VMP 313: What's Working Now To Fill Your Practice Schedule

Brandon 00:00:00  It feels like everything is changing faster than ever when it comes to marketing. And so in today's episode, I have to Trace who's our beloved Customer Success Manager, an integral part of Maverick Digital Marketing, our agency that helps to serve veterinary practices. And in today's episode, me and him talk in depth about what we're seeing is going on in practices right now, the bigger trends that we see coming. And I think we're going to be doing this probably at least quarterly to keep you up to date in all of the things that we see working well right now, things that aren't working well right now, and it's just full of really good insight on hundreds of conversations that we're having with practices all across the country and the world. And so if you are trying to figure out what should you do next, what's working, what's not? This episode is going to be full of value. So be sure to comment and let me know that you like Trace being on the podcast. I really appreciate him for coming on, so give him some love in the comments and enjoy the episode.

Brandon 00:00:58  Be on again.

Trace 00:00:59  Oh, yeah. Round two. I'm excited.

Brandon 00:01:02  So hey everybody watching. If you like seeing Trace more on the podcast, be sure to comment. Because, we got a lot of comments last time, but we want to have them on the podcast more, so thank you. and for those of you who don't know, Trace, Trace is our customer success manager. And so he's got probably I'm going to guess about $8 million of ad spend management under his belt and is just doing amazing. So I thought I'd have him on this call to you because we're both working with clients in practice every single day. And so, you have a lot of really good insight, Tracy. So I really appreciate you taking time to be on the pod today.

Trace 00:01:40  Oh, yeah. That's exciting. I love doing these. So if people want more of me, let's let's do it. I'm excited. Okay, cool.

Brandon 00:01:46  Very good. So let's talk first about general trends that you are seeing and that I'm seeing.

Brandon 00:01:53  What do you think 2026 has for the rest of the year. What are what are your major predictions through end of year based on what you're seeing right now? Right now.

Trace 00:02:02  For sure. I mean, with all this AI talk, it's definitely leaning way more towards AI and everything with with that aspect there. with. I would like to say a lot of our clients are relying heavily on AI or there's clients that aren't relying on AI whatsoever. and I think that here within the next, you know, year, at a minimum, even next six months, AI is just playing more in a more of a role into your practice. And that could be from, you know, all the way from PIMs to, you know, website to even like scripts on how CSRs are communicating and talking and things. and so honestly, I would like for our clients to be more involved with AI and start that process with AI, sooner rather than later.

Brandon 00:02:53  I think that's really good. I think there's I think there's some like really important distinctions from what I'm seeing in that most people are delegating like the entire process to AI.

Brandon 00:03:05  And so it's like making people dumber. No offense, but like they're just completely offloading all of their their thought and creativity. And then also people just don't know what questions to ask, right? If you don't know what you don't know, and then you ask Google or you ask cloud or ChatGPT, you're going to get a pretty good answer. But there's so much room for improvement. And I'm like, specifically, I'm thinking about setting budgets, setting expectations, targeting options. There's just so much stuff that is generally considered best practice when it comes to marketing and advertising and digital marketing and things like that, that I think doesn't really serve the veterinary industry in particular, just because it is a unique industry. And so like, I think it depends a lot on what model you're using too. So what is your favorite AI model right now?

Trace 00:04:08  Definitely. So it really depends on what I'm doing, to be completely honest with you. For like data sets and doing, you know, matching with with large, you know, CSV files, things like that Claude, all the way.

Trace 00:04:20  I've really enjoyed a lot of the things that Claude does produce, but I mean, with any AI, it's going to tell you mainly what you want to hear rather than the actual answer. And that's what I found the biggest problem. but with ChatGPT Astro coming out, that is insanity. I haven't really been able to use it much, but some of the stuff that I've been seeing online looks insane with the new model of ChatGPT there.

Brandon 00:04:48  Definitely. So I'm I'm in the same boat I still really like cloud and Astra is very cool as far as models go and being able to do marketing things, I think it's really, really capable. But I do think you need to give it direction and you need to know what questions to be asking. what I see a lot of practices doing is just, again, like offloading complete creative control and being like, what should we do? And so you're using it as like a consultant. And I guess that's better than nothing. Maybe. I mean, it depends.

Trace 00:05:21  It really depends.

Brandon 00:05:22  I think there's so much generic AI slop out there that if you're just saying, what should we do, come up with the plan. It's going to be just like everything else. And most practices aren't in a position where they're trying to scale and be like a name brand, like, you know, Veg or Petco or, you know, these big brands. And so pulling from playbooks that are like general marketing and advertising, you're going to be very, very general and it's going to be very sloppy in my opinion. and I mean, I think a really quick test for practices to do is just be like, okay, we've been using AI to come up with all of our post ideas or content ideas and like, are we seeing more clients in the door? And my guess is if you just offloaded that creative process and you're just posting AI slop, you're not actually going to see an incremental improvement or even a noticeable improvement in the number of clients coming in, engagement on posts and things like that.

Brandon 00:06:20  And so that's one thing that I keep hearing, is that especially if you go to YouTube and you're looking up tutorials or lots of this AI, I would call it AI hype content, where it can do everything for you, and it's just like the future. I think that people who think AI is the only thing that matters in the future, it's going to take over everything. And then the people who think like AI is terrible. I don't want to use it, and I never like both of those people are not using it wisely. I think there needs to be overlap within it, basically. but I'm trying to think like it's making our job a lot more. I mean, more capable. We can do so much more for clients and provide even more value. But if you think about since AI has come up and you're using it now more often, how much money is it actually making you? And I think that should be the measure, right? If we're talking about return on investment, how much more money are you making? Because now you have these AI processes in place, like there has to be actual return for it to make sense.

Brandon 00:07:31  And I don't think people are looking through that lens because it's exciting and it's shiny and you can see a lot of activity, but you're not necessarily seeing results with it.

Trace 00:07:42  100%. One one thought I have on it specifically is I'm not necessarily I'm using AI in my thought process around it is for productivity right to improve my productivity, trying to make like duplicate myself. Almost that way I could do double the amount of work into a single given day, and I think people are looking at it, not necessarily at that lens. I think they are for sure, but it's more of like, I want to offload this task to you to do, and I want you to have full control. I want you to do it from start to scratch. Right? Instead, we need to be using it, or people need to be using it for more of like a tool to double check, to fix things, to enhance your, you know, enhance what you're doing rather than leaving it for the AI to completely do just because I mean, Gen Z especially, I mean AI slop, AI slop is all I hear, right? Like, no matter, you know, if you post a graphic on Facebook and it's clearly ChatGPT made, that's not going to do well, it's really not gonna mean.

Brandon 00:08:39  I've seen so many, so many brand ads where people are like, I was going to buy this, but now that you're using it, I'm not going to like I've seen that very heavily and be sure to be looking at comments on social content when it's clearly AI. if your audience is boomer audience, then you can trick them easy and they won't know it's AI. But other than that, you have to be careful. I think it can actually diminish your brand, in in using it. And I do think that, like you mentioned, productivity and processes, that is 100% a great use case for it. like we use it for ROI matching building software products, building dashboards. Like there's so many more things that we can do, but I 100% know that we've had clients who've completely delegated their entire strategy. So instead of them being like, here's what I want to be focused on, here's what I see the market doing. Here's what my clients are saying. It's like, here's the data, tell us what to do next.

Brandon 00:09:37  And I see performance in those cases sliding consistently like it can't be. I mean, it's going to depend on the skill level of the person doing the marketing. It's probably better than if you had no marketing expertise at all. And you're you're trying to brainstorm. But if you just delegate it, we've seen things like, especially with ChatGPT, it's going to confirm your bias and tell you something that's pleasant and nice. And so we had this one client that was only spending $10 a day, and then they were talking to ChatGPT, and we could tell that they just copied and paste the ChatGPT and they're like, we want to do ten campaigns at $1 a day, and here's why this is going to work and here's why this is important. And at $1 a day per campaign, it's not going to serve enough to get any traction. And so instead of one small budget campaign, now you have ten micro-budget campaigns, and it's not going to serve and it's not going to perform. And it sounds good in theory, and there's lots of other stories like that where we were at a really high impression chair for Branded Search, and we were we're actively targeting that on purpose.

Brandon 00:10:41  And, there was only 2% increase. We're at 98% of impression chair. And he's like, we need to increase our budgets doubles so that we make sure and show up 100% of the time. And that doesn't make sense either. And so it just like nuances like that, I think it needs to be considered a really capable employee, but you have to give the employee direction. Otherwise it's going to unravel and kind of be not effective and very generic too. So that's that's what I think.

Trace 00:11:16  My, my last piece to this all too is like for like let's just exclude AI for now, right? Like when we're setting up campaigns and stuff, we could set up a campaign with the exact same structure, exact same budget, exact same keywords, and in Sacramento. Right. And then we'd set it up in Utah, for example. And just because we have the exact same structure, exact same, you know, everything, it's just demographics that are different, right? Different type of people, different type of interests, things like that too.

Trace 00:11:42  So that being said, AI is just going to be giving you a general rule of thumb of, you know, across the whole United States or across Canada, right? It's not going to be your market specific. It's not going to be your clientele specific. And that's what people need.

Brandon 00:11:56  Yeah, 100%. And I mean, the other thing too, that I see pretty consistently is people wanting to use AI voice receptionists. And we've had at least a dozen clients test it out and try it. And we have a few clients that are still actively using it. But what we're seeing is that especially when you have the capacity to take calls, I don't think we're at a place where pet owners just want to deal with robots for something as important as their pet. we had somebody that was using it only as after hours, one of our clients, and they had somebody who called for euthanasia emergency, and they got the AI voice receptionist and it got hung up and it couldn't finish that call. And like, especially for things like that, it's just so sensitive.

Brandon 00:12:43  And if you drop the ball once in like a life or death situation like that, it I don't think that it would have been better just to have the after hours message that that played instead of them on the phone, emotional trying to get help. This AI was, you know, saying things like, oh, I'm sorry, you're right. and then it would just get hooked up. I know that doesn't happen every time. I know it's getting better, but it has to be perfect. And the other thing, too, is that it seems to be like most of the AI receptionists right now for vet med is just kind of like a glorified answering machine. And so like the other client that was using it, they would get calls, people who were wanting same day appointments. It would assess the call and it wouldn't do a live transfer. It would just be like, okay, great, we'll call you back. And they were on the phone right then wanting to get into a Into practice the same day they had capacity.

Brandon 00:13:36  And so those types of things are super frustrating. And you're losing opportunity for the sake of like a shiny efficiency, basically. And I don't think that that makes sense. So I think especially as it becomes more pervasive within our lives, the more human analog you can do, the more valuable that's going to become, because you can't. People are going to get tired of it. And, you know, when you call your cell phone company or your bank or your credit card company and you're talking to the AI assistant, you're never having a great experience. You know, it's like pulling teeth. So why would you want to replicate that for your personal, local, high touch business? Like doesn't doesn't make sense to me. It's not usually brand consistent.

Trace 00:14:24  They're 100% I whenever I get an AI phone call I'm always like, talk to a real person. I need to talk to a representative. Like I don't even answer the questions. I don't even go through the processes. I just want to get on a phone with somebody and talk to somebody, especially if it's about my, my lovely, my boys that I got my dogs, you know, like they're my pride and joy.

Trace 00:14:43  So that's my thoughts.

Brandon 00:14:45  Yeah, exactly. And consistently through the industry, it's compassionate care. We care about you. We treat your pet like family, but you won't answer your phone. Call for them like that doesn't. It's not consistent for your brand. so I get it. It's me. I know it's hard because answering phones is one of, like, the most difficult parts for for practices, but it's just incredibly important. And, it sets the stage for the entire relationship. and so if you're going to delegate client contact and client communication, that's relationship building. And if you're going to push them to AI, like they're just going to go there instead and use ChatGPT to diagnose their dog if, if that's how you know you're treating them, basically. I don't know 100%. I don't know. When it comes to, schedules and consistency, this year has definitely been a crazy year so far. I think it's probably going to get more crazy. Gas went up $0.40 a gallon overnight in my town, so, I'm sure other places are feeling that, too.

Brandon 00:15:55  what have you seen this year as far as appointments, availability, general trends in the in the industry for sure.

Trace 00:16:03  Definitely a wild year. I mean, I started in, I believe it was February last year here. So I didn't get the full, full year swing. And I mean, we haven't gotten fully through the year yet, but, I it's been all over the place, like back to school this year was, really recent and that was huge. It was significant in the, the whole market of all my clients. And that was from, you know, our youth and ages to our GP's and even emergencies were slow during, you know, that back to school people getting back into swing of things, people taking those, you know, summer vacations, stuff like that. but besides that, I mean, holidays are always a stickler. in some markets, for some reason, we, we get busy with some clients, but majority of the time holidays are just, you know, the times where people are wanting to stay with their family and not go out as much.

Trace 00:16:50  So definitely, definitely, you know, up, up in trends and then it goes down like the following week. It's really, really weird sometimes. just just lots of volatility.

Brandon 00:17:03  Yep. We had a client back to school week. Their calendar was basically empty and then the following week had already was pre-booked. so like we saw it really distinctly in some locations and so trying to backfill those with like same days, urgent cares, stuff like that. I think differentiation around availability and services will help to fill those two things. And making sure that you're like, have those things preloaded instead of being like, you know, oh my gosh, we don't have any appointments the rest of this week or, you know, we're half full. What should we do if you have to come up with it at the time? I think that makes it a lot harder to figure out. Instead of having maybe a game plan to go and be like, okay, here's what we do. If this happens, here's and you know, we have a specific plan in place for it, but definitely market swings.

Brandon 00:17:48  I think, too, I don't think that the gas prices are coming down anytime soon, and it's probably going to be a pretty hard winter, I think, for most people economically. And so, you know, having value add offers and things like that will be kind of the key in making sure things stay busy and you're acquiring clients and stuff like that. thinking about the the clients that we brought on most recently, what are some of the things that stand out, around setting up and executing successful campaigns for you. Like, what are the the big things? We've had a really good group of clients come through and they're seeing really solid results, and seems like we've had a lot of turnaround practices that had a pretty slow spring, slow summer, and we're getting them going here, and they're getting pretty busy now. Oh, sure. Which is great. What do you think are some of the things that are most important right now for practices?

Trace 00:18:55  mainly everybody wants to focus on same day urgent care.

Trace 00:18:58  And that's the new group of clients that we've gotten. Hey, we we mainly want to focus on urgent care. Same day. Of course, we do have those that are mainly focusing on wellness. And those are actually surprisingly working really, really well as well. Just acquiring those new clients. We actually just did an ROI report for one of our new clients that we just got. We did a 30 day ROI report in seven out of the ten new clients that came in for the last 30 days were generated from the ad extension on Google Ads, which tells me, hey, that means we only didn't generate the three new clients, but then we're also bringing people over to the site and things too. Long story. But, you know, seven out of ten confirmed data is amazing. And so if we can just keep that momentum going for them, that's just what I'm most excited about. but one thing that my, our clients aren't really doing as much, and I really been trying to push on them specifically as social content, you know, they're coming to me and asking me a lot of questions about social, hey, do we do social? You know, do can you at least point me in the right direction with social things like that? And so I've been trying just to lay out all the tools that we have for social content.

Trace 00:19:59  What's working well right now in the market, what's not working well, and just trying to get that, you know, foot in the door of, hey, short form content, record videos in practice, get, you know, dogs in frame and videos and things like that. and so that's kind of what I've been striving for a lot of my clients do. I mean, it goes back to the first meeting or, you know, podcasts that we had, you know, everything ties back into recording more social content and just getting your name out there and be funny, be quirky, you know, be yourself, and that will truly speak wonders.

Brandon 00:20:29  I agree, I think with social in particular. I do think that having team lead or founder lead content is really, really important. So, the practices that I see being the most successful are definitely integrating the owners or the doctors. They're definitely integrating team members. it's not just infographics and education, but a lot of interest graph content. So pet owner related stuff that is like, would this worry a veterinarian like as a series that you consistently have like get some really good hooks and ideas and then run and test those consistently so that you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time.

Brandon 00:21:13  and the episode that I did with Ariel was really, really good on, on all of those different ideas. But, I agree, that's a big spot. There's so many practices doing a really good job, but it is confusing if you haven't been practicing it. And so you have to definitely approach it from from a different standpoint. Now definitely definitely, definitely. when it comes to placements, what is your favorite ad placement right now and and why? When it comes to honestly PMCs.

Trace 00:21:45  Genuinely PMCs, I honestly wasn't the biggest fan of PMCs when it came to probably six months ago. But of course, Google Ads is always working on trying to improve things. And I feel like more than ever, we've been able to dial in PMCs and just get the most out of our placements there. I mean, Matt Pax number one, right? Whenever I'm looking for like fast food even or a good restaurant, sometimes I'll throw up, you know, Apple Maps or Google Maps and search within maps. And so, showing up within that is amazing.

Trace 00:22:13  And then also doing these ROI reports for our clients, it's surprising or not, the the Max campaigns are almost always outperforming our search campaigns at this point. and so I would definitely want to put, you know, I'd put my eggs in a basket.

Brandon 00:22:27  I was looking I think it depends on where you are in terms of your, your focus and things. I was looking at, combined ROI reports for all of our clients that are that we're tracking our wife were which is really cool. So our conversion rate across, search campaigns, across all of our clients that are measuring it is about 15%. So, like searches still really targeted. It has to be very, very targeted. And I think that's skewing a little bit more in our data set with respect to emergency. So like our emergency practices are spending more. So it's kind of skewing averages. And that makes sense because people are doing searches for emergency on Google search rather than, you know, chatting with AI about it, but, It has higher conversion rates still.

Brandon 00:23:23  and so I think it depends on the category for sure, but the conversion rates are also really, really solid. Just because we get so much more volume of clicks and cost per click right now. so I'm kind of just in, in both of those. We're, we're actually testing some really cool new things with the AI Max placement in search, too. we've got word with our partner rep from Google about AI max placement targeting that it's becoming a much better option and a lot more dialed in. He said six months ago would have said stay away, but now it's time to start running a max placement. And for people who don't know in Gemini, those AI overviews will show ads, and that's a placement that we can run on that's search based. So you get all of the keyword details and things like that. But, you still are able to target things that are happening within AI. Now, which is cool.

Trace 00:24:24  definitely been using that. The Gemini. you know, search within Google a lot more often to I can't remember.

Trace 00:24:31  I was actually just using it yesterday. I can't quite remember what I was using it for, but I definitely want to start testing that out more and using those placements just because people are definitely using it for sure.

Brandon 00:24:40  And Gemini is the default AI partner for Apple. Still through I think 2030 is the deal that they have. So, I don't think that that's going to be going away anytime soon. It's just going to be going more. And then Google announced back in May that their AI is going to be taking over search. I don't think they're going to roll that out to map placements and local stuff. just because there's been a lot of studies around what people like to use for different types of searches, and the map pack placement is preferred. Still, like I think it's 78 or 79% compared to an AI search like you don't want to chat about like fast food restaurants near me. And then that's like, what are you in the mood for? Chinese? Or like, you know, Mexican, like that type of thing.

Brandon 00:25:33  So for.

Trace 00:25:33  Sure.

Brandon 00:25:34  Same thing. Same thing there. anything that you're seeing right now that you feel like are really big mistakes that you see consistently happening when it comes to practices, when they're either approaching their marketing or executing it in practice right now.

Trace 00:25:50  So honestly, this kind of goes back to what we were talking about on our last podcast. I mean, I feel like most of our clients aren't wanting or willing to spend money on ads. And, you know, at some point you have to spend money to make money. And so that's kind of where I'm at on that. And then that also goes back to letting AI fully decide your marketing game plan and what you want to do. You know your practice the best. You know your clientele the best. You know what they're after and things ChatGPT doesn't. And so those are the two. You know, major things that I'm like, hey, we want to get, you know, you want to get busier, but you don't only want to spend $5 a day on a campaign, you know, there's only so much we can do with $5 a day or, you know, vice versa.

Trace 00:26:31  Same with, you know, we can't let ChatGPT, you know, plan your whole marketing game plan or, you know, the type of clientele and things like that. And so those are the two, two major. And then also just loading up your CSR with all the resources too. I mean, more often than not, when we run into a, you know, particular situation where we're seeing really good performance on Google Ads, we're seeing search terms, call durations looking really good, but then the practice is still slow. Like, okay, what's going on? And then we'll listen into some phone calls. And the CSR just, you know, is either instantly giving another practice's phone number or is, you know, super, super sweet on the phone but wants to talk to them for four minutes about, you know, their pets, you know, life and things like that too. So there's really a happy medium in between both of those to stay off the phone. You know, just, you know, not necessarily stay off the phone.

Trace 00:27:16  I don't want you to kick off the person on the phone, right. But politely try to get them to get off the phone as well as, you know, just try to improve your your work productivity as much as possible too.

Brandon 00:27:28  Yeah, that's a really good point. And we've been telling all of our clients that, like, I know, especially when you get people, I've listened to so many calls, it's like there's a squirrel in the road and it looks like it's hurt, like, can can you see that? Can you see this squirrel? Come and get it. And it's like, no, you have to be polite but like politely reject them and so have those. I think those are also equally as important as being like, we need to have really simple closes of like, you know, we have Tuesday or Wednesday available. Which day works best for you or do you prefer mornings or evenings, things like that. Right. So closing questions and then also a simple rejection script to you that pushes them off the phone.

Brandon 00:28:09  So for like our clients, for example, when we're optimizing conversions and if your ads weren't set up by us, I can't speak for those. But with clients we're optimizing for phone call duration. And so how long somebody on the phone call is generally a good indication of if it's going to convert or not. And so Google sees that. And they see that you spent, you know, four minutes with the squirrel lady. And it's not a good call. But Google doesn't listen to the call. And so it just says okay, conversion and let's find more people like that. And so then you get people calling about snakes and turtles and all kinds of things. Right. And so being able to tell Google this is not the right type of client, pushing them off before you hit that 62nd mark is really, really important. and then like the other thing that I see too, phone trees are terrible. Like, if you can please remove phone trees. And then like warm, clear, understandable greeting that's enunciated like so many people get to the end of the call and they didn't know who they were calling or talking to because that's, you know, if it's the animal house, it's like, yeah, like gibberish.

Brandon 00:29:22  And so they don't they don't know who they're talking to and they're calling the wrong place. So that's a big 1 to.

Trace 00:29:29  1 practice that I actually ended up calling recently. And the way that they, they ended up removing their phone tree, and what they did, just because I know that one of their concerns was, like, hey, we can't have a CSR instantly pick up the phone. You're right. There's sometimes on the, you know, other line or, you know, they're busy doing something. And so what they ended up doing, and I think it's working really well, is they'll instantly pick up the phone, you know, say, hey, I'm such and such animal hospital. Is this an emergency? And then if they say no on the phone, okay, can you hold for a few minutes, you know, until I can, you know, you know, you know what the situation. and so that's been working really, really well for them. And so if you can possibly remove the phone tree, remove it like nobody wants to sit on the phone and just listen to, you know, they would rather hear you, you say, hey, I'm going to put you on hold for a minute or two, rather than just sitting on a phone tree waiting for somebody to pick up the phone, if that makes sense.

Brandon 00:30:19  100%, and I'd say that most phone trees are on average about 35 seconds long to get to the point where you can talk to somebody and like that is a long ask for people that have very short attention spans. especially if they're new clients. And so again, it's giving them the bank experience. If you're trying to do something that's not like you're not a massive corporation and you don't want to give that perception and that you have like actual relationships, you pick up the phone when they call, right? If you if you want to be considered like the good friend and somebody they can rely on, if you think about calling your best friend who's always going to pick up no matter what, right the middle of the night, they'll pick up the phone. I'm not saying you have to pick up the phone in the middle of night, but that's just if you think about that friend that you have. If you have that same experience in your practice, you're going to have a better chance of converting. So.

Brandon 00:31:12  Yeah, I totally agree. I've listened to lots of calls where they they do that and almost everybody stays on the phone, especially if they're not being rushed. Like that's the other thing too. If you're going to answer the phone call and say, is it an emergency or are you able to hold? They usually say, no, I can hold. Right. So like have a good scripture on that. But don't feel like they're inconveniencing your CSRs too. So like it needs to be done done well. And that's one thing that I would do every single time we had a training with CSRs. If I had them to practice, I would revisit that often, like pull transcripts, coach through it. Opportunities, good jobs like those types of things. And make sure that that's happening. And in the last episode when I'm Interview, doctor. True. I think going through that mission statement of the practice, every single time when you're in a team meeting is so important. I remember listening to the book traction where they said, you know, go ask your employees, what's the purpose of our business? Like, what's our mission in our business? Almost everybody has a different answer.

Brandon 00:32:20  They don't know. They're unsure. And so everybody's not on the same page. You're not going to be able to get them providing that level of service that you're hoping that they're out there providing. So that's another thing too. I definitely think there. let's talk about landing pages, because you've been building tons and tons of landing pages. Which ones do you see working best right now for most practices?

Brandon 00:32:46  We actually just implemented and thanks.

Trace 00:32:49  To Noah, Noah's been doing a great, great job at building landing pages, and he's been doing really, really good job at developing copy and everything to Actually, he just built a same day landing page for one of our clients. We had it up. I want to say we put it up on a Wednesday. They were closed Friday, Saturday. And then we had it running till Tuesday. So from Wednesday to Tuesday closed Saturday, Sunday. And she said, hey, we gotta stop running that we're too busy. We don't have enough room for same day availability anymore.

Trace 00:33:15  We need to stop that. And so okay, so so I told him, hey, let's use this as a good stepping stone. Hey, we know this works really, really well. We know like, you know, this type of of same day works really well. Just getting people in the door and and the way that we layer it. And I'm not sure this is probably, you know, our marketing secret that I probably shouldn't air out. But there's a specific way that I really like to air, you know, order stuff. So like the first thing that they see when they get on the landing page is a picture of what they're after. Right? So is that a dog with, you know, teeth cleaning? Is the dog getting a toothbrush? you know, or is the dog playing or is it a picture of a mountain background? Right. So thinking about the first thing that they see when they land. and then right underneath is typically I like to put right under the hero fold is what they're experiencing right.

Trace 00:34:03  Is that a broken tooth? Is that a broken leg? Is that a itchiness? Is that, you know, any of those those things that way they see what they're after. They instantly see what you know. Services we provide, what they're looking for, and then they just call. And that's been that cadence has been working really, really well for us just being super conversion focused. super, you know, just fake laying everything out for them on the table. So that way when they call, they're ready to book. They don't have any other questions.

Brandon 00:34:32  That's that's really strong. And I think too that's that's a lot of problem. And I do think that's why we're seeing better conversion and higher conversion rates across most of our campaigns is because when you're sending people, it doesn't matter where it's coming, if it's from social or from email or Organic or paid ads doesn't matter to the channel, but if you're sending them just to your home page, they have to do the mental work of figuring out, okay, here's what I need, which section would best help and get there.

Brandon 00:35:03  Like, okay, sometimes people do kind of creative naming conventions on their menus. and so like, it's not super clear where they should go and how they should navigate to it. And so it takes a lot of thought power and depending on the motivation and like what's going on with people, it's just so much easier looking for dog teeth cleaning your Me search dog teeth cleaning near me, I go to the landing page. It looks exactly like a dog teeth cleaning landing page. Just like you mentioned. Picture of dog with his teeth being cleaned and like problem defining the exact problem that they have in their mind. Identifying with it. Again, if people say this all the time, but if people know that you understand their problem, they're going to assume that you have the solution that's going to fix it. So that's a really big principle within marketing, making it really, really simple and also making it just they don't have to think, they don't have to navigate. Here's the problem. Here's how we fix it.

Brandon 00:36:01  Here's why it's important. Here's testimonials and proof and risk reversal and all of those things that we have within those. And then here's an easy way to get your problem fixed. Make it as easy as possible for people not like, you know, making people jump through hoops, looking through all of your services on your service page that has every single service listed, going through and finding it and reading like how many times like what percentage of clients do you think on their main website have like dental cleaning as like a bullet item under services, right? Like, yeah.

Trace 00:36:34  I honestly, I would probably say a little bit more than half honestly. But the problem is, is that a lot of our clients, it's for one kind of hard to find, right? Especially like on mobile or if somebody's in a rush or hurry, people want to just have it right in front of them without clicking anything. So that's number one. And then number two, it's a lot of the stuff isn't because people want to skim read.

Trace 00:36:54  Nowadays people don't want to. I mean, yes, you'll have your select people that want to read every line by line, but it's mainly they'll read the H1, which is the headline. Of course, they'll like Zee pattern read it. And a lot of our clients just aren't very good at I don't want to say our clients aren't good at it because it's their website people. Right. But it just it needs to be made for scanning a bit, you know, a scanning ability, like just scanning. and so that's kind of the main problem I see.

Brandon 00:37:20  I think that's actually a bigger problem that you're highlighting is that websites are made to be comprehensive, like it has to do a lot of work. It has to show who you are, tell your story, explain your philosophy around like it's it's like reading a novel versus reading Cliff notes. Right. And so like Cliff notes is what the landing pages. Here's all the important items. You get that info really quick, and you're able to then digest it quickly instead of reading the entire book.

Brandon 00:37:43  And so I do understand why websites are built the way they are. Because it has to be comprehensive. But knowing that you should be using landing pages as much as possible, especially if you are driving paid traffic there. but I totally agree with you. And I think to scanning and headlines and sub headlines and all of those things people have been trained from, like the beginning of direct mail to like respond and skim things too. So like, it's not just a new thing, but people's attention spans are way less. People are reading way less than ever. and so anytime you ask them to do work, that's not like a headline sub headline, easy to see proof, easy to see benefits that they can scan, all of those things. You're going to reduce your conversion because anytime you ask your clients to do more work it it drops your conversions. Definitely. Definitely definitely. Well, what are some of your predictions through end of the year when it comes to marketing. I'd like to see if you have any any big predictions and if you're not sure.

Brandon 00:38:51  I'll go first.

Brandon 00:38:52  To be honest, I don't have any crazy big predictions.

Trace 00:38:56  I'm hopeful that AI will continue to improve, but not get to the point where it's going to be, you know, all crazy wild. Yeah. Terminator. which I I'm very optimistic in that way. For sure. I hope it just keeps continuing. and I'm hoping that the economy gets better. I'm not very optimistic about that. But at the same time, I want to try to be optimistic about it, because, I mean, economy gets better. People are able to afford more things. People are, you know, able to afford the $1,000 dental cleaning for, you know, your dog or, you know, whatever that might be. And so I'm, I'm hopeful that the market gets better. but I also don't see people not, you know, stop not stopping buying pets. And so I don't think that we're going to see a crazy decrease in volume, and I'm hopeful that it does the opposite. We see a huge increase for the rest of this year, but I guess we'll see what happens.

Trace 00:39:49  I guess I'm more hopeful and optimistic rather than having to set in stone goals.

Brandon 00:39:54  I think that's probably a good I mean, in any market, any economy, there's going to be winners and losers. And so being able to target and and go after the right types of clients, I think is going to be really important. And then especially with AI, like you said, improving and getting better, like the incremental differences in strategy and implementation and watching things is going to be, I think, even more important, just because like if everybody basically has a superintelligence that has general best practices, that's able to do a good job. Like, how are you going to be able to compete? It's like if everybody has the same Ferrari and you're all doing a drag race and it's a self-driving Ferrari, like there's no winners. They're the same car, right? So there's like no way to improve or beat the competition. and so the incremental small differences make a big difference when performance is, is really high.

Brandon 00:40:49  That's I think one thing that I'm going to predict is that the practices that are doing a better job of marketing their practices, they're probably relying less on AI, especially for content creation, like as far as production and being real. So like they're they're differentiating by actually creating stuff that's good, that is entertaining and that is is real. And then the other thing that I think is going to happen through the end of this year and then basically on forever, is that I think Google in particular has a pretty big problem. And this is kind of like a there's a different problem within social. So like the the search side of things, AI is taking more market share out of especially informational Searches. And so Google needs to capture that ad traffic and that ad revenue somehow because they have. Here's what typically happens. People go up and they set up their own Google ad account, and they get the garbage placements and they're showing up for, you know, search. They put in the word dog vet, and then somebody searches, why does my dog eat grass? And then their ad shows up.

Brandon 00:42:03  It's like, hey, this is probably related to dog vet. And so then they're selling that crap placement. And then those searches are happening less and less and less. And so Google is trying to figure out how do we squeeze these advertisers for more revenue so that we're not seeing losses in terms of revenue. And, so we already see what's happening. Like we've had some performance like issues that we picked up right away on for some clients where our cost per conversion skyrocketed overnight and we're like, what the heck is going on? we had a call with our rep and they said, oh, we changed the way that target cost per action is optimized for. And so they it used to be that with target cost per action, it was like, let's say you set at $20, it was $20 or less would be what it would send you conversions at. Now if it's set at $20 it only sends you $20 conversions. And so like that's a tricky way for them to increase people spending more without giving better results basically.

Brandon 00:43:10  So like there's a lot of things like that. Lisa's have a similar thing which is local service ads. I don't think those are good fits for almost every practice. but those are getting more expensive too, because missed calls are being built, whereas they used to not be. So they're just basically any chance they get there squeezing you. And they're trying to get more revenue out of out of advertisers. And so that's that's one thing. the other thing too, is that as the economy gets more difficult, we usually see decreases in costs for different types of placements, specifically like placements that have scaled company opportunities. Like that would be YouTube, where you're competing with big, big companies generally, or just buying scaled ad spend. They're pulling back budgets to save money. And so we see usually reductions in our cost per impressions, cost per clicks and things on those placements that are typically competitive on against, you know, like the Chuy's and the Pecos and things like that. and so those are always kind of underused platforms that I think, if you could snap your fingers and make your clients do something automatically, what would it be if you could get them to do something?

Trace 00:44:31  one thing that I actually haven't really thought about recently.

Trace 00:44:35  That actually plays a huge role in the practice is demeanor and attitude. If I could snap my finger and make every single one of my practice doctors insanely happy, insanely positive, insanely funny. I can promise you, like our practices would be busy. It's crazy to say, but I promise you, having a doctor that's insanely happy, super positive, super motivational, it rubs off 100% on the, you know, people working coworkers, working CSRs, working technicians, all that, you know, and everybody's different, of course, but I excel. I excel at work when I am in a good environment and I really feel like a lot. A lot of people are too. If you have a good environment, you know your boss is amazing to you. Your other coworkers are having a good time, but also, you know, still getting their work done. then then that's what I would do. Honestly.

Brandon 00:45:30  I totally agree. culture makes all the difference in the practice. And, Like our chipper happy practice owners are crushing it in general.

Brandon 00:45:41  I think that's a really good, attitude to have for sure, because it just rubs off on your CSRs and your team, and you don't have to be all sunshine and rainbows all the time. But like.

Trace 00:45:54  We all have.

Brandon 00:45:54  Good attitude.

Trace 00:45:55  For sure.

Brandon 00:45:56  Yeah, exactly. And we know that practice owners definitely have bad days. for sure. But I totally agree. Like, you can't beat, just like I can't you figure it out attitude, when it comes to everything. And I think that actually is like the biggest determination of success, which is kind of odd, too. Like, sometimes we'll get clients who they come to us and they're like, I know this isn't going to work, but let's try it. And you're like, why? Why do you think that? Like, why is that true? And we typically can convert those people. I'm thinking of a few clients. but it's a lot harder. It just takes a lot of time. And they're constantly trying to be like, prove why it doesn't work.

Brandon 00:46:40  Then rather than, like, say, oh, these clients came from here. We've matched their phone numbers. Here's the return on investment like that definitely is is one thing. One thing that I wish that I could do would be to, number one, get more of your existing clients coming in more frequently. So work on those internal retention tools, like if we have a practice that's like a 3 or 4 doctor practice, and let's say we're spending $2,000 a month on ads like that is definitely going to supplement and increase new clients. But we can't carry a three doctor practice on $2,000 of ad spend. it just won't fill, you know, 40 schedule appointments a week, right? And so Making sure that your existing clients are coming in frequently, that you're talking to them often, that you understand what their problems are. All of those things are really, really important, and you can't overstate how important it is to make sure that you're engaging and retaining your existing clients. The other thing that does, too, is anytime we generate a new client and if they come in, you know, 2.4 times a year, that's going to have a really strong lifetime value for that client.

Brandon 00:47:52  So make sure we're retaining them as much as possible. And keeping the practice going through that. and then I guess last question. Is there any big thing that you see people missing that you think they should know about right now? And marketing, especially with client acquisition?

Trace 00:48:22  It's a hard one. Missing. I feel like I would like to say majority of our clients aren't really missing anything. I would say more of maybe the full picture. they're kind of wanting. Like I would say some of our clients are wanting like next day results, right? Which is definitely feasible and possible, but that's not realistic. and so I would say having a game plan for the next six months, right. Or having a game plan either for like the next month or next six months. Right. and looking at the full picture rather than just next day, I would say that's probably one thing that I can think about off the top of my head right now.

Brandon 00:49:03  All right. I, I would agree, but I would probably compress that down to like at least two months.

Brandon 00:49:07  It's like if you have a sick pet coming in and there can be lots of problems with it. Like developing a treatment plan for it instead of being like, oh yeah, for sure this pill is going to fix it. Like your your ads and things will generate new clients for you, but it won't fix the bigger problems and trends that are going on in the practice. And so using it as a component that's going to help to grow your practice is really, really important. But being like, I need the magic pill and the practice is going to die if we don't get it and it has to work in the next two days or else, like it's not going to work out. That's that's definitely not a realistic thing to expect. So I would totally agree with that. for sure. Well, thank you so much. Trace, I appreciate all the work. You. Clients love you. You.

Trace 00:49:59  Oh, yeah. I love working with them. I love working with them. Couldn't have asked for a better, better job.

Trace 00:50:03  And I love doing these podcasts, too. So we get some likes, comment, and I'll be on the next one.

Brandon 00:50:09  Everybody say hi to Trace. And if you guys want some help with your marketing, be sure to comment below. Send us an email you can send Trace an email trace@maverickdigitalmarketing.com. All right. Thanks, Trace. Have a good one.

Trace 00:50:20  You too. Bye.