Ep. 245: Back-to-School Blueprint: Capturing The Autumn Patient Surge

Patient Care Marketing Pros (00:00.206)
I actually had a conversation this week with a client where they wanted to increase budget for just a day and then turn it right back down the next day or shift it to another location just on the fly. Doesn't work. marketing doesn't work that way.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (00:21.4)
What's up? Walk ins Welcome crowds. So we have another webinar episode for you guys. It's that time of the year. It is August. So we have a whole webinar dedicated to taking advantage of the surge that you're having right now in the August, September timeframe. Cause we know like this is when schools get back into play. This means your patient volume is probably up and you're probably running a little chaotic right now. And we we give you a blueprint of, hey, don't just let it go to the wayside and where in two months from now you wish you had that surge again.

How can you capitalize what you're doing now? Now, last week's episode, we kind of touched on the importance of just this time of the year, but on this webinar, we actually have some action plans behind it, what you can actually do, and then like a full 30 day like rollout with that goes with it. So I know you'll enjoy this because it's gonna add a little more fire under you in terms of like, hey, I should probably pursue this a little bit, not just enjoy the s the season and then be really frustrated in two months when it everything slows back down. Hope you guys enjoy.

You need to ask yourself, like, is this smooth on all cylinders, or is there some things that we could probably figure out? All right. Next, right here. So this is what's happening in the in the world right now. So I my daughter got sick, or I have, you know, I need to get some forms fit out because we've changed schools, or I need some routine care, or maybe a vaccine if you do vaccines, things like that. And so all these things are happening and

This is why it's a surge, right? Because all like every and then we shove everybody back into school, into rooms together, and then now the sickness gets to spread around and all the fun stuff. So that's all that's happening right now. And hopefully your system that you built in the summer is working really well for you. But this is what people are thinking. Like, this is your surge. You'll it'll continue a little bit into September, and then October and May start dipping. Like you'll have some falling and stuff, but your return visits start to really matter. Because we know that.

Lifetime value of a patient's really important. You don't want a patient one time. You want that patient to keep coming back and back and back and hopefully bring other people with them over time. But this is what's happening. So you're feeling you're probably pretty feeling pretty good. Your numbers have lifted, your profits gone up, all or starting to move up. You've recovered now from the summer. so you start to what most people do, relax and say, all right, there's plenty of demand. I'm not worried. There's money in the bank. Whatever. And then you start to forget.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (02:40.802)
That October, November's coming. Then it may start dying off again. And then that that next surge doesn't really show up until January. And like even this year, it was like a late January because the flu season just kind of delayed itself some. Last year was a very weird year. And so, like, that's all happening. Well, we're trying to tell you how you can prepare and not have these lulls. Like, there's gonna be some, but let's not let's soften that blow a little bit, right? And not just rely

On super busy seasons, they're just that cash is to carry us for two or three months until it gets busy again. That's you know, ultimately at with any business, you want consistency because you have consistency, you can have growth, you can have scalability, and all the things that go with it. So there you but all right, so and this is what happens that you don't have the strategy, you're not prepared ahead of time, and everything kind of falls apart a little bit. Or you have a reactive setup.

Multiple like a great example right now. The lettuce. We all know the the the lettuce and what it's caused and all the things. That's a pretty reactive way to like get stuff right where we had urgent cares. Hey, can we run some campaigns? Like it's now been in the news for a couple of weeks. It's not going away quite yet. Can we run campaigns? Sure. Well, when we started running some campaigns just to see, the demand was already falling back off. It was too late. Like we couldn't capitalize on it for the the clinics because it happened very it went up.

And it went straight back down. It's like a roller coaster. Just went up real quick and fell right back down. It wasn't smooth, wasn't long lasting. And the potential it got out of it's low. Like they probably got some patients out of it, but that wasn't the like people weren't all over that type of thing. Now, if we saw that coming and it was going to be a long term situation, yeah, let's start building stuff now and build off of that. So that reactive mindset, like because we we've actually had a conversation this week with a client.

Where they wanted to increase budget for just a day and then turn it right back down the next day or shift it to another location just on the fly, doesn't work. marketing doesn't work that way. It's very rare that one thing very quickly will fix all the problems. The best way I could describe it, if you were given a thousand dollars to spend on marketing for one month, if you spread it out over thirty days evenly, so thirty-three dollars a day, versus you actually just taking two days and spending

Patient Care Marketing Pros (05:03.896)
$200 on one day and $800 on the next day, I can pretty much guarantee you that 30 day spread will give you more patients, 10x versus that simple two day run. That's the way campaigns and and platforms work. They don't want hop in and hop out. They want consistency over time. Like even our clinics that stuck with us over the summer in terms of budget, where they didn't lower budget or anything, just kept it. Their conversion costs started to go down because the competitors kind of faded away because it was summertime.

And now it's starting to pick back up. Now that conversion cost is maintained, it's low, like still low. And then then the overall conversions keep rising. And so we can throw more budget at it and just goes with it. And not so much like, we got to rebuild and let it be better. What we see all the time. So that's that telling you having a reactive mindset in your marketing never works out. But having a proactive approach and thinking ahead makes all the difference. And that and that's what we're trying to discuss today. So, but that goes right into a poll.

How far ahead are you planning your seasonal marketing? So we'll have a poll go up in this second. There it is. Let me know. Is it do you you got the wait? I think that's the wrong poll. Yeah, hang on. I might want to switch polls. There you go. One second. Wrong poll. Don't answer that one. Yes, there you go. So how far ahead is your clinic? Is planning your seasonal marketing? Are you months ahead?

Couple weeks ahead, I just whenever the man changes, I change with it. What do you do? I can tell you most most of the time when we ask this question, like it's like couple, maybe a month or two ahead. I don't know. So we'll see what the answer is. We'll get the responses up in just a second. There you go. Okay. So it's kind of a mix. Couple, but nobody's not good. Nobody reacts as demand changes. That's good.

And that's good to hear. And here's the thing, this is why I tell people when it comes to seasonal thing th things. Well, seasonal things is the your seasons technically are kind of the same every year. There's variances on timing where like flu season might be late, summer slowdown might be a little adjusted, whatever it is. But the difference though is you know these seasons come. Every single year it's going to be cold.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (07:24.12)
It's going to be hot. It's going to there's going to be some sickness coming around. You know these things. So if you know it, why don't you go ahead and prepare as much ahead as you can? Obviously there's going to be changes, but you might as well have 75% of it figured out and then make the adjustments rather than just like, yeah, it's that time of year. I should go do something. That's what we're trying to hook into. But all right, so moving forward. Maybe. There you go. So we're having that shift, right? So you're not just sitting here relying on that one burst that you're relying on right now.

Because you should be going through it. I really hope you are getting some nice patient numbers right now. And then you're thinking to yourself, all right, I everything's fine. I don't have to think about it. And then we're trying to shift you to like, all right, this is actually that chance to take advantage of all these patients coming in. Not only are preparing stuff for the future, but you're preparing to re-engage with these people in a couple of months. Where that one patient is not one person, it's a family. If I have a child that I'm taking to the doctor, it's not.

you know, just my child, I'm there. My wife might be there. Maybe I have my dad who said, How's my how's the granddaughter? And we went to this place and it was really good. I'm glad to know that I've always wondered about them. Like these are all these layers that come with it. And I need you to capitalize on this family because if that one patient becomes three patients all of a sudden.

Totally worth it. And the more patients you have related to that family, the more likely they'll be coming back because now it becomes a a better standard of like, yeah, yeah, I always go to them because they treat me right. That's what our goal is. The goal is not just thanks, thanks for your money. Here's that one review request, and you're never going to hear from us ever again. That's not the goal. You guys live in a very challenging industry where loyalty is tough. Getting repeat visits is tough.

has to be intentionality behind it and that's what we're here for. Like we want that intentionality side of it. Because if you don't if you're not intentional, they'll just go to wayside and you'll be like, where did my search go? And why am I looking at my bank account all of a sudden and I didn't want to. So that's what's going on there. But anyway, that that's what we're trying to talk about. So here are the four four part series to make this work. We have we're gonna own the search. I'm gonna go through all these act individually. You're gonna own the search. You're gonna run the right campaigns.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (09:43.882)
activate the community and then convert and retain the family. And it's in this particular order because search still matters. It's very important. we still find that majority of people find we actually are now able to do some additional tracking like clockwise on the online booking stuff. And it's super fun to watch because when we're able to turn it on and see gosh on the online booking you probably 80% is through Google, like the reference point is still finding Google as the number one referral.

I know and there's a lot of conversation about AI stuff, but like, man, Google still pulls really, really well. Anyway, and then the campaigns, like this, like are we being proactive at our campaigns and not just running one set and walking away from it in the community? There's a lot of cool stuff in the community we'll talk about. And then of course the convert and retain, like what can we do to build that relationship? So here we go. All right, on the search. These are some things that we practice with our clients, but we also just tell everybody.

This is what matters when it comes to searching. It it it goes back to a they ask you answer mindset, which is a Marcus Sheridan book. Go look it up, they ask you answer. He and we actually got to see him live a couple of weeks ago. It was super cool. And but anyway, his focus was hey, you need to be answering the questions that people are asking. And if you can't, then they're probably gonna go to your competitor to find the answer. And then all of a sudden the competitor gets to business and you don't. So here's the mindset.

Are is your website, so think of your website first, is your website answering all the services that you want to highlight? So go look at your services internally. Look at all the services that you offer from x-ray to just traditional urgent care to on-site labs to maybe there's you're doing DOT physicals or immigration physicals and then SED testing. Look at all of them, right? Because you offer quite a few, and not every urgent care offers the same thing. Do you treat young children or do you avoid them?

That type of thing. What does it look like? Are you starting to offer primary care as well? So think through that. All right. Now, now that you have a list, you should have a short list in your mind. Okay. Now go to your website. Do you have a service page for each one? So you have a page on your website dedicated to that particular service that talks about it, has details around it. It's not just AI generated content that's generic, but it

Patient Care Marketing Pros (12:07.928)
There's some local flavor put into it that represents you guys really well. Is it there? Are you answering the right questions? Because chances are you know what kind of questions your patients ask, maybe related to x-ray. What can you x-ray? What can't x-ray? How quickly do I get the image back? Can you tell me what to do once it happens? on-site labs, is it same day as the next day? Is it something I get while I'm still sitting in the clinic or I need to come back? Do you mail it off?

Answer all those questions, right? Because they're gonna they're asking because they want to know. And if you can be up up front with it, go for it. Another one that's not here, like when that's not necessarily a service page, self-pay pricing. That's almost a service in itself because not everybody offers self-pay pricing, and not everybody wants to put that pricing on their website because they feel like they're losing, right? Like, if they find out how much we charge, then they're not gonna come. Not really. They rather have the transparency than the surprise bill.

Every single time. I'd rather know I'm paying you $150, then pay you $50, and then I get a bill for $100 later. To me, that's a bad experience. So making sure you're transparent and all that and put on your website. Next is answering the essentials. Here's the basic essentials. Are you open? What are your hours? Where are you? Do you take my insurance? And can I go in and book now or can I call you now? That's what people care most about. Even this little screen on the right here, the little snip of what it

Like in mindset wise, this is what you're what people are looking for. I have sports physical near me. Here's your clinic name. You have really good reviews. You're not too far from me. And you can see me today. I can click and I can click a call to action and go and get that started. That's the ultimate goal. Obviously, like this is like a sim simplified version of what a Google listing would look like look like, but it's essential what people are looking for because they want to be at their answers very quickly.

Next on the I talked about the service pages a little bit, but making sure that you're just not sending everyone to a generic homepage. Like your homepage is going to talk about services, gonna talk about you a little bit, it's gonna talk about your locations. But anytime you're putting anything out there, you wanna be able to link to

Patient Care Marketing Pros (14:20.28)
Hey, real quick, if you've been thinking about how to get your clinic up to 23 patients per day and beyond, patient care marketing pros is here to help you scale. We have worked with hundreds of locations to drive results through digital marketing services. We do search engine optimization, Google Ads, Facebook, Meta, all the different ways that we can help you drive more patients through your doors. If you want to see what your clinic looks like online, what your competitors are doing, and how we can help fill in the gaps to grow your clinic, click on the link below and

Get a discovery call with myself or Michael or Grace. We'll show you what's working, what's not, and we will help you get past that 23 patients per day barrier and beyond. I look forward to you.

Even in your business profile, you can list services and you want a link to your services. You don't want to just keep sending everything to the homepage. I think the homepage looks great on like Google Analytics, GA4. I got all these clicks and all these visitors, but that's that's not that's not what they want most of the time. They want something very specific. And we see it in ads all the time. And then finally, are you tracking your outcome? Hey, you got people coming coming in, you have people calling, you have these conversion data. Are you like

Keeping up with it? Are you monitoring the calls and the book visits? Are people that are booking actually showing up? Are you checking those boxes off or no? On the call monitoring stuff, like I said, we have a front desk training course coming. And one of the things I push on is like you need a HIPAA compliant call or phone system that can record calls. And you need to regularly go in and just spot check them. And you're looking for certain things. Are they asking for the appointment to ask them to come in? Are they just saying, here's your info?

We close at seven, be here by 645 for last patient. Are they turning away services because they don't want to deal with it? Are they just rude? All these things. Because no matter how great your marketing is, no matter how much money you put into it, your front desk or whatever you're using to help that convert them into a patient, if it's a bad experience, it's really just a waste of time and money. So that's a big push there. Make sure you're tracking stuff. I hope you are. I hope you're going in and looking at stuff regularly.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (16:26.412)
You can't look at it all the time, maybe at least once a month or once a quarter, and just kind of see the improvements or see opportunities to make adjustments and do some additional training. But like I said, we have a course coming out soon that we'll actually dive into that in the course, which is really fun. All right. Next is the campaigns themselves. So by default, high-intense search is where you start. High intense search is like the classic urgent care near me. Maybe it's SED testing, maybe it's flu related stuff.

Anything that's like a hot like a hot topic keyword that we know people are looking for, it does take keyword research to do it. You can't just guess. You do need to look because we find because we work with urgent cares from Hawaii. I used to say Hawaii to New York, but now I can say Hawaii to Maine. So the whole stretch there. And we're find that there are a lot of similarities among locations, but there are nuances in between, like what they call walking care versus urgent care and so forth. So you have to be very aware of what that looks like. Also, too, we always joke.

If you're near a college town, your number one campaign should be SCD testing, especially this time of year with everybody coming back. It's a real thing. So it's just like you have to be very conscious of your location and your community. Next is the awareness retargeting side. So the retargeting is kind of a challenging word in the space of urgent care because of HIPAA, because HIPAA doesn't really allow much retargeting. But you need to adjust your mindset. So

Traditionally speaking, you don't want to retarget with like Facebook pixel pixel or MetaPixel. There's some challenges that go with that. We try to avoid it as much as we can because there's just some things that have happened in lawsuits and we don't want to deal with it. But what you can do in the retargeting piece is you now have an amazing account list of all your patients, what they came in for and all these things. You can now create audiences around those things and focus on what can I send to them. Because I know the reality is

You probably don't communicate with your patients after they've done their visit, other than a review link. Or did you get your here's your link to your prescription? And maybe that's it. There's I bet there's not a lot of follow-up care. And that's where all the gold mine is the follow-up, because it's a whole lot easier to bring in that repeat patient over time cheaper than trying to grab that new one every single time. And it just builds itself. Finally, too, on the focus landing page.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (18:45.784)
This goes back to like this when you're running campaigns of any sort. I don't even care if you're running a campaign that's related to maybe a a community event that you've targeted type of thing and you're not just there physically, but you're running some digital to go with it. It needs to go to a page that makes total sense for the campaign you're running. That's for anything that you do. Not just running Google Ads or Facebook ads. Anything you do, you need dedicated pages for that. One, you can track it. Hey, people are getting to it or not. Two, when they get there, it's exactly what they were expecting.

Last thing you don't an example, simple example. I don't want to click on shoes and I show up and it's and it's a shirt. Well, I didn't want a shirt, I want shoes. Same concept with everything you're pushing out there. If you have if you have a QR code at your clinic that sends them somewhere, is it sending them to where it needs to go? Not just like the home page of your website or a generic search for something. even with these cards that we talk about, like these things right here, like this goes straight to the review option.

on your business profile for that location. So it's like you just tap and then go. And that's it. And the because the the fewer barriers you have, the better everything actually. All right.

So next is the community side and the retaining side. So the community side is lot of fun. So the community side, this is where you need to showcase that you are a part of the community. The reality is urgent cares, you are serving one to 10 miles. That's probably your now. If you're rural, it may be greater. And then if you're like in a tight city, like a New York City type of thing where it's blocks, like you only need to serve a handful of blocks. Understandable. Generally speaking,

One to ten miles, that's that's who you serve. And so what inside, we'll just say 10 mile radius, what inside a 10 mile radius can you go to? What are you doing to engage with that community? Easiest one by far is getting involved with school systems. Because school systems have ac I mean, it's not terrible, they have access to hundreds or thousands of students. But digitally speaking, like we're kind of limited, like we've we can't geofence a school that it's not allowed.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (20:57.154)
But from a physical on the ground, boots on the ground situation, you can get involved. Let me kind of paint the picture a little bit. So here we are, I'm in Birmingham, Alabama. Our office is really like Hoover. If I had an urgent care here, I would go to the Hoover School Systems. Now, I can't go into school systems and just say, Hey, I want to be your preferred partner with anything medical related. They're gonna say, Okay, you and everybody else. They don't care. That's not how you do it. You gotta build into it. So what do you do? You go seek out events you can sponsor.

You become involved, not only just paying money to go do stuff, but like you get on boards and things like that. Takes time, it's not like an instant fix. And you just kind of build that part where we call it marketing, omnipresence, where people are just seeing you every witch away in that community. And it's not just ad hoc. Because if you just sponsor, I'm gonna tell you right now, if you sponsor one school event, say, Well, I didn't do anything, I'm not gonna do it again. Well, of course not. Nobody really knew you yet. You need to like build that rapport over time with your community.

Because your community, like they remember stuff. And so you want to have that positive memory with them and just like that cornerstone, a medical cornerstone in your community. Cause some of you, your urgent cares, are in an area that you are the the only choice, or your choice, or and then maybe a terrible competitor down the road. And so like you want to make sure that you're well exposed there. So it's to just kind of think through that. It's not a quick win, but hey, you are entering that time of the year though. Like we know here in the south, at least that I'm aware of, you know, you have

Trunk retreats, churches and other businesses run trunk or treats. You could run a trunk retreat. We had a urgent care that we interviewed on a podcast. That was one of their events. They ran their own trunk retreat. Had hundreds of families come out. Why not? Like why wouldn't an urgent care do? You most of you guys have good parking lots. This would work out pretty well. You can serve your community. You provide the candy, you get your staff to show up with cars and then maybe ask some families as well that you know, maybe patients that you know.

Hey can you show your car? We'll we'll provide the candy and then we'll provide maybe a coupon for a next visit or something like that. And there you go. And you're giving back. Now will that be instant return? Not necessarily, but it will build over time. And that goes for any other community events. Like reach out to your community, see what's going on. How can I sponsor? How can I help? We have a team that does this. Can we come in? Because like, you know, goal-wise, if you could become like the preferred provider for all the sports events, like that makes a big difference over time.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (23:16.618)
And to get your your foot in the door. So when there's an opportunity and you've been building that reputation with that school system and have some new event, they go to you first and not you try to go to them. And that's that's the goal with all that. So that's the community side. And then from our standpoint, you brought those patients in right now in August, September. And now you're showing up everywhere in inside their community because they're probably local to you. And now like, yeah, I've been there, it's a good time. And all of a sudden a little bit of word mouth picks up. So all that starts to matter.

You know, here Patrick Market Ros, we don't believe in a single channel of marketing. Like our clients that do what work with us and also do other channels of marketing tend to do better because they're just spreading their name in a very positive way and controlled way, it just makes things a lot better for you. Finally, so on so that's like community side. So on the convert and ret retain. So you made the first step. You had a really good first-time visitor experience. And if you don't know if you have or not, just go look at Google reviews. That's the easiest way to do it.

my goodness, you could have an AI right now just say, Hey, scan my business profile for all my reviews. Can you tell me the good and the bad and and maybe there's a pattern to look for or trend? Identify. If you're below a four point star, you need to fix that because the rest of this stuff becomes way more challenging if you can't fix that first. So go fix that. If you're above a four, I think I believe still today, four point three is like the golden average. Five is great, but four point three feels more real. so any

Basically anything in the mid fours, you're doing really well. So you can check that box. Okay. So you've checked the box so they're having a good time. They can book online. If they don't, they call you. It's a great experience. You've trained your people to answer well. So all that's happened. The next phase is the are you sending them care reminders after the visit? This is the part that most people go ahead and skip over because they don't know. They say, Hey, here's that one text that or email says, I hope you had a good time. Here's the review link.

But we're saying no, no, go beyond that. Here's some things that are coming up. Here's some we recognize we've prepared for the year and recognize the seasonality. Here's some things we want you to look at. So that's what we're leaning into on this part. And your EMR has capabilities. Like all the EMRs are a little bit different, but there's some things that we say C CRM here because that's more the marketing term, but EMR-wise, you have the same data. You have patient data, you have what they come in for, you have opportunities to.

Patient Care Marketing Pros (25:46.402)
Take you take it to the next level. There's a company that we've talked to called Preface, and they do this where they go into your EMR and look for opportunities to send out these messages like, hey, this person had a an x-ray on something, it's been a few months, they'll send a message to them saying, How's the pain going? So a real care message, like this sending actually match, not just pure upselling, right? Like an actual check-in of some sort. You're doing all that just to kind of keep them engaged and keep that little touch points with them. Because if you can put a touch point out there, if they came in August.

And then you gave them a touch once or twice in September and then again in October and they decide to get and they get sick again or something comes up or they need maybe they're not sick, they need something for school. Who's the people that were texting? yeah, those guys, those are great. Let's go go see them and get that taken care of. That was a good experience. That's where it all kind of comes together and wraps up really well. So that that's the push there, right? And you gotta think through it. Like, am I doing this really well or am I just kind of doing this? I don't know.

so which goes into this question. Everything I just talked about on the blueprint side of things, which one do you think you need to focus on the most? Okay. So now you're on the other side of this. Do you have an action plan in mind? Are you actually going to take the time and say, Okay, I have a big surge right now. How can I make sure I can utilize this and make my slow season less slow and just better overall? 'Cause you know that matters because

The second that the slow season starts up, you start to panic a little bit. You may have reactions. But let's be proactive. So I hope this webinar information was really good for you. Put your proactive hat on now and so now you can actually say, Okay, slow season's not gonna take me out. I'm gonna make sure I do all the right things and get ready for it right now. Hope you guys enjoyed it.