VMP 306: Visibility vs. Demand: The Key to Making Your Veterinary Practice Stand Out

Brandon Breshears 00:00:00  In today's episode, we're going to talk about how to make sure that the right people are finding you when it matters most. So if you haven't been following along, this is the third part of our series of how to make this year your best year ever in practice, and how to get your marketing to work for you consistently. So it's going to help you to demystify what you should be doing, what you should work on. Last week we talked all about positioning and messaging. This week we're talking about visibility and demand. Being seen is not the same thing as being chosen. And that's one thing that I really, really want to talk to you about. Because when we talk about marketing in general, that can mean all kinds of things depending on your skill level, what you consume in terms of marketing and media these days. And so we're going to hopefully demystify a lot of that to make it really simple to figure out what you should be spending your time on, what you should be doing as far as strategy for each different channel that you're focusing on, and how to make sure that the right clients that you've defined from the last episode where we talk about positioning, positioning and messaging.

Brandon Breshears 00:01:04  That was hard for me to say last episode too, but we're going to help you to make sure that people are finding you at the right time and choosing your practice based on if it's a good fit or not. The truth is, most practices don't actually have a visibility problem. Most practices are really, really busy. it's kind of just constant chaos for the most part. Now, there may be some times where it's just dead quiet, the phones aren't ringing, and if that's the case, this is going to also be a helpful episode for you. But at some point, hopefully, in implementing these steps and tactics that we're talking about, you're going to be able to make sure that the phone is ringing consistently. But if you're not translating that into more clients in your practice, then this episode is going to be really, really helpful for you. So the biggest problem that I think a lot of times happens is that people just don't necessarily know who it is they're targeting, what they serve, what problems they're they're solving, and things like that.

Brandon Breshears 00:02:03  So more eyeballs simply don't fix that unclear demand that you're seeing in your practice. I want to make some some shifts in kind of the way that you approach your marketing. Visibility is not the same thing as awareness. Visibility is showing up when somebody is already looking. So there's two different ways that you can target people basically. And you can also do a mix of of targeting. You can target people based on behaviors or you can target people based on demographics. And obviously you can apply demographics to your targeting for behaviors as well. But let me break down exactly what that means. So with demographic type targeting, you can target people based on, you know, for example, the zip codes that they live in, the income that they do, the different types of characteristics for both demographic and then also psychographic targeting that you can do. behavioral based targeting is targeting based on somebody's action. So, you know, wanting to make sure you're you're showing up when somebody's searching vet near me, that would be a behavioral based targeting.

Brandon Breshears 00:03:09  And with all of the language learning, the large language models out there. Now, AI is also potentially both an awareness type platform as well as a behavioral type platform. And so there's lots of really cool new things that are coming out to help us with that. We're not going to be diving directly into that in today's episode, but it's good to kind of consider where that fits based on these different principles that we're talking about today. Really, my goal for you is don't try to be everywhere. Try to be at the right place, at the right time, in the right location to be targeting as much high value clients as you possibly can. So let's talk really quick about demand Versus attention. So attention based marketing and this is more of like that demographic type marketing where we're trying to create content that's going to resonate with the demographics of people that are going to be potential clients for you. But attention based marketing is more like social media. That's going to be display ads that are going to show up on different placements based on, again, those demographic features that's going to be boosting posts and content out there.

Brandon Breshears 00:04:22  but attention based marketing really is interactive. You're trying to either break somebody's pattern, have them consume something and interrupt what they're doing so that they kind of dive more into what your practice offers, what this is about, and figure out if this is a good fit for them. Interactive marketing can be very, very effective, but it's definitely a skill that needs to be developed. There's practices out there that are incredibly good at doing social content. But the thing is, when you're doing interactive marketing, you're not necessarily hitting people when they have a specific need. And so the old saying is you can't, you know, pay your staff with likes, you can't pay your staff with views. It's because your your content might do really, really well and it might get thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of likes. But that's not going to translate into millions of new clients. I'm not saying that it doesn't work to generate clients, but you have to continually kind of be on that hamster wheel running to stay in front of these people so that when the need does arise, they know, like, and trust you and then they want to come into your practice.

Brandon Breshears 00:05:31  But that interactive style marketing, you have to stay a lot more ahead of people. I think two, when we're talking about like social and, content based marketing, which definitely is important, I think that a lot of practices would be very, very benefited if they used that type of social content and as a way of staying in touch with their existing clients, rather than using it as a primary channel for driving in new clients. And the only reason I say that is because it takes a lot of work. You have to get really good at it. You have to learn how to do positioning statements so that you're taking this content that has some relevance to an offer. Link those two things and then basically drive them through the funnel in a time where they don't necessarily need your services. The way to counteract the need for, like people not needing your services would be to create an offer that's so compelling that they feel stupid for saying no to it. So you either have to incentivize people strongly to take action that they don't necessarily need, or you can find people who need your specific services and who are actively looking for it.

Brandon Breshears 00:06:43  And again, I'm a huge fan. There's a lot of practices who are very, very good at creating content, generating attention, staying in front of millions of people. The person that I think is one of the best is going to be Ariel Potter. I have two episodes with her. She consistently helps practices get in front of millions of pet owners, and so that definitely has a lot of value. But if your practice is not as full as you wish it would be, or you're not necessarily trying to basically generate more attention and awareness, you're trying to generate more clients. I think focusing at least on the beginning of what you're going to really revamp and rework would be demand based marketing. And so that's going to be things like search, that's going to be maps, that's going to be trying to rank for certain types of phrases within the language models and AI and SEO, getting reviews, referrals, things that helps to build demand right away. We don't try to necessarily create demand in these demand based scenarios.

Brandon Breshears 00:07:51  We're just trying to align with it and then get people to see us when that happens. And so I think that's a really important distinction in almost every market. And there's going to be exceptions for this, especially in really rural markets. But you know, thinking about all of the demand in your your market, there should be more than enough of your ideal clients that are actively searching that can't necessarily find you. And so that's why I think when we're trying to fix your practice, you need to look at your practice and try to create a score to figure out, you know, what is our biggest need? Do we need new clients in the door right now? Are we at, you know, 70% of capacity or lower? Are we at, you know, a couple days booked out or are we couple weeks booked out? If you're a couple weeks booked out, then it probably would be better to make sure that that continues by capturing the attention of the clients that you already have. And so that would be attention based marketing creating social content, creating emails, keeping in touch and making sure that you're nurturing that existing client base that you have.

Brandon Breshears 00:08:58  But if you're not necessarily at that point going down the funnel, working on the on the bottom of it, that's going to help you to increase the number of patients that you have coming in the door is the right place to start. So kind of to reiterate here, you know, pet owners scrolling on Instagram, liking your posts, even if it goes very viral. That doesn't necessarily mean that those pet owners are ready. And if you have the choice to be in front of those pet owners or not, it's good to be in front of them. Again, I'm not saying that's not a good strategy, but it needs to align with your goals rather than just trying to get as many viewers as possible. So if you're if you're thinking about your practice, do you want to find the pet owners that are scrolling that aren't necessarily ready, but they will be sometime in the next year, or are you wanting to show up more in front of the pet owner that's googling vet near me that's open today, right? So there's urgent demand.

Brandon Breshears 00:09:57  And so figuring out the platform and the channel that's going to really help to meet your goals is really, in my opinion, where you need to be focused. I also think, too, that with social media in particular, looking at the different platforms based on how they perform organically and then also kind of the buyer mindset. When I mentioned Ariel, I talked to her twice. I personally think that with social, if you're looking at social networks, using them as different stages of the funnel too. So for example, like a TikTok or an Instagram real strategy, that's definitely a high top of funnel strategy. So the content needs to reflect that. If you've ever created like a really good educational resource and you've posted it on Facebook, probably didn't do too well because that educational resource has more of a conversion focus, and so it doesn't align with the platform that rewards like awareness and just kind of fun posts, because that top of funnel is better suited to awareness and fun, fun type post. Right.

Brandon Breshears 00:11:06  So TikTok and Instagram definitely a top of funnel platform. Facebook can definitely be a more middle funnel platform just because there's so much more engagement typically on posts, whether it's client reviews or Facebook groups or things like that, where people are more in the evaluation stage. and so people use these social channels differently. And so as you're using these social channels, just start to become a student of how people are actively using them. And when you look especially on TikTok, for example, if you see somebody that's doing a good, good job of of TikTok, whether it's for a practice or maybe like a pet owner influencer taking a look at what they're doing, what the comments are saying, how people are engaging with this, and then thinking about if I did something that was equivalent for my practice, I would probably get similar results, right? So like looking through the comments and seeing, you know, most of the time people are just engaging and not necessarily making buying decisions there. So you need to think about anytime you're consuming social media or any type of marketing material, think about how you could apply this to your practice, and then take a look at what the results are, what the calls to action are, and what's appropriate.

Brandon Breshears 00:12:21  So there's something that I like to call the demand curve. And that is basically the different levels of intent. So the first level of intent that people have is number one they're unaware. They're not thinking about it. So this again would be like the pet owners that are on Instagram. They're not thinking like they necessarily need to come into the vet. Right. but let's say that their dog walks up and licks their face. And it is a dachshund and has the stickiest breath ever. And so like, jeez, my dog has really stinky breath. So at that point they become problem aware. That's the the second level of awareness. They understand that the the problem exists, but they don't necessarily know that there's a solution to it. And then let's say that they're on YouTube and they see a video that says, does your dog have stinky breath? Here's three things that you can do to fix that right. And it can talk about routine dental cleaning, types of food, and types of toys that people that dogs get you on that you could buy them.

Brandon Breshears 00:13:23  So now they know solutions exist. they know what they need, but they're still not necessarily looking for it. and then the final level of that is a provider awareness. So after they know that they have a problem, they know a solution exists. If the the last step is they can see, for example, that somebody gives like a before and after video or something, right? Something that then shows them that this person can help solve the very specific problem that they have. So they they know who can fix the problem. But not only do they know that who can fix it, they actually trust them and they are going to want to move forward with them. The marketing that you're doing, it should meet people at every single level of this, but the platform or the placement is going to help to dictate what you focus on. So, for example, on those awareness platforms like TikTok and Instagram, you could be targeting people that are unaware that problems exist. You could be targeting people that are problem aware.

Brandon Breshears 00:14:32  and then you could drive them down the funnel through content, hoping that they would see that, there are lots of good examples of social content that work there. and so start thinking about it in terms of who is this content targeting? Is this platform the right platform for it? If you're seeing it organically, it probably is because it's being shared. And then figure out how to apply that into your practice. If you're thinking about like, how do we drive people into the practice, we're probably going to want to focus more on that intent based marketing platforms. And so paid search, for example, in Google Ads, is a good platform that can help you to find people that are problem aware, that are solution aware, and that are provider aware. So back to our stinky breath example. If we're looking for people that are problem aware, we should target people searching for, stinky breath treatment for docs, right? So they're talking about the specific problem. And so we're aligning that search intent with those people.

Brandon Breshears 00:15:44  When we're thinking about driving demand, that's going to take a little bit more education, because now they see that they have the problem of stinky breath, but they don't know what to do next. And so we'll need to address those issues typically in a landing page. But we need to make sure that we're aligning the right goals with the traffic. If we think about marketing from like a macro perspective, I like to do this from anything that we do to make it very, very simple. But what you're trying to do is break down the conversion process into each of its tiniest steps. So what needs to happen next? And usually we start with the very beginning and the very end. So for example, the end would be that somebody comes in for a dental exam and gets the teeth cleaning. The beginning step would be okay. They know they have their dog has stinky breath. That's the starting point. Then what needs to happen? They need to see an ad. They go search dog stinky treatment.

Brandon Breshears 00:16:38  Stinky breath treatment. Right? Once they see your ad, what does the ad say? It says. Does your dog have stinky breath? We can help. Click here. A quick thing that I think is really, really important that people often overlook is that when they create ads or content, they're trying to do every single piece within that first exposure point. Really, the purpose of an ad is to funnel the right people to the next step. And so that next step would be to give them more information. So somebody has interest. Then we capture the attention and then we can work on converting them. So stinky breath search. The ad would say does your dog have stinky breath. We can help. They would click. And then that next step of the journey is hand it off to the landing page. Now landing page is a specific web page that has information that's going to help them to acquire all of the information that they need to, and then perform the next logical step. So if we're targeting people that are problem aware, the next logical step would probably be to book an appointment.

Brandon Breshears 00:17:45  That would probably be an ideal goal, but you could also add lead magnets in there. And lead magnets are an irresistible bit of information that you could give people. So like you could do a dental health guide, collect opt ins, and then follow up and mark it with people. Typically, when you have some type of marketing that is kind of higher up in the funnel, so somebody knows they have a problem, but they don't know the solution exists. It takes more work to get them educated so they won't be manipulated into making a decision. We're trying to persuade people. We're not trying to manipulate people. And anytime you have somebody that has a bad experience or has buyer's remorse, if you've ever had buyer's remorse, it's probably because the salesperson was really, really good. And so you ended up buying something that you didn't feel like you actually needed after you got it. And so we're trying to avoid that just because it's not going to create long term good clients for you. And so using persuasive tactics like here's all of these problems educating the client, letting them understand what's happening that is helpful.

Brandon Breshears 00:18:49  Manipulation is the opposite of that. It's going to cause buyer's remorse. It's going to cause bad reviews. People are going to feel like it was too expensive. It was waste of money. It was a scam. We don't want that to happen. So the landing page is going to do the heavy lifting of giving people all the information that they would need so that they can make the next logical choice. Now, the positioning, positioning and messaging that we talked about last week is going to help you to create clear, concise benefit statements that help people understand the before and the after and how you help them to get there. So that is the basic way that we're going to work to to drive people to convert, which is the next logical step. How can I do this next logical step? Here's all of these benefits. Let's let's move forward. And that's what really what we're after. If we're targeting people that are solution aware and there's tons and tons of examples there. Real quick, I want to give you a few differences though, and we'll show you some different.

Brandon Breshears 00:19:56  There's a lot of distinctions within the solutions aware targeting option. So for example, if you had a pet owner that knew their dog's breath was stinky and that they knew they needed a dental cleaning, they might look up dog dentists near me or dog teeth cleaning near me. Those types of searches. People know that they need that. They want it, and they're actively looking for it. And so that's a great place to target. And that's probably the majority of what we try to target when we're working with clients is we're targeting people who want and need your services, who are in market. They don't take convincing because they believe that they need it. And so they're looking for that provider. And that's really where there's so much opportunity. So if you're doing SEO, if you're doing paid ads, that's where you want to be spending the majority of the time getting that kind of traffic. The distinction that I wanted to mention to you was that within that solution aware searches, there are so many differentiations of people that are searching.

Brandon Breshears 00:21:00  So, for example, you know, if you do a tooth cleaning for pets, you're probably going to have some extractions in there. And so it just comes with the territory. So you'll also have people that are in market that are searching for like dog tooth extraction near me. And so if you think about that, most practices would say, yeah, I absolutely want those extractions because people are looking for extractions. It's a great revenue source. It's going to help the pet. We're going to be able to shine here. The only problem with that is if you think about how somebody arrived at that position, they probably had a teeth cleaning. They got x rays, they saw that the teeth needed to be extracted. And there's two choices here. They either didn't trust that the practice could do it. They didn't. The practice didn't feel comfortable doing it or it was too expensive. And so now they're looking for affordable options. Same thing goes with people that are searching for typos. it's really a mixed bag.

Brandon Breshears 00:21:55  And so when you're, when you're doing targeting around this, you want to make sure that the demographics that you're targeting are also going to align with that, because you don't want to get people that are just looking for the cheapest extractions. Because if you're going to be especially paying for these clicks, it's harder to convert somebody. That is a price shopper here. And so thinking through your practice, and I have a client who is really good at converting those extraction calls. And so we're using that as a target because they can their CSRs are fantastic. They're trained, they're able to explain their value proposition. And so they feel comfortable getting those people that might be on the the price shopper fence. So you have to think about, is this the right fit for our practice when you're doing these types of things? So, and I'd say that surgeries are a big one. Especially more complicated surgeries. people that are actively looking for, you know, TP yellows, cherry eye surgeries, anything that they could have been basically referred to, especially on the more kind of niche diagnostic like section where they're they've been diagnosed with something and now they're actively looking for a better alternative.

Brandon Breshears 00:23:10  and I'd say most practices should be testing those types of things, by the way. So I don't want to, you know, make you afraid of testing that. But at the same time, if there's more demand for, you know, dog teeth cleaning and you're a dental practice, that's just a, I'm sorry, your, your dental practice that's doing dentistry. If I had the choice between that and then people that were just solely looking for extractions, you probably would want to target more of the teeth cleaning side, just because that's going to also help you to get more long term general clients to you. So there's going to be some overlap there. The last thing is your provider aware people. So those are people that are looking for typically branded searches. So for example if somebody searches you know VCA hospital or specialty practice or they're searching specifically for the name of either you or a competitor, I typically don't suggest doing paid ads around that, simply because you're going to have a hard time converting somebody who already knows, likes, and trusts and is searching for another practice.

Brandon Breshears 00:24:13  Your CSRs probably aren't great at converting that confusion. Traffic where people are thinking they're calling another practice, they get you on the phone. There's always going to be exceptions. exceptions that I think are pretty standard would be specifically emergency euthanasia, stuff like that, where you have the practice that the people don't necessarily have a long term relationship with. They're more in the urgent case spot. And so maybe they know that veg is an emergency hospital. So they search emergency hospital near me or veg near me. Right. But they're looking for an emergency provider. And so, targeting those types of keywords and those searches would make sense because people want their problem fixed. They don't necessarily care about the brand that's fixing it. Same thing goes with euthanasia. Like, you know, people know it's like the Band-Aid brand of the industry, so it's just Band-Aid. You know, they mean, adhesive bandage. And so there's some category, exceptions there for that. But typically your practice is going to rank really, really well organically for your own practice name.

Brandon Breshears 00:25:26  and so you want to make sure that your Google business profile is set up, your citations are set up, and all of your organic SEO pieces are really inline so that when you search for your practice name, you're the one that shows up at the top with the Google business profile on the right hand column every single time. And if that's the case, you're going to be great. And your existing clients that are searching for your hours or your directions or your address or things like that, they're going to see that every single time. I think in generating demand and awareness, this is where practices are wasting both time and money. Though this is the the biggest waste in my opinion. And it's really not your fault if you look at your favorite brands and so many people do this where they're looking at like the big brands, they're looking at Starbucks and Nike and Coca-Cola and all these iconic brands that are doing really interesting things. They're trying to basically copy those types of tactics. And so when we talk about advertising, like people think about Mad Men and, you know, these Large scale ad campaigns that really are made to build awareness.

Brandon Breshears 00:26:37  They don't necessarily have a plan. And so in creating content that just gets out there, you know, thinking, okay, if a million people see this, we're going to get new clients. You probably will, but it's probably not going to be incredibly effective. And so trying to build awareness without a plan for taking them from awareness to evaluation to then conversion is going to fail every time. And this is why most practices that do boost posts or create a piece of content and then post it and then it doesn't get anything, it's because there's no plan to drive the person to the next step. Like, what is the next step in this conversion process? Even if you're very effective at creating awareness, unless it goes insanely viral, you're not going to get these viewers into the next step of being actual clients. and so many times people too, when they're creating ads, especially there. They're creating ads that get impressions and they're not targeting intent. So boosting feels like marketing because you're getting it out there in front of more people.

Brandon Breshears 00:27:49  And any time somebody sees a piece of marketing, maybe they need something. They're going to take the next steps on their own. But that lack of clear path, that lack of understanding, who is this for? What does it do? How can you help me? It's going to make it very difficult for people to convert. And so it's going to be the exception, not the rule, that people who see your content are actually converting. And this is the same thing to when I have practices that have CSRs that are not saying, you know, hey, sounds like we should set up an appointment this Tuesday or Thursday work for you. So basically trying to make, you know, the the client do the self close is also a problem as well. So one one thing that I really, really want to emphasize here and have you work on is if you ever catch yourself saying, you know, I've tried Facebook content, I've tried Instagram, and it doesn't work. That's not true. The platforms work like I hear practices say to you, like I've tried postcards.

Brandon Breshears 00:28:52  They don't work. They do work. You're sending them out there. People are looking at them. But the problem is that that, again, is an awareness channel that's not a conversion channel. And so it's doing its job of getting you impressions. It's expensive impressions but impressions nonetheless. So flyers do work. But the question is what is the goal. And is the right goal matched to the right intent? And so don't say this marketing isn't working. Say, what is our end goal? And then try to reverse engineer the easiest way to get there, instead of probably trying to do kind of like the most complicated and difficult thing that's going to require your clients to be hyper motivated and take the next step and basically close themselves as clients to your practice, in spite of all of the other things that you're doing. So it's not working because of it. It's working in spite of it. So do flyers work? They do work, but what do they work at doing? Does Facebook boost work? They do work.

Brandon Breshears 00:29:49  But what is it trying to accomplish. Right. And so it'd be like taking a scalpel and say, okay, I'm going to extract all of these dog's teeth with the scalpel. It's not made for that, right? Scalpel is made for cutting. Facebook boosting is made for awareness. Okay? It's not made for converting clients at that stage. Right? So we have to have the next steps of once they engage, how do we get them in further down the funnel basically. So I want you to think to not just in terms of intent, but also visibility channels that you should have And the benefits of each of those. So I think there's three types of visibility. You have owned visibility. You have earned visibility. And then you have paid visibility. And there's pros and cons to each of these. The the thing that I think you need to to think about with the owned visibility, these are things that you should be building. Because even if like Facebook went away or they banned you or you lost your account, you would still own it.

Brandon Breshears 00:30:56  So own visibility would be things like your website, that would be your email list. That would be your Google Business profile and Google Business Profile, I think is less fickle than like a Facebook page or TikTok account where you could be banned very, very quickly. but you own that traffic. You don't have to pay for it to keep people coming back over and over again. And so if somebody finds you today through these channels, are you going to control that relationship and with these things you are. So you have your website, your email list, and your Google business profile and your email list. I can't tell you how much I wish you would send more emails. I'm definitely going to be doing series on email marketing here, but it is the most untapped, untapped channel for veterinary hospitals. That's going to help you to get more people into your practice. next, we have earned visibility. And so these basically are things that are going to help to lower fear and decision friction, but it takes work to get them.

Brandon Breshears 00:32:03  So that's things like your reviews referrals. word of mouth. It's going to be your your local reputation when people comment about you in Facebook posts or Facebook groups and things like that. This is stuff that you've earned because you've done a great job. And so these are also very, very important because it's part of the buying decision and the criteria that people use to come into your practice. So you want to make sure that you are building this type of visibility. It's very, very valuable. I did a podcast episode a few episodes ago with Daniel from Star Loop about how to increase the number of G's that you get. It's a fantastic episode. Daniels, a true expert around that. So, be sure to check that out. And then we have paid visibility and paid visibility. The con of it is you have to pay to get shown, but the pro of it is that you can control it. It's really, really detailed. And, you can turn it up and down and on and off as needed.

Brandon Breshears 00:33:07  And so it's, it's a channel that I think every practice should do, just because it helps to give you a lot more control. And even if your business is thriving and full, I don't think it hurts to run small campaigns so that if things ever changed and the economy is just so fickle right now that, you know the news cycle is wild. Having small campaigns that are performing efficiently, even if you're busy, so that you could scale it up if things slow down. It's like insurance that you know you have insurance not because you're expecting your your practice to burn down, but if it did, insurance would cover it and you wouldn't be, you know, fully out. I think approaching that from a busy standpoint, it's like insurance that pays you to get new clients. So that's things like Google search ads. That's going to be social ads, that's going to be retargeting, but it's basically renting the attention and visibility that these channels have. And so you do have to pay rent all the time.

Brandon Breshears 00:34:09  Again, that's the con, but it's going to help you to get more of of what you're looking for and your ideal client. I think if we're talking about when to use this, when to consider each of these different types of visibility channels? I think social is really, really good for trust education. Community. Staying in touch with your existing clientele. The part that it kind of lacks on is just mostly urgency. and there's always going to be exceptions, but typically people aren't on social. Like they are on search or using AI and things like that. So paid paid like traffic channels like Google. it's stronger for when there's a problem. Now, when time matters or when somebody is comparing options. So if we think about this social is great for warming up people, keeping them engaged, keeping in touch. It's social. Right. Like people forget that social media means you're being social, but you're being social. Google is great for catching when somebody raises their hand and they're interested. Now for Local veterinary hospitals like yourself.

Brandon Breshears 00:35:25  Maps, reviews, and proximity are the key factors that are going to help you to make sure that your your practice is shown when somebody needs it, especially on the organic side. Google Business Profile is incredible because it is free and it has some really good tools. It doesn't have as much detail and attribution as you would like, but still, it has a lot of good key indicators on what's going on in your practice. So I think that especially with Google Business Profile, it's not something that you have to do all the time, but at least a quarterly check in just to make sure that everything is set up properly and you're in line with with where you want to be. So with Google Business Profile, you want to make sure that you have your primary category set correctly. You want to make sure that your secondary categories, as many as you can find that are going to be relevant to your practice are also selected. And then what you need to be focused on with your Google business profile is going to be reviews, not just total number of reviews, but also frequency of reviews.

Brandon Breshears 00:36:27  And so if you have your PIMs that sends out review requests, make sure that you're sending those out. I think and I've been looking at so much data, I'm hopefully going to be able to put together an actual case study with it. But from dozens of practices that I've been reaching out to and seeing how they request reviews, I'm always asking questions about how they're getting their reviews, especially practices that are getting lots of reviews. It's very, very important, in my opinion, that you're not review gating. And what that means is that you're asking them to submit a survey first. If the survey is high enough, then you invite them to Google reviews. most practices that are doing a good job in providing great service will not get bad reviews. and of the people that go through your survey first, and let's say they give you ten stars on your survey, and then you invite them to go give a five star review. It's such a small percentage. I'm seeing about 5% of the people who submit the survey actually go to the next step to leave a review.

Brandon Breshears 00:37:33  And so you're missing out on like 95% of the five star reviews because people think, oh, I already gave feedback. I don't need to leave a public review, and they don't understand that you're trying to review gate there. So I know it feels scary, but truly consider avoiding that survey step. In my opinion, it's not as good. So make sure again that that's all set up properly. And then I have a tool that I use that helps you to see exactly where your practice ranks against your competitors. And I would suggest auditing that to see what you're doing. and there's a bunch of tools that can help you further. If you're interested, reach out. And I'd be happy to provide you with one of those reports for free if you send me an email at Brandon at Maverick Digital Marketing Comm. But local visibility is really, really important for reassurance and then also volume of new clients. And so that should be the primary focus in my opinion, making sure that you're consistently getting reviews every single week.

Brandon Breshears 00:38:40  I would try if I was a general practice, I would shoot for five reviews a week at least. and I think even a single doctor practice could have enough volume to get that done, but it just really needs to be emphasized and the team needs to be asking for reviews regularly. So what I would like for you to do this week is to go through your practice data, if you can, and see where are your clients coming from? Are your clients coming from social? Are they coming from Google? Are they coming from your website? Are they coming from Google Maps? Like where exactly are your clients coming from? So identify the places where you're seeing the most high quality clients, and then think about the opportunities that you have in your practice. Whether you want to be doing some Google Ads, maybe you're not getting as many clients from Google as you thought. Maybe most of them are just coming in from referrals. That shows that there's probably a really big opportunity to capture that demand. Google ads is a great demand capture tool.

Brandon Breshears 00:39:42  It's not a branding tool unless you're going to be creating content, doing YouTube. And there's there's definitely Google platforms and placements that have that, awareness play. But most practices, in all honesty, don't need that. I would focus my awareness plays more on social. but it is a demand tool that when you're positioning is clear and your visibility is clean and your follow up is ready, Google is a great placement for that. So if you're looking for more calls and more people who want service today. It's a great place for that. Or if you have very niche specific services that you're looking to attract. Google is amazing for that. So this week, please go through audit and find out where your leads of your clients are actually coming from. Identify one bottleneck and then just commit to fixing that bottleneck. This week you don't have to fix everything, just fix one. And if you're posting on social, take a look and see. Are you posting more awareness content that's getting good engagement? And if so, if you're generating that awareness, let's think about how you can take that awareness and turn it into evaluation and then turn that evaluation into conversion.

Brandon Breshears 00:41:00  So I hope this was helpful. If you have any questions or you need help with anything, please don't hesitate to reach out. I hope this was helpful again and thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to to share it with somebody who you think could benefit from it. And I'll see you soon.