When I first connected with this Spokane based physical therapy clinic they were paying $1K+ a month to local news sites to distribute their written content. The crazy part? Their revenue wasn’t growing.
From 2018 to 2019 I helped grow this medical clinic from $900k to $1.4 million in yearly revenue. During that time period they invested only $36K spread between ad spend and my service fee to attain this growth.
Below is a graph showing patients per month for the organization from September 2018 to October 2019.
This growth increased their demand so much they had to open a new clinic to increase their monthly patient care throughput. The client at one point told me “This growth is great, but it has been too fast. Can we slow down?”. We throttled back ad spend in response.
Hi I’m Cody Schneider, president of Schneider Media – a digital agency that specializes in growth marketing for small businesses.
Here’s how I helped a 25 year old physical therapy clinic transition from traditional to digital marketing and experience rapid growth.
If you would like to hire me, use the form below.
Physical Therapy Business Strategy
To begin I helped them differentiate from their competition in the community.
Previously they had been promoting all of their services with equal resources. But this distributed their marketing thrusts too and didn’t solidify them as an expert in a specific service category.
With this in mind, I had a conversation with the founder of the medical clinc about what she felt they did different and better than any competitors in their community.
From these conversations we concluded they were the best in their community at women’s health physical therapy.
Once we had this North Star, I determined that the most arbitrage existed in providing services for pelvic floor physical therapy, breast cancer physical therapy and and prenatal postpartum physical therapy.
Here’s the logic behind this business decision:
– 1 in 3 women have a pelvic floor disorder
– 1 in 10 women will face breast cancer in their life (oncology is also a highly profitable service in PT)
– 1 in 2 women who give birth will experience some type of physical challenge
– The demographic for these three services (pelvic floor, breast cancer, postpartum) were female
– Women are the primary decision makers of health care for their families – if we could win them as customers we could win their families as well
There were other factors that influenced this decision, but these were the foundational ideas.
The last thing we did before venturing on this journey was define the patient lifetime value to be $1,200.
A patient lifetime value is how much a patient will make you over the lifetime of going to your clinic.
From here my team got to work.
Goal Based Marketing
Goal based marketing is a modern strategy I employ to help companies grow quickly. The idea is simple, start with the user action you want people to make on your website, and work your way upstream to find the right channels and media to accomplish your goals.
This model is straightforward and uses a simple sequence:
Traffic –> Content –> Capture –> Nurture
Send targeted traffic, to educational content, that captures emails, and then nurture the leads with automated email campaigns.
Traffic That’s Cost Effective
Since our focus was on women we tested Facebook Ads and Pinterest Ads. We found through our trials that Facebook ads were the most cost effective way to get traffic, so we put all ad budget there. Below is a screenshot of the targeting I used for this client.
Content that Educates
The content we sent the traffic to was educational on the the specific services they offered. We made them very conversational and tried to remove the taboo around pelvic floor health. These articles are 750 – 1000 words, contain photos and videos and are mobile friendly.
Of the 20 articles we tested, 3 pieces went viral. Those three pieces are the ones we continue to run today.
Capturing Contact Info
To capture contact info, I used a contact form, downloadable PDF, and newsletter popup on the content pages. These were strategically placed throughout the content so that they triggered at different points of the reading journey. We wanted to give the user multiple ways for them to learn more from us at different commitment levels.
The PDF download is our best lead asset.
Nurture Our Leads
Email is so powerful, and done so poorly by SMBs. Provide value over, over a long time horizon, with call to actions on the landing pages not in the emails email will serve you immensely. Also, through time you’ll grow you email list that is the most value asset a company can own.
Below is a screenshot of our automated email nurture campaign for this time period.
Analytics and Conclusion
The real power of digital growth marketing is that each month you get more efficient. I look at the data, see what is working and what isn’t and then do more of what is working and less of what isn’t. It’s very simple, but the discipline and patience is hard.
Every client I work with tries to do too much and wants a magic bullet. There is no magic bullet. Digital marketing is a lifestyle choice. You get up, do the work each day and 6 months later you lost weight.
Stop trying to be on every social channel, promoting every service for short periods of time. What actually work is focus on communicating a single service, over a single channel, for a long period of time. Anyone who disagrees is wrong.
