Getting patients to enter the door may seem simple but is actually one of the hardest steps PT clinics tackle. Today, Nathan Shields talks to Peter Decoteau, the marketing director at Physical Therapy & Sports Medicine Centers (PTSMC), the largest privately-owned PT group in Connecticut. Focusing on breaking down any barriers that keep new patients from coming in the door, Peter recognizes that the first barrier for a majority of people is simply knowledge – not enough people know what physical therapy is, thus your message has to recognize that. He shares aspects that make these technical such as location, insurance, and those can be further addressed after you’ve captured their attention. Peter believes that regardless of the steps taken, it is necessary to know what your brand is, who your ideal client is, where they get their information, and the content they need to hear all of which leads you to begin to generate marketing campaigns.
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Marketing Strategies To Ease The Path For New Patients With Peter Decoteau
My guest is Peter Decoteau. He is a Director of Marketing for a large physical therapy company in Connecticut. I brought him on because I want to talk a little bit about a couple of things. First, the things that we need to consider as we are advertising directly to our local community or direct to consumer marketing. Secondly, what are some of the things we need to do on the back end, which is number one, how did we get that patient who is interested to convert? Number two, how do we track the KPIs related to our marketing strategies.
Important stuff as we’re considering that a lot of our marketing strategies need to spend more time and effort either direct to consumers, via mail, email, or social media and rely less on physician referrals. That’s the trend that we’re seeing. I’m trying to highlight physical therapy clinics that have been successful at doing it. If you do have a marketing strategy, I’d love to see how yours compares to what Peter represents. Also, if you don’t have a marketing strategy, consider some of the basics during this episode that you need to do to be intentional about your marketing efforts to grow.
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I’ve got Peter Decoteau. He is the director of marketing, Physical Therapy & Sports Medicine Centers, Connecticut’s largest private practice group. I wanted to bring him on because I saw a past impact magazine article in which he talked about marketing. I’m always open to that and we need to consider marketing outside of the traditional physician relationships. Based on his article and further talking with Peter, I wanted to talk a little bit more about marketing and some of the things that we need to do and look outside of the traditional relationships or things that we’re doing. Peter can give us some light and insight into how to make it easier for new patients to get in our door in general. First of all, Peter, thanks for coming on. I appreciate it.
Nathan, thanks for having me. I’m happy to be here.
Give us a little bit of breakdown about you. You’re not a physical therapist by trade, you’re in marketing, but tell us how you got into this all and your experience with physical therapy.
I came into physical therapy cold. I didn’t have any experience with physical therapy personally. I had not gone through physical therapy. It’s an interesting experience to come in not knowing too much about the industry. I have a strictly marketing background. I started in a nonprofit in Hartford, Connecticut and then moved onto a private school up in Simsbury, Connecticut. I was an ad agency for a little bit as well. The benefit for me of having those experiences and coming into this environment is that I have a pretty broad breadth of knowledge in terms of different approaches to marketing. The different pieces of marketing like PR, digital or advertising, all those different things that you’d want someone to be doing.
A different perspective.
Working with different audiences. If anybody out there has worked with a nonprofit, they would know that you were pretty much every hat possible there. It was a good starting point for me. I was doing some multimedia marketing for them, but I was also doing some membership relations and some sponsorship relations and things like that. It gave me a good foundation for where I wanted to go next. The opportunity to come into Physical Therapy & Sports Medicine Centers came from working with someone in our leadership group. I was working with her husband at the private school and they needed someone to come in and do a little bit of consulting for some of the digital marketing and social media stuff that they were looking to expand upon and reach a broader audience with. I jumped on as a consultant in that way. I did a pretty extensive audit of their digital presence and gave them recommendations and I was doing some ongoing work with them.
Do whatever you can to break down the barriers for new patients to get into your clinic. Click To TweetWhen the opportunity came out for a marketing director to jump on board here, they reached out to me and things were tumultuous at the ad agency. That’s a different story. Suffice to say that they don’t exist anymore. It was good timing, jumped on board here. I had already been working with the team here. I knew that it was a good fit and I was interested in coming into the physical therapy world knowing that it’d be doing something that at the end of the day is helping people. Not necessarily for me doing the hands-on treatment, but getting people into the physical therapy clinics, especially clinics that we have that I believe do top-notch work. It felt like it was a good industry to jump into.
That’s cool that we have you on because you bring a different perspective than the typical physical therapist that might be talking about marketing. I want to ask you, are there some false ideas that physical therapists have about marketing and how it should be done that you have to come in, break down or challenge and change their perspective about it? If so, what might some of those things be?
The number one thing that I’ve seen, in coming into the industry and being a part of the private practice section committee, is that physical therapists greatly overestimate how much the general public knows about physical therapy. We tend to exist in an echo chamber of our making. In an impact article that I’ve put together, we’re the fish living in this water all day. We tend to think that everybody else sees it the way that we see it. We talk to the general public. You realize that their knowledge about the scope of services provided through physical therapy, the way that you might come to physical therapy, even where their nearest clinic would be or the difference between outpatient and inpatient.
There’s not a lot of knowledge in the general republic and that is a matter of messaging for the industry. For the most part, the industry itself was mainly surviving on doctor referrals to physical clinics. Most of the messaging had to happen from the therapists or if they had marketing people, which a lot of them didn’t to the doctors and to trust there and build relationships there, which is still important. Given that direct access is something nationwide that came out in Connecticut. The focus should be on pushing forward on self-referrals, direct access, teaching people even what that means and what that is, especially the scope of service that we provide.
Tell us a little bit about that because that leads to our topic as far as how to get those new patients in the door, direct consumer marketing. It’s getting the knowledge out to the broader audience because the stack gets thrown around and I don’t know where it was found. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s true that only 10% of those patients with musculoskeletal injuries get the physical therapy that they would need or could need to overcome their injury. That means that all of us are fighting for a pretty small pie. If we’re focused on the physician referral route, there’s 90% of the population out there that could use our help that isn’t getting it because they don’t know about us. We take for granted that everybody knows about physical therapy or at least some version of it. Maybe they don’t understand how physical therapy could help for minor traumas, for simple injuries and stuff like that. Talk to us a little bit about how you work to help those new patients get in the door from the population and utilize direct access.
I love that you use that number. That’s a number that our Vice President of Business Development, Mike Durand. He’s been a part of this company and he was an athletic trainer before. He throws that out all the time and says the same type of thing. It’s like, “If that’s true, which the study shows that’s the case, that we’re all fighting for that little piece of the pie instead of working together to try to make the pie bigger for everyone.” If we’re talking about ways that we can increase self-referrals or increase our patient volume with people who are not coming directly from the doctors, is that we first focus industry-wide on our messaging and create a little bit of consistency.
At least acknowledgment to get the messaging out there in a broader sense before we start doing more clinics specific or company-specific messaging, if we do that successfully in terms of having clear, consistent messaging, talking about the benefits of physical therapy as a whole because that percentage of the pie gets broader. Even if there are fewer people specifically knowing about our clinic at some point, all the whole thing grows. We’ll be reaching maybe more of a niche audience, but that niche audience is also bigger. Our patient volume still grows.
It sounds like your marketing starts with developing the knowledge-based of the community as to what physical therapy itself is and how you can benefit those people who are having less traumatic issues. Maybe simply low back pain, you’re marketing your message is a little bit more knowledge-based and then you add your tag or logo at the bottom? How do you guys go about doing that?
We talked a little bit about this, something that David Straight had mentioned on a previous episode of yours, which I encourage everyone to go back and read it if they haven’t. He talks about starting with establishing your brand identity and figuring out who your target audience is. Also, figuring out where that audience is in terms of platforms you can reach them most effectively. We always start there. Once we’ve gotten to that point, we know who we’re talking to, we know who we are and how we’re positioning ourselves and we know which platforms we’re using. We get to this piece about the intellectual property that we can bring to that, the content that we can put together.
The value to the users or the audience while also educating them on this broad range of topics that we’re talking about. That doesn’t necessarily have to be broad with each piece of content, but that we’re covering a lot of bases in the messaging that we’re putting together. The more that the audience sees these messages, the more comprehensive of the picture they get and the more personality they get about our companies specifically. The pieces that I’d say differentiate us from the other clinics that are in Connecticut.
I love that you bring up David Straight’s episode one of the few first episodes and you talked about marketing. The evolution of your marketing doesn’t necessarily change. You’ve got to figure out who you are and who your ideal client is? Some people might say, “What is that avatar?” Once you have that figured out and what you do best and what patients you want to work with, then you can focus on, where did those people get their information from? Is it social media? Is it mail? Is it email? Is it postcards? Is it community events? You can focus on the content. Based on knowing who your demographic is, you can structure your content accordingly. To invite those specific people in the door, that’s how you would structure your marketing program as you’re going direct to the consumer.
In terms of what we’re talking about with getting people into the clinic, educating the public both on an industry level and then on company or clinic specific level. What we’re talking about is breaking down the barriers of entry to the general public. This piece of it that we’re talking about is the barrier of knowledge. It’s a general knowledge barrier that people have for physical therapy. What are the things that we can do that breakdown that knowledge barrier in a general sense of the benefits of physical therapy? That specific level of physical therapy can help with your recurrent back pain that you might not need surgery for but keeps you up at night. Here are the ways that our clinics specifically can help with that because we offer dry needling. We do hands-on therapy. We focus on the manual. We are closer to you than the other clinic. There are these other things that make us a better option for you. We can start from that broad sense and get more specific as we continue to try to reach that audience in the way, read the messages that resonate with them.
If you look at their websites and some of their content, they might focus more on the treatment they provide instead of the benefits they can provide to the patient. As we’re talking to ourselves, we know the benefits of say, dry needling or some manual therapy technique but that’s not what you want to highlight and advertise. You want to get down to their knowledge level and also, what’s important to them, which are their functional capabilities and how you can improve those and focus there. What you provide is off to the side. This is how we do it. If you can simply get them to buy into what you’re doing to improve their lives, you can talk about how we do it later on.
Our motto is improving the quality of people’s lives. That’s the thing that we always go back to because we do say that PT in general if you’re going to a good physical therapist, that’s what they’re doing. They’re improving the quality of your life because you can sleep throughout the night. You can pick up your grandkids. You can play rec league soccer on the weekend, which I do. I’ve needed to go back to physical therapy for that specifically to get me back out on the field. Those are things that provide quality to my life or somebody else’s life that we’re trying to get you back to. Starting at that point and then getting more specific.
I like to think about it and you talk about a marketing funnel, getting people down in the funnel and then wondering where do they go once they convert? I made up in a previous position. I tried to visualize what it looks like to me after they’ve converted and put a little bit of a tornado in the middle of the following, say, “If you’ve created the awareness and then you’re getting to the point where the people exist in the middle point.” Especially with physical therapy, which you want them to be aware of the fact that you exist and you have these benefits. Maybe that person doesn’t need physical therapy but you want to be there for them when they do need it.
You want them to exist in this little middle part of the funnel that’s like a little tornado of information that they can keep on receiving. How can we keep them engaged? How can we keep them interested? How can we get new little tidbits of information to them? That’s the way that I like to think about it. The content marketing that we’re doing that we are getting people to that point and then staying in front of them with all this relevant information that speaks to both the services that we provide, but also the personality and the differentiator points that we offer. When you talk about something like dry needling, you’re right, we’re not going out there necessarily promoting dry needling to the general public as a selling point for us.
Reach the audience by reading the messages that resonate with them. Click To TweetOnce you’re engaged with us, we’ll do videos about dry needling and talk about the benefits of that and show you what it looks like. I had the barrier to entry for that would be thinking that it hurts. Can we show you in a video that we’re dry needling, someone and they’re not reacting to it at all? We did a video with one of our clinicians. She specializes in temporomandibular dysfunction. She dry needled two parts of one of her aide’s phases. We’ll first show the type of treatment that you would be offering, but also, ancillary it showed that it did not hurt her at all. The more we can bring that type of content into the fold, the better.
As you consider breaking down the knowledge barriers and providing them what they need to know about physical therapy and how it can help them? Do you have a secret sauce when it comes to getting that conversion? If they call and they want to utilize direct access and come to you without going to a physician, what can you share about how you get those people to convert and become new patients?
I wish we had all those answers because that would be fantastic. That’s something that we’re working on daily. I talked to our operations people and our employees as much as I can about the things that we should be doing that are consistent. I see that as two separate things. One is the functionality of getting them to convert. The other is the interface with our employees when they’re interacting with them on the phone or when they come into the clinic. The functionality piece is, we try to optimize everything we have. Everything that a potential patient might be interacting in a way that again, breaks down the barriers to getting them into the clinic.
For example, if you’re someone who doesn’t have any relationship with PTSMC in the past, and you probably maybe even not had a relationship with physical therapy in the past or you’ve had a bad relationship with them, which is something that we hear sometimes. What’s the information that you’re looking for? How are you looking for it? How can we get it to you faster and easier and more effectively? How can we make it easy for you to book an appointment? Ideally, what’s happening in the person’s thinking, “I need physical therapy.” The doctor said, “You need physical therapy.” I’m going to tell you to find your therapist, which happens more often. They go to Google, they search for it. You come up, they go to your website, they’re looking for maybe, do they take my insurance and do they offer the treatment that we’re looking for?
We know that those are two things that people are looking for most often than not. Are you getting them to the right page initially? Is it easy for them to find that information? Once you’ve given them that information, how easy is it for them to book an appointment? The way that we have it set up for us, our organization is that we built a new website specifically with that user process in mind. It’s optimized for the user flow. Also, for the SEO flow to the individual pages, search engine optimization flow. On purpose-built out landing pages for every treatment option. We’ve got that landing pages for every individual clinic so that if you’re Googling, “Best physical therapy in Avon, Connecticut.” If you do it in Connecticut, the first three things that probably show up are one, a Google Ad campaign that’s running for that says best physical therapy in Avon, Connecticut, that when you click on it, it goes directly to Avon’s location page.
The second thing that shows up is probably the organic result for that. The third thing that shows up is probably either the maps result or staff result for the same thing. We’re trying to dominate the search results there as relevant as possible. When they get to the site, make it easy for them to find that additional information. We have, I believe, two or three conversion points for submitting a request for an appointment through the website on every single page. There are a floating button, a sidebar and a top bar that says, “Request an appointment.” Everywhere on the site, it’s there, it’s ready to go.
Whenever you want to request an appointment, we’re ready for you.
Ideally, what would happen is that they would click on that and they’d be able to integrate with your scheduling and requested an exact date and time. We’re not there yet. It’s somewhere that I would hope for us to be pretty soon. Also, there’s some friction in terms of what’s available in someone’s schedule. Maybe it’s available for a reason that you know all about because I’m not in the clinic. It was a little bit of like, “How much can you do there?” You’re breaking down those different barriers to book an appointment or they put them to call and they’re going right to the clinic that they’re trying to.
It’s great that not every individual practice owner is going to have a director of marketing like you to handle a lot of the Google Ads, the SEO and stuff like that. What it shows is, we put out some marketing promotional material or an ad, you name it, but in what you’ve done intentionally is, how can we make this as easy as possible for patients to get in the door and make an appointment and convert? That’s a necessary exercise for any owner. That is to say, we put out this ad when someone calls or when we’re calling out for a referral, how easy are we making it? Are we forcing them to give us all their insurance information before we answer their question? Are we making them jump through hoops and getting the date of births and that stuff?
Are we more focused on them and maybe what their name is? What their ailment is and how it’s limiting their life, maybe establishing that relationship right off the bat. I’m saying there are other ways that you can go about it and it’s worth the exercise for owners to sit down and say, “At this touchpoint with a potential patient, how can we break down the barriers?” Maybe they’ve got an understanding, a knowledge-based. What can we do to make it as easy as possible for them to make an appointment? Everything we can or in that call and I’m sure you’re doing it with your calls. You’re also doing it with your website. How can we make it as easy as possible for that internet traffic to translate into a visit as well? You can look at those touchpoints and say, “How can we make this as easy as possible?”
You bring that up and that speaks to that other point that I was talking about the interface part of it. One of the things that we try to do, everything I was talking about the functionality wise is called technical side of it. At the end of the day, we always have to remember that we’re dealing with people who are probably in some pain or representing someone who’s in pain. Not only that, but they have to deal with the pain of going through the healthcare process, which is usually not simple. From that point, can we come to them from a perspective of empathy? Can we make that part of it easier? When they come into the clinic to treat the real pain that they’re dealing with, they haven’t had to jump through all these hoops beforehand?
Typically, what we do on that end is a lot of different folds to it. I would say that our operations group does a good job of onboarding people to the particular culture that we have at PTSMC. We focus a lot on the differentiator for us being one of the tenants of our mission statement is lifelong relationships. That’s a key tenant of that. We want to be known as the physical therapy company that focuses on, we say that the person, not the problem. When we onboard people, we focus on that as a key element of everything that you do when you’re working. You’re getting people in a database and your scheduling. You’re first and foremost, a representative of that philosophy that we have here.
Likewise, we do that with our clinicians too and we have to do that with the front desk people were feeling most of the phone calls. Another thing that we do that speaks more to the marketing side of it is we do a separate onboarding event process with all new clinicians’ call, “Living The Dream,” which is they met our president loves to say. We’ve got to wrap it into that. It’s focused more on that what we call the soft skills that you don’t necessarily learn in PT school that are related more to that interpersonal piece. What’s beneficial for me as a marketing person to be involved in that is again, not knowing that I’m not a physical therapist and I’m not having these face-to-face interactions with them. Giving them some more consistent tools to bring to those interactions that might help the growth of both their client base and the clinic more broadly has been useful for them. Sometimes it’s something as simple as always have business cards on you.
When you’re discharging a patient, if you think that they had a positive experience, which we think that most people do and our survey scores reflect that, give them a few. You can say, “I’m your person. I’m your PT. Hand this off to any friends or family that you think is dealing with pain and tell them about direct access because people don’t know about that. Let them know that you’ve got a guy and I can get you in as soon as possible.” That little intimate touch of saying like, “You’ve got a guy, here some cards, and bring other people into the fold.” It both allows you to get that word of mouth out there for the referrals, but also, it puts the value into their hands that they’ve got a connection that they get to reveal to people who are in their circle enough to take advantage of. We do small things like that.
As you’re Looking at some of these efforts that you’re putting out, are there certain KPIs that you follow to see if these are being effective or not? You brought up Google Ads or SEO costs, how do you measure KPIs or ROI on some of these things?
I tell partners at all the different clinics and this is my number one byline to all of them. My job is to get people into your doors. That’s the ultimate thing that I do. If all else fails, if we’re getting more people into your doors from a marketing perspective, then I’m doing my job. Their job is to provide world-class physical therapy care, so that people want to spread the word and come back as return patients. Let their friends and family and colleagues know and all that stuff. We do a lot more than that in terms of supporting brand awareness within the clinic and supporting the clinicians to get out in the community. The number one KPI for me to answer that question is that if we’re getting more patients into the door, either self-referred, returning patients or referred patients, then that’s the number one KPI. In terms of tracking the performance of individual campaigns that we’re running, it’s a lot easier to create KPIs and track them when it’s coming from a digital campaign. For Google ads, you can track the clicks through to the website and the conversion rate from those clicks.
PT clinics must remember that they are dealing with people who are in pain or sending someone in pain. Click To TweetThere’s direct percentage of saying, we have a little bit of an equation that we use that’s like, “If we’re spending $300 a month with this clinic on Google Ads and we’re seeing six conversions through that ad campaign because their phone calls and requests through the website, we’re going to estimate that only three of them are coming in. What are three patients worth in the life cycle of a patient coming for ten treatments?” The average is nine or ten. That return on investment might be $3,000. We can say those numbers of conversions and the percentage of click-throughs and say, “For that ad campaign, we’re getting a ten-time return on investment of those numbers.” You start to look at that and say, “How can we get those percentages higher? How can we tweak the campaigns?” Those are the types of KPIs that we start to focus on in terms of like, “We want to get more conversions through that, how can we do that without blowing out our whole budget?”
What’s a percentage of return that you’re expecting typically? What is the sweet spot for you at least this number and above?
We tend to see it. It works out well because we have the 25 clinics, soon to be 26, where I built out from the start a few ad campaigns on Google and optimize them as much as I could, knowing what our budget was going to be. I pretty much copied them and duplicated them down, changing the location information in the contact information. We’re working off of these few optimized ones. We’re the good month for one of them, we might see a 10% conversion rate, which is pretty good. Typically, we’re probably seeing 4%, 5%, or 6%, which is still pretty high I as an industry average, which is good.
You work with a large company and you had soon to be 26 locations, what would your recommendation be for a guy that’s only got one or two locations? He can’t bring on a full-time person for marketing, maybe has room for part-time to find somebody or maybe as needed for a campaign. How would you recommend they go about looking for marketing help or doing it themselves?
I always say to start with the low hanging fruit. In this case, if you had to pick out two people who are your ideal client personas whether those are based on payer mix. Maybe you have enough volume, but you want to get volume from a higher payer or payout. Maybe it’s volume focused specifically. What’s the low hanging fruit in terms of the people that you know or in your area that need PT who aren’t getting it or don’t know about you? Start with the groups that you would most like to reach as the low hanging fruit, easiest people to get to. Figure out where they are and be specific about what you’re doing in terms of the platforms that you’re using. One of the things that I tend to see, and I saw this at the ad agency too, that we would bring on clients who wanted to do everything.
They were only working with the small budget or maybe it was a small organization we were working with. We dealt with a lot of that and nonprofit because nonprofits don’t have a lot of money for marketing. You want to do a little bit of everything. You want to chase every new trend and you want to be on the TV and get the print ads and also do the social media thing and do the Google thing. It’s important to focus on those audiences and focus on where are those audiences are or those audiences are and be that targeted and specific. It’s better to maximize the effectiveness of something efficient in terms of your budget and your resources and time that you can put into. Rather than spread yourself thin and maybe see success at a few of those different things which are using up way too many resources. Be specific.
You’ve brought up a couple of things. Number one, be specific. Focus your marketing efforts on something and focus on that only instead of trying to hit every button out there. You also brought up something else that it’s important to bring up in that is most small clinic owners don’t necessarily have a budget. Number one might be figuring out what your budget is for marketing or this campaign, and then set that money aside and limit yourself to that budget and see what it does for you. Make sure you’re measuring it appropriately. I brought it up with David Straight and I also brought up with Neil Trickett. What your budget is for marketing can vary wildly simply because if you’re a startup and you’re new. You’re opening up a new location, while you want to put more money aside for your marketing purposes and may be up to 10% of your gross revenues if necessary.
Whereas if you’re going along and you’re nice and steady, you’ve got a reputation, you’ve been around a long time, maybe that number pairs down to 3% to 6% of your gross revenues for marketing. Number one, come up with a budget first. I like what you said, “Focus on what you want to do.” How do you focus while you focus on where your demographics are? Who do you want to hit establishing your brand identity? Who’s your typical patient, the ideal patient? Focus on those platforms with that predetermined budget. That budget can allow for maybe bringing someone on as needed to fulfill that campaign for you or doing it yourself if you have the capability of doing so.
I’m in a unique position at PTSMC because the way that the partnerships operate is at each clinic technically has its individual budget. We all have things wrapping up into a broad marketing bucket budget for us to work with for the most part. I have to have these conversations with each partner at the beginning of the year and then in the middle of the year when things are rolling out. The piece about, how much are you willing to spend to maybe test a couple of things out to see what works? How much are you willing to spend on things that we already know works? What’s that breakdown look like? An important piece of it, what are you doing to drive organic results as well? Things that don’t require too much of a budget and that’s when we get back to this knowing the language to talk about self-referrals.
Having the knowledge and the language to use in talking to patients to tell them to talk about you’re going on in the community or leave reviews on Google, leave reviews on Facebook, things that you know have a pretty high yield do anything asking for those things. I was talking about this piece of patient interaction that’s called the point of delight. It’s a marketing term that speaks to this point where people, I’ve received great service and they’re looking for a way to reciprocate. Especially when it comes to physical therapy. They may not be paying too much for it. Hopefully, their insurance company’s paying for it.
Maybe there was small copay, but they don’t feel like in terms of the monetary interaction that’s happened, that they’ve necessarily reciprocated for the service that they’ve received, especially if you’re building a relationship. That is trustworthy, caring, they feel like they need to do something to make it up to you. Catching them at that point and saying, “Would you mind leaving a Google review or going on Facebook and sharing some of our staff or I would think most value telling people about us.” That’s free advertising for you. Having the language to do that, it doesn’t require any budget, once you get that point if you’re doing those things and you want to continue to grow and expand your patient volume, yes. How much are you willing to spend? Are you willing to test out a few different things?
Not spreading yourself thin, but you did the research, you looked at your analytics, you know that they needed the demographics, they’re trying to reach out to you. This is where they are. Let’s try a couple of different AB tests and see if we can track results there. Also, having the tracking measures in place to know if it’s working or not because I’ve seen a lot of that too. Where it’s like, “We’re doing the social media stuff or the Google stuff.” It’s like, “How are you tracking performance on that? What does success mean to you there?” “We want to see more patients.” Like, “Are you separating them and tracking them individually to see that this one’s working, this one’s not?” It’s having all of those points in place before you start rolling things out.
It’s important to ask the question, “Do you want to try new things or do you want to continue with what you’re working on that will determine your budget?” You’re going to spend a little bit more, but you don’t want to forsake the stuff that’s you’ve got going already. You want to continue doing what you’re doing and then if you’re going to do something new, make that an add on so you can see the benefit of it. You have to be intentional about that and plan those things out.
Don’t be afraid to cut off the things that aren’t working. We saw a lot of that when I came on board originally. We have relationships that had been going at certain clinics, whether or not they’re community relationships where we pay $1,000 to be a part of this event. Also, print relationships where we have a monthly percentage of the budget going to these print ads for these smaller local publications. I’ll see value in those things, but typically it’s not that top-level value. I see a lot of value coming from people reading the paper and seeing the admin like, “I should go to physical therapy.” For me, is there a way to leverage that relationship? Can we talk to the sales rep or the smaller publication?
Usually, it’s a small staff to leverage the consistency of advertising into actual news coverage? Those things have a value that you might be able to parlay your investment into it, unlike a regular basis. For the most part, you come in and you see that we’re throwing a few thousand dollars a year at this print ad stuff and we haven’t done any of those relationship pieces. They’re expecting it to keep on coming in and you pull the plug and talk to the clinician and say, “Do you know if you’re getting any new patients out of this?” I would say, “Someone mentioned it to me one time. I don’t know.” We’ll try to create some metric for measuring success there, but if we don’t see that in the next two
Reviews are reciprocations of the services clients receive. Click To TweetMove that money somewhere else that’s more effective. Anything else you want to share with us before we take off, Peter?
I’ll say one thing and this is a call out to all physical therapists out there, whether or not they have a marketing team or if they’re small staff doing the marketing for themselves. I’ll push this again because we talk about it a lot at the PPS and APTA and all this stuff. For us, a rising tide certainly lifts all boats. We as an industry, do have a great opportunity to take advantage of the huge percentage of people out there who need physical therapy but aren’t receiving it. Also, for some reason aren’t getting the information about the benefits of physical therapy, the scope of services that we have. The ways that they might be able to bypass whatever healthcare system they were working within using referral direct access to come straight to your therapist in ways that that might save you time and money.
If we can be more consistent in not being necessarily self-serving on a marketing side to talk about, we’re the best all the time. Let’s talk about physical therapies the best because it’s a part of a healthy lifestyle. If you commit to it and if you build a relationship with the physical therapist in a way that you might have a relationship with primary care doctor, attendant or anything like that then. Down the line, first off, that’s a longstanding relationship that you have. Also, that person’s going to have a healthier lifestyle and be able to maintain activity and stay active in the older age. For me it’s more about broad messaging, getting those talking points out there, direct access, the scope of service, and then being specific about what the differentiators are for you. That speaks to your brand identity as you’ve outlined it.
I love the insight and that you’re willing to share some of what you guys are doing. I appreciate that. If people wanted to reach out to you and ask you questions or where you might be doing, are you willing to share some of your contact information?
Sure. I’ll share my email, Peter.Decoteau@PTSMC.com. Always feel free to reach out to us on Facebook. You can message us on Facebook. We have one account for the whole company. We try to keep it all tight together.
If people want to check out your websites, you were talking about the Google Ads that you use and how you set things up to allow people to request a referral or request an appointment, what is the company’s website?
It’s easy PTSMC.com. The individual locations are available there. Hopefully, you’ll see in the coming month we’re rolling out. This speaks to the idea of breaking down barriers, but we’re rolling out an AI chatbot on the site. The goal of that is to get people to the information they’re looking for as quickly as possible. We know that people are looking for insurance location or treatment. It pops up and says, “What can we help you with?” If they don’t need any things, it goes like, “Here it is.” Try to get people to the stuff that they’re looking for.
We’ll have to check it out. Hopefully, it’s already in place.
Hopefully, it’s in place and it’s all working correctly. If it’s not, you can email me and tell me that it’s not.
Thanks for your time, Peter. I appreciate it.
Thanks for having me on, Nathan.
Important Links:
- Peter Decoteau
- Physical Therapy & Sports Medicine Centers
- Mike Durand
- Episode – David Straight previous episode
- Neil Trickett
- Peter.Decoteau@PTSMC.com
- Facebook – Physical Therapy & Sports Medicine Centers
- www.PTSMC.com
About Peter Decoteau
Ben has been a member of Teton Therapy since May of 2010. He graduated with a Doctorate of Physical Therapy from the University of Mary in Bismarck, ND and conducted his field work primarily in out-patient settings while in school. During his time at Teton Therapy, Ben has taken many continuing education courses on topics such as Dry Needling, Kinesiotaping, neuromuscular re-education, running analysis, and injury prevention—a topic which he immediately found a passion for and has since conducted classes to the community. Ben quickly applied this vast amount of knowledge to the practice and sharpened his therapy craft. His general interests include water sports, running, outdoor activities such as camping, competing in triathlons, and most importantly spending quality time with his wife and children.
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