Signs You're Ready for a PT Marketing Agency vs DIY

Should you handle your PT clinic's marketing yourself, or bring in an agency? Sam Villenave, Director of Sales at Practice Promotions (and former Apple employee), breaks down exactly how to tell.

In this episode:

• The #1 marketing tactic driving results for PT owners in 2026
• Why solo clinicians are often better off DIY-ing it, and what to focus on
• Clear signs it's time for an agency: 4-6+ providers, a new location, $500K+ in revenue, feeling overwhelmed, or not showing up on Google
• Why even clinics with an in-house marketing director shouldn't do everything themselves
• What a real marketing agency should deliver: tracked results, ROI, the fundamentals (website, SEO, ads), and patient marketing
• How AI is changing PT marketing, and where it falls short
• The top 3 things holding PT owners back from growth

Ready to hire a marketing agency? Practice Promotions is the PT-specific agency you'll WISH you hired first! View our Marketing Plans & request pricing at PracticePromotions.Net! 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:14

Hello and welcome to the Practice Marketing Podcast, highlighting successful strategies from North America's fastest growing clinics and experts so you can learn from their wins and power your practice growth. Hi, I'm your host, Neil Trigott, CEO of Practice Promotions, and today we're going to talk about signs you're ready for that PT marketing agency, or should you do it yourself, DIY it. So we've been talking with uh Samantha Villeneuve, who is our director of sales of practice promotions. And before she came to the sales side, the dark side, Sam was one of our production leaders at Practice Promotions. And so she's helped hundreds of clinics with their websites, SEO leads, she's done lots of customer supports, which means she has a deep understanding of what works in a PT market, in a PT clinic, in the PT marketing, and what doesn't, right? And lots of variants there depending on what you're doing in your clinic. Sam's also worked for Apple. So she has a great background and a very interesting background in software and customer service. So she gets it from the technology side of things too. And so today she's going to share some insights with us whether your PT clinic is really ready for that next step of working with a marketing agency or the few signs of when it makes more sense to try and keep doing a lot of stuff yourself and what's a better fit for you in your practice. So, Sam, welcome to the podcast.

SPEAKER_03 1:35

Thank you, Neil. I'm excited to be here.

SPEAKER_01 1:37

Awesome. All right. So let's let's talk because you obviously have a pretty robust experience here working with a lot of different practices. So just to kind of kick us off here, what are you seeing working well for practices in uh 2026? What's that number one marketing tactic?

SPEAKER_03 1:54

Um if I had to pick one strategy, I would say Google Ads with the caveat of be careful, because it's also something where people can have much money. But I think that Google Ads are really needed. You know, Google is God of the internet, it's pay to play, and it will get you in front of the eyes that are actually looking for pain relief. So I think Google Ads are extremely important for practices.

SPEAKER_01 2:16

Yeah, I think some of us that have been in the game a long time remember the days when Google was really free and uh you could do a lot of stuff without having to pay for it. And then Google Ads came along and you have to start paying for things, and now we're at a point where we've got AI, we've got Google ads within the AI overviews in Google, uh ads within the local map pack, ads within the top four spots on Google. So pretty much Google wants you to pay to be in front of your audience today in your local community, and uh people are choosing those clinics that are advertising as well as having good SEO. So yeah, I 100% agree on that. We're seeing some great conversions for our clients that are really working into ads. And we do we also get clients come, well prospects come to us that are making giant mistakes with Google Ads. And do we have one client who's spending like $60,000 or something crazy like that?

SPEAKER_03 3:09

I talked with people I I spoke with someone last year who's spending uh $125,000 a year on Google Ads. Wow. I spoke with somebody last month who was spending between $30,000 and $50. Now, this is a multi-location clinic, but they weren't, it wasn't 30 locations, but they were spending between 30 and 50 a month just in Google Ads alone.

SPEAKER_01 3:29

Wow. Yeah, so it's easy to blow a lot of money in Google Ads, and we think throwing more money at it fixes it, but that's not the case, right? You have to have a good budget, and sometimes we see clinics way underspend, thinking like $250-50 is going to give me a lot of new patients. It's not, right? But typically, you know, anywhere from $500 to $1,000 per clinic location gets you uh good traction in that community. And uh depending on where you are, whether you're a very competitive area like New York City or you're in a rural area, um your spending varies with that, right?

SPEAKER_03 4:02

What I love about ads as well is it gives them so much control, like the type of patient they want, the type of services that they want to promote, or even the location. You know, if they know that this is a cash-based service and they have an affluent neighborhood where it's gonna be a good fit, they can target that neighborhood. Um and they're not breaking HIPAA because we're not targeting specific people, we're just looking for specific types of keyword searches.

SPEAKER_01 4:29

Yeah, absolutely. And Google Ads does not allow you to um retarget people uh because you're in a healthcare space, right? Unfortunately. Um but you know, you you you do have other plat other parts of Google Ads that you can do if you weren't in healthcare and it had a lot uh more bandwidth for that. So uh um, Sam, as as you've as you've talked with hundreds or even thousands of different clinic owners over the years here, what you know I'm I'm sure you see people come to you and they're doing a lot of stuff themselves. And so what kind of practice owners are you seeing that uh really trying to attack a lot of their marketing themselves? Because PTs, we're great at problem solvers. We try to think we can do everything ourselves and you know we can be the best at it. So what do you commonly see there?

SPEAKER_03 5:19

Um so I think it can make sense for like a solo or somebody who's just starting up to try to just get a little bit of presence out there. They probably don't have the marketing budget to really hire an agency that's gonna really get them results. But once we get to about that three, four provider clinic, it's actually gonna cost the clinic more in terms of lost revenue to not have someone who is, I would say, specifically geared toward filling the clinic with actual patient requests. So sometimes I think they're looking at it like, oh, I don't have the budget for this, but they're not walking back from the lost salary time of employees that they're paying, like the therapists who are not seeing patients. Um, and then they try, I think that the next step would be they they try to do things, but they're maybe trying to control every piece of it a little bit too much. And uh physical therapist did not go to Google Ads Academy and they're not a web developer. So they're trying to, as there's you mentioned they're problem solvers, they're trying to do everything on their own. But it's a self-sabotaging effort because by piecemealing it together, they're not getting the results that will actually drive people into the clinic.

SPEAKER_01 6:38

Yeah, I totally agree with that. I I've I've heard many, many times that uh you know the most money you'll ever lose is the money you never made. Right. And so it and the hard part of that is it's hard to track that. It's hard to track lost opportunity because it's sometimes hard to see the opportunity that's missed. And so, yeah, there's simple things in the practice, like, okay, well, if all my therapists were full all day long over the week, how many patient visits should we be doing? But then you also have to look at, okay, what's the capability of my entire space that I have? If I had to hire, if I was so busy that I had to hire two more therapists and I could get them in there, what is the what's the capability of that practice, right? And that's that's really lost opportunity. And if you're trying to just be budget conscious uh about your marketing um and holding yourself back from reaching that full potential of your practice, that's a huge amount of money that you're losing that you just don't know about. Right. And that's uh I I've seen it, I'm sure you've seen it too, as we get uh practice owners who are curious about what we do, they they could start to explore uh they've never worked with a marketing agency before, especially one that's specific in PT and rehab, and they're thinking, well, what are they doing that I could just do myself? Right? And that's something that we we hear quite a bit. Um and so thinking about that, then you know, if if a if a if a practice owner is starting to look and explore, like, hey, I need to do more of my marketing, I need to get busier in my clinic, or I want to take it to the next level, or I'm not really attaining the goals that I thought I would be doing. Like, when is that right time to start thinking about getting outside help and specialist help?

SPEAKER_03 8:19

I think it's right at that three three-four provider mark. Um, that's the moment when they can start to invest in something that actually will fill the books. And I like what you said, like what what what they what they can't do themselves is what they need to outsource for. I have yet to meet a practice owner who is also a web developer, SEO specialist, pay-per-click specialist, you know. Um, I think that that that you you cannot hire in-house a marketing coordinator that's gonna do all of the different pieces that could be done by an agency. So it's actually saving them a lot of money. Um, and then they can, you know, focus on the growth and maybe making sure that front desk process is dialed in to convert those requests into actual patients on the books. But let someone who is versed in marketing do the mechanical parts of things. And then, you know, again, that relationship that we would have with them makes it look like who they are. We're not necessarily, well, I say the mechanical parts of things, or you know, we're still representing that.

SPEAKER_01 9:29

Yeah, and and so there's that natural threshold to cross, usually close closer to the one million dollar mark, right? But if you're a clinic that's you know 500, 500,000, you're growing towards a million dollars, you start coming against this natural resistance, right? It's just it's it's part of business. You got to get over this hump. Um, and that means investing in more infrastructure, systems, processes, leaders. Marketing is one of those big components where you have to invest in it to take you to that next level and get over the million dollar hump and start progressing towards the three million dollar, which is kind of your next barrier uh to overcome. But we do see that there, you know, we we work, we work with those winning clients that really have that attitude of I'm gonna go to the specific level. Like, I want to achieve this, I want to be successful, two, three, four, five location practice. Um, and they realize like, I have to improve my systems, I have to improve my processes, I have to lean on experts in order to get there. But then we also see practice owners that are very fearful about doing that kind of investment into their practice, but still wanting to achieve a certain goal. Um, and so what are some of the things that you see in regards to that?

SPEAKER_03 10:42

I think that people have been burned. And and rightly so. I I don't necessarily believe it's ill-intentioned marketing agencies, but we are such a very precise niche. You cannot go to a local agency and get the compliance that you need for whether it's HIPAA or even ADA on the websites and catching cookies and those things. Like there's so many pitfalls that clinics can fall into, but also the language of physical therapy. And then the other trick is that a physical therapist is thinking about their practice and advertising it in a way that isn't necessarily gonna appeal to the search engines. So uh, and that can be incredibly frustrating to a practice owner because I like to say that not doing SEO is like not doing your exercises, right? It's something invisible to the patient, maybe, or to the clinic owner. But if you don't do it, you're not gonna get the results. I can go to all the PT appointments in the world, but if I don't do my home exercises, I'm not gonna get those results. So I think clinic owners, so when they want to control everything, because they've been burned or because they haven't had tracking in prior situations, um, they can self-sabotage and prevent themselves from moving forward. Working with a niche agency really, you know, that has a proven track record, right? You you there are fly by night agencies popping off all over the place now, and that's that's been a real challenge, I think, in our space.

SPEAKER_01 12:06

But yeah, I that is uh, you know, it was super busy before, but now with the rise of AI, yeah, you know, a single person can just say, hey, I I'm the market for you, I can do your website on AI, I can run your SEO on AI, run your ads via AI. And we use a lot of AI too to help us you know maximize results for clients. But the the key is that if you're just relying on AI, you put yourself at huge risk uh for non-compliance. And also, you got to realize that AI is scraping the internet, um, which isn't always right. And so you're gonna get a lot of things wrong with that too. And and then you get that person who gets burned. Hey, I'm not seeing results in the clinic, I'm not getting enough new patients in here. What are you guys doing for me? And then you know, you hit you have this person that has been burned for their marketing before, and they don't trust an outside person, but it's typically because they they had someone who was local that was just didn't have the experience in that niche, or they just didn't really have the overall experience to get that, right? Um and so what what are some of the things that you've seen there for uh clinics that that have multiple locations that are are growing that that maybe even have that marketing director or even a marketing team internally? Like, why shouldn't they be DIYing everything?

SPEAKER_03 13:27

Why should they or why shouldn't they?

SPEAKER_01 13:29

Why shouldn't they?

SPEAKER_03 13:30

Oh, why shouldn't they? Well, the same thing, like that marketing director is pr fantastic as a point of contact, and maybe they are working on strategic initiatives and they're able to film uh video for social media and do things like that, but social media is not what fills the clinic with patients, it's an emotional connection. So that's that's something to bear in mind. And even the clinics that I speak with who have a fantastic marketing coordinator in-house, you know, that person's going out to the doctor's office, this is that person is working on event sponsorships, maybe they're writing some email campaigns, but they're not going to be able to do things in a consistent manner that have the level of tracking that an outside partner could provide as well. So again, um, I think that that's where having a support for that marketing coordinator or manager so that they are a strategist and have a team under their wings that takes what they do and makes it have impact and can provide the metrics behind it instead of just paying that person so that you can be happy with yourself that you're doing a little marketing in your agency. It's not enough.

SPEAKER_01 14:36

Yeah, absolutely. And and we work with a lot of marketing directors because one of our specialties is working with larger multi-location practices. And so we empower the marketing director to have their marketing, fractional marketing team underneath them, right? If you look at it that way. And so I think it's very unfair as a practice owner to think that your marketing director is gonna be the problem solution for everything. You know, they're there, they may have some skills, right? But you can't expect them to be a web developer, an SEO specialist, a Google Ads specialist, a social media expert, an email marketing campaign specialist, an email technical deliverability specialist, like all of these things that are needed to make marketing at scale happen. Um your marketing director really needs to be very good product uh project manager, really. Like, because there's a million marketing projects happening all the time. They have to be very good at making all these projects come to life and using the resources that they have to help that happen to move the clinic forward, ultimately getting a lot of new uh patients in the door, client retention, client referrals, all those kind of things happening. And you know, you don't want your marketing director sitting down to just put an email together, right? Or spoke social posts together. Like that's not a good use of their time, right? That's where they can leverage outside assistance. Um, you know, maybe it's a $5 task that you're asking someone who's you're paying $25, $35 an hour to do when they can do a much higher level task. So I think it's important. We see that with clinics that are really trying to scale, they get that, right? They get that that marketing person is more of that project manager. They they then lean on our fractional uh marketing team to help implement all these things and lean on them for expert advice, and then we can really move the clinic forward. Um, what are what's one of the things that you see too, like as far as uh in marketing, right? Having the data, the tracking, the analytics to make the right decisions, and then how that impacts someone trying to do everything themselves versus again working with an agency that's doing all that tracking.

SPEAKER_03 16:48

I cannot tell you like how many times I've spoken with somebody who was spending money on Google Ads and they were like, I thought I would know where the patients were coming from, but they're not. So I I I it's there's probably nothing more important than that. Because if you are investing in marketing and you're throwing it like spaghetti in a wall, hoping that something will come back to you, and my biggest pet peeve is front desk tracking being the only way that we are actually um trying to assess how people found us. The front desk will not always be able to provide that data. Nobody knows, or many people don't know if they clicked on an ad. Um, and then there's multiple streams that bring somebody into the practice. They might be a physician referral, but then they went on Google and they saw your reviews and they looked on your culture and careers page when you were trying to hire a physical therapist and you looked like nice people. So you need to be able to follow that patient journey and know that there's multiple touch points and the traditional methods of you know, doctor's office to clinic aren't valid anymore. So I think I think that yeah, there's nothing really more important than metrics and tracking. The level of finance that is needed to invest into marketing, it's it's irresponsible to just spend that and not know what's coming back.

SPEAKER_01 18:09

Yeah, I mean, if you're gonna spend two or three thousand dollars a month, you know, that could be twenty-four thousand, thirty-six thousand dollars a year on ads and other marketing uh activities. Like you should be measuring the the results of that, right? And uh and uh yeah, we see that time and time again, people going, yeah, well, I tracked my front, I asked my front desk, you know, how did they get to us? And they're they're asking the patient, hey, how did you find us? Well, that's good. That's but that's really arbitrary information. It's very subjective. Yeah. Uh you know, we want to be objective in our data, right? And so do you know, uh, like, did they come from an ad? Did they go through your website? Did they call in the clinic? Was that call tracked? And did they actually become an evaluation on the books because of the ad that you had, for example? Or they came in from Google uh business profile, right? From your SEO. So there's lots and lots of different ways that people are coming to you, but if you don't have the systems, the mechanisms in place to track that, you're kind of shooting in the dark and you get what you measure, right? So if we're if we're very diligent about what we measure in marketing, we can make very smart decisions on what is working. Let's put some more effort or some more investment into what is working and we'll get more out of it.

SPEAKER_00 19:20

The top 10% of PT owners aren't just surviving, they're thriving. But what's their secret? Well, Neil Triggett's new Market to Grow book reveals how the top 10% of PT practices leverage marketing systems to simultaneously grow their new patients, attract top talent, and boost profit in their practice. You can learn from their secrets. Visit practicepromotions.net slash book to claim your free copy of Market to Grow. Yes, you heard that right. We are shipping a free copy of Market to Grow to all podcast listeners who want it. Just visit practicepromotions.net slash book to claim your free book. And now back to the show.

SPEAKER_03 20:06

These leads that coming in, do how are they handled as well? You mentioned call tracking. Like we want to be able to see if you're paying for Google Ads to go to the clinic at 3 p.m., that can't go to voicemail. You paid money for that person to call you to request an appointment. The phone needs to be answered, and the front desk needs to have those closing skills to be able to get them on the books as a patient, verify their insurance, make sure that they're ready for their appointment, that it's confirmed. So those pieces as well, it goes hand in hand. I would say that's more business administration, but it goes hand in hand with the marketing is to make sure that that the leads that your marketing spend is bringing in actually become patients at the clinic, too.

SPEAKER_01 20:49

Yeah, 100% agree. Yeah, and so um you know that all comes back too for your marketing director to be able to make strategic decisions with you as a practice owner, they need information, they need data, right? And uh we don't want to just track what we call vanity metrics. So, hey, how many visitors do they get to my website? Or how many clicks do they get on an ad, right? Those are those are part of the picture, but we call them vanity metrics because they're not they're only part of the picture, they're not what we're chasing, we're chasing. Did that patient actually convert on my website? Did they actually fill out a form? Did they actually call the clinic and want an evaluation? Like that's what we want to really measure. Sure, we want to measure how many visitors come to our website, but if we get 500 visitors to our website and only 2% of those people turn into an evaluation or a new patient on the books, you know, that's uh what, you know, 10 new patients a month from our website. But we could, from that information, then say, hey, well, how are people behaving on my website? Uh we've got tracking for that. I can understand now how people behave on my website, and you know what? They're just not clicking on certain things or they're not scrolling down the page. Wow. Okay, I need to make some updates, some changes to my website. When I do that and I recheck, now I start to increase the amount of people that are converting on my website. So I didn't necessarily go out and get more people to come to my website. I still have 500 people coming to my website a month. But if I can get that to four, six, practice projects would get 8.3% or higher in terms of average conversion rate. You know, that could be going from 10 new patients to 40 new patients just from your website alone, from that data, right? And knowing what to do and how to how to use it. So that's where trying to figure things out on yourself, you you're kind of shooting in the dark because you don't have a lot of these systems set up, whereas you leverage an agency that knows what they're looking for with this, you get much more sophisticated data and information to make better decisions that move the clinic forward. And so so Sam, um as we as we're talking here about, hey, should I, as a practice owner, should I try to keep figuring things out myself just to save some cost? Or should I, you know, start to look towards a marketing agency? Um, we get people who are curious all the time about, hey, is it is it time for me to start thinking about that, or maybe start looking at someone like practice promotions to help me. But what what should a marketing agency really do for a practice?

SPEAKER_03 23:23

Help them grow. Practicing a marketing agency needs to increase the bottom line revenue, the profit margins of an agency, um, of a practice. So yeah, that's I mean, it's not about getting your brand out there, it's about getting patients in the clinic and getting your brand out there as a tool toward growing the clinic.

SPEAKER_01 23:44

Yeah, 100%. And and so we've got to realize like that's the outcome we want, right? But we do have systems in place. So obviously we've got tactics and systems, we've got websites, we got SEO, we got Google Ads, we've got email, we've got social media. Um, we want to look at what's producing a return on our investment, right? Um, to make sure that the money that we're investing in there is producing a five times or even a 10 times result uh for what we're putting into it, right? So that's where the tracking comes into place. But I do you see that sometimes you have someone come in and they're just fixated on one thing, like a like website or just ads?

SPEAKER_03 24:24

Yeah, I think I think people fixate on the one thing they think is broken. And oftentimes in the conversations we have with people, they're so laser focused on that one thing. They don't realize that the thing that is broken is the revenue. That's what we want to fix. These other pieces are tools, right? Whether it's social media, email campaigns, ads, that's not the goal. That's the tool. The goal is to go on vacation and not worry about your practice and to get your life back and to go to a soccer game with your kids and know like I have patients coming into the clinic. The goal is to be able to hire with less costs and less stress. And we didn't even touch on that. You know, that's the goal. Um, I think that, you know, physical therapists, I always say they're the altruists of physicians, right? You guys go into this because you want to be able to help people. Well, it's it's it's hard to help people when you're so stressed trying to keep your business afloat. So that's what we want to do. We want to give people their lives back so that they can grow their practice and and enjoy their lives and have more patients in the clinic, compensate their staff, give out raises. Um, you know, that's that's the end goal. And I think that's why people stay with us for years and years and years.

SPEAKER_01 25:39

Yeah, because it is. It's about like that end goal for them. Like we want them to be successful, right? It's not just putting a website together for you. And I think if you're if you're just looking for one thing, if you're like, okay, well, I want I'm thinking about Google Ads. Let me just check out a company that does Google Ads, or you know what, it's been five years. Let me I need a new website. That's that's really the wrong approach, right? The wrong approach is like, okay, in order for me to be more successful in my business, more profitable, have more freedom, more time, I need to build processes, I need to build systems in there, I need to hire the right people to make these things go. That gives you more free time. You know, it gives you more responsibility, but it also gives you more free time and more capabilities. But you got to look at the the big system. And marketing is a big system that makes the clinic go for sure.

SPEAKER_03 26:25

And it is a lot less work on the practice owner than hiring an employee, I will also say. You know, as far as getting your life back, like you can you can set it and forget it in the moments that you need to and you know it's still working for you.

SPEAKER_01 26:36

Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, if you don't have a marketing director, um what's that person full-time going to cost you? Probably six, seven, eight thousand dollars a month with benefits and things like that, right? So um, you know, you could hire for a fraction of that cost a marketing agency to help you in that interim to the point where you're ready, real ready for that marketing director. And even if you have that marketing director, you're thinking, okay, well, I, you know, they're good at this, but I need help with all these other things, you know, uh SEO, Google Ads, whatever it is that they're maybe not as talented in. Uh well, again, if you're gonna bring on another person to your marketing team in your clinic, what's the cost of that? And so oftentimes working with a marketing agency uh can give you much more capabilities at a fraction of the cost of hiring an individual uh in-house or an extra individual in-house. Um so I think that's an important consideration for people is is why would I outsource some of the things that I do? And I'll say this from a business standpoint. I mean, we've grown to like over 75 employees in our business, and you know, the the growth of uh the growth that I had in my practice, and now with practice promotions being even bigger, I I realize that the larger that you get, the more sophisticated your marketing needs to become. And even your operations and lots of things become more sophisticated. So you can't know all of that internally. And that's why we we use vendors, right? We use outside experts to help us implement new technologies and new processes and things that are different at scale. So the same thing applies in your practice. You really have to be thinking with, okay, I need to level up here. Who can I lean on as an expert or specialist to help me implement that within my practice? Um, because that's what businesses do at scale. They they they actually outsource more of what they do because it's it's it's much cheaper to do that than try to hire all this internally.

SPEAKER_03 28:33

It is, and I think as you're doing your research, and you know this, Neil, is like you want to look for somebody with a proven track record. You touched on earlier, you know, with AI, I could start a marketing agency tomorrow if I want to, but you know, doing the research and looking to see like how long has this company been in existence if you're bringing on a vendor? Um, what did the owners do before they had it? Like, did they just graduate PT school and start an agency or did they really grow a practice? You know, have they been in business a decade or more? And um, you know, what what are the Google reviews? What are other practice owners saying about working with this specific vendor? I think those are important things for the practice owner to do as they're making their decisions.

SPEAKER_01 29:20

Definitely. And so speaking of AI, like how how are you finding that AI is changing the game in PT marketing?

SPEAKER_03 29:27

I think that we're all learning how to discern between AI and real human speak, and that's a good thing. But Google knows quicker than we do. So if we just throw a bunch of AI up on a website or if we generate an AI website, Google's gonna detect that immediately and kill it with this SEO. But I think that the expectations that the consumer has have increased. People want things faster, they want them better, they want them more um impactful. But I think that people are also really leaning toward what I'm hearing from people that we chat with in the sales pipeline. They want authenticity, they want high-touch customer service, and they want real human beings that are driving their marketing. They don't want to fully entrust it to something that is uh, you know, it's like a self-driving car. Uh, keep your eyes on the road and your hands ready to grab the wheel. So we really have to have that balance, and it is not going to replace the human factor.

SPEAKER_01 30:29

Yeah, I think it's actually gonna strengthen it because there's in marketing, I'm seeing two like paths start to diverge, right? One is going along the path of as much automation as possible, less human touch, and you can see it like an AI website that's been put together in a matter of minutes, right? It just doesn't have a lot of feeling to it, it doesn't express the practice, what's happening with the patient stories internally. It seems very robotic, right? And so we're seeing that direction of some marketing go that way. And then there's kind of the opposite that's hard happening where we're using AI to increase the impactfulness of the human experience, right? And that's really the direction we're leaning in as practice promotions is we're heavily using AI to help us analyze data, get better results, what's working, but how do we create more of the human experience for patients because that's what they connect with, right? They're in pain, they have a problem, they want to see what's the reality of coming to this clinic, are they gonna help me overcome my pain or problem? That's what's gonna attract them to your practice, right? And so we're leaning heavily into that human experience backed by AI versus removing the human experience and making it all about AI, uh, which we're seeing a lot of like you know, fly-by-night you know, agencies start to do.

SPEAKER_03 31:48

We're doing a lot of streamlining internal processes and efficiencies with AI so that our teams are able to focus on the strategy of the clinics without doing copy-paste busy work. And I think that that's really made a difference internally so that we can be more strategic.

SPEAKER_01 32:06

Yeah, one thing I'm super excited about is we actually have an AI department now in practice promotions that's got two full-time people just figuring out AI solutions for our team, what what's impacting the clients, and in a short amount of time they're creating some incredible processes. Uh, one of them I'm super happy about is what we call our practice profiles. And that's basically it's collecting all of the data that's happening real time with a practice. So everything from their website, their SEO, their Google Ads, uh, what's happening with call tracking, but it's also bringing what's the voice of that clinic, what's their brand identity, what's their brand colors, uh, what are the notes that the conversations that are happening between our customer success managers and the practice owner or the marketing director, and it's bringing all of that knowledge together into one single source of truth for that particular clinic. And then our team can really leverage Claude and different AI tools to pull real custom data from that clinic. And that's that's again using the power of AI to really be custom, authentic, personalize the outputs and the direction of what's needed for that particular clinic because all clinics have nuances and differences and their markets are different, right? So you can't just have one cookie cutter thing for everybody, it doesn't work like that.

SPEAKER_03 33:31

I think AI has really helped us customize the way we market each individual clinic and to have a handle on, you know, we want every clinic to be our top-performing clinic, but when you have a portfolio of like 1200 clinics you work with, you're gonna, you know, the ones that are that are, I would say, less robust, we're able to give them more retention and they get more to the top of our radar. So we're not having to rely on all of the manual ways that we did in the past of making sure that every box was checked off. And I'm excited about that.

SPEAKER_01 34:03

Awesome. And so, Sam, any final words of advice for our listeners out there if they're you know thinking, aha, I can just keep DIYing on my own marketing, or should I start looking at uh agency there?

SPEAKER_03 34:13

I think it's always worth having a conversation, right? Um, we are extremely, I would say, collaborative and consultative in our um, I don't like to say sales process. It is a sales process, but you know, have a conversation with vendors. If you're doing it on your own, having those conversations is only gonna give you the information that it's gonna allow you to make better decisions for your practice. So um it doesn't cost anything to have a conversation, and it could cost everything to not do something about the marketing, right? Because the cloak then the clinic isn't growing.

SPEAKER_01 34:48

So yeah, absolutely. It's okay to ask for help. Yeah, it's okay to look, ask for explore. Uh I think too, like I've seen that too, where uh our top performing clients are very inquisitive, they want to know, they want to do better, they're they'll ask a lot of questions. I could tell they're gonna go places, right? And then we we come across other practices which are very defensive, they don't want to, you know, are you gonna sell me something? You know, they kind of feel that way. Um it they're very, very reserved. And so I think you have to kind of look at yourself in order to grow the business, you have to grow yourself individually. You have to look beyond um where you are now and what kind of leader you need to be at that next level. And part of that is being inquisitive, curious, exploring new options, what can you do to drive the clinic forward? So, yeah, get on a get on a call with with uh Sam and the team there. They can uh, you know, a strategy call, really dig in on where your current challenges are, where's the opportunities that you have? Hey, maybe we're not the right fit for you. That's fine. Uh, but at least you had a conversation and have a direction of where you need to go with your practice marketing. Awesome. Well, thanks, thanks, Sam, for being on the podcast with us today. It's been great. Yeah. And so to all our listeners out there, thank you so much. Appreciate uh you being on the podcast with us. Hope you got a lot out of today's podcast. Don't forget to like and subscribe to the podcast, share it with your friends and colleagues there, and don't forget on YouTube we also have uh these conversations as well as other helpful tips. And don't forget to go to practicepromotions.net where we have lots of marketing tips for you. You can get our free practice marketing kit and see our website portfolio and all kinds of cool stuff on there. So, this is DeAntric from the Practice Marketing Podcast, wishing you much success in your practice.

SPEAKER_00 36:33

A free way for you to support our show is by leaving a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts. It's a chance for you to tell us what you love about the show, and it helps others discover it as well. Just scroll down to Ratings and Review on your phone and click write a review. Thanks.