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Clinic Owners: How to Know When to Dump Your Marketing Company (or Your Front Desk)

Posted by Rick Lau on Jun 25, 2019 7:00:00 AM

 

1st Clue: Are They Showing You Marketing Metrics that Actually Mean Something?

Which marketing metrics should you pay attention to, and which ones can you ignore?

I had a talk recently with a clinic owner in my #clinicboss community that shines a light on all the ‘dead numbers’ marketing companies like to boast about.

Here’s his story:

He’s been operating his clinic for about five years, and has been crushing it, hitting almost $1 million in sales last year. But in terms of revenue, he noticed he has been starting to plateau (if you are growing less than 15% a year, you have plateaued in my world). Have you ever experienced this? When your revenue flattens, you have a few choices for what to do:

1) Nothing – just be content with whatever profits you’re making, and hope nothing changes for the worse

2) Make changes to your clinic business – including monitoring marketing metrics like call tracking

3) Jump down the rabbit hole of online marketing

You can guess which one this clinic owner chose (the same one you probably think you need to do more of, because it’s what everyone is obsessed with these days).

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That would be #3 – the classic mistake of believing online marketing can fix all your revenue problems.

He noted that all the new clinics starting up seem to be on Instagram and Facebook (aka Wastebook), and so he felt compelled to do the same. If they’re all doing it, it must be working, right?

So, for the past three months, he’s been spending $1000 per month on Google and Facebook marketing. In that time, he’s seen no measurable increase in new patients, and his revenue still clings to the same plateau line. No growth. No change.

But his marketing company sure is excited!

They’ve got all these next-gen marketing metrics like site impressions, unique visitor counts, click through rates, likes and followers. And look – they’re going up! Isn’t it exciting? Your marketing is “working,” they tell him.

But is it?

The very reason I was having this conversation was because his revenue was still flat.

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Topics: Marketing

7 Reasons You Need to Attend Accelerate LIVE 2019

Posted by Rick Lau on Feb 27, 2019 8:09:21 AM

Have you got your Accelerate LIVE 2019 ticket yet?

>>Get Your Ticket Here Before They Double<<

Attending an event can seem inconvenient right?

You have to take time off from running the clinic, find someone to take over, travel there, get a hotel, etc.

You may be thinking I'll just get the recordings when they come out. However, recordings are not available for anyone who doesn't get a ticket.

What's most important about an Event. Just one idea can make your investment back 10 fold. You apply a couple more ideas you can make 100 times what you spent on the event.

So if it's inconvenient for your schedule. Early Bird Ticket is equivalent to $10,000 put towards coaching or courses.

Here are 9 more reasons you should attend Accelerate LIVE 2019. At Accelerate LIVE You’ll learn...

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Topics: Marketing

Battle-Tested 5-Step Plan Reveals How Call Tracking Metrics Enable Smart Clinic Owners to Explode Their Revenue

Posted by Rick Lau on Jan 29, 2019 7:00:00 AM

Learn What to Measure, How to Improve Staff Trainings, Get More Patients

Some time ago I came across a dentist and a physical therapy clinic (PT) in the same area of town.

Both had one doctor on staff. Similar sized offices. Same client base. So, I figured they’d also have similar revenue, even considering the differences between dental clinics and physical therapists.

Boy was I wrong.

The PT clinic had nearly twice the revenue as the dental clinic. How could this be? I started digging.

My first guess:

The PT clinic must have better marketing. But when I went online, the dental clinic was actually doing more marketing than the PT clinic, and it wasn’t any better or worse. More referrals maybe? Better service? They had pretty similar online reviews, mostly high. There was no clear reason why one clinic should be so much more profitable than the other.

What gives?

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Topics: Call Tracking Metrics

The Unusual Employee Onboarding Process I Use to Retain Loyal and Talented Employees

Posted by Rick Lau on Dec 5, 2018 4:00:00 AM

 

I spoke with Tom a clinic owner last week that I’ve been mentoring for the past 2 years. We grew his revenue from $1.3 million to $1.7 million in the last 18 months.

Tom thought he had a marketing problem like most clients who hire me. The truth is most clinic owners don’t have a marketing problem but a people, training, and process problem.

They think in order grow their clinic they have to improve their healthcare marketing so they hire marketing agencies and consultants to come in. They spend a lot of money on advertising only to get poor results or lose it all.

Even if the marketing agency or consultant is really good. There is not much they can do if your front desk is not trained on how to maximize the number appointments on the phone. How to handle patient objections so they don’t call your competitor instead.

Then once you get the appointment is your patient experience great so they keep coming back and refer their friends, co-workers, and family to you?  And even give you a google review.

I told Tom before you even think about marketing you first need to get really good with clinic operations so you get the highest ROI possible from your marketing. Otherwise, you just speed up the rate at which your community finds you’re not good.

He was struggling to train new employees for his front desk. So I told him about the unusual employee onboarding process I use to train new employees fast so they can start producing right away. Not only that it’s the key to retaining talented and loyal employees. I wish someone told me this a decade ago when I was making all kinds of costly onboarding mistakes at my clinics.

Plus I’m going to give you a simple strategy to accelerate training even more that 99% of clinic owners don’t even know about.

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Topics: Clinic Culture

7 Questions Every Clinic Owner MUST Ask Before Even Thinking about Opening a Second Location

Posted by Rick Lau on Oct 23, 2018 4:00:00 AM

 

Warning: Do Not Invest in a Second Location Before Reading This

You made it. You’ve got a booming health clinic. Patients are pouring in, your staff is happy, your doctors are busy. And so are you.

And as you sit back in your office chair, you start to ponder the Big Question:

“Should I open a second location?”

And if you don't, you know your competitor (or superstar clinician) will because it's a really good business opportunity.

If that’s where you are right now, I’ve got two words for you: Sit tight. Be like Congress – do nothing, at least until you read this.

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Topics: Clinic Startups

How to Drive More 5 Star Google and Facebook Reviews While Intercepting Negative Reviews

Posted by Rick Lau on Aug 30, 2018 10:23:13 AM

My staff and I always found it difficult to ask for reviews. It just felt awkward and didn't come naturally for us. I would always hesitate when asking ( or not at all) and just didn't come out right. I was mad at myself afterward because I knew we needed good reviews for the clinic.

Plus I never really knew how to ask the question the right way to not put off the patient causing them never to come back.

Asking for a review can be a daunting task. It's just awkward to do.

Plus hard for patients to give one. Patients really want to help you out and say they will give you one. They just get stuck and think to themselves.

How do I write a review?

What should I say?

Or life just gets in the way.

In this blog post, I'm going to show you a dead simple word for word script you can deploy in your clinic to drive more 5 star Google and Facebook reviews while intercepting negative reviews.

You'll get a manual way and a completely automated way to do this so you don't have to talk to anyone. This is the exact strategy I teach all my clients after I first help them boost their monthly revenue by making this one simple improvement. This one improvement added $15,000 in additional monthly revenue for this Chiropractor here.

Also in the blog post, you’ll learn the right time to ask for one to get even more reviews. Most clinics get this wrong.

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Topics: Marketing

27 Things to do to Reward and Recognize Your Staff

Posted by Rick Lau on Jul 31, 2018 7:00:00 AM

I ran a sold-out conference last year called Accelerate. It's Canada's largest clinic business summit where hundreds of clinic owners attended.

We talked about everything from getting new clients with digital and doctor marketing, patient experience operations, commanding higher prices, selling your clinic and more. What came up is that clinic owners said their #1 problem was recruitment and management of staff.

Staff today are more difficult to manage than ever before, especially millennials. So It’s essential to have proven reward strategies in place to maximize their results and get the most out of them.

In this blog post, I’ll teach you the best 28 reward strategies my team and I have discovered from working with 100s of clinic owners to reward your staff to get maximum results from them when you can't afford to give them a raise. 

Lets get started…

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Topics: Hiring & Firing, Clinic Culture

How to provide constructive criticism that will make your front desk respect and love you using the Oreo Cookie Approach

Posted by Rick Lau on Jun 28, 2018 9:00:00 AM

Maybe you can relate…

You just finished treating a patient and have a few minutes to grab a bite to eat before your next patient. So you walk over to grab a quick snack and get a drink. As you’re eating you overhear a call with a potential new patient. The patient was pretty much ready to book but just had some general questions like whether their first visit was covered by insurance.

The caller says “I’ll call you back” and hangs up without your front desk even asking for an appointment!

Your blood is boiling and you want to shout at your front desk. Especially since competition is fierce with all the new clinic startups and you can’t afford to lose any more patients. Plus you spent all your hard earned money on advertising to get them to call… only to lose them because your front desk forgot to ask for the appointment.

I see this problem all the time when we are training the front desk and it’s one of the top phone objections they face. However, there’s a proven and highly effective script I give to all my clients and what clients pay me thousands to train their front desk to increase their booking rate. Allowing you to book more patients, increase your revenue, and stop those patients from going to your competitors instead.

I talk about it inside my brand new training tool kit “How to Book a Patient When They Say I Will Call You Back.”. You can get it by clicking here.

Many front desk staff just don’t realize they’re causing your clinic to lose patients by making these small but costly mistakes. Whether you do Chiropractor marketing, Physical Therapy marketing, or Healthcare marketing it’s expensive. You can’t afford to waste money because of mistakes that can be easily corrected in a minute.

When I speak at high ticket seminars and consult with clinic owners. They ask me this question all the time. “My front desk are good workers and I don’t want to lose them because it’s difficult to find good people.

But I see mistakes they make all the time on the phone that drives me crazy. I want to tell them but I’m afraid they’ll hate me for it or quit.

Then I have to spend all my valuable time finding another good person. Going through endless interviews. Then when I think I found a good one. I have to test and train them that many times causes me to lose a lot of money to see if they’re a good or bad fit. I really want to implement your techniques but how can I give them constructive criticism without them hating me or quitting?”

In this article, I’m going to reveal a simple Oreo Cookie Approach to providing constructive feedback that will make your front desk respect and love working for you.

When you provide constructive feedback in this way. You’ll have happier staff, book more appointments, and increase your bottom line.

I discovered this Oreo Cookie Approach through hiring 100s of staff for my 100+ clinics. I use this when I work with clinic owners. Plus our CallHero coaches use this to train front desk all the time to book more appointments

So let’s get started…

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Topics: Hiring & Firing, Clinic Culture

Healthcare Marketing 401: The Secret to Selling Patient Care without Feeling like You’re Selling

Posted by Rick Lau on May 23, 2018 7:00:00 AM

I talk to a lot of healthcare clinics. The one complaint I hear more than any other isn’t about their recruitment, marketing, or staff (though all of these would make a top 5 list).

The complaint I hear the most is that they hate having to sell patients on their plan of care. You didn’t get into this to be a salesman, right?

Well, the truth is, whether you’re a dentist, a chiropractor, a physical therapist, or some other kind of health clinic owner, your growth and influence in your community ultimately comes down to selling your plan of care to patients.

Ugh.

Think about when you have to convince a patient to follow your treatment plan. How much do they have to protest before you give in.  Or even worse, you don't even give your patients a treatment plan.

What are the consequences of this knee-buckling timidity? Four things happen, all of them terrible:

  • The patient comes in a few times, irregularly
  • They don’t follow the plan you’ve painstakingly developed and that you know is what they need to get healthy
  • After one or two visits, they self-discharge, never to be seen again
  • Finally, they tell all their friends and family that you didn’t help them

What’s the real problem with all this? Why should it really get you angry? Because they aren’t getting healthy!

It’s really no different than a teacher trying to motivate a lazy student. “You’ve got all this potential!”, they say. Then they try to break down the tasks of working, studying, and learning. But it’s all for nothing. The student doesn’t do any of it, and earns another D minus.

All your best efforts to provide world-class care – and all your marketing efforts – evaporate when that new patient stops coming back because they didn’t ‘catch the vision’ for what you were doing for them.

What you’re about to read isn’t basic stuff. This isn’t marketing 101. It’s upper division – healthcare marketing 401. Only this stuff, they don’t teach in chiropractor school (and probably not marketing school either!).

Get it, use it, and profit from it. Here’s where we start:

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Topics: Marketing

5 Ways to Crush Your Competition in Marketing and in Business

Posted by Rick Lau on Apr 10, 2018 7:00:00 AM

As a clinic owner, you know competition is fierce.

You probably worry that your competition are out there stealing your market share in your community.

While you do need to be aware that competition exists, worrying yourself over it is the quickest way to failure.

Instead, the key to crush your competition is to focus on your business.

To stand out of the crowd, really zone in and use the things that differentiate you.

Don’t try to copy the competition, instead be you, be unique.

And clearly explain how your story, brand, and your clinic is different so patients know what they are buying into.

But those three things (differentiation, uniqueness, yet clarity of service) are often hard for most business owners to achieve.

So let's break that cycle today, so you can forge ahead.

Using the following strategies you can become a market leader because one major advantage you have over bigger competitors is you have the power to get creative and adapt quickly with social media.

In this blog article, you're about to discover:

  • How to dominate the market with little to no budget
  • How to find the gap and fill it
  • How to become an influencer in your industry
  • Why looking outside your industry is the key to success
  • How to get people talking and doing the work for you

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Topics: Marketing

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