Which Marketing Metrics Actually Matter?

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. Join us always with my trusty co host, Tyson Franklin. Tyson, how's it going today?

I am fantastic today, big Jim. How are doing?

I'm doing well. I'm kinda curious about how your your maple and your whiskey experiments came along. Is that something that you wanna let us know about?

Well, I haven't actually made it myself yet. I'm Okay. I need to go and buy get some I need to go and buy just some cheaper whiskey, and I've got maple syrup because I always have maple syrup. I have maple syrup every single day. But what stopped me was a friend from Canada visited, and he gave me a bottle of maple whiskey.

There you go. A whiskey liqueur with maple syrup in it. So I've been drinking that. I haven't got around to making it, but I'm gonna try. So I will give it a give it test.

But if anyone's listening to this, you find anything with maple syrup in it that you think I would like, send it to me. It's every anything with maple syrup, I just love it. I'm addicted to the stuff. It's terrible. So should we get on today's topic?

Let's do it. What are we gonna talk about?

Well, today's topic is not about maple syrup again. We are gonna talk about which marketing metrics actually matter, and basically, which ones you should be measuring, and which ones are just noise and can get in the way. And this sometimes confuses a lot of podiatrists because they they always you hear people to where, oh, you gotta know your numbers. You gotta know your numbers. And that is the numbers of your business, you know, the financial numbers.

But there's other set of numbers or the metrics of your business which are just as important, but you can it can get confusing because you'll have for example, if you're posting on social media like Facebook or Instagram, if you're running ads, if you're sending emails or even just maintaining your website, you get bombarded with so much information from yeah. Everyone would have heard these terms. Likes, impressions, open rates, click, yeah, click rates, bounce rates, engagement percentages, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. It just goes on. So there's so many things that you can look at all that, and it it can just get really, really overwhelming sometimes.

Yeah. You can kinda get distracted and not really understand what numbers are, you know, moving your business forward and what are just more vanity metrics for sure.

Yeah. And that's why not all metrics deserve your attention. There might be some things that are might be really important to one business. Like, if you're a an influencer, then maybe likes are important. But I don't think there's too many podiatry influencers out there that the patient in their local area and last week, we talked about the whole local SEO.

I think that your local area really cares sometimes how many likes you actually have. There's there's basically more to it. So there's some of what they call there's two types of metrics, vanity metrics and performance metrics. So vanity metrics don't really look much about how your business is actually growing. If you look at how many likes you get on a particular post, how many followers you have, or how many page views, that might make you feel really good, and they are they're sometimes they do.

I must admit, if I post something and you get a ton of likes, it does make you it really does make you feel good. But rarely does it translate to direct revenue for your business. It's the it's the scary part. Whereas the performance metrics, they're the ones that you should be tracking. They're the ones you should be measuring and use to actually make, better decisions.

So how many leads are generated? How many appointments are actually booked? How many calls are made? Patients that are retained? They're the real outcomes that are gonna drive your business.

So I would much yeah. You could have 10,000 likes somewhere, but I'd rather a hundred phone calls.

Well, those those vanity metrics sometimes will give you that little dopamine hit. Right? Like, oh, they liked it. Oh, wow. Like, it kinda is like a something that makes you kinda go back into those different social media platforms that you're right focused on what's moving your business forward.

Yeah. And that's why look. I've been was it the set the social network? Was that the name of the movie? The one about Facebook when it got started?

Yeah. The Facebook movie.

Yeah. And and I think that was part of the thing why they end up putting that section there about the like. They understand that that little dopamine hit that you get. And every time you pick up your phone and you're scrolling through Facebook, that's what keeps people on there. It's the little hits they get from the stuff that they post themself, and it's also looking at what other other people are doing.

And you can waste a lot of time looking at the wrong thing. I think that's that's the scariest part about social media. You can go down a rabbit hole really, really quickly.

Absolutely.

So I've got here my top five marketing metrics you should actually track. Almost needed a drum roll for that.

What's number one? Come on.

Number one.

Should we call number 5? It's number 5. I don't know.

Oh, it's in no specific order. Well, it's sorted out, but this is sort of number five, but it's gonna work its way down. But new patient leads. How many genuine inquiries are you getting each week, and where are they coming from? So it's like and this is the important part too when it comes to your referral sources.

Not all referral sources are equal. You might get a lot of calls from one particular place. Say, for example, you had two medical centers. One, you got a hundred referrals or or leads through that medical center, and the other one, you only got 10. It's what happens with those people long term is actually more important.

Just the numbers itself is, once again, is almost like a a vanity type thing. But it's how many genuine inquiries you get each week from what it is that you're actually doing. That's the first thing that you really should be measuring. And we used to have a a phone sheet. Some of my clients, I've given them this phone sheet.

And I'll say, for certain periods of time, have it at the reception desk. While you're doing different marketing campaigns, every time that phone rings, every time someone walks into your clinic, note down the time and also ask them yeah. Write down what the inquiry was all about because that will relate to what sort of marketing you're doing. So if you're doing a a big push on fungal nails, you should get more people inquiring about fungal nails. If you've done a big push on fungal nails and spent a lot of money on that, you're not getting one inquiry from it, whatever you're doing doesn't work.

No. Absolutely. I think one of those things that a lot of even digital marketers will sometimes kind of over rely on either analytic data, Google Analytics data, or Google Ads. But, you know, sometimes phone calls come in, sometimes things aren't attributed properly. So kind of a a way to to mark that down on paper can be a great way to kind of figure out the attribution of what was causing that.

Right? And and kind of help you, like you said, kind of figure out who those people coming in and making sure they're genuine inquiries based off the things you've been doing.

Yes. We used to have a new sheet each day. They just sit there at the front counter, and the receptionist would give me that sheet at the end of the day. And it was it was a really valuable piece of information because I knew what marketing had going on. So I really wanted to see, like, for example, if we're doing fungal toenails, we have, yeah, the time because I knew what was running when when certain things were popping up.

And you would see, yeah, they're trying to get the person's name, their contact, their email address if we could. So if we get follow-up information, that's a totally different podcast altogether. The money's in the follow-up. But I'd also get the receptionist to put their initials next to it on who actually took that call. Because if, say, example, Joanne took five calls, but only one out of five were making an appointment, and Barbara was taking the calls, and she was getting four out of five making an appointment, then I would look at that sheet and go, okay.

Well, what's Barbara doing? The the other one isn't. So that that was really that and that's the next thing you should be measuring is your patient conversion rate. Of those inquiries, how many actually book and attend an appointment? That is super important.

No. Absolutely. You have to know that conversion rate. Like you talked about, if someone's not, you know, kinda helping you convert those patients that are inquiring, there's there's some teachable moments that can be had between maybe you and the employee or maybe the two employees can talk about it.

What people gonna remember if they've listened to other podcasts, I have mentioned conversion rates before, that might be when a new patient comes in, how many gets orthotics, and that's got to do with the podiatry skills and communication. This patient conversion one is really just through your metrics. You've done some form of marketing. You're getting the phone calls coming through, so that's how many leads, then this is how many actually book and actually keep an appointment. Absolutely.

The next thing you wanna take a look at that, and this is really important, is how much did it cost you per lead? So how much are you spending ad cost and also time cost to attract each new inquiry? Because that will also let you know when you're keeping track of where the people are sort of coming from, you might be spending a lot of money in one area, and you're thinking, oh, yeah. I'm I'm getting phone calls from that. You might be spending or putting less time in another area and getting four times more of the inquiries.

So all of sudden, when you realize that, you can go, that's an moment. Double down and you put more time and effort and money into the one that's bringing in the patients. And even though people might go, oh, well, that just seems logical. It is logical, but not everybody does it. And I'm sure people listening to this now, when was the last time you sat back and actually really looked at your cost per lead?

Where these people are coming from and what you're spending, where this other group of people are coming from and what you're spending, and really thought about it? And I think too not too many people do it.

I mean, I think people even don't do the step before that, which is to really look and see where their patients are coming from.

Like Yeah.

Like what look what locations are they coming from first and foremost? Like you said, that's part of that cost per lead, which can be definitely calculated. But just to know which which, you know, locations, which neighboring cities, which neighborhoods are people coming from, so then you can go after more of those people. But, yeah, your cost per lead is definitely a super important metric. But just like you said, no one's really doing very few are really doing that.

I learned this back in I did a talk on this, I think, in 1996. I remember doing a talk at an event, and and the talk was how to create a million dollar podiatry clinic. This was the talk they did. Oh, did I cop it from so many podiatrists at this conference that I had you say and this is back in 1996, so that's a while ago. How dare you say that you can have a million dollar podiatry clinic?

I said, well, you could if you do this. And that's just that's just crap. You can't yeah. It's just impossible. Now, time's moving on, everyone knows it is possible.

But one of the things in that, I did the talk and I said, you've got these two ads, and you spend the same amount of money on both those ads. One gives you a hundred leads, you get a hundred phone calls from it, and this one, you only get 10 leads. Which is the better ad? And also, everyone's like, oh, the ones that get a hundred. I go, well, you don't know yet.

I said, you'd you'd really donate. Just get your hundred leads. I said, but if out of those ten, nine out of 10 book in, and out of those hundred, say 10 out of 10 book in, or 10 out of a hundred book in. I said, which is a better ad? And they go, oh, well, one that you got nine out of 10.

I said, well, you don't know yet. Because you gotta keep following it. What happens with these these patients as they go through? So sometimes people would just look at the activity, which is almost like the vanity metrics, and they get excited about that and think, oh, we should just give you more money in that because it it's getting the phone ringing. But if it's not converting, it there there's no point.

Yeah. The conversion is key.

Yeah. So the next thing so so far, we've gone through new patient leads, patient conversion rate, how many you actually book and keep an appointment, how much it costs you per lead to get those appointments, and the next thing is your patient retention rate. How many patients come back for additional treatments and reviews? Because you can have your thing where you have a pile of people coming for their initial visit, but if they didn't then don't follow-up with more treatment later or follow a treatment plan that you put in place, then those patients weren't really worth a lot of money to you.

No. It's kind of a leaky bucket. Right? You're hoping that people people will come in, have great care, receive follow-up care, and then, you know, maybe they'll see you back in a you know, after they're kinda done that course of treatment, they'll come back again. And then since they're familiar with you, you're more likely to get additional referrals, you know, to friends and family from that.

But if someone is a one and done, you just it's it's kind of they're not they're kind of out of that system, and you're gonna be paying for that brand new patient again. So you have to find ways to to retain those patients.

And the reason this is important to know, and this is something that I think every employee if you own a podiatry business and you have employees, they need to understand this thing I'm about to explain. If you're advertising, you're marketing if you look at and I mean, look at all your marketing that you do, right from running your website, the cost of having your website, the cost of your uniforms. That that's all part of your marketing. You put all your marketing together. That's how you work out how much it's actually costing you per new patient that walks in your clinic.

And you'd be surprised how much this all adds up to. When you divide it by how many new patients you have per year, that tells you how much it costs you per patient. And I knew when we used to do ours, say, for example, it costs us a hundred dollars to get a new patient sitting in our chair. If the initial visit at the time back then was only $90 and they never had another appointment, I lost $10 on that patient. There there was no point.

So you need to know what it costs to get each patient in, and therefore, you may not make any money from a patient until the second visit, until the third visit. But this is where smart businesses are thinking long term, and your your team needs to understand. And then if you've a podiatrist on a percentage, it gets even worse because part of that money is going to them, so you're making even less for that first visit. So if they don't have anything other than that, every time they come in, you're losing money, but the podiatrist working for you is making money. So it's

Yeah. That's a that's a recipe for disaster over the long term.

Yeah. And that's why some clinics go, oh, we're so busy and because so many people coming in, but we're just not really getting ahead. It's because you don't understand these numbers. And you might some people will set up a business and they'll go, oh, what's the podiatrist down the road charge? They charge this.

Okay. Well, I'm gonna I'm gonna undercut them. You don't realize that you're spending more to get patients in than you're actually charging them. So unless they come back, you're not actually making any money.

Yeah. You're you're saving yourself out of business in a way.

This next thing is per pay the next thing you wanna measure is your per patient value. So it's how much is each patient booked worth to you on average per consultation? You might go, oh, I know that this is what they pay for this and this is what they pay for that. But what you should do is look at the total patients that are booked in for a week and then divide that by the total revenue that you make that week. And that gives every patient a value.

And you you count every patient. So even the patient that's just coming in for a a quick review or something that you're not even charging them for, they're still counted. You might have a person that's coming in for an orthotic fitting, and they charge you $600 and they're only with you fifteen minutes. That's just one patient. When you divide that out, that gives you a per patient value.

The reason for doing this is over a period of time is as you get more efficient, you're seeing better quality patients, more the ones that you like, you should see your per patient value going up. And you should measure this for your whole clinic, and then you should measure it per podiatrist as well. And everyone should be pretty close, depending on the type of patients you're seeing. When I had the clinic, I was only doing biomechanical patients. I didn't do any routine foot care.

So my per patient value should've been way higher than someone who was doing 30% routine foot care and 70% biomechanical patients. Does that make sense? Yeah. Is that clear?

Absolutely. Okay. Very good. Crystal clear.

Crystal. Yeah. If you had said clear as mud, it would've gone, okay. We have problems. And and the the the best part too, when you actually know your per patient value, people go, well, what's the value?

Yeah. What's the benefit of knowing One, you can see who's performing and underperforming, but the other part is you could look at your week ahead, and if you know your per patient value is a hundred dollars, for example, which is actually quite low. So if your per patient value is under a hundred dollars, that actually is quite low. But say, for example, it's a hundred, and you've got a hundred patients booked in that week. Hundred times a hundred, you know you're gonna make $10 a week.

Without without even going through any figures, you should know if nobody else books in this week, you're make $10. Nice and simple. And that also so therefore, that helps you planning with, yeah, purchasing equipment, paying bills, if you wanna get bonuses. It's it's just a really good figure to actually know and understand. If you have any questions on this, please reach out to Jim or reach out to myself, we will help you.

Absolutely. And this so I got here why one thing I just wanted to mention to you, why focusing just on likes can actually be dangerous, and sort of touched it on before, that you can have 10,000 followers and have an empty appointment book. Yeah. You might be a podiatry influencer. Tens of thousands of followers, but unless those people are booking in, it doesn't really matter.

Or you can have a hundred engaged people that they're loyal followers and they book appointments on a regular basis. That is far better than having, what do they call it, 10,000 passive passive scrollers that are flicking through your page. You better have smaller numbers. I've, like, I know some podiatrists who said, I've been doing really, really well, really well. And then you go to their all their social media stuff, and it's really average.

But they they post good stuff. I mean, they the quality of the stuff they post is fantastic, but they do not have thousands of followers. They've got like 400 people following their pages. But when they post something, they get 50 or 60 people are actually liking it, and it's not their mom, cousin, brother, nephew, auntie.

I think there's a there's a book called, like it talks about kinda like 1,000 true fans. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I forgot I forgot who it's like the guy used to be the editor at Wired magazine. But, you know, it's that it's that thing where, you know, you don't need a million people.

You don't need, you know, you don't need a hundred thousand. You don't need 10,000. You just need a thousand people that, you know, that can they'll vouch for you that are, you know, maybe that are a thousand loyal patients that come to the practice that speak well to you about to people in the community. So, you know, focus on treating people well, and you kinda kind of, you know, find ways to treat them the best you can, and they're gonna they'll help you out. So it's, yeah, it's kind of that thousand true fan idea.

Yeah. And it it all comes I think a lot of this stuff, it all comes down to that's why it's really important to understand what your goals are in your business. Yeah. If you really don't know what it is you're trying to achieve from your business, then you can't put things in place to actually make it a reality. People often ask how often should you look at your metrics?

You can do it monthly. You can do weekly check ins just to see if campaigns working. Like, I used to have that sheet at the front reception. They used to give me give me to me every day. It was just a little bit of a daily reflection on what was happening.

Even though, yeah. In my notes, I actually wrote down here, I said don't obsess daily, but I did.

Practice what you preach, Taziko.

Yeah. But but I I did. I used to look at I wouldn't sit there and look at that sheet and just go, ugh. I'm gonna lose sleep over it, but I would just look at that because I knew what marketing was going on. But I would grab all those sheets, and at the end of the week, I would do a reflection on how that week was going.

Then at the end of the month, I would gather all the figures together, and I'd spend, you know, an hour or two just going over it, using that the plan for the next month. There you go. The other thing is you should have, like, a simple dashboard set up and just track and measure it, like, only about three or three or five different metrics that tie directly with the business growth. But those ones that I went over, I think that's all you really need to but there's other numbers you can look at if you really wanna dig into your business. But as far as looking at is your marketing working, they're the easiest ones to do.

Zig Ziglar used to always say, yeah, was it paralysis analysis or analysis paralysis where you just you're digging so much into the numbers, you just you don't even really know what you're looking at. And numbers are only useful if they're driving bad decisions. And use the info you know, like, if you're gathering information, just use it wisely. Like I said, I would sit down at the end of month, look at everything, and I'd use that to make decisions in future months. I'd make decisions on if I'm gonna keep marketing in certain areas.

Absolutely. Whether it be different platforms provide so much data these times Mhmm. These days, you can really drill down into things that don't matter. You really need to be looking at kinda general trends over time, you know, from quarter to quarter. Like you talked about, the metrics you bring up are great great things to kinda track over time.

But, yeah, there's so much granularity and so much ways just to kinda, like, you know, go way too deep into it. So try to look at things from different levels and try to look for trends more than you are, like you said, obsessing over daily daily numbers or daily details.

Yeah. Somebody I was reading something just recently, or it might have been on a podcast, and they were just talking about if you wanna know what yeah. So a video to shoot if you're putting something on YouTube, is have a look at some of your past videos and which ones did well. There'll be a reason they did well because it'll be a topic that people like and are searching for. That's something you can look at.

So therefore, do more of those videos. Don't come up with some wacky ones that no one cares about. Really think about it. So just the final notes, just remind people, not all metrics are equal. So only focus on what you know is gonna drive the growth of your business.

Track new leads, the conversions, your cost per lead, your patient retention, and, you know, the average revenue per patient. I just think that's important. Don't overcomplicate your dashboard. Just have a simple I know some people do it electronic. Mine was manual.

We should just have all these things, and I get the receptionist to fill in these figures at the end of the week when we give it to me, put together as a month. I'd put that in a folder. Therefore, it didn't matter whether I had electricity or not. I could sit down at the beach with my folders. I could go through them.

That was just how my brain worked. That's why I still have, yeah, brain books that

I Was before electricity, said? I didn't know before electricity?

That was before electricity when I get used to get the dinosaur drop me off at work. It was but it's true. I like I always found that's why I still have, you know, my my brain books. I write my notes and everything in. True.

Because some of the ideas or thoughts or notes that I gather in here, I can take this away. Can sit down at the beach. I can be on a a bus, which I've been on a bus for ten years, but I could be. And but if I was, I could pull this out and I can read through it. As long as I got another pen or pencil, I can write down thoughts and ideas.

I don't have to have a computer with me all the time. And the last thing I wanna say is marketing isn't about looking popular, it's about staying profitable. You'd be super popular and broke. Or you could be not as popular and be making really good money.

Yeah. A lot of these things need to tie to business objectives like you mentioned, and not not vanity metrics. So it's yeah. You can be have a hundred thousand followers, but if it's not helping drive, you know, great business outcomes, it's not worth your time.

Yeah. And I I was talking to a couple of podiatrists recently, and, yeah, one podiatrist I was doing some work with, and she's decided to move on because she wants to be part of a group. You know, part of a a group coaching, which is fine because some people are suited to groups because they they need to be bouncing ideas off other people. But I've got other clients who I've said that to him, yeah, if you ever wanna go and join a group, by all means, and then why wouldn't I do that? Yeah.

I'm so far ahead of where the group thinking is that I don't wanna be dragged back down in the group. I wanna excel, and you're helping me actually excel. And it's they've got this type of mentality. They know what works. They know what they should be measuring, and they just keep building on it from there.

Sounds like a recipe for success there.

Okay, big Jim. That's it for me. I've ranted and raved too much today.

No. This has been great, Tyson. Thanks a lot for the helpful information here, and I look forward to talking to you next time.

I will be here. See you next week. Okay. See you later. Bye.

Bye, Tyson. 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.