37: Patient Experience Not Marketing

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When I was working as an associate, right, at a school, I never imagined I could own these many practices with this amount of success.

So thank you.

You have helped build my marketing mind

to a whole new level. You have this natural talent, this unique ability.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of DSO Secrets. I'm your fearless host, Emmett Scott, and I'm excited to chat about a question I'm seeing a lot around, and that is marketing strategy. Hey, Emmett, what marketing tools do you use? Hey, Emmett, what are you using for marketing to get patients in?

Hey, what do you think for marketing?

What would be good flyers to use? How are you using social media? How are you using your website? All of these questions around marketing. One of the fundamental issues I see in a lot of these questions is that they are starting with a very transactional mindset. I see it with Dr. Recruiting too, which I think of as a marketing and sales funnel concept as well. But I get questions all the time of, hey, do you pay a bonus? Hey, what's your percentage for this? And it's not that these questions are wrong questions or bad questions. It's really the context of the questions that I want to talk through. When we ask questions that look transactional, we. Well, our mindset is pretty transactional. How many of us wouldn't love to have the perfect flyer that drove 100 new patients in the door this month? You know, if I just knew that giving a 22% discount on a flyer was exponentially more powerful than a 20% discount, then of course I'd want to know that data. And I think that that's the holy grail, if you will, that all of us are seeking after some kind of silver bullet that says, if I just knew the right colors to use in my flyer, if I just knew the right discount to give, if I just knew the right contract amount for bonus for doctors, then all my life would be easier. And it's just this transactional component that I'm missing. If I knew exactly where to put my phone number on my website, all of those things, then somehow it would solve all of my issues. Or if I knew exactly the right thing to post on Facebook, then I'D be done. I just post that every week and all these patients would come in. Now, as I'm saying this, some of you might say, well, no, that's ridiculous. Of course, that's not what I'm after. But. But isn't it really like, all of us would love to have that one thing that just drives patients in the door or helps with doctor recruiting and just having associates lined up to work for you? But if you think about the relationships you have in a retail market, different brands that you associate with, was it really about some transactional component? Was was it really this coupon or was it really just this website? What was it that attracts you to the brands that you love, the ones that you want to buy from and be associated with, or different relationships that you have in a capitalistic market? What's really driving that? Even when you think about your online purchases as a customer or what's driving you there to make those purchases, and sadly, as you really start to unwrap and untangle how you think about the purchases you make and the relationships you have with other companies, you realize that it's way more sophisticated than some flyer or website design or anything of those natures. They all play a component. So I'm not discounting that. And I don't want the takeaway to be that none of that design matters and none of those concepts matter. But aren't they part of a bigger relationship? Are they part of a bigger concept or connection that you feel with these brands? And I think that's where we get off track, is we start asking questions around quote unquote marketing as if it's going to be a transactional relationship. And then we get upset when it actually attracts patients who are very transaction minded. They hit us hard on treatment plans and they come back to a very transactional type relationship because that's what we started. I love the quote, that which begins well ends well, and that which begins bad ends bad. And sometimes because of our mindset around quote unquote marketing, we start things off in a very transactional relationship and then we try to move it to a more connected relationship and it's just very difficult to do. So the reality around this is we're going to have to get more sophisticated. We're going to have to think bigger than a transaction. We're really going to have to get into these things like what? What is our why and who is our avatar? Who is the customer that we're trying to attract and what do they care about? Now most of us are going to shy away from this because it's heavier thinking. I mean, by far the biggest work we do, the hardest work that we do as leaders is thinking. I mean, when it's like problem solution type thinking, we're masters at that, right? A team member comes in, they have a problem, boom, we give them an answer. That kind of thinking is not what I'm talking about. Most of us are great with that. But it's really that deeper thinking when we're trying to create an experience. And that's the word that I want to start pushing more is get away from the term marketing. What marketing do I need to. What patient experience do I need to design? You can kind of feel the weight of that, and I know it's bigger and I know it feels heavier, but the reality is you can waste a lot of time and a lot of money chasing after transactional marketing products. And if you haven't scoped out your patient experience, what is it that you want things to feel like at every step of the interaction with you? Then those transactions will feel disjointed, they'll feel insincere, and you won't get the type of patient and customer that you're looking for. See, when you map out the patient experience, you really begin with the end in mind. You say, okay, what is it that I want to happen throughout the relationship? And if I was the consumer, if I was the patient, what kind of experience would I want to have customers? Patients are not experts in clinical capability. They're not experts in treatment plans. They're not experts in insurance. They're really experts in one thing, and that is how do they feel? So it's not about buying this perfect marketing plan that texts patients, though. Those are awesome and they're helpful. But really, what is it that I'm trying to help the patient feel in that interaction? And am I hitting the mark with that? And is that consistent in other places of my digital, online, and also my offline practice marketing patient experience? So here's my challenge for you. Before you buy that next marketing product or even looking at the slew of marketing products you've already bought, whether that's your website, your texting platform, your flyers platform, your SEO, step back and start asking yourself, what is the patient experience that I'm trying to have happen here, and do I have consistency? Now, one of the things that this will have you start looking at is even your building, even when you walk into the place, and is that consistent people want consistency even more than they want customization. So what I mean, by that, if you think about McDonald's, McDonald's is consistently a crappy hamburger. They don't vary from that. You don't go into one McDonald's and say, Ooh, this is a really good hamburger. But over here, that McDonald's isn't as good. What you have with McDonald's is consistency, and people love consistency. So when you think about your patient experience, start with that. Am I providing a consistent experience? Does my online look like my offline? And is all my interactions consistent with how I like to interact with people and patients? Now we can get into a lot of details quickly. I'm not going to do this on this podcast, but we'll start breaking down these different elements here in the future. But just step back and I want you to start thinking about who is my ideal patient and what do they want? What do they want their patient experience to be? Take the time to write that out and you'll start having now an umbrella, a foundation, if you will, to start building out these other products and services. You might look and say, you know what the biggest thing I could do is, is change how patients are greeted when they come in. The biggest thing I could do is change up how my lobby design looks and feels. Cause if I'm going after that patient, they want this kind of experience. It might give me context on some of my scripting that I want to use both on the front as well as the back office piece with the patients. It might change maybe flyers or different brochures that I want to use in the treatment planning conversation. If this is sounding like hard work, it's because it is. Those brands that you love, those ones you respect, the ones you feel connected with, they didn't just happen like someone did the heavy lifting and they said, you are the customer that they wanted to attract. And they designed everything around that experience and they worked really hard to, to keep that continuity and that integrity within the product. And they're constantly working to make sure that you feel connected to their brand because of the consistency of experience. You can't have a Facebook page, for example, that shows all this fun and dancing and post one time, et cetera. And then they come in and they're greeted in a drab manner and the office doesn't look that great and it looks drab, et cetera. Now it's extreme example, but I see it all the time. We try to do these one hit, wonder type marketing things and we really need to create a consistent patient experience. Now what makes this not overwhelming is when you just remember that you got to start with you and who you are. Like, authenticity is the best place to start. Don't try to chase after somebody else's niche. Find the place that you want to service and who you want to be and start pounding that drum. Put that antenna up and you'll start attracting, attracting the patients and customers that really center around your niche and your interests. Let me give you an example. Early on, we knew that we wanted to service pediatric patients and we looked around in the marketplace and we said, what do children want to experience? What do they want to have? Well, the best at that is probably Chuck E. Cheese from a restaurant perspective, if you could call it that, and Disneyland. Okay, so how are we going to integrate those kind of elements into it? And children love games. So how are we going to integrate gaming into our patient experience? How are we going to integrate in Chuck E. Cheese type experiences into our patient experience? That's where we started from and built out our practice accordingly and then took our offline and online marketing around those concepts. What about in rural towns? What is it that patients want in rural towns? What do they feel affinity towards? How do I design all of my patient experience around rural towns when I'm in a rural town? If you're in an upscale town, what is it that patients want to feel there? What's the authenticity that they want from you? What's your niche? So the main takeaway I hope you take from this, maybe to avoid marketing transactional questions and start asking yourself a bigger question, which is, what is my patient experience? And start documenting that out and then look for incongruencies. Look for lack of integrity in the products and the services that you're providing. They'll exist. They always exist. We're always working towards an ideal. And we'll find different times where we say, this really isn't who we want to be in congruence with the patients that we're going after and trying to attract. But the worst place you can be is to not have documented out the patient experience that you want to have and then just go buy products and services and hope that there's a magical flyer out there, a magical website, a magical social media post or some other software that's going to create the patient experience. It's not going to happen. I'd love your questions around patient experience. Come join us on our DSO Secrets Facebook page.

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