Why Digital Marketing Sucks!

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Hey everybody, Matt Gallogly with the Practice Profit System, and today we're going to talk about why digital marketing sucks. Yeah, uh, that's right, we're going to talk about digital marketing. Yeah, the thing that you normally do to generate your leads and your new patients. I'm going to tell you why it sucks and it's a complete and utter waste of time. Before I go into that, don't forget we have the Practice Growth Event coming up April 2nd and 3rd of this year. practicegrowthevent.com. It's a 2-day virtual event held via Zoom on Saturday and Sunday. Details are at practicegrowthevent.com. Uh, it is totally free. All you have to do is register. There are a number of great bonuses. Um, people have asked, am I going to record it? The answer is no. There is a benefit for making the time out of your schedule to come. If this was something on like ozone therapy, you'd probably rearrange heaven and hell to be there. This is more important than learning ozone therapy. This is more important than learning how to do PRP or PRF or anything like that. This is the most important thing that you can learn how to do, and that is grow your practice. Grow your practice. Let's get as many people in your practice and sharing and sharing this gospel of the great stuff of cash-based medicine that we do— anti-aging, regenerative stem cell, ED, vaginal dryness, all these great things. Come to practicegrowthevent.com. Second time I'm hosting this, first time I'm hosting it virtually. Join us, be there April 2nd and 3rd. Now let's talk to you about why digital marketing sucks. It sucks, it sucks bad. Here's why, okay? In case you haven't noticed, there's a little bit of a war going on between Facebook and Apple and Google. Have you heard about this? Most people haven't. But here's the reality. Let me tell you a little bit about digital marketing. Now, digital marketing in and of itself is not a business strategy. It is a tactic. It's kind of like a different kind of gun. Okay? Hate to use that analogy during this time and age when, at the time of this recording, there's a horrible war going on in Ukraine, but it's kind of like the same thing. Okay, so marketing and getting patients to come in is one of the biggest challenges that you're ever going to face in your business. So what do you do? You go to a conference and somebody has a— they only get in 30 minutes, which is stupid. Why are people hosting conferences? Why, why in the world do people host conferences on all the technical side and they'll spend hours talking about microbiomes and gut health and you know, peptides and HRT and all this stuff, and they'll have practicals, and they have one person that talks for like 25 minutes about how to grow your practice, right? Idiotic to me, but that's another topic for another day. Okay, so here's the deal. What happens? Well, you're there and you hear some guy talking about, oh, we generated 50 leads for somebody for their practice and we did it for $2 a lead, and you're like, oh my God, my answers are solved. Well, here's what you don't know. There's a lot of layers and nuances to digital marketing. And 95, 98% of the people out there offering digital marketing do it wrong. I can say that because I've been marketing for 25+ years. I've used just about every type of medium that you can think of to grow businesses in 30 different industries on 5 different continents. I've done radio, TV, digital, Facebook, Google, YouTube. I've done social media marketing. I've done print. I've done direct mail. I've done I've done speaking at events. I've taken big ads out of newspapers. I've done everything I think except for the Goodyear blimp. Okay, and here's the thing, all right? This is why digital marketing sucks, and it sucks bad. Here's why: it is the lowest common denominator to getting a patient. The reason why you are marketed about utilizing digital marketing, specifically Facebook and Google, to generate leads for you is it sounds cheap. Let me just say that again. It sounds cheap. And you have— most doctors have this wrong thought process and this wrong opinion when it comes to marketing. They approach marketing like, well, I'll spend $500, and if we do better, then I'll spend more. That's the completely wrong attitude. I tell my doctors right off the bat You need to be spending at a bare minimum $5,000 a month on ad spend, not management fees, ad spend per month, preferably $10,000 a month in order for you to grow. Okay, don't buy another machine, sell one of the machines you have, right? You'll go on the hook for $100,000 for a machine that's going to sit there and collect dust that costs you $3,000, $4,000 a month, but you're afraid to invest money in your marketing. Silly, nuts, crazy. I don't know why you do that, but it is what it is. Okay, so let's go back to why digital marketing sucks. Here's why digital marketing sucks. It's the same reason why all other forms of marketing suck. You're only doing one thing. Let me explain. At the Practice Growth event I'm going to walk you through, there are 3 main components of how you grow your practice. Okay, each one of those components has 3 outliers, 3 subcomponents that you need to focus in on in order to make that one work. Well, digital marketing is only one of the 9. Let me say that again. Digital marketing is one of the 9 things that you need to be doing at a full-fledged level. You don't have to do them all right off the bat, but if all you're doing is digital marketing, you aren't going to see results because it's like trying to fight a war with one bullet. Or just a handgun. Okay? And again, I hate to use this analogy with what's going on in Ukraine at the time of this recording. I think this will be released out in a couple of weeks after that. But the analogy makes sense. If you want to think about this in World War II, I talk about this in actually my event. If you think about it, World War II, when we invaded the European continent in D-Day, we had sea, we had air, we had paratroopers, we had ground troops, we had tanks, we had all these different things. And the concept is called force multiplier. The more things we can take and approach from the enemy, to overwhelm them, the greater chances we have of winning the battle. Well, your marketing is exactly the same thing. It's a concept of force multiplier. The more things we can do, if you are just doing Facebook ads or you are doing just Google, which they're both essentially kind of the same thing, I mean, they're digital marketing, then you are only getting a very small impact. But when you add a second component to that, it's not 1+ 1= 2, it's like 2× 2= 4. So in this matrix that I share with everybody during the Practice Growth Event, which if you sign up and you attend, you will see it, you will see me break this down on day 2, is that these 9 different things, once you start working on them— so first you start with the— you can run digital marketing, right? And then, but you have to do something else, and then you've got to do a little bit something else, and you've got to do some videos or some podcasts or things like that in order to get things going. You can't just rely on one thing. Okay, now here's the other reason why digital marketing sucks. Okay, and you probably don't know that this is going on. Remember how I said at the beginning there's a war going on between Facebook, Google, and the powers that be online, and Apple and all this stuff? Well, if you're like me, you have one of these babies. It's called an iPhone. And if you haven't noticed that when you're on your iPhone, or when you're on your iPad, or when you're on your Mac, What's happening is that Apple's asking you if you would like to be tracked. I always said no. And the reason why they're asking that is privacy is a big issue. And so this privacy thing is what's happening is Facebook makes a lot of money by somebody clicking on an ad. See, Facebook is what we call interruptive marketing. So you're scrolling through your feed and you're looking at your friends, everything that they ate or their new dresses or their shoes or whatever, or their kids' whatever holiday party or whatever, and you get this ad, right? And it's about hitting a golf ball straighter, right? And you click on that one and all of a sudden you see a lot more ads about hitting a golf ball straighter. And then what happens is that you're like, well, shit. Okay. Then you go offline and you see more ads about hitting a golf ball straighter and you're like, wow, what is that? It's called retargeting. And what it is, is there's a pixel that's on there. And what it is, is all the other networks, what they do is when you take an action, that data is shared. And if you go to outside the system, if you go to their site, then that data is shared, right? So when you click on it, you go out the Facebook ecosystem and then you get other ads from that person. You're tagged. Okay.

You're cookied.

Well, the problem is, is a lot of these services are no longer allowing it. And Facebook's ad costs are skyrocketing. I have friends of mine that spend literally $5,000, $6,000, $7,000 a day on Facebook and their ad costs have doubled. tripled. And they're having to find other ways to do it. And so the landscape is changing quickly. In fact, Facebook has said that they're— in the Wall Street Journal, this was quoted a week ago, that they're having to reset their forecast that they're going to have a $10 billion, with a B, $10 billion reduction in ad revenue in 2022 because of this change. So these changes are coming. And the other thing is, if you're just focusing on one thing, not only Not only are you missing on the concept of force multiplier, but you're also at the whim of one thing and you have too big of a leverage point. Okay? So yeah, does digital marketing suck?

Yeah.

Can it be okay?

Yeah.

But it's just a really small component of what you do. It is not the end-all be-all. You have to learn to diversify. You have to learn how to scale. You have to learn how to do all the right things that come with that so that you are no longer at their mercy. Right? That's what I have for this week. Make sure that you join us, practicegrowthevent.com. It's going to be 2 days, April 2nd and 3rd. Yeah, I'm pounding the heck out of it because here's what, folks, I'm on a mission. I'm on a mission to help as many doctors, nurse practitioners, naturopaths break free of the insurance money trap, and I want to help you do it. I just took 10 people through our first— that were at this event in November. Some of them have seen dramatic impacts, changes in their business. Adding $25,000 a month of new revenue just like that from barely just one little thing. Imagine what happens if you learn all these other 9 things and start to implement them. So join me at practicegrowthevent.com. April 2nd and 3rd, virtual event, not to be recorded. You got to be there live to get the benefits, okay? And it's free. That's it. That's what I have for today. Enjoy the week, get after them, and we'll see on the other side.

Thank you so much for listening. If you liked this episode, take a moment and share it with your fellow medical professionals, or post a positive comment and rate it on wherever you just listened. Now don't forget, you can get a copy of my book, The Anatomy of a 7-Figure Medical Practice, for free. Just pay $7.95 in shipping and handling, plus you'll get over $1,197 in free bonus material. Simply go to srpmedicalmarketing.com/book. That's srpmedicalmarketing.com/book. Thank you so much, and we'll see you next time.