Marketing Tips for Doctors

In this episode, Barbara and David discussesdiscuss:    Six right-fit target markets for physician practices  David outlined six crucial audiences: current patients, new patients, current employees, potential employees, current referral sources, and potential referral sources. He stressed that practices often neglect one or more of these or blend them together instead of treating each as a distinct target.    Culture as the foundation of retention and marketing  He emphasized that employee retention and effective marketing both start with culture—clearly defined core values, core behaviors, and a “cultural handbook” that goes beyond legal HR documents and is built with and for employees.    Systematic feedback from employees, patients, and referral sources  David recommended annual “snapshot” surveys using an outside party to gather more candid feedback from employees, patients, and referral sources. This yields insights to improve operations, strengthen culture, and collect testimonials.    Employees and patients as powerful referral engines and storytellers  He explained how employees can be coached to talk about the practice’s culture in everyday conversations, and how practices should proactively gather and use patient testimonials (written and video) on websites, in waiting rooms, and in email newsletters.    Key Takeaways:  “Culture is everything, and communicating that culture and building it with and for your employees is really critical.”    Connect with David Mastovich:    LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidmmastovich/   Instagram:   https://www.instagram.com/massolutions/  Business website: https://davemastovich.com/   Email:   [email protected]  Book:    No bullsh!t Marketing: https://davemastovich.com/books/      Connect with Barbara Hales:   Twitter: @DrBarbaraHales Facebook: facebook.com/theMedicalStrategist Business Website: TheMedicalStrategist.com Email: [email protected]  YouTube:@barbarahales LinkedIn: https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/barbarahalesBooks: Content Copy Made Easy 14 Tactics to Triple Sales Power to the Patient: The Medical Strategist   TRANSCRIPTION    Chapter 1: Introduction & Guest Overview    Narrator [0:00:02]: Paul, welcome to the Marketing Tips for Doctors podcast, where you’ll discover the secrets to attracting more patients ready to schedule their first appointments to grow your practice without spending hours and hours away from your practice or home. Hear how to boost your online presence, develop a strong rapport with each patient to increase patient compliance, and add value while growing revenue. Now, here’s your host, Dr. Barbara Hales, America’s leading medical strategist.    Dr. Barbara Hales [0:00:32]: Welcome to another episode of Marketing Tips for Doctors. I’m your host, Dr. Barbara Hales, and today we have a really special guest with us, by the name of David Mastovich. Dave is the CEO and founder of Mass Solutions, and you will find the contact information and more about the company in the show notes. He is a consultant who drives growth in revenue, recruiting, retention, and results. He is the author of No Bullshit Marketing, a number one bestseller, and host of the long-running No Bullshit Marketing show, Easy to Remember. He turns data, behavior, and patterns into practical actions and stories leaders can use to transform their organizations. Earlier in his career at UPMC, Dave’s marketing leadership helped grow the system’s revenue from under 1 billion to 10 billion. Today, he brings that same mix of cognitive science and real-world execution to help organizations strengthen culture, increase enterprise value, and accelerate performance. Welcome to the show, Dave.    David Mastovich [0:01:57]: Thanks for having me, Barbara. I’m really excited to be here.    Dr. Barbara Hales [0:01:59]: Tell us about the six target markets that matter to physician practices.    Chapter 2: Six Target Markets & Culture / Retention    David Mastovich [0:02:05]: Thanks. Great question. It comes down to the fact that we often don’t realize the various target markets out there, so some of the ones I tell you about will be neglected. They’re neglected right now, and they’ll become obvious and say, “Whoa, I have been neglecting them. But first and foremost, it’s actually current patients, and I think that’s sometimes neglected a little bit, because you have an opportunity to talk to them more than you currently do, and then they become marketers for you. So, I think the first audience is tied to your current patients, the second is the one that everybody knows and targets the most, and that is trying to find new patients, and so that’s the one that everyone will relate to. But then there’s a group called Your Current Employees, and I think we don’t talk to them enough about how they can become a part of the marketing team, and how the culture that kept them is something they should talk about. And then potential employees, because we’re in a field with a lot of turnover and retention issues, and we’re also going through a lot of growth. So, the third and fourth are current and prospective employees, and there needs to be the same rigor in marketing and communication to current and prospective employees as there is for new patients. And then the fifth and sixth are referral sources, so current referral sources and potential referral sources, so all six of those are intertwined, and they make sense, but what ends up happening is we neglect one or two, or we blend them into one, and we just say we’re trying to talk to referral sources, and we don’t break down the art and science of it, and say, okay, here’s our current referral sources, and here’s what they look like, and here’s how many referrals they give, here’s how many they could give. So we try to get them to give more, but then who are the look-alikes that are similar to them that we’re not getting anything from? So that’s how the fifth and sixth ones come into play. So those are the six right-fit target markets for physician practice.    Dr. Barbara Hales [0:03:53]: Where so many practices say that once they train people to work as staff members, the next thing they know, the staff have up and quit. Do you have a special secret to retain them?    David Mastovich [0:04:07]: There’s no magic wand. I wish I did, but I will say that culture is everything, and communicating that culture and building it with and for your employees is really critical. So, where we’ve seen success at companies as large as UPMC, with the 10 billion and now like 20 billion in revenue, all the way down to a physician practice of two physicians and a mid-level practitioner. We’ve gone all the way, everything in between, and we’ve talked about how important it is to convey your cultural story. Why do employees come to work for you? Why do they stay? How long do they stay? What do they love about you, and talk about that to patients, even because patients need to hear that, and current and potential patients need to hear that? Current and potential employees need to hear that, talk about them, and give them positive feedback. All of those things matter, and some of those sound like common sense, but you’d be surprised how often we aren’t. When talking about our employees and our culture to current and potential patients, we also aren’t giving that positive feedback as much because we get so busy, and we don’t tie that back to the culture and say, “You’re living the culture in this way.” I think that’s what I mean by the feedback. The feedback needs to say, ” Hey, here’s a core behavior of the company. We have core values, but we also need to define the core behaviors that show that value in action, and then when it happens, we have to say to that employee, ” You know, our core value is customer service. We have multiple ways to say there are behaviors, and one is going above and beyond by doing whatever it takes to get the patient comfortable. You did that yesterday, Suzanne, when you did x. That’s how you make sure you’re talking to your employees about the culture and making the culture about them. It’s built by and for them.    Dr. Barbara Hales [0:05:48]: Do you create a handbook that you give to them when they first start under your employment?    David Mastovich [0:05:54]: Yes, yes, I think a lot of it comes down to we have an entire system around the retention and recruitment, and it does involve continually having input from the employees on what they see as the core behaviors that show the core value, and then over time you continually update that core handbook, cultural handbook that you have, and you call it a cultural handbook, as opposed to employee handbook. Use your terminology; play to your strengths. If you say we’re all about culture here, and the culture is this, then here are the three or four core values, examples of those core values in action, and core behaviors for each one in our handbook. In addition to the, oh, you have to do this, and we’re off on Thursday, you know, all that stuff that’s in the legalese is what people tend to remember to give, but when you talk about it from a culture standpoint, that’s when you make the most difference,    Dr. Barbara Hales [0:06:42]: That’s great. And also, I noticed that when a person has been working a while, asking them what they recommend to improve what they’re doing and valuing their opinion, as opposed to just giving you, you know, a statement about what they should be doing. I think that they appreciate that you respect them when you value their opinion and your own.    Chapter 3: Employee Feedback, Surveys & Referrals    David Mastovich [0:07:14]: Oh, there are two parts that as well, Barbara. So, the first is that they absolutely value you asking for their opinion. The second part of that first part is that you’ll actually hear things you can change and improve, but there’s a second way to do it as well. I recommend that you, everybody, do a quick snapshot survey every year when you talk to your employees, some patients, and some referral sources, using an outside source. It doesn’t have to be a big huge budget buster, but what it does is when you’re talking to an employee from the outside and saying, hey, your employer thought enough of you to have us talk to you, that also elevates you, and then they give their little more frank, both positive, they’re a little more direct on the positive, a little more direct on the constructive feedback with an outside party, so then when you can gather that back together, and even if you only have five employees, 10 employees, you’ll get that feedback, and you can hear ideas of how to improve, but they also appreciate that you talk to them. Then that same survey of patients gets you testimonials, and referral sources get you feedback on why they refer and why they don’t. They don’t say it exactly that way, but if you have a good interviewer and you have a good firm, that’s what our team has been trained on. Each of our team members has been trained to conduct those surveys because we do that for all of our clients across the country, and that’s a way to really get that touch-point in for employees as well.    Dr. Barbara Hales [0:08:29]: You don’t find that some of the employees are hesitant, to be honest, for fear of it affecting their employment.    David Mastovich [0:08:36]: Well, at a really small organization with two or three employees, it’s, it’s going to be a little more challenging, because they know that there’s less chance of anonymity, so with those, we often do it in sometimes in a group setting, and we try to make it less punitive, like as if they’re being less negative, but you can still get that done once you get beyond talking to two or three people, so if you’re a company that has 2530 employees, you can send an all employee survey out, and then we do the interviews as well, and they know that it’s the feedback is then coming multiple ways, the completely anonymous employee survey, and then the qualitative feedback, they know that we’re telling them, hey, we’re not going to say that Suzanne said that statement, and Barbara said this statement, and Dave said that statement, we’re going to come back and say some trends, we’re going to, because what you’ll, what you’ll find, we’ve seen three to four items get mentioned three or four times, and when you’re doing a qualitative survey, that means those are the ones to bring up, and so we can bring those up and combine it with the quantitative piece of the all employee survey that had maybe 10 questions, key is keep it really short, keep it to eight to 10 questions on the email survey, and three or four open-ended questions when you’re talking to them. Then they get the sense they can tell that this is not something you’re going to run and say so and so said this, because you’re saying, like, what’s one thing you’d change, what’s one thing that makes you want to work here. Those kinds of open-ended questions can make a huge difference.    Dr. Barbara Hales [0:09:57]: Absolutely, how would you encourage? Urge them to be referral sources,    David Mastovich [0:10:02]: well, with the with the employees, that there’s multiple things that they can do, they can talk to patients about the positive culture of the organization of the practice, so that’s something we want to get them to feel more comfortable talking about the culture, talk about the core values and the behaviors that exemplify those second thing is we want to get them to where they’re positive enough that they feel look when we go to our Fourth of July get-together here in a little bit, or when it’s around Labor Day, or whatever holiday, we’re going to talk about what we do for a living. It’s almost impossible after we get through the small talk, we end up inevitably saying something, so what do you do, or how’s work? We’d like them to maybe give a positive example, and the more you coach them on that, the more you support them. You get them then talking about you that way, so they’re talking to patients more because we’ve encouraged them to do that. They’re talking about us more in their private lives. We encourage them to do that, and when they get a referral from someone, the follow-up to them and the thank-you for that referral can help that person refer again. If they have someone call with a question, that could be a potential referral source. How they handle that can increase referrals. All of that takes communication from us as leaders, and we can’t just say it once. Saying it once helps a little, but you’ve got to say it repeatedly. You’ve got to recognize when someone does it well and include it in your employee email newsletter. You might put a sign in the break room about it. These are all different ways to get the message out again and again, so employees know they really drive the company’s growth and will be recognized when they exhibit that behavior.    Dr. Barbara Hales [0:11:36]: And I would assume that that stands the same way for having them speak to patients about ratings and reviews.    David Mastovich [0:11:46]: Yes, absolutely, absolutely. And I think that we have to be really patient because we have to look at ourselves. How often do we do reviews? And I’ll give you a personal example. So, whenever you go, and this is my second book, and you, you learned from doing the first one, and there’s a big gap between it, so the world has changed so much since the first two, and I had some experts that I brought on board to help me with, and they said you need to really talk to your employees, your referral sources, or centers of influence, your clients, your friends, your family, and get them to do reviews. Well, I have to tell you, the average person hasn’t really given a review, and they don’t even know how. My parents didn’t know how to shoot. My brother, my brother’s gonna kill me for saying this. He didn’t use Amazon. I’m like, what? So he didn’t. You can’t just go on to Amazon and give a review. They think it’s fake, then. So he had to get a gift card from Amazon and buy the book, even though I’m his brother and he didn’t know how to do any of that. So we actually built a little PDF that we sent to our clients and everybody on our email newsletter. And I tell this story because we expect reviews to come in so easily when we don’t review much ourselves. We don’t give ratings much ourselves, so we have to be patient and realize that that’s just not a normal train of thought for the average person; they can love your practice and never do that, and it’s nothing malicious. So, there’s a way to coach it. An example I would give is, look what I did with my book. We ended up hitting 100 reviews before the first anniversary, and I will tell you, my book publisher said, I told him I have a goal of getting 100 reviews. He said, he said, yeah, right, Davis. I tell you what, I’ll give you a kicker if you get that. Well, he had to pay that kicker, but the reality is that people don’t get that many, and we got to 100 like three days before the book’s anniversary in one year. So that’s the example I would give you: we went out and talked to everybody we knew, and we didn’t just do one phone call, one email, or one conversation, but we didn’t bag either. We had one official email that went out with a little how-to, and we talked to people when we had the chance. Anybody who talked to me the week before the book, the day before the book, a week after the book, a month after, when I was on a Zoom call, I’d bring it up. These are the things that people listening to your podcast can do. Do they have something that explains how to do a review, and they’re thinking, what again? Go to my brother’s example, my parents’ example. One of my best clients said, ‘Dave, I’ve never given a review. Now, the fact that he told me that took vulnerability, because it’s kind of.. we’re all a little embarrassed when we haven’t done something like that. So I said to him, ‘Don’t worry about it, you’re going to be getting this PDF, and Courtney sent it out to everybody, so if you’re thinking you want more reviews, do something like that.    Dr. Barbara Hales [0:14:25]: Okay, so with the next book that you’re going to put out, would you consider having a QR code in there that takes them right to a page where they could then give their opinions?    David Mastovich [0:14:39]: Absolutely, absolutely, I think that’s good. QR codes are working way more. It’s funny, they’ve gone through this cycle 20 years ago when they came out, and we would push them for clients. The clients thought we were crazy; they didn’t do much. Then they did nothing for a while. Then, 10 years ago, they seemed to come back, only to be an afterthought again. And then the last three or four years, they’re now really common, and we had a client that they had a. Graduation for their career and technical school, and we had QR codes all around saying to go to this QR code, and you can drop your pictures there, because everybody’s taking pictures of themselves with their kids, and, and so we use that, and we had a tremendous response. So, yes, QR codes are really valuable, and I think that practices could do that as well.    Chapter 4: Storytelling, AI & Referral Source Growth System    Dr. Barbara Hales [0:15:21]: Yes. What do you mean when you say science and math drive the creative art in storytelling? You know, storytelling is just so important these days, but you know, obviously, there has to be some analytics involved. So, could you explain that?    David Mastovich [0:15:38]: I’ll explain it, particularly for your audience, the healthcare audience, and specifically physician practices, so the art is driven by the science and math. When you do some level of systematic gathering of insights, I gave you examples of qualitative and quantitative research you can do without breaking the bank or the budget. Both of those bring you more science. The math is in taking the time to study your referral sources and patterns, because then you have some math behind it. And the Pareto principle is true: 80% of the outputs come from 20% of the inputs. If you go look at your closet and mine, the 20% of that closet is what we wear 80% of the time, if you look at our meals that we eat, 20% of the stuff in our kitchen is what we eat 80% of the time. It is human nature. So, 80% of your referrals will come from 20% of your referral sources. So, if you haven’t done that math and looked at that for real, your gut instincts are going to be right on for many of them, but you’re gonna be some, you know, that one’s in our top 20, and this one isn’t. So you start looking at that, and you now have the math from that, and the science from the systematic gathering of insights of qualitative and quantitative research. And now your story is being built by and for your patients, referral sources, and employees, because you ask them for their insights, you listen, and then you use your math to see who they are, and you build the story by them, for them, and with them. So now your story is that much more powerful, and that can be done in any industry, but in healthcare, it is particularly important, because healthcare is all about meaning. We place meaning with our healthcare, meaning behind hospice, meaning behind home health, meaning behind assisted living and senior living, meaning behind an oral surgeon, meaning behind what our family doc means to us, and that means the story has to be built with, by, and for the target audience through the science and the math.    Dr. Barbara Hales [0:17:38]: Okay, so because of the experiences that we have with patients as physicians, obviously, we can give stories from the experiences we have, but to you, do you recommend that stories are built by the patients themselves in the stories they relate to their experiences?    David Mastovich [0:17:55]: I think it’s fantastic when you have a combination, so each physician practice has people that are incredibly happy with them. My family doctor just left UPMC. She knew I was part of UPMC and part of building it, and she would lament some of the things she didn’t like. And I said to her, it’s still a great system, it’s one of the first integrated financial health care delivery systems in the world that has the financing arm, the provider arm, the insurance arm, the doctor arm, and the health hospital arm, but it’s big now. And so she left, and I went with her. I followed her because I’ve been with her for 15 years and have a personal relationship. You talk about meaning, meaning is this person, what she’s done to help my health, that’s what we have. So when she goes to this new place, she would be wise to ask me to do a testimonial. I’m gonna see if she does. If she doesn’t, I’ll offer at some point, but I want to wait, see if she does. So, there are people like me with her at each practice, listening to us right now. So, at the very least, they should be able to get 358 of these testimonials on their own without much trouble. Just go out and ask the person, will say they’re going to do it, and then they won’t necessarily do it. You then come back and say, ‘Hey, I typed this up next time there. And I typed this up, would this be okay? And you put in from… they’ll probably say yes. Then you say to them, ‘Hey, I’d like to get you on Zoom. Can we just call you on Zoom? Can we do a Zoom call? And you just edit it right in Zoom yourself. And now you have a video testimony to put on your website. Look, would I like you to do better quality? That’s sure, I use Riverside FM, which is a tool for your audience that takes away the bubble and Zoom and makes it look much better as far as your crisp quality of video, but my point is I want to get people out there listening to get started. So now you’ve got no matter what, you’ve got a testimony you can put on a brochure, you can put it on your website, you can put it on the monitor in your waiting room, you can have testimonials or scroll on that, and you start to get them to do some on video, but you build your library of testimonies. The first three or four are layups, to use a basketball term, because they’re people like me with my doctor who love the practice, but over time you start asking more and more people when they say something like. Boy, I hate going to the dentist, but you make it so okay. That’s saying someone telling you they’ll do a testimonial, and when they say no, who cares? Someone just doesn’t want to have their name out there, doesn’t want to be, but most people will say sure. So now you’ve got testimonials from real patients telling your story for you, and you should use your waiting room to share that, and you ought to put it on your website. You ought to get the video that’s on your website. You may send that an email newsletter with that video in the email newsletter. You have three little stories in your email newsletter, which comes out every two months, because you’re busy, you don’t even get to it. Okay, do it every two months, preferably every month, but every two months, and you get three stories in an email newsletter, and one of them is a video testimonial every time from a different person. That’s the way you have your patients telling your story for you.    Dr. Barbara Hales [0:20:48]: Do you recommend that most medical and dental practices have e-newsletters?    David Mastovich [0:20:55]: Yes, I do. I think there’s a couple of things that people might think are old technology, but they’re still relevant as a hub for you, the first is your website still has to be relevant, still has to be updated, still has to be real, because of the search aspect, but also because we still use it, we still, as humans, use it, even though we’re going to Facebook or whatever, we still use websites. Second thing is, a blog is still important for this reason: I’m not claiming that the dentist’s patients are running to read her blog or his. What I am claiming is that you will now be the thought leader, frame that message, and then use it in other ways. Sending that link out helps with SEO. You have all kinds of ways to use it. I’m not expecting people to run to your blog, but it’s a blog that can be sent via email, can be part of an email newsletter, helps with SEO, and shouldn’t be that difficult for you. You are an expert in your practice. You are an expert in your practice. It doesn’t have to be 1000 words; it can be 300 words. In fact, less is better. So, I think a website and a blog are still relevant today as hubs of activity where people can go to, but it also helps with SEO. So, yes, I think that those are two things that each practice should be doing.    Dr. Barbara Hales [0:22:04]: What is your opinion about AI taking over that role?    David Mastovich [0:22:08]: So I think that right now we’re going through what I call the AI sameness of content, and I’m being nice. I have friends who call it AI slot, and here’s what’s happened: we’re not using in the way we can, because we, I think, most people get nervous about writing, the vast majority of humans, and so they get that’s why there’s a term called writer’s block, but most people get nervous about writing, so they think, well, I’ll enter into Chat GPT and it’ll give me what to write, that’s what creates what we call AI sameness of content, if you go to LinkedIn every morning, not every morning, but most mornings, I do this just for fun. I go on my phone, pull up my LinkedIn feed, and I scroll with my thumb. I stop and take a screenshot, and after about 45 seconds, I can have four screenshots of the same opening sentence, each from different people in different industries, and there are a couple of tells that something’s AI. If it says not only is Barbara a great podcast host, she’s great at motocross. You know that phrase, “we don’t talk like that”? That phrase is in there. Another one is the em dash; you see the two-line em dash in between two thoughts that weren’t used much at all. Now with AI, you see it all over the place. Another is that it says not only are you this or that, but it also says that when you set out to do your business, you didn’t want to do blah, but you ended up doing blah. Those are all tales of AI, because the person who doesn’t like to write didn’t realize that the way to leverage ChatGPT, Claude, or any of the others is to get out of writer’s block and say, “I’d like to write a blog for my dental practice.” I’d like to do a blog for my neurosurgery practice. I want to talk about what’s happening in the field. Here’s my take on it. My voice is, I tend to be very direct, and I bring this up, and then you pop that in, and it comes back and gives you about six 800 words of of crap, it’s not really crap, but what it is, is there’s enough slop in it that we know it wasn’t written by a human, but it still got you closer. If you then take that and come back to it, and you say, well, my voice would be this, I talk more like this, and here’s an example of a success, and please don’t use em dashes, and please don’t use a paragraph like this, and copy and paste it. Then the second version gets you even closer, and then you take that second version. You go, now what would I really say in paragraph two? And you just change that. So now this blog that you were nervous about writing takes about 20 minutes and didn’t stress you out, but instead we’re making it take five, and then it’s an AI slop. So that’s one tiny example of a blog post, but the same thing is happening for your LinkedIn post. It’s happening for people trying to write their website copy, people doing email blasts and email newsletters, and people writing video scripts. It’s because we’re not doing the three parts. The first is priming your voice, telling them who you are. Telling them stuff about you, whatever personal stuff, what you like, what your tastes are, what your tendencies are, writers you like, things like that. The second is putting, putting in your thoughts for that particular piece of content. The third is editing it. Most people don’t prime it well, and hardly anyone edits it well, which is why we have AI sameness in storytelling.    Dr. Barbara Hales [0:25:19]: Gosh, I do speak like that. I’m really in trouble now.    David Mastovich [0:25:24]: If you speak like that, people will know, and then you’re okay. Yeah, okay. The people who know you will know. I have a certain style, and people will tell me, Dave, I can tell anything that you’ve written. Like, if I write something for… so when I have to write for a client, I actually prime it in that client’s voice. I describe that client, whatever, but I end up still doing the editing myself. But if you, if that’s your style, then that’s what you do, that’s how you write. But that key thing you just said was, I said, that’s how I write, that’s how I talk. Those are the things most people don’t do. Write as you talk. Who says nonetheless? Not many people say so. If you do good, not many people say; nonetheless, you open a sentence up with nonetheless, and you don’t use that. This will have a deleterious impact. Who says “deleterious” is a nice long word and everything? I don’t know many people who say that. So, if you put that in there, someone’s going to go, “Oh, that doesn’t sound like Joanne, that doesn’t sound like Rob, and so write as you talk, and then it’s easier for you.    Dr. Barbara Hales [0:26:22]: Well, I think that in itself is good advice. Tell me, could you speak about your referral-source growth marketing system and how it works?    David Mastovich [0:26:33]: Sure, it’s really a growth accelerator, and involves most of what we’ve talked about today. It involves first ensuring we’re not neglecting any of those six right-fit target markets for healthcare companies, healthcare organizations, and physician practices across the board. The second is using science and math to drive any of your storytelling, that is, making sure that you’ve gone out and done the qualitative research, and then this part, analyzing that referral data, because until you do that, analyzing that referral data, you really don’t have the full system. I know people who will go and hire liaisons, I know people who are staffing companies of liaisons, and that’s important. I’m glad there are people who do that, but if you haven’t done the other part, if you haven’t done the systematic gathering of insights, studied the data yourself, if you haven’t built the story with the target audiences, because that liaison has to have a story, they have to have the story that really will resonate emotionally and factually. So, the system is to go through all of those. It’s a five-step part, which the first part is systematically gathering insights, the second is mapping out, based on the math, science, and math, what the target markets are. Then the third is activating the story and the repetitive system of having someone tell that story, whether it’s a liaison or another employee. And then the fourth is continually doing that and tracking it and testing, tracking, and tweaking what’s working and what’s not, because anything we do in life doesn’t work 90% of the time. And so the same thing of your referral source marketing, so you have to tweak and track and test that, and that’s what the whole system is, as each of those steps in it, and most people do a couple things, some do nothing, they actually do nothing, and they think the quality of their care is going to matter, and sadly that’s not the case for any of us in any field, the quality of my marketing. Hey, if this were all judged solely on the quality of the storytelling, the science, and the system, we’d be a heck of a lot bigger at Mass Solutions. So, you still have to go and tell that story, but you have to do it systematically. Others do the liaison thing, they have a liaison going out talking to referral sources, that’s good, but not if you haven’t done all this other stuff, and not if you haven’t used things like predictive index to see what drives the communication of your liaison team, not if you haven’t given them the stories and tested them on the stories, not if you haven’t gathered the testimonials, not if you don’t track the referral sources on an ongoing basis to see the outcomes that the liaisons are getting you, so it’s more than just getting liaisons, it’s more than just doing a story, it’s a whole system.    Dr. Barbara Hales [0:29:05]: What social media platforms are for no-bullshit marketing?    David Mastovich [0:29:11]: Well, the main one for me is LinkedIn, and my team makes fun of me because I’ve been a big LinkedIn user for 15 years, and they’ve made sure that we still have a presence on other social media outlets, like Instagram, Facebook, to a degree, Twitter, not as much. And the reason I haven’t put into all four of those the full level of activity is because you’re not going to be an expert at 10 things in your career, and you’re not going to be great at five social media platforms, so you need to pick one or two that you’re going to really focus on, then another two that you’re going to focus on to some degree. So, because a lot of my business comes from entrepreneurs, CEOs, owners, and the like, LinkedIn is important. However, there are many, many doctor practices that we’re not going to get from LinkedIn, so we’ve got to make sure we have other ways. To market to them and to reach them and communicate to them, so I would say that it depends on what your target markets are like within those six, what their makeup is, and what you want to convey. So, for me, I personally use LinkedIn a lot, for me and for Mass Solutions, but we also have posts on Instagram and Facebook to a degree. You also have to be realistic about it. While we are passionate about what we do, and we’re excited, and we have a cool little no bullshit marketing thing, and we have our no bullshit button, that bullshit. So we have that for what we give to clients, so we’re still not going to be something you’re thumbing through regularly to see what you know what you and I are doing, Barbara. That’s not going to happen as much as when you’re watching, you’re looking at stuff on social media about other things, about different products, movie stars, celebrities, things of that nature.    Dr. Barbara Hales [0:30:47]: Do you sell that button?    David Mastovich [0:30:48]: No, I haven’t. We’ve thought about doing that. We probably should. What I do for the button is that new clients get buttons for the people on the team that brought us in and are working with us on a regular basis. Funny story behind that is with the podcast, one of the team members came up to me one day and just said, “Hey, give me for the test today, you know, you’re testing the audio, just give me a.. that’s bullshit. I go, “That’s bullshit. About a week or so later, this was on my desk, so they did it without telling me. I said, “That’s that’s cool, and it is a.. it is a proud.. as a crowd favorite, people like that a lot.    Dr. Barbara Hales [0:31:22]: When I was speaking to you prior to the show today, you mentioned that there is another book by you that is in progress. What is that going to be about?    David Mastovich [0:31:31]: Well, my first book was Get Where You Want to Go through Marketing, Selling, and Storytelling, and that was in 2011 when storytelling was still not considered a good thing. Storytelling was like, oh, you’re kind of bs, and so forth. So we’re ahead of the curve there. The most recent one is no bullshit marketing, and as a, there’s a large focus on healthcare. The one I’m in progress right now is looking at the family business aspect, because we’re at a time when the very high percentage – it’s about, I think, it’s between 60 and 67% I don’t know the exact stat of businesses are turning generationally right now within the next three to five years, and so I want to be able to help with recruiting, retention, and revenue results for those kind of family owned businesses, and that family owned business could be a physician practice, it could be a dental practice, it could be anything that’s family owned. It could be a physical therapy company, so it is in healthcare. I don’t want people to think that that’s not just outside of healthcare, but the reason it’s so passionate to me is my dad had a family business, he’s my hero, and my mom and dad are my heroes. I got to see them yesterday, and so I’ve always had a soft spot for family owned business, and I have one myself, but these businesses that are generationally going on and are big enough that they’re handing it down in these next three to five years, they really need to be able to convey that cultural storytelling and the market storytelling, and if they aren’t going to do that with the science, math, and driving the creative art, they’re going to have problems, so I’m looking at any type of multi-generational business out there, many in healthcare and some not, and that’s what the book’s going to be about.    Chapter 5: Family Business, Offer & Episode Close    Dr. Barbara Hales [0:33:08]: There are a lot of family-owned businesses, or businesses that are passed on, that have a tremendous amount of friction between siblings that are in there, you know. Is there something that you do to get rid of that tension?    David Mastovich [0:33:24]: Well, it’s about clarity, and that’s what we want to bring to the situation, is clarity about what you want to keep of the existing culture. So, let’s say there’s a 70 year old dad that owns this, that’s still in the top spot, and his 45 year old daughter has been there for a while, and she’s been in the number two spot, and everybody kind of knows she’s going to be the number one, and there’s some friction there because he doesn’t want to walk away completely yet, and she doesn’t want the shadow there. So we have to get clarity on what they both want, convey that to each other, and then have the new generation decide what we are keeping from the culture. You don’t throw the entire culture out, you don’t even throw 70% of it, I don’t throw 50% about you, probably just tweak the culture 20 to 30% So, let’s, let’s, what’s the two thirds that’s going to stay and make sure that story remains intact, and what’s that new third going to be for that new leader, so they have some pride in ownership of the culture, and then you have to infuse that culture through current and potential employees again and again and again, and then convey that to the market.    Dr. Barbara Hales [0:34:30]: Very often, with these family businesses, there is friction when it comes to disbursement of funds, and like, how much each person you know can get, like, where the money is being spent, you know, which is not always something that they agree upon. How do you get them to not only see that there is a problem, but also how to resolve it?    David Mastovich [0:34:56]: Well, we see it as a mass solution as one key part of. Our team, and we’re the part that’s finding out what the market is thinking, and the market is those six target markets. We’re finding out what those six target markets are thinking and feeling, coming back to convey that, and building plans around it. But we’re only one part of the team. We know that there’s going to be a wealth manager, financial planner part of that team, and we know there’s going to be a CPA firm part of that team, we know there’s going to be a top legal person part of that team, and what we do that’s a little different is we love talking about that, because we’ve had clients in all three of those spaces, so we have had multiple CPA firms, multiple wealth management firms, and multiple law firms, and so we kind of know that space and we look at it as a positive to make it a team, whereas I think a lot of times when someone’s doing mainly the storytelling and not all the other business solutions that we’re doing in the strategy, they don’t even realize who the law firm is, or who the CPA firm is, or the wealth management team is, and so then it’s they’re just an afterthought, so then your, your digital agency is an afterthought. Oh yeah, when we get the story done, we tell them, whereas what we’re trying to do is say, no, no, this is a key team that you got these four external forces along with your internal leadership team.    Dr. Barbara Hales [0:36:13]: Well, what I’d like to throw out to the audience listening is that if this happens to pertain to you, if you are part of a family or a legacy where it’s being passed down, and I’m sure you’ve got stories. Then what I’d like, before the book is finished, is to know, write your story out, and submit it to Dave, and maybe it’ll wind up in his book.    David Mastovich [0:36:38]: Yes, for sure, that’d be great. That’d be amazing,    Dr. Barbara Hales [0:36:40]: So you know, let me say this again. If you missed that, write your story, good or bad, don’t have to put your name on it if you don’t want to, and send it to Dave, and you know your company, and, and if you put your name, you know, and and it winds up in the book, you know that’s going to be great exposure for you. So write out your story, submit it to Dave, and you know it may be in his next book,    David Mastovich [0:37:05]: and to be, to be completely transparent to them, so they know if you email me this stuff, I’ll reach back out and we’ll talk, and you can say, I want it to be anonymous, or no, I don’t mind, like, I want, you know, that’s the way we tackle that, so it’d be good to just hear that and learn that, and it’s Dave at Mass Solutions dot biz dot biz, and even, even if a listener wants one of my other two books, just tell me which one you would like, and because they listen to your show, I’ll give them a signed copy.    Dr. Barbara Hales [0:37:31]: Okay, so also before the show started, Dave told me that he was going to offer, you know, something great for all of you listeners, but not only listeners, you have to actually engage and submit a request. So, could you repeat what you offered them again?    David Mastovich [0:37:51]: Sure. If any of your listeners would like either of my two books, No Bush Marketing, or Get Where You Want to Go Through Marketing, Selling and Storytelling, email me at David Mass Solutions dot biz. Mention which book, and mention that you listen to the show, and I will sign it and send it to you.    Dr. Barbara Hales [0:38:05]: Well, thank you so much. This has been a great episode, and I’m sure everybody learned a tremendous amount. You know, thank you for being on the show with us.    David Mastovich [0:38:15]: Hey, thanks for having me, and I really enjoyed    Dr. Barbara Hales [0:38:17]: it. Okay, well, that’s the end of the show. Thank you for watching Marketing Tips for doctors with your host, Dr. Barbara Hales. Until next time,    Narrator [0:38:29]: Thanks for listening to Marketing Tips for Doctors. If you like the podcast, please subscribe, rate, and review. Press the subscribe button so you never miss an episode, and tell your friends about the show. Join us on Marketing Tips for doctors.com for replays and more resources to help grow your practice, strengthen your brand, and dominate your field. Remember, your one tweet from greatness, you. The post What Doctors Market Wrong first appeared on The Medical Strategist.

In this episode, Barbara discusses:    How to stay top of mind by sharing relevant articles, studies, and news instead of generic “just checking in” follow-ups.  Why becoming a connector — introducing the right people to one another — is one of the fastest ways to build a trusted, valuable network.  The “networking graveyard” of opportunities lost to a missing follow-up, plus a simple 24-hour challenge to reconnect with three people.    Key Takeaways:  “Networking does not create opportunities — relationships create opportunities, and every meaningful relationship starts with a simple follow-up.” — Dr. Barbara Hales    Connect with Barbara Hales:   Twitter: @DrBarbaraHales Facebook: facebook.com/theMedicalStrategist Business Website: TheMedicalStrategist.com Email: [email protected]  YouTube:@barbarahales LinkedIn: https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/barbarahalesBooks: Content Copy Made Easy 14 Tactics to Triple Sales Power to the Patient: The Medical Strategist   TRANSCRIPT    Welcome & Sharing Value as a Follow-Up    Dr. Barbara Hales 0:02  Hi, welcome to another episode of Marketing Tips for Doctors. I’m your host, Dr. Barbara Hales, and this is part two of We’ve Met. Now, what becomes a valuable source of information when it comes to following up and being top of mind for the people that you’ve met? Here’s another simple way to stay connected without feeling awkward or intrusive. Whenever you come across an interesting article, a new study, an industry trend, or a breaking news story that relates to someone’s interests or professions? Send it to them. A brief note is all it takes. I saw this article and thought of our conversation at the conference. Given your interest in concierge medicine, I thought you might find it interesting, and this breaking healthcare story reminds me of our discussion a few months ago. You don’t need a reason beyond that. In fact, these small touchpoints are often more meaningful than formal networking follow-ups because they demonstrate that you were paying attention. They show that you remember who the person is, what matters to them, and what challenges they’re facing over time. People begin to associate you with useful information, thoughtful insights, and genuine interests. You become more than a name on a business card or a connection on LinkedIn; you become a trusted resource, and every time you provide value without asking for anything in return, you are making another deposit into that relationship bank account. I particularly like this section because it gives listeners a practical action step. Most people think networking means checking in. The smartest networkers do something different. They share a value that keeps them visible, memorable, and helpful all at once.    Become a Connector    Several years ago, I met two professionals at different times, both of whom were talented, both of whom were smart, and both of whom were trying to solve similar challenges. One day I realized they needed to know each other, so I sent a simple email, John, I’d like you to meet Susan. Susan, I’d like you to meet John. I think the two of you would enjoy connecting. That was it. No commission, no hidden agenda, no benefit to me. Months later, one of them called. That introduction had evolved into a collaboration that eventually created opportunities for both of them. What struck me wasn’t the business outcome; it was the reminder that one of the most valuable things we can do is to become a connector. You don’t have to be the smartest person in the room. Sometimes your greatest value is simply helping the right people find one another. The lesson people remember is the person who opened the door, who becomes a connector. One of the fastest ways to build a powerful network is to stop asking what I can get and start asking who I can help. When you introduce people to opportunities, resources, and relationships. Something remarkable happens. You become memorable, you become trusted, you become valuable. The people who are most respected in. Professional circles are often not the ones who are the most successful people. They’re the most helpful people.    The Long-Term Value of Being Helpful    A physician once reached out after hearing one of my presentations. We spoke briefly, nothing formal, no consulting agreement, no major discussion, just a conversation. A year passed, then one day I received an email. He had referred someone to me. When I thanked him, he said something I’ll never forget. Barbara, you took the time to help me when you did not have to. I never forgot that. Think about that. The referral didn’t come from a sales funnel; it didn’t come from advertising; it came from a relationship, and relationships often operate on a timeline we can’t predict. The lesson is never to underestimate the long-term value of being helpful today.    Don’t Let Opportunities Die in the Networking Graveyard    I want you to imagine a giant cemetery, not for people, but for opportunities every day. Opportunities die because nobody follows up: potential partnerships, friendships, referrals, speaking engagements, job offers, and collaborations. They all disappear because one person assumes that if they’re interested, the other will contact them, who assumes exactly the same thing, and the opportunity quietly vanishes, not because anyone said no, but because nobody said anything. I’ve often wondered how many life-changing opportunities have been lost because two good people simply fail to send one email, one text, one LinkedIn message, one follow-up note. Don’t let your opportunities die in the networking graveyard. At one conference, I met two individuals on the same day. Both handed me their cards.    Follow-Through Beats Talent    Dr. Barbara Hales 7:46  The first person followed up the next morning. He thanked me for the conversation, mentioned something we had discussed, shared an article he thought I’d enjoy, no sales pitch, no pressure, just value. The second person never followed up at all. A year later, I remembered the first person immediately. I couldn’t even remember the second person’s name, the difference was not talent, the difference wasn’t intelligence, the difference wasn’t credentials, the difference was follow through. The lesson is that relationships don’t grow from introductions; they grow from intentionality.    Networking Is for Introverts Too    Many people believe networking belongs to extroverts. I disagree. Some of the best networkers I’ve ever met were introverts. Why? Because they listen, they ask thoughtful questions, they remember details, they make people feel heard. Networking isn’t about working the room; it’s about working the relationship. You don’t need to meet 50 people; you need to genuinely connect with a few. In fact, I’d rather have five meaningful professional relationships than 500 superficial contacts.    A LinkedIn Connection Is Not a Relationship    Let me gently challenge something. A LinkedIn connection is not a relationship; it’s simply a digital handshake. Many people believe networking happened because they clicked connect. It didn’t. The relationship starts afterward. Did you send a message? Did you connect? At the conversation, did you provide value? Did you learn something about the person? Did you stay in touch? Technology can facilitate relationships; it cannot replace them.    Staying Connected Through Shared Value    Here’s another simple way to stay connected without feeling awkward or intrusive whenever you come across an interesting article, a new study, an industry trend, or a breaking news story that relates to someone’s interest or profession: send it to them. A brief note is all it takes. I saw this article and thought of our conversation, or given your interest in healthcare marketing, I thought you’d find this interesting, or this breaking story reminded me of a discussion we had a few months ago. These small touchpoints demonstrate something powerful: they show that you were listening, that you remember, and that the relationship matters. Over time, people begin to associate you with useful information, thoughtful insights, and genuine value, and every time you provide value without asking anything in return, you are making another deposit into that relationship bank account.    Networking Ends — Relationships Begin    I want to leave you with this. The most valuable relationships in my life rarely began with a grand strategy. They began with a conversation, a moment of kindness, a willingness to listen, a thoughtful follow-up, a simple act of generosity. Years later, those small moments often became referrals, friendships, collaborations, speaking opportunities, and professional growth. So the next time you leave a conference, a networking event, a medical meeting, a podcast interview, or even a chance encounter with someone interesting. Don’t ask what I can get from this person. Ask what I can contribute to this relationship, because networking ends when the event is over. Relationships begin when the follow-up starts, and that’s the answer to today’s question. We’ve met now, what? Now you build something meaningful.    Your 24-Hour Challenge    Before we finish today, I’d like to give you a simple challenge. Within the next 24 hours, think of three people you’ve met in the last year, maybe someone you met at a conference, maybe someone you connected with on LinkedIn, maybe a former colleague, a physician you admire, a podcast guest, or someone you had a meaningful conversation with but never followed up. Pick three names, then send a message, not a sales pitch, not a request, not a favor, just a genuine note. Tell them you enjoyed meeting them, share an article that reminded you of them, congratulate them on something they’ve accomplished, or simply ask how they’re doing. That’s it. Three messages, three deposits into your relationship bank account. You never know which conversation may lead to a friendship, a referral, a collaboration, a speaking opportunity, a new patient, a new client, or an opportunity that changes the direction of your career. Remember, networking does not create opportunities, relationship creates opportunities, so it’s not networking, but relationships that create opportunities, and every meaningful relationship starts with a simple follow-up. If today’s episode resonated with you, I’d love to hear about it.    Closing Remarks    Dr. Barbara Hales 14:59  Send me a message in the comments and tell me about the most valuable professional relationship you’ve built and how it began. You may discover, as I have, that some of the most important opportunities in life started with a conversation that almost never happened. Thank you for joining me today on Marketing Tips for Doctors. I’m your host, Dr. Barbara Hales. Until next time, keep building trust, keep building relationships, and keep making a difference. Until next time.   The post We’ve Met Now What’s Next Part 2 first appeared on The Medical Strategist.

 In this episode, Barbara discusses:   Why networking is really about what happens after the introduction—because relationships, not contacts, are where the real value lives. The simple “48-hour rule” and no-ask follow-ups that make you instantly stand out, since almost no oneactually does them.  How to treat every relationship like a bank account—making genuine deposits of value and kindness long before you ever ask for anything. Key Takeaways:  “Networking ends when the event is over. Relationships begin when the follow-up starts.” -Dr. Barbara Hales  Connect with Barbara Hales:   Twitter: @DrBarbaraHales Facebook: facebook.com/theMedicalStrategist Business Website: TheMedicalStrategist.com Email: [email protected]  YouTube:@barbarahales LinkedIn: https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/barbarahalesBooks: Content Copy Made Easy 14 Tactics to Triple Sales Power to the Patient: The Medical Strategist TRANSCRIPT  Introduction: We’ve Met… Now What?  Dr. Barbara Hales 0:00  Hi, welcome to another episode of Marketing Tips for Doctors. I’m your host, Dr. Barbara Hales. Today we’re talking about something that almost nobody teaches us—not in medical school, not in residency, not in business school, not even at most networking events. We’re talking about what happens after you’ve met someone. You attend a conference, you exchange business cards, you connect on LinkedIn, you have a wonderful conversation—and then nothing. Weeks pass, months pass, years pass, and the connection quietly disappears. That’s why today’s episode is called We’ve Met… Now What? Networking isn’t just what happens during the introduction. Networking is what happens after it. The introduction is simply the beginning of the story. The relationship is where the value lives. Today, I’m going to share practical follow-up strategies that work, but I also want to share three stories that taught me something important. People rarely remember your elevator pitch. They remember how you made them feel.    A Lost Badge and a Lesson in Kindness  Several years ago, I attended a healthcare conference. Like many conferences, there were hundreds of attendees. Everyone seemed to be collecting business cards like children collecting baseball cards. Near the end of the day, I noticed a woman standing alone near the registration desk. She looked frustrated. She had misplaced her conference badge and was worried because she needed it to attend an evening reception. I helped her retrace her steps. We searched a few meeting rooms. Eventually, we found it tucked under a chair. She was relieved. We chatted for maybe five minutes—nothing remarkable, no business discussion, no sales pitch, no strategic planning, just two people having a conversation. A year later, completely out of the blue, she reached out. Her organization was looking for someone with expertise in healthcare communications and patient engagement. She remembered me—not because I handed her a brochure, not because I gave her a perfect elevator pitch. She remembered me because I helped her during a stressful moment. That interaction led to introductions, opportunities, and relationships that lasted well beyond that conference. The lesson: people may forget what you said, but they rarely forget kindness.  A Contact Is Not a Relationship  Here’s a controversial statement: most networking doesn’t fail because people can’t meet others; it fails because they never follow up. Think about it. How many business cards have you collected over the years? How many LinkedIn connections do you have? How many names sit in your phone that you haven’t spoken to in years? A contact is not a relationship. A relationship requires attention, just like a garden. If you plant seeds and never water them, nothing grows.  The 48-Hour Rule  Here’s the 48-hour rule. One of the simplest things you can do is follow up within 48 hours. Send a message, keep it simple: “Great meeting you at the conference. I enjoyed our conversation. I’d love to stay connected.” That’s it. No sales pitch, no proposal, no immediate request. You’re simply continuing a conversation. Most people don’t do this, which means when you do, you immediately stand out.  The Handwritten Card  Years ago, a physician I met at an event sent me a handwritten Christmas card—not an email, not a newsletter, not a marketing piece, a simple handwritten card. Inside, he wrote, “Barbara, it was a pleasure meeting you this year. Wishing you and your family a wonderful holiday season.” That was it. No agenda, no hidden ask, no business proposition, just kindness. Over the years, we exchanged occasional notes. Sometimes months would pass, sometimes years, but every interaction was genuine. When someone later asked me if I knew a physician they should connect with, his name immediately came to mind—not because he marketed himself, not because he promoted himself, but because he stayed present, because he stayed human. The lesson: being memorable often has nothing to do with being impressive. It has everything to do with being thoughtful.  Relationships Are a Bank Account  I love thinking about relationships as a bank account. Every interaction is either a deposit or a withdrawal. Many professionals make a withdrawal immediately: Can you refer patients? Can you hire me? Can you introduce me? Can you buy my service? But they haven’t made any deposits yet. Successful relationship builders do the opposite. They make deposits first. They share an article, offer encouragement, congratulate someone on an accomplishment, make an introduction, and provide value without expecting immediate return. Eventually, trust accumulates, and trust is the currency that creates opportunities. People often tell me, “Barbara, I don’t want to bother people.”  Thoughtful Follow-Up Is Not Bothering  Dr. Barbara Hales 8:06  I understand that, but thoughtful follow-up does not bother someone. Nobody is annoyed by “Congratulations on your promotion,” “I saw your article and thought of you,” “Your recent presentation was excellent,” or “Hope you’re doing well.” That’s relationship-building, and relationship-building is never out of style.  Every Conversation Matters  Many years ago, I met a young student who was exploring a career in healthcare. We spoke briefly. I offered some encouragement and answered a few questions. That was it—nothing dramatic, no expectation of ever seeing that person again. Several years later, I received a message. The student had become a healthcare professional. In the message they wrote, “You probably don’t remember me, but years ago you took time to talk with me when I was trying to figure out my future. That conversation meant more than you know.” I sat there reading that message with tears in my eyes because I genuinely didn’t realize the impact that brief interaction had. We often underestimate the effect we have on people. A few encouraging words, a few minutes of attention, a little kindness—sometimes those moments stay with people for decades. The lesson: every conversation matters. You never know which connection will become meaningful, and you never know whose life you may influence simply by showing up as a decent human being.  Relationships Create Opportunities—Networking Just Creates Introductions  One of the biggest misconceptions about networking is that networking creates opportunities. I don’t think that’s true. Relationships create opportunities. Networking simply creates introductions. The opportunity comes later—often much later, sometimes years later. That’s why the goal isn’t to collect contacts. The goal is to build genuine relationships. After meeting someone, send a short note within 48 hours. Connect on LinkedIn and include a personal message. Share a useful article related to your conversation. Congratulate them when they achieve something. Introduce them to someone who may help them. Check in every few months. Remember birthdays or work anniversaries. Be genuinely curious about their success. Most of these take less than five minutes, yet almost nobody does them consistently.  Conclusion: Build Something Meaningful  As we wrap up today, I’d like to leave you with this thought. The most valuable relationships in my life did not begin with a transaction—they began with a conversation, a shared moment, a small act of kindness, a genuine interest in another person. So the next time you leave a conference, a networking event, a medical meeting, or even a chance encounter with someone interesting, don’t ask “How can this person help me?” Instead, ask, “How can I continue this relationship?” Because networking ends when the event is over, and relationships begin when the follow-up starts. And that’s the answer to today’s question: We’ve met… now what? Now you build something meaningful. Thank you for joining me on Marketing Tips for Doctors. I’m Dr. Barbara Hales, the Medical Strategist. Until next time, keep building trust, keep building relationships, and keep making a difference.   The post We’ve Met Now What’s Next first appeared on The Medical Strategist.

In this episode, Barbara discusses:  Why many successful-looking practices still struggle financially behind the scenes. ● How doctors canidentify the kinds of patients they truly want to serve. ● The hidden cost of attracting the wrong cases into a busy schedule.  Key Takeaways:  “A packed waiting room doesn’t mean a profitable practice — the real success comes from attracting the right patients and building the right referral relationships.”  — Dr. Barbara Hales Connect with Barbara Hales:   Twitter: @DrBarbaraHales Facebook: facebook.com/theMedicalStrategist Business Website: TheMedicalStrategist.com Email: [email protected]  YouTube:@barbarahales LinkedIn: https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/barbarahalesBooks: Content Copy Made Easy 14 Tactics to Triple Sales Power to the Patient: The Medical Strategist     Profitable Practice vs Busy Practice    Dr. Barbara Hales 00:02  Hi, welcome to another episode of Marketing Tips for Doctors. I’m your host, Dr. Barbara Hales, and today we have Dr. David Romani with us. Welcome to the show.    Dr. David Romani 00:16  Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.    Dr. Barbara Hales 00:19  There’s a dirty secret in healthcare that nobody talks about: a packed waiting room does not mean a profitable practice. Dr. David Romansky spent over 25 years figuring out why, first as a clinic owner, then as the founder of Doctor Referral Institute. He works with healthcare practices across multiple specialties, helping them build referral systems that consistently bring in the right cases, not just more cases. Well, let’s get into it. Dr. David    Dr. David Romani 00:58  Sounds good. Thank you for the intro.    Dr. Barbara Hales 01:01  How is it that you decided upon doing this referral system? What got?    Dr. David Romani 01:11  Yeah, good question. So, actually, is in my own practice, so this is back early, probably know, probably 2530 years ago, we were working on getting into a publication that was pretty popular for our demographic that we were looking for, and we finally got into this big publication, was actually called Suburban Women, that went to probably about 80,000 women household in the area, who was a big target for our practice. So we ran the ad, and we’d met every week with our team, and I’d had working for me, and so the phone was ringing off the hook, and I asked my office manager, So how’s that new ad going? And she said, It’s going awful. I go, what do you mean, the phone’s ringing off the hook? She’s like, yes, we’ve had tons of phone calls, but we really only had two cases that are really what we want to see, not only cases that are appropriate, but also on the business side, the appropriate payer mixes.    Understanding Referral Relationships    Dr. Barbara Hales 03:20  Why do great doctors still struggle to grow even today? Despite the fact that there is supposedly a shortage of doctors,    Dr. David Romani 03:30  It’s education. It’s really what it is. It’s education of not only, I guess, from a doctor’s standpoint of it’s truly understanding the business side, because if you think about, as a provider, we’ve always been taught, you know, patients first, patient everything, which is exactly what we’re talking about. We want to make sure patients are being taken care of, but on the business side, we need to take a step back and look at our actual practice, right? Because if you think about the person who walks through the door as an owner of the practice, whether it is exactly the case you want to see, or if it’s something that maybe is not an appropriate fit for what you’re doing, either condition, pay, or mix. You’re the only one affected. Everybody else makes the same amount of money, right? Whether it’s the front desk, referral coordinators, office managers, assistants, or whatever else, everybody gets paid the same. You do not.    Dr. Barbara Hales 04:32  What do referring providers actually base their decisions on?    Dr. David Romani 04:37  Good question, and a lot of it has to do with people they know and people they can relate to, right? So, we do have some people who will say, you know, I do work on those relationships, and we show up, you know, every, you know, couple of times a year and bring something to them. Well, they see patients every week, right? And so every week they’re seeing people, so we want to make sure we’re staying on top of them and communicating with them.    Seeing the Right Patients    Dr. Barbara Hales 05:32  You’ve, you’ve talked about the busy trap. Why a full schedule doesn’t mean a profitable practice. What do you mean by that?    Dr. David Romani 05:42  Well, because if you think about it, I’ll give you a perfect example. We have a client who will retire in about six years. He said he wants to be able to retire in, and he says that right now in my practice, I have a waiting list of about 5 to 6 months or 5 to 6 weeks to get in to see me yet. If I actually looked at it, because one of the assignments I gave him said, Look at your practice and understand actually the demographics of it, and 35% of his practice is full of cases that are really not what he should be seeing, right? They’re not really the kinds of cases they want to see in their office.    Dr. Barbara Hales 06:42  I see. Well, you also talk about how your best referral sources aren’t sending you patients. That seems like a country contradiction. If they’re the best referral sources, how could they not be sending you patients?    Dr. David Romani 06:56  Because they don’t understand exactly who to send those cases to, right? So, this happens a lot, right? They may have the demographic that’s perfect for you, but you’ve not been there in front of them to educate them on exactly what you do.    Dr. Barbara Hales 07:32  I see. Well, how do you stop seeing the wrong patients?    Dr. David Romani 07:37  Well, and the biggest thing is going to be is that first thing again is understanding what you want to see, right, and not so much that, but really the demographic is finding out, okay, what are you good at, who has those cases, and then building and nurturing those relationships with those appropriate providers.    Dr. Barbara Hales 08:30  Well, don’t you have to see all the patients referred to you?    Dr. David Romani 08:35  Of course, you can’t go in and not tell people not to come into your practice, right? You can’t say that, but if you educate the referring providers again, of, hey, guess what, this is exactly the case I’m looking for.    Dr. Barbara Hales 08:55  And do you have a, you know, like you wash my back, wash yours in terms of you referring patients to them as well?    Dr. David Romani 09:04  No, we don’t. We don’t set that up as far as a reverse expectation for any of our clients.    Building a Referral System    Dr. Barbara Hales 09:38  Well, as is, you know, with your name implying Doctor Referral Institute, this is more beneficial for the patients themselves than for the physicians. How do you get your name out there so patients at. As well as doctors know who to come to.    Dr. David Romani 10:03  Yep, good question. Yeah, so for all the work we do, we deal directly with the doctors themselves. All of our clients are specialists, so think of anyone in the medical or dental industry. Does not matter who they are; if they can receive a referral, they can be a client of ours.    Dr. Barbara Hales 11:44  Okay, so you come into an area that you may not have been in before, as you are expanding, and you, you know, go to speak to the doctors. How do you get in, how do you get in the door?    Dr. David Romani 12:04  Great question. Yeah, and remember that’s the number one question I get from everybody. How do you get in the door? Right, we’ve been there before, because you think about even in my practice, yours, you know, the gatekeepers’ responsibility is to keep you out, right?    Dr. Barbara Hales 14:13  Well, that certainly makes sense. Do you, do you run webinars or any type of educational programs to attract prospective physicians.    Dr. David Romani 14:26  Yeah, so we do different, all kinds of different items for that. We do different things with us on social media, across different aspects, and in webinars. We also offer, for any of them, which is pretty powerful, is a free referral evaluation.    Dr. Barbara Hales 15:48  Well, that certainly sounds extremely helpful. So, are what about patients that can only go to certain providers based on their insurance participation, does that enter into your service as well?    Dr. David Romani 16:08  Absolutely, yeah, that’s part of the educational process, right?    Helping Doctors Grow Their Practice    Dr. Barbara Hales 16:37  I say, let’s say you are considering me as a client. Tell me, you know, like, tell me what your spiel would be that would make me just say, you know, I have to do this.    Dr. David Romani 17:09  Well, part of the difference is understanding that we’re not a marketing company that hasn’t been there, right? I’ve been in your shoes, right? As far as a provider goes to understand that nuance.    Dr. Barbara Hales 20:09  In getting to know all the doctors in a particular area. Can you help a physician who says, you know what, what service is lacking that by taking it, I would be unique, or what am I offering that is unique that nobody else is doing?    Dr. David Romani 20:30  Yeah, absolutely, yeah, we do look at that. So, we have, we have quite a bit of data as far as the market share goes, and we don’t have every provider in the country, but pretty close.    Dr. Barbara Hales 21:43  Yeah, I think that may be one of your most valuable services, like as a practicing physician. Like, I know what I provide; I don’t really know what everybody else, you know, in my specialty is providing.    Dr. David Romani 22:06  Yeah, absolutely. No, and it’s big, because if you think about it, the workflow of patients that’s out there, right, they’re looking, the referring providers looking for a solution, because they can’t treat them, they got to go somewhere, right.    Dr. Barbara Hales 22:46  Absolutely, well, this has been a wonderful conversation, and for all you listeners out there who feel this is the service for you. How can they reach you?    Dr. David Romani 23:02  Yeah, we have numerous different ways. So, our website is Referrals for doctors.com    Dr. Barbara Hales 23:28  Well, that’s great. Thank you so much for being with us today.    Dr. David Romani 23:33  Thank you for your time, Doc. I really appreciate. The post Why Busy Practices Stay Broke first appeared on The Medical Strategist.

In this episode, Barbara discusses:  Why most business owners are using AI the wrong way — and how to shift from “tool usage” to AI-powered systems.  How Ronnie automated repetitive admin work and saved 10–15 hours every week.  Why identifying your biggest business pain point is the best place to start with AI.    Key Takeaways:  “AI should not replace the human connection in your practice — it should remove the repetitive work so doctors can spend more time building trust, relationships, and better patient care.” — Dr. Barbara Hales Connect with Barbara Hales:   Twitter: @DrBarbaraHales Facebook: facebook.com/theMedicalStrategist Business Website: TheMedicalStrategist.com Email: [email protected]  YouTube:@barbarahales LinkedIn: https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/barbarahalesBooks: Content Copy Made Easy 14 Tactics to Triple Sales Power to the Patient: The Medical Strategist   TRANSCRIPT (242) Introduction to AI for Business Owners  Dr. Barbara Hales 0:02  Hi, welcome to another episode of Marketing Tips for Doctors. I’m your host, Doctor Barbara Hales, and today we have a special guest named Ronnie Toronto. She is the founder of One Woman. A woman shows a community how to help women business owners bring AI into their work strategically, in a language that feels like theirs. Her mission: no woman should have to figure AI out alone now. This is big, because you know every day you hear about AI doing new things, and every day there’s a new type of AI, whether it’s the three different divisions of Claude or Nano Banana or one of many, many AI types, and each one you know is known to do something better than any of the others, so you know it can get really confusing, especially if you want it to help you out in, in your business, you know, AI isn’t just Chat GPT anymore. Her method starts with the pain, not the tools. She does not ask a business owner which AI to buy; she asks which task is killing her this month, today. She walks us through how she built her own AI-run business and where any solo practitioner should actually start. Welcome to the show, Ronnie.    Ronnie Toronto 1:59  Hi, welcome, and thank you for the opportunity to be here with you and share about some of my work.  How Ronnie Got Started with AI   Dr. Barbara Hales 2:10  How did you get involved in AI to begin with?  Ronnie Toronto 2:15  Um, as I think, as like everyone else, I saw AI ads and AI all around the news and the platform at Instagram and Facebook, and like I felt left behind, and because like I knew a CGPT, but I didn’t know how really to use it, and everybody say like, oh, it’s the best thing, it’s it’s helped me in my business, so I just started to explore more and more, and read, and to take process, and I like surround myself with people that use AI as a victim and not only as a tool, and and then from that moment and on I realized that I can change my entire business with AI.    Life Before and After AI Automation    Dr. Barbara Hales 3:10  Tell us, what a week in your life looked like before AI, and what it looks like now.    Ronnie Toronto 3:18  So, before AI, I was doing all of the admin tasks, and all of all of the tests, actually alone, like I did everything manually, and if it’s to spend like between 10 to 15 hours a week on on building reports for clients, and and now I can actually say that, like, AI build me the same report, the exact same system, but even better to send to clients without me needing to operate a single file, like he can do everything for me, and it’s actually same between 10 to 15 hours a week, only for one task.  The First Task, Ronnie Automated  Dr. Barbara Hales 4:09  What was the very first task you handed over to AI, and what happened? Walk us through that, I    Ronnie Toronto 4:28  What was the first task that I gave to AI to do for me, because I thought it’s like taking a lot of time and a lot of effort, and to actually uploading the same, the same numbers through Google Sheets manually all day long take me a lot of time, and so I think that was my biggest pain point, and but I didn’t, I mean to say that I didn’t automate my. Our business, because I do believe in humanity, and I do believe that we need to do some stuff in the business, because in them the client chooses me because of who I am, and not because the AI can do it, and I chose four pain points to automate it, and there are 1000 in a business.    AI Morning Brief and Email Prioritization    Dr. Barbara Hales 5:25  You get something called a morning brief in your inbox every day. Tell us what it is, who built it, and how it changed your mornings.    Ronnie Toronto 5:42  Okay. I don’t know if a lot of people in the podcast know about what is it, but you can use clothes and clothes have a clothes and you have code a cloud code, so I’m using Power right now, and I build a skill like you have your own system that you teach her how to be new, so I build my co-work to do the same thing that I’m doing manually, so every morning when I wake up, Co-op already builds for me the priorities that I have on my email, like who is the most important to answer, who I can actually ignore, and so he, he built for me this, and that I can see what is the urgent stuff in my business, what I need to answer, and I don’t need to just go through 40 or 20 or even five emails anymore. It’s just in, and when I wake up and open the computer, it’s already building for me. It’s already showing me what I need to do next in the morning, without me having to start reading and exploring what was happening when I closed the computer last night.    Building an AI Stack Beyond ChatGPT    Dr. Barbara Hales 7:01  Most people think AI just means ChatGPT. What is actually in your AI stack, and what does each tool do for you?    Ronnie Toronto 7:16  And so I was starting to say that what I’m using isn’t a tool, and it’s not that I’m trying, like, to sell another product, but when you’re using AI at JGPT, you’re using one tool, like you pay $30 months for one tool, they do one thing, but the co-work that I’m using, the AI that I’m using right now, it’s a system that you pay, that you pay, you pay $20 but $20 a month, but you can have unlimited tool that, like, is built for you, and that you can operate with your entire business, and to reduce the amount of time that you spend on the same repetitive test, but is one tool that do every, like, it’s one tool, but inside with unlimited rule. Yeah, it’s magic. What is    Common AI Mistakes Business Owners Make    Dr. Barbara Hales 8:28  What is the biggest mistake you see business owners making with AI right now?    Ronnie Toronto 8:40  I think the biggest one is that people that business actually they are not replaced by AI but being separated by AI because again it’s easy to use JGP team to ask him the same question but in the end you need to build operation, you need to build AI that is like your team, and you need to ask yourself not how I’m using AI, it’s actually how AI helping me to replace my pain point to reduce my repetitive test, like how he’s walking without me needed to touch the computer, need to use or ask him over and over again the same question, because I’m not asking for my tool to build me report, he know the co-work, know to send an email to each client every Sunday, and every, and every month, actually, like it’s weekly, it’s daily, weekly, and monthly. He knows how to send the reports along without me needing to tell him, “Oh, you need to send reports. He knows how to open Google Sheets. How to build the same report that clients like to see and send it to the mail with the sentence that and summarize with text that the clients want and like to see. What is one    How to Avoid AI Overwhelm    Dr. Barbara Hales 10:17  What is the biggest thing that could save them from the mistakes that they’re making with AI,    Ronnie Toronto 10:30  I would say that they need to stop using it as a tool, they need to start exploring more than only chp and ask themselves what can help me to reduce the time that I’m spending or or even to eat, like I know it’s sometimes very nervous, like it’s become nervous like to just using Instagram or Facebook or LinkedIn, and see the ads popping up with AI, and then become confused where to start, what to do. So just stop anything. What is your biggest pain point? And from that point on, explore what can help you replace this pain point with a tool with AI.    The Vision Behind One Woman Show    Dr. Barbara Hales 11:26  Tell us about the one-woman show that you have. I understand that’s a community.    Ronnie Toronto 11:33  Yes, so one more show is for women in business and a movement that turns women business owner from traditional operation using AI as a tool into AI powered operate with their team running in the background, and so it’s helping business women to see there is more, and like I was attending in a lecture a few months ago, and 90 90% of the people in the room were women, and most of them knew what is AI, but none of them know how to actually use it. So I realized that there is a gap on the market, and it’s important that business women out there will become one and actually understand how to speak with AI in more in a feminine language, language in a way that we can understand how to use it, and I didn’t find it, so I realized that if I didn’t find it, maybe I can open one and help other women out there to understand a bit more about AI and how to use it correctly,    What Happens Inside the One-Woman Show Community    Dr. Barbara Hales 12:46  So what happens inside the One Moment Show,    Ronnie Toronto 12:52  And so right now, I am trying to share as much information as I can about how I automated my business, and most of it is for free. I even launch a small, a small course that actually explore how to, how to use the co-work, how to do the same thing that I did to automate, to automate like 70% of my business right now, and I’m trying to share all the time my progress, and my system, and how to use different tools out there, and what is more, what is more fit for you and for your business, and yeah, how to operate AI.    Future Plans for Coaching and Community Growth    Dr. Barbara Hales 13:39  So, will there be a coaching program in the future?    Ronnie Toronto 13:43  Oh, yes, I hope I can do a Zoom call, like once a week, so more and more women can share and explore how they use it, and I can give some tips and actually talk with business owners out there. Yeah, something that I really, really want to do    Two Practical AI Tips for Business Owners    Dr. Barbara Hales 14:09  for the listeners that we have on the show. Could you give us two helpful tips that they could implement right away?    Ronnie Toronto 14:22  and one stop using certificated and just I and yes, explore co-work and second thing is that something that I’m doing, I’m asking this every AI that I’m using, I’m asking AI to ask me questions, because as much as AI is a wonderful tool, you need the magic of humanity, and if we don’t go into ask for ChatGPT or co-work or whatever you use to ask us. To ask us questions, we are going to start thinking. I think it’s very, it’s very important for us to continue thinking and not to give the AI to do the work for us and to do it together as a team.    Using AI Chatbots for Customer Support    Dr. Barbara Hales 15:16  Do you also show people how to use and create chatbots?    Ronnie Toronto 15:22  Yeah. yes, yes, I’m doing, I yeah, I help some businesses to do it as well, and I don’t have a website to do a chat, but it’s actually very helpful to some businesses to have, because it’s reduced the amount of time that you spend on answering the same repetitive questions that you have from clients, so you just upload all of your base knowledge to there, and they, I know how to answer the client for you, so yes,    How to Join the One Woman Show Community    Dr. Barbara Hales 15:58  How can people find you if they would like to join the one-woman show, and can anybody join?    Ronnie Toronto 16:12  Everyone can join. I know that I’m speaking only for women, but I think that men also, if they need help, I would be more happy to help them, and you can find me in LinkedIn as Ronnie Toronto. And also, if you have school or you want to sign up for school, you just search One Woman Show AI, and you can find me there. Yeah,    Expanding the Community Beyond Women    Dr. Barbara Hales 16:38  okay. Well, you’ll also be able to see that in the, in the show notes, but if a guy approached you, he said, “Well, I know that you have this thing going on for women, but I’d like to learn too. So, you would accept them into the pack.    Ronnie Toronto 16:55  Yes, I might even open a new pack, a new community for everyone.    Ronnie Toronto 17:00  Yeah, I would be happy to help everyone. Yeah,    Final Advice and Closing Remarks    Dr. Barbara Hales 17:04  okay. Great. Is there any last bit of advice that you would like to say that I didn’t ask, or did we go    Ronnie Toronto 17:15  on? I think no, I think I. I hope I have explained everything clearly. Yeah,    Dr. Barbara Hales 17:24  Well, you know, listeners, if there’s something that you’re unsure of, then we are giving you the way to reach Ronnie, and you could just ask her directly. So, thank you very much for being on the show today. This has been another episode of Marketing Tips for Doctors with your host, Dr. Barbara Hales. Till next time.    Ronnie Toronto 17:53  Thank you. The post Women, and the AI Revolution first appeared on The Medical Strategist.

In this episode, Dr. Corey Malnikof discusses:  Scaling from one clinic to 24 locations  Building a patient-focused clinic culture  Marketing strategies that work for doctors  AI, SEO, and social media marketing  Advice for growing a successful practice    Key Takeaways:    “Marketing works best when it comes from authenticity. If you truly love helping people, then marketing simply becomes sharing that passion with your community.” – Dr. Corey Malnikof    “Scaling a practice requires systems, leadership, and the willingness to step into uncertainty before growth happens.” – Dr. Corey Melnikov    “Doctors don’t always need bigger budgets to grow. Many of the best patient acquisition strategies are free and relationship-driven.” – Dr. Corey Malnikof Connect with Corey Malnikof Email: [email protected] Business: palmercaregroup.com Twitter: @palmercaregroup @coreymalnikof Connect with Barbara Hales:   Twitter: @DrBarbaraHales Facebook: facebook.com/theMedicalStrategist Business Website: TheMedicalStrategist.com Email: [email protected]  YouTube:@barbarahales LinkedIn: https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/barbarahalesBooks: Content Copy Made Easy 14 Tactics to Triple Sales Power to the Patient: The Medical Strategist   TRANSCRIPTION (241) Building a Patient-Focused Chiropractic Brand    Dr. Barbara Hales:  “Welcome to another episode of Marketing Tips for Doctors. I’m your host, Dr. Barbara Hales. Today, you’re in for a rare treat. We have Dr. Corey Malnikov here with us. He is the CEO of Palmer Care Group, a healthcare organization operating 24 chiropractic clinics across the whole United States. He is an entrepreneur, speaker, and leader known for building high performing teams, scalable systems, and world class patient experiences. Today we’re going to dive into what actually works when it comes to marketing for doctors, how to attract the right patients, grow your practice, and build something that truly scales. Welcome to the show.”    Dr. Corey Melnikov:  “Thank you for the introduction. Always fun to hear all of that in 111 share. Thank you.”    Dr. Barbara Hales:  “When you first started out, did you see patients at that time?”    Dr. Corey Melnikov:  “Yeah, no, I was a.. I’ve been in practice for 21 years. I saw patients probably up to about seven or eight years ago, I had about 10 clinics at the time, and so I was a full-time guy. I loved seeing patients that they literally had to kind of rip it out of my hands for me to stop, but I kept cutting back. I kept.. I went from full-time to Monday, Wednesdays, and then just Mondays, and then I think I got to the point where I had a patient laying down, I was listening to what my doctors were saying, I was listening to the front desk, I was thinking about the other clinics, and I just felt bad for not being there 100% for the patients, and so, yeah, it’s been probably seven eight years, and I’ve been running the clinics instead of in it, but is there a long time?”    Dr. Barbara Hales:  “What made your practice unique in compared to other chiropractic offices around? Did you have multiple streams of income? Where were there additional services that others didn’t provide? Were there products that you felt your patients could use? Like, what is it that made you different,”    Dr. Corey Melnikov:  “yeah. And I will say, you know, with 24 clinics, you know, when doctors are into different things, we do have all sorts of different techniques and instruments and things that we use on patients, but really, what makes us different is I always tried to create this atmosphere, you know, I was a big Starbucks junkie in the beginning, you know, and I was trying to open a practice, and you know, I thought I’d graduate, put a shingle up, you know, the Red Sea would part, patients would line up, I’d take care of them, and the reality, like most, most entrepreneurs find out, is you open up, and then you know nothing. So I studied a lot, I studied Amazon, I studied Nordstrom, I studied the Ritz, I studied Disney, and I studied Starbucks, and Starbucks talked about how Starbucks was meant to be the third home, right? You had home, you had work, and then Starbucks,”    Dr. Barbara Hales:  “but no, I thought no drive-through, right?”    Dr. Corey Melnikov:  “Right, exactly, no drive-thru, but I thought, you know, a chiropractic clinic, a wellness clinic, should be the third home, not Starbucks. And so I kind of wanted to create this atmosphere, and I was always really big into personal and professional development for my doctors, for my staff, and even for my patients. So we tried to build a place, and we always talked about when patients come into our place, if their anxiety is high, we’re going to lower their anxiety to peace, and if their energy is low, we’re going to bring their energy up. And so for us, it was all about the experience, the second you walked through the door, the way you were greeted, the way you were treated, the way your case was managed, and how we kind of had an impact on every aspect of your life, emotional, physical, chemical, and treatment. And so that was the goal, and for me, that’s what’s made us different. It’s just the culture and the place we created,”    Scaling From One Clinic to 24 Locations    Dr. Barbara Hales:  “that’s wonderful. Now, before you had your first offshoot, you must have been a little bit nervous about doing that. Would opening up another location divide my patients, or would I succeed? You know, walk me through that, and how, and how you did succeed.”    Dr. Corey Melnikov:  “Yeah, I had no intentions of having 24 clinics. I had every intention of opening one clinic and trying to make it as successful as humanly possible, being a big part of the community and making that who I was. The reality was I opened a clinic, didn’t know what I was doing, figured out what I was doing, and then very fast grew it. I had been renting a room while I was waiting for my clinic to get built with from another chiropractor, and when he kind of saw how fast I built it, he said, “You know, my friend is selling a practice, I’ll go buy it, I just need you, you can be 5050 partners, no money, and you just fix it, and so that second clinic. Was just kind of like I couldn’t do anything else in my current clinic. My wife was about to join me, so we couldn’t, we couldn’t fit any more patients there. So the second clinic was like literally completely unpredicted, but man, it was fun. You know, I got to drive down, I was about 45 minutes away, go to this clinic that was, you know, pretty much failing, and then take it from where it was and grow it up, and so, yes, it was scary, but I’ll tell you, the scarier step wasn’t that second one, because the first one was successful, the second one was just fixing, but I went from two clinics to four clinics in a blink, and the scary part of that was, you know, I had no money, and then I started to make a little bit of money. Then we got the second clinic, and then I started to make a little bit more money, and I got four clinics, and I have negative money. So that was where I learned about the scariness of expansion. You know, when you, when you want to expand and you want to scale, you just, you have to be willing to step into this world of fear, where you’re going to take a few steps backwards before you step forwards, and that’s kind of been not to go off subject, but that’s been the whole thing, right? I went from money to no money, and then from four clinics to 10 clinics, where I went way backwards, and then got caught up, and then from 10 clinics to 20 clinics, and every time we make a massive growth, now I have to expect that fear and expect that, and just be willing to make that jump and be prepared.”    Dr. Barbara Hales:  “What’s really interesting is, I think many people hearing your story would think, well, by the time you got to the second or third one, you had, you had it down, and it was just going to be gravy after that.”    Dr. Corey Melnikov:  “Yeah, yeah. No, you know, it changes, you know. Five clinics is you right? I can see patients full time and still have my fingers on everything, but it’s not me anymore, right? There has to be a C suite. There has to be an infrastructure that I built and pay for for people to run our systems and run our marketing and run our HR and to run our everything, so with every clinic you add, you are limiting your ability to accomplish the job that you would normally do, and now you have to replace yourself with somebody who is paid and trained by you, so it’s a learning curve, because none of us, you know, on this podcast, I think your listeners, the doctors, none of us are trained entrepreneurs, trained businessmen, trained business women, we just have to learn as we go and study as hard as we can, and all of it’s a learning curve, but it’s a fun ride if you take”    Dr. Barbara Hales:  “it, when you started realizing that other people would be taking over the roles that you once were actively doing. Did you feel bad about it, or were you just so excited that it didn’t matter?”    Dr. Corey Melnikov:  “No, no, you know, you don’t want to let go of those. You grip them, death grip those. Not only do you not want to give them up, but then you know you have to learn very quickly that you can’t micromanage, right? So, like, I’m going to allow you to do second interviews and decide if this person has the ability to do the job, and I have to be able to, like, not give my approval on every employee that gets hired, and that is a very difficult thing to do, so no, every step along the way, every time you hand something off, you know, yes, you watch it a bit in the beginning, but you have to have the ability to not watch it if you want to grow, and that’s very difficult.”    Marketing Strategies That Actually Work for Doctors    Dr. Barbara Hales:  “So, what would you say to them about that?”    Dr. Corey Melnikov:  “Yeah, so there’s so much, it’s never ending. I mean, you know this with all the people that are on this podcast, there’s just so much great stuff out there, but it really, for me, becomes very dependent on geography, because digital marketing is absolutely amazing, and it is so deep now. I mean, yes, you can do Instagram posts, Facebook posts, LinkedIn posts, Twitter posts, YouTube posts, there’s Google post, there’s Google ads, and all that stuff works amazingly. You’ve got to learn all of that and use all of that, but there’s some geographies, like I have some geographies in Texas, that are, have such a congested digital footprint, like so many people in that congestion, that the ROI and the responses for that, you know there’s no way I could scale clinics there if that was what we did, so like in Northern Virginia, I’ll spend a lot of money on Google Local and Google Ads, and on boosts on some of our social media, so that would become very well known in the, in the neighborhoods, versus you know, in Texas, what works very well is being out in the community, meeting all the professionals that I can refer to, and that can refer to me, that are doing health screenings at different health fairs, that are doing lunch and learns in different companies, and so we use all kinds of tactics. Now, do I also do some digital marketing in Texas? Of course, but I don’t spend a lot, and do I also do all the other things in Northern Virginia? Yes, but I don’t push it a lot, you know. You’ve got to figure out what’s working. I think you know when I talk to people on the phone and they’re trying to get their marketing to work. I think part of the problem is they’ve got 15 different things going, and then these don’t work, so they try this and this doesn’t work, so they try this. You know, you got to focus in, and if, if, if somebody else can get this marketing to work in your area, so can you. So, instead of quitting it, dive into it, you know, learn why, why it’s not working, what you can do to make it work.”    Dr. Barbara Hales:  “Absolutely, and you know people are, so you know, scrambling for AI in their practice, without realizing that some of the old school techniques really work the best, and that it’s not something that they should forget about. People, after all, want to have a relationship with you, they want to actually see you, talk to you and hear what your views are, so you know, getting out there and introducing yourselves to people, both you know, prospective patients, but also to physicians in the area that can refer to you.”    Dr. Corey Melnikov:  “Yeah, doctors and professional referrals. I mean, we talked to this about our doctors all the time, if the only thing you did was have two lunches a week with referral partners, and you did that every week, you’d have 104 lunches a month, and if 10% of those people like you, that’d be 10 people sending you patients every month. So there’s professional referrals, is one of the most amazing things. I will say old school is kind of funny, because we just started doing some postcards again. Now that’s from like a decade ago. I’m going to tell you, the response, the response in some of our areas on like these postcards is insane. So, there is some old school stuff.”    AI, Social Media, and Modern Healthcare Marketing    Dr. Corey Melnikov:  “And AI, I right now, by the way, also, I mean, I know everybody wants to dive into it, and I think they should. AI, right now, is the wild wild west, because there’s nobody knows for sure, but we do know that feeding it, and doing, you know, AI, oh, doing, doing the search engine optimization, which is now for AI, is absolutely amazing. I think if I can give one piece of advice on something like AI, and even, you know, social media marketing, and things like that, I think that doctors, because we were, we want to be doctors, and that we don’t want to be the professional marketer. Too many times, doctors will go out and find this is the best company to do AI marketing for me. This is the best company to do lead generation for me, and they like hand it off and forget it. So, the one thing I would say is you’ve got to learn it right, and it’s not that hard. You can jump on YouTube and say, you know, put in a video, teach me how to do AI SEO, you can go into Chat GPT and just say, “Tell me the top 100 things I need to know. You really have to learn how to do it. So, I always like lead generation AI. I learn how to do it to the point that I’m dangerous enough that I could do it, and then I don’t. And then I hire a company, because then I can watch what they’re doing, and I can make pivots, and I can give suggestions, and I don’t just take the results for what they are. So, so get into AI marketing, get into all this stuff, but for the love of God, know what you’re doing first.”    Dr. Barbara Hales:  “Absolutely. How actively involved are you in creating videos for your patients on the sites”    Dr. Corey Melnikov:  “I I’m actively involved in, and by that I mean like maybe twice a month I get with our social media people, and they shoot videos with me, so that’s about as active as I am. And then they do all the editing and posting and everything for group, which is kind of the umbrella. The individual clinics is me giving them what I want them to record and do right, and then I have a separate crew that then edits and posts those, but at the end of the day I’m really just looking at how many posts are we doing, when are they going up, what are the statistics, what are the results. So I’m all KPI driven.”    Advice for Doctors Growing Their Practice    Dr. Barbara Hales:  “That’s great, so what advice would you give to our, you know, physicians and chiropractors that are listening today? You know, like two pieces of advice that they could implement right away.”    Dr. Corey Melnikov:  “Yeah, well, number one, you know, when I talk to chiropractors and they’re like, I don’t have enough new patients, or I talked to functional medicine, I talked to any of these guys, and I don’t have enough new patients, right. And then it’s, I don’t have the budget for it, because there’s, there’s so much stuff that’s free. You can right now shoot videos and post it on six different platforms. You can right now go stop by an office and drop your cards and meet a professional. You can right now go bring bagels and coffee to a bank before they open. Introduce yourself and tell them about your clinic. There’s so many free things you can do right now. If you don’t have enough new patients, it is just because you are not trying hard enough. It exists. You just have to do it, and no one can make you do it. But you could post 50 posts on social media right now, if you wanted to, right, and talk about who you are, you know, talk about what you do, and your community will absolutely love it. And then, you know, the only other thing I would tell you is, you know, have a goal, like, okay, I don’t have enough new patients for the love, like, what is enough new patients, and why did you pick that number, like, and if that’s your number, give me the action steps of how you’re going to get it. So, there’s a million ways to get new patients, right? If you, if you’re stuck and your brain is like, I can’t come up with one, then go on Chat GPT, Chat GPT, and say, give me 25 ways to get new patients right now that cost me nothing, and then you can do it, but work towards a goal, right? Say, I want 27 new patients this month, and here’s the action steps I’m going to do. You do those two things. I just don’t know how you can’t have enough new patients.”    Dr. Barbara Hales:  “Do you have a program yet on how to instruct physicians to follow in your footsteps?”    Dr. Corey Melnikov:  “Yeah, that’s good question. No, right. So we have all the programs for all of our doctors and CAS, you know. For me, right now, it’s just that there’s so many people that reach out about what we’re doing. My thought process was, let me just give it out for free, let me answer any questions. There’s really nothing for me to gain from this, except for, hey, doctors are helping a whole lot of people. I want you to help a lot of people. I want you to do more, and if I can be of any help for you to do that, then do it. Use me.”    Dr. Barbara Hales:  “That’s wonderful. So, what else would you like to tell our listening audience that maybe I haven’t touched upon lately, you know? Yet,”    Dr. Corey Melnikov:  “Well, you know, your podcast is marketing. You know, the only, the only other thing I’ll say about. Marketing is this. I’ve always looked at marketing is, you know, if you love what you do, if you absolutely love what you do, then marketing is just your extension of your love for what you do out into the community. And how many different ways can you come up with doing that? And if that’s what you’re doing, if the only thing you’re really doing is sharing what you love with the community, because you know it will make an impact. Then all of the negative things that we think of when it comes to marketing, the sales process, the I don’t want to do this, I don’t want to do that, all that goes away because the second you are locked in to all I want to do is help, then that’s all you’re ever doing, you’re just offering your value, and because it’s coming from such an authentic place, it works. It just works, you know. I used to go out to health screenings, and my goal was I wanted to meet one person that I could show them an alternative to maybe a surgery they were doing, and because the only thing I was doing, they were sitting there talking to people about health and wellness. I ended up with all these new patients. It just has to be authentic. You just have to figure out why this means so much to you, and then all you have to do is share that, and that’s all marketing is. It’s just you sharing who you are with the world.”    Dr. Barbara Hales    “That is wonderful advice. And with that, I would like to thank you for coming here. And listeners, this is, you know, a great guy, as you have seen and heard, and his company is called Palmer Care Group, and you can reach out to him at Palmer Care group.com We’ll also have that in the show notes, in case you don’t know how to spell it, or you probably forget it, as I have said it, but you know this guy has some great moves, and you need to see what he’s done and follow along. If you do that, you’re sure you’re sure there’ll be bumps, but you know what, you’re sure to meet with success. So, thank you so much for being on the show today with us, Corey”    Dr. Corey Melnikov    “Thanks for having me.”    Dr. Barbara Hales  22:10    “This has been another episode of Marketing Tips with the Doctors, with your host Dr. Barbara Hales and Dr. Corey Malnikof. Till next time,” The post Scaling the Patient Experience first appeared on The Medical Strategist.

In this episode, Barbara discusses:  Why video creates deeper patient trust than traditional advertising and why trust is the real currency in medicine.  How simple, authentic smartphone videos outperform expensive, polished productions in attracting the right patients.  How familiarity bias makes patients feel like they already know you before the first appointment.  Key Takeaways:  “The future belongs to physicians who learn how to combine technology with humanity, not one or the other.” – Dr. Barbara Hales Connect with Barbara Hales:   Twitter: @DrBarbaraHales Facebook: facebook.com/theMedicalStrategist Business Website: TheMedicalStrategist.com Email: [email protected]  YouTube:@barbarahales LinkedIn: https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/barbarahalesBooks: Content Copy Made Easy 14 Tactics to Triple Sales Power to the Patient: The Medical Strategist   TRANSCRIPTION (240) Introduction: Can Doctors Survive This?    Dr. Barbara Hales 0:02  Hey, welcome to another episode of marketing tips for doctors. I’m your host. Dr. Barbara Hales, today, we’re talking about something that many physicians are quietly asking themselves right now: Can doctors survive this? And when I say this, I mean the exhaustion, the bureaucracy, the endless charting, the emotional depletion, the inbox overload, the pressure to see more patients in less time, and now, artificial intelligence entering medicine at lightning speed. Some doctors are excited about AI. Some are terrified of it, and many are simply too burnt out to even think about it. But today, I want to talk about AI differently, not as a threat, not as science fiction, but as a tool that may actually help restore some of the humanity medicine has been losing for years, because, let’s be honest, most physicians are not burned out because they stopped caring. They’re burnt out because they care deeply inside a system that often makes caring harder and harder to sustain. And I think that distinction matters. So today we’re going to talk honestly about physician burnout. What AI is actually doing right now, what concerns me, what gives me hope, and why the future may belong to physicians who combine humanity with technology instead of fearing one or the other.    The Real Problem: The Machinery of Medicine    Dr. Barbara Hales 3:24  The real problem, you know, when people outside medicine imagine physician burnout, they often assume doctors are exhausted because medicine itself is emotionally difficult. And yes, of course it is. We deliver bad news. We carry enormous responsibility. We witness suffering. But strangely enough, that’s usually not the part physicians complain about most. What many doctors are truly exhausted by is everything surrounding medicine, the machinery of medicine, the clicks, the forms, the documentation, the prior authorization, the inbox messages, and the constant interruption of human connection by administrative overload. I’ve heard physicians say I spend more time talking to my computer than my patients, and honestly, that’s heartbreaking, because medicine was never supposed to feel like data entry with a stethoscope.    I once spoke with a physician who told me something that stayed with me for a very long time. He said I realized one day that I barely look patients in the eyes anymore, not because he didn’t care, not because he was cold, but because he was trying to survive the pace, typing, clicking, documenting, trying not to fall Behind, trying not to drown, and he said the moment that really shook him happened when a patient stopped talking in the middle of a visit and finally said, Doctor, are you listening? That hit him hard because he was listening, but the patient couldn’t feel it. And honestly, I think that’s one of the great tragedies of modern medicine, not that doctors stopped caring, but that the system slowly began interfering with the visible expression of caring. The eye contact, the stillness, the presence, the humanity.    AI as a Tool to Replace Friction, Not Physicians    Now here’s where things get interesting, because the same technology many physicians fear may actually help restore some of what we lost and before anyone panics, no, I do not believe AI is replacing physicians, at least not good physicians, not thoughtful physicians, not emotionally intelligent physicians, not doctors capable of judgment, ethics, intuition, empathy and trust building, but AI is beginning to replace friction, and that matters Right now. AI is helping physicians with charting documentation. Note, generation, administrative tasks, patient education, marketing, scheduling, and communication. And if that sounds small, you haven’t been in medicine lately, this is all administrative work, because reducing just one hour of nightly charting can feel life changing to an exhausted position.    AI Scribes and the End of “Pajama Charting”    One of the most promising uses of AI in medicine is the AI scribe: instead of physicians spending hours typing notes and navigating electronic medical records, AI can now listen during patient visits and generate documentation in real time. That means doctors can maintain eye contact, focus on the patient instead of the screen, and often finish charting before they even leave the office. Miracle of miracles for many physicians, this could dramatically reduce the exhausting pajama charting that steals evenings, weekends, and personal time. AI isn’t replacing the physician’s judgment. It’s removing the administrative friction that has slowly drained energy and humanity from medical practice.    I recently heard about a physician who started using an AI documentation tool during patient visits. At first, she resisted it. She thought, I don’t want a robot in the exam room. Fair concern. But after a few weeks, she noticed something surprising. She was finishing notes before leaving the office for the first time in years. No more logging back in at 10 pm, no more pajama charting, no more sitting in bed, exhausted with a laptop, balanced on her knees, trying to finish documentation before midnight. And what struck me most was not what she said about productivity, but about her family. She said my children stopped asking me why I was always working. That’s not a technology story. That’s a humanity, a humanity story. And I think we need to start looking at AI through that lens. Not only can it replace us, but it can also help us reclaim our lives.    AI for Content Creation and Online Presence    Now, let’s talk about something many physicians know they should be doing, but often don’t have time for, content creation, patient education, social media, videos, blogs, newsletters, most doctors are already overwhelmed just trying to survive the work day. The idea of consistently posting online can feel impossible, but AI is beginning to change that, too. AI tools can now help physicians generate post ideas, create captions, organize educational content, and repurpose long videos into short. Clips, draft newsletters, and simplify medical information into patient-friendly language, and honestly, this matters more than many doctors realize, because patients today are searching online long before they ever schedule an appointment, and the physicians who communicate clearly online are often the physicians patients trust first.    AI-Enabled Patient Education and Teaching Videos    AI is also transforming patient education itself, with past educational videos often requiring expensive equipment, editors, designers, lighting scripts, and hours of production time. Now, AI can help physicians create teaching videos quickly and efficiently. Imagine a cardiologist creating a simple animated explanation of high blood pressure, a pediatrician generating a short video on fever management for anxious patients, or a gastroenterologist sending a post-procedure recovery video for patients to watch at home. These tools allow physicians to educate patients at scale while still maintaining their own voice and expertise, and better education often leads to better compliance, less confusion, less anxiety, and stronger patient Trust.    Let’s look at the patient who finally understood. I heard about a physician who kept running into the same problem. He would spend 15 or 20 minutes carefully explaining diagnoses, medications, treatment plans, and lifestyle changes to patients, and by the next visit, many still felt confused or overwhelmed, not because they weren’t intelligent, but because patients are often anxious during appointments. They forget details, they mishear, and they leave things emotionally overloaded. So this physician started experimenting with short AI-assisted educational videos. After each visit, patients would receive a brief, two or three-minute video explaining their condition in simple, easy-to-understand language; some included animations, and some reviewed medications. Others explained symptoms to watch out for or how lifestyle changes could improve outcomes. And something remarkable happened. Patients became more engaged, more compliant, and less anxious. Staff phone calls decreased because many common questions had already been answered. But what really struck him was when an elderly patient said, “Doctor, this is the first time I actually understood what’s happening in my body.” That was powerful because AI didn’t replace the physician in that story; it amplified the physician’s ability to educate, reassure, and connect.    Automated Patient Communication and Self-Scheduling    Another area where AI may significantly improve both efficiency and patient satisfaction is in automated. Patient communication, AI-powered chatbots can already answer many simple, repetitive questions that flood medical offices every day, such as office hours, refills, policies, insurance participation, directions, pre-visit instructions, Portal, access, and follow-up information. And at the same time, many patient portals now allow patients to schedule their own appointments online without waiting on hold or speaking to front desk staff. That’s huge for me. I remember waiting a good 20 to 25 minutes before I got someone in the office who could actually give me an appointment. This doesn’t replace staff. It frees staff to focus on more complex patient needs and higher-level personal interactions. When used correctly, technology can reduce frustration on both sides of health care.    The Danger Zone: Protecting Humanity in Medicine    Let’s take a look at the danger zone now, with all that said, there are legitimate concerns and positions should absolutely be thoughtful and cautious, because medicine cannot become emotionally automated. There are things AI cannot replicate: compassion, intuition, emotional nuance, trust, moral judgment, and human presence. Patients do not heal simply because information was delivered correctly. Patients heal through connection, through reassurance, through feeling seen, and my concern is not that AI will replace good physicians. My concern is that systems may try to use AI to strip medicine down to efficiency alone and medicine without humanity becomes cold, mechanical, transactional, forgettable, we cannot allow that to happen.    The Future: Human-First, Technology-Assisted Care    I truly believe the future belongs to physicians who learn how to combine technology with humanity, not one or the other. Moving forward, the smartest doctors will not be blindly anti-AI, nor will they be blindly dependent on it. They will be balanced, curious, intentional, human-first, technology-assisted. And honestly, I think that’s where medicine is heading, not physician versus machine, but physician plus machine, with the physician remaining the center of trust, judgment, empathy, wisdom, and healing.    And if this conversation resonates with you, whether you’re a physician, health care leader, or someone simply trying to understand where medicine is heading. I’d love for you to subscribe, share this episode, and join our growing community here on marketing tips for doctors, because these Conversations Matter, and the more honestly we talk about burnout, technology, humanity and the future of healthcare, the better chance we have of building a medical system that works not only for patients, but for the people caring for them. Thank you so much for being here today. This has been another episode of marketing tips for doctors with your host, Dr Barbara Hales, see you next time. Thanks. The post Can Doctors Survive This first appeared on The Medical Strategist.

In this episode, Barbara discusses:    How the podcast grew from frustration and concern about confusion, mistrust, and misinformation in healthcare  Why does authenticity, clear language, and hearing a doctor’s tone and compassion help rebuild trust  How patient education lowers fear and helps people ask better questions and participate in their care  How podcasting lets doctors reconnect with their purpose beyond rushed, transactional visits  How to approach conflicting health advice online without panic or blind trust  A success story where awareness from a podcast led to timely, life-saving heart disease treatment  A cautionary story showing how stopping medication based on online voices can cause serious harm  Why medical podcasts should promote critical thinking, not fear, and support partnership with doctors    Key Takeaways:  “Responsible medical podcasts don’t ask for blind belief; they give people the clarity and context to think critically and make wiser health decisions.”  Connect with Barbara Hales:    Twitter: @DrBarbaraHales Facebook: facebook.com/theMedicalStrategist Business Website: TheMedicalStrategist.com Email: [email protected]  YouTube:@barbarahales LinkedIn: https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/barbarahales Books: Content Copy Made Easy 14 Tactics to Triple Sales Power to the Patient: The Medical Strategist TRANSCRIPTION (239)  Introduction & Why This Podcast Exists  [0:00:02] Dr. Barbara Hales  Welcome to another episode of marketing tips for doctors. I’m your host, Dr. Barbara Hales. We are going to discuss why medical podcasts matter more than ever. You know, one of the questions I get asked a lot is, ” Why did you even start a podcast? And honestly, the answer has very little to do with marketing. This podcast was born out of frustration, concern, and ultimately hope, because over the years, I noticed something happening in healthcare that became impossible to ignore. Patients had more access to information than ever before, but somehow, they were becoming more confused. Doctors were exhausted. Patients felt rushed. Trust was slipping, and meaningful communication in medicine was quietly disappearing. People were turning to the internet for answers about their health, and instead of clarity, they found fear, misinformation, extreme opinions, miracle cures, and influencers posing as medical experts. At the same time, many physicians had tremendous knowledge and experience, but no real platform to explain things calmly, clearly, and humanely, and I realized something very important: education has become part of healthcare itself. That’s where this podcast came from, not from ego, not from wanting attention, but from wanting to help people think more clearly about their health, because here’s the truth: most healthcare decisions are no longer made only in the exam room. They’re being influenced on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook groups, Google searches, and yes, podcasts, which means the quality of medical communication matters enormously now, and that’s why these conversations are important.     Authenticity, Trust & How Podcasts Connect  [0:03:00] Dr. Barbara Hales  People often ask why podcasts connect so deeply with audiences. And I think the answer is simple. People are starving for authenticity. They don’t want to be talked down to. They don’t want complicated medical jargon designed to impress other doctors, and they don’t want constant fear-based headlines screaming everything you’re doing is killing you. People want honesty. They want clarity. They want someone who can explain complicated things in a calm, intelligent, understandable way. And podcasts do something unique. They allow people to hear your tone, your compassion, your thoughtful process, and your humanity, which builds trust. Sometimes, patients feel like they already know a doctor after listening to several episodes; that connection matters because medicine works best when trust exists. How do podcasts help both doctors and patients? For patients, education reduces fear when they understand their conditions, medications, risk factors, options, and the reasoning behind medical decisions; they feel empowered instead of helpless. Educated patients ask better questions. They participate more actively in their care, and in many cases, outcomes improve. But podcasts also help doctors. And I think this is something people don’t talk about enough. Many physicians went into medicine because they genuinely wanted to help people. But modern medicine can become incredibly transactional, with 15-minute appointments, endless documentation, insurance battles, burnout, and teaching. Reconnects doctors to purpose. It reminds physicians that communication itself can be healing, and honestly, sometimes one thoughtful conversation can help more people than an entire week of rushed office visits when podcasts disagree, then what?     When Podcasts Disagree & How Patients Should Respond  [0:07:00] Dr. Barbara Hales  Well, here’s where things get interesting. Patients will often hear two podcasts with opposite opinions. One says, Never eat carbohydrates. Another says plant-based nutrition is the answer. One says, Take this supplement. Another says that the supplement is useless. So how is the average person supposed to know who’s right first? Don’t panic. Different opinions in medicine do not automatically mean someone is evil or incompetent. Medicine is not mathematics. It involves science, clinical judgment, individual differences, risk-versus-benefit decisions, and evolving research. Reasonable experts can disagree, but patients need a framework for evaluating what they hear. So what should patients do? First? Never make major health decisions based on one podcast episode. A podcast should educate you. It should not replace personalized medical care. Second, be cautious of people who sound certain about everything. Real medicine usually contains nuance. If someone says this works for everyone, doctors are hiding the truth, or this cures everything, that should raise concern. Good Medicine acknowledges limitations, exceptions, uncertainty, and individuality. The third look at motivation is the person educating you or selling fear, because fear has become a business model online, and frightened people click very quickly. Now, let me tell you a story that beautifully shows how Podcasts can actually help patients when handled thoughtfully.     Success Story: Awareness, Not Self‑Diagnosis  [0:11:00] Dr. Barbara Hales  A woman in her late 50s had been listening to several health podcasts to improve her overall wellness. One episode discussed early warning signs of heart disease in women, not dramatic movie style, symptoms, subtle ones, fatigue, shortness of breath, jaw discomfort, exercise intolerance, and she realized she had quietly been experiencing several of those symptoms for months now. Here’s the important part: she didn’t panic. She didn’t diagnose herself online. She didn’t start taking random supplements. Instead, she used the information intelligently. She scheduled an appointment with her physician and said I heard a discussion that made me wonder if I should get evaluated. Her doctor took it seriously. Testing eventually revealed significant coronary artery disease. She needed intervention, and afterward, she said something incredibly powerful. The podcast didn’t save my life because it gave me treatment. It saved my life because it gave me awareness. That’s exactly what responsible medical education should do, not replace doctors, not create fear, but encourage thoughtful action.     Cautionary Tale, Confidence vs. Credibility & The True Purpose  [0:15:00] Dr. Barbara Hales  But now let me tell you the other side: a younger woman became convinced by several online personalities that all prescription medications were toxic. One podcast after another reinforced the same message: natural healing, only doctors overprescribe. You don’t need medication. So, without consulting her physician, she abruptly stopped her blood pressure medication. She felt proud, at first, empowered, like she had taken control, but several weeks later, her blood pressure skyrocketed, she developed severe headaches, dizziness, and eventually ended up in the emergency room with dangerously elevated blood pressure. Thankfully, she recovered. Others who do that wind up stroking out. But afterward, she admitted. Something important, I confused confidence with credibility, and that sentence stuck with me because sounding confident online does not automatically mean someone is correct. What is the real purpose of medical podcasts? The best medical podcasts do not demand blind trust. They encourage critical thinking. A good podcast should help patients ask better questions, recognize misinformation, feel calmer, and become partners in their health care. The goal should never be, believe me, blindly. The goal should be to become informed enough to make wiser decisions. That’s a very different mission. So, if today’s conversation helped you see healthcare a little more clearly, share this episode with someone who may need it too, because informed patients and connected doctors create better medicine for everyone, and honestly, that’s exactly why this podcast exists. I’ll see you next time. This has been another episode of marketing tips for doctors with your host, Dr Barbara Hales. Till next time. The post Restoring Trust in Medicine first appeared on The Medical Strategist.

In this episode, Dr. Barbara Hales interviews Bret Gregory, founder of DrTalks : Bret shares how his decade of running a marketing agency for doctors showed that virtual summits and podcasts are the strongest long-term patient-acquisition strategies, with summits often generating 20,000+ email leads and significant new-patient revenue. He recounts his entrepreneurial path, including selling a corporate wellness business after his brother’s terminal cancer diagnosis, attempting an eco-wellness community in Costa Rica, and learning online marketing to survive the 2008 downturn. Brett explains why doctors make in-demand podcast guests, how DrTalks helps doctors get booked for free using AI, and why nurturing an email list with a weekly newsletter is more valuable than social followers. Connect with Bret Gregory: sign in/up https://drtalks.com/ LinkedIn Bret Gregory Connect with Barbara Hales:  Twitter: @DrBarbaraHales Facebook: facebook.com/theMedicalStrategist Business Website: TheMedicalStrategist.com Email: [email protected]  YouTube:@barbarahales LinkedIn: https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/barbarahales Books: Content Copy Made Easy 14 Tactics to Triple Sales Power to the Patient: The Medical Strategist   TRANSCRIPT. (238) Dr. Barbara Hales  00:02  Welcome to another episode of marketing tips for doctors. I’m your host, Dr. Barbara Hales, and today we have a very interesting person with us by the name of Bret. Gregory  Dr. Barbara Hales  00:19  Bret was giving that little pause there for excitement. What I wanted to tell you about him, which makes him so interesting, is that he is a healthcare investor and has invested in several health and wellness startups. So I’d like to say that over his 30-year career, he’s founded and built not one but four successful startups in the health and wellness sector, two of which empower doctors to build their brands and businesses through innovative approaches. His most recent one is called Doctor Talks. You can reach that through drtalks.com.  Bret Gregory  01:11  Thanks so much. Barbara, I really appreciate you having me, and it’s wonderful to have a physician who is helping other doctors. It’s really exciting for me to have a conversation with you. I founded drtalks.com about six years ago, right when the pandemic started. And prior to that, I had a marketing agency for doctors for about a decade. And that entire time, while we were helping doctors, we were doing all sorts of marketing strategies, lots of social media. We were doing campaigns, emails, webinars, you name it. And then what I noticed is, over that decade, the marketing that worked the best, the long-term marketing that worked the best for doctors was very consistently virtual summits and podcasts and putting on a virtual summit where one doctor might interview 20 or 30 other doctors, and then we would launch that summit virtually. And every time we did that, they would grow a 20,000-plus-patient email list and convert it into a million dollars in new-patient revenue per year. And the only thing was, it was very hard. Took a lot of work. It was a lot of effort. And the same thing with podcasts. Podcasts took, they took a while to get going, but once they got going, they ended up being some of the best long term marketing strategies for doctors. Well over that decade, I was wondering, how come no one has ever created an entire platform dedicated to this? It’s kind of like YouTube for doctors. And after asking myself that for over five years, I finally said, Well, you know what? I’ll create it. And so I went out, maxed out my credit cards, borrowed $50,000, hired a few employees overseas, found my first 10 customers, and we launched in March of 2020, right when the pandemic started. I didn’t know what was going to happen. No one did, of course, but it turned out helping doctors with their online businesses was perfect timing. The pandemic gave us a tailwind, and now, six years later, we’ve grown into the world’s largest streaming platform for integrative and functional medicine doctors who want to reach our 11 million patient web visitors. And so we’re really on a mission now to democratize the Creator economy for doctors. What that means is we want to help you, doctors, make money off your information. I believe that doctors have been squeezed from so many different places, and now it’s time for doctors to monetize, to be able to get paid for their information while they’re helping people with their knowledge. So that’s the mission of doctor talks.  Dr. Barbara Hales  04:04  That’s really great. But before we continue on this topic that you are clearly passionate about, what I would like to do is to turn the dial and go back to the beginning, because and you know other doctors and other you know, possible entrepreneurs here that you are an investor, that is something, I think, that you know, other than being envious, strike strikes the the question or fear in people. Well, isn’t it scary to start with something like that from the beginning, you know, and worry whether it’s going to fail and is going to lose all his money, or, you know, like, like, how that works. So take me back to the beginning and say, you know, most people would take the safe route. So, you know, they. Start a business, or they would, you know, work in a, you know, in a business that was either, you know, like, joint-vented with someone else. So let’s, let’s start from the beginning, because I know there are people here listening to this saying, like, what you know, like, how does this happen? So tell me how it happened. Like, why is it that you had all the confidence to, you know, be an investor and, you know, like, how that all came about?    Bret Gregory  05:33  Sure. Well, I started out as an entrepreneur. Very early in college. I started my first business, started a painting company, and then right out of college, I went into the Employee Benefits business, and I started my own company there, and that was from about 1996 to 2006 I did corporate wellness programs, and I also started a radio show at that time. And what I accidentally discovered is that by interviewing real prospective customers, I was interviewing CEOs of companies in San Diego and interviewing people who could refer us prospective customers, we ended up building a really significant business in the corporate wellness sector over a 10 year period, and that was my my first business, sadly, in 2006 my 34 year old brother was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, stage four non small cell carcino carcinoma, and he ended up passing away nine months after that, And that just changed the trajectory of my life completely.  Bret Gregory  06:44  Thank you. I appreciate that. But I tore off my suit and tie. I sold my business. I had about $3 million I moved to Costa Rica. I purchased a 164-acre property to develop an eco-friendly wellness community that helps as many people as possible change their lifestyle habits and heal from within, to the best of their bodies’ abilities. Now, I’m not a doctor. I know nothing about I don’t pretend to be one. I do understand marketing and sales. That’s really where my experience lies, but I was really focused on helping as many people as I possibly could, and I wanted to use that as my brother’s legacy. Well, I went and purchased this great piece of property down in Costa Rica, right across the street from the beach, and a new hospital is under construction. Now it was a great time to sell my corporate wellness programs business, but it was a terrible time to invest in a speculative real estate development because we closed in 2007, right before the 2008 global financial crisis, and I was really worried. I thought I was going to go bankrupt. I very quickly learned online marketing. I learned how to build websites, drive traffic, build lead magnets, grow an email list, and in just about 12 months, we were able to do about $1.4 million in sales to customers we met on Facebook, and this was now in 2009 2010 it was just enough to avoid going bankrupt, but it wasn’t enough to raise the money that we needed to raise to develop a large eco friendly wellness community. So I had to put that project on hold, move back to San Diego, and that’s when I started. It was called “attract customers now,” where I helped doctors grow their practices. And I did that from 2010 to 2020, and that’s when I learned about the different techniques that can help doctors grow their practices and attract patients online.    Dr. Barbara Hales  08:54  Did you use that property for wellness retreats?  Bret Gregory  08:58  That was the goal. Unfortunately, we were never able to really recover from the global financial crisis, and that was the whole idea and goal. We wanted to build a wellness community for retreats. We just weren’t able to do it.  Dr. Barbara Hales  09:14  And that’s unfortunate, because it seems like such an absolutely beautiful place.  Bret Gregory  09:19  It is truly, truly beautiful. Feels very magical, feels very nurturing and healing, and that was the idea.    Dr. Barbara Hales  09:29  So I understand that one of the ways you recommend physicians, you know, become visible to their prospective patients is by putting out podcasts. Do you recommend they guest-podcast on other sites before considering creating their own?  Bret Gregory  09:51  Yeah, well, guesting on podcasts has become the hottest new way to attract patients online right now. Wow. And one thing: since I started drtalks.com about six years ago, I’ve worked with 1000s of doctors. There are probably 3000 doctors on the platform today. We’ve got lots and lots of Doctor-hosted podcasts, and I’ve coached. We’ve produced over 7500 podcast interviews on doctor talks. And one thing that I see very consistently is that doctors don’t always realize that they make fantastic podcast guests, and that podcast hosts love to interview doctors, and you don’t need to pay anybody or anything to be booked on a podcast as a doctor. As a doctor, your information is valuable to podcast hosts. You’re a sought-after expert, key opinion leader, and the podcast hosts want to interview you, so we’ve made it really easy to help doctors get booked on a podcast. And yes, I definitely recommend guesting first before you just run out and start your own podcast. What the doctors I’ve worked with find is that when they become guests on a podcast, they love it. They usually, you know, it’s unexpected how much fun it is that they really enjoy it. And then, of course, the side benefit is that they get the word out and educate the public, which is something that pretty much every doctor I know wants to do, and they can attract new patients online, as well as new clients and customers for their business.    Dr. Barbara Hales  11:40  So, as a representative of drtalks.com, do you have all the podcasts on the doctor talk site, or are you helping doctors get onto other people’s podcasts?    Bret Gregory  11:55  Both? Yeah. So think of doctor talks as YouTube, but with all the content creators being doctors. So, when I say YouTube, it’s the world’s largest podcast platform. So YouTube is far larger for podcast consumption than Spotify. It’s far larger than Apple Podcasts. And so a lot of people who have podcasts, almost everybody that has a podcast puts their podcast on YouTube, and 1000s and 1000s of doctors that have podcasts also put their podcast on Doctor. Talks: It’s free to have a channel on doctor talks, just as it is on YouTube. So there are so many podcasts out there that doctors can get booked on really easily. And we’ve created a system that lets them set up a free expert account and start messaging and connecting. We have an AI that connects them directly with podcast hosts, and they can start pitching themselves. And we’ve made it really easy for them to pitch themselves and get booked on a podcast. It’s easy, it’s free, and it’s a lot of fun.    Dr. Barbara Hales  13:08  That’s great, and certainly financially, it beats paying for ads and hoping that people will see those ads    Bret Gregory  13:16  much it’s much better than paying for ads. It’s much better. There are podcast booking companies and agencies out there that charge, you know, 2000 to $5,000 a month to book people on podcasts. Well, we can do that for free. And like I said, we’ve got hundreds and even 1000s of podcasts. If you’re a doctor, it’s free. You can create a free expert account on drtalks.com and start getting booked right away. And the one question that you know some of your listeners may have, because I’ve heard this from many, many doctors, when I am always encouraging doctors to be a guest on podcast, is sometimes they say, why would anyone want to listen to me and aren’t there already so many experts talking about menopause or hormones or peptides or whatever, whatever your expertise is in. And let me tell you, you are still that key opinion leader. You’re still that sought-after expert that the podcast host wants. You still have so much to offer. If you can help one patient, you can be a great guest on a podcast, and I just want to encourage you to give it a try, because you’re not only probably going to love it, you’re going to help people, and you’re probably going to start to attract new patients, clients, and customers    Dr. Barbara Hales  14:39  are physicians who are functional into functional medicine, or maybe non-traditional medical care. Welcome to your show as well.    Bret Gregory  14:50  100% yes, so any doctor can make a free expert channel on doctor talks. Uh, the great thing about doctor talks is that there are 11 million patients visiting the web. Most patient web visitors come to look for alternative treatments. They, you know, usually want to figure out, how can I use diet, lifestyle, exercise, and how can I work with a doctor that’s going to, you know, work with me. Listen to me. A lot of cash-paying patients on drtalks.com, and so it can be great for integrative Functional Medicine and even traditional doctors.    Dr. Barbara Hales  15:30  That’s great. Now, I did notice when I looked at the site that in addition to podcasts and videos, you also have summits. So maybe you could tell the audience here the difference between a podcast and a virtual Summit?    Bret Gregory  15:46  Sure. So, virtual summits and podcasts are similar in many ways: there’s usually one host, or a host and a co-host, who interview other doctors. But the summits tend to focus on one subject. So we just recently completed the Reversing Heart Disease Naturally Summit, hosted by Dr. Joel Kahn, a cardiologist, and Dr. Joel Fuhrman, a nine-time New York Times bestseller. They interviewed approximately, I want to say it was maybe, I think they did 20 interviews each. So they did approximately 40 interviews, and almost everyone they interviewed was also a doctor, but it was all about how to reverse heart disease naturally. And so they record all those interviews, and then we do a summit launch. And so, usually, all the experts on the summit will send an email to their patient email lists, inviting them to watch the summit for free. So the summits are free to register for and attend. And our summits usually have between 20,000 and 40,000 attendees, and they’re all virtual. They’re launched over approximately a five-day period, during which everybody comes together to watch the summit for free. And we have summits on lots of different topics. We’ve done summits on Alzheimer’s and diabetes and Hashimoto’s, and we’ve produced over 100 summits in the past six years, at doctor talks,    Dr. Barbara Hales  17:25  When a person is having a podcast, versus, you know, being head of a summit or leading a summit in a particular group, is the one leading the summit considered, you know, prospectively, a higher authority than someone that just has a podcast?    Bret Gregory  17:47  Well, I wouldn’t necessarily compare it to having a higher authority than someone with a podcast, but certainly, hosting a podcast can help you raise your authority and become that key opinion leader. Definitely, hosting a summit can also help you raise your authority and be a key opinion leader. I think one of the main differences is that if you’re hosting a summit, you’re going to grow an email list that should be highly valuable and profitable to your practice, and so in both cases, you will be able to elevate your key opinion leadership.    Dr. Barbara Hales  18:22  So, with a virtual Summit, you can grow your email list faster.    Bret Gregory  18:33  Definitely, yeah, usually, again, when we have the host, we will get a copy of the email list that we can produce with the summit. That email list should be worth half a million to a million dollars a year to a doctor who has a practice. You know, whether it’s even if it’s a brick and mortar practice or even if it’s a virtual practice, the it’s you know, think about an email list of 20,000 prospective patients, you’re going to have a lot of you know, great value in that, and that’s something that the summit does. Now, summits are they’re considerably harder than a podcast. Podcast is a much easier place to start. But I would also suggest, again, if you’re really starting out from scratch, start out as a guest with one podcast interview, and we can help you get booked for free on drtalks.com.    Dr. Barbara Hales  19:30  Well, one of the great benefits of having a summit is that, for whatever topic this summit is highlighting, the people who have signed up for it are the ones who are raising their hand, saying, ” You know, this is a topic that I’m interested in,  Dr. Barbara Hales  19:59  when a person. And signs up. Is there a little blurb at the bottom saying, “By signing up, you give permission to receive information,” or is that the first email you send after you get the email list? Would you like to keep getting information?    Bret Gregory  20:17  Yeah, it’s the first part. So they have to acknowledge that they’ll be on the host’s email list. And that’s why they have to check a box to agree to it in order to register. So it’s very clearly labeled up front that you’ll be joining the doctor’s email list. And then, of course, like with any email system, you should be able to easily subscribe with one unsubscribe with one click. Should you choose to do so?    Dr. Barbara Hales  20:47  Surely. Now, do these people who sign up get any kind of lead magnet, or is the Summit and the summit information enough of a draw that nothing else needs to be sent to them?    Bret Gregory  21:00  Usually, we’ll have four to five ebooks, and, as you said, you can refer to them as lead magnets, but they’re typically high-value. Many times they’re authored by the host; sometimes they’re authored by premium guests who have, you know, really high-quality information aligned with the topics. So, for example, on the reversing heart disease naturally Summit, there were, I think, about four or five ebooks that were all related to reversing heart disease naturally. And they’re very, very high-quality ebooks,    Dr. Barbara Hales  21:40  which is a very important topic these days.    Bret Gregory  21:43  Yes, absolutely agreed.    Dr. Barbara Hales  21:46  So when a doctor gets an email list, well, I think first of all, we can all agree that one of the most valuable assets a doctor or any businessperson has is that email list, right? So once the doctor gets the new email list, what do they do with it?    Bret Gregory  22:06  Great question. Yeah, this is one of the most important things for a doctor, and really for any business, is your email list. And the email list should be far more valuable. And let me just help give some perspective here. Would you rather have 10,000 Instagram subscribers or a 10,000-person email list? You would much rather have the email list. You could likely turn a 10,000-person email list into hundreds of 1000s of dollars of revenue, where you could almost never do that with 10,000 Instagram subscribers. So if you ever hear this phrase from people who teach marketing, “the money’s in the list,” it is absolutely true. So you want to really focus on building your email list. That can be done with a newsletter. It could be done by hosting a summit. There are many ways to do that; we won’t get into it right now, but the most important thing is to nurture your list. So you want to send, ideally, a weekly email newsletter that drives traffic back to your website. This is one of the most valuable things we can help doctors with who have podcasts: many doctors forget that if they have their own podcast, they should send out a weekly email as part of their newsletter. And it’s really this. This last part is really important in the if you’re going to release a weekly podcast episode instead of driving traffic to Spotify or Apple or your YouTube channel, you drive them back to your website so you can put your podcast on your website, and whenever a new episode comes out, you would send that email in your newsletter once a week and send traffic back to your website that right there could be worth six figures a year in driving traffic from your existing patient email list you don’t need, you don’t need a giant list. You could have a 1000-patient email list, and that would generate, you know, probably six figures per year. So what do they do with the email list that you want to nurture it? The best way to nurture it is with a newsletter. The easiest way to do it is news. To populate your newsletter is like having a weekly podcast.    Dr. Barbara Hales  24:32  When a person signs up to the website, of course, they’re seeing everything that you are. You know, believe everything that you believe in, everything that you teach. But you know, when people look to see how many subscribers you have, obviously, if they’re going to the website as the primary exposure. Or that there is no, you know, subscribing button. So do you say, well, it’s more important that they see your web list than a subscriber number.    Bret Gregory  25:13  Well, great question. So the subscriber number that you see, whether it’s on YouTube or your Spotify followers, I like to refer to as social proof. Often, those are vanity metrics. So you might see a lot of people with hundreds or 1000s of followers on Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok; those tend to be what I refer to as vanity metrics. The exception is YouTube. If you have YouTube subscribers, those tend to be a lot more valuable than, say, Facebook subscribers. That all being said, I would still rather have the email list and when you drive traffic, if you’re going to drive traffic somewhere, you always want to drive traffic to your website, and when, for anybody that is, you know, if you’re just getting started out, one of the things that you would do is make it easy for people to sign up for your newsletter, and so you just Have a form on your homepage where it’s very easy for people to sign up for your newsletter, and then you send them a weekly newsletter. That’s the nurturing that we were talking about earlier. And if you do it once a week, you can send people traffic to your website, whether it’s reading a new blog post or perhaps seeing your latest podcast interview. Anytime you can get your patients back to your website, you have the opportunity to let them book a consultation or purchase anything else you might offer.    Dr. Barbara Hales  26:54  Well, that’s really great advice. So, at this point in the podcast, I like to ask my guest: What are two tips you would give to the listening audience? So let’s say a person you know is not just starting out in the practice, but is not, you know, towards the end of their practice, either they’re you know, like midway, they’d like to, you know, they’d like to improve the numbers, or if they’ve decided recently, which is even more important, if they’ve decided to transition away from an insurance dependent model to a concierge now, it’s as though they are starting from scratch, because now they need to let people know that that’s what’s going to be happening. They need to attract new people and convince existing ones that paying for something is worth it. So, absolutely like, what tips would you give?    Bret Gregory  27:58  So my biggest tip, and you know, I’m certainly biased, is that I think doctors should be a guest on a podcast, but because it’s free, it’s easy. And, you know, we have a way to make it really easy for you to get booked on podcasts. My tips would be to get booked on a podcast, and one of the easiest ways to do that for any of you, if you use any kind of AI out there, if you like ChatGPT or Claude, whatever you use, go and open up a window and type in this prompt. Help me come up with a catchy podcast title. And here’s where you fill in the blank that might be, wherever your area of expertise is, peptides, menopause, heart disease, diabetes, whatever your specialty is or area of expertise, and then let it run, and it’ll come up with a bunch of really catchy podcast titles. Find the one that resonates with you, and it just hooks you. That’s the key. Find the one that just really hooks you. Go, ooh, that one would be great. Use that when you approach other doctors who have podcasts. So again, on doctor talks, you create a free expert profile. You can quickly start messaging our AI, which will match you with other podcast hosts. You could start messaging those doctors and say, “I would love to be on your podcast.” Here is my and you can call it your signature talk. Here is my signature talk. Copy and paste that catchy podcast title, and that’s going to hook them into wanting to interview you. It’s totally free, and it’ll give you a really great opportunity: once the last step is taken, you can ask your favorite AI chatbot to help you come up with great interview questions. And have come up with approximately 10 questions that should be good for about a 25-minute interview. Try to keep your interviews to approximately 25 minutes. It’s just a good rule of thumb. You don’t want them to go. Too long, and those are my tips that can really help you.    Dr. Barbara Hales  30:04  Those are great tips. And if I might just throw one in, following up on what you said is, you know, when you find that title or that hook that you think is wonderful, the thing is, someone else might have thought it’s wonderful first. So, before you actually make that your podcast, get the URL. If the URL is not available, then think again, because sure, you don’t really want to be promoting someone else’s podcast.    Bret Gregory  30:41  Yeah, I was referring to if they were going to be a guest, as opposed to hosting their own podcast, you’re 100% correct. If they’re going to host their own podcast, you need to put a lot more thought into the title, the name of the show, but I was thinking more of a catchy podcast, title of an episode, of an episode, then in that case, you’re absolutely right, yeah.    Dr. Barbara Hales  31:05  Well, you know what? I thoroughly enjoyed speaking with you today, as I’m sure the listeners are, you know, interested in what you have to say. They’ve, I’m sure, gotten a lot of value out of it. So I just want to remind listeners that you can visit drtalks.com, browse the site, and sign up. It’s free. You are getting nurtured by one of the best. Yeah.    Bret Gregory  31:39  Thank you so much. Well, yeah, for anybody who’s listening, you can create your free account. If you’re a doctor, go to doctor talks.com that’s D, R, T, a, l, K, s.com, forward slash, connect. Then you can sign up, create your expert profile, and get started. Our AI will connect you with podcast hosts, and you can start getting connected. And our team will be happy to assist you if you need any help    Dr. Barbara Hales  32:01  well. Thank you so much. This has been another episode of marketing tips for doctors, till next time.   The post Attract Patients Forever first appeared on The Medical Strategist.

In this episode, Barbara and Jarod discuss: What search engine marketing is and the different types of SEM.  How a medical practice can maximize their return on investment from any marketing campaign. What an exciting or creative ad is and what it looks like regardless of the industry you are in.   Key Takeaways: You have to think of the lifetime value of the marketing dollars you are putting in. It may take some math, but it is worth doing.  A Pay-Per-Click campaign is directed specifically to the clientele or the type of patients that you want. It’s only going out to the prospective patients that would be interested in utilizing your services and coming to your office. If you are new to advertising, give it at least 3 months to start. There is a trial and error period.      “It is a change of thinking where you have to go from thinking from “what does this cost me” to “what does this make me”…Marketing is expensive, but it is expensive because it works.” —  Jarod Spiewak     Connect with Jarod Spiewak:   Twitter: @JarodSpiewak Website: TeamBlueDog.com/video LinkedIn: Jarod Spiewak Keyword Research     Connect with Barbara Hales:  Twitter:   @DrBarbaraHales Facebook:   facebook.com/theMedicalStrategist Business website:www.TheMedicalStrategist.com Show website:   www.MarketingTipsForDoctors.com Email:   [email protected] Books: Content Copy Made Easy 14 Tactics to Triple Sales Power to the Patient: The Medical Strategist YouTube: TheMedicalStrategist LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/barbarahales  The post 048 Jarod Spiewak: Generate More Business and More Money with Search Engine Marketing first appeared on The Medical Strategist.