Rick: Our expert is on board today to speak with you, and when his presentation is complete we’ll follow with a Q&A period. This is going to be an interactive session today. So we’re going to share a link in the chat to the marketing calendar template that you can use to build your marketing calendar in real time on today’s session. You can submit questions throughout the presentation by clicking on the appropriate chat icon on your screen. Our presenter today is Chad Madden, PT, MSPT, and co-founder of Breakthrough. He is also the founder of Madden Physical Therapy.
And since opening his practice in 2003, Chad has scaled across six clinic locations and was recently valued at more than $16 million. Through Breakthrough, Chad helps hundreds of chiropractors and physical therapists scale and grow their practice. He is also the host of the Grow Your Practice Podcast. Thank you for taking the time to participate in our webinar and for sharing your expertise. Before we get started, can you please give us a brief background of your work with Breakthrough?
Chad: Hey, Rick. Thank you very much for the introduction. Yeah, work with Breakthrough. So very simply, right now our healthcare system is broke. If you look at especially over the last seven years since I started keeping track we’re up to $4.3 trillion per year spent in 2021 on healthcare in the U.S. Utilization is down, but that math works out to more than $12,000 per person per year. If you look at where the money is going, we combine all conservative care, which is chiropractic care, physical therapy, speech, and OT combined, it’s less than 3% of that money.
So we have less than $30 per person per month going to conservative care. We have $720 per month-plus going to medications, injections, surgery, diagnostic, and imaging, much of which doesn’t address the root cause and is proven in research to be unnecessary. So really our mission at Breakthrough and my purpose here today is to help practice owners create consistent patient demand for their services. And at Breakthrough, we have a whole host of tools of how to do that, increase patient demand, help more people get back to normal, naturally overcome their health challenges without unnecessary medications, injections, and surgery.
Rick: Thanks, Chad. And we’ll turn it over to you for the presentation.
Chad: Great. So was that too heavy, Rick, in the beginning?
Rick: No.
Chad: Hopefully, that was good. Yeah. So what I want to start with everybody here and hopefully you’re very motivated to improve our healthcare system here just like we express and what we want to do at Breakthrough. But when you think about creating patient demand or your marketing for your practice, what’s your number one biggest challenge? You can type that into the chat right now. The biggest challenge in marketing your private practice. Is it selection of media? So, for example, like, should I be advertising on Facebook, Google, TikTok? Should I be doing something offline like billboards, radio, television, print? Is it a conversion challenge where you have successful marketing, successful advertisement where people are raising their hand, but not many of those people make it over to become a paying patient? You’re frustrated tracking everything where you don’t have tracking metrics in place. Whatever your biggest challenge is, you can type that in the chat right now.
So regardless of what your challenge is, whether it’s around attraction or conversion, and thank you, Sage, I see that, keeping content fresh. Steve said, “Getting a balance of new patients from multiple streams, not having to rely on social media marketing.” So there I hear diversity of patient close. Peter says conversion. He says, “Online marketing website, SEO.” Thank you for those. Regardless of how we’re thinking about it, most of the time when we’re talking with a practice owner, if we dig deep enough, they’re really looking for consistency. We have monthly expenses, most of us, for space and also personnel. We’re employing receptionists, somebody in billing, perhaps even other clinicians. We want to keep this schedule full so that we can keep our doors open and continue to make a bigger impact in the world and serve more people.
So it really comes down to a consistency in terms of patient flow year-round regardless of the season, even if we’re in Arizona or another snowboard state like Florida, that regardless of the seasonality we can maintain a consistent patient flow and have predictable growth. So for most of us, this is what we’re dealing with. We need more new patients. We’re busy treating in the clinic. Our census, our caseload starts to decrease a little bit, we do some sort of marketing, right?
We launch a marketing campaign. We go out. In our area here in Central Pennsylvania they’ll say, “Shake the bushes.” But we go out there’s some sort of marketing effort and we generate new patients. Now, we’re busy in the clinic treating again, and then marketing effort falls. The caseload falls. Then we have to go out and market again. And many of us can feel like we’re reinventing the wheel every single month or every single quarter. Ideally, what we want to create is that consistency in patient flow.
We want to have diverse sources of new patients coming into our clinic and reactivation. So we want to consistently attract more new patients. And that’s at the top of your screen. Then for everybody that responds to our ads or email campaigns if they’re on our past patient list, we want to be able to efficiently follow up with those leads. We don’t want to lose patients in a spreadsheet or in a notebook or in an EMR system or something like that. From following up on the leads we want to be able to track with performance and metrics about how our team is doing in terms of conversion, and also what advertising is working.
Is that SEO working for us, or is a social media initiative working for us? Is the print ad working for us? What’s working so we can look at attribution. And also seeing where our patients are coming from so we can make better business and management decisions moving forward as we’re growing our practice. And what that allows us to do is hire more predictably and ultimately expand our practice, whether it’s adding in another location or it’s hiring additional clinicians, buying more equipment, increasing our ability to deliver our service. And then, that rolls over into consistently attracting even more new patients.
So what typically gets in the way of consistent marketing is, number one, we don’t have enough time, right? So how many of you are treating right now more than 40 hours a week? You can just type so in the chat right now. But I can remember, especially early in my private practice career, treating upwards of 80 hours a week, 7:00 to 7:00 Monday through Friday, and then going in on Saturday as well. I guess it was an 80-hour work week, and then I would work on Sunday doing admin and marketing cleanup. And it was nearly impossible to work on the business because I was always working in it, right?
So most of us don’t have enough time to think through going through and creating campaigns, and writing emails, and following up with patients, and doing all those other things. The second thing that typically gets in the way, the biggest barrier, is it’s unclear what’s working and what’s not. We might be doing something online. We might be doing something offline Maybe we have some sponsorships in the area, but we’re not really sure what’s really driving patients.
And then finally, when we do have a marketing initiative in place, for most of us, the systems are overly complex. We have degrees as clinicians. We don’t have degrees as software engineers, or being a online marketing expert. And learning that is time-consuming because it’s something that we have to completely learn over. And then for most of us, we’re delegating that information and knowledge to another person. The key for consistency in overcoming those barriers is creating a marketing calendar. Essentially, there are two main benefits. One is accountability where we can look at what did we do? What was the initiative? What was the campaign that we ran? What were the results of that campaign? So it drives accountability and it also enforces discipline.
Because when we see, if we’re hosting an event let’s say, on October 1st, we can look forward and say, “Okay, so if we’re hosting this in-house event on October 1st, what do we have to have done in order to have a successful event there, right?” And we can look at, well, promotion needs to go out six weeks beforehand. We need to have this done four weeks beforehand. We can have a deadline two weeks beforehand in order to have a successful event. For example, and you’re looking at a sample marketing calendar here. This was one that we ran last year for one of our clinics, and how we laid it out for the year.
So we think about paid ads for events that we’re hosting in-house. We think about partner workshops, which I’ll be talking about here in a second. And then we think about email campaigns to our past patient list that compliment everything that we’re doing out in the community. So as we’re going through here and, Rick, thank you again for the warm introduction, we’re going to go through marketing strategies that work, and making sense of it all there. And then, we’re actually going to go through a tutorial and build a calendar. And for this one, we’ll specifically do a quarterly calendar here for Q4.
And then we’ll be giving you a link where you can go through and do this yourself so you can have that marketing calendar specific to your practice, and then we’ll open it up for Q&A. This training is brought to you by Breakthrough. I shared a bit about what our purpose is, what our mission is here in the beginning. Ultimately, we believe the healthcare system is broke. We want to improve it. And we think that conservative care, specifically chiropractic care, physical therapy, OT, and speech functional medicine are the key to righting the ship here of what we have going on here with the healthcare system that has spiraled out of control and it’s unaffordable right now.
The best way for us to do that is to create patient demand marketing tools, and working with practice owners like yourself. So we’re going to go through six strategies, chiropractic marketing strategies that work, and if you’re taking notes now would be a good time to start. So the first thing we want to do is go to the lowest-hanging fruit, which is our patient list, right? It’s the number one asset in your business, and there are three ways that we can essentially do that. We can do it via email, text, and direct mail. Why do we want to go there? Again, it’s the number one most valuable asset in your business when you nurture it and take care of it.
If you’re in an area, if you’re in a town and let’s say there’s 50,000 people in your town, and we had to guess who’s coming in next month for your treatment type, whatever treatment that you provide, whatever specialty you provide, it’s most likely going to be the people that you’ve treated in the past, that you’ve helped, right? Because those people already know they can trust you. You can reactivate past patients and also get word-of-mouth referrals from your past patient list. How do we do it? You want to decide on a cadence.
I’ve talked with practices that send out three emails a week. I’ve worked with practices that send one email campaign a month. But you always want to lead with value, always lead with education. And the other thing that’s worth noting here is you want to balance your offers with goodwill. And what we teach here at Breakthrough, and just a little bit of background, co-founder here at Breakthrough and our CEO is Carl Mattiola. When I met Carl back in 2012, he was the head of online sales at Tesla Motors. So he had to figure out how to sell a $100,000 electric vehicle with an email campaign and a landing page. Much of what he learned there and in other industries like Johnson & Johnson and other Silicon Valley startups is exactly what we’ve brought here, what he’s brought here to Breakthrough.
And what he noticed is that many clinicians, they will only do offers in their emails and they’ll burn their list out, or they only do goodwill and never have an offer. And the mechanism that he discovered works the best is we offer goodwill. So here’s the top three exercises for shoulder pain, or a simple, easy exercise that you can do for back pain. And then once a person responds to that email, that piece of goodwill, you know, downloading a video or whatever that might be, clicking on the video, clicking on the report, then and only then there is an offer made. And what that does is it builds goodwill long-term with your patient list, and also you’re not burning your patient list out by giving them offers all the time. So lead with goodwill for the people that interact, then, we make an offer.
And the other thing that you want to do is you want to keep it personal, and right now with software, it is very easy to do that. Yeah. So, for example, this was one practice campaign, and, yeah, using what we do with the Breakthrough servers. Most of our practices have more than a 40% open rate when they’re sending out their emails, and you can see the click-through rate here, sky high. Industry-standard is less than 20%. The second thing that we can do if we talk about low-hanging fruit and then moving slightly up the tree is we can host partner workshops, and these work really well in conservative healthcare.
So it could be, for example, we commonly work with gyms, especially boutique studio-type gyms like a CrossFit gym, or an Orangetheory Fitness, or a yoga studio, and we create a mutually beneficial relationship. Why do we do that? Well, advertising costs go away. So rather than investing $1,000 or $2,000 or more to promote an in-house event, which we do consistently, now what we’re doing is getting a ton of free traffic because, essentially, what we’re doing is that partner will promote us to their entire patient list.
So it’s one of the most cost-effective things that you can get long-term is a warm third-party referral. What we do is we provide education. So it’s essentially an add-on service to the gym. Why would gyms want to work with us? Think about it. A gym owner’s biggest pain point is people dropping off for medical reasons for injury, right? There’s shoulder pain, back pain, neck issues that arise as people are working out, they cancel their membership, and they churn, right? And that’s a pain point for the gym owner. So we’re going in and our goal is to help people keep people in the gym working. It’s a win for our patient, for their client. It’s also a win for the gym member and it’s a win for us. So it’s a win, win, win, and we lead with education.
How do we do it? We aim for all of our clinics, six, soon to be seven clinics here to host a workshop with a local business one time per month. Many times, it’s with a large employer as well. We’ve figured out that small civic and social groups also work really well. In Pennsylvania, we have townships here, local townships, and they actually use local taxpayer dollars to promote events that we’re doing, which is wild. Again, it’s that win, win, win, and you can be harnessing that same thing. You want to focus on business or groups that have your ideal client, your avatar as well. So think about that. And you know, for us, we match up who is our ideal client for us. It’s a 45 to 64-year-old family-oriented female. And where are they spending their time shopping in the community? And then we go there and we set these up.
So here’s the result. Another campaign, 37 people attended.This should actually be a partner campaign, 37 people attended, they got 17 new patients. The largest one I ever did was an employer who set up three lunch-and-learns back to back-to-back, so it was every 30 minutes. And in the end, over 500 employees ended up watching the recorded lunch-and-learn. So these can be quite powerful and a good use of your time. The third thing we can do is we can get in front of the community with online ads. So this includes Facebook, Instagram, Google, the alphabet suite of platforms including YouTube. It could be TikTok as well. So why do we want to do that? Well, there’s a funny thing that happens when we do online ads.
So not only do we get people from cold traffic when we do it correctly, and we’re leading with education, we also get past patients reactivated coming in for additional care. We also get increased word-of-mouth referrals. We also have increased relationships with our partners because they see us out there advertising. And, yeah, online advertising it’s the most cost-effective way long-term to successfully attract cold traffic, people who do not know they can trust you yet. Again, we want to lead with education here. We highly encourage and we share a model around not only doing evaluations, free screens, discovery visits, whatever you may call them, but we also complement that with online education. I’m sorry. With offline education where people come in-house and we host a workshop.
Yep. Oh, yeah, I can’t do that. So a typical workshop, for example, we just ran one last week at our Hershey office. We had 17 people come in for roughly $1,000 in ad spend, and we ended up with 15 plans of care out of that. So, again, when done the right way, when paying attention to good attraction upfront in your marketing, and then also conversion, your rates can be really high here. The other thing that we want to think about is long term we want to be able to market across all five stages of awareness. Now, why would you want to do this? Here’s how we think about it. Most of us have a slow season. So for you, if you look back at the last few years in your practice, is there a time of year that you expect to be less busy? You can type your answer in the chat.
So for us, our typical slow season is first in June of each year. Dan says February, Steve says December. And the second slow season that we have is we’re straight on par with Steve, which is really Thanksgiving through the end of the year, so December. And what you want to think about is if you have full all five stages of awareness covered that during our expected slow season, we can actually lean forward a little bit and increase our marketing effort so we have that consistency. So if we’re averaging, let’s say, in this office, it’s 600 visits a week, and if we expect to drop down to 500, for example, every Thanksgiving through the new year, what we can do then is we can actually increase our effort across all five levels of awareness in order to have that consistency of visit flow through our clinic.
And very quickly, and looking at the five stages of awareness, and by the way, this comes from Eugene Swartz in a famous book called “Breakthrough Advertising,” it was written in the ’60s. But at the bottom, the low-hanging fruit we have people who are highly aware. They know you, they love you, and they’re ready to be reactivated for your chiropractic treatment plan right away. They’re likely to buy any additional programs you have, if you introduce a new modality or anything like that. They’re highly likely to be one of your fanatics, one of your raving fans. And at the other end of the scale, the highest-hanging fruit, we have the unaware. This is the cold traffic that we’re talking about.
In general, Facebook and the Meta Suite are the best platform to go to, the best place to go to if we’re advertising for the unaware. On the other end, a simple email campaign is the best way to reactivate patients who are highly aware. And then we have everything in between, which is product aware. That’s they know that they need chiropractic care, but they want to know that you’re right for them, right? Maybe they saw you in the past for neck pain, but they weren’t really aware that you treated something related to that, right? That you also treated shoulder pain, or you could help them with their sciatica or something along those lines, right?
So they’re product aware, they know your treatment packages, but they’re not aware completely that you can help them with the problem that they’re having right now. Solution aware is, this is the person that is Googling chiropractor near me, right? They know that they need chiropractic care, they need chiropractic treatment, but they’re not aware of you. Their level of awareness stops at they need chiropractic. Problem aware, I have back pain. Is there something that can help me? Should I be putting heat on my back? Should I be doing exercises that I find on YouTube? Should I be doing something else, right? That’s problem aware. But you can see when you’re marketing to all five levels over time, as you’re building your marketing machine out, that you can basically pull whatever lever you want to, depending on the season, and have better control over your patient flow.
The next thing is, especially if we’re going to be investing in advertising, our staff has to know how to convert, right? I register for an event with you, or to receive a screen, or I am redeeming a voucher for my first treatment, first appointment. And, ultimately, I’m going to have contact with your office, whether it’s via email from a landing page, or I’m calling in and there’s going to be a human-to-human conversation going on there. What happens in that human-to-human conversation is directly proportional to the number of people who respond to your ad and convert over to a paying patient.
So for most clinicians, they just completely skip this step, right? The result of a marketing campaign, this step is ignored and they just look at the number of plans of care that come through. So we’ve seen clinics already that have had 40-plus people respond to a campaign, and 1 person made it through to a plan of care, right? That’s a two-and-a-half percent or less conversion rate. That’s very anemic, right? So it should be significantly higher. And we want to pay attention to that. We have noticed from call center data that we’ve done directly in working with other practices, following up with leads, up to seven times is really the key. After that, it’s the point of diminishing returns. Most practices follow up with a lead twice. That’s the average, right? But there’s a lot of headway to be made, a lot of success to be had by going the extra five additional touch points.
When we look at our processes and we have a slight variation for every office, depending on the type of area that we’re in, whether it’s rural, suburban, or urban. But nonetheless, within the first day we want to have two touch points. So it could be a phone call and a text. It could be a phone call and an email. The same thing day two, we’re touching them twice. Day three, two or three follow-ups. And then day four, we’ll get that seventh follow-up in by day four. The sooner that we do the call to the ad response, the higher the conversions are. And five minutes is amazing if you can get it in faster than that. I realize that sometimes somebody’s calling your office at 4:00 in the morning and you can’t possibly return the call. I get it. But, in general, the closer you can get to returning their call as quickly as possible, their communication as quickly as possible, the higher the conversion rates are going to be
And the other thing that you should have in place is a call tracking system, so you can look at what’s going on. And finally, we want to measure the results, understand what’s working so we can do more of it, and what’s not so we can do less of it, or improve it. The thing that happens for most owners is when we get stuck in that roller coaster, and we feel like we’re reinventing the wheel, we’ll take time, we’ll write an email out or an email campaign, we get it launched to our patient list, we reply to whoever replies and now by that time it’s the next week or the next month, and we have to sit down and do it all over again.
And that can be a burden for the clinician long term. It’s much better to reuse material and get everything set up on a system so that your main function just becomes to look at the metrics so you can make longer-term strategy decisions about what your marketing mix looks like. So here’s an example. We look through and One of the main things that we do for the owners that we work with is help them keep in contact with their customers, so patients. So this is a nurture campaign, which, again, delivers that goodwill first. And then for people that interact with the campaign, we give them an offer typically it’s for an appointment.
So you can see open rates here of different campaigns that people have selected. Open rates are really high. What that means is that more people are seeing your emails and, ultimately, you have more shots at conversion over time. So what we’re going to do next is I’m actually going to exit out of this, and we’re going to build a calendar. Yeah. So let me back up here. And I would love to have a volunteer and just walk somebody through live. If anybody wants to volunteer, you can just type in the chat and we’re going to do this live. Eric says sure. Eric, you can unmute yourself. That would be great.
Eric: Hello.
Chad: How you doing, Eric?
Eric: Great. How are you?
Chad: Good. Tell us a little bit about your practice while I’m getting this set up.
Eric: Yeah. So what do you want to know specifically?
Chad: Where’s your practice at, and how long you’ve been in practice? That would be a good start.
Eric: Yeah. I’m in the suburbs of Detroit and I’m at West Bloomfield, Michigan, and I’ve been practicing 22 years.
Chad: Congrats.
Eric: Thanks.
Chad: That’s the same as me.
Eric: Nice.
Chad: Okay. So I’m going to share this link with everybody, or Andrea will. I’m going to make a copy for you, and this is going to be called… What’s the name of your practice, Eric? Eric, what’s the name of your practice?
Eric: Synergy Chiropractic.
Chad: Am I allowed to write that here?
Eric: Sure.
Chad: Okay, cool. So I made a copy. Now, do you already have a Q4 calendar?
Eric: No, I do not.
Chad: Okay. So…
Andrea: Hey, Chad, just so you know, right now, we are just looking at your desktop. We don’t see the template.
Chad: That’s pretty classic. There we go. Good?
Andrea: Yes.
Chad: Thank you.
Andrea: Maybe if you can zoom in a little bit that might help. Great.
Chad: Better?
Andrea: Yes.
Chad: All right. We’re gonna go through. I already copied the template for you, Eric. And so this is the Synergy Chiropractic marketing calendar for Q4. So right now, when you’re talking about your patient list, what do you currently do for your patient list?
Eric: They get a weekly email from the office.
Chad: Nice. Anything else?
Eric: Yeah. you know what? I’m not consistently doing live workshops, but I used to do a monthly workshop in the office. And I already made my mind up I’m going to start doing it again in October, and if people don’t feel comfortable, I guess, they won’t show up.
Chad: Okay. So for the workshop, is that only to your patient list, or are you using that as a mechanism also for the cold traffic, for people who’ve never been a patient?
Eric: Both.
Chad: Okay. So we’ll put workshop here. And then do you promote that only with the email, or do you promote it other ways as well to your patients?
Eric: I have some referral partners that I promote it to.
Chad: Cool. Your referral partners, do you do anything specific for them, like a monthly lunch-and-learn, or office visit, or anything direct mail?
Eric: No.
Chad: Okay. And for your patient list, do you use direct mail?
Eric: No.
Chad: Okay. Nothing wrong with that. I’m just touching all bases here. So patient list, referral partners, and then we have cold, and you said workshop here. Is there anything else that you’re doing for cold traffic?
Eric: Well, I have a specialty in my office. I do neurofeedback, and I’ve been doing a campaign with a different agency that we’re doing, Facebook ads and cold traffic, like promotional things. So it’s, like, a niche that I do.
Chad: Okay. Awesome. So you’re running Facebook ads. Anything else that you’re doing for cold traffic?
Eric: No.
Chad: No offline ads, no direct mail, print, TV, radio, nothing like that?
Eric: Correct.
Chad: Okay. Cool. So, weekly email, workshop. Ideally in Q4, how often are you running a workshop in-house?
Eric: Once a month.
Chad: Okay. Referral partners. Okay. So if we go over to October and we look at the weekly email, what day of the week does your weekly email go out?
Eric: It goes out at the beginning of the week, Mondays.
Chad: Okay. And you already have these. Do you do, like, a monthly theme?
Eric: Yeah, we do.
Chad: Okay. Cool. Do you know the theme for October, National Chiropractic Month?
Eric: Yeah. Well, kind of for October we do like fall back into health.
Chad: Oh, nice. Great. All right. So patient email you have going out each month. I’ll give you the link for this specific, Eric, but you can go back and fill in the theme or the exact campaign that you’re using here.
Eric: All right.
Chad: And, okay. So one workshop a month. When are you going to host the workshop in October?
Eric: I like to do it the second week, and then usually Wednesday or Thursday,
Chad: The 12th, okay. That’s the…
Eric: The second Wednesday of the month let’s just say.
Chad: Cool. Workshop. And what’s your topic?
Eric: Well, I have a generic one that I do. But then I also have one I do for the specialty niche for the neurofeedback. So the basic one I do, it’s usually, like, seven strategies for healthy living or something like that.
Chad: How does that work for you?
Eric: Well, I haven’t done it in a while, so it’s hard to… It was working quite well before the world got shut down, but…
Chad: Yeah. Okay. So, and then I’m assuming your emails will promote this workshop as well on the 12th?
Eric: Yeah.
Chad: Cool. And then you said there are Facebook ads and do you know, like, two to four weeks beforehand how long they’re running Facebook ads for?
Eric: The Facebook ads are lead gen for [crosstalk 00:36:20].
Chad: They go straight to the appointment?
Eric: Mm-hmm.
Chad: They don’t promote the workshop?
Eric: Yes, they don’t promote the workshop.
Chad: Okay. So for this workshop on, I just have it in here is neurofeedback, what did you call the other one, seven steps?
Eric: Yeah. Seven strategies for healthy living.
Chad: Okay. Cool. Would you promote it any other way other than your patient email? Oh, you said the referral partners, right?
Eric: Yeah.
Chad: How soon before this workshop would they have to promote?
Eric: Two weeks. Usually, 10 days to 2 weeks out.
Chad: All right. Well, we’re going to put it on the 1st, just so it looks okay.
Eric: Yeah. There you go.
Chad: Okay, great. Okay. So we have a basic marketing calendar for October. We would go through and do the same for November, your patient emails, putting your workshop here, and working backwards on promotion, and then the same thing in December, having all the components that you’re finding work well. Any questions on this so far, Eric?
Eric: No.
Chad: Great. Is this helpful for you, or have you done this many times before?
Eric: No, this is helpful.
Chad: Great. Yeah, I’ll post this link directly to you. Actually, I’ll do that right now, and then we’ll switch back. Any questions from anybody else who’s on the call right now about building out a marketing calendar? I know we’re going through it fairly quickly. Cool. And then just gimme one second. Yeah, thanks for doing that, Eric. That was great.
Eric: Okay. No problem.
Chad: And, yeah. I’m sending it directly to you in the chat right now, and you can go in and use that and fill out the rest.
Andrea: Chad, we’ve got a hand raised from Dan. Do you mind if I let him talk?
Chad: Yeah, go right ahead.
Andrea: All right. I’m going to unmute you, Dan.
Dan: I was just typing into the chat line. It says workshops, one-to-one in a facility or his office, or are they online or what?
Chad: Yeah. So various ways to run workshops. What we’ve done that has worked very well, Dan, is every clinic that we have twice a month will host an in-house workshop. So it’s one-to-many. And our wheelhouse is anywhere from 10 to 20 people in the room. I mean, I’ve done them for over a hundred people. Very hard to do follow-up and give people any semblance of individual attention, although I’ve done them, but the conversion rate just drops off the cliff after 20. If there’s 20 in the room, we can have a 90%-plus conversion rate. And we’ve done them significantly smaller than 10 as well. It is not one-to-one.
I know there are different models. So I’ve also done them via webinar. I’ve also done in-house where somebody can come in, schedule an appointment one-on-one, they can sit and go through a workshop presentation, and then do an immediate follow-up or an immediate screen with a PT as well, or the clinician. But, yeah. They’re various models, the most common one that we teach at Breakthrough is getting people to come in-house. And the reason why is because if somebody takes time to come into your office… And, Dan, you have a bricks-and-mortar office?
Dan: I do.
Chad: Yeah. So if they take time to do that, versus somebody who goes online and watches you do a workshop or a webinar…
Dan: I don’t have a lot of space in my office. So we do dinner with a doctor at a local restaurant, and I do the speaking.
Chad: It’s the same thing. Very, very similar. Yep. Could you fit 10 people in your office, or would it be tight?
Dan: That’d be real tight.
Chad: Yeah. Then stick with exactly what you’re doing. We’ve had other practices that do home care or do online, and they’ll rent a room from, yeah, usually it’s the back dinner room in most restaurants, or they’ll go to a public meeting place, like a community center or a library. We’ve seen many adaptations. But, yeah, it sounds like you already have. Does the dinner work?
Dan: It does. We stopped doing it because of the virus, but we’re getting ready to get started again.
Chad: Yeah. I’d go back to it if it was a successful model for you.
Dan: Yeah. The most we had was 56, but usually, we get about 15 to 20 people.
Chad: That’s great. Yep. That seems to be our wheelhouse for every week, every two weeks we can build clinics around that flow. That’s great. Thanks, Dan. So…
Andrea: Hey, Chad, before we switch off of this topic, we have a question in the chat from Steve. What do you think about doing Facebook live workshops?
Chad: Oh, awesome question, Steve. And a lot of learning over the last three years. So a little bit about my background pre-pandemic. So I’ve been a practice owner since 2003. And just to give you an idea, right now, we’re a little over $8 million a year in revenue. Back in 2011, I started posting YouTube videos and a few of them went viral. And they were really intended for patients who said, “Hey, by the way, I’m not going to do the rest of these exercises for the rest of my life. Just gimme the three exercises that I should be doing for my sciatica.” And I would record a three to five-minute video, post it on YouTube, and again, a few of them went viral. At one point in the early 2010s, I had the number one video in the world for back pain and sciatica. It now has over, I think, it was over 4.5 million views last time I looked.
From that, I was able to do a lot of research. So we would put people through a survey funnel, and I was doing all this research learning about how back pain and sciatica sufferers thought about what they were going through, and I learned a lot. We were doing online webinars and I was even doing online treatment as far back as 2011. And this was kind of when it was Wild West where you could do a lot as a clinician. And we quickly, by 2012, 2013 had to shut down, like, treating overstate borders. And so I ended up doing some treatments internationally and it’s all been shut down for a while, at least for us.
But when the pandemic hit and we went online, what I saw a lot of clinicians doing is trying to record with their phone, them doing a workshop and streaming it, and then thinking they would get conversions from that. Nearly impossible. Like, right now I’m not teaching 100 people over here and then trying to engage with you online. It becomes almost impossible. I’m not sure if you have children, but, like, my wife and I have six children. And we watched in the beginning of the pandemic how teachers would teach, like, half the room live, and then they would have to address half the room on a monitor and it was a disaster, right? We’re not wired to do that, where if I’m online with you I can be engaging right here, I can ask you to go to the chat, you can unmute, we can interact, or I can address people in the room, but I can’t do both at the same time.
So if you’re going to go to Facebook live, which we did, I would highly recommend that you’re not also addressing people live in the room. I would recommend that you do it in this format where you have slides and you can walk through. So two very different things, and it took us three or four months to discover that back in 2020 that there was a dramatic difference. When we were doing it, we went back to what initially worked on YouTube in our early webinars, which was addressing essentially people via webinar without a live audience. I understand where you’re coming from. I try to do the same thing. We try to… You know, when I’m doing a live workshop, I want to broadcast it everywhere. We did it for years. I just don’t expect many conversions coming out of that, not nearly as many as if we’re on a live webinar.
All right. So I had mentioned, and I want to have time here to get to your Q&A, but I had mentioned a patient demand platform. And everything that we do in terms of our marketing efforts for our practice and the practices that we work with, we want to track through one central system. So that’s what a patient demand platform is. It can track all of your marketing efforts, just like we walked through here with Eric, where you have email campaigns, plus Facebook ads, plus any other layered market. Like, Eric talked about his referral partners. So with a patient demand platform, we should be able to track all those things in one single place.
So if you think about what you’re actually doing when you’re marketing your practice, the very first thing that you’re doing is the actual attraction, right? You’re sending out emails to your patient list to get people to raise their hands. You’re posting online ads or offline ads to try to get people to raise their hands. That’s attraction. The next thing that we want to do is for those people that respond to the email or the people that respond to our ads, we want to be able to convert them over. Yes, there’s a human element. There’s scripts and everything else that we can share there, and we have a lot of research on.
At the same time, we have to be tracking that. We want to see people that go from ad responder the whole way through becoming a paying patient and ultimately graduating, or going onto a maintenance program, or, you know, graduating onto another sort of program with us. And then finally underneath it all, we want to be able to measure what’s going on. So if we can’t see what’s working, if we’re not tracking appropriately, what happens is the next time it comes to make a decision, let’s say in Q1 of next year, if we’re not appropriately tracking, we’re just guessing when we’re lining up our strategy for the next quarter.
So, again, we went through the marketing calendar. How to do that for us, essentially every two weeks for each of our offices we’re turning on an ad set, an ad campaign. Offline, we’re also running an email campaign to reactivate past advertising responders and our past patient list as well, and we want to convert. So this is just, you can see on the left there, a list of… I mean, we have hundreds of campaigns with data behind it, that practices send out to their patient list in order to reactivate patients. And then underneath it all, we want to be able to measure what’s going on, right?
If we’re spending a dollar for online advertising, we want to be able to see how much of that dollar is making it through over to a plan of care. What is our return for the marketing efforts that we’re doing? We want to be able to track everything so we can adjust and get better. And if you’re interested, and there’s going to be a poll popping up on your screen right now. So if you’re interested in learning more about Breakthrough and what our patient demand platform can do for your practice, just click yes on the screen. And then, somebody from our team will follow up with you and show you exactly what we’re doing with the all-in-one patient demand platform that encapsulates email, the partner, or the referral partners, and tracking there, and also setting up workshops or any other events that you may be hosting. There’s call recording in there, there’s two-way texting as well. There’s lots of tools in one consolidated toolbox designed specifically for the practice owner. So just click yes on your screen, and then we’ll open this up for your questions.
Rick: Thank you, Chad.
Andrea: Chad, we have a…
Rick: I’m sorry. Go ahead.
Andrea: You can manage it, Rick.
Rick: I was just going to say thank you very much. That was really informative. I wanted to click yes myself on that form and get more info. We’re going to start with a few questions here. The first one, as a brand new practice, not even to grand opening yet, would it be more beneficial to break down the calendar even further, for example, hourly or half-day plans to build the initial patient base, or does that get overly complicated?
Chad: That is an interesting and timely question. Literally, this afternoon I have a recording podcast episode with an owner who we started working with before they ever opened their practice. They literally were a clinician working for another practice planning their opening when we started working with them. So what we did in that case, and what we advise frequently, is in the very beginning when you’re opening, you have a list of friends and family, right? And if you think about any famous blog or blogger or anybody that’s creating content anywhere, almost always in the launch, in the earliest stages, you know, when the list is essentially zero, there’s a friends and family list, right? So start there.
There are people in your community who already know, like, and trust you. This might seem counterintuitive. I would actually go the other way. You might be over-planning if you’re thinking hourly. But when you’re laying out the quarterly calendar, you know, do we ever get more granular? Absolutely. Everyone… We have a marketing team of four, I’m sorry, five, in-house. And, yes, they plan everything out by the hour, but it starts with that 30,000-foot view, “What are we doing for the next three months?” And then we get more granular from there. But initially, if you just walk into it and you’re like, “I’m going to plan this down by the minute what I’m doing every single minute for the next 90 days,” it’s too heavy.
You start with what we did with Eric. Let’s look at this quarterly. And then when next week’s coming up, let’s say the next week would be the first week in October, well, then, you know, Eric can get more granular and break it down, “Okay. Here’s what I’m going to do on Monday. Here’s what I’m going to do on Tuesday. Here’s what I’m going to do on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, etc.” But start with the big picture. And in the beginning, you’re going to promote to people who already know, like, and trust you. So your email list is going to be 50 to 300 people who already know, like, and trust you in your area even though you’ve never treated them before. So start there and build out and layer your marketing from there. But great question.
Rick: All right. Thank you. And another question right along those same lines, but a little bigger picture. How far in advance do you recommend planning out your marketing calendar? Quarterly, annually, or how far?
Chad: Yeah. So the same idea here. We plan annually where we’ll lay out themes, exactly like Eric had a theme for October. So September for us is National Fall Prevention Month. And every year for the last, as long as I can remember, 10 years or so, we promote that it’s National Fall Prevention month, and we have this huge push around that. So we plan themes annually, right? And really truly we’re recycling that calendar over and over. But once a year we refresh it. So end of this year, we’ll lay out 2023. Then before every quarter starts, so right now we’re in September, so we will plan exactly as I did with Eric, Q4.
So that’s the next level up. We want to get more granular and take a look at, you know, what we’re doing each of the 13 weeks. The week before… I’m sorry. The week before the month starts, what we will do in October is we’ll break it down even farther. So for example, every time that we run, we do, a mail patient newsletter to compliment what we’re doing with our email campaigns. So there are deadlines there. So, for example, we need a proof approximately 10 days before we want that patient newsletter to hit the mailbox, right? So we work our calendar back on a monthly basis, right?
And then we weekly and hourly, yes, we have activities there that are even more granular like writing a follow-up handwritten card to every patient that has completed their plan of care within the last week, right, or a handwritten thank you to every referral source who sent us a patient last week. Yeah. So we go through that as well. But it starts with that broad overview annually, and then quarterly as the quarter approaches, and then monthly as the month approach, and then we plan out each week as well.
Rick: All right. Thank you. And another question that a lot of people would want to know, what’s good ROI for online advertising?
Chad: Great question. So what I’ve seen most clinicians do, and this is even on a… I’ll just call it the larger player. So people that have eight-figure -lus revenue practices, even nine-figure, the way that they’ll look at it is they tend to coagulate all new patients, and the accounting of all new patients into one category. And you can be more discerning than that. So automatically we know, you know, to reactivate somebody from your patient list should be pennies. So your ROI is going to be through the roof, right? And instantly, that messes up looking at this from a homogenous standpoint.
So it’s going cost a lot less money to reactivate somebody from your past patient list than it is to go to somebody who is completely unaware of you and, you know, what we would call cold traffic. So when we look at online advertising, I’m going to assume that you’re meaning cold traffic. And we start in the very beginning, and this might shock some of you, but one-to-one is acceptable. So if we do a direct mail piece, if we do a Facebook campaign, in the very beginning because I know over time we’re going to get more and more tuned in that we’re going to continuously test. And my goal when we’re advertising to cold traffic is 10 to 1. So $1,000 coming in for every $100 that we’re spending. But typically, it starts at one to one. And we work really hard to get it to the 10 to one depending on the line.
Rick: Excellent. Thank you for sharing that. And Eric asked, “Live in-person workshops are the best ROI.” Sorry. Is that correct?
Chad: Yeah. So that’s a tricky question, Eric. I can tell you this. Long-term leading with patient education, however you’re doing it, is the right way to go. So, for example, we have a clinician who just despises speaking live in front of people. He is amazing on video. So we just put him in video, and it’s really, really simple. We have others who love to write, who have their own blog posts, and we just go with the strength of each person. But, in general, if I had to make a broad sweeping statement for most clinicians, the best route is to host whatever you want to call it, a workshop, a lecture.
And by the way, that is not a new idea. Originally, that started in the 1800s. There was a female physician in New York City named Elizabeth Longfellow, the first female physician in the U.S, for the AMA predecessor. She was not allowed to advertise for her services. So the way that she circumvented that and adapted is she started hosting a lecture series. And she built a very successful practice before there were telephones, or there were computers, or there was electricity, or cars, or paved roads or anything like that, right? So absolutely amazing. And yeah, it’s a tried and true method, and it’s what we go back to. Yes, we use vouchers. Yes, we use free screens or discovery visits. Yes, we do those other things. But all our bedrock for our marketing when we’re going to cold traffic is patient education via the workshop.
Rick: All right. Thank you. And I wish we had more time because we’re having some great questions here. But at this time we’d like to thank our sponsor, Breakthrough, and Chad Madden for today’s webinar, and thank you all for attending. Remember this webinar, including our speaker’s PowerPoint presentation, has been recorded, and we’ll alert you via email when the webinar is available online, and that email will also include Breakthrough’s special offer. Thank you again for attending, and we look forward to seeing you next time. Have a great day.
