Maximising Clinic Growth with Efficient Marketing Strategies with Michael Schumacher

Katie Bell: 1:12

everybody welcome back to this week’s episode of the Treat Your Business podcast. I am your host, Katie Bell. And I am delighted to be joined yet again, back by popular demand, by Michael Schumacher. Now, the last two episodes that you will have listened to, and if you haven’t, please go back and listen to them. We’ve been talking about working on your business rather than in your business. And we’ve talked about what that actually means and how he was really busy clinic owners can pull yourself away from the treatment, but away from the clinic room, because you can’t grow your business between appointments. And last week, you will have heard me mentioned about eg A is exponential growth activities. And I’ve encouraged you over the last few weeks to really look at what you’re spending your time on. And when we do this with our clients, what we often find is that 80% of their time is spent on stuff that is not about bringing clients through the door and making more money. Actually, when they look at it 20% of their time is really spent on those key key activities that are going to grow their clinic, create more income, bring more clients through the door. So I’ve asked Michael, if he would talk about this with you in terms of Michael, well, we are really busy clinic owners, and we feel like we’re having to do it, or we’ve got to try and do the marketing. We’ve got to figure out what marketing we should be doing. When we do the marketing. We don’t really know what we’re doing. And we’re just kind of scrambling around and I often want people to stop and look at are they the ones that should be doing it? Or should they be outsourcing? Should they be delegating? And you’ve really, really kindly agreed to give up some of your time to talk about this because you are you are the right person to tell us what we should be looking for what we should be outsourcing what what is a good company? What makes what what kind of should we be scared off and be put off by? So Michael, thank you for being here on this week’s episode.

Michael Schumacher: 3:06

No problem. Thanks for having me again. i It’s for people that haven’t heard from me before, just want to qualify, I guess who I am and why I have some level of authority. So we work with more, I guess MSK clinics, physio chiropractic, mainly than any other company in the in the country. We run marketing for pretty much everyone you’ve probably already heard of us. But that isn’t an ego thing. It just means we have a lot of data, we know what works. We know what doesn’t work. We know. You know, essentially, you’re talking about the Pareto essentially what are the most important things for you to do. And also as a marketing agency, I can also tell you what to look for and what not to look for. So I think the first thing we should look at is the absolute do nots, the things that I know that 90% of his audience are either spending too much time on, or worrying about, let’s start with social media. Stop worrying about it. And probably don’t stop doing it all together, but stop doing it. I think people spend way, way too much time on running social media, they spend too much time on thinking about what to post on putting creative together AI images, and so on. And I want you to kind of look at and do this yourselves, go and look at how many patients have come through your social media and messaging booked, and how much time you’ve spent on it. And I will guarantee other than some very rural clinics, and I will leave those out because they are an outlier. If you’re in the depths of Scotland, that actually social media can be really, really good for you. But generally, you will get zero patience for it. Or at least certainly, you know, you’ll be spending you’ll be making about one pound 50 an hour in terms of wage if you look at your how many patients you get and how much time you spent. So stop, stop worrying about it. I think and just a tip one post a month is plenty. If you really want to go into it, you can but now we’re talking about spending a tonne of time. There’s no in between. It’s either spend very little, or spend a tonne of time, something in the middle where you put up four or five, six posts a month actually isn’t enough. We won’t go into social media strategy. But generally if you’re worried about social media, don’t be it’s not going to get your patients through the door. What else not to do? I guess I guess do the marketing yourself. If you’re running your own marketing, you’re absolutely crazy. Because you’re not going to do it as well as people who are qualified in it and you’re wasting way too much time forget about results for a second forget about all those business benefits. I talked to every in fact every single clinic owner I talked to says my work life balance is crap. I don’t have enough time for my children, my husband my own free time. And they’re sat there spending hours, if not days a month thinking about marketing, worried about marketing, why you’re doing it. I have a very lovely account of my company. I could probably do my accounts if I really wanted to I am not as good as he is. And I don’t have the skills that he does. And quite honestly, I’d prefer to sit back with a glass of wine and spend some time with the kids, maybe not with a glass of wine. But you know, you can’t continue doing your own marketing. So that’s, you know, those are the two big don’ts. Don’t spend too much time on social media, don’t do too much of your marketing. Let’s go on to the do’s the simple things that you can do that that are incredibly important that if you want to do them yourself, it makes sense. I think the first is really simple. regularly update your Google My Business Profile. And when I say Update, posts, images, put pictures of the team up regularly update your Google My Business Profile, make sure that holiday hours are on there. People forget that Google wants to know that you are active. So the more active you are, the more you’re going to rank essentially. And the other thing is, on your Google My Business get reviews really, really important, but not for the reason that you will think it is. I asked this question on Instagram recently, against 1000. People said, how important outstand How important are Google reviews for your ranking. And everyone said 10 out of 10 it’s actually less than one out of 10. It’s about naught point five out of 10. Google reviews don’t affect ranking. They do but it’s a very small amount, they actually impact your click through rate. So imagine you’re looking for a plumber, you see three plumber businesses on the map pack. If one has one review, one has 20 and one has 300 You will automatically click on that has 300 It doesn’t matter in which which order, which by the way, is actually why you don’t need to worry about whether your first second or third. It’s about being in that backpack and having the most reviews work on those reviews. Now, I’ll give you one little tip on this, and it’s very difficult to do and it can impact your ranking. And that is getting reviews that feature the keywords of what you’re trying to rank for. So for example, an email a review that says Katie was wonderful. Okay, it’s great when we rank, it’s okay. But and he keeps saying email a review that says Katie Bell physiotherapy were fantastic in helping me with my back pain. I would go nowhere else in Sheffield. That ranks for Sheffield that ranks for back pain it ranks for physiotherapy. So if someone does a search for physiotherapy, Sheffield physiotherapy, in Sheffield back pain, Google’s scan your review, and it will actually put it up in that map pack. Now it won’t do it from one review generally, although if it’s a very if it’s a condition that no one else treats, or doesn’t advertise for. So a good example of that would be vestibular. Or it might be false prevention, or it might be TMJ, lots of things do it, but they don’t actually put anywhere. So if you had, you know, great TMJ physio in Sheffield, fantastic, that probably would get you ranking. So spend time on your Google reviews, spend time on on your Google My Business. What you can do just to take time saving tip. If you are if you haven’t multiple social media platforms, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Google My Business, get a tool like loomly. And that’s spelled l o w, l y and I think it’s dot com. And what that allows you to do is take one post, create it once, choose the channels that you want to post it to, and click Go. And that will then go across all of the different platforms. So you don’t have to spend some time on Facebook, then on Google My Business just do the same thing across the board. That is actually terrible advice for social media strategy in general, because you need different types of content for different channels. But in this case, given that you’re not getting patients anywhere, and this is just for what we call social proof, ie, people looking at your social media. After finding you that’s it’s absolutely fine. But that will save you a tonne of time. It may only be 10 minutes, but 10 minutes across 10 posts 100 minutes, you know, it’s a it’s a I was gonna say a massage, but it’s spare time. So the next thing I would do, I think is go spend some time on your website. Here’s a tip. If I call you up Katie and I say I’m struggling with my shoulder, I’ve got rotator cuff I’ve had bursitis I’ve seen loads of different people. I just can’t get it better. Is that something you can help with your Talk to me five minutes. And you’ll tell me that nine out of 10 people you talk to, you convert and turn into patients. Now, if I take a script of everything you’ve said, and this goes for other clinics, moreso news, but if I take a script of that, and do that, test yourselves, guys, how much of that text that is high converting, that gets nine out of 10 patients in how much of that is on your website? Probably 0%. A lot of websites, just the content on them is very clinical. First asked for everybody if it says MSK on the on the website, get it off. Like there’s no one knows what MSK is outside the industry. Think about the patient, what does the patient want to see what does the patient wants to hear really simple stuff, if you’ve got a contact page, they don’t want to hear. I’ve know Bob’s physiotherapy contact us here, they want to see, we’re a really friendly bunch of Bob’s physiotherapy, we’ve seen it all. If you’re worried, scared, or confused. This is our bread and butter, you’re in safe hands, we have a number of options for you. If you want to have a chat with us, please give us a call. If you want to pop in for a coffee, we’re more than happy to say hello. If you know that you want an appointment, and you’re ready to book now and reserve this time, please do that. It’s a tiny, simple change. That little changes like that throughout the website make all the difference. And it’s like clinic owners all the time and see this, they they put their clinic together, they’re very happy. They actually touch it in 10 years, it’s it’s the same sofas, it’s the same art, it’s the same everything. Your website is the most important thing of your entire marketing mix. Because you can do the best Google ads, you can do the best Facebook ads, although you shouldn’t be, you could you could be doing all the best things across every other area. If you send someone to a crappy website that doesn’t have the right messaging that doesn’t have the right call to actions, it’s just not going to convert, if any wants to do a test, and you’ve got everything set up properly, go to your analytics, look at your conversions. If your conversion rate isn’t two and a half percent, there is something wrong, you need to fix it. But none of this you know, it’s not too technical, it’s stuff that you can just change, get the get the clinicians to do it as well, you know, you can get other people in the business to, you know, to work on stuff. I would definitely suggest thinking about as well as the texts across not all pages, if you’ve got 300 blogs, just leave them but certainly your homepage, your services page or contact page. Another little tip for you guys. Your most visited pages in order. And I can pretty much say this 95% of the time will be your homepage, your team page, or About Us page. If you’ve got to it’ll be team in about us your prices page and your Contact Us page in that order. So those are the most important pages. So on your homepage, does it do what you want it to do? Does it really tell people about the vibe of the business? Why you’re different? What is it? We’re just taken on a new clinic? Fabulous clinic. She told me how wonderful she is. They’re a podiatry clinic. I mean, she’s lovely, fantastic. They do Netflix in my clinic. So when you’re sat there with your feet getting done, you can watch Netflix and they have real coffee and real tea. Where’s that on your website? It’s not throw it in. It’s amazing. Throw it in, you know. You can find out they’re gonna go through the text with you but you get the idea. So if you have cool things, put that on your website. Talk about why your race that’s your homepage, your team page. I will strangle anyone that comes to me with another team member pay your team page where it says Katie Bell graduated from Birmingham University with a two one in physiotherapy She then went on to do I don’t care. Nobody cares. Do you know what your dentists University was? No. But I want to know if Katie’s a mum, I want to know if she does is running. I want to know she does weightlifting, rock climbing. Does she have a dog? Does she What are her hobbies? That stuff is so much more important because if I go and see. So I do I used to I don’t anymore. I’m too old and broken. I used to powerlifting. If I see Katie as a power lifter in her spare time, she’s got me because I can see that she Well, in my opinion. I’m sat there as a patient thinking, Oh, she must know about powerlifting and powerlifting injuries. So put that in there about your stuff. Make it approachable. If anyone wants to see an example of that, go to HMD g.uk. Go to our team section and go to all of our staff profiles. You’re gonna see loads of fun stuff which Just had a someone join us Brit. She’s Australian. And I think it starts off something like Britain’s our most recent starter, obviously having very little taste of any kind of culture in life being an Australian, she, you know, it’s just you want to make it fun. You want to make it interesting where where would you like to go on holiday? The best team pages are the funnel, I think mine says something like, spends most of his time stopping two teenage girls kids from killing each other. It’s like, you know, you’ve got to put some passionate emotion into it, and some humour into it. We’ve also added a Spotify playlist into our team page. So you can see what we’re all listening to. So many people are playing those songs. It’s ridiculous. They’re all looking at it. It’s really interesting. So put some effort into your team page. But proper pictures up, add pictures, you know, the worst thing I ever see a bloody osteopaths with their scrubs on, it looks terrible, it looks so clinical, like have nice pictures of team that aren’t scary. Another quick tip, actually just on pictures, I won’t go into replacing all of your pictures on the website. If you have a picture on your website where a patient looks like they’re in pain, or one of your members of staff is not smiling, take it off and replace it. If you have stock images on your website, either if you’ve got the cash, go find a photographer. If you don’t get your best member of staff who’s got a great Instagram, get them to take photos. Even non professional pictures are better than you know stock images of someone with a hurty knee or something. These are all little changes on your website. You know, you can’t redesign a website itself. But these are all little changes you can make is in your contact section or in your finder section. Does it tell anyone about car parking? If it doesn’t, why bloody not? You’ve got to put it in there. If you’re near a tube station, what’s the nearest tube station? How do you get there? You know, you’ve got to make, you’ve got to think this is a massively competitive area, this industry. And you’ve probably got 20 clinics around most of you whether osteo or higher or whatever, physio, you’re competing for the same people, you’ve got to make it as easy as possible for those people to find you to be able to navigate the website, put pricing on your website, this is another one, if you don’t have it on there, it will make a difference. You will get more inquiries, don’t hide your pricing. If you’re hiding your pricing. I hope this doesn’t go against your advice, Casey, if you’re hiding your pricing, you’re actually you’re not confident enough about what you’re doing and what you’re providing. And that’s actually a different problem. And you probably need to talk to Katie about that. But you know your price is your price, because you’re really bloody good at what you do. So put your prices up. Because it is one of the most visited pages, none of you are booking online or contacting a plumber. If there’s no price, if you go to two websites, one has a price it has pictures of the plumber, what he likes doing his spare time has how you can get not how you get to him. But you know, easy contact details versus a plumbers website that doesn’t have pricing doesn’t have a location on can’t see his picture, it’s documentary, you will always go with that first website. So these are little things you can you can do yourself. Yeah, I think that’s about it, don’t get into please don’t get into trying to do Google ads yourself or your SEO or anything like that. But those are the main things.

Katie Bell: 19:46

And these are when we talk about EDA is like exponential growth activities if you and we really encourage time blocking and looking at when you are going to be spending time on this stuff. And it needs to you know, a lot of our clinic owners don’t even do a day in a year. And we’re going to be encouraging them to do a day a week, you know, that’s what we’re pushing them towards, because that is where you’re going to see the real growth. But things like this, you know, this is like, a two hour task that you could go in and go pay what like to do an audit on what does my team patient like? What does my contact page look like? What are my Google reviews, like? How many Google reviews that we’ve got, how many of those Google reviews actually say those keywords that you’ve talked about Michael that can perform so much better? That’s a very small task to do an audit. And then from that audit, you create your strategy like practice is what I’m going to do. And then this is what I’m going to do it and that is taking that purrito principle and saying, right, you are spending probably 80% of your time on content creation or perhaps social media posts that have got no engagement that nobody’s seeing anyway. Just stop doing it. Like we both are giving you the permission to pause to just press pause on those activities that aren’t really bringing you clients and money and especially especially if you are listening to this and you are a year Longer business and you are needing more revenue, then your whole focus needs to be on sales and marketing. Absolutely. That’s where you need to be spending more time.

Michael Schumacher: 21:25

Yeah, absolutely. I think that, you know, people get very worried like, I must do these tasks. But when I ask them about measurement, like how, how do you know it’s actually doing anything for you, they say it feels like it’s doing something. And it’s actually not because they just don’t know data. But I can tell you now. And there are outliers, there are outliers. If you are particularly interesting, if you run ultra marathons, if you are an international sports star, we’ve got clinics who have very famous people in them, then that’s very different. But if you’re anything like me, where you spend most of your time working, you’ve got a dog, you’ve got a couple of children, you make dinner, and you go to bed. It there’s there’s very little you can do. And also, it’s remember MSK clinics are really, really bloody boring. Yeah, I once wrote an article, if I see another picture of another bloody spine, I’m going to kill myself. Like there’s only so many times you can make it interesting. Make it people based.

Katie Bell: 22:25

Yeah, but if it and I absolutely agree with that, like most people’s posts are so boring, and they’re not value driven. That it’s there’s got to be if you’re going to do it, that needs to be and we’re not going to get into it. On today’s episode. It’s a whole nother episode about your strategy behind it. But I think like you said, Michael, just track it. And I will say to people, okay, you don’t believe or you feel really nervous about it. Just stop it for two weeks, pause, press pause, and actually see the difference? Yeah, and go okay, well, there is the proof, there is the evidence. So now I’m going to continue to pause it for another two weeks. And it’s not about pausing and then doing nothing else. It’s about saying, actually just this, I remember working with a client, Michael, a few weeks ago, we did this update on the Google My Business Profile. She had more patients ring her that week than she’d ever had before. And it was like small, simple things that she changed. But it got traction, it made a difference. And that gave me the confidence to then pause the endless amount of social media posts that she was doing.

Michael Schumacher: 23:30

I think what I would always recommend to any client is to think about themselves as the customer. And always think of it as another service orientated business, whether that is a dentist or a plumber, or whatever it might be. Think of yourself as a customer, what is it that you want to see? Are you going to your doctor, social media or your dentist social media, you’re certainly not finding them there. What do you want to see on the website, you want clear pricing, you want to see who they are, you want to see who’s going to be treating you, you want to feel safe and comforted, particularly the dentist, you want to feel safe, right? They have the same problems, you guys in the you know, all of your patients acute or chronic, worried or scared. So you want to make sure that that that you you calm these people down by saying that you’re good with this is our expertise, we’re really, really good at what we do, but speak it in their language as well. I had a client the other day deliver me some content and it had the structure of the problem. I know what structure is, you know, a structure is you’ve studied it. No patient cares about the structure of plantar fasciitis, like what are the causes? What are the symptoms? That’s all you need the bloody structure anyway? I think I think it’s probably worth going on too. Because that’s that’s about all I would do. I’m sure there’s a few other things I think you could do. But I think that those things are the most important things I would do. If if it was my clinic that I would do. But I think it’s important to go on to the outside source inside of it. Because, you know, we obviously were an agency. So we benefit from outsourcing. But I’m just going to talk through, essentially what you need to look for in an outsourced agency. But let’s start with, let’s start with why you need to make sure that you are not doing tasks that you’re not qualified to do. You want to make sure that you’re not doing tasks that take you longer than someone else to do. Because the moment you do that, you are in trouble. You are not being efficient with your time, you are wasting your time and you’re also just less, you’re letting you become less profitable. Because if you spend an hour think what you could do with that hour, somewhere else. So you’ve got to make sure that the if you do want to do your own marketing or do want to do your own things, when it comes to the whole marketing mix, you better be quicker than an agency like us, you you’ve got to be better than an agency like us. Otherwise you are making a massive mistake. So that’s the first thing I would say. And again, yeah, I outsource all sorts of things because I’m I either don’t have the time I don’t do the I don’t do the cleaning. I don’t have the time to do the cleaning, I pay for that. I’ve got bad things do and also I’m terrible at cleaning. But it’s really important that that you really think in that in that way and stop being scared of outsourcing. What is interesting, and we’ll go into this because I know exactly why. What is interesting is that outsourcing marketing in this industry is more, we get more pushback than outsourcing anything else, literally anything else? What is it about marketing? And I know what it is. It’s really scary, because you don’t understand it. You’ve all had bad experiences, you’ve all spent money. Normally, to be fair, it’s DIY money, and you’ve got it. I spent 300 pounds on Google ads, it didn’t do me anything. Or you’ve had an agency that’s absolutely ripped you off? There’s one at the moment who’s going round? Should I mention them? Or do I get sued? I won’t mention them. There’s a company at the moment I’ve I’m, I’m always getting sued, I just think be honest. Right? There’s a company around at the moment, who are running around all of our clients and a lot of MSK businesses, that absolutely terrible, really bad sales techniques. And, and, and I get why people are scared. So how do you choose who to work with? Well, I wouldn’t ever hire a builder, or anything really that simple in my life without knowing that they’ve done work for other people. And I want that work to be relevant. If if, if I come to you, and you say, Well, how do I know that you’re good. I’ll say, here is our list of 900 clinics. All of the lovely clinic owners go contact them. I’m not gonna do anything, you just choose one of those people or ask them, because I bet if you got a call from someone or an email saying we’re thinking using HMD, G, would you recommend them? Yeah, of course, we’re, they’re really, really good. So go on recommendations, look at reviews, make sure they’re genuine reviews as well, because people can get away with doing all sorts of funny stuff. But make sure that decent reviews. Once you know that that that a marketing agency does good work, you’re 50% of the way there because it doesn’t mean that they’ll definitely do good work for you. The next thing is, as much as people want to hire local businesses, in my opinion, only hire an agency that knows your industry and knows what you do. Don’t ever hire someone who is just a generalist. It’s super, super important if they don’t know the difference between sciatica, back pain, and axial spondylitis don’t hire them. Because they they’re not going to know how to do things. There are, there are businesses out there in this industry that are competitors, I’ll name one because they’re the only one I would I would name actually, it’s company called Medeco. Digital, if you’re not going to use us use them be be very careful about where else you go. Because most people are terrible. And most of them are actually working out their bedrooms. And I mean that it’s like a kid running Facebook ads in his bedroom. So make sure that you’ve got great testimonials, make sure that that they know the industry. And then beyond that reporting and tracking and measurement. If if your agency cannot give you those things, you’re in a world of trouble. Because the moment a customer information, if a customer says to us, how are we doing? We have plenty of data, we can go to it. And in fact, you get reports because you know, you get reports every month. Most of our customers by the way, don’t read that stuff. Because they just after years, they’re just like, even after about six months, there’s see everything’s going great. Fine, you don’t need it them. But certainly at the beginning, you need that rapport, you need that visibility, you need that transparency. And make sure the person that you speak to me, for example, doesn’t just run off. This is another telltale sign where you get a great business owner, they speak to you, they sell you the project, and then they bugger off and you never hear from them again, you’re just stuck with a little team. Make sure that doesn’t happen. But measurement and tracking is everything. Because if you don’t know what’s happening, you’re going back into that problem of before, which is why you don’t want to use marketing into because you don’t know if it’s working. It’s too expensive. You’ve got no idea. You don’t understand it. It don’t you know if you’re better off not hiring an agency in that case. So absolutely. In within industry, find recommendations and find someone that actually does real reporting because most companies don’t. They’ll talk to you about clicks and click through rate. We don’t care about that stuff. We care about patients. Pretty simple.

Katie Bell: 31:06

And I think when when you then have a great experience it will you So as you said, so many of our industry are put off by it because of previous experience that they’ve had. And they always say to me, good luck don’t work with having a great website doesn’t work. And it’s like, no, it really does. But who is running it for you? Who has been delivering it before? What measurables? Were they working towards? What you know what reviews that they have all of those great things that you’ve just said, Michael. So I think I want to kind of instil confidence that Google ads 100% work, we eat, you, you do my stuff in my clinic, you’re sending me the report, the tracking, we speak on a regular basis to make sure that everything is where I want it to be. And that’s what creates a good relationship between, you know, it is a working relationship at the end of the day, isn’t it?

Michael Schumacher: 31:59

It is I love how you say I do it, I don’t do anything. I just do nice chats and talk to clients. But I will say it’s not just Google ads, it’s everything. Anything that we do, I can I have demonstrable data that says, This is what you get. I you know, I’m not gonna screen share, I could show you 500 Google Ads accounts today that we’ve got, we did a little look at what we’ve spent over the last six months in budgets are over a million pounds Google ad spend. And there are 40% of clinics that are getting a 10 times ROI on that. Now there are variables on lots of there are lots of variables on that. But there are 40% of clinics of all of our clinics getting a 10 times ROI. So you spend 100, you’re making 1000 It’s It’s It’s, I can guarantee you it works. I guarantee I’ll just Google ads, it’s everything. You know, it doesn’t, it doesn’t take much again, put yourself in the in the in the place of a customer, if you’ve got the right website if you’re really visible. And if you are, if you’ve got great ads running, you’re going to clean up because so many clinic clinics do it badly. That’s the other thing. They do it so badly. And yeah, you only need to make a 10% difference to be in the top 10% of all the clinics out there other than ours. Obviously, this has

Katie Bell: 33:20

been so useful. I always love chatting to you, Michael, because I kind of feel like I get the energy of all these clinic coders. They’re going to be listening in thinking, Oh my God, I’ve so many things, I can do so many great tips that you’ve given us. And you’ve really kind of instilled confidence that, you know, go and spend your time appropriately and specifically on the things that are going to make the biggest difference in your business. So, Michael, thank you for giving up a whole boatload of your time to give so much valuable content to our listeners. So please come back again soon.

Michael Schumacher: 33:52

We’ll do thanks, cosy. I

Katie Bell: 33:54

have loved this episode, and I could go on and on and on and on. But I won’t I will save you and get ready for next week’s episode. So please do meet again. And don’t forget to write just a little review. Like it, share it. Make sure as many people can listen to this as possible, because hopefully, it will help just somebody along the way. Thanks for listening