Clinical Solutions Blog

Google AdWords have just made a massive change to how their paid ads appear in the search engine results. If you’re a clinic owner who uses Google Adwords or you’ve been thinking about adding it as one of your healthcare marketing strategies, the competition is about to get a whole lot fiercer!

If this is all news to you, I’ll be sharing the Google Adwords changes in just a moment.

Over the past 10 years, I’ve had ample operational experience with managing over 200 multi disciplinary centers and from working with countless clinic owners in my Clinic Accelerator Program. Out of that experience I’ve learned that using paid advertising is a great source of physiotherapy and chiropractic marketing for bringing in new patients - IF you know it is an effective channel for your business.

What I see all too often is people don’t track their Adwords marketing, they don’t know what to measure, how to work out if it is actually effective, and if it’s translating into new patients or not.

With the new changes, if you want to make Google Adwords work for you it is going to be essential to have a better understanding and better management of your Adwords campaigns. The new changes will limit ads to 7 per page with no right hand side advertising. You will lose your shirt if you don't know how to properly optimize Adwords. 

So let’s talk about the Google Adwords changes and some solutions that can help solve the issues that these changes will bring.

I recently went for a massage therapy session and it was awesome to see how this clinic offered direct billing for the massage therapy session from blue cross and green shield. As I sat in the waiting room, I heard at least 3 other patients ask about this service and how they could get enrolled.

This clinic was also using new technologies to make it easier for patients. They were using Jane App to make it super easy to book appointments online - zero hassles for me (and other patients).

This got me thinking about 2 things:

1. How clinic owners could use extended health benefits more effectively
2. How being innovative with marketing and selling products can attract more patients

Like most employers, at CSC, we offer health benefits for our staff.  It's a cost that is expensive but we see it as an investment. We want our staff to be healthy and happy so they can take care of our customers. And, after my massage appointment, as I was submitting my paperwork with Sunlife so I could get reimbursed, I started reading the fine print - which I found very interesting.

Using the CSC extended health plan as an example, I wanted to share what typical things are included, what I learned out of this experience, and exactly why it is so important to clinic owners and clinicians.

More than that I'm going to show you how you can use extended health benefits trends to attract new patients, and, more importantly, keep them coming back over and over again.

It’s very important to think about your online reputation because everyone is searching for healthcare services online. Where do people go to search for a chiropractor or physiotherapist?

In most cases, their first stop is Google!

Nowadays there are lots of different places customers can leave reviews - Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, and Yellow pages online.

It benefits your business to encourage patients to leave reviews because according to research: 

• 9 out of 10 consumers trust an online review as a personal recommendation
• 72% of patients say a bad review stops them from going to a particular health practitioner
• 44% say they would go out of their network to see someone with good reviews

That means, the more positive patient reviews you have the more customers your clinic will get.

You need to be proactive and encourage your patients to write reviews. But the frustrating thing is when you spend all this money on marketing, you do your very best to provide a great service, and then you get a bad patient review.

At some stage it’s bound to happen, people tend to talk more when they are unhappy, than when they are happy.

So let’s talk about how you can deal with any bad feedback and turn it into a positive.

What if you could get close to successful clinic owners from coast to coast across Canada and ask them something that could change your business?

Well listen up…

As physiotherapists, chiropractors, and massage therapists, the clock always seems to be against us.

When it comes to running our clinic and growing our business, most of us don’t seem to have the time to plan and execute an effective physiotherapy marketing strategy for continued growth.

But treating patients and running an effective business at the same time is possible – many experts have done it and started in the same place as you. But there’s much more to it than giving away free consultations, or relying on winning doctor referrals.

This led our team to the simple question: is it possible to grow your clinic in just a few hours each month?

We reached out to 9 incredible clinic owners from Newfoundland to Ontario, Quebec to British Columbia, and even Australia - Justin Whittle, Alain Scheldeman, Jason Bellefleur, Wendy Coombs, Rick Lau, Tanja Yardley, Mark Cho, Darryl Yardley, and Paul Wright.

We asked them a simple question:

“If you could spend only 4 hours this month to grow your clinics, what would you do?”

Let’s see what they have to say.

Have you ever tried typing “free physiotherapy consultation” into Google?

Go ahead and give it a try. Like me, you’ll probably be surprised at just how many chiropractors, physiotherapists, and even massage therapists are offering a ‘free’ consultation.

Here are a couple of quick samples I found:

White Ave Sport & Spine in Alberta says:

“Unsure whether physiotherapy is right for you? We provide free consultation to determine whether physiotherapy is right for your condition.”.

Portland Physiotherapy in Nova Scotia says:

“Call (902)-XXX-XXXX now to schedule your free 10 minute consultation to determine how we can best help you achieve your healthy lifestyle goals and independence.”.

Dorval Physiotherapy in Ontario says: 

"Book a free fifteen minute consultation. You can decide with no obligation if our services are the right fit for you."

This ‘free’ marketing strategy is happening both locally and globally, and it’s not only restricted to clinic owners. Even lawyers are using this model! For example:

“Free Advice From An Experienced Car Accident Lawyer. Have you been hurt in a car accident? Fill out the form below for a free consultation about your accident”.

You might think…’FREE’, well how is that going to help me, I need to make money not give things away for free!

I know it’s easy to think this way, but since lots of physical therapy and chiropractic clinics are doing this, the bottom line is that if you don't, you’re missing out. 

So I’d like to talk about why you need a free lead magnet and how you can convert ‘Free’ consultations into paying customers. 

A while back I met Wendy Coombs for lunch in Calgary.

Wendy was a finalist for the RBC 2009 Canadian Woman Entrepreneur Award, and is the owner of Momentum Health, a company with 6 multidisciplinary clinics in Calgary. They have physiotherapists, massage therapists, chiropractors, and even naturopathic medicine doctors working at the clinics.

I’ve known Wendy for 10 years, as a friend, and we’ve also done business together. We’re both a part of Entrepreneurs Organization, and we do some work together at the CPA Private Practice Division. 

When we were having lunch we were talking about Wendy’s startups and expansion plans in Calgary.

Then she stopped and asked me:

"Rick, what is your all time favorite marketing book?"

It had me stumped for a minute. It’s a difficult question to answer because there are so many - but I told her a few I could think of.

It got me thinking about marketing and how we always need resources and hacks to help us grow.

And that's exactly what I'd like to share with you today - 5 great marketing resources that you can use to learn everything about physiotherapy marketing and healthcare sales. And 5 awesome physical therapy marketing hacks you can implement for rapid growth, starting today.

If you own a clinic, you’ve probably spent a pretty penny on healthcare marketing. Seeing as how you lose 14% of your customers every year, you can’t afford not to.

Even the most inexperienced owners know that the more you spend on marketing, the higher your chances of getting more phone calls to the front desk.

Considering how much effort everyone is putting into their marketing strategies, it’s strange to see how little effort some clinics put into converting phone calls into bookings. All the physical therapy marketing in the world isn’t going to make up for the fact that you and your staff can’t seem to translate those calls into new clients.

New patient phone calls can make or break your practice.

While you may have a list somewhere that walks you through what to do with a new client, you probably aren’t familiar with the 4 deadly sins that ruin new patient phone calls. So, let’s stop worrying about creating the next great chiropractic advertisement for a second and focus on what matters: turning those potential clients into real ones. 

Let’s face facts: in the 21st century, if Google doesn’t know who you are, no one does.

In your industry, the greatest commodity is new patients. Competition for these new clients is as fierce as ever and clinic owners all over the world are fighting tooth and nail to be at the top of Google’s search results. 

So, you’re looking for an advantage. A marketing technique that puts you leaps and bounds ahead of every other health business and gives you the exposure you deserve. 

Well, looks like today’s your lucky day. By using just one simple marketing technique, you going to learn how to increase your client base by more than 30% in less than a month. Plus, we’re going to talk about how to establish your brand online and become an authority in your community.

When it comes to marketing, do you feel like nothing works?

You run an ad but your clinic just isn’t seeing the return – you can’t remember the last time your calendar was “fully booked” with appointments?

The price tag involved in most external methods of advertising is often discouraging to clinic owners who don’t have deep pockets or the time to do marketing – and rightly so.

But, there is a big difference between external marketing and internal marketing – and the internal stuff is where most clinic owners fall short.

I am fortunate enough to be able to work with some very sharp health-business owners in my one-on-one coaching program and a lot of our time discussing innovative ways to do marketing. I continually see the difference between great health businesses and those that are always struggling to stay afloat.

The difference is always a strong focus on internal marketing.

So, before wasting any more money on external marketing, the fastest and cheapest way to see a positive return on investment is by fixing your internal marketing first.

Here are 10 low cost internal marketing tips to help get you moving in the right direction.

We all know that it is much more cost effective to re-activate a past client than it is to recruit a totally new one – yet many health business owners neglect their “past client” list. According to Bain and Company, it costs 6–7 times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one. When you speak to health business owners about marketing, most of them talk about how they get new clients, and rarely mention their re-activation program. Possibly because most health businesses do not have a structured re-activation program in place at all. If you need a simple and effective past patient re-activation program then here is one of my favorites - and it is guaranteed to make you thousands of extra dollars each and every month.