Your Podiatry Clinic Is A Local Business

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

Hi. I'm Tyson Franklin, and welcome back to this week's episode of podiatry marketing. With me, as usual, is my cohost, big Jim Mac. Jim, how are doing today?

I'm doing fantastic. Life is good as big Jim Mac. Loving life here in in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. I've got nothing to complain about.

We need to get feedback from people. Would you like big Jim Mac shirts done? I think that'd be great. Just big Jim Mac and then and then he says, and Tyson in little little font underneath, little bald headed guy underneath, Tyson.

Yeah. We've been teasing that out for the last, I don't know, what six six months, twelve months, I don't know. But not a lot of demand yet, but if you do want them, definitely hit us up.

Let's get up. What are we talking about today, Jim?

Yeah. So today we're gonna be jumping into kind of a approach that a clinic should consider when marketing their practice. I, you know, I talked to a lot of podiatry clinic owners and practice managers, podiatrists themselves, and there tends to be a bit of confusion around kind of, you know, what is the quote unquote best way to market their practice. And I think it's easy to get confused out there these days because there's no shortage of videos, websites, and, you know, people approaching you with supposedly kind of the magic way to, you know, get more patients in the door and to be more visible to local patients. But I think there are some kind of things that podiatrists need to kind of arm themselves and educate themselves with in order to really make sure that they're kind of going after the low hanging fruit initially before kind of jumping into, I would say, you know, more kind of small business marketing or online marketing for things that are like less relevant for clinics or people trying to bring more patients into the practice.

Yeah. One I know one thing not to do and that is to advertise in the yellow pages. I actually every year, when the yellow pages still comes out, it's getting thinner and thinner, is I like to go to it and open up and see who is still advertising in the yellow pages. And, you know, the one profession that I find is in there that is quite, I think, stuck in tradition, lawyers. So I think if there's any podiatrist who's still doing that, please don't Listen to Jim.

Listen to what he's about

to talk about. Maybe maybe they're going after that old money, you know, that's those people 65 or 70 and older that still will use yellow pages. I don't know if that's still a thing with older folks, but I would assume that that's maybe a democrat a demographic thing.

I think even older people wouldn't do it anymore. I think even older people would just go, I'm not going to yellow page. I'm gonna Google that. Yeah. My mom is all over Google, YouTube, that's that's all she has.

We'd never go to yellow pages. So anyway Yeah. Continue.

But yeah. But but getting back to the the idea around so what is this kind of disparity between, I would say, like, small business online marketing versus clinic or local marketing. So there's there's some clear distinctions here. And, you know, what we need to be aware of is that, you know, something that works for a Amazon or, like, a kind of an Internet business is not necessarily the different types of tactics or strategies that you should use for your clinic. The most obvious thing, but sometimes overlooked I think when people are considering these different options is that, you know, you do have a brick and mortar office.

I mean, there's gonna be some people that will do home visits or have more of a mobile clinic, but, you know, 99 times out of a hundred, people have a physical location and you're kind of constrained in a good in a good way, I guess, by that location. Maybe you have a satellite clinic or maybe you have a couple different locations. But each of your clinics, even if you just have one, there's a certain radius of people or communities or locations that you're drawing patients from. And you really need to kind of embrace that local aspect of your business, not only to, you know, be a good member of your community, but when it comes to your marketing, there are specific things that you're gonna need to do differently than someone that, you know, has a product that can be ordered online or is looking for, I would say, like, nationwide recognition and visibility. The things that you have to do are different.

So it's important to kind of distinguish yourself and educate yourself that you don't and a lot of the information that's out there is not necessarily all focused on local advertising or local marketing or local SEO. So you really have to kind of focus more on the local aspects of things when either providing some looking for someone to provide these services for you or to kind of do some of these things yourself. And I'll get into more specifics as we go on, but just realize you are a local business. So it's important that you market and get visibility that way.

Yeah. Because there's no point somebody saying to you, well, you got 10,000 page views from Bangladesh.

Right. Exactly.

And you're based in Chicago. It is really unless you're selling something, like you said, online, that people in Bangladesh could easily order. But if you're wanting people to walk into your podiatry practice, wouldn't matter if you're getting a million views. If nobody is actually in your local area, no one's gonna come walking through through the door.

No. Exact no. Exactly. I think, you know, one of the things that I see very commonly with a lot of clinics and it's kind of purported by a lot of marketing agencies is like, oh, we're gonna do a blog a blog post every single week about some different topic in podiatry. And if it's not if there's not some local tie in to it, yes, maybe you'll get five, ten thousand page views a month for your website.

But, you know, if if you're based in Illinois and the top, you know, seven locations that people are seeing it are, you know, The UK, California, Arizona, Florida, You know, if you have some kind of online course that maybe you can teach people about heel pain or some you know, there's some kind of educational online component that you could sell people, fantastic. But if you're really looking to get patients in the door, this kind of having that nationwide or international scope of traffic coming to your website, you're not gonna convert many of those people to kinda come in in the door. Maybe there are people that do some really novel procedures that can draw people from a wider range of states or local areas, or maybe you're located in that location that's on the corner of four or five states and you are the go to expert for something like limb lengthening or some rare condition in foot and ankle surgery or podiatry, you are known as that regional best and you want to try to be national. But that's a very, very small group of folks and most people would benefit and their clinics would benefit and the local patients would benefit from taking more of a local approach when it comes to the content that you have on your websites, the kind of Google Ads or Facebook Ads you're you're running.

Taking a more local approach is generally gonna yield a higher return on investment than you know, trying to go national or international.

Yeah. And I I definitely agree because I think when it comes to writing a blog, it's gotta count. If you're if you're gonna get all that time and effort of coming up with the idea, putting words on paper, whether it's 250 words, 400 words, 600 words, you want it to relate you want the people in your town to actually read that or be searching for something, and that is gonna pop up and they go, oh, now I'm gonna go to this podiatry clinic because that relates to what I the problem I have. Plus it's something you wanna see more of. Yeah.

Don't write about ingrown toenails if you never wanna see another ingrown toenail in your clinic. It's it's just crazy. But I I do like that trying to relate whatever you're doing to the to the local market or it's got some emphasis on that local market. Like, last week, we were talking about corporate boxes, for example. And I mentioned that, yeah, we did a lot of stuff with the Cairns Taipans, a basketball team.

So if I was talking about ankle injuries or treating ankle injuries, I would mention, oh, and a Cairns Taipans player that came into my clinic, I would mention local teams, not necessarily the player's name, but I'd try and introduce the the locality of where I was.

No. That that's a perfect example. I think the kind of the importance of local keywords is kind of normal for that's the way patients are gonna be looking for you. Right? So whether it be Google, Bing, a different search engine, maybe even through ChatGPT these days, people, when they're looking for things, you have to kind of take a step back and not necessarily think about the great care and the surgical training you have and oh wow, you do these things, but how are patients actually finding your clinic and your practice?

And the majority of the time it's the name of your local area or surrounding area plus their problem or the type of care they're trying to receive. So maybe it's podiatrist near me and you know things like Google and your phone will have GPS baked into it. They can also kind of track your IP address and know what general area you're in. So, you know, you're gonna pop up more likely for those types of terms when you build a website and have an online presence that, you know, is that kind of attracts and is visible more visible with and kind of coming up for those local keywords. If you're just trying to, you know, show up for heel pain or generic terms that don't include those kind of local modifiers, you're gonna be running up against, you know, whether it be the kind of free organic ads or the Google paid search ads, you're gonna be running up against like big companies.

Maybe it's surgical equipment companies or

Big budget.

Doctor. Scholl's. Yeah. Big big ad budgets you can't really compete with. But when you are utilizing, let's say, I'm based in Chicago, Chicago Podiatrist would be a really really important key term for me to follow-up to show up on in Google search and online.

Obviously Google also knows when is something kind of a local search versus something kind of it's more a general or national search. Right? So when you throw in those when you're doing keyword research or using keywords within your website and in your ads, you're gonna get a when the when the patient puts those words into Google, they're gonna get an experience that reflects those those clinics that are gonna show up, and hopefully your clinic can be one of the top ones by building your online presence in the right way.

So what should people be doing to build that online presence?

Yeah. So it starts off like we talked about in the past. It's like it's a foundation of your website and your Google Business profile. Those two things are super important. So having, you know, pages on that website that really emphasize, you know, not only where you're physically located at, but maybe also where you treat patients from.

I sometimes like to utilize what are called areas we serve pages. So maybe you're not based in Barrington, Illinois, but you treat patients from Barrington. You can create kind of a Barrington specific page that is a great landing page for people that find you through Google organic. But also, if someone's searching Barrington Podiatrist, you have an ad that shows that you treat patients or you're five minutes from Barrington, and then they land on a page that shows that you treat patients from Barrington, it feels very relevant to the people that land there as opposed to what I see sometimes happen is that people even when they do Google Ads in a good way, they always put the traffic onto kind of a generic home page. Oh, Or it's like you had them like maybe it's Barrington Podiatrist or Hillsdale podiatrist, but then you just put them on to, like, Smith Family Podiatry Clinics, and it it loses that relevance for them.

Obviously, were looking for podiatrists, there is it's not completely irrelevant, but if you can land them on a page that's, you know, podiatrist who teach treats parent patients in Barrington or podiatrist who treats patients in Hillsdale, it's going to feel much more kind of a good path for them to walk down. And building trust with that patient is ideal. And if there's too much of a step off between the ad or the Google result and the page they land on, it's kind of discombobulating and can kind of be a turnoff, and people can kind of lose trust in that patient journey. So that's the first step is making sure that Google Business profile and these local pages are built out on on your clinic website.

So a lot of it is starting too with your website. Like, I because I've always said to people, your website is your mothership. You're you're bringing people to your website. You're not taking them to your Facebook page or necessary YouTube channel. You're bringing them to that website.

And I've been frightened. I think people would have experienced themselves where they've they've searched for something. They've clicked on it, but then it takes them to a website like a home page and they go, okay, where's the information I was actually looking for? And if they can't find it within a couple of seconds, they go up, just go back or go to the next place. They just they get off of it very quickly.

No. For sure. Like it yeah. And there's always gonna be another clinic or another place that they can look on in the Google results and move in that direction if they want to. So you really need to make sure that you have a real kind of a a smooth patient journey for them so they're not gonna wanna click back and go to a different podiatry clinic's website.

I think it is also important to obviously the online component is important, but there's definitely some offline things that should be considered. Not too dissimilar from our chat last week about getting out there into the public with a corporate box, but sponsoring local events or being visible and volunteering at events is a huge opportunity to

Yeah. Definitely.

To build a lot of good local connections. And it's it's one of those things that kind of snowballs and gains momentum over time. If you're the podiatrist that works at the marathon, it's only normal you're gonna meet other doctors that are helping at the marathon or nurses or other runners. Know, if you don't want to treat runners, I probably wouldn't work at a marathon. But if you if you do want to, you know, kind of be where your patients are at, right, in that local area.

And sometimes that can also benefit from, you know, partnering with local businesses. If you, you know, if you do want to see runners, you know, going and giving talks at the local running shoe store, you know, having a link on their website and maybe you refer patients to them, you know, for their running shoe needs or maybe some good walking shoes. So it's not the online component is important, but it's also making those real connections and building trust offline that's hugely important. So when you're trying to be local, those are the kind of moves you're going to do instead of trying to, you know, get thousands of page views for, you know, irrelevant terms or just kind of generic terms that they could find on WebMD or on the Mayo Clinic's website.

Yeah. And I'll get a perfect example of this is a purely an offline thing that happened to us when we hit the clinic was when we went in the Telstra Business Awards, which was a big awards in Australia, and we actually won it for our category five to 20 employees for our business. And I remember it was on a Saturday night, we won it. Yeah. Fanfare and all that was great.

Pizza publicity. It appeared in the newspaper on the Monday, but it was the national newspaper. Not necessarily it wasn't their local newspaper. And we had a couple of people call and go, hey. I saw that in the, you know, the Courier Mail.

Congratulations. The next day, it appeared in our local newspaper. And we were getting phone calls and emails continually all day because the local market saw it. And I think that's the difference between you want more running patients, you can write this amazing running article that just goes out to the world, or you can attend a local running event where there's hundreds of runners, and you have more chance of connecting, having an impact there, being face to face with people or being in that local community than just putting something out into the interweb.

No. That's a great point. It is it is being seen by, you know, the the ideal patients you wanna treat. Right? So when you're present, you're the expert, you're giving your time and your efforts to the betterment of the community, it's going to endear you to the local community and you're going to reap the benefits by doing that consistently over a long period of time.

So I think in a similar vein too, if you do have the opportunity, when you do make content, it should be obviously, having these errors we serve pages is one opportunity. But if you're creating content, you could talk directly about common injuries that you see, what the people do that compete in the Sydney Marathon or the Chicago Marathon. Whatever your location is, tailoring it to those type of patients that you see and really kind of making it relevant to those folks. I know that let's say there's course that has a lot of hills and you see that people get shin splints or Achilles issues when they if they're not trained properly for these kind of things and maybe even some preventative care or some ways that they can avoid injury by working with those local running clubs, giving you their talks or giving them information that's helpful. But when it is local, it's a much easier sell or it's much easier for the patient to kind of become and seen by you.

Otherwise, like you said, if it goes out nationally, maybe you could build some network of podiatrists, but a lot of that that traffic or that little foot traffic is probably not gonna come your way. But when you can really tailor your content and the events you attend to your local community, it's gonna set you up for more success.

Oh, it definitely will. And I suppose that also relates to getting, like, more local reviews and testimonials from your patients or people in the area. Even if it's not necessarily a patient, but if you've worked with an organization and they can write a a testimony or review depending on what country you're in, that's also gonna be beneficial having a local organization talking about you.

No. Exactly. It's gonna they're kind of almost like lending their trust to you. Right? Sometimes we call you know, you'll see it on web.

When I build websites for people, it's kind of what I call these badges of trust. Maybe it's the organizations you're part of, your certifications, you know, the associations you're part of it. It can be events as well that you've you've helped out at the the Chicago marathon or you're you helped out with a local Olympic Committee or something. Those kind of things can be really helpful as far as building trust with patients. I'd also say that there's a lot of different kind of online tools people will try to use how do you measure the ROI, or how do I know that I'm getting these local patients.

And Google Analytics is one way that can be helpful as far as breaking down to show you the demographics of where people are coming from. You can see where the traffic is at from your city, from your state, from your region versus international region. You have to be careful. There's a lot of expensive tools like Moz or HREFs or SEMrush. Those things can sometimes be okay, but they won't always help you really kind of see if you're making traction on the local area.

There's something called Local Falcon that I use when I'm working with the clinics I work with. Building some of these more local pages on the website or taking more of a local focus as opposed to kind of a scattershot online marketing without that local focus.

But your thought on you only hear some podiatrists say, I don't need to advertise. I just it's just word-of-mouth.

When it comes to there's different types of advertising. I think I think they're right to be skeptical about kind of, I would say, your kind of generic attention grabber or trying to do that Sometimes if it's not relevant to the type of patients you want to go after, maybe that's not the best thing. But I think there is importance to know that the advertising game has changed over time. It's maybe you know, less focused on these attention or interruption advertising. But now with, you know, Google Search, probably ChatGPT and AI in the future, you know, when you type in who is the best podiatrist, you know, in Chicago or, you know, best podiatry clinic podiatrist near me, these are highly relevant terms you want to show up for.

And if you have a if you're a new clinic or you're a clinic that hasn't really put time and effort into local marketing in the past, you know, pay spending some money on Google search ads or you know potentially AI search ads in the future could really benefit you and your clinic because these are not if you're using the right local keywords, these are people that are we call low funnel or ready to make an appointment, and it's a good good ROI, you know, return on investment opportunity for for most practices. You know, if you obviously, if you wanna spend $50 a month on ads, it's not going to go very far. There's a certain threshold I would say it's bare minimum of $500 at least in The US market per month, if not you know a thousand or more. But that's kind of the the kind of the range that you're looking at if you really want to kind of get a good ROI because if you're just running 50 to a hundred dollars a month, you're really not going to get above that threshold to get the benefit of the the search volume and to be seen by those kind of right fit patients.

So definitely more intent based search advertising is the way to go these days. Definitely things like display advertising, it be through Facebook, Google, or other platforms, can be helpful to get visibility for things patients aren't looking for, but I definitely would say that the first step when people are looking for, you know, advertising their their practices is is that search advertising.

Yeah. I was at an event last week and they were they were talking about Google. And they said, if you had this asked them five years ago, do you think anyone will compete against Google? And they were going, no. No.

But you mentioned ChatGTP. And they're actually saying, especially now that you're you're talking about the local searches, you're being more locally relevant. They said ChatTP is actually becoming a search engine where people are just asking ChatTP questions about places, and and it's giving them the information they need. And it's really drawing upon the local information in that particular area.

Now it's an area that I'm trying to stay stay in touch with and understand you know what these these kind of large language models, how they're deciding you know what to show because if you do type in you best podiatrist in Chicago, it's going to provide some results, but it's not really clear right now how they're providing that information and what are the on page signals. Is there certain content they're going after? Are there certain websites they're scraping from? It's a little bit confusing. I would also know that some of these large language models, they're very new.

And they don't always provide great I mean, for certain types of things, like I would say, rewrite this email for me or do that kind of thing. It does provide a great service or clean up this copy of this blog post. It can be really helpful. But if you're trying to have it make content out of thin air, it's definitely something that you really have to keep an eye on. And a similar thing for asking questions about who the best podiatrist is or who's best foot surgeon in a local area.

I would probably say that Google is still stronger now, but it's only a matter of time before ChatGPT starts taking that away from Google and learning. And that's, like I said, one of my challenges is to learn how is it doing that, and how can I help clinics, you know, the right clinic show up in in those results?

Yeah. I think it's still trying to there's still a lot of teething problems because I put in there what's the best podiatry business book in the world. And mine was number one, so everyone everyone's already aware of that. That's why. But I also had book two and three.

They weren't my books.

Wow. But it

had my name on them. It's actually taken took Rem Jackson's book and Peter Wishnie's book, had the titles of their books there, but actually put my name there written by me. It had gathered information, but also at the same time got a little confused while gathering it and put it together. So I think what you're right. It's I think it's still trying to figure out how it's actually going to draw information out.

No. It's gonna be interesting to watch this over the

next few

few months and years, but I'm sure we'll have a updated podcast dedicated to this topic in the not too distant future.

We should because the chat GTP episode you did, I think it's still ranked there number two most listened episode.

Yeah. Definitely people have enjoyed listening to that one, but I I probably overdue for a bit of an update.

Yeah. I think it needs an update because we did the one two years ago. A lot has a lot has changed. So what what else do you wanna cover on this particular

No. I think that's that's good as far as, you know, I don't wanna overload the listeners too much for kind of run up on a good time to to call it quits. But I would just, you know, reiterate that, you know, whether you're doing the marketing yourself or you're hiring someone, really try to understand the difference between online business, you know, kind of, I would say, national or online advertising versus local clinic advertising because it's super important in the type of tactics or the type of things you're and the kind of goals you're gonna make are gonna really differ between those two types. So, you know, as a clinic owner yourself, unless you're trying to sell courses or you have you're trying to develop a national level of, you know, clientele, you really wanna focus on local marketing. And doing it the right way, like we talked about includes having a locally relevant website, being a great member of your community and making the connections within your community that's going to help grow the practice, and then also finding ways to know what those right goals and the metrics are.

You don't need hundreds of thousands of page views to be successful with a local podiatry clinic. You just need the right patients finding your clinic and making appointments. So if you do have questions about that or there's other topics, you know, you're interested for Tyson and I to chat about besides ChatGPT or in addition to ChatGPT, let us know and we're happy to to help you out there.

I love this stuff. Anything that's related to marketing, I just I find it such a great topic because it's always changing. There's always new ideas. And if anyone ever tells you they know everything, they have all the best marketing ideas, you don't need to talk to anyone else but them, they got no idea. Because if you but we could sit down for a week, Jim, put all the idea ideas we've ever come up with down on paper, and some 12 year old kid will walk along and go, ever thought about this?

And you go, little bastard. I never even looked at it that way because it's just the the creativity behind marketing is great, which is why we've been doing this for a couple of years now, and we keep coming up with new topics.

Yeah. There's no shortage of new technologies, innovations, and things for us to talk about.

Yep. Okay, Jim. I look forward to talking you next week. We'll have another new topic.

Sounds great, Tyson.

Okay. See you. Bye now.

Thanks for listening to Podiatry Marketing with Tyson Franklin and Jim Mcdonald. Subscribe and learn more at Podiatry Marketing. That's the website address, podiatry dot marketing.