Ben Lynch: Ahoy. Peter Flynn, is that a background in your background?

Peter Flynn: No, that's a painting. It's a… Look at the size of this thing, by the way. And yes, these are Harry Potter pyjamas, in case you… Oh, all is revealed.

Ben Lynch: At least you're wearing pants. Look at the size of this thing. Wow.

Peter Flynn: That is the biggest canvas I've seen in my entire life.

Ben Lynch: Oh, gee whiz. G'day, good people. Welcome to the Grow Your Clinic podcast by Clinic Mastery. Here's what's coming up inside of this episode.

Jack O'Brien: The goal of marketing or getting new clients is getting as many new clients for as cheap as possible.

Ben Lynch: So let's go there. A lot of people will say, I don't want to use discounts. It cheapens the service.

Peter Flynn: Early in my career, I would have said, no, we don't do discounts, but I've absolutely changed my tune on that.

Ben Lynch: How do you help a clinic owner understand what to allocate and how to split them perhaps between a Facebook ads and a Google ads?

Peter Flynn: We actually just want to test it with $1,000 per month budget because we don't want to start spending $3,000 per month and realise that we've made some wrong bets.

Ben Lynch: How do you track what this Facebook meta ad spend, Instagram ads, is actually leading to bookings?

: Don't swear. You're swearing, Pete. You said sales.

Ben Lynch: Sales.

Jack O'Brien: Sales.

Ben Lynch: This episode will be right up your Allie if you're looking to get more new clients. We're diving into marketing using Facebook ads. And trust me, you'll want to see Peter's breakdown of a current new client offer. Plus stick around for when Jack talks through setting the right ad budget and getting a return on your investment. Before we dive in, today's episode is brought to you by AllieClinics.com. If you're the kind of clinic owner who loves to feel organised and stay ahead of the chaos, you'll love Allie. Think of it as your digital clone. It's the single source of truth for all your clinics, policies, systems, and training. Test it for free at AllieClinics.com. And, in other news, applications are now open to work with us one-on-one at Clinic Mastery. If you want support to grow your clinic and bring your vision to life, just email helloatclinicmastery.com with the subject line podcast, and we'll line up a time to chat. All right, let's get into the episode. J-O-B, are you going to be able to talk today? I'm a little bit slower, but I'm okay. Oh, you're going to speak as slowly as I am. I got some images here. Well, this guy.

Jack O'Brien: Yeah.

Ben Lynch: He said it was a floral outfit. This is impressive.

Jack O'Brien: It is, isn't it? Bottle It is an initiative from a mate of mine all around promoting positive mental health through endurance sports and activities. So yes, flying the floral with pride.

Ben Lynch: This is great. Look, the government wouldn't be able to get into your thick skull through this helmet, would they?

Jack O'Brien: I need all the aero gains I can get. Is this your tinfoil hat? Oh, I've got many hats.

Ben Lynch: That is not my tinfoil one. Oh, that's good. It helped you go a little bit faster over the course of the weekend. The socials were lit up. You progressed past your training wheels. Here you are in the event.

Jack O'Brien: Yes.

Ben Lynch: What's your strongest leg? Is it the not the right one or the left one, but the swim or the run or the bike, which is definitely not the swim.

Jack O'Brien: If there was a triathlon with no swimming, sign me up. Swimming is horrible, but the cycling would be my strong leg for sure. Swimming is a different level of fitness, right? Yeah. Swimming is a different sport. If you didn't swim as a kid, you're not going to get it, basically.

Ben Lynch: Pete, have you ever donned lycra or done an Ironman or triathlon?

Peter Flynn: Uh, no to the lycra, no to the Ironman and no to the triathlons. Ah, missing out. But I have brought a stringer to the gym many times if that's out for anything.

Ben Lynch: Well, there's always room for firsts. Good to have you on deck. Let's dive in. It is episode 319. I'm again joined by Jack O'Brien, physiotherapist, Exeter Terrace Physio Plus. J.O.B., good to have you here, and Peter Flynn, of course, also recovering physiotherapist and exited PhysioFit in Adelaide. A few new folks joining us on the pod, J.O.B., you shared this morning on Slack, just continuing to hit some record numbers with folks tuning into the show, which is fantastic. So if it's your first time here, welcome. Maybe you haven't met Pete, Jack, or myself before, but thank you for joining us. J.O.B., I'll throw to you in a sec for a couple of announcements. I've got a few here on the A11y front. So those folks installing A11y for performance managing their team, understanding the numbers, installing the systems and training to connect those two things. We've got Josh, Maliha, Alliecia, Pam, Jackie, Mick, Emma, and Lizzie. Welcome. Thanks for testing out A11y. J.O.B., what have you had come across your desk?

Jack O'Brien: Yeah, plenty of clinic owners, thousands of clinic owners every week, in fact, are tuning in. And so our request to you would be, if this episode or a previous episode has resonated with you, please do share it with a colleague. That means the world to us. Feel welcome to review and rate on Spotify or iTunes, and you can leave comments. on Spotify now, a new feature. Come and join us. If you want to join in the banter or leave some positive feedback, maybe some requests, come and join us, particularly over in the Spotify chat. Finally, we have released our tickets for the Grow Your Clinic Summit, March 2026. This is only for members. If you want to join us for the summit, Melbourne March, 2026. You need to be a member. You can get in touch with us to ask what membership looks like, whether that's the Business Academy or Elevate, depending on your stage of business. You can do so by emailing ben at clinicmastery.com.

Ben Lynch: Yes. And if you're on Haloxy, Nucle, or Splose, and you're interested in trying Allie, you can also email me to join the priority list, ben at clinicmastery.com. I'm looking forward to that. It's crazy how quickly the year goes by. It feels like that event just happened in preparing for 2026, the retreat in 2026 as well in Palm Cove in the sunny North, which is really good. So today, Pete, you're back on after a little bit of snowboarding. Skiing. Skiing? Yep.

Jack O'Brien: Yeah, he's not one of the cool kids. Not one of the cool kids.

Ben Lynch: All right. That's fair enough. But you did successfully teach Beck. Is that correct? How to ski?

Peter Flynn: I did reasonably successfully teach Beck. There was some pain. There were a couple of snowboarders that did take her out as well, unfortunately. Not the snowboarders fault. Hilarious.

Ben Lynch: Well, that's very good to hear and good to have you back in the saddle because we're talking all things marketing. How do you fill your books with new clients, specifically tackling some of the digital marketing? Previously, we covered Google ads. Today, more on the Facebook ads. Now, you said something in that last episode, Pete, something to the effect of… Be quiet, Siri. I'm not talking to you. Google ads are intention-based marketing, and Facebook ads, meta ads, are more interruption-based marketing. What did you mean by that?

Peter Flynn: So think of Google as a search intent platform. You go on Google to find an answer. I mean, a lot of people are going on ChatGPT these days, but that still does use a lot of what's on Google to answer your queries anyway. but someone's going on there to search for a solution to a problem or to understand their problem so they can find the right solution for it. Whereas meta, so Instagram or Facebook, typically they're just scrolling through their feed and you're trying to pop up and break that feed. Now, if there are any marketing nerds watching this, I do understand that Google also has those same ways of marketing, the display marketing that'll pop up when you're on like news.com.au. if you want to hurt yourself and go on websites like that, or if you're on YouTube or things like that, it's the ads that pop up on the side and whatnot. So Google does have that, but it's not an effective way to use Google dollars. So I typically just pretend that doesn't exist for the budgets that clinics have. You're going to want to use search intent. So the Google search bar, essentially, that's where you want to pop up. So Instagram and Facebook, they're not searching for your clinic. They're not searching for a solution to pain. They're not searching for how to fix their child's stuttering, most likely. They're just on there to mindlessly scroll, as we all do occasionally, mindlessly scroll, go through different things. And so what we're trying to do is we're trying to pop up and catch their attention, break their feed, and then help to educate them as to how we can help solve a problem that they might have.

Ben Lynch: So you bring up a good point around budgets. Let's go there. How, how do you help a clinic owner understand what to allocate and how to split them perhaps between a Facebook ads and a Google ads, and then more specifically within Facebook ads, how to think about allocating the budget?

Peter Flynn: Yeah, I think it, it really depends. Like overall, you're going to have a marketing budget for your clinic. And most people, when we get on the call and we talk through marketing, they go, what should I spend? And I'm like, well, how much would you like to spend? How much would you like to get? So we tried to begin with work out, what are we willing to pay for a client? So we might say we're willing to pay $100, $120, including the advertising agency fee in order to get a client. And then we can reverse engineer and go, all right, we want to get 30 new clients. per month, your 30 extra new clients per month, which would be an extra three grand. But we might say, to begin with, we actually just want to test it with $1,000 per month budget, because we don't want to start spending $3,000 per month and realise that we've made some wrong bets. So what we do is we go, what do we want to acquire for? Let's test that and actually prove this at a smaller budget. And then once we prove it at a smaller budget, let's start to expand that budget further. And I'd be interested, Jack, how you go about that. I know you do a lot of work on the marketing side of things as well. How do you, because I'm sure everyone asks that same question, how do you tackle that with them and help them to understand and get them to pick a reasonable budget to start? It's not too low, not too high.

Jack O'Brien: Yeah. I mean, ultimately the goal of marketing or getting new clients is getting as many new clients for as cheap as possible. And so it's, it's not so much of how much should I spend? It's how much, what's the outcome that you need. And then we can reverse engineer the budget from there. As you described, what are we willing to spend to acquire a client? How many clients do we want or need that will dictate our, our max budget or our ceiling. And ideally it comes in closer to zero. I mean, that's not always real, but it should be less, ideally.

Ben Lynch: It's a great point. And Pete, we have a number of marketing nerds that do listen in that you work closely with as well. But for a lot of people, this is fairly new. They're not sure. Maybe they have outsourced it or they're looking to it for the very first time. Just talk us through even practically about how to decide how much you'd be willing to pay to acquire a new client. Some people haven't even thought about that.

Peter Flynn: It's a good question. And I actually had this conversation with the clinic on a Friday. So a few days ago now, they weren't too happy to pay a lot to get a new client. They're like, oh, I'm only having to pay 40 or $50. And I was trying to temper their expectations going. I actually don't think that's realistic with the type of strategy that you want to pick to do that. And so we broke down what are they trying to do? What's the outcome? Like Jack said, that they're trying to do. And they had two therapists who were seeing, they're both full-time, 38 hours a week, both seeing about 12 clients a week at the moment, relatively new. Their employees, their salaries are about $1,700, $1,800 each. So at the moment they're spending $3,600 per week on these two employees, right? That are not breaking even, basically. They're basically losing money. And so what I said is, would you be unhappy? Like your initial cost is $160. If you were paying $160 for initials and we got an extra 10 a week each in there. So you're paying, what's that? $3,200 that week. Would you be unhappy? Because actually it's a null and void equation. You're not making any more money, but you're not losing any money. But if we did that for four weeks and then stopped advertising, you'd suddenly be making a lot more money. And I said, well, what if even we were paying $240 per new client in that example? and you ran that at a loss for a period of two to four weeks, but then we could pull back the marketing. And then at that stage, you now have them, instead of seeing 10 per week, they're now seeing 35, 40 per week. And we actually worked out the numbers of the profitability. And so what that showed us is that it's a risk reward equation and you're looking for an asymmetric risk reward where the reward is far higher than the risk. And so the loss in that example over that four week period was relatively small, even that exaggerated example that I did then, the loss was quite small. But after four weeks, when we paired that back, the reward was extremely high. And it was almost like an eight to one, if we looked at a ratio, And they're like, oh, I hadn't thought of it like that before. I'm already paying these people to sit here, twiddle their thumbs. Like in this stage of growth in my business, paying more to acquire a new client is acceptable. Now, if we were in a phase of business where we're already quite busy and we just want a small top up to maintain sustainability and profitability, that wouldn't make any sense at all. So I think it really depends on the stage of business that someone's in, Ben.

Ben Lynch: Yeah, Jack, how do you go about people managing their cash flow to do this? Because they might say, and I've heard people say, yeah, great, all right, I'm willing to spend, but maybe they're feeling the pinch with the cash that they've got coming through. You work with a lot of early stage businesses, startup clinics are in their early journey. Money's tight. How do you help them actually start to allocate towards marketing and have a budget to spend?

Jack O'Brien: Yeah, I mean, Pete's got a good point or a number of good points. And one thing that I like to chat with clinic owners about is how can we look at a problem from multiple different angles and triangulate our theories, kind of test our theories from multiple different perspectives. So to Pete's point, we want to think about the lifetime value of a client and our acquisition cost should be a percentage of that lifetime value. Round figures, a new client is worth $1,000 to your practice. Maybe your PVA is $10 and the average consult is $100. They're going to spend $1,000 with you over time. How much are you willing to spend to acquire $1,000? If I said to you, you give me $50 and I'll give you $1,000, that's a pretty good deal. And so, you know, thinking broadly about that 5%, maybe 10% of lifetime value is a good first angle to consider. And then Ben, to answer your question about cashflow, we can cross-reference that with the income that we'll receive on the first visit. So in that example, I just gave you $1,000 lifetime value. You might be willing to spend $100 to acquire that patient. And when that patient shows up for their initial consult, your fee is $135. Let's say for example, and so you've spent $100. to get 135 in the first consult. And then over time, that patient keeps coming back and you'll get $1,000. So I think that's to your point about cashflow and for those early on in their clinic journey, thinking about getting a return on your spend in the first consult is a good filter to help you manage cashflow. I'm curious what you think about that, Pete, because it's not always possible depending on the type of patient and the type of marketing, but is that a filter that you've considered before, Pete?

Peter Flynn: Yeah, it's something I talk about a lot, actually, is you've got your your lifetime value return and then you've got your cash on cash return. And typically we talk about that. That's you just want to make more money in the initial session than you spent on the marketing. And because that way you're positive every month, you're not having to dip into your own money in order to put back into marketing. And so if you look at a trend that would be trending up month on month, The only time I sort of look outside of that is when we want to do really aggressive marketing. And that's the Uber, the Airbnb, where they weren't trying to be profitable at all points. They were trying to have aggressive growth. And I've seen a few clinics do this. They've had really aggressive growth rather than focusing on profitability. And so their marketing budget was way up there for about a period of a year. And then when they paired the marketing budget back, they'd gone from seeing 100 clients a week or 100 appointments per week to about 275 per week over a 12-month period. And then when they paired the marketing back, suddenly they were extremely, extremely profitable. And so rather than trying to do it in a really sustainable manner where it wasn't, let's call it stressful from a cashflow perspective. They said, no, fastest way from A to B is going to be we aggressively reinvest into this. And then at this point, when we hit this many appointments, we actually decrease and pay this back. And we are spending this year as well, building up the the marketing methods that don't cost money. They're doing the referral partnerships, the stuff in the background that takes a while, but they just supercharged it with the ads for a 12-month period.

Jack O'Brien: And if you've got the cash flow to be able to handle that, I think a good example would be if you're an established clinic looking to open a second site or a subsequent site, maybe you've got some cash flow, you've got some cash reserves, and you want to open on day one with full books or month one with a full book. It's in those types of circumstances when it's a good idea to really aggressively market to boost your cashflow. It won't be necessarily profitable, but your books will be full. There'll be some cash coming in and over time, it will be really profitable. You just need to hold your breath for the skinny profitability in the first instance to be more profitable later.

Peter Flynn: And there was a clinic I worked with, and this was six years ago now. They opened a new clinic, and they said, all right, we're going to have two full-time therapists here, and on week one, we want to have 100 appointments. And so what they said is, we're going to market extremely hard. They did $70 for your first two appointments. They had to pay $70 up front, and that was your first two appointments. So $35, they were osteos, $35 per appointment, and they marketed hard. And they finished with just over 100 clients in that first week, 100 appointments in that first week. Now, if you look at the retention on the like, we just worked really hard with the team on how do we retain these clients longer term? And they had about a 70% retention. So realistically, you've had a clinic that started and after week two, they're now consistently seeing 70 plus per week. Like that's insane. And we probably spend about probably four grand on the marketing in order to do that. So yeah, it's amazing.

Ben Lynch: It's crazy. So then Pete, I want to come back to in a moment, what you just touched on there around discounts and the initial consult. But before we do, just to clarify, because the budget piece is such an important piece. Okay. People say, I want to get into Facebook, Google ads. I want to do this. I need to get new clients, perhaps haven't thought about the marketing budget. So we're getting the cogs turning there. How would you think about the allocation towards Google ads versus Facebook ads? And then we're going to continue down the Facebook ads line here through this discussion. But how do you think about the budget overall and divvying it up between those two platforms?

Peter Flynn: I think different clinics would do it differently. If you're doing both of them, I would do… Typically, I would do Google Ads as a year-round type thing, and then I would do Facebook Ads at certain blasts. Like, if you're doing it for a pure new client perspective, I'd do maybe a three-week blast every three months if you're doing Google Ads as well. If you're leaning more on Facebook Ads and not really doing Google Ads, then I'd look at how can we run it year-round. And the challenge is, if you're running a special, you don't want to run a special year-round. Because there's no longer a special, it's just the new norm. So if you are doing discounts, which is totally fine. Some people love them, some people don't. Just think of it as it's lowering the potential risk for someone as they have that first session. So you just build it into your marketing cost. But If you're running Facebook ads year round, you want portions of the year where you can run discounts and portions where you're really focused on the education side of things. And I mean, all of it works really well. You just have to be really clear on what is your strategy.

Ben Lynch: So let's go there. A lot of people will say, I don't want to use discounts. It cheapens the service. You'll get those that maybe are like, we can't use discounts, you know, for those folks in, uh, opera governed land, um, just as a sidebar, actually go read the, um, regulations and you'll get some clarity rather than Facebook group comments. Um, go check it out.

Jack O'Brien: So.

Ben Lynch: What you're positioning this as is it lowers the risk for a prospective patient to book in. It lowers the barrier, lowers some of the friction that they might have about seeking help from your profession. This makes it a little bit easier for me to jump on this and take it up as a first step.

Peter Flynn: Yeah, and look, to answer the whole Opera thing, Opera doesn't hate poor people, right? Opera's not going to say, because you're offering a cheaper service, you're a bad clinic or you're doing anything wrong. Right. Because what you're doing is you're lowering the barrier to entry. Like, would APRA be unhappy if one clinic had higher fees and one clinic had lower fees? Like, that's not the issue. The wording in APRA is they want to avoid the indiscriminate use of health care services or marketing for indiscriminate use of health care services. So basically encouraging people to use things that they don't need to use. Okay. So that's what they don't want to do. So what they don't want to do is they They want to avoid you having, you know, let's say things that say there's only three available or, you know, book. You have to book by this date. You're putting time pressure on people.

Ben Lynch: But even those, I think you can do some of those things, but you just have to call out the T's and C's very clearly in what you're doing. Just don't lie.

Peter Flynn: Those are the areas where you might have some conversations. But most people, I see them a lot anyway. But it's just the whole the indiscriminate use of health care services. In answering this question, though, I've completely forgotten the original question.

Ben Lynch: Well, discounts. It's essentially looking at this. And it sounds like it's a different tact than Google ads and offers that we're putting out there. Because if I'm hearing you correctly, we're entering a domain, Instagram or Facebook, where we're interrupting someone. They're not necessarily seeking our services. And so perhaps to make it easier for them to click the link and go to the booking page, we want to make it as appealing as possible. And one of those ways is to include a special offer, a discount, where they can save financially. It lowers the risk for them, lowers the friction, and ideally converts you know, better than the alternative, not doing it.

Peter Flynn: Is that correct? Yeah, yeah. And I think I made a bit of a joke about it with ARPA before, but it's just looking from the perspective of what does a discount actually do? A discount reduces risk, it reduces friction, it makes it easier for someone to trial something initially. Now, a lot of people might go, I'm not sure if this is for me. I'm not sure if this is the right service for me, if this is the right clinic for me, if this is the right person for me. And we're living in a time where, like, let's be honest, the cost of living is quite high. We've had mortgages quite high for a while now, and people are really mindful of where they're spending their money. And if you're thinking about trying a new clinic because the one you're at, you're not thinking that they're the best or maybe you've tried a few things, you're not doing anything at the moment, but you want to sort something out and you look at two different clinics and one of them says it's $200 for the initial and the other one over here says it's $59 for your initial session. Now there will be a subset of people who look at the $59 one and go, I don't want a discount, I want to pay more because I value things that are more expensive. That's perfectly fine. There'll be plenty of people who view it that way. There'll be many more people who view it the other way and go, I want to trial this. And this is what Amazon's business is entirely built on, is being able to offer things cheaper to get people in initially, right? And then they actually increase their lifetime value with many other things that they do offer once people get into that ecosystem. But it's just looking from that perspective, it helps someone to trial something, reducing that risk and reduces the financial burden of them doing it initially. Does it actually cheapen the service? I would argue no, it doesn't cheapen the service because at the end of the day, every session thereafter is going to be at this fee and this cost. And I'd encourage you, if you're going to offer a special like that, that you're up front around the cost long term and what they look like. But to me, it doesn't cheapen the service. And early in my career, I would have said, no, we don't do discounts. It cheapens the service. But I've absolutely absolutely changed my tune on that, especially listening to a lot of Alex Hamozy, who, for those who listen to him, he does price things very high, but he also looks for how can you get someone to experience this amazing service and make it such a no-brainer for them to continue.

Ben Lynch: So to clarify, if you're just starting out on ads or maybe you're new and you're dipping your toe, you want to take it to the next level with your ads to acquire new patients. You've established the target of how many new patients you want. You've got a budget there that you want to spend. You're allocating to Facebook ads. You're saying more seasonally for a three, four week burst. And you're doing Google Ads evergreen, just ongoing there in the background. And so you're splitting that up. Any sort of rules or principles for around, you know, is it 50-50 split in terms of the ad spend? How do you think about that? Is it about just continuing to test and make sure you're getting a good return on whatever you spend?

Peter Flynn: I think the latter, right? It's making sure you're getting the cost of acquisition, right? You're looking at how many new clients are we getting into the diary and what is our cost per acquisition? And if we need more new clients in the diary, if we increase the budget, do we see a relative increase in new client numbers? Can we keep that cost of acquisition the same? I think when we talk about budget, we talk about these sorts of numbers, like theoretical, like abstract, it's quite hard to talk about some of these things. And it might be that for some clinics, when they do that burst with Facebook, they don't have heaps of room in the diaries. So they might do a relatively small one or they might be bringing on three new therapists and they're like, we are going ham at this. There's so many confounding factors within that, but I don't think there's a perfect ratio or anything like that. But what I'd say is you need to understand the numbers. You need to understand what am I paying and what do I get for what I pay? And we need to be thinking ahead, Jack, or through to you, mate.

Jack O'Brien: Yeah, I think when it comes to budget allocation, Ben, it probably is dictated by the types of ideal clients that you're looking to serve and the types of presentations that you want to work with ideally. And so what I mean by that is if you're treating something where people have a known problem and they have an intention to reach out and get help, then you're probably going to wait more towards Google ads where people have, they know what they're after, they're searching, they're looking for you. and therefore, that's where you should spend money because that's where people are looking. But if you're perhaps a little bit more holistic or you treat a little bit differently or alternatively, and maybe people don't know that your service could be one that they could benefit from, it's in those cases that you probably should consider more of Facebook or Meta Budget because we can interrupt folks and bring to front of mind their problems that they may not be aware of or solutions that they may not be aware of. So in those cases, you would wait more to Facebook ads where people have a known problem and they already know the solution, wait, as in the waiting towards Google.

Ben Lynch: So Pete, we know that the ultimate outcome of this is new patients, but I so often hear clinic owners, especially when they're working with agencies say, I'm spending the money, but I'm not seeing the bookings. So how do you track with a degree of confidence that this Facebook meta ad spend Instagram ads is actually leading to bookings?

Peter Flynn: What I like about Meta, or the strategy that I really enjoy using, it's a lead gen strategy. So we put the ad out there, people will see the ad, and from that ad, they will then leave their details. We want to ask one or two questions where they've actually got to write something in. So, you know, what's the best time of day to call you? What's the best day of the week to normally contact you on? So, they actually have to type something in because otherwise you'll get people who accidentally click on it and they go to click out, they click submit and then, yeah, you get a bit of junk in there. So, you want to ask one or two questions where they have to type and then you want their name, email and contact number. And then you're going to have a list. So you've now got this list of people who are interested in whatever the offer is that you have. Now, it's a little bit of a sales call. And what is sales in healthcare, by the way? It's being a great listener. Don't swear.

: You're swearing, Pete. You said sales.

Peter Flynn: Sales.

Jack O'Brien: Sales.

Peter Flynn: But it's being a great listener. And for a lot of people in healthcare, it's the first time they've ever been listened to. And it's helping them to understand that you can help them and how you can help them. It's not solving their problem on the call or anything like that. It's a five minute call to just listen and let them know, A, can you help them? And B, how can you help them? C, what are the next steps? If you can't help them, maybe you can refer them on to someone who can. And so we find this strategy works really well because once you get on the phone with them, the conversion rate is very, very high. And most people, once they're on the phone, have a conversion rate of about 80% that I've worked with. It's just getting them on the phone. Sometimes it can be hard, which is why, if you rewind this back to where I said, get best day and best time of day to give them a call so you can get in contact with them. So from this, you'll have a list of people. You'll say we spent $1,000 on Facebook ads for those two weeks, and we got 50 people, so 20 bucks each. And from those 50 people, we converted 20 of them into clients. You'll know how many you've converted because you literally were on the phone with them. You booked them in. Simple. Now you can see if we made 20 bookings from those 50 leads from that $1,000, we've now paid $50 per conversion. And if we're running it at, let's say that $59 special we talked about, you're now running it a cash on cash win. And for a lot of people, when they run a special like this on Instagram or Facebook, they can normally pick clients up for around the $40 to $50 if they do it well. but not if they run it all the time. So they've got to think about how can we just do it in bursts typically. Some people have run it all the time and had good results, but that does have second order consequences of people finding you through Google. But once they find you through Google, they're likely they're going to see your Facebook ads and they come into their second session and they say, I didn't get this special. And you have to work around how you're going to go through that. So there are second order consequences to doing these things too often.

Ben Lynch: I'm keen to break down the specific Facebook ad, what you include, what you're seeing working in just a moment, but let's go to who's making that call quite practically. How long are the calls? Just talk us through some of the practicalities of what you've seen work particularly well.

Peter Flynn: I mean, to be honest, I get the business owner to do it to start with, because I want them to understand the type of people that they're going to be talking to. I want them to, if they can, take down some notes or some recordings of the calls so that they can think about, you know, these are the questions that I asked that worked. These are the things that I said that worked. And then they can take this and create a script and a training for the admin team or clinicians within your team to be making those calls. But I think it starts with you as the business owner. and then you package it up and pass it on to the team.

Ben Lynch: Imagine, depending on what you've actually put on the ad, it's going to be fairly explicit what the call is about, the nature of the call. So maybe we go there. What are you seeing on the offer side? Literally from the creative, the messaging that is the ad that shows up in my feed as I'm scrolling through looking at the world's best sandwiches on Instagram. And then it disrupts my feed with this great offer that you've helped craft. Yeah, what's working? What does this look like? Have you got something to share?

Peter Flynn: Yeah, I mean, I would have… sandwiches, to be honest. But here's an example from Cody. And I actually asked Cody if we could use this. And he said, only if you're using it as an example of something that's doing good and not something that's… Thank you, Cody.

Ben Lynch: Big shout out to you.

Peter Flynn: Thank you, my man. Now, here we have a physiotherapy clinic in WA. So physiotherapy session offer. And just to work through this really quickly, you'll see he say, you know what, what can we help here? It's super obvious. It's back and neck pain, sciatica, sports injuries, ankles, knees, hips and shoulders, muscle strain, headache, migraine, vertigo, or in other words, everything. But the thing that actually works well in this, even though it's quite broad, is that it just labels these things super clearly. It says Physio Session Offer. So you know what this is for straight away. You can see the $59 there. So you know how much it costs. You can see the things that they treat. So you're like, all right, this is really obvious. There's a picture of someone doing some physio. So it's all congruent. So it's normally $119. Now it's $59. Book yours now. And then you've got the form there. It says Get Offer. And you're just going to put a few details in.

Ben Lynch: So when I click get offer here, and for those that are listening in, another call to action to. Anyway, we can check this out here. There's a button that says Get Offer. So I'm gonna click that, right? And then it takes me to a very simple form that is built and created in Meta, Facebook, Instagram. And it has sounded like about six questions that you said, like their name, their email, their phone number, there's three.

Peter Flynn: And then- There will be auto-filled by- Auto-filled, even better.

Ben Lynch: And then the next are what questions, what time of day and what day is best to contact you?

Peter Flynn: Yeah, so typically I say what time of day and for me that's a multiple choice. So for me that it would say 8am till midday, midday till 5pm or after 5pm. So they've got to click one of the three and then I say which is the best day to contact you in bracket Monday to Friday and then the other right Monday. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, whatever it may be. So the key there being they've got to answer one multiple choice. They've got to write one thing in, which shows to me a level of intent that they didn't accidentally click this and accidentally write those things in there, which is important. Otherwise you will get people that do accidentally click it and send it through.

Ben Lynch: And then from there, let's go back to the phone call. Yes. Is there, you know, a couple of bullet points, script structures that you've advised or seen work really well? Because now seeing that, it's pretty clear the offer that's there, though they may have one of whatever seven different problems that were called out. How have you advised clinic owners to have that call? Like, is there a couple of questions that you tell them to use?

Peter Flynn: Yeah, absolutely. I think the first thing is when you give them a call, introduce who you are. You would not believe how many times people don't actually say who they are there. Now, if we go one step before the call, we would actually text them that morning and say, Hey, it's Pete from PhysioFit. I'm going to be giving you a call today from this number. So from whatever number you're going to call, write that in there. You can send the text from that one even better if you've got like a clinic mobile phone, because honestly, who answers a phone call from a number you don't know? I don't.

Ben Lynch: And you've got this new… I don't even answer Jack's calls.

Peter Flynn: Oh, you answered mine once. I was really feeling quite special. That was a pocket answer. Yeah, pocket answer. But another thing that's important, right? The new iPhone software coming out has got the glass, if you've heard of that, if you've got the new iPhone. And now when someone calls you, it is an unknown number, they actually have to say their name and you'll pop up before you even, like, so you can choose to answer it. And so I think these little additions are really important, especially as technology changes to avoid, you know, scam and fraud calls and whatnot. So, coming back to the call, the question was, what should people ask on that call? The first thing, once you've introduced yourself, is, can you tell me a little bit more about the issue that you're facing? And then, shut up. Don't say anything. We have this need or inner desire to talk and give and give and give. But, sorry, I would ask that, and they would say all these things, and then I might say, thank you. And what else? And then they'll probably talk a little bit more and I say, thank you. Is there anything else? So just giving them the opportunity to talk and to be heard. Then a couple more questions I might ask would be, what have you tried so far and what have you found most frustrating? and I'll let them talk. And then by the end of that, I've got a really clear understanding of what is the problem that they're facing? What have they tried so far? And what have they found most frustrating? And by that stage, typically most people sold themselves on coming in because we've listened to them. We've asked some good questions, but you can really just tip them over the edge by, you know, what's most frustrating. Okay. We don't do that. This is how we do it here. And typically the segue I'd ask is, you know, Would you be open to me explaining how we might be able to help you? And no one ever said, no, I wouldn't be open to that.

Ben Lynch: Yeah, especially if they've submitted the form, right? Yeah. A reasonable degree of intent. I can hear though, Pete, someone saying, how does this not turn into like a virtual consult and it goes for 45 minutes? So how do you make sure that you preserve the time you do give space to listen, but that this isn't just a free consult on top of the discount?

Peter Flynn: Good question, good question. For me, I would typically pre-frame the call a little bit early on and say, look, I've got about five minutes or I've got about 10 minutes, so you might just pre-frame that. So just, you know, being mindful of time, I might interject at a couple of points here.

Ben Lynch: Yeah, nice.

Jack O'Brien: I think it's also helpful to say as part of your answer, like, I'm here to understand. I'm not going to be able to, we won't have the time or capacity to be able to intervene, but we can get the ball rolling. We can understand today.

Ben Lynch: Mm, really good, yes. Okay, so this is the strategy that you're seeing work most effectively when running Facebook ads. Are there any bits of tools or tech or equipment or parts of the process that we haven't covered that are essential for it working?

Peter Flynn: Nothing that's essential, but there are other things you can add in, like, you know, you can add like a text magic or if you use GoHighLevel to automatically text them the moment or a minute after they submit the form with a thank you for submitting the form type thing.

Ben Lynch: And GoHighLevel is a software platform that you can use. It does integrate with a couple of patient management systems for those that haven't seen it yet.

Peter Flynn: Yeah, it's a CRM. It's like a MailChimp, but better, you could say. CRM means Customer Relationship… Management. Management, that's it. Blank spot there. Which is basically just your email system, but a really fancy one for a reasonable price. So that's something you can do. Speed is important. If you get leads and leave them there for two weeks and then call them, the likelihood they convert is far lower. So if you're calling them to convert within, call it 24 to 48 hours, you have a much higher chance of success. And then I think the other part of it, and this is the part that I didn't used to focus on enough with my team in the early days anyway, was you have to work with your team on this isn't just a cheap consult. They're not just coming in for a cheap consult. They're coming in because they have a problem that needs solving and we need to treat them like any other client you would see. We need to present a great management plan we need to rebook effectively because what I've found is that younger therapists especially tend to have really poor rebooking rates from these sessions because in their mind they're already thinking like the financial planner going well if this person's coming in for a cheap session we're They're not going to be able to afford the full session after this. So I'll just let them see how they go after this one type thing. Whereas when it's done with senior therapists, they tend to have the same rebooking rate as any normal new client. And so what that tells me is it's not the patient, it's the therapist.

Jack O'Brien: It's a really good point, Pete, and I'll jump in here. He's a good mental framework for clinic owners to think about. Job of marketing is to get a new client to show up to an initial consult. Then once we get them through the door and into the clinic room, it's our job as a clinic and as clinicians to go through our initial consult process as part of your new client journey that you should have engineered every moment deliberately as a team. And so you go through your assessment, your diagnosis, you deliver your findings and your plan of care. And at that point, marketing has done its job. Essentially, your marketing is to get a new client through to the management plan delivery. And then it's your clinic's responsibility, your process's policies, the way you've documented that in Allie, the way you've iterated your delivery skills. At that point of management plan, that is when you enroll that patient in their plan of care. So marketing's job is to get an ideal client with an ideal presentation to the management plan delivery.

Ben Lynch: It's a great point. And I was on a phone call with Dan Gibbs before we jumped on this pod, because we're planning our next immersion for members. And we're just working through what's the title going to be. We know the theme and what we're going to be covering. We were just working through a few. And where we got to was essentially filling your books with more word of mouth referrals. by transforming the patient's experience. So we're going through the client journey. To your point, Jack, literally from when they book in that initial appointment, what are the communication they get via email and SMS and phone call? What's their first experience? And that experience of the management plan or treatment plan being delivered. I'm excited for that. That's a little sort of rabbit hole to go down. But for members that are listening, please make sure you register for the next immersion so that we send you all the relevant links. And if you're not a member, Hey, come join us. Come on. It's important.

Jack O'Brien: This is critical, Ben, because how many clinics go, I need more new clients. And so we do the marketing, get the new clients, but you've got a leaky bucket as the metaphor goes. And then we get clinics who say, oh, I've got these tire kicking new clients. They only show up for one or two sessions. Well, I would suggest there's a two-part solution that you can whinge about the problems or you can act on the solutions, get better with your marketing and attract more ideal clients and convert them better. And when I say convert, not in a sales sense, but in a management plan delivery sense where we've got a compelling reason to engage in care to get outcomes. That's how you overcome tire kickers from paid marketing sources.

Peter Flynn: And I think as well, like just coming back to the management plan and getting people through that, it's exactly like you said, typically the clinic owner doesn't have that problem. They don't have the call it the tire kicker problem. And so often it's less about the clients and more about the therapist. And even if I reflect on my journey early as an early career physiotherapist, it's like I used to think it was more about the clientele I was seeing and the quality of clients I was getting through the door. But what I noticed was that the better I got at delivering management plans, the more confident I got at asking people to come back and explaining the plan to them and showing people how I could help them and listening to them, the more people chose to come back.

Jack O'Brien: Here's what you're saying, Pete, or here's what we're saying. If you have a tyre kicker problem, you have a skill deficiency problem to be solved. It's not the patient's fault that they're tyre kickers, it's your or your clinic's skill and confidence in delivery that's the opportunity.

Ben Lynch: We love taking care of patients, transforming the client experience. It is great to even look at some of the systems, the communication prior to those folks coming in that might be an opportunity for better pre-framing to your point in the phone call sense that actually sets them up for a really terrific first appointment, initial assessment, however you frame it. Pete, we were speaking about in Slack, you and me, what are some of the biggest mistakes that clinics make when it comes to ads from boosting posts, targeting too broad or not tracking conversions properly? These are the three things that you brought up with me. And I said, hey, that'd be great for us to just unpack a little bit more on the pod today. So maybe take it in one of those three directions, boosting posts, targeting too broad or not tracking conversions.

Peter Flynn: I think we've talked through conversions already. If you don't track conversions, you have no idea where the marketing dollars are going. If you don't know what you're getting for your marketing dollars, you're really just at the end of the day guessing. And you probably have that feeling where you go, I don't know if it's working or not. If I stopped putting money in that, would I get the same results? Would I get worse? Would I get better? Whatever. So conversion tracking is super important. But if we look at that boosted post, a lot of people do boosted posts because they go, hey, this post was really popular. Maybe I just boost it, maybe get some more followers, some more likes, whatever. But at the end of the day, what pays the bills are conversions. Likes, followers, they're all great. And we could find a link between that and conversions across a long period of time, potentially. But I think for most clinics, we need to think of our marketing as a direct marketing where we want to spend X amount of dollars to get X conversions and be able to measure that. Once you become a huge, huge business, we can think about things like followers and likes a little bit more and more on the branding side. But I think the direct marketing that we can measure is most important. So boosting posts, it more tends to be a bit of a vanity metric and a vanity thing rather than a vanity outcome, rather than an actual outcome that we can measure and get a great result from. And I'm happy to be wrong on this one, Jack. Well, I think you're wrong, Peter.

Jack O'Brien: I like it. I like it. No, I don't think you're wrong. I think there's many ways to be right, as we say around here. So I think it's all about why you do it or how you do it. If you're boosting something to get followers so that your follower count goes up, However, if it's part of a more integrated strategy, and this comes back to the commentary a few minutes ago around tech or what other ways, if you're boosting a post with the objective to get more followers, and when you get a new follower, Ideally, they're part of your ideal audience. They're geographically located or they're a lookalike audience, et cetera. If it's part of an integrated plan to direct message or set up some automation, some message flow, some AIs with those new followers to engage with them as a consequence of why they followed you. So let's say you do a reel about a couple of treatment interventions and someone follows you as a result of this intervention reel. Logically, you'd follow that person up and say, hey, thanks for following. Notice you came into our community based on this intervention. Have you been suffering with X, Y, Z? Have you ever tried this type of intervention? And so we start a direct message conversation based on the reason that they followed us. And so the overarching objective isn't followers. The overarching objective is conversions and bookings. But the marketing objective might be followers in the first part of the plan.

Peter Flynn: Yeah. I know. I would agree with that because in that example there, you're, there's a, like you said, there's a clear reason why you're, let's call it boosting that one. You've seen it work well to get followers. And each of those followers is then going to get a direct message. And then you're going to track, you know, from what we spend, how many conversions have we had on that? Yeah.

Ben Lynch: Okay, I'm glad we settled the debate. We're both right. Oh, as usual. You're both right. No, it's good. I think that's the great context. And it even leads into where we spoke earlier about clinic owners going, I wanna do this, but I haven't thought about a budget. Like what we're really encouraging here is just to think of what is your objective? What is sustainable? And so long as you're tracking it, you can figure out how we're going and what adjustments need to be made. Yeah.

Jack O'Brien: I think it's an important conversation to think about the differences and the nuances.

Ben Lynch: Yeah.

Jack O'Brien: You know, Pete mentioned a lot about picking up the phone and we know that when someone answers on the other end, there's a high chance of conversion, but there's also a very high chance of it ringing out or going to voicemail and we play phone tag. And so, Again, all methods can work. It's finding what will work for you. And a lot of it probably comes down to your ideal client. If your ideal client avatar is someone in their 40s, 50s, or 60s, they're very likely to pick up the phone to an unknown caller. If your ideal avatar is someone in their 30s, there's a good chance that someone in their 30s or 20s, they've never answered a phone in their life. Because we don't answer phones. And so it's those ones that you might consider a cell-by-chat type approach or an AI phone conversation approach or an AI text conversation approach, whether it's text or direct message or phone call. Matching that communication pathway to your ideal avatar and how they best communicate will increase your chances of converting, lest you have a big spreadsheet of leads that you just can't get in touch with.

Ben Lynch: So Pete, on that front, are Facebook ads only for the musculoskeletal clinics out there, the physios and the podiatrists and the osteos?

Peter Flynn: No, I have plenty of clinics who were in the PAIDS disciplines, the disability space that run these type of ads as well.

Ben Lynch: So speech pathologists, OT psychologists, Facebook ads work for them?

Peter Flynn: Yeah, they work for everyone. I think it's all very similar. Like what we do is similar. We help people to solve problems. And at the end of the day, a lot of clinic owners across all disciplines will say, yeah, but we are unique. Um, which it's, it's always interesting to hear, but then we break down like what is unique about it. And we find there's more similarity, um, similarities than differences. And for a lot of, I guess, clinics that say it won't work for us, they say, look, would you be willing to trial it? And if we were to trial it, what would success look like? And if you were to achieve X, Y, Z, would you continue this? It's one of those things where it's a two-way door. If someone was going to trial something like this, even if they said, we don't really feel like this is for us, hey, you could trial it for three weeks and you could go, you know what? That sucked. We're not doing that again. No, we're out. Okay. We tried it. whatever, get rid of it. And you don't have to go back to it, but you did try it. There's a lot of people I believe that would trial it and go, you know what? There's actually value in doing something like this. I can see the value in doing this and where this fits into an overall marketing strategy. I think that's the thing. It's one piece of an overall marketing strategy. There's no silver bullet here, Jack.

Jack O'Brien: Yeah, it's a really good point, Pete. And I think tying into what you've just said, we need to be fairly agnostic about our marketing strategies. And some of us have preferences or I would never click on that or I can't imagine that my clients would click on that or accept that. At the end of the day, you can have your opinions or assumptions or hypotheses, but we need to be guided by the data. Let the data, let the objective information guide our decisions and put aside some of our assumptions or at best test our assumptions and hypotheses so that we can have a data-informed approach, not just a preference-informed approach.

Ben Lynch: I agree and disagree. I think because there might be something that works really well and it's like a significant discount, but it really doesn't pair well with you run a premium brand. And so you're doing this maybe, you know, continuously over time. It might work incredibly effectively, but I think there is also a brand filter into your point of like the ideal clients that are, are they coming through off the back of this? that is a nuanced perspective to it to say, yes, I absolutely agree. We need the data to guide this. And that's probably one of the biggest things we all see, right? Someone tried it. They weren't sure if it was working or not working. They felt like they were just throwing money into the wind. And so they stopped it. And so being able to track, is this working and pairing it with, you know, the brand stuff is that Caleb Ralston, who's going out quite a bit at the moment. I really love his distinction of like branding is the conscious pairing of two things together. It said it really beautifully. Way better than that. I butchered it, but it's essentially how can we make sure that we continue to associate our brand with, you know, what we want it to be associated with. So I agree with you, JB. And my question to you, Pete, as we look to wrap here is, Is there an element to this that's more important than the other? Like, is it the creative side, like the images and the videos? Is it the targeting side? Is it the offer, the substance of the offer itself? Like, okay, you know, maybe doing a $10 discount is never going to work compared to like a 50% off type discount. Like, yeah, which area actually yields the most value and return on investment in your Facebook ads?

Peter Flynn: It's such a hard question. It's a combination of everything, though. You can't just do one thing well, I think, and expect it to work. Realistically, to start with, it's understanding your ideal client, understanding what is the offer that would appeal to them, then being able to articulate through your creative, which is usually the image more so than video, would be simplest and easiest, and then having a really simple form that allows them to not have to take 10 steps to fill it out. And then it's how you run that sales call and the process around that to get them to pick up the phone. And then once they're on the phone, it's the process of how you do that sales call. Each one of those parts to me has an equal importance because you miss one of those things and suddenly it all falls over. So not the answer you're looking for and really sitting on the fence here and getting some splinters, but it's literally every single part of that is as important as the next. It's like dominoes. You take one domino out and suddenly it doesn't work.

Ben Lynch: It's a really good point of just considering each of the elements to this working. And if you're tracking it well, you know where to maybe change or test. Jack, you mentioned this, I think it was literally last episode of kind of the mad scientist approach. I think you use something like that of testing these things. I think to that point earlier of maybe people did one test. It didn't work, so they stopped. rather than iterating and going, okay, what can we learn from this? Adjust, test again and see the outcome of it.

Jack O'Brien: Yeah, we do need to constantly be experimenting. That's the game and that's the game of marketing, right? Is that we never arrive. You can always do better. I'll answer your question that you posed to Pete. I'll get off the fence, Ben. I know Pete's still stuck there. We'll share the tweezers later. The creative matters the most. And here's why, because you can set up all the most wonderful targeting, but if your creative sucks, your ad will not work. If you're using stock images as garbage chat GPT with em dashes everywhere and you know, your creative will let you down. However, if we flip it the other way, and your creative is sharp, you've had a photographer or videographer, your wording and your copy, your call to action is compelling, using emojis and the image or the video matches the offer. If you get that right, Meta in particular will take care of the targeting for you. It will overcome some of your poor settings because it will optimise to find the right audience who will ultimately convert for you. So I'll say the creative matters the most.

Ben Lynch: I do like Gary Vee's sentiment around that of let the creative be the variable of your success. Okay, he's going to plant his flag there. So as we look to close this, Pete, is there a minimum spend? You spoke earlier about testing this over a period of time. Someone's just ready to get started with this. Is there a minimum spend to actually make it worthwhile?

Peter Flynn: Yeah, for me on Google, $500 per month would be a minimum spend per campaign. And for Facebook ads, I would have a $300 minimum spend per campaign per month. How do you get to that number, Pete? $10 per day on Facebook, basically, and $16.50 per day on Google. And it's just because the cost per click on Google is far higher than on Meta.

Jack O'Brien: So, you're talking about getting, say, 2 to 5 clicks a day, which kind of gives the platforms enough oxygen to do their learning and optimization. If you're spending $5 a day, there's not enough critical mass for us or the platforms to learn. you know, to put in practical terms, that $300 to $500 a month spend gives the platforms the learning critical mass. Exactly.

Ben Lynch: J.B., you're going to sit on the fence? Agree? Disagree?

Jack O'Brien: I don't know what the fence is. I don't sit on fences. I agree. I mean, I just explained his rationale. So, yes, I concur.

Ben Lynch: You concur. That's terrific. Well, Folks, if you are dipping your toe into ads or you're working on ads, perhaps you're working with an agency and you're like, I'm not sure if this is working. We'd love to do an audit for you. You can message Peter at clinicmastery.com. And Pete, you'll do a complimentary audit and assessment of people's ads. Give them some feedback to take back to their agency. But people often get so much from that session, they end up going, can you just do it for me? Which, of course, we can. But send a message to Peter at clinicmastery.com. We're going to continue down this road of getting more new patients to fill your books because it's such an important area for you to grow your clinic sustainably. Any closing remarks, gents, before we tie a bow in this episode, Pete? That's all from me, folks. Sounds great. J.O.D.

Jack O'Brien: Yeah. I've always got closing remarks. Always be marketing. You always need more new clients than you currently have. You want to be looking at them, not looking for them. So whatever you're doing with marketing, just do a little bit more.

Ben Lynch: So important. Well said. Head over to clinicmastery.com forward slash podcast for the show notes, the recording. And until next time, you stay caffeinated. Bye for now.

Peter Flynn: Bye bye. See you later guys.