Why Some Podiatrists Don't Like Marketing

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

Oh, fantastic. Hey, big Jim. How are you?

Doing well. Doing well. Ready to jump in. I know that we you have a little interesting side note you wanna jump in on, so I won't don't won't delay that.

Yeah. Before we get on to what today's topic is, today's topic is actually gonna be why some podiatrists don't like marketing. But before we get there, if people listen to episode one seventy when we were talking about the business name strategy and protection, and on that episode, we were being very clever. We we kept referring to ourselves as ABC Podiatry, and we said, hi. We should register that name.

That's a really cool name. There is an ABC Podiatry, so we found out. So if ABC Podiatry has been listening to our podcast, they would be going, this is great. We've been mentioned a lot. So just let everybody know, there is an ABC Podiatry, so we will be coming up with a new name, x y zed podiatry.

We haven't checked that one yet, but I just thought that was funny.

They're in Columbus, Ohio. So, yeah, like, I just googled them and took a look. So, yeah, x y z podiatrist, I don't know. Let me Google real quick here and see. So I have to use them.

I don't I don't see x y z podiatry now. I think we're good.

We're good. Okay. So from now, we'll be x y z podiatry because we don't wanna infringe on anyone's copyright that all of a sudden they go, that is my own name, and you you were bastardizing it.

Yeah. We don't wanna slander anybody on accident, so

No. Okay. Today's topic, why some podiatrists don't like marketing. And I've heard this, I don't know, decades of podiatrists saying, oh, no. I'm not really into marketing because they are they go, oh, I'm not a salesperson.

Or when they think of marketing, they think straight away that they've gotta be sleazy, and they gotta lie to people to get people to come through the door. And I actually think they're really just lying to themselves. I don't think they I don't think they I don't think they really believe that marketing is evil. I just think they don't know how to do it, or they've just got some misconceptions of what marketing actually is.

No. It is tricky because I think a lot of people, maybe they get into medicine or sometimes in podiatry, and they think, okay. I'm not going into business. I'm not you know, I just want to go help people and do the medical side of things. And marketing is maybe one of the kind of least things that they're interested in or just they have no you know, they just they don't really like it for some reason.

But I think, like, whether you're trying to, you know, talk to a patient about a specific type of treatment that they need or a device that would benefit their their livelihood or their ability to kind of do their normal daily activities, there is some kind of marketing in that the way you communicate with people, the way you, you know, convince people that this is the right treatment for them requires some kind of level of persuasion and ability to kinda help communicate with them why it's important. And I think a lot of those same things are super important in marketing as well.

Yeah. Well, I think they lie to themselves to actually hide the real reason why they don't do marketing. So I've written a list of things down that I think is what stops them liking marketing because they think this is what's really happening. And the first one is I think marketing is time consuming. And there is.

There there is a if you're gonna market your business properly, you need to understand it. You do need you do need to put a little bit of time and effort into it. And I think they have a fear that if they put too much time into marketing, they'll be taking time away from looking after their patients or just looking at other operations in the business that they think are more important than marketing. Whereas I actually think marketing is probably the most important because without it, you're not gonna have this steady stream of patients coming through.

Yeah. If there's no awareness of your expertise or the the services you provide in your clinic, then, you know, you're just gonna have a a super quiet practice with no one coming in the door. Right? So there has to be some level of, you know, people knowing about you. Marketing is the way you make that happen.

Yeah. And I think the second thing is they're uncertain whether there's actually a return on investment. So they're thinking, well, if I'm doing all this marketing, how do I know if the money I'm spending is actually bringing in the the right amount of revenue? And that is I remember seeing a quote. I think it's a company, Kitcher and Leven or something like that.

It was the CEO of this multibillion dollar company. I remember him saying, 50% of our marketing works and 50% doesn't. I just wish I knew which 50% it was.

Yeah. The different marketing opportunities definitely can feel like a black box at time. Right? Like, it know, you have either you're doing the marketing, someone in your your practice, or maybe working with someone outside consultant. But you have these kind of these kind of black boxes or these different channels that you try to market in, whether it be Google or newspaper ads or radio or door to door or or different types of, like maybe not door to door, maybe, like, mail types of campaigns.

You know? Sometimes you can tell what's working and not working. Right? But, like, a lot of the time, like you said, 50% of the time, it's like, did this come from this? You know, whether you're doing Facebook ads for awareness, you know, like, there's no click through that's gonna tell you whether you know, if someone saw your Facebook ad and then comes and sees you six months later, there's no way to attribute initially that to that ad.

So there can be this kind of kind of unclear ROI like you talked about, but you kinda have to look at trends in your business and kinda pair that with the activities you've done from a marketing perspective to really kinda tease out what the true ROI ROI of your your marketing efforts are.

Yeah. And that's why you just need to keep the simple numbers that you keep track of. But even just the the question of asking patients, how did you find out about us? And don't assume the first thing they wrote is the truth. So if the patient said, oh, doctor Smith referred me.

Alright. And I used to say say to them, so you were in the room with doctor Smith, and doctor Smith said, you need to see a podiatrist, and you need to see Tyson. He pointed at you and said, you need to see Tyson. They go, oh, no. No.

What happened is doctor Smith said, I need to see a podiatrist. I said, so what'd you do then? They said, oh, so then I went online, and I said, I need a podiatrist that treats this, and then your thing came up first, and that's why I came in and saw you. And you go, okay. So, yes, the doctor recommended podiatry.

So they told me a couple of things. One, I need to educate the doctor to let him know that we're the person that you come to for that problem. But also, I would then contribute that to an article I wrote on my website. I wouldn't give that that referral to the doctor. So the return on investment was the effort I put into writing that blog article.

Right.

So and this is why you you need to ask the patients a question. How'd you find out about us and dig into it deeper? I do the same thing whenever coaching client approached me. I said, I had a curiosity. How'd you find out about me?

And they go, oh, let me think. And I go, said, through the podcast. And I love it when they go, have you got a podcast? Okay. You're shitty me.

Really? I got two podcasts. And and it's come through something else. Either research they did or they're talking to somebody else that had worked with me previously. So it's really important to dig deep, and that's when you'll find out whether you are getting a return on your investment or not.

Absolutely.

And and what's really good one, I remember we were used to advertise on TV back in the day when TV advertising worked really well. And I think in certain towns and areas, it still does. But we would advertise on TV for a certain period of time, and you would always see the numbers. How'd you find out about TV? So it was really obvious.

We would then not advertise for six months, but then one of the other podiatry clinics would. And we say, how'd you find out about this? I saw you on TV. Yeah. When was that?

Last week. Okay. We we had an advertisement for three months, and this comes back to I know this is in my marketing talks. I don't know if we've done here, but owning that space. If you can share that message first before anybody else does, when somebody else mentions it, they will think of you straight away.

They won't actually think of the other business. That's a that's a side thing.

That's excellent.

The third thing that I reason I think well, the lie that they create for themselves to say that reason why they don't like marketing is just a lack of expertise. They feel like they don't have the knowledge or skills to actually execute a marketing plan properly. Don't know where to start. Don't know what to do. There's so many options out there, and that's where you and I come in.

That's where I think if anybody needs help with marketing, they can talk to me, they can talk to you. If somebody wants to know about online digital marketing, setting up Google Ads and all that, I will direct them to Jim. It's not what I I don't I don't do that. I don't wanna do that. But if somebody wants to know about putting together a strategy and coming up with some unique ideas about their particular business or their community, then I love doing that sort of stuff.

No. I think that's a that's a great point. And I I think today with the Internet and just the amount of content that's out there, you know, I think used to be maybe there wasn't a lot of good resources. Right? Like, there's only a few things they could look.

You know, maybe there's a couple books about marketing a podiatry practice or medical practice, you know, talking to other maybe other people that are in practice or kind of the resources that people had in order to figure out how to market their practice. Nowadays, with the Internet, podcasts, all kinds of stuff, there's there's way there's so much information about different forms of marketing that trying to find kind of the signal and all the noise is very difficult because the way you market a, you know, a practice or a podiatry practice is not the same way you market a certain product. Right? Like a like a and and, you know, whether it be so there are different ways of marketing different types of things. So sometimes they'll see, you know, I'll have get on a call call with somebody like, oh, I wanna do this thing and I wanna market in this way.

And I'm like, well, what do you where'd you read that at or where'd you hear about that? And, you know, usually it's something that's not I mean, you can definitely take some things away from the way that, you know, Nike or other types of people are marketing things. There's definitely takeaways. But if you wanna be visible in your local area, there's very kind of concrete things that need to be kind of put in place to make sure that that happens. And I think there's not always a great great kind of information resources that are kind of aggregated for people to know that that's right for the practice.

So obviously, reach out to Tyson and I. You know, we can either help you personally or kinda send you in the right direction for, you know, things that's that's gonna help help benefit you and grow in your practice.

Yeah. And it's even as simple as somebody go, oh, I want more patients in my clinic. And you go, alright. Okay. Who's your ideal patient?

Oh, why is that important? Backhand. Straightaway. Slap. I need some sound effects here.

Slap. And I'm like, if you don't know who your ideal patient is, then how do how do you start putting together the strategy on on the type of business that you actually wanna build? And some people go, oh, everybody is my ideal patient. I go, okay. So patients people who got no money are your ideal patient.

Well, no. I want people who have money. Okay? So we've narrowed it down slightly. There's so many I mean, there's at least 50 questions you could ask about identifying an ideal patient, but that's the lack of expertise.

So number four, the lie that I think is I think marketing is extremely costly. And it can be if you're not getting a return on your investment. But and that's why I think it's important. If you're if you're going to spend money on marketing, is you need to make sure you're spending it in the right areas. And yes, sometimes there will not be a guaranteed result.

But I've worked with enough people that I know that if they do certain things in certain places, I just know gonna get a result from it.

Absolutely. It's about just kind of not taking a scattershot approach. I think sometimes when people, if they jump in too much, right, they don't kind of have a a consistent kind of build in the type of channels. They are going from, like, the high ROI opportunities to lower ones. You know, that's where I see people that kinda get frustrated or think that it's too expensive.

Right? You're trying to do five or six things off the bat, and maybe they aren't necessarily the kind of the right order to to do things. Obviously, you have to have a great website to start off with, and then you can start building up some of these other tools to get traffic to that website. But there's you know, it it doesn't have to be costly right away, but just to make sure you're doing things in the right order.

And and I'd like I love that point too. To me, your website is like number one because everything you do should be leading back to the mothership, back to the website because that's what people are going to be searching for. And I've seen businesses, and then I've gone to find their website and they don't have one. And I'm like, seriously, you don't have a website. And like I was recently at Mission Beach, a couple of businesses down there I really like, didn't have websites, didn't have a social media presence.

And I'm like, how can I tell people about you or recommend that they go to see you? Or I I wanna tag you on a photo that I took. And I can't because, obviously what's funny is sometimes these will be the same businesses that are going, oh, Jesus. It's really tough at the moment.

I'm gonna because it's tough. Invisible.

Yeah. Because you're invisible. You can't be found. People wanna talk about you, but then they talk about you, people go, oh, I'll go online and find them, or can't find them.

Right.

So anyway, number number five is, we sort of touched on this already, overwhelming options. There's so many marketing options out there. And I think if you try and take on everything as well, so trying to eat an elephant very hard, one bite at a time. You've got to do a couple of things and do them really well. And when you know what's working, you do more of that.

When you know what's not working, you stop doing that, and then you try something new. And you keep testing out these different things until you find what is the best strategy for you. My my marketing system when I had my podiatric clinic was so simple. We just had three or four things that we did really well. We we were always testing new things, so I never just said, oh, these are three or four things we're do and never do anything else.

But we're constantly testing things. But, yeah, there's so many options out there, and that's why it helps if you've talked to someone that's actually done it before.

Yeah. I think the the overwhelming options is a thing, and it's also, you know, kinda getting caught up with the the bright shiny object thing. Right? Obviously, whether it be TikTok or things that are coming on online, being aware of those things, I think, is important. But I see a lot of people kind of do a lot of starting and stopping.

You know, like, oh, I like, that thing didn't work or, oh, this thing, you know, I wanna try this new thing over here for kind of being, you know, kinda scatterbrained and kinda jumping thing frame from thing to thing and not kind of kinda getting traction and momentum with some of these channels. Obviously, if you try something for six to twelve months and it doesn't work, probably not gonna work. But I see sometimes people would go from instead of, know, taking things on a quarterly basis, they're trying to do things on a month to month basis. When you're doing that, that's just kind of a recipe for frustration and for wasting money. So, you know, there are a lot of different options out there.

Just make sure that you spend a quarter or a couple quarters or three quarters seeing whether something is working or not, and making sure you've kind of tested out the limits or the different options available in in that marketing channel before you give up on it and move towards something else.

It's even with podcasting. 95% of podcasts never get past 10 episodes. They call it pod fading. And it's the same thing. It's that 10 episodes is almost at three month mark, and they've got to that three month mark.

They're looking at the figures again. For the effort I put into it, it's not really getting any traction, so they give it up. Whereas you see the people who have done twenty, fifty, a hundred. What are we up to? A 60 something, 70 something.

Proprietary legends is, yeah, 360 something. So it's to be the long term, you just you've gotta give something time to see whether it's working. And we wouldn't keep it we wouldn't still be doing this if we wouldn't didn't think it was working for us.

Absolutely.

Anyway, number six, I think is an interesting one, where this is one of the lies I think people tell themselves, or it's one of the things they do tell themselves to to make them think they don't like marketing, is really just a fear of failure. And they're concerned that if I do it and it doesn't go very well, is it going to affect my my brand? Will will I look silly as an individual? And I think some people are scared that if they try something and it doesn't work, will their team look at them and go, well, told you that wouldn't work. So I think they're scared that if I do marketing and it fails, it's gonna make me look silly.

You only look silly if you do marketing that is silly. And I don't think I've really I can't recall any podiatrist where I've seen them do something other than some of the silly names that they've done some poor marketing. They've gone, oh, that looked really, really stupid. I don't think I've really seen that too much in podiatry. Nothing that sort of jumps out at me.

Neither me. I think sometimes it's it's more kinda like the boring bland marketing that, you know, you kinda see. That's like I it's almost like they they feel like they have to do it, so they're gonna kind of do the kind of normal, you know, happy fourth of July, merry, you know, merry Christmas kinda like those, like, kinda all the holiday, all the kind of Facebook posts that are all kind of just generic Yeah. Stock image. It's not you and your team.

It's not you and your staff. I don't I have no problems with holiday stuff if it's a little bit more original. But you should see these marketing agencies that sometimes but I just hire and it's just like it's it's it's across like 30 other Facebook pages for clinics as well. It's just kind of a just kind of vanilla generic content. And like that's not I would say that's not embarrassing, but I feel like people will do that when they feel like they have to like, everyone's telling they have to market.

So they're gonna spend 250 or $500 a month just on, like, some marketing. You know, they have their website. They have, like, someone posting these things onto their Facebook, and, like, they're trying. So, like, that's enough for them. They kinda dip their toes a little bit in the water.

But really, in reality, in order to kinda, like, truly make an impact, it has to be something that's custom that actually is something that people would like to interact with. And that's harder. It's gonna cost more money. But, like it but when you allow yourself to do the kinda like low level stuff, it kind of quells that fear. You can always tell people like, well, I'm doing some.

Look at look at this. I'm doing some marketing. Right?

Mhmm. Yeah. I had when I did my marketing master class in Liverpool, and I said to people, if you're thinking about doing this, and I showed them an example, don't. I said, instead, try this, and I showed them an example of something else. I think it was three days after the event, someone sent me a message and just went, normally, I would have done what you said, but I didn't.

Instead, I did this, and I sent it to these people, and I've made three times back what it cost me to go to the marketing workshop within three days. They go, and I'm still just getting calls about it. And they just went, that actually works. And I had another person just yesterday who was talking about recall system, and they were telling me what their recall system is. So said, how's that working for you?

Because they were doing, you know, send a text message to remind people it's their recall. And I went, you're so lazy and impersonal. And I said, do this, and I showed what to do. I spoke to him yesterday, and they went, my god. That old school shit works, doesn't it?

I said, I told you it works. The telephone can be a powerful tool when used correctly.

Absolutely.

The last one is just about inconsistent results. It's what you touched on before. A lot of times, you'll get inconsistent results from your marketing if you're being inconsistent with the effort that you're putting in. And sometimes people will only market when they're quiet, and then as soon as they get busy, they just basically stop again. So they've got all these peaks and troughs just constantly with their marketing.

And because it's inconsistent, they go, yeah, well, I don't like marketing because it's inconsistent. You go, no. You're inconsistent. It's got nothing to do with marketing.

No. That that's a tricky one. I think also, you know, I find that when it comes to results, you need to kinda look at long term trends and not necessarily, like, month to month. Obviously, if there's huge drop offs and there's issues that need to be addressed, definitely address them. But, you know, sometimes I like, for example, a clinic I'm working right now, they have, like, a lot of traffic, probably a lot more than a lot of podiatry websites, other ones I worked with in the past.

But they're getting traffic from all around the world on all these blog posts that aren't necessarily gonna draw local patients to their clinic. So, you know, I've tried to take an approach with them which is more about, you know, building local pages and, you know, running their their ads that attract kind of people within their specific locality, people within twenty minutes of where their clinic is. And, you know, we've if you look at the, you know, the the amount of traffic we have, the traffic traffic is going down a bit. But at the same same time, the amount of traffic we're getting to these relevant local pages is, like, exploding, and the amount of leads they're getting is is is kind of moving in the right direction. So you have to kind of understand what your goal and your opportunities are and making sure that, you know, there you know, you're kinda following these, like, long term trends and that you're really kinda going after those people locally.

And when you do that, you'll have success. But you were just chasing kind of vanity metrics or you wanna get a lot of traffic, but they're not from the people that will actually come and see your practice. You know, you you kinda have to find ways of there's gonna be downtimes occasionally, but, you know, part of you you kinda going through the marketing journey is learning about how you can overcome them with consistency, and consistency is that key as you mentioned, Tyson.

Yeah. And I do think just long term, it's just experience. The more you do it, it's no different to being a good podiatrist. I know there's people say who yeah. They'll say, I don't like marketing, and we've given reasons why they probably are telling themselves that they don't like marketing.

But there's other people who say, oh, I don't like biomechanics. And it's probably exactly the same reasons. It's these things that they tell themselves because they're just not going in there and doing the work. If you do the work in biomechanics, you understand biomechanics better, you actually start to enjoy it. Marketing is the same.

If you put some time and effort in, you talk so people get some training on how to do it, you'll start to understand that marketing is fun, and then you'll actually start to enjoy it. And then when people say to you, what do you think about marketing? You go, I love it. I actually love marketing. I do.

I think I I just find it fun. Nothing better. Come out with an idea just out of nowhere, applying it, and seeing it work. And you go, goddamn. I'm a genius.

I like the I like the problem solving. I think that there's a lot of issues that can come and you're just always you know, as much as this kind of if marketing is changing, it gives you a chance to kind of stay on top of things and experiment. Like you said, you know, sometimes you're gonna have home runs. Sometimes you're gonna have you're gonna you're gonna whiff, but at the same time, you get out there by doing. You're not just kinda sitting on the sidelines and just waiting for some miracle thing to come along.

Yeah. And I don't think it matters what platforms or what new technology comes up. Bottom line is patients just wanna know you care about them.

Absolutely.

And marketing can let them know that you do care about them. So okay, Jim. That's it for me this week.

No. It's a good topic. Thanks for that. Yeah. I really obviously, I'm one I'm someone who likes marketing, so A little biased.

Understanding. We're a little bit biased. Yeah.

For sure. Yeah. You have the podiatry marketing podcast. We're probably biased. But and the thing is probably people listening to this already know that they like marketing.

But I'm sure there's a there's a couple there, people who see this who will go, I'm on the edge. I'm not sure whether I like marketing or not, but after today, they're gonna love it. Absolutely. Okay, Jim. I will talk to you next week.

Sounds good, Tyson.

Okay. See you.

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.