5 Question You Need to Ask Your PPC Marketing Agency

Hey everyone, how is it going? I am here with Matt Adams of Empirical 360 and we are going to talk PPC advertising, Google advertising today. Our topic as you saw, five questions you need to ask your marketing agency for growth of your practice in 2019. If you have experience with AdWords, there are some key things that you want to make sure your agency is doing for you and with you to have that sustained success. And I'm thankful for Matt to come by and chat about this.

Yeah, thanks for having me, Jeff. It's good to be here.

You got it. How are the holidays? Sh.

They're shaping up good, you know, for the agency right now. Empirical 360 we've actually invited out a lot of our clients to kind of give year end testimonials and it's been very encouraging, the feedback, but it's also been very good for us as well to learn about some of the things that we can do to improve as well. And that's kind of where this topic derived. It's, you know, the questions that you really need to ask of your marketing agency, if you have one, you know, to see if they're performing, if they're really invested in helping you grow your practice. And so I think we've whittled it down to a few here that are going to be kind of enlightening for you.

Awesome. And the five things that you had brought up and we're going to talk about are transparency, value, accountability, communication and credibility. I think those are really, really key tenants. And let's dive in with transparency. One of the questions that I had for you is how do you know what your agency is doing is actually helping grow your practice?

So yeah, it's an interesting question. So from a transparency standp, agencies tend to report on a lot of different metrics. There's so many different things that you can actually report on impression share clicks. And a lot of this might be, you know, kind of high level, but there's really just one metric that really matters and that's new patients and growth in revenue for your practice. A lot of agencies out there, we get into meetings where they start talking about, well, our goal going into this month here was to increase your impression share. You can simply do that by upping your bids within your account. And if you're reporting on that and you go back to your client and you say your chiropractic client and you say, hey, our goal going into this month was to increase the impression share. And we did that. Well, what value did that really Provide to me, transparency also doubles down as well in terms of knowing what your agency's actually doing for you on a day to day basis. We've actually run into some instances here where we've had questions asked of us, you know, for the retainer that we're paying for your services. What am I actually getting for that? And you know, recently as, you know, recent as a month ago we didn't really have any self auditing and self reporting on that to be able to give back to our clients and say, hey, this is really everything that goes into the management of your accounts. So what we did is we built out these internal processes to log time and have project management, line item, every single thing that we're doing. So that I think that it provides people an understanding because if you don't know what PPC is, and we talked about this term before the George Foreman said it and forget it, people think you just put in some keywords and you plug them in there, you put some bids and you bid on it and you just assume that you're going to get new patients. It's just frankly not that simple. And so that transparency goes both ways. So we report to ourselves internally for all the work that we're doing, but we also report on it externally to our clients as well. And we like to think of things in such a way that if we realize that our retainer is grossly too much for a client, given the work that we're having to put into it, we're going to reduce that retainer because we know what we should be doing there. On the same token, if a month, two months into the relationship, we're putting a lot more work than we need to, or a lot more work than we had originally expected. We're going to go back to you and say, hey, this is a lot of work for us and I think that we're heading on the right track with your marketing. But we need to up the retainer because we're having to put a lot.

But it's that bilateral transparency and that dives into value. So when an agency is providing value for a client, how do I, as a chiropractor, how do I know if I'm getting that value for the dollars spent ultimately?

Well, so the value, number one is a direct kind of coefficient of your revenue and there's a lot that goes into that as well. So you know, when it comes to Google Ads, pretty much anybody can go out there, log on to Google, create yourself a Gmail account and get AdWords certified but we take a different approach to it because we really just don't want to be this by the book agency because it's dynamic. You know, the markets are different, the geographic locations are different, each demographic is different. And if you're buy the book, it's only going to get you so far. So we like to think outside the box in terms of the way that we manage accounts and then additional value. I mean, you know, how much are they actually giving? Are they giving you that kind of reporting to say, you know, we're doing your SEM campaigns, are we doing social for you? Are we doing SEO for you? Are we doing things that are actually relevant? Because I'll tell you another point on this here as well. Working in marketing is kind of interesting because it's such a convoluted process and it's very confusing to people. And I've worked in sales for a long time. When you can add confusion as a component to what you're trying to sell, it becomes exponentially easier to sell it because people don't understand it, really. We just don't want to do. I could probably go in and tell everybody, hey, you should pay for SEO and you should have this massive retainer, and you're going to do great from it. And I think all these great things are going to happen, and six months down the road, nothing actually came from it. But that's just not the way that really business should be done and marketing should be done. We want to be honest with our clients, and that's how. How you know, you can actually get value from it. Are they trying to pitch you on the whole kit and caboodle? Are they actually just giving you what you need?

Yep, yep, that's a good point. And getting down to that, from an internal metric perspective, I know one of the things we had regarding accountability with your agency, if you're going through Google Ads, holding your agency accountable for what you're looking for, what are your goals? Are you hitting those goals? And really, lifetime value of a patient becomes really, really important for that. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Yeah. So lifetime value of a patient is paramount. It's probably the number one or lifetime value of, you know, an acquisition. Right. So new patient or, you know, an insurance policy, sold, whatever we're marketing for. And that's relevant to. Because I think, unfortunately in chiropractic specifically, you look at your growth of your practice in general. I had these expenses, I had this much revenue, and thereby I'm growing. But if you segment out your marketing Dollars specifically. And you compare that against, you know, the actual growth was your marketing dollars specifically, that were tied to the new patients coming in. Worth it for you. So if you spent $5,000 in your marketing, did you get, you know, 10 new patients or something that is a net positive for the new, the revenue that you'd expect to have coming in from it? And if you don't tie that actually back, you're probably missing the boat and you might be spending more marketing dollars than you actually need to.

Gotcha. So there could be something. An interesting point comes about that there could be a situation. Let's say when somebody is growing, they've been in practice a few years, they're actively growing, they're ramping up marketing, but actually their growth is coming from internal referrals. Nothing that they're spending marketing on, which would be an unwise marketing spend to say.

So the way that we look at any kind of practice or any entity like that. So we want you to fire us or retain us for other reasons. So let's say that we have a goal alignment meeting with our clients, and we say the first year into it, these are our goals. We expect this amount of growth. And the end goal of it is you're begging for mercy. You literally can't take anymore. Your wife and your kids are mad at you because you're always in clinic and you're always treating patients, and that's a great problem to have. So you either have to tell us, hey, guys, I need you to back off the throttle for a little bit because I can't breathe anymore right now, or the better option of the two is you expand your practice, you get another office, you bring another chiropractor in with you, and you grow that way. So we want you to get to a point where it's like, I need you to back off the throttle. You know what I mean? But that only comes if you know what the lifetime value is, if you know what your marketing dollar spend is, and you can actually tie new patients that you're getting in back to those marketing dollars specifically.

Gotcha. And with that, one of the things that we wanted to talk about was communication. And you talked a little bit about, or you just mentioned kind of a goal setting, meeting up front. Talk about that process. Like, you know, when somebody, if I'm gonna go with an agency, what should I expect in terms of, I just cut them a check and hope for the best. How does the process work of setting what you want to do and then monitoring it throughout time?

Sure. So goal orientation, we call it in, the discovery meeting is going to be learning as much about you and your practice, the way that you conduct business, the services that you offer, if it's spinal decompression or cold laser therapy or whatever it might be. A lot of chiropractic offices right now are offering total wellness and so they've got additional supplements they can sold on all that kind of stuff. And so that leads us into. Do we need to incorporate any kind of e commerce into your website and do any kind of paid search behind that as well? Do you have a social presence, all of those kind of details? We really kind of have this parsed out process and then the expectations going forward for communication as well. How often do we expect to communicate with one another? We're very hands on. We love our local clients, not to say anything against the national clients that we have as well. But it's great to be able to get into the office with our clients and actually talk to them so that we can make sure that for their initiatives we're all on the same page. For our initiatives, we're on the same page. Agency growth from the marketing standpoint and from our business is directly related to the business growth for our clients as well. That's really kind of our goal and we like to make sure that our clients are aware of that. Other marketing agencies out there might just be in it for a retainer and they don't necessarily care about the end result. And so they shield themselves from having to report on revenue and attribution and where your leads are coming from. And the assumption is if your practice is doing great, well, it's because of us. We're not afraid to tell you, hey, your practice is doing great, but it might be because of other reasons. And so we want to make sure that practices are growing. And if we feel like you should throttle back on your marketing with us because it's kind of wasted spend at that point, we'll let you know.

And kind of rounding out the fifth one, it was really about innovation. So if you're using an agency, one of the things is again not having that complete set it and forget it mentality. The dynamic of online marketing is constantly changing. The dynamic of how Google is going about their business obviously is constantly evolving and the agencies should as well. So what are some good questions to ask? What have you seen as far as growth? Creativity. Innovation.

So innovation really? I always like to ask the clients that we bring on, how often was your previous agency coming to you with new ideas or New developments or new softwares. Because marketing, and you know this because you've been in this for quite some time, specifically for chiropractic. And you know, marketing literally changes every single day. There's something new, there's something hot, let's push social this. Instagram's the next big thing and it's, you know, so we have to be able to navigate what's actually relevant, what's going to perform for a client and if we have a new idea, actually convey that when it's appropriate and not just, hey, something new came out, we think we can make some money on this here. So let's go ahead and pitch it to everybody. Because it's not relevant, it's about finding out what's going to be beneficial to that particular client. We came out with our performance portal this year, which gives our clients direct visualization to all of their initiatives that they have going on. We came out with our CRM this year. If your agency isn't coming to you like every month or every two months with some fresh new ideas for your practice and how to grow it going forward. And chiropractic changes too. You have new service offerings that come out and new things that would be trending in the marketplace and you got to communicate with us on the other side, hey, this is something new. We think that we can actually get some new patients coming in for it. We feel like it's going to be beneficial to them. So let us know and so we can incorporate that into your marketing going forward.

And with that, you know, with the portal that you guys came out with, what a client see, in other words, is it high level enough where, you know, I'm a chiropractor, I understand chiropractic. You know, I want to know what's going on with my marketing, but some of it gets over my head. What are some of the key items that you think are important from a chiropractic, from a clinician's perspective, that they can take a look at in a portal and get a pulse check as.

Far as what's going on. Yeah. So the performance portal itself gets to a kind of a granular detail. It talks about all the things, it talks about impression share, it talks about clicks, it talks about your cost per lead, and it talks about all those different granular items that you want to be able to see. But it doesn't do it through the Google Ads platform, which can be incredibly confusing at times. So we both are easy. The one thing that it actually does show in combination with our CRM so long as we have. And this is the caveat on this, we always ask our clients disposition that lead appropriately so that we know that a lifetime value can be assigned to it. And it's, it's, here's your marketing dollars, here's everything that's been spent, and here's actually the amount of revenue that you should expect from the lifetime value of a new patient acquisition. And if this number is bigger than this number, then we say, hey, your marketing dollars are worth it.

Yeah, I really appreciate it. These are, you know, five key things that we talked about today. And I'll kind of say the high level is, you know, as you go through and if you're a doc watching and you're making a decision on an agency, maybe you have an agency and you want to make sure you're doing the right things in 2019. Transparency, value, accountability, communication, and innovation. Those are the five key tenants that you need to make sure that your agency is living up to their end of the bargain on. And one of the things additionally, I know we had talked about was, you know, anybody who's been watching our weekly series here, if you have questions, feel free to fire them down below and we're happy to jam on them and answer them for sure. Additionally, last episode we went through your chiropractic guide to PPC advertising. We'll throw a link to that below as well. So if you're a chiropractor saying, man, this sounds great, but I don't even know where to start. That guide is for you. It's a great place to start. So, any closing thoughts?

No, it's been a great 2019 for Empirical. We're really, or 2018 for that matter.

I'm already moving on to the next.

One, but we're really excited for the next. And like you said, Jeff, if you have questions about it, PPC is something that you can entertain without having to hire an agency. And so that's why we created that guide as a very. Now, some people, they're not technologically savvy and they don't want to have to deal with it. As a practitioner and as a doc, you want to treat patients and that's what you got into the business for. So if you need any help, if you need any lift with it, reach out to us. We're always happy to help. Awesome.

All right, until next time, Matt and I will be back after the holidays. We'll be chatting ppc. We'll be diving into some very specific strategies and tactics you can use throughout 2019 and beyond to make sure if and when you are doing that advertising, you're getting the best bang for your buck. Hope you guys have a great day. Bye. Bye.