#19 - Top 3 Marketing Must-Do’s for Your Practice with Colin Swala, DC - Part 2

FAKTR, spelled F-A-K-T-R, stands for Functional and Kinetic Treatment with Rehabilitation. Over the past decade, this unique approach to treating pain and dysfunction has been utilized by healthcare providers on 6 continents. Serving as a framework that guides clinical decision-making and patient visits around the globe on a daily basis. With this podcast, our goal is simple: to bring the best and brightest in clinical education to the forefront and empower practitioners with cutting-edge, evidence-based content that improves patient outcomes and inspires healthcare providers to continually evolve their approach to treatment. In each episode, we will feature a training or interview with some of the top minds in healthcare in a short format that is easy to digest with actionable information that you can implement into practice right away. Let's get started. Hi guys, happy new year. Welcome to 2022 and a new episode of The Factor Podcast. I'm your host, Jessica Riddle. If this is your first time tuning in, welcome and thank you for listening. Now today we dive deeper into our training with Dr. Colin Swala Titled The Top 3 Online Must-Dos for Your Practice. So this is part 2 of this 2-part training. If you missed our last episode, I highly suggest you hit the pause button, go back and dive into part 1 before you pick back up here with part 2. So today we continue our training and discuss the most important social media platforms that your company should be engaging with. We'll also talk about how to navigate Facebook advertising, In light of Apple iOS ever-changing security updates, and guidelines for creating a blog that will not only increase your search engine rankings, but draw new patients into your practice. Dr. Colin Swala is an established digital marketing expert who specializes in helping chiropractors market their practices. He's the Director of Technology for PIF Digital, founder of the New Patient Generator, and co-founder of familyhealthadvocacy.com. He also has authored an ebook, The New Patient Generator: Digital Marketing Step-by-Step Guide, that he wrote specifically for health professionals. Dr. Swala has managed millions in advertising budgets throughout his career, and he has a formal education in computer science, which he had prior to becoming a chiropractor. That gives him a unique skill set that has allowed him to develop 3 online applications to date. So let's cue the intro music and get started.

So this is also why we've spent so much time and resources to develop the Natural Health Practitioner Directory and blog, Family Health Advocacy. We wanted to create a space for natural health professionals to be able to boost their website search engine optimization by making the hardest part, yet most invaluable ranking factor, simple, easy, and free. So we launched it last year, and I'm excited to say that it's actually working as described. For many practices who have just simply added themselves to the directory and been providing content to the site, they've seen huge boosts to their Google search positions, and in some cases, it made it to the front page of Google for the most popular search terms related to their profession. And so essentially it works in 2 ways. We have created a landing page/profile directory system that auto-optimizes for every profession in every city for which we have a practitioner in the directory. So let's say that you add yourself to the directory and you are the first practitioner in a given city to do that, and then immediately a brand new listing would be created automatically and Google will be notified that it exists. Now, with you listed on that page optimized for something local, then you will get credit for the backlink for that listing. And further to that, we've given you full control over what info you share about your practice. So all of the fundamentals, of course, like your address and hours of operation, but also each page allows you to include many features that are showcased in the SERPs, also known as your search engine results pages. Things like having images and featured images and linked blog articles and more also, they all help to tell Google that these profiles are valuable. And remember I said that backlinks are important. So from your profile landing page, you can link back to your website from this page and also control what's called the anchor text, which is the text that's used to link your page, which gives you full control over what keywords specifically or phrases you want to optimize for. Now, what's really cool is that the more practitioners that we have in the directory, or specifically the more we have in your specific city, the stronger the links become for you and the further up the Google ladder you go. So, you're more encouraged to help grow the directory for your city versus just thinking of these other people in the directory as competition. There's also a form on the page as well, so people can request appointments with you, making this yet another source of new patients. And practitioners at the top of the list in the directory for each city will be the ones that most likely get the most patients that come through. So the only real competition becomes in the end is where you rank in that listing for your city. And we've made it simple for you to be in the first position on that page by contributing content to the site. So the second part is this website isn't just simply a directory, it's also a full-blown natural health blog as well. So I've mentioned earlier, one of your SEO strategies has to be providing content on other credible websites. Well, organizing that or building a relationship with other owners of health websites can be a challenge. So we can help you because this is exactly why we built Family Health Advocacy in the first place to promote you for free and give you a place to easily contribute your content in exchange for those valuable backlinks to your website. Now, I mentioned in my book, which was written just before all of these major Google updates came out, that author authority online was something that was going to be really important. It turns out I was right. So since your website showcases you as an expert for specific discipline, and thanks to Google's sophisticated algorithms and deep learning systems, Google knows who you are and how credible you are and if you can be trusted. And this is only speculation on my part, but deep— I believe deep in their system somewhere, I wouldn't be surprised if you specifically have a score associated to you that affects your website search positions and those that host you as a health professional author. A popular acronym that is circulating now for something major to keep in mind moving forward with SEO is the acronym EAT, which stands for expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. And the only way to build your quote unquote score in these areas is to put yourself out there and start writing, which means you really have to get started contributing and distributing. So by contributing articles to Family Health Advocacy, you can further boost your SEO. By helping to build your EAT credibility with Google. But remember, I mentioned that you also have control of where you're positioned in our directory. Well, this is exactly how you keep your spot at the number 1 position as the directory grows. So, I'm so excited about the launch of this directory. Its features are brand new, proprietary. It's innovative with huge potential for everyone. And we, we're going to be a massive website in the natural health scene. Sharing the traffic of the big guns like Mercola and Josh Axe. The only big difference with us though is that we will be sharing our growing credibility with you and using our traffic to help you grow your practice. So the sooner that you get on board, the further ahead of everyone else you'll be and the more benefit to your SEO and to your practice. So plus you've got nothing to lose because it's absolutely free and you can get started at the end of this webinar. We'll have links for that. Okay, so the last topic to cover for today is my pick for the most important social media platform for your practice this year. And for this, I'm referring specifically to organic growth and audience building, not paid advertising. For paid advertising, nothing beats Facebook. I'm excited for the day that a new platform comes along that takes Facebook out because I have a love-hate relationship with them, but it is impossible to produce the same result for the same amount of money. anywhere else when it comes to generating patients online through paid advertising than Facebook. But so right now, we're going to be talking about the social platform for the organic stuff. But first, I'd say let's determine what features or benefits that the best platform should have to top the list for this year. So the first is having a wide age range of users. Now, Facebook is a great example for this because it boasts the widest on all of the social platforms in Canada, United States, Australia, and the UK. And I believe it's because they are the most popular. So, which obviously that helps because that makes you so well known. And even my 90-year-old grandmother is on Facebook. And if you're lucky, you'll catch her cheering on her grandson commenting on my posts. So yeah, Facebook, huge wide age range. We need that for our pick for our number 1 social media platform for this year. Next. Is the ability for your content to not only be searched within the platform, but also to come up within the search engine results themselves. Like, wouldn't it be great if you had produced some content on sciatica or low back pain within a social media platform that would actually show up among websites in a search engine? It's a huge benefit. The platform— next thing, the platform should have a qualified audience. So basically having the right type of audience. So for example, Twitter has tons of users, so technically it should be a solid platform to grow an audience, but I disagree. It's designed for ranting and most popular for news and political discussion, quote-unquote discussion, but it's highly entertaining maybe, but it's not the best for what we want to accomplish. So we need a platform that has a qualified audience. And last, the most important is the platform must allow you to reach your whole community. So, or basically all of your followers when you're posting content. So Facebook is the worst for this. You invest, and it's happened to me, you invest all this time and money into building an audience for your Facebook page. And then when you want to present your content to your audience on Facebook, You have to pay again. And just to make sure that everybody is shown the content, that's not going to work for what we're needing this year. So we need unrestricted access to our audience if we're going to spend time building it. Okay, so what is my pick for the top platform for 2021? Ta-da! Surprise, it's YouTube. So before you start cursing me because of— I know that maybe starting to get a bad rep because of all of the censorship people have encountered last year. And trust me, social censorship is something that really boils my blood as well. But just hear me out on this one. YouTube ticks every single one of those boxes. So if you're going to spend time building an audience online, then my recommendation is to start making videos posting to YouTube and build your audience there. That really crappy thing that Facebook does that I mentioned, well, YouTube doesn't do that and they never will. For every single video that you post, all of your subscribers will be notified. That's huge. You won't get that on Facebook. You won't get that on Instagram. So don't forget also that YouTube makes their money from showing ads within the videos. So they want more people to watch your content, not less. So for this reason, if you're considering investing time and money into a platform for regular communication with your patients and your external audience beyond simply emailing them, then my advice is YouTube. They have a wide range of users and age range. The videos show up in the Google search listings. The audience is qualified and you will not be restricted when delivering your content. As long as you stay clear of anything controversial, then you should be fine. And I think that actually wraps up everything here, but I believe we still have some time for some questions.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Dr. Swala. So one person was asking about the Facebook changes, and this I think is in relation to paid ads with the new Apple updates with iOS security. Can you give any kind of insight or insight into how that landscape is going to change here this year?

Sure.

Yeah, no problem. It's a great question.

So it is for the new iPhone 14, I believe. And they're just giving the opportunity to have people shut off tracking. So the ability for pixels. So there's, we have a lot of different ways that we deliver our Facebook ads. We will do it within the Facebook lead forms and have the audience never even leave Facebook and we'll collect lead information. Or we'll send them to a landing page where maybe there'll be an advertorial style landing page or just a simple video. And Facebook allows you to put code on the page that will track the interaction basically. So if somebody does submit a form, then it will count that person and it will also count that that person was present on the page. So it does sting a little bit because the results that you get, Facebook's algorithms use that to help try to target similar people to try to boost a result. So your overall, what they're reporting in their data for your campaign, may be underreported essentially. So you may not— you'll be getting leads that Facebook may not be knowing about. And so it will have a minor impact on that. Overall for us, it doesn't affect us that much because we typically, if you're doing your marketing for new patients, you're in a tight geographic area anyways.

How do you find out about new continuing ed courses? Do you check your college's website, maybe your state association? Do you type in keywords in Google and hope that your course of choice is coming to your hometown? Statistics show that the number one way that people learn about worthwhile CE courses is through other attendees. Studies also show that attendees who take courses recommended by their like-minded friends are 5 times more likely to find value in the course content than by simply seeking out courses to attend on their own. So the takeaway is this: if you attend a course, whether it be online or in person, you should tell your friends and colleagues about it. After all, you all have to get continuing education every year, so why not make sure that you're taking courses you actually want to take? Learn things that you actually want to learn about to improve your patient outcomes. At Factor, we want to reward you for your efforts, and we want to reward you for telling others about our courses that you attend that you enjoy. Through our Share the Love program, you can actually earn cash back for every person you refer. So here's how it works. Tell everyone you know about our live courses or online course offerings, the courses that you've taken that have had an impact, the things that you've learned from us that you've then taken directly into practice and used in those patient encounters. When your friend or colleague registers for a course, make sure that they input put your email address in the How Did You Hear About Us field at checkout. It's very simple. That's on every single course registration form that we have. They just simply put in your email address so that we make sure we send the appropriate information over to you for your promo codes. After we receive that information, you'll receive an email with 2 promo codes for each person that registers and gives us your email address or your name. So one promo code is good for $25 off in our online store. And you can use that as a credit to purchase any of our Factor products or any of our products in our store for that matter. The other promo code is good for $25 towards any online course in our online learning platform. You can stack up the promo codes and tell as many people as you want. So you will earn $25 for online courses and $25 for products for every single person that registers through your referral. Be sure to visit the links in our show notes to view upcoming live course dates and online courses that you can tell your friends about. Now let's get back to the show.

Your audience sizes are not 10 million people, right? At max, maybe sometimes 200,000, 300,000 in the radius around your practice. So we typically don't do any retargeting with our ads anyways because there's no— it doesn't make any sense. We cast a wide net and And we only restrict on like geographically. And so because of that, I think we'll be safe from these changes. And plus it's only if people decide to turn it off that it will be implemented. So I think that for, yeah, for new patient generating stuff specifically, it's not gonna have a huge impact.

Someone else had a question about the New Patient Generator program. Is that a ClickFunnels-based program?

The New Patient Generator? Well, for one, it's a book. So it's a step-by-step guide on everything that you need to do from an organic and paid advertising perspective. But we also, what's more popular, I think, even than the book is our done-for-you service, which we're actually an agency and we manage Facebook ads. So what's different about the service specifically is that we have a high focus on content as opposed to sort of deal of a lifetime style campaigns. So A call to action is something that's essential. So you do, you do need to have some sort of offer in there if you want it to be a success. But we have a focus more on creating tons of content and we do use landing pages for it. We have used ClickFunnels to implement some of those landing pages, but we have a brand new platform that we're, as we speak, starting to implement right now that is offering us way more in the way of features than ClickFunnels could ever do. So really excited about that.

Wonderful. Someone else is asking if you could speak more as to what style of Facebook ads you found to be most effective. So for example, vouchers, educational content, Facebook Live, condition-specific content. They also asked about exercises and stretches or even showing in-office treatments. And I guess this could also kind of flow over into some of the YouTube content you were talking about as well.

Yeah, for sure. Like for specifically for Facebook ads. What we find to be the most successful is condition-specific. The people that are seeing the ad, a lot of times if they're sitting there in pain in some capacity, they're on the edge of making a decision or wanting to do something. And it's— what happens is the ads just end up being perceived as you speaking directly to them. So content-rich is key. So what we find with people in this industry, there's tons of I've been doing this for 5 years back in its infancy, but now 5 years later, there's tons of agencies, tons of experts, and, and you can produce huge numbers of leads just by simply throwing up an ad and putting a steal of a deal and for a chiropractic exam specifically. And that will produce good numbers, but we find that the quality of the people starts to diminish as you do that. And so it definitely, it excites their clients. You're seeing 50, 60 leads coming in, but if only 15 of them you can get ahold of, and then only 5 of them start care and none of them refer anybody else, then I don't think it's as successful as having less number of leads with a higher quality, ones that will actually stay and they'll pay and they'll refer other people. And we find the way to get that is through content, giving value, a little bit of value. And an ethical call to action, I like to say, is via conditions, is the best bet for sure.

Absolutely. Going back to what you were talking about earlier when it comes to having a blog and creating blog content, is there kind of a guideline for word count on blogs? And then the second part of that question was, should the blog be written in third person or coming from the doc?

Yeah, those are also great questions. And Google keeps changing this up. Like it wasn't that long ago where you were better to have like a super blog where you'd have 5,000 words and you're trying to keep somebody on the page for a really long time because one of the ranking factors was time spent on a page. Like Google assumed that if somebody was sitting on a webpage for 20 minutes reading 5,000 words, that it was going to be really good for the topic, that keywords it was optimized for, then they'll rank it higher. But now it seems more like that's not necessarily the best route. And so I aim on family health advocacy now for 700 words typically, and lots of different pages specifically rather than cramming everything into one. And I did mention earlier about the structure is really important now. So Google's ranking based on How valuable the blog is at answering common questions. So that's why if you're going to start blogging, start first by grabbing a list of the top 20 most frequently asked questions for your chiropractors in this room. Then it would be for chiropractors and create 20 blogs answering all those questions and try to get it to be at least over 500 for each of them. And then after you're done that, Then you can branch out to specific conditions, but sticking with that same format, all thinking of it as like an FAQ, because that's really how people are searching, right? So Google wants to improve the user experience. So if somebody's looking for a question to be answered, then the pages that best answer those questions are the ones that get ranked higher.

Wonderful. And then the second part of that question, of course, was, and I guess maybe you answered this by the content piece. Should this be coming from the doc directly or be written in kind of a third person?

Yeah. So if it's done structured correctly and it's done as a blog, which means like the author is properly noted, then that's a good question. It depends on what the topic is because you want to be, for example, if you're doing a blog on a specific condition, then Google needs to know that what you're writing about is factual. So as I said, they take into consideration the authority of the author themselves and how they determine the authority, I have no idea, but it does help if you have credentials. So that's why I was saying we're valuable as chiropractors with comma DC after our names when we're writing online. Another blog would be attracted to, to have us be writing for them because they know that their blogs will go further when someone with credentials is writing it. But also you want to reference everything as well. So the more well-referenced things are, the better. So you can write in the first person if it is going to be an opinion piece, but if you're talking about facts, then I wouldn't write in the first person and I would just lay out the facts and then make sure you include references too.

Wonderful. I had another come through text message here and it was referring to educational content. There's been kind of a trend lately Where docs will put together online courses that are patient-focused. So an online course on their site about stretching for low back pain or things of that nature. Have you found that those are effective at kind of pre-qualifying the right type of patients?

It can be, but again, it's sort of, it depends on what your goal is. So if your goal is to get new patients, we've found that the best bang for your buck is to have them jump through the least amount of hoops. So if you're sending them through an hour-long thing on how to help with sciatic pain initially, and then at the end offer an exam for an appointment, there's not that many people that are going to get to that step. So the way we do it is I like to call them mini webinars. And all really it is is really condensed video. They go to a landing page or they watch the video within Facebook and they're only 3 to 4 minutes long. And so you're just condensing everything down from, and there's this very specific format. So in the book. So if you go and get the download for the book, there is a skeleton specifically for writing blogs. But that can be also used for creating your video scripts as well. And it'll help you touch on all the things that you need to do in a short amount of time. And I think you'll get a better result if you do that. You don't make them jump through too many hoops. Now, that being said, if you are trying to build an audience to nurture them and over time and maybe have it as a value add for your existing patients and a place for your existing patients to soft refer their friends and family into, and then that it is worthwhile to do. But the challenge we all face is just the amount of time it takes to do all this stuff. So you really have to stay focused and focus on— figure out first of all what your goal is, and then focus on what's going to be able to get you to that goal fastest, basically. And utilize tools or services like what we provide to help take some things off your hands so that you can focus more maybe on nurturing. We're handling your ads for you or something.

So we can go ahead and end today's session. Thank you so much, Dr. Swallow. You've been a wealth of information, and I hope everyone kind of walks away with some great insight and information. Once again, thank you so much, Dr. Swallow. We really appreciate you presenting for us today. Thank you everyone for joining us. We look forward to your questions and your feedback as well.

That's awesome. Thanks so much for having me. It was fun.

Okay, guys, that is it for today's episode. Be sure to tune in for episode 20, where we kick off a brand new training with Drs. Brandon Steele and Tim Bertelsmann from ChiroUp. Now, if you haven't had the pleasure of hearing these 2 present before, it's a real treat. And this session specifically covers game-changing practical research to improve patient outcomes. You won't want to miss it. Episode 20 drops in 2 weeks, or 1 week for our Patreon subscribers. You can subscribe to The Factor Podcast on Apple, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or the podcast app that works best for you. Give us a 5-star rating to help us grow the show. Every little bit helps. And last but certainly not least, please be sure to visit the show notes for a link to download the PDF of today's full presentation, as well as learn more about any of the special offers featured in today's episode. We'll see you next time. Hey guys, if you like what you heard today, I encourage you to visit our website at factor-store.com. That's spelled F-A-K-T-R-store.com to find out more information about all that we have to offer. We have a variety of online offerings as well as our hands-on Factor Rehab System course scheduled in cities around the globe. Be sure to also You can also check out our event calendar and bookmark any of these upcoming live webinar dates coming up in the near future so you can join us live. And of course, the biggest compliment we can receive is for you to help us spread the word to your friends, colleagues, and classmates. You'll find all the important links as well as info about our sponsors in the show notes, so be sure to check those out.