The way physical therapists market has been affected and will be changed forever because of the COVID-19 pandemic; it’s forced to go digital in the way we treat and connect. In today’s episode of the Physical Therapy Owners Club, Nathan Shields talks to Tracy Repchuk, a multi-awarded pioneer in digital marketing who has worked with social media, branding, and websites for over 25 years. They discuss the ways physical therapists can market for the better and learn from this slowdown. It’s time to turn our attention to digital.
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Marketing For Physical Therapy During The COVID-19 Crisis And Beyond With Tracy Repchuk
I’m excited to bring on Tracy Repchuk. She is a marketing expert and I’ve met her a couple of times and I’ve seen the work that she’s done, especially at this time during the Coronavirus crisis. It’s important to recognize the importance of the marketing that we’re doing to sustain our clientele and stay in communication with them. I thought it’d be important to bring her on. Tracy, thanks for coming on. I appreciate it.
Thank you, Nathan, for having me. I’m excited to be sharing what’s happening out there.
If you could let us know a little bit about you, what you’ve been doing here and also what you’re doing nowadays to help private practice owners with their marketing efforts?
I started a software company at the age of nineteen in 1985. I’ve been in technology and in marketing my entire life. In 1994 before it was even the internet, that’s when I was doing development for banks, JC Penney, Walmart, the Lottery Corporation and large corporations because they didn’t know what this was. I knew when I saw it that it was a future, that everything was becoming this. I was an extremely early adopter. In 2006, I went all-in on internet marketing and exploded. I moved from Toronto, Canada to California because I knew this is where the market was at that time. It had not been accepted yet in Canada. It’s interesting though because this is an example, what we’re going through, in a way was going to happen. The virus accelerated it, is what ended up happening. We were all going to be online in some bigger way. It rushed it by 5 or 10 years. It’s turned into a disrupter. Uber and Lyft was a disrupter for taxis, Redbox and Netflix blew away Blockbuster. By the time 2000 came around, those that did not adapt to the new technologies, clung to the Yellow Pages, they perished. They’re gone.
Normally, this type of thing has been localized or niche-specific. In this quite case, it’s global. It’s a planetary reboot. The world will be new. You’re going to need to adapt rapidly. That’s my excitement quite frankly because everything I’ve been trained for is happening and what I can do for companies, restaurants, retail, physical therapists, chiropractors, yoga, Pilates. Anyone with a physical location, it’s time to take a look at where to go. I’ve been talking about what you do and where you go for years now. We’re right and ready to move into this new era.
It’s interesting because this shouldn’t necessarily be a pause for a lot of the business owners out there, but rather a reset and consider what you’ve done and what you need to do differently in the future. If your business is the same coming out of this as it was going into it, then you’ve not taken advantage of the opportunity. I don’t know how well you’ll survive going forward. It’s a great message to share like you’re talking about for physical therapy owners to consider how they can take advantage of telehealth services. How can they sell their services on digital platforms and social media platforms? There’s a lot of effort that should be looked into putting our businesses more digital and not rely on the brick and mortar. That’s hard because as physical therapists, we want to be manually engaged. We have to recognize that there is a market out there for the other things and we can take advantage of it, frankly.
What’s interesting is one of my specialties is to systemize, streamline and scale. When you only have a brick and mortar environment, scaling often involves high costs and expense as well and you’re carrying huge debt loads. The beautiful part I’ll say about what is occurring is we can add all of the technologies that exist for us to leverage. We can build a more systemized and streamlined infrastructure online. That’s going to help you scale and make more money without necessarily adding buildings or offices unless you want to. It’s great when that is a choice and not the only route so that you can figure out what you want to do. How do you want to make money going forward and how do you expand?
To me, I know it’s an extremely exciting time because it’s making companies think out of the box. What I love about physical therapists is you are built for health. You want to help people. You want to make sure that they understand how they can repair an injury or how they can get more mobility, especially without drugs. It’s the savior of the planet from what’s happening now. Two things the online environment can give us, and one is exposure. Instead of us having that localized message office by office, when the entire PT industry or people start to shout it from the rooftops what you do. It’s an ambiguous think quite frankly, and people think it’s specialized that it’s not for them.
I came into the physical therapy world when my mom had a huge incident that resulted in her entire back crumbling. She had the entire thing repaired with pins and rods and through numerous surgeries and then ended up in the hospital for seven months doing physical therapy, during which time I stayed and assisted her. Hence, the beautiful part that I had an online business and could do that has that gift of time. The other part was what respect I built for what you did. That’s where my passion became, I need to get out the message about what you do. That’s where I entered into the physical therapy arena and started to help physical therapists to move online. This is what we’d be doing, but now it’s game over. Get on now.
I like the points that you brought up and that is number one that spreading your message or at least relying on the office space to grow your business can be much more expensive and time-consuming and energy-consuming. Whereas, if you expand more digitally, it doesn’t cost as much to expand and grow. Number two, we can market directly to the consumer if we take advantage of it the right way and not rely so much on physician referrals but rather go directly to the consumer because all 50 states have direct access in some form or another at this time. We can bypass the physician referrals and go directly to the consumer and say, “If you have an acute injury to your back, because you’re a weekend warrior, come and see us.” For some reason, chiropractors are able to get that message out, but physical therapy hasn’t been able to do that. If we work together as a group during and after this crisis, we can get that message out via social media, through digital marketing, what you have it, and help people understand that you don’t have to go to see a doctor to see us. You don’t have to have gone through surgery to see us. We can see you right now. That’s a message that you can get out even for those people who aren’t affected by the virus and then sustained as we ramp back up.
We were all going to be online in some bigger way. The virus just accelerated the process. Click To TweetTo me, this is part and parcel of a combination of how do you get people no longer addicted to opioids by spreading the message that there is an alternative. You can get natural-based therapies that most people are not aware of. This is the reason that prescription drug abuse, in particular, happens because people don’t know. “If I get adjustments or if I do this or get a correction on an injury, I don’t need to be in that pain.” The biggest problem is when they choose that the alternative route is they don’t want to end up out of pain. All they end up is masking it and it never gets repaired. It’s important. Honestly, this is the greatest catalyst you’ve got for the PT industry and my other passion is nutrition response testing. Anything that deals with making the world a better place and helping a person to get healthier without any introduction of alternative elements other than your own body telling you how to heal.
I like how you brought that up because it made me think of two things. I thought this is going to be good for our profession in that it’s going to force our hand into telehealth services. Our profession is going to be changed forever because of that. We’ve been forced into some telehealth services to a greater extent than we were before. Number two, this is going to force us to get our message out digitally that physical therapy owners, in general, are behind the curve when it comes to modern technology use and social media use. Some people have done it well, but I would go out on a limb and I think it’s a big limb and that I don’t think we’ve used it to our capabilities to push the message that we can see you directly, that your acute issues can come to us directly. We can see you without a doctor’s referral that is forcing our hand in direct to consumer marketing. I don’t think I realized that before talking to you. I did regarding the telehealth, but it’s going to force out the physical therapy owner’s hand to be more aware of their direct to consumer/digital approach. As you’re working with somebody, where do you start? Do you start with the website? Do you start with their Facebook accounts or their Instagram or all of the above? Where do you start initially?
I’ll tell you where I normally start and then I’ll tell you the COVID-19 start. It’s an important piece and I’d be talking about that again for years. It’s with the landing page and the list building. We need to focus on accumulating the database because that is going to be your greatest asset. It’s also the reason that it’s important is as you’re now going to expand through social media, we don’t want to expand through social media unless we have somewhere to send them. It has to be the landing page. We have to be list building so that we can do email marketing. Why is that important? It still has the highest return on investment. It is the way that I’m advising clients now is to get emails out to your database and triple your communication to them so they feel heard and taken care of. They’re in worry as well, especially if they do have injuries. They know that they should be doing something and they feel like they can’t.
It’s one of the original technologies that have to become stable and should have been years ago. The other reason I love landing page technology, especially for PT’s, is how we can create what we call the lead magnet. This gift, which I’ve been creating for many physical therapists now, is an educational tool and that’s what they need. The five ways to whatever to get off of opioids or the five best strategies for pain reduction of your back, your knee. We pick the target market, we create an asset to give. The beautiful part about where we have gone is all of that marketing at that time was kept local.
You can grow at a certain rate. There are only so many people that might need you. Now with the introduction of this global pandemic and the fact that we should be out in a bigger way, it doesn’t have to be local. It’s great when it’s local. I do a lot of the strategies to focus on that, but the bigger picture is the more people that have this gift or guide and content in their hand, the more people will understand what physical therapy as a whole is. This is how we elevate the entire industry at the same time as you’re moving into a position of leadership and authority because you’re the one delivering this information. We add fuel, which is social media. We start on Instagram and then we start on Facebook.
We create a community on Facebook. What I love about Facebook is it is the platform for community building. You can become a leader, not only in your community, which is wonderful, but overall for maybe a specific thing you deal with. I have physical therapists, some focus on sports injuries, some focus on back injuries. If you have specific needs then you can build an entire platform around that and attract all people. There are two billion people on Facebook. There’s your entire market. You have many people to draw from. This is how we’re going to educate.
I say, “Let’s get the landing page and list building in place.” What I’m saying to people now is we need to get the Zoom technology in. We need to get you in front of it and have you doing Facebook Live and we need to start talking telehealth. Both of these pieces have to get in rapidly so cashflow continues and you become the stable datum in your marketplace as that person of authority that says, “Welcome, everybody. I understand.” Originally you’re talking to people that are in your community, but as you grow and as you start to do more Facebook Lives, you can say, “We’re going to be talking about how to remove or eliminate a back pain that you have from sitting too much.”
You can start joking with things. “We’re going to help you with your Netflix knee.” I don’t care what you’re talking about. Don’t be afraid to connect it to what most people are ending up doing and start to outflow. The beautiful part is if we do this in conjunction with the landing page, we’re database list building at the same time. I have even, not just for my clients but for myself, quadrupled my outflow. I’ve been doing a Facebook Live almost every single day since we were put into lockdown and quarantined and my numbers have exploded. That’s what can happen for every business that turns around and does it.
We are experiencing a planetary reboot. We need to adapt rapidly as the world changes. Click To TweetI’ve been pushing my clients and my readers to make sure that their promotion and marketing don’t suffer and decrease. That’s the last expense line you want to rid of. I like how you’re saying at this point where you would typically have them go through a landing page process and develop that all out. It’s time to move fast and quick. The best way to do that is to get onto social media, develop your community. When you say list building, you mean collecting email addresses essentially. Probably the quickest way to do that is to create that Facebook page or the community. You should have a list of past patients that you can invite to it. You can maybe boost the page or something like that if you want to, but develop that immediately with your past patient email list, that database to begin with. Then build on that by inviting more people and get them to create more data or more content if you will and start developing more and more lists. That’s a way that you can immediately start building up that list of subscribers.
Here’s the cool part. As you do a Facebook Live, especially if it’s content-driven, you’re going to talk about the knee, the back, the shoulder, whatever. Now you have content. The average Facebook Live, let’s say it’s 20 and 30 minutes, you can break that apart into over 200 pieces of content. Even if we only do one thing and that one thing is to take the whole video and move it into YouTube. If you move it into YouTube and you do the necessary keyword optimization, here’s the reality of YouTube. All of the deals in the world aren’t going to be found if you do not search engine optimize with keywords. It’s a critical and key part. It’s exactly what I’ve been doing with my client. All we’re doing is taking their content to YouTube and we’re keywording it.
In general, I’m getting on page one of YouTube for searches in the top four spots when it’s properly keyworded right off the bat. There is no loss in that content. Let’s say you did a Facebook Live and you’re like, “Nobody was there.” No worries. One is going to replay on Facebook. Facebook Lives, it’s going to continue to replay it for you and then we’re going to take it and now build an asset from that. That content, we can pare it down even smaller. You can start thinking membership site. You can start thinking added-value for clients. That’s what we’re doing with one of my clients, which is a Pilates studio.
When we were shut down in California and she was shut down, she was like, “How on earth do I pay my rent, pay my mortgage?” She had eight staff. The rent on her studio was enormous. For some of the PT’s, you’re in the same boat, you have the equipment, you have studios and you have staff. We went into crisis management at that point and that is, how can we get money in this studio? The immediate answer was getting a Zoom camera in front of her and build out the website so that she could take money for classes immediately. We were recording those classes by Zoom.
They were going out there and then we were taking that same class, putting it into a replay page as an added bonus for purchasers and then we were taking that class and putting it into a membership site. Now, as people go through, they can buy a week’s class, they can buy a one month class and/or they can buy access to the membership, which means they get access to every replay on Pilates in this situation. It has exploded. She went from, “How am I going to live?” to one week later, she had 65 people going through her classes, which was more than the physical studio because of the volume you can deliver to in that situation. It’s great when you, one, know that you have the technology to help somebody in that situation, but two, you can see somebody who was extremely distraught. I’m sure there are many people out there like that. This technology will work for you, we just have to think out of the box on how.
How does that cross over to physical therapists? What could they do? What content do you recommend that they come up with that kind of growth if you will or accelerate maybe their digital presence or their online content?
We have physical therapists that are leveraging Zoom for telehealth. They’re leveraging Zoom for Facebook Live. At first, your Facebook Lives are targeted at your current database and they’re like, “This is what we’re doing. This is what the office looks like.” After that, you want to start taking a look at what is a niche you can talk about. Generally, to make money, you need to go nine miles deep and an inch wide. You’ll come out as a physical therapist and let’s say you specialize in athletic rehab. Let’s say you specialize in back, sports, shoulder or golf, whatever it is. If you have that particular niche, I will start to talk about that. That’s how you’re going to attract not just your PT client-base, which you’ve already moved into there, but now you’re going to attract those people that are interested in that particular topic. How you do that is not just through Facebook Live. You’ll set up events because events on Facebook get promoted. Somebody sees, “Here’s an event coming up on Facebook and it’s on the three tips to increase your running speed.” “Great, I want to know that.” The PT can talk about that.
In the beginning, that is a lot of outflow without monetary income except for telehealth, but what I like about that is the power of positioning and the power of educating on what physical therapy is. Plus now, as the people start to follow you and you get 40, 60, 100, 200 followers on Facebook in your community, all you have to do at that point, and I always pilot everything before we build it and say, “What if I opened up out a community, a membership and you paid $47 a month and I would continue to do education and assessments, whatever you want to put in there? Who is interested?” If you get ten people that say, “I would like that. That’s great.” I always do it based on ten. You get ten people that say, “Yes,” then you start to build and honestly the build starts simple. You don’t have to fill it with 52 months of content. You’re going to be building the content as they’re in it. They’re going to pay you to build the content. This is where social media starts to come into play. Before, more social media, more followers, we couldn’t capitalize on monetization at that point yet, but we sure can when we have a membership site built. Now, we can funnel them in through that and start to build up a community of people that want our results that are running, better golf, health, out of pain, whatever it is that their goal is. This is what your membership community will start to focus on.
Digital marketing will work for you. You just have to think outside the box on how. Click To TweetThe alternative to that is building a course. You want to build a five-module course on that. Whatever route you choose, the beauty is it’s scalable, salable and evergreen, which means Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads. More content to drive to this marketing media that you’re building is the ability to create six figures without any extra cost to whether it be your office infrastructure or more staff. It’s what I call a plan B. Plan B means if you were pulled out of the workplace, if you had to take care of your parents, like what happened to me, or if you had to take care of a family member, whatever. If you had to stop, would it be sustainable? With that infrastructure of the digital environment in place, the answer is yes. If we build this and rapidly and something like this occurs again. It’s occurred how many times now? At least seven. I was in Toronto during the SARS. It was similar to this only it wasn’t a global pandemic. It was in Toronto. We were the ones that were shut down and into lockdown. My business already went through a year of what we’re going through right now. I knew and I did at the same time make these assessments and that’s why I have so much experience on how the heck do you go digital because I needed plan B way back then and that’s when I started talking about it. It’s time to get plan B in place. I love to help people do those.
My biggest issue has always been creating content. I’m not one that can spin out content. Is that something that we would expect out of you or any marketing specialists that we hire on at this time?
You don’t need us to create the content. You need us to take that video, SEO it on YouTube, and then build a membership site, put the video in the membership site, maintain the infrastructure, the communications, and email marketing. You have the PT knowledge that already your marketplace is waiting for. All you do is seven bullet points before you start talking and you already know what you’re going to say and there is the training that you’re giving them within the membership site. There is no need to get nervous about the content you’re going to give or whether you know what you’re doing. You know what you’re doing. You can demonstrate things on a doll, whatever it is you’ve got to do to show somebody how to do something that can help them with whatever outcome that they’re looking for. The knowledge is all in you. The marketing and technology are not and that is a piece we handle.
It seems like it goes without saying that you’re pushing video over written, a blog or anything like that.
It is 2020 and beyond blowout. More video is consumed and uploaded than in the last 30 years of all three major networks. All search is coming through the video line. People are even bypassing Google now because they don’t want to read. They want to watch a video because five billion people are watching on their phone and consuming content and reading is a pain in the butt on the phone. We are media watching junkies, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime. That’s what’s happening. Media is key and the good video combined with what Google is looking for and what the YouTube search engine is looking for, which is keywords, is your secret sauce. That’s where you’re going to punch to the top for everything someone’s looking for. That’s it. Once you’ve done that, you can start to embed selling in your videos that are on YouTube by saying things like, “Go to my landing page, go to my channel, go here,” everything. There’s this circular way of optimizing every piece of content you produce, driving them ultimately to a membership or a course.
Not to get too much into the details in regards to video, but is there a certain amount of time that is optimal, as a 15-minute versus a 30-minute video? Backgrounds like this, does that matter too much? I’m wondering about any details that you recommend if someone is to post a video on social media?
It depends on which social media platform. On Facebook, they like the longer the better. That’s how you can get more people watching because you’re constantly going to be fed through the news feed while you’re still on. If you’re a blip on the news feed and you’re off, that was it. That was your shot. The longer is better on Facebook. Why? Let’s say you’re doing a training video on YouTube because we’re going to take that content. Thirty minutes is fine on YouTube. The average person is consuming 40 minutes at a time on the YouTube platform. This is only going to go up during this time. That was before.
We know on average we can do 40 minutes. My videos are 40 minutes. YouTube wants over ten minutes. If you have a quick key tip, then that’s 3 to 5 minutes, something fast. Let’s say somebody had a headache and you’re like, “How to get rid of your headache in two minutes?” That could be a video. You touch here and you do this and you put whatever. I only know how to translate it so someone pays for it. It all depends on what you’re doing. To me, most of mine are longer and highly consumed from that perspective. You’ve got content. What do we do? Now we take that video and we embed it in the blog post, we’re hitting another platform, then we do have Instagram on it. We do a LinkedIn on it, and then we do a Facebook promo on it.
It’s a constant circle of leveraging content that you’ve already created and making sure that it can get consumed wherever your person might be. It’s because LinkedIn is B2B, it doesn’t mean there are a lot of people incorporate suffering from physical therapy needs. It’s interesting. It’s the same with Instagram. Even though that’s the younger platform doesn’t mean that a Millennial who’s been jogging or playing tennis doesn’t need a physical therapist. That’s the beauty of what you do. Cross-platform promotion needs to happen so we can find the sweet spot. Once we know it, that’s where the fuel pours in that area.
That’s why I’m glad there are people like you out there because doing all of that blows my mind. I don’t want to touch it. I don’t want to put in all the keywords. I want to do my thing and then give it to someone to work with. Either that person is on your staff or you hire it out to someone like you who’s a specialist at it. I’m sure the dollar put into you will go a lot further than having someone in the house through it unless they are super expert.
This is not a time to shrink and go into survival mode. You need to market and promote more than you ever have to rise to the top. Click To TweetThere’s the other thing. Let’s say you had a social media person on staff. We can work with people like that because what they’re often missing is strategy. They’re like, “I’ll do this or this is a cute post.” We’re watching too. We have to know what all the trending keywords are, what all the trending hashtags are and we need to make sure that all posts optimize five different sets of hashtags for everything that’s going on. They may not know that, but when they’re talking about that, then there’s like, “I understand what I need to do.” That helps the office as well. For those of you who do have staff, but perhaps they need a little more guidance, that’s where we often come in. We teach them specifically on what they’re doing to help you and then we move either to another part of the company or you don’t need this anymore, whichever happens.
A lot of times you lean on that social media person to be your strategist when maybe they’re saying, “Here’s a cute video. I’ll post that. Here’s a recipe that our audience might like,” and post that. It’s what anything that we put out there is okay mentality instead of being strategic and focused on the content that they produce.
That goes to part and parcel of increasing your conversions, increasing your brand and your elevation of authority and influence comes strictly from the strategy that goes behind the post.
If people wanted to get in touch with you and see what you provide and how you can help them, how would they do that?
There are two ways. You can check me out at TracyRepchuk.com. You can check any social media platform with /TracyRepchuk or you can take a look at the funnel, what I want you to have. My landing page, which is FastActionResults.com and you’ll see the process. I bring people in, I give you a gift. At that point, if you need to schedule a strategy call so I can take a look at what you’ve got, where you’re bleeding and how we can help repair it, then that can happen immediately. You click and schedule.
Thank you for your time. Is there anything else you want to share with the audience?
The thing I would share as a final note is you need to market and promote more than you ever have. You said it at the beginning, Nathan, and that this is not a time to shrink. This is not a time to go into survival mode or hunkered down. You have to do the opposite of what everyone else is doing so that you’re the one that rises to the top and becomes the cream. The only way to do it is to get out there bigger than you ever thought you would.
Maybe a lot of market owners have time now if they have slowed down and/or shutdown. If you’ve got time, now is the time to consider maybe your digital presence and that strategy a lot more. Thank you for your time, Tracy. I appreciate it.
Thank you, Nathan. It’s been great.
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About Tracy Repchuk
Tracy Repchuk leads and empowers you to develop a freedom-based business by systemizing, streamlining and scaling to success
> 7 Time #1International Bestselling Author including 31 Days to Millionaire Marketing Miracles from Wiley Publishing
> World-renowned speaker in over 37 countries including China, Dubai, Brazil, Africa, Australia, Singapore, UK and more
> Award winning entrepreneur, writer and speaker since 1985 when at the age of 19 she started her software company
> Over 20 awards including from Senate, Assembly, the White House and President Obama
> Pioneer on the internet developing brands, websites, SEO and now social media since 1994 and currently serving on the Forbes Coaching Council, Amazon Influencer, and Linkedin Advisor programs
> Featured expert in over 22 National and Local TV as a trusted resource for technology, internet and social media including ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX and featured in 3 motivational movies
> Runs her own 501c3 foundation to help underprivileged women to gain life and business skills so they can be independent and run a business from anywhere with confidence
> Global leader in strategic thinking for increased market reach serving thousands of clients around the world to help you reach millions with your message.
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