Go back in time with me to 2005.
Websites were five page online brochures. Smartphones didn’t exist yet. You still had a Yellow Pages ad. We had to pay by the minute for phone calls!
In 2005, I was writing content for a web directory of cosmetic procedures and doctors. When a new procedure or treatment came out, I couldn’t just Google it to learn about it. I had to talk to doctors and device company reps, crash laser dinners, and write content like a reporter.
To know what questions the public was asking about those treatments or procedures and answer those questions on the website I worked for, I had to go listen to patients ask their questions in an actual doctor’s office.
Our websites got better and grew much larger, we got better at SEO, and Adwords gobbled up another big chunk of the marketing budget (which is still a bottomless pit with terrible ROI btw).
And then came social media, and its capacity for massive reach grabbed our attention in the same way a lottery ticket fools you into thinking if you play enough you’ll eventually win.
Someone you know has 100k followers, it must be possible!
Along with your website, SEO, and Adwords, now it’s standard to hire a full time in-house social media marketer, or two, or in one practice I know there is a team of six, standing around trying to look busy and create content all day long. And there in the background, Meta slowly, painfully, and intentionally limits your social reach to force you into the paid advertising machine.
Just boost the post. Just buy some followers to get over the 10k mark. Just get verified. Just ask all of your patients for reviews. Just get one more tool. Just increase the budget to get through the downturn.
This is where we are today. Wasting thousands on paid ads every month and rarely, if ever, tracking whether the lead became a patient and what that cost per acquisition was. Completely over-indexed and over-resourced on social media marketing, ignoring the cost of the full time employee we hired to take these pictures that last for a day and aren’t remembered by anyone.
Consider the sustainability of such an arrangement and what is required to come up with engaging, post-worthy visual content every day of the week. Your team loves you and they do good work, but it’s never quite how you want to be seen. It still requires your attention and feedback. It still feels vulnerable and somewhat dangerous.
So you settle for pretty close, because the tradeoff is that nothing would ever get done if you edited every post, every caption, before and after photo, blog post, procedure page, email blast, ad variation, print ad, whatever. The risk you take by letting go has real legal and financial consequences.
A tattoo isn’t blurred and a patient demands compensation. A poorly-written caption suggests breast implants are a biohazard and out come the pitchforks.
Wouldn’t it be nice to take marketing completely off your plate? The hard truth is that there is no successful strategy where the surgeon can do NOTHING. People need to see, hear, and feel like they know their surgeon to make a confident decision.
That can happen online or it can happen in person, and the more you can do that ahead of actually meeting in person, the closer they will be to making that decision. That’s a powerful enough reason to do a podcast in and of itself. For the listener it’s a chance to hear how you talk and think, and decide if you want to invest the time, money, effort in battling their way onto your schedule.
But the real magic comes in the myriad ways the podcast can save time and drive long-term results in all the other areas of practice marketing. And that’s my secret sauce.
I’d love to tell you more about how you can get off the hamster wheel.