it's don't change the headline, the copy, the photo, and the color all at one time. Because if all of sudden there was a significant change, you don't know which one it was.

No. %. If you're just kind of changing things up the whole time, you're gonna be lost in the sea of change and not know what's working, what's not working. It's probably it's much worse than than doing no testing at all, to be honest. If you just do one thing at a time, you have a much clearer understanding, much more direct results from that.

But like I said, if you're if you're not gonna take more of a methodical approach by just changing one at a time, then then don't change because otherwise, you're just burning time for no real purpose.

Because a lot of times, people will create some form of marketing. And a lot of times, people are just constantly throwing at tactics. They saw somebody else do something, so they do it. And it works or it doesn't work. And they see somebody else do something, so they try that.

It works or it doesn't work. And this is where you've gotta really step back and think more of this strategic level. What is it you're trying to achieve? Who are you trying to attract? And then work out what is gonna be the best marketing tactic to use, and then tweaking it to try and improve upon it.

So it's even when it comes to to platforms, for example. If you look at all the social media platforms yeah. And the big ones are, yeah, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube. What would you say the next one? What would you say is number four?

They weren't in any particular

I'm on LinkedIn a lot, but I don't know if that's actually the best place to look for patients.

I think LinkedIn's a great professional platform to connect with other professionals, but I don't know if patients run around there. But I know, yep, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube are huge. And there's different practices, but I do clinics that I know just kill it on certain the ones that just absolutely kill it on YouTube are not necessarily the ones that are killing it on Facebook or Instagram. And those that are killing it on Instagram aren't usually killing it on YouTube. So sometimes it's good to be just great at one particular platform and then okay at a couple of others.

I totally agree. You can spread yourself out very thin. It seems like every three to six months, there's a new platform, whether it be, you know, Facebook has their threads, you know, Twitter's now x, like I said, LinkedIn, Snapchat, TikTok. There's probably gonna be a new one in the next, you know, couple months. So do at least at the very beginning, do one thing and do it very well.

Have kind of your own voice on that channel. Obviously, like we've talked about in the past, these social media channels don't just they they shouldn't be just make appointment, make appointment, make appointment. You need to show your personality, show your expertise, show your staff, show the kind of differentiating factors you have versus the the clinic down the road. You show your personality, your love of I like to tease a little bit, but your love of burgers is a is a perfect example of

Mhmm.

How you can kind of, you know, you appear to be you know, you're a human being. Right? So it's okay to show that human side. We talked about, like, you know, celebrating your staff. It doesn't have to be constantly shoving, you know, fungal toenails in the faces of the people to follow your page because probably that's not something they would ever wanna share with anybody.

Right? So finding that channel where you think your ideal patient is and then, you know, getting really good at it, can be a a great way to get started and not be overwhelmed by you know, I would definitely highly recommend that you'll go into, like, three to five channels to start off with. Start with one and do it really well.

Yeah. And and that comes all back to the testing and measuring. And it's ask your patients who are in the room with you. Instead of talking about politics or religion, you know, the two great topics that really bond people, is while you're chatting and say, are you on social media at all? You are.

Oh, okay. What platforms do you go on? Why do you go on there? How much time do you spend on there? What what is it you're looking for when you're actually on those particular channels?

And, like, I know when I'm on Facebook normally, I'm on Facebook because I wanna catch up with friends, see what they're doing. But I'm connected with a lot of different podiatry clinics as well, so I see all that information. When I'm on Instagram, it's slightly different. I'm there to sort of, I don't know, just look at photos. Just yeah.

And they're they're usually shorter sort of things. But when I go into YouTube, I'm usually searching for something because I want to be educated. I rarely jump on there just to watch a video. Even this unless I'm watching someone who's just released a guitar video about teaching a certain technique or it might be a UFC video. That's my entertainment.

But, usually, I use YouTube to educate myself. So ask your patients what platforms they use and why do they use them. Look at what they tell you, especially your ideal patients, and they go, okay. Now let's test it. Let's try it out.

And there was a there was a really good thing. So, yeah, I was in America last month, and while I was there at Business Black Ops, they gave this good example, and they told me YouTube as a perfect example. And they said some people will wait until they're perfect before they start. And they said, what you gotta do is just put something out there. Just test it.

Test the waters a little bit. The lighting might be okay. The sound might be okay. Just put it out there and see what response you get. And then based on the response, you know whether you put more time, money, and energy into it.

And they said in the example they gave, they said, think of the Mayflower because we're in America. And then they knew also. Said, think of when they sent the convicts to Australia. They said, England sent people out, they didn't send out high society and the top quality people in England. They sent out the crazies.

They sent out now if anyone who had family on the May 5, are. I don't know if it was just crazies, but but they sent the crazies out to these places first to go, let's see what happens. And then they sent out more people. And then as it started to get more civilized and they realized, okay. This this could work, the quality improved over a period of time until, yeah, just better people or, you know, people that were at a higher socioeconomic level started coming out to, yeah, America started coming out to Australia.

They said, treat your platforms and everything you're gonna do the same way. Send your crazies first. See what response you get. And then as it improves, you start putting more time, effort, and money into it, and you'll get the return. But it all starts with testing and measuring everything that you're doing to know whether what you're doing is actually working, which is all part of your marketing.

Yeah. Could put it any better. I think it is something where you're you're constantly experimenting, whether it be new channels or new ways of getting out there. It's easy sometimes to kind of be your own worst critic, especially when you kind of either create content or putting stuff onto these channels because you see or maybe someone on your staff sees you putting these things out all the time. But to be honest, most podiatrists or most patients in their lives are pretty busy.

Right? So don't be too shy just to put stuff out there and even rinse, recycle, and repeat some of it because it's if it's you know, obviously, maybe you if you just send out one type one themed, you know, Facebook post or something on YouTube and doesn't hit, doesn't actually mean that that topic isn't important and maybe just maybe the headline is a bit off. You know, maybe it was instead of being thirty minutes, try, like, five minutes, something more kind of quick hit. So there's different ways to kind of adjust what you're doing. But like you talked about in the past, like, it's about, kinda finding your ideal patient, knowing which channel they are in, and then just testing things incrementally over time.

And you'll get to that right formula as far as the type of content you like to produce and also the type of content or the type of marketing your patients will engage with.

Yeah. It's funny because I I I think in my YouTube channel, Tyson e Franklin, in case anyone's wondering, should change. I'm not I think it'll change it just to mister awesome.

Mister wonderful. I think that was, like, a wrestler and and I

think it was. Yeah. I don't if anyone has mister awesome. I should check it out. Anyway, this I was just joking if anyone's listening.

And and but what I think like, I've got over 520 videos that I've uploaded to YouTube on that channel. And I every now and then, I'll be flicking back through something, and I'll pop up, like, some of my early ones. And I look at them and I go, oh my god. They're awful. The lighting was terrible.

It's got the the cameras, like, shooting up my nose. It's just they're awful. They're awful videos. But at the time when I did them, I thought, oh, these are pretty good. They're good enough to to put up there.

But if it wasn't for me doing those ones, you know, sending my crazies first and then seeing what happened, I wouldn't have slowly improved. So, like, you know, say the last hundred or so videos, I've got the microphone, better sound. I know I I sometimes let natural light in, but I've also got a little switch here that I can improve the lighting if I wanna improve the lighting. Sometimes I put it on, sometimes I don't. Depends what time of the day it is.

But these are little tweaks that you make over a period of time that if you just sit there and wait till everything's perfect, you will never do it.

Yeah. You can kill yourself with trying to be perfectionist, and there's always gonna be little little things you can prove on on the next video or the next blog post or the next social media post.

Yeah. Like, now I do I have no hair. When I first started shooting videos, I had hair, so just be warned.

That's I did I did send you that powder last year that you could have, you know, got rid of some of that shine, but

I know.

Just not to wear.

I know you did send me powder to sort of put on my head to rid of it. What I gotta do is I'm gonna fix a light. This what I mean? That's what I mean where it's the lighting in this room. It's still far from perfect.

But if I wait until it's perfect, I'll then some of the content that I put out there that I know people listen to and they go, oh, that was really good. I've used that that idea. It would all just be still be sitting in my head. So if you're a podiatrist and you've got information that can there's someone walking around today who's got pain, You have the information, and they're gonna find you. They're not gonna find anybody else.

If you're not sharing that with people, then you're being selfish. You need to get it out there. And, yeah, there's some podiatrists there that just bloody they're so good in front of cameras. They just make the rest of us look bad. You've noticed that you see some people, you just go, god.

They're just they're just so good in front of a camera. They've got this natural charisma. They don't have any shine on their head. They just yeah. I'm not one of them.

Makes two of us, but that's why we're here each week recording these episodes, get a little bit better each week, and that's well put.

Yeah. Okay. So that's it for me. Just wanna remind everyone, if you wanna know if your marketing is working, just test and measure all the different aspects of it. And, yeah, and when when you're thinking about, should I I work with somebody else online?

Talk to Jim. If you wanna talk with somebody else just about marketing strategies and coaching, talk to me. This is this is what we freaking do. This is why we do the podcast. It's not just to educate people on marketing, but it's also to let people know we're freaking good at what we do.

If you're thinking about going to some massive big company who is just gonna flop you off to somebody else, just an employee who's gonna be teaching you stuff, deal with the guys who have actually done it. That's just my 2¢ worth at the end there. So, Jim, I'm I'm done for this week. I'm a bit fired up, actually.

Yeah. I could tell. It was it was a good episode in a in a fiery note, but until next week, Tyson. Okay. I'll see you then.

Okay. Bye. Bye.

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.