Know Your Patient Avatar and Call to Action Before Using AI

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 are my trusty French speaking co host, Tyson Franklin. Tyson, how are you doing today?

I am fantastic today, Jim. And we are both trying not to laugh at the moment, which is which is good. Which means this should be a fun this should be a fun episode. I've just got myself under control again now. I'm good.

Alright. So what are we jumping into today then?

Well, we're jumping into it today. This episode is gonna be titled, know your patient avatar and call the action before using AI. What it's Yeah. I know. And so basically, even before you think about social media, be able what social media platforms you should be using, or if you're gonna shoot a video, write a blog, or do some audio recordings, or you go back a few steps back to the beginning.

Because a lot of times, people just straight away, they go, oh, I wanna write a blog article. They go to AI. Chat GTP, Claude, Gemini. I'm thinking about shooting a video and getting your script done, and straight away, they go to AI, and they're getting them to produce things, which is not a terrible thing, but you can do it a better way. Going back a couple of steps, the first thing you should do before you even go anywhere near AI, just stay away from it.

Just keep right away from it until you know who you're creating your content for. Who is your avatar? Who is your ideal patient? And I know people have heard us talk about this before, your ideal patient, but I bet majority of you have not done it. You might go, oh, yeah.

It's a male or female between the ages of 25 and 55, and and that is so vague, it's so beige. If your ideal patient is male and female between the ages of 25 and say 45, I'll guarantee a 25 year old male and a 45 year old female are at completely different stages in their life. You would talk to them different. They would do different activities. They're different hobbies.

Socially, would do they're such completely different people. If you're trying to talk to both of them, you're stuffing up. That's the truth. So you need to go back. Picture the perfect patient sitting right in front of you.

If you get to a clinic full of those patients, and before someone says, I'd get bored seeing the same patient every day, shut up and just listen. Because just picture the ideal one. You're not gonna get a thousand of those patients come in, but just picture them and describe who they are as much detail as you can. I'm feeling very aggressive this morning, Jim.

I know you're telling people to shut up. I know. You're making off color French comments. I mean, it's just a it's a wild it's a wild day today here on the Podiatry Marketing Podcast.

It's it's just one of the things, you know, when people will post things on, oh, I wanna get can someone give me some marketing tips to get more patients? And I'm like, jeez. Just and then you can say to them, who's your ideal patient? Describe them. And they'll say, oh, 25 to 45, male or female.

Because they could all be my patients. And I know they can all be your patients, but you really gotta pitch one that that's who you're going to talk to. And when you talk to that person, then you're not gonna always hit them, but you'll get a lot of people that are similar to them. The age group might vary a little bit. You will get some females if that's who you're talking, but you will also get males who resonate with that message.

But you've gotta come up with the before you create content, you gotta know who your ideal patient is, Which leads on the second thing is what is your call to action for those patients based on where they are on the patient journey, and what action do you want them to take? What I mean by that is there'll be certain people who may have a foot problem but don't even know podiatry exists. How are you gonna talk to them? Because you might think okay. Say you've written down your description of the ideal person, ideal patient.

You've got them really pictured in your head. This can be those people that know who you are, and this can be a group of those people that don't know who you are. So you've got to create your content differently depending where they are on the journey. You might have a patient who's already engaged with you for something else, but now they've got this new problem, how you talk to them is gonna be completely different.

That's well put. You know, someone that doesn't know who you are, you know, you're still in that kind of trust building phase with them. Yeah. So it's one of those things where you're you're not gonna just like give them an opportunity to review your clinic. You're not gonna present call to actions to them that don't make sense for the stage of the patient journey they're in.

As opposed to someone who has had great results with you, who is a practice advocate, you're gonna ask that person to do something completely different than someone who doesn't know you. So knowing who you're building that content for and then what you're gonna ask them to do is, yeah, it's gonna really vary. So you need to make sure that the message fits for the person at the right stage of down that kind of podiatry journey, that podiatry path.

Yeah. So if you were creating content around getting a review from somebody or or a test you know, testimony depending on what country you're in, but say you're gonna get a review from a patient, you don't ask the patient who's just walked through your door to inquire about, do you help with heel pain? Or can you write a review for us? They'd be like, don't haven't been here yet. Compared to someone who's been through the process, may have had orthotics, may have had family members, then you ask them for a review.

This is what I'm talking about. You could create content, but depending where they are on the journey or what you're gonna ask them to do is going to be completely different. So you really need to sit back and work through step one, who is your patient avatar? And then step two, what do you want them to do based on where they are on their journey? Once you have that, then you go to AI and go, okay.

Now, let's get to work and start putting something together.

But what is that and once you have that information, prompts or how do you how do how do you get the the right kinda outputs from that then, Tyson?

Prompts are a big that's a that's a different beast altogether. Because we were talking about prompts off air just with some of the stuff that we're doing. And you can do some very basic prompts. What I like about, say, chat, for example, and Claude's probably exactly the same, the more you're using it, the good part is is once you have this information, who your avatar is, who your call to action is, when you put that into AI, you can start almost having a conversation with it, which is what makes it fun. So you enter the information in, and then you can get it to help you develop the right content for the right patient, basically, at the right time.

That's one of the key parts. So AI may help you choose the right modality. So when you're telling it, this is my ideal patient, this is what I wanna create, should we do a video? Should we do text? Should we do audio?

Should I do a combo combination of it all? And they're gonna find based on who your avatar is, they might lean you towards a certain way. So maybe for this group of people, YouTube Reels or YouTube Shorts might be the best platform that you should actually be using or modality.

That makes sense. You you definitely have to match the the kind of the channel or the the message to that to that patient because like you talked about like, I didn't grow up on TikTok or I didn't grow up and if I wanna have young patients or if I wanna have, you know, patients of a certain age, what are those channels where they're actually gonna potentially see you and help build trust? Because like for example, maybe young people are little less into email, a little less into, you know, getting, you know, talking to people. So it's you have to find the right way to communicate with that ideal patient avatar.

Well, my daughter's 21, and if I want to get something through to her, if I send an email, she'll get it when she's 27. She does not check her emails unless she's really expecting something. She's filled in something, she's expecting some the only time she looks. Other than that, I've seen her email thing that they just pile up. She doesn't look at them.

She doesn't care about them. I was talking to a lawyer recently who was in Texas, and he said, I was somewhere like twenty percent of his patients, some crazy figure, come from TikTok. He's a 60 year old lawyer on TikTok, and I'm just shaking my head and go, what are you doing on there? And he said he just started he didn't wanna do it, but then he went to a seminar. This other lawyer said, get on TikTok and start building your authority, just sharing information.

Because what the area of law that he's in, I think he gets a lot of younger people, they're on TikTok. They keep seeing these videos on a particular area that then lead him onto his website, and then from there, he has further information and then they come and see as a client. So he he was blown away. He kept resisting it. I don't wanna do that.

But as soon as he started doing it, it it basically helped. So this is thing. When you know your avatar, like, part of his avatar were younger was a lot younger demographic. Once you know your avatar, you can then choosing the right platform is a lot clearer. So it could be social media.

It might be collaborations. Collaborating with somebody else like you and I collaborate on this this podcast successfully for almost four years. But it might be a newsletter. Your newsletter might be the best platform that you're going to put your message and your call to action because that you know that your ideal patient is going to look at that actual modality. I know with my own newsletter that I send out, it has about a 50% open rate, which is when you send out a couple of thousand, knowing a thousand people are looking at each time I do one, I'm extremely happy with it.

But it might be if you're in a smaller area, TV may still work. Guest podcasting might be the best thing for you to get your message out to your ideal patient and the best call to action, or you might would need to create your own podcast. And obviously, it heaps of times. If I had podiatry clinic tomorrow, I would have a podcast attached to my podiatry clinic.

That's definitely a great way to to network with other local businesses. When you brought that up, it also made me think, you know, sometimes you think about newspapers and older technologies being, you know, kind of the old way of doing things. But if there's still people that buy newspapers, there's still kind of a certain demographic that likes to read the the my my mother in law's one. She likes to read her morning newspaper. So if I were to advertise and I wanted to have more, you know, patients kinda in their seventies and eighties, for right now, a newspaper is a viable marketing option that is sometimes overlooked or is seen as old fashioned Yeah.

Or kind of, you know, out of date. But it depends on who you're going after and so knowing that patient avatar and your ideal patient is super important before you just kinda rule things out. And the AI can kinda help you maybe see past some of your your biases or something's kinda lead you in directions where you it's kind of not intuitive initially, but then you think about it's like, that makes a lot of sense.

Yeah. But everything has become so online, and I get it. I'm online all the time. Most of the stuff I do, I produce it online. There's not much hard copy of anything.

But and this is why it's really important to know who your avatar is. Because if your avatar is someone who probably may still read the newspaper, and this is why you need to ask that a person comes in your clinic that you sort of go, this is the person that I'd love to have more of these. The perfect age, they're nice, they're whatever your list of people, what what your list of who your ideal patient would be. And then you start asking questions. So do you still read the local paper?

If you find 30 or 40% of them still do, then maybe the local paper is a place you need to be marketing. But if you have your ideal patient and you ask them all and not one of them reads a newspaper, then you are wasting your time spending any money there because they're not reading it. That's not who you're basically chasing. Moving on with the AI. Once you've got AI helping you, you can use AI to help create frameworks.

And people will be going, oh, what's a framework? This is where you might it's a structure where you can say to AI, hey, I wanna write some topics about frequently asked questions on this particular problem, or do some q and a's, or five tips to, or a case study. So you can get AI to help you structure some of those things. I did a a talk recently to a dental group, and I went to AI and said, this is who the dental group is. This is all the information I knew.

This is what the topic that they're covering. So I gave it as much information as possible. It said, help me structure a talk for this duration, and this is this is what I wanna get at the end of it. And chat just went just gave me this list of things. I went through about 12 different items, removed four that I thought, yeah, they're good, but I don't have time to do all that.

It just gave me this whole framework on putting this talk together. It just saved me what it does is saves you a lot of mental energy.

Absolutely. And it kinda gives you a chance to like it can ideate and you can act as the editor. Right? Like maybe it's gonna get, you know, 80% of the stuff is good there or you think it's good. Maybe you need some polishing, but you don't have to start totally from scratch.

Yeah. And so a simple you might have five ways too. So using AI can help you structure it. But always never forget where they are on the journey when you're actually doing this. So you may say, this is my avatar is, this is what I wanna write, this is what the topic is, this is where they are on the journey at the moment.

So now help me structure the framework for that, and then you can actually fill in the gaps. And I still think you should write some of the content even if it's rough as guts, then give that to chat and say, now polish this up. And and then it will start putting something together so it'll be better, then you go backwards and forwards a few times. One of the other advantages of having a framework is so you don't actually miss anything. A friend of mine, Dave Wyman, who's a psychologist, he's usually at the business black ops events, he shoots these videos.

And when he does these videos called Verizon Wine. But what he does, he has this coffee mug that he holds up. He says, welcome to this week's episode of Verizon Wine, and it's written on the coffee mug, which has always been really funny. And then he goes on with his little spiel for a couple of minutes and the psychological aspect behind it. Love his videos.

One of the videos, forgot he didn't hold the mug up. So many people noticed he didn't hold the mug up. And he said what had happened is he'd forgotten to look at his framework of how he had it had it structured. It's the same as I've done videos, and in some of my videos, I'll say, hey, don't remember if you enjoyed this video, remember, give us a thumbs up. Click the tick the bell icon so you're informed when the next video comes out.

And a little emblem will come up on the screen as well that goes the thumbs up. If I don't follow my structure, I'll forget to do it every single time. I'll finish a video and go, oh, damn it. Didn't tell people to give me a thumbs up or like the video. So that's what a framework does.

It just keeps you on track. If you're writing an article, keeps you on track of what you wanna do. If you're doing a video, keeps you on track of the simple steps that you need to follow. We do the same thing on here, Jim.

No. For sure. We have we have kind of structures and systems in place to make sure that, you know, that I'm staying on point and I'm not getting, you know, way off topic. But also, when we're writing up things, when we're getting things onto YouTube, when you're editing the audio, I'm editing the video. There's kind of a checklist of things.

And sometimes, you know, whether it be a robot voice, sometimes things happen that that don't work out well. But I think it is it is super important to have these checklists. And I think, like you mentioned, having the AI kind of help kind of provide you a little support or a checklist or kinda work with you, kinda almost as like a collaborator, can be a very powerful way to make sure you're you know, producing like high quality content on a consistent basis, but not all that cognitive load as far as like having to memorize the checklist or like have like, what should I be doing now? How many blog posts am I gonna Like, if you have a a system and a project you've created either in ChatGPT or Clod, you can create these kind of projects in there and you can say, okay, we just did a podcast. What are the you know, how do I edit it on Descript?

Like, what are those steps that I need to do again? And it can walk you through those things, and you can also, you know, you can refine your process utilizing AI as well. But it just helps relieve some of that cognitive burden so you can just get back to doing the work and don't have to be bogged down by concerns that you've forgotten something or you've you forgot to double check something.

Well, a perfect example, when I was at Business Bike Ops in October, I was there with Peter Wishnie. And and I said to Peter, hey, we should shoot a video while we're here. We'll talk about something. And he said, yeah, that'd be fantastic. So we agreed we were gonna do it.

Then we were talking about this subject again, about your ideal patient you call to action or your ideal client call to action. What did you want them to do? Where are they on the journey? And then when I thought about that, I said to Peter, hey, let's not do a video because neither of us have sat down and thought about who we're talking to, where they are on their journey, and what we really want them to do. So I said, just shoot that video.

It would be a total waste of time. We'll shoot the video. It might be really clever and and great and someone might get something from it, but unless we're talking to specific people, what's the point? Plus I would've had to go on and edit the video. So it's all this extra time, and I think a lot of podiatrists do that.

They just they create content for creating content without thinking about who it's for, where are they on the journey, what do you want them to do. So when I said that PD went, you know what? You're right. I said, so let's do a video just telling people you're gonna be coming on the podcast and stay tuned. That way, at least we've got some call to action.

It's get ready for this podcast coming out. So that's what we ended up doing. Just shot this really short video. I think it went for sixty seconds, and it actually got a lot of engagement as well. So when the podcast comes out, everybody will basically know about it.

So one of the things too though is then don't do even a q and a. Don't even write a q and a unless you're writing it for your top avatar. Whoever is your ideal patient, really have them in mind when you're doing any form of q and a, any frequently asked question. What would your top ideal patients? What sort of frequently asked questions are they gonna ask?

Answer those ones. The other patients who are a bit of a pain in the bottom and annoy you who ask really dumb questions, don't answer them. Don't answer their dumb questions. Don't spend time answering dumb questions for dumb patients. Answer good questions for your good patients.

Now, I want everyone to go there and start creating content. And when you do that, start distributing it based on what you've heard on some of our other episodes. And we did do an episode on the Oodle Loop, didn't we?

Yeah. We did.

Yeah. If you don't know what the Oodle Loop is, go and find that episode, understand the Oodle Loop, and after you've done all this, you then need to go and oodle loop it. Everyone's everyone who hasn't listened to episodes go, what is an oodle loop? You'll figure it out when you listen to the episode.

No. That's it's really a great topic. I think a lot of people will just jump into AI too quickly and kinda like feel like it's gonna give them what they want out of it. But you really have to know your I think what you're talking about is really kinda like really knowing initially what your inputs are, like and then what your outputs wanna be. You want your outputs to be.

And like what what AI does is kinda help with that in between process. And when you have a clear understanding of your patient avatar, kinda where they are on the journey, that's really really important information and context to feed AI, whether it be Chad GPT or Claude, to get out those the the content and the outputs you wanna have. So I think it's a great topic and, you know, maybe in a future episode, we can talk a little bit more about those kind of frameworks about I think it's a great framework you brought up today, but also just other ways and other kind of roles that AI can play

Yeah.

In helping you not only market your practice, but make sure you're running your practice efficiently, you know, helping refine the way you're trying to build your clinic.

But what's really funny, we're talking AI now, but how old is the saying garbage in garbage out? I mean, that goes back decades. When they were talking about computers, you put bad information in, you're gonna get bad information out. AI is exactly the same. If don't stop and think about your ideal patient, where they are on the journey, what you actually want them to do, what action do you want them to take.

If you don't know that and you just put anything into AI, garbage in, garbage out. You're not gonna get as good quality stuff coming out. So I hope everyone gets something from this. If you want to if you need help with all the online social type stuff, you contact Jim. What's your what's the best way to contact you, Jim?

Yeah. They can contact me, jim at podiatry growth dot com. Just send me an email, always happy to get on a phone call and just hear about your practice, hear what's going on, and, you know, either provide some advice or talk about ways to work together. Try to build out the practice that will bring you that joy to your life.

I love the joy. And if you're looking for a business coach who does things a little bit differently, I take no prisoners. No, I do occasionally. But reach out to me. My email's tf@tysonfranklin.com or just go to tyson franklin dot com, click on coaching and all the information's there.

And as I was described by this dental group that I used to do work with, I'm described as the fun coach. I'm fun to work with, and we actually get results. That's the main thing.

I I definitely say if people found, you know, this podcast helpful, they should definitely share it with another podiatrist. You know, someone that, you know is is wondering, you know, how can they get more of their ideal patients. You know, this is a great episode to share with them, and you know hopefully that will translate into, you know, they'll they'll be they'll be thanking you for introducing you to the this episode.

Yeah. And when the edit edit all the swearing, you'd be able to post it anywhere. Okay, Jim. I I think we've we've covered it for this episode. It's been fun.

We we started laughing, and we're finishing on a laugh. That's the way it should be.

Absolutely.

Okay. I look forward to talking to you next week.

Alright, Tyson. Okay. Bye. 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.