Digital Marketing To Get New Patients

I am.

All right, guys, well, welcome. We're so excited to have you on the call. Thank you for your patience as we experience some technical difficulty. For those of you who are watching this later, who are wondering, did they actually have the call? And the answer is yes, it started eight minutes late. So we apologize for the confusion on that technical difficulty, but we are up and running. And I am so excited because as a PT practice owner, I can tell you from experience that one of the most frustrating experiences of my life was trying to develop a marketing strategy that didn't involve me knocking doors and developing those relationships with doctors. Even though I loved it, I did. I loved the element of, like, that piece of it. But it was expensive. It took so much time. It was this exhausting journey of like, constantly getting those new patients refilled. Refilled. And as technology started advancing, I felt complete overwhelm around how do we use this technology to help us grow and scale? And so, as you know, here at the hba, we only recommend companies that are going to make the journey of entrepreneurship easier and or produce more success in your path. And so the company that we work with, we are, I'm so glad to introduce, is a company that we have. We have no financial relationship whatsoever. This is a company that came to our attention solely through the success of their good works. And so I have a network that I've curated over the years, and this individual is going to speak to us about their company, but more importantly, just educate us in general around what digital marketing looks like. So it is my great pleasure to introduce Gordon Isaac. He is the Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer with Agile Media, and he has. It's been a great privilege for me to get to know him over the last few months. And Gordon, welcome to the call. Sorry again and thank you for your patience. How are you doing today?

I'm doing great. I wish I had a snazzy of a background, but I'm on the road, so. Actually we both have great backgrounds, so.

Well, thank you.

Yeah, Michelle and I do our little thing to make it look snazzy. And so, yeah, we also know your world has shifted dramatically. You made this happen in a situation where most people wouldn't. So, guys, for those of you who are listening, Gordon has moved literal mountains to get here today in a world that, like, with some things going on in his world that most people wouldn't. So, Gordon, tell us a little bit about Agile Media to begin.

Yeah, absolutely. So Agile Media has been around for about eight years and really started with the owner who happened to, who's joined on as well. Thomas Ferraro, who came from a large agency and had noticed that the quality of service and the focus on really partnering with companies so starts to go out the window when you're working with big scale agencies. And it becomes really, you know, kind of about money and repetition and quantity over quality. And so, you know, one of the things that, you know, we're a lead gen agency, which means we really specialize on getting new clients, new opportunities and real business. And, and you know, the big thing that makes us different though is our focus is on being a consultant and supporting the, the clients that we work with, not in just trying to see how much money we can get them to spe. We have a very high accountability to our customer experience that we provide and the results that we deliver. And you know, to the point of Will's, you know, we do no marketing. As a marketing company, our business is 100% word of mouth. We, if you ever read the book of the.

Raving fans, that's really kind of the premise of our business. And so it's all about we try to create clients that enjoy working with us to the point that they essentially become our sales force and voice, which I'm sure is a lot of the same kind of tactics that you guys use as well about having customers that say, hey, you know what, I know a great PT place that you can go to and get service. As somebody with a terrible back, I've been to plenty of PT places and I love a good word of mouth referral so.

Well, I think it's really funny, Gordon, that your company specializes in digital marketing, but you don't actually have to use the skill that you know to grow because of the word of mouth factor. Like, to me, that is probably the greatest validation of what you do is that you don't actually have to do digital marketing to grow agile media because the word of mouth is so strong and that is, that's so cool. As a matter of fact, that's how I found you. I won't say his name. Let's pretend his name is CJ because his name is cj. He was like, yeah. He was like, stop what you're doing. Well, you got to call these guys. They know exactly what they're doing. Cool.

Yeah, we appreciate, we appreciate it. And again, I think it's just a different approach and I think it's, you know, as you, you pick the right companies to work with and scale and help to grow, it's the same thing we're trying to work with the right companies that have the interest in, you know, partnering and not just trying to see who's doing it cheaper, who's doing it faster. Because as we all know, you kind of get what you pay for in business, so.

Well, let's get right into it. So, you know, obviously PT owners are on this call. They're trying to deal with their crazy day. They worked their best to get into this call as best they could, or they're listening to it later. When it comes to digital marketing, let's get right to the point. What would you say are the top areas for them to focus on? To get more patients?

Yeah, so that's a great question, because it can definitely be confusing and especially if you're online reading, there's so many different opinions. But at the end of the day, there's really only two major tactics when it comes to jetting, generating new leads. And that is through either organically, which we would refer to as search engine optimization or SEO, or through pay per click, or digital, which is referred to as search engine marketing or SEM. And so those are really the two tactics. And it really just kind of depends on where you are with your business and what your goals are. The thing that's important to realize is that with these two tactics, because of the fact that they're dealing with algorithms, those algorithms are changing constantly. And when I say constantly, not like daily, like by the second, they're constantly evolving. As you look at what, what's going on right now with AI as an example, there's a lot of, lot of discussion on artificial intelligence. And so what's important is, is that when you pick a strategy and you pick the right partner, you have to understand those things take time to optimize. So what you don't want to do is be saying, okay, I need this right now, because there is going to be a delay and then in three and not be thinking, what do I need three months from now? And that's why it's important to have a really good partner in this, is because, you know, they need to know what your goals are and they need to be integrated into your business. Because at the end of the day, if you want somebody, if you're working with somebody that truly is there to help you be successful, then they need to be involved in those conversations, almost like a consultant and working with you and kind of what you're. Where you're trying to head so that they can deploy the right strategy. So as we kind of talk about SEO and SEM SEO is definitely more long term play and really what we're trying to do there is that when somebody is looking for keywords like physical, physical therapist near me or physical therapists in Scottsdale, Arizona or any type of version of, of that, if you will, we want to make sure that you show up on the first page and, and hopefully in the first few spots. And that can be very difficult in a lot of industries, especially when you're dealing with large conglomerates. And in certain spaces it can be really a challenge because they're spending years doing that. And so what it, you know, without getting into too much of it, there's a lot of back end work that has to be done in regards to research, competition, finding out why they're ranking, understanding what people are searching for. Because the thing that we find a lot of times is that the client has a perception of what the customer might be typing in to find them. But the reality is that search volume might be 20 people a month and that could be nationally. And so what we have to understand is what are people searching for that has high intent and we know is going to generate an actual lead. And so there's a lot of backend research that has to be done to help deploy that. And then the second part we talked about was search engine marketing. So you know, that's a pay to place practice and that's a dangerous one for a lot of companies. And I'm sure if you've ever tried it, you understand why, because you have a budget that is largely paid to Google or Facebook or Meta, I guess they're referred to now. And, and then you have a management fee of essentially doing the work. So the agency really gets a pretty small percentage of the overall cost. And so what can happen is, is that if your budget is low and want to keep you as a customer or gain you as a customer, they might have you start with a budget that's so insignificant that it's not actually generating leads. And then they're explaining to you how you need to increase your budget because well, we're doing our job, but we don't have enough money to play with. And, and that's what I was saying about before. Why like we will tell customers, hey, you know what, your current campaign is doing great, or what you're doing is doing great, or maybe you should try this or I'm sorry, you don't have the right budget for us to be able to be effective with you. Here's what will need and if you don't have that budget, then we don't want to, we don't want to waste your money because that's really what it is. And that, and that happens a lot. And that's why finding the right agency is important. But pay per click is going to generate the most immediate opportunity for a lead gen in that it while while you may see leads within the first 30 days, it's really still about a 90 day window before you start to see the campaign optimized to a point where you're getting good traction. And that's because again, a lot of behind the scenes work that goes optimizing those campaigns, removing words that are maybe expensive because a lot of people are bidding on them, but finding words that can still generate leads. And so we found with a lot of our clients that we're able to generate and keep people, you know, at the top of page one in ads or even number one or number two in the ad space and in the top few for SEO by focusing on high lead volume. That's very important, we know is going to generate leads, but also maybe a slightly less competitive. And so we can fluctuate between SEO, SEO where you're not paying to play, you're paying for strategy and pay per click where you're paying for every single click. We can, we can, we can vary the approach depending on what the overall budget is to try to optimize the amount of leads that you're getting. And oftentimes most of our clients, even though we specialize in small to mid sized client businesses, many of them are still performing at the top levels of national chains in the industries. One other thing I also want to point out too is that we are definitely what you would consider a generalist and we do have, have a specialty vertical that we also do white label services for. It's not in the PT space, but we work with everything from doctors, lawyers, chiropractors, physical therapists, dentists, lawn and maintenance companies. But what really difference, aside from the, you know, kind of ethics and standards that we have, it's applying best practice into making sure we do the due diligence before we engage into a client relationship and that we feel confident that we can deliver even though we're new to that vertical or that space. Because again, it's not about the money for us, it's about, we want to deliver the right results. So whether you were to use us or use anyone, what's important is to get some multiple referrals from people in different verticals and find out do their stories kind of Match up. You know, do they feel like they're all getting that kind of value? Because what you can find is certain people. Maybe all they specialize in is physical therapists. But, you know, that doesn't mean that they understand how to differentiate them because they're really applying a lot of the same tactics to everybody. Or was that with us or with people are generalists. If you get a good one, they're able to really understand how to fine tune things for that specific niche and industry. And they're not doing it for a hundred people, they're doing it for one or two or three people. And they're massaging that constantly to generate the best result.

So, yeah, that's awesome. It's interesting. You know, a lot of details into that that you shared. I, I want to point out that one of the things you said that really stuck out to me was that you are so committed to the results, which is why you don't have to do any of your own work for your company to grow. Is that if someone else has a good solution in front of them, you'll acknowledge that I. The first person I sent you guys to in my network was working with a current company and he was very happy with what they were doing, but he wanted to talk to you guys because he had no idea how good of a job or bad of a job they were doing. And you came back and said, yeah, he was doing great. Like, you could have, you could have said so many things to easily shift that needle to your company. But it's true. I think at the end of the day, I think the real takeaway from this, from that first question is like, when it comes to digital marketing, the two things we need is to be at the top of that search page and have some presence in, in advertisements. And I think everyone here and everyone listening gets the first that we should be at the top of the page. We understand that, you know me, you know, physical therapy, near me. Apart from that, like, how can we get at the top of the page? I think it's the click per play thing that just freaks us out because we're not experts in this area, we're geniuses in others. But when it comes to digital marketing, that's a completely different skill set. So I loved your ideas around, like, hey, this is how you validate it. My experience with another company that I didn't have a lot of success with. It was exactly what you said, where I was paying money and there's so much money just to run the ads, like minimally it was like, I don't know, 2000 2500amonth. But like, that wasn't even their fee. That was just the ad cost. And, you know, after. And they told me the same thing, it takes three months or so, but five months in, I'm like, what about now? And they're like, oh, no, we just got to figure out, we got to figure out the right search and the algorithm and that kind of stuff. And it's, it can be a very slippery slope. But when it works, I have another friend in my network, PT owner, who legitimately, when he wants to, to grow, he. He knows already if I can put, I just increase my ad spend because he's got it dialed in into his search function. So for the pay to click the, the click to play piece, he will just increase what he spends in his ad ad spend and it generates that percentage of new patients more per month. And he hasn't gone to a doctor's office in three, three years. So it's pretty amazing when it works. It's not even pretty amazing. It's like the way patience, in my opinion, because then you're in a position of automating it. So you're not people dependent. It's not real dependent upon how good that doctor likes you. I had a doctor who I still love, by the way. I'm not ripping on him. I just. One guy was responsible for 60% of our business, and I had to spend so many hours nurturing that relationship, and I kept thinking that this guy has a heart attack, like, I'm up a creek.

So that's what you provide. And how, and so the, the SEM and the SEO, those are the two pieces. But how do those tactics compare and what's the one to use? I think you actually described this. I was going to say, which of those two is there, but you kind of answered this. You're saying in your previous answer they should probably be doing some combination of both. How do you determine, you know, how much of the SEO versus the, you know, click to click to play option? Like, how do you know which. Which is the more appropriate, you know, balance for each client?

Yeah, so there's a lot of factors that play into that. And I think that one of the things that's important, which I didn't mention before, is that a lot of times when you're doing it, when I say generalists, I'm speaking to generalists in regards to the fact that we can deploy our tactics into multiple industries, but they're also generalist marketing Agencies where they attempt to do everything from email campaigns to social posting. And nothing to say that that's long, but do they specialize in each of those tactics or are they offering them a way to just generate more revenue? And the reason why I bring that up is that SEO and SEM are very closely tied together because it's the same data that you're using when you're building a marketing campaign, doing advertising, or whether you're building that SEO foundational campaigns. And so you learn a lot from each of those. And so in the example you gave earlier with the client that you referred us to, he was very happy with the company he was working with, but all they did was pay per click. And so then what he was talking with us about is, well, I really like what they're doing. Would you be open to talking with us about SEO? And I said, you know, of course, like, we're happy to do that. We're happy to take a portion of it and deliver, or we're happy to look at both of them and deliver, but there is so much crossover that it does benefit you. You will get efficiency. So to answer your question specifically, will, like I said, if your business is rocking and you're already doing pay per click, then SEO is a great place to start to put some money into. You don't want to stop your campaigns. We've seen that before. People are like, I've got way too much business. Stop my PPC campaign. That will destroy those algorithms and all that money that you put into it. You're literally starting over. But what you can do is start to reduce the budget. And how much all depends on a lot of factors. So you don't want to tell, you know, your agency should say to you, let me see what we can do to minimize your, you know, start to reduce your budget without damaging your campaign integrity. And so as they're looking at that, you can then take that money and start to reapply it into SEO tactics. And again, when we talk about SEO and there's a lot of confusion around it, there's multiple aspects to it. So first is your website. And, and your website is really the key to all of this, because everything we're doing, if your website is not, not done properly, then you absolutely will be wasting money. And the reason why I say that is because we, you know, when you're driving all this traffic to a website, if it's not easy for the customer to understand what you do and how you do it, in very short and succinct way and also to engage with you, whether it's through chat or a form fill or a phone call, then your people don't have a long attention span. They're going to come on from the ad, the ad worked and then they won't convert and now you're wasting money. So the first thing we always do is an audit of the website and we've had a great partner for a long time. We're actually in the process of acquiring them because we realized how critical that component is and we want to provide our clients with a turnkey experience of hey, if we need to optimize something for our campaigns, we don't want to have to work through, we don't have to tell them or work through somebody else. We want to have that be an in house, you know, experience so that the client can just work with a single account manager and make it easier for them. But, but again, once you have that website dialed in, then you have to make sure you have the right technology kind built into the website, which from an SEO perspective that has to do with plugins, potentially depending on what platform you're using. There's certain tags and identifiers on images and things like that that are important to help make sure that Google is finding that information valuable. And then you have linking which can be done both internally on your site with content like blogs and the actual content of anything that's written on your site. And then there's backlinking, which is where we actually create content in areas that have Google preference that link back to your website on the subject matter. So even though it doesn't, maybe, maybe it's not something that a end user would or a potential client of yours would see. It's something that adds credibility and that credibility helps you show up further up the page because of the work that was, that's being done. And so you know as far as which one should you do again? If you're, if you're a new business, you really ideally should be doing both because you need pay per click to generate the immediate lead. You need SEO to be able to start ranking with Google sooner because with a brand new domain name, brand new company, it could literally take a year to get integrity. With Google, with SEO and with pay per click, you're driving so much traffic and you're forcing the algorithms that it makes, it'll happen quicker. Establish business depends on your goals. If you have a good customer base and you're just looking for ways to maintain that SEO, it's going to be something that's going to allow for you to long term build that high level integrity with Google and rank organically. Then you need to increase business, throw some pay per click ads and start to have both a great organic presence in addition to that. So you know, again, we're not going to tell people, go spend a whole bunch of money. We're going to say what are your goals? What are you trying to accomplish? What are your budgets? Here's, here's what the budget could look like and then we're going to maximize it based on what's best for you. And, and when I say we again, whatever agency you choose, those are the types of things that you should be hearing from them is that that's how they're approaching it, that they're not saying, here's a quote and I'm going to just tell you how much money to spend. It's a conversation on what are your goals and objectives and how can we maximize what your spend, you know, what your budget is and hopefully the goal is, is that we generate more business, that it pays for additional increases in the spending so that you can go ahead and start to grow your business. And you know, as you know I come from a consulting background and will you do, you're obviously doing that as well. Like there's you, when you grow your business, you're not just adding one new employee, you're usually adding one employee which then causes you to add one or two other employees because you know you had one, one person, now you need more people to handle billing. And so it grows at a rate that's not just singular, it's like I gotta add two bod, one body to be another therapist in the clinic. And so that's where that advertising, you know, what are your goals, where are you at so that you can invest to get to those hurdles and get over them quicker.

I love it. You know, I've never, this is the first time I'm really getting the process now and just I have to almost say this for my benefit more than anyone else's, but I finally see the relationship between all these different digital media fronts. And I would say arguably for someone who spends a lot of time consulting with companies across the country and I've seen, I don't know, hundreds of websites that the website area is a huge area of potential upgrade for most of the people who are listening, you know, for most of us, we, we especially 10 years ago, even up to 10 years ago, you really didn't need it. Especially when your marketing is in sales is so focused on relationship marketing and sales. What's the point? Most of the elderly people in my mind were like, they're not going to the website. But here's the vision. I see around what you do and I can see how my friends who have done this really well now I get why it works so automatedly is that you have first of all your SEO, so your website and tell me if I'm wrong, Gordon. But you have your website at the top of the search for anyone who's relative in your area. Then you have these, these ads that are driving traffic. So people who, for example, are just organically looking around them, they'll find you with SEO. But others who are searching, like knee pain or whatever the key terms are, all of a sudden there's an advertisement. Do you have knee pain? Well, yes, I do. Well, you gotta come see Michelle. Physical therapy. You know, there's the ad, you click on it and then to your point, if the, if the website doesn't convert, it's lost money. And I can see now where all these EMRs now are going. Most of our EMRs in our industry have these plugins for websites that allow patients to schedule right there on the website. So like the first thing, there should be only two major focuses on that call to action wise on the website, which is, you know, schedule your free consult or whatever that piece is, or schedule your new patient at eval or come work for me is the other piece. But, but everything else is just built around like why you're going to get the results you want on the website. And so the old days of having a picture of me and my dog and that's not bad, by the way. But that's like, you know, me and my dog on the COVID of like, like, you know, my. It's just not. We have to step up as an industry. But that's the good news. Physical therapy companies, I believe are pretty technologically backwards overall because of the way we've grown our businesses. Not because of the owners, but because of the industry. So that leaves a lot of space for people who are willing to invest in automating their sales and marketing to get it to scale with minimal effort. I think the, the key thing there is finding the right partner or company to help them grow and scale. I think that's it. Because once they get success around this, it's no longer the stressor, it's a button they push every, you know, it's called ad spend. They push that button to increase it and there's a proportionate number of new patients coming in the door and they know their profit margin, they can, they can scale accordingly. Right, so did I get that correct, Gordon? Is that.

Yeah, totally, totally agree. And, and, and that's the other thing too is like the website is so critical, but that's also the most painful thing for any business owner to go through because you, it, you know, you've all been through it, but you have to provide them all the back end login information and then you know, you spend time because they don't know your business so you have to tell them about your business. And then you got to go through tons of like, well those are not the right pictures or that's not the right story about my business or you know, and, and, and everybody's always going to tell you you need a new one. And oftentimes for us, you know, we're willing to work with an existing website. We're willing to, you know, if it makes sense, if it's not cost effective to do it, then we'll suggest a new website. But at the end of the day, like that, that component is so important. And you're right, it is about picking the right company and it's about, it's that you truly can partner with because there, there's a lot to this. You know, there's a lot in the back end. And it's as, as business owners you have so many different things to focus on that it's important. Just like you would. You, you know, you probably have a CPA or you probably have a good lawyer to deal with. You probably have a good marketing company. Like they know those intricate things and you know, and you need to know enough to make sure that they're doing the right job for you on your behalf.

So I love it. Hey guys, by the way, I forgot to mention this a long time ago because I was too busy scurrying trying to get this up and going when the technical stuff hit. Can you guys, if you have any questions for those of you on the call, feel free to type them in the chat. We will make sure Michelle will bring those up to the forefront so you can get those answered. You know, I will tell you, Gordon, while they're, if there anyone's typing that I, the one thing that I have some concern on is always like the website piece. I have been all over the place on website development. You know, I remember before back in the day I got quoted like $30,000 to create a website that I ended up paying one of my employees husbands $500 to put something together. And I, and it was so funny because the company that was going to charge me that money, they, they were actually a friend of mine in my network and they were very successful. And he came to me, he's like, hey, I'm a little bit hurt that you went with some other agency. That was a really nice website though. I really like it. And I'm like, I spent 500. So the reason I'm not saying that to challenge what you're saying, because back then there was no such thing. Like the pay per click thing and like the whole converting on the website, that wasn't even a thing. But I still have a concern around like the cost of like the general cost of all of this. And I think my, anyone listening is going to agree with me. Like, this is all exciting and all, but like what's that cost look like? But let's, before we get into the cost, I want to ask you this. How do you know if it's even working? Like if I, how can a business owner know if the marketing strategy after investing all this is working? You know what I mean? So that they know that it's not like coming from some other like random source. Does that make sense?

Yeah, absolutely. So great question and an important question because again, like I said, unfortunately the marketing industry is all. Has so many different KPIs and most companies spend time focusing on the ones that are working and kind of ignoring or shuffling away the ones that aren't. And so, you know, again, just like with any aspect of your business, you kind of need to know enough to hold the people that you're either employing or working with accountable for the work that they're doing. And so.

There'S, the first thing is to make sure you understand or learn, start to understand some of the basic premises of Google Analytics, which I know sounds intimidating because it is, but you don't have to be an expert at it. But there's key metrics that are within Google Analytics that with a little bit of time or partnering with the right agency that explains it to you, you can understand. And with some simple Google searches, you can see how much should my time on site be, how many, how many pages should people be looking at, you know, in various different aspects of it. And same thing. And in Google Analytics you'll see a lot of the key data. And if an agency sets it up right, which is another thing, the agency doesn't set it up properly, you won't be able to view it. You'll be able to see the real data coming in and, and there isn't, you know, kind of a wool that can be pulled over your eyes. Now for a lot of companies, what they are agencies, what they do and we do as well, is we use a third party tool to create essentially a dashboard so that you can look at the dashboard and see all the real key metrics in one place. And again, there's nothing wrong with that because that helps you from having to dig into this analytic database that can be very complicated and see a snapshot of what's working, what's not. And again, as far as how it's working or not working, got to build that trust, got to build the relationship, got to find the right agency. And then the dashboard should really be that tool that, that a 30 second health check, you know, every week you kind of get a glance at it. But eventually that becomes every month and then maybe every other month because, you know, there's an analysis paralysis if you start to dig in this too much because there's just so much that's going on. So I can't stress enough the importance of finding the right agency because, you know, at the end of the day you have to have TR trust when you're doing something like this because it is, it's spending a lot of money, you know, which I think is your next question. I don't know if you want me to go into that.

Yeah, I, I would like to talk about that piece I just wanted to highlight before we go in. And that's really, my last question is like, the last two questions would be like, what's the general cost of this look like, you know, in terms of. Because I know it's going to be person by person specific, but there's some general costs I'd love for you to talk about. And then if they wanted to get started some somewhere in this journey, what would you recommend? But the thing I wanted to say quickly is, is that I've heard this phrase over and over again that many of you have probably heard, which is that, you know, I'm, I'm wasting half of my marketing money. I just don't know which half. And what you just said there helps centralize that into knowing how to know if it's working for you. Because at the end of the day, I think one thing I just want to say to our listeners is that this is part of the entrepreneurial journey, like learning how to make these investments. There is no such thing as failure in the way that we typically look at failure when it comes to Growing anything I've ever done came from doing it either wrong until I got it right or leveraging a relationship or a network to get it right the first time, which is what the HBA is all about. Right? Like, we are bringing you to the table as someone that we trust. And even though you may not be a fit for everyone who's listening here, there's enough positive recommendation around this to where it's very easy. We can say, this is a good company to talk to if that's something there. And by the way, I didn't mean to turn this into a sales pitch, but I. I really do mean it from a place of, like, just saying to the owners that it's okay. Like, sometimes we invest in these things and they don't work out, but then we learn what we do need. The people I've coached that I'm the most that breaks my heart the most are the owners who have never tried. They have. They've stayed treating. I can say this openly to this group because you're not listening to this call or on this call because you're treating 60 hours a week. And you've never stepped into leadership. But there are people I've worked with who have never stepped into leadership, and it's because they've. Because of these reasons, like, well, I don't want to waste that money. It's like investing in these things is how we find the solution. And once we find it, the return on that investment is exponential. So let's talk about the cost. What are some of the associated costs that people should be aware of going into these relationships? And how do they get started in this journey?

Yeah, absolutely. Let me answer that. But I also want to address one thing, too, that I think is important, because when you talk about, you know, which half are you wasting money on, a lot of that comes down to the fact there's so many different tactics that could be deployed. And so I want to address some of the other tactics without getting too deep into them. But just as an overview, if you're trying to generate leads and business, it really is SEO or SEM, if you're paying an agency or if they're offering you based on your budget, and if your budget we'll talk about next is not large enough, spending money on things like Facebook posts and Instagram posts and email campaigns and all those other types of tactics is where you're wasting that other half of money. And the reason why is because that's branding. That's not. That's not customer acquisition. That's branding. So, and, and you have to be really careful because there are companies out there that will say, well, you only have 400 followers on Facebook, but if you hire us, we can get you 1500 followers and now we can go ahead and do posting, which is going to be important because now you have 1500 people that follow your business. The problem is, is that most of the time there isn't an easy way to attract the potential buyer in your market through just adding new people to your Facebook followings. Like, you really need to do that organically through your, your PT company and ask your customers to, you know, follow you on Facebook, maybe do a little contest and keep it fun. You know, I mean, the, the, you probably all know if you have your own social media platforms, whether it's Facebook or whether it's Instagram, people want to know what's going on organically with your company. They want to know when you celebrate someone's birthday. They want to know when a customer has gone through three months of treatment and now all of a sudden is not coming back. Not because they don't want to, because they don't have to. Like, they want to know the success stories, want to feel that. And that's something that an agency really can't deploy. And so, you know, you need to be careful because you don't want to pay somebody to try to artificially inflate your following and you don't want to necessarily pay somebody to do the organic side of your posting because those aren't generating leads. Where you can pay an agency is to create content, to keep, to keep in front of your audience, to augment what you're doing because you probably don't have time to post three or four nice pieces a week, but maybe you post one a week and the agency does three or four pieces that are more generic and educational and that helps to keep in front of your audience. But again, that tactic's not generating new business, that's speaking to your existing for the most part. And then second, same thing with email campaigns. Great way to stay in front of your clients. My chiropractor sends me an email regularly and some of them might have interest in read and some of them I just go, oh, glad he's doing well. When I say my chiropractor, he's a close friend of mine. So I, I monitor this marketing stuff. So, but you know, I, I, I, you know, it for staying in front of existing clients. But again, probably not generating brand new business. So, so that's the first you Know what? You know, am I wasting, you know, half of which, half of my wasting. That's kind of where you can look at the other thing is when people start to diversify the tactics. So for example, if someone says, hey, on your pay per click you have a $2,000 budget. We're going to run five different campaigns. The reality is it's probably not enough money and you're probably spreading it too thin. And so do you want to maximize one campaign and get a certain targeted customer or do you want to try to talk to everybody and run out of budget before, you know, before they get a chance to even see your ads? So to talk about cost, cost is a tough one because it varies so much. And websites, you know.

So your website for $500 could absolutely be as good as a website for $30,000. If that guy came from a company building a $30,000 websites and truly took care of you. What we typically find is, is the adage of you get what you pay for is very much true. And what I would suggest is again having that marketing agent, agency partner, maybe they offer websites, maybe they don't and have them just look at some of these websites that you may be looking at from a company. Because you can get a really nice website these days for anywhere between three to six thousand dollars, you know, and, and sometimes maybe even slightly less. But five to pretty, if working with a good company, you can get a decent website, a high end agency, 10,000 on up and $30,000 for website is not unusual. But the thing you'll find is that these fancier, more complex websites with videos and all that kind of stuff, they don't convert well. People don't have the attention span. So what a lot of times we call them are kind of ego sites. They're a great way to stroke your ego. So when you're showing your friends and family about your business, you can show them and, and you're going to walk them through all 20 pages and all the cool videos and graphics and animations. But the customer coming in off the ad, they're in pain. They want to understand whether or not you can help them. And they don't need to know that in two or three pages. They need to know it in like 10 seconds and then they're going to go ahead and reach out. And so can I jump in real quick on that?

Because I just want to highlight from personal experience. I have one website for my medical billing company in the black. I paid some big money on it because I wanted the branding to Just be on par and I'm so proud of it. And to your point, the number of leads I've gotten from that website that turned into conversions over three years is one. And it's very cool looking, but it doesn't convert. I love the idea of just saying for me, I'm just saying this out loud for myself. It makes so much sense to get a website built, connected to a, to the actual marketing side of things because I, I talk to those guys who run those high end website firms and they charge 30, 50,000 or more and they're gorgeous websites. But to your point, it's like I don't, I think for pts, I don't think we need that man. I think we just need a website that's like warm and friendly and here's.

What you do and tells your story, tells your unique story and makes it easy for somebody to engage with you. It's and, and mobile friendly. If it's not mobile friendly, if you can't navigate the whole thing with your thumb, then it's, you know, then you're kind of in challenges too. So, so those are some things to consider and I think we could probably do a whole nother session on website best practices and educate on that. So that's kind of a ballpark for a website. And again, it's less about what you spend and more about what you get, meaning how it's designed, how it's configured. When people say it's SEO optimized, what does that mean to them? Get a list of what they're saying they're going to give you. And again, with some Google research or talking with somebody you trust, you can find out pretty easily what H1 tags are and what you know, how they're going to optimize the imagery and that type of thing. And so they should be itemizing that stuff out so you know what you're getting when it comes to SEO. Tricky because SEO is all labor. There's no money being paid to Google or Meta. It's all labor and it's all research. And so when you're talking about SEO, it's about how much do you want to rank for and how fast do you want to do it? And so typically what, at least what we charge starting out is about $1,000. And that includes a mix of, you know, blogs and some, you know, back end linking stuff and pages that are on your site that are specific to the markets that you're trying to service to help you rank. So it's kind of a mix of different tactics. As you spend more, then you can get into GMB posting, which is your Google my business, which is again a whole nother conversation we can get into. And, and so our, our typical customer spends anywhere between, you know, a thousand dollars. If they really just don't have the budget we're trying to, to work on getting them something to 2000 to 3000amonth is pretty average. And that in that we, we know for a fact, based on the, you know, quantity of clients that we have, that we can help them start to rank for the places they want to be when their customers are looking in a pretty short amount of time, a reasonable amount of time now if you want, if you have multiple clinics or if you want to shoot up the rankings quick in every manageable way. I mean, we have clients that have $10,000 a month campaigns for SEO. But we have to realize is SEO is ongoing and it's because those algorithms are always changing. So while you could go ahead and spend, spend two, $3,000 a month for six months and then stop, what you'll find is very quickly and you'll see it within your analytic data, you'll see your numbers go up and you'll see them slowly start to taper off. And so it is a constant battle. And Google keeps it fun by doing two really critical core updates every year, which can have a tendency to destroy the work that's done by SEOers. And so it's important to again, like, it's not just about how to continue to understand what you're looking for, what you're trying to get for a customer, and then rank you in those areas. But make sure that as your competitors are starting to do SEO work, as Google's changing the algorithm, staying on top of that so you don't drop off because you will see arrows showing you going up 20, 30 places and arrows showing you go down 40, 50 places. So it is one of those like keeping all the plates spinning. So but that's kind of a general budget. Thousand dollars on the low end, 2000, 3000amonth is a pretty significant budget if you're in LA or New York or something like that. Those budgets can obviously go up quite a bit based on competition. And then the last thing is on advertising. So most agencies will charge anywhere between 20%. Some will charge 15, some will charge 25. We charge 20% and that's of the spend. And so the reason why, you know, I told you before, PPC can get dangerous, this is you might be spending $2,000 if it's not a month and then spending a 4 or $500 management fee. And if it's not being managed properly, then the agency's only making four or five hundred dollars a month. But Google's getting $2,000 of your money that didn't generate those leads. And that's where it can be an expensive game. So that's why gotta hire a well reputable, you know, agency that's got your best interest in mind. That's not telling you what you need, but listening to what you need and understanding it and then giving the right tactics and then updating you. You know, we, we try to meet with our clients once a month and give them the ability to communicate where they're going and us to show them what we've done and that we're achieving those, those goals.

Hey, love it. So we're almost out of time. One question from the chat from Colette, which Colette got your email. Thank you so much for being patient. Do you have or is it possible to create a particular campaign to encourage more cash paid clients? So what she's asking there is like in physical therapy we have insurance based, which is everybody, but they're talking there's a big movement in physical therapy about going cash based. So you know, from your experience, is it possible to create a campaign that would target people from a cash pay perspective?

Yeah, absolutely. And I totally understand because I know the insurance companies are more and more difficult for you to collect from. So we absolutely can do that. There's a couple different ways we can do it. But you know, typically if you're saying cash, you're kind of tying that to a discount. So you almost have to, you kind of say we accept insurance but offer a cash discount or you can skip the insurance if you're doing cash only and just say, you know, cash discounts available. But there's, there's definitely ways that we can structure that. It doesn't really change anything with the targeting because the targeting is the same client. What it does is just kind of clearly states that this is a cash based, you know, there's a cash based opportunity if somebody has an interest in that. The other thing where that could also work is in what we call display ads. And so instead of search ads where somebody's doing a search on Google, a display ad might show up on an Amazon page or on a website, another website might. You can also obviously do Facebook targeting or Instagram targeting display ads where it can tell a little short snippet about your business, a nice image and Then it says, you know, cash discounts available. And so that way, you know, display ads don't convert as much because you're kind of, you're, you're, you're advertising to somebody who's not looking, but it's a target customer where search ads are advertising to a customer when they're actually looking for your service. But we can absolutely do that. And, and again, the most important thing is, are you structuring those campaigns to make sure that as you're building, as you're trying it out and you're, you're trying to make sure that it's optimized, you know, what are you getting for results? Because there's a lot of times people will try a campaign like that in addition to four or five others, and they're not managing each campaign individually. And so you end up spending 500 bucks out of your budget on a campaign that's not generating results. But we absolutely can do that and so can other agencies.

I love it. Well, Gordon, it has been awesome having you on this call. I've had a lot of epiphanies. I really wish I owned a practice again. I just, man, it's so funny. I'm like, man, where was this information I sold five years ago with Michelle? Well, right. So, yeah, I would love to, in closing, I would like hear Michelle's thoughts on the topic and then Gordon, to pass it to you to let people know how they can get a hold of you. So, Michelle, what are your thoughts?

Yeah, I just first of all, appreciate your time and you're speaking to our group and, and to the many people that will see it later. But I, I just love the idea of, of leveraging this in a, in a usable way. And it seems like a great partnership way for our PT practice owners who are short on time, but also have a desire to help more people in our community. So I think it's a great win win in terms of that partnership potential. So thank you for your time.

Candace typed in, you don't really wish you owned a practice right now, Will. I don't know, man. I learned. I mean, I was very fortunate. But I will tell you, I've got so many clients now. I'm like, there's something out there now. I just, I don't know.

It's crazy now.

Much, so much crazier than 15 or 20 years ago, so. No, yeah, that's true.

I'll cheer you on. Well, yeah, yeah, there you go. Yeah, same.

No, by the way, listen to Candace. She's going to Be our guest. Oh, geez. In May for our town hall. Make sure you guys attend. It's going to be awesome for that.

Amazing.

All right, Gordon, how do they get a hold of you, man? I'm sure people on this call are listening, are gonna be like, okay, great. So just tell me, just tell me what I'm supposed to do. So you tell them, what are they supposed to do right now?

So if you have questions and have interest in us working with you, we do work with small midsize businesses nationally. You can reach me at Gordon G O R D O N or Thomas T H O M a s@agilemedia.com and agile media spelled with a J because we were agile when we found out that Agile with a G was taken.

So.

Hey, you know what? I will also put your email and contact information in that email out to everybody. Michelle, I'll just put that in the chat room for those of you who are on the call. Gordon, have a great rest of your day. Thank you all for attending this wonderful event. We are so grateful for the support that you guys constantly give. We know that you got value out of this. Please share this with others when you see that email go out and definitely when you work with with Agile Media, let me know. Give me ideas and stories about how that experience is so that we can continue to perpetuate the companies that support the PT practice, PTOT and SLP owners in developing, growing and scaling their business. The more foundation we have on that, the more we can create a roadmap for owners in rehab to create success and balance in their lives. So, guys, have a great night. Gordon, again, thank you for being here.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Have a great night, guys.

Okay, bye. Bye. Thanks, Thomas.