You may be looking at that title and screaming…why in the world would I be disappointed with a 3650% ROI when getting new patients?
WARNING: I discuss a lot of direct response marketing concepts in this post that you might not be familiar with if you are new to my blog. If you are new, I encourage you to read it to get a grasp of what is possible in your practice. If you are advanced, then enjoy 🙂
To be clear, I’m not disappointed anymore. However, I was initially when I was looking at it with the wrong mindset…
Today, we’re going to talk about the importance of having a “long term” perspective versus a “snapshot” perspective on your marketing campaigns.
By the end of this post you’ll learn:
- The danger of having a snapshot perspective and why it may be costing you money
- How to convert unconverted leads into customers through automated follow up.
- And an idea on how to get free traffic down your sale and marketing funnel.
I want to talk about a mindset shift that has totally changed how I view our marketing.
With this mindset shift you could start thinking about your marketing in a whole new way.
Quick Background…
You’ve most likely heard that we’ve been using Facebook Ads to drive a ton of leads into our workshops.
These ads are running in the Harrisburg market, and 8 days from now I have a workshop with 39 people already registered.
These are Direct Access patients.
Going straight to the general public, to people who don’t know us, like us or trust us yet.
They then go through our automated sequence that we’ve built, and out of the other end we get patient registrations.
We call this Growth X.
Our partners at Gilbert PT have also been testing this for a while now. We’re also testing it in 5 other markets here on the Atlantic Coast.
Exciting stuff and we can’t wait to reveal it to you…
But back to the mindset shift.
Before I was comparing our Facebook Ad campaign ROI like I would for old media. And this was a BIG mistake.
Snapshot VS Long Term Thinking
Before I would look at our Facebook Ad ROI as a snapshot.
I would see that if 39 registered for a workshop, 20 showed up, and 16 of those were converted to a free screening and 15 converted to a full plan of care…what was my ROI and should I keep doing it.
39 -> 20 -> 16 -> 15
I.e. how much did it cost to get those 15 patients, and how much did I make back?
But I forgot that over the long term, there are other variables.
Why though?
Why would I look at it from a snapshot perspective?
Well here’s what a typical direct response campaign looks like.
You use our workshop copy, you run a print ad in your local newspaper for $350. 96 people call in and register for the workshop. That turns into 35 new patients coming in.
$350 -> 96 -> 35
If you use the national average of $1000 per patient, that gives you an income of $35,000.
So for every $1 invested you get $100 back.
That’s an unreal ROI by the way. If you ever get that in your market don’t stop running your campaign.
That’s a simple ROI calculation, a simple snapshot, and it works for print media or direct mail.
However when it comes to Facebook advertising….it’s better to think long term.
Why Long Term Thinking Wins
Here’s the thing. It’s really hard or costly to follow up with print media or direct mail leads.
The leads who didn’t convert, it’ll cost you to remarket to them.
However with Facebook it’s a whole different matter.
My team has worked with some experts in the Facebook marketing industry and have got our advertising nailed to a science.
As such it costs us less than $10 per lead to register for a workshop.
That is, for a prospect to see our ad on Facebook, click through and register on our workshop page.
(Here’s a link to the Physical Therapy workshop page that they register)
So it costs us less than $10 for a lead to enter their information in that page.
So going back to our earlier example, let’s round up to 40 leads that register for our workshop. If 20 show up and I convert 16 to a free screening and 15 to a full plan of care, how much would I get?
40 -> 20 -> 16 -> 15.
(By the way, those numbers fall in line with our average conversions)
So at $10 lead, that would be $400 on Facebook Ads and I get $15,000 in income.
Should I keep doing it?
Well that would be for every $1 in, I get $40 back.
40:1 ROI.
Well yeah!
That’s a good game to play. $40 for every $1 I spend is amazing.
But not as good as our print media example right? That was $100 to $1.
In fact if you were trying to optimize your advertising spend, you’d focus on print over Facebook.
But here’s what I was missing out…
I was only thinking in the short term. I was viewing it as a snapshot.
Remember how I said with Direct Mail or Print Media it costs you to follow up on unconverted leads? So you usually let them fall away.
But with Facebook ads, it’s FREE to follow up with those leads.
So out of those 20 who didn’t turn up to the workshop, we get their email address, and we can follow up.
If we run those numbers, over 12 months, that’s 240 people that we can continue to market to.
We can re-invite them back to another workshop, or another event we’re hosting in the community. From there we can build trust and convert them.
Why is this important?
Because over the long term it increases your ROI!!
Suddenly that $15,000 we got for $400 goes up.
We can increase that 1:40 ROI to 1:50 or 1:60…for free!
But that’s not all
The Power of Automation
For that workshop we have an entire indoctrination sequence.
We have follow up emails, reminder emails and other stuff. It’s all automated. We only need people to enter the front of our funnel.
Traffic goes in, patients come out.
But here’s the thing… we’re already paying for marketing in some venues. Maybe a brochure in a doctor’s office, or a book or report that we’ve given to the general public.
Well what about if we put our website link in those marketing materials?
We can piggyback off those marketing dollars we’re already spending and send them to that same site.
A third thing we can do, when you start thinking with a long term perspective is to partner with others.
We can make a strategic partnership with another business owner and get them to send traffic down our funnel.
For example, next week we’re hosting an event where a local legend who owns a series of running shoe stores in the area is coming to speak.
He’s an awesome guy and I’ve known him for 15 years.
He has an email list. It would be nothing for him to send an email to his list where he talks about the event, and a free workshop we’re throwing to fix back pain.
See that’s the power of long term and automation. Once it’s automated you can send traffic to it forever.
Adjust Your Thinking
In a later post I’ll go into detail on how to get free traffic into your funnel.
But once you have something automated, like the Growth X system (formerly Product X) I mentioned earlier that we’re building for BPTM owners, you can start thinking of the long term income.
It starts to snowball, as you have a growing list of people who registered for the workshop and didn’t show up, who can be converted.
On top of that you have a growing list of people who scheduled a free screening, but didn’t convert – for a variety of reasons – who you can convert later.
This is a really important concept. Adjusting from snapshot thinking to long term thinking when it comes to ROI can be a game changer.
Especially when you’re building an automated process like Growth X for your private practice.
Summary
A long-term perspective lets you see the bigger picture.
With an automated sequence you can use your other marketing materials to increase ROI, and you can partner with others to drive traffic down your funnel.
In short, adopt a long-term perspective and you may start getting more customers from your advertising.
Until next time,
Chad
P.S. If you are interested in learning more about our Facebook Ads & automation process then check out Growth X.
