Jack O'Brien: G'day, good people. Welcome to the Grow Your Clinic podcast by Clinic Mastery. Here's what's coming up in today's episode. This episode will be right up your Allie if you are looking to fill your books and attract new clients with paid marketing strategies. We're diving into Google Ads, websites, and mistakes to avoid. And trust me, you will want to hear Peter's take on when you should leave your current ads agency. The headline of your keynote was paid marketing without wasting money. On your first slide was a picture of you and Taylor Swift. I thought it was pretty good. Even my mum said it was terrible. Paid marketing is the amplifier and here are some of the things that it can't fix. An offer, a website, slow follow-up.

Hannah Dunn: This has been my biggest learning from Pete is just like when we direct someone to a website, is the website actually converting?

Peter Flynn: There are certain things that I think are important that we fix before we start paid marketing. I spent 20 minutes this morning onboarding a new client and just going through their ideal client and getting every part of that out. And It Depends is not welcome today. Are we on the same page? We'll see.

Ben Lynch: 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 organized 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 clinic's 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 hello@clinicmastery.com with the subject line podcast, and we'll line up a time to chat. All right, let's get into the episode.

Jack O'Brien: Welcome back to another episode of the Grow Your Clinic Podcast. I'm Jack O'Brien, your host. Joining me, my two IC, we've kicked Ben out for three episodes in a row now, I think. So, Hannah, it's just you, me, and Beck on the alternate day. So, Hannah Dunn, Director of DOTS, OT for Children, Coach, Clinic Mastery, Superstar, All-Round Legend. Welcome back to the podcast, Hannah. How are you? Thanks. Good. How are you? Well, thank you. Look, before we dive in, it is the morning after the night before. The Minister interrupted our feeds yesterday regarding NDIS. At least the time of this recording is the 23rd of April. We're not going to go into all the nitty-gritty details because, frankly, there weren't too many details. But if you were to offer a couple of words of wisdom to budding NDIS type clinic owners

Hannah Dunn: What would you say? I would say that yesterday there was a lot of information, but it's important that we remain calm, that a lot of the information didn't relate directly to allied health providers, that it was around other like personal care attendants type of people and plan managers, etc. And so not to panic about registration and to really look at what your client group is, what percentage is actually early intervention. and also around how you can diversify moving forward. So just staying calm and Jack, as you mentioned on your stories, on Clinic Mastery stories, just ensuring that you get your policies, procedures and those things in place so that you are preparing to get registered if that is what occurs. We don't know what that will look like but essentially for now it's just getting familiar with your clinic and understanding where you need to go from here.

Jack O'Brien: I feel like there was one or two practical things to take out of yesterday and that being get your house in order, your policies and procedures, your mentoring setup. If that looks like Allie, head to a11yclinics.com and get your house in order. You don't have to race to registration or anything like that just yet. It's all very unsubstantial. Practically, that is a good one, thinking about diversifying, making sure we're functionally oriented. More importantly, take care of yourself. Breathe, get a good night's sleep, and get out of the comments thread. Again, we said this on Instagram and on Stories, but for those listening here today, you do not need to take advice from everyone with an opinion in a Facebook group or a comment thread. Choose very, very wisely who your inner circle is. You want folks who have been there, done that, got the t-shirt, have the expertise and the experience. That's who you want to be listening to, not just anyone with an opinion. And do yourself and your mental health a favour. You don't need to be doom-scrolling on social media. You need to be leading your team, leading your community, and thinking proactively about where the opportunity is for you in what feels like a bit of a turbulent time. Is that sage advice, Hannah?

Hannah Dunn: Yeah, absolutely. Yes.

Jack O'Brien: Super. Awesome. Folks, if you're a little bit unsure, need some guidance, need to make sure you've got the right people in your corner, we are it. At Clinic Mastery, we would love to help make sure you're a good fit for our community and we can show you what our programs look like. You can do that by emailing me, jack@clinicmastery.com. No obligation, we're not here to twist your arm. We're here to make sure there's a good fit and help you if and when we can do so. So send me an email, jack@clinicmastery.com. There is no AI in my inbox and we'll explore a conversation.

Hannah Dunn: Yeah, I think yesterday what was really valuable for our community was just the NDIS channel on Slack and the Paids channel on Slack, that there was some strong voices who've been around a long time just creating reassurance and giving key points and really narrowing it down.

Jack O'Brien: Yeah, spot on. We have such a rich community of coaches but also clinic owners that are very experienced and expert in their field. Love that. Good distinction. Hannah, joining us today also, we have the 1% Better Every Day Man, Google Ads and Marketing Agency extraordinaire and just all things wise, calm, the face you're used to seeing on YouTube. Peter Flynn, welcome back to the podcast. Thank you, sir. Good to be here. Now, just to confirm the rules of engagement on the podcast, Peter, you cannot say it depends. You'll get splinters in your bum and it depends is not welcome today. Are we on the same page? We'll see. We have a rule around the place that if you say it depends, it's 10 push-ups, which is made even more difficult for you because you only have one working upper limb. You'll have to do 10 one-handed push-ups if you keep saying it depends.

Peter Flynn: Deal? I don't know. I did do a four kilo dumbbell press today, so we're getting back.

Jack O'Brien: Oh, look at you go, you big boy.

Hannah Dunn: I got told last week that I was too Peter Flynn in my decision-making when I was on the fence a bit, I had to jump to one side.

Jack O'Brien: Yes, he's become a meme. We will see. We will see is being added to the swear jar list. But we are talking all things marketing. Pete, you gave a keynote at the Clinic Mastery Summit just a couple of weeks ago, title around how you can stop wasting money on your paid marketing. So many clinics are wasting money on their paid marketing. So we're going to unpack that. But specifically when it comes to paid marketing, before we dive into it, Pete, for listeners, you could do it yourself. You could learn it and try it and give it a go and maybe waste a bit of money or you enjoy experimenting in the science and that's totally fine if you want to do it yourself. We can do it with you as your coach inside Clinic Mastery, the Business Academy and Elevate is a done with you type approach. We teach you how to do it and we'll critique that along the way. we can do it for you. So it can be done by you, done with you, or done for you. And Pete heads up our agency, helping clinics run their Google Ads for them. I just want to welcome a couple of new clinics. There is dozens, if not hundreds of clinics now getting help. Welcome to the Google Ads Agency community. Recently we've had Abdul join us, Amy's joined us, Sam has joined us. We've got a number of others rolling on through here, Rochelle, Brooke. Katie, Michael, so welcome to those folks who are getting some help with their Google Ads. We are doing it for them and seeing incredible results. Pete, before we get into wasting money on paid marketing, if listeners want help with their Google Ads, how does that work? What do they do? Where do they go? Who do they speak to?

Peter Flynn: Yeah, pretty much the simplest way is to either email me, peter.clinicmastery.com or go to clinicmastery.com forward slash Google dash ads. On there, you can see an application form or there'll also be an audit form where you can request an audit for your Google ads account. That button will appear magically later today after this. And you can request an audit on your account. We'll go through, I'll break down all different parts of your account and show you where you're wasting money currently and what you stand to gain from improving those things.

Jack O'Brien: Awesome. So if you are not currently doing Google Ads, you can apply and schedule a conversation to make sure that we can actually help. Or if you are running Google Ads, you can either book a call or get an audit of what you're currently doing, find out where you're wasting money and we will help you improve that spend. Pete, let's tee this up. The headline of your keynote was Paid Marketing Without Wasting Money. On your first slide was a picture of you and Taylor Swift and a microphone. I know Hannah had a great time chuckling away at this. So, tee it up for us. What does Taylor Swift have to do with wasting marketing money?

Peter Flynn: Well, I mean, I'll spare everyone the karaoke. But the idea being a microphone is just a microphone. The idea of a microphone is simply to amplify whatever we put into it. And so if you give it to a professional singer, someone like Taylor Swift, and she sings into that, you get a certain experience, an experience people will pay really good money and line up for many hours to go and witness. Now, we then gave myself that same microphone and had me sing the same song, 22, by Taylor Swift, one of my favourites. And whilst I thought it was pretty good, even my mom said it was terrible. And it's entertaining, you could say, but not super great to listen to. And it's the idea here being the microphone, it's the same, right? She's probably got a slightly better microphone, but it's the same thing that we're using. but we're amplifying two different things. And when it comes to marketing, if you amplify something that shouldn't be amplified, that doesn't deserve to be amplified, it's likely going to have the impact that is going to just amplify inefficiency or amplify something that people don't want. So we really first need to look at what is it that we're amplifying before we put the microphone in front of it, because paid marketing is just a microphone for your business.

Hannah Dunn: And if you're in the Clinic Mastery community, you can jump on Kajabi, search Peter Flynn and get to watch that recording. Don't let yourself down by not doing that.

Jack O'Brien: Yeah, it's a members only special that you usually get on Over 18 website. Really, Peter Flynn's speaking and singing into a microphone, but we have it for our members. Head to Kajabi, search Peter Flynn and find him on karaoke for all to see. Peter, I reckon we might sneak that into the socials and get that that snippet on the stories but nevertheless, sharing a slide here that you spoke to that paid marketing is the amplifier and here are some of the things that it can't fix. An offer, a website, slow follow-up or poor conversion. For listeners, if you're listening to this on Spotify or iTunes, I have two actions for you. Number one, leave us a review. Please comment five stars if you think we deserve them. If you think we deserve less, Don't bother. But if you can leave us five stars and a comment at number one. And number two, head over to YouTube, subscribe. You can check out the slides, all the stuff over there. So for viewers on YouTube, you'll see this. Listeners, Pete, can you explain this slide for those listening along?

Peter Flynn: So this slide basically looks at, and again, amplifier, microphone, same thing, right? And we're looking at what are we amplifying? And I've broken it down into four key areas. So one is a weak offer. Now, think about your offer is what are we actually, what are we exchanging value for money for here? And a large part of the offer can also be looked at how is it positioned, right? How does it look? How does it feel? And so if you land on a website and it looks like You know, someone put it together just after they started business and it's done on the old Wix website. It's slow. It's clunky. There's just lots of stock images. It just looks pretty bad. What do you mean by stock images? Stock images, like just the images you just download off Google. They're not real images of your team. They're just stock images, right? You're looking around, you're not sure where to look, there's all these mismatch of colours and branding, and it's just not clean. You're looking, you know, what do I do? Where do I go on this website? If you push traffic towards that website, the likelihood that people convert is low. And if you have a beautiful website that has a really clear call to action, really clear offer, and it all sort of funnels down to one or two key things, you get to see the team, the smiling faces, and you feel like, yeah, these guys are professional. These guys are really good, and I can already start to build a bit of trust, and that's key, build some trust. The week off for the confusing website, those really go together quite nicely there. So you need a strong, I would say quite a strong website. Now, do you need specific, really detailed landing pages? It can help in time. You don't need that to start with, but you need a solid website to start with.

Jack O'Brien: Hannah, when you think about clinics that you've worked with, where do you see them have these types of errors or what are the common errors that you see?

Hannah Dunn: Yes. I was so proud of myself one week when Pete messaged me about a member that I coach and he was working with and said, hey just heads up there's all these broken links in the website and I was like oh my gosh check out the channel of coaching because that's exactly what I just said last week to them. This has been my biggest learning from Pete is just like when we direct someone to a website is the website actually converting and so I think we find yeah broken links too many items in there, too many button options, too many places to go, not a good flow. And I think as Pete said, people know what a stock image is and what they're looking at as a stock image versus what is a real natural team. I think people put the pressure on themselves to go and get that professional photographer to come in. And Pete, maybe that is what we want to be doing. But on the flip side, I think it's also better to have an image you've taken on your iPhone that is your natural team than having the stock images there. They are still quite good quality photos at times.

Peter Flynn: Even just to jump in there, what I normally tell people is, hey, why don't you, instead of going into really expensive photographer or something like that, go on AirTasker. You can find a really good solo operator. We did it in Adelaide for like 400 bucks. We got a whole bunch of fantastic photos, brilliant edits. It was great. And I know we got some quotes for like three, four thousand dollars.

Jack O'Brien: It's pretty good. Okay, so there are the common errors or things that need fixing in a clinic. And as you described, Pete, if we're just amplifying those things, we end up with more problems. You highlighted here, if we're pushing these common errors through an amplifier, you end up with either the wrong traffic or broken system, but a strong foundation gets us growth and phenomenal results. So are you suggesting that people need to get things fixed before they start spending money on paid marketing?

Peter Flynn: There are certain things that I think are important that we fix before we start paid marketing where we need to think about do we have somewhere to send people and for a lot of people it's looking at it and also just going well maybe this is part of the project. So for example I've had people come to me and we've looked at the website we looked at a few different things and we said ah this isn't really going to work. If we were to start working together now, and I map out all the key things that we need to change, the bare minimum, for us to launch these ads and start to be successful, and I help you to schedule them, I help you to find the right people to do each of them, over the next two to three weeks we'll be ready to launch the ads, which gives us time to plan out the ads, to plan everything out. to build these in conjunction and so for a lot of people we look at what is the minimum viable standard that we need or minimum viable product and how can we help you to do that because it puts the line in the sand. It says we need this done by this date and it suddenly makes it a big priority. The people who have said, all right, I'm going to go away and I'm going to fix these things, I'll do this, then I'll come back, often they come back three or six months later and they still haven't done it because it's just this deadline that should have been pushed forever into the future.

Hannah Dunn: I actually was coaching someone yesterday that I said to them, hey, I wanted to let you know that I got your ad come up on my newsfeed on Instagram to say that you had available appointments. And I said, but I'm in Victoria and you're in Queensland and I don't follow your page. So I follow it on the D.O.T.S page, but I don't personally follow it in my personal account. And so they were like, Oh, we're pretty sure we've got it set to an audience, just local. Anyway, they sent me a message later in the day and said, checked it. It was Australia wide ad. And so things like that can be things that you might not even realise need fixing.

Jack O'Brien: Right. And it's not that, it's not that ads don't work. They're inefficient and so we can waste money. Where you optimized ad with an optimized website and a really dialed system and all of your ducks in a row, you might be able to attract a new client for $20, $30, $50 to your clinic. If you have these leaks or these breaks in place, it means you end up attracting new clients for $80, $100, $120. So it's like if I said to anyone, would you rather a new client for $30 or a new client for $100? Of course, you'd say $30. And that's the work that we're talking about here. And so ultimately, Pete, if we move on through, what happens is when we're attracting the wrong type of traffic, this is exhausting. It's not productive. It might be busy, but not productive, right?

Peter Flynn: Yeah, well, this is the targeting aspect of it. So we're moving on from the where are we directing people to and now we're looking at. Who are we trying to get in? And I think all of us, when we start out early in business, we tend to go, right, let's cast the net as wide as possible. Because if we try and market to everyone, surely we'll get somewhere. Like I felt that before. I've done that before. I'm sure everyone in this room has and everyone listening has too. But what you find is that when you try and target and talk to everyone and be everything to everyone, it's very hard to actually get anyone to come in. And so you have to think about, well, who is it that I really love serving? Who is going to be searching for a solution to a problem here? And how aware are they of that problem? And who does my team enjoy working with? And do they have a strong lifetime value? These are all things to consider when we think about who to market to through ads. And is there a better way to get them in? There's so many different facets to this. And it might be that, hey, in our clinic, for example, we have physio and EP, and we find that we acquire physio clients far cheaper. And then we have a really good structure of moving them from physiotherapy through to EP. So rather than trying to spend $150 to get an EP client, you might spend $50 or $60, get the physio client and have a structure behind the scenes that fills up EP that way. And so these are the kind of conversations I have with clinic owners a lot in the early phase of going through and building out these ads, because it's not just a simple ad. We're now thinking about what is every part of this and where does this fit in to your clinic goals? Because that's what it comes back to. It's like, where are we going?

Hannah Dunn: And one thing I would say that I, you know, might have been valuable to say right at the start and I hate this word of NDIS, but this is an area in which we have not had to educate ourselves in from an NDIS perspective, but now we absolutely need to understand this language Pete, you shared a video yesterday about Claude AI and tokens and I understood none of it, but watched it and started to think that the more I absorb, the more I will learn. And so just that is one thing I would say is probably one thing that I'm definitely doing is upskilling about what does marketing look like for us now compared to what it might've looked like zero during the NDIS boom, for lack of a better term.

Jack O'Brien: Here's one of the mindset shifts that I think clinic owners need to think about when it comes to getting an agency to help with their ads. When your agency and your website and your internal system is fragmented and isn't coherent, it's where we see super benefit from clinics that invest in an agency to help with their ads that is linked with the coaching It helps you understand who is your ideal client, who is your ideal avatar, what presentations do we want to work with. To your point, Peter, how do we attract better fit leads who have a value mindset that are going to convert when they click rather than just more volume and intent or interest-based clicks? This is what separates clinics who are working with a fragmented support network to those who are working with an integrated support network. What do you have to say about that? I think you pretty much nailed every part of that then. I would agree. Because really what you're saying, sorry to interrupt, is like we're here to talk about Google Ads but actually what you're talking about is who do you want to work with and what presentations can you help best and what's your therapeutic approach. So, it has to be this comprehensive and really all-inclusive approach. It's not just I've got an ad budget, run the ads, please make it blue links, click go.

Hannah Dunn: The things that you just mentioned then Jack, Pete's been on a couple of episodes and there is so much more context about this sort of stuff on some of those as well. So I would go back and listen to those previous episodes that Peter Flynn's done with us as well.

Peter Flynn: Thank you. I, just to add to what you said there, Jack, I think. And I'm not biased at all. Not at all. But this is why we're better. So, I would say the advantage that I feel we have when we work with people from an agency perspective is the understanding of healthcare. And that's the key thing. And a lot of the time when I look through someone's account, They're working with someone who is probably objectively really, really good when it comes to e-comm and those other things. And a lot of things are set up that way for repeat purchases and things like that, which aren't useful to us. But it's being able to ask the right questions and sit down and really, like I spent 20 minutes this morning onboarding a new client and just going through their ideal client and getting every part of that out. Because if we can understand the ideal client, understand the brand voice, but really narrow it down to, well, we're not trying to get you busier as a clinic owner. And we might be talking through some clients that you really like working with. but are your team equipped to deal with this? No, okay, what else do we need here? And so it's knowing the right questions to ask because we understand this is the goal of the healthcare clinic owner that we're working with. And so it's such an integrated approach, I think. It's almost like there's a coaching part to it that allows us to then create these ads and what's everything or the assets underneath this that need to be at what standard in order to achieve the desired result based on these hundred other clinics that we work with.

Jack O'Brien: Yeah, it's that synergy. Okay, so we've covered that first shift from more leads to better fit leads. Let's talk about the next shift in your conversation and this is a big one because so many folks when it comes to Google Ads and specifically agencies would say that their job is to get clicks. But ultimately, clicks are vanity. Conversion is sanity, to appropriate the cliche. So, talk us through this shift in mindset and approach to Google Ads specifically here, Pete.

Peter Flynn: A key thing we want to understand is what is a conversion and what is a conversion action and what is a click, right? So, a click is just someone clicks on the ad and they go through to your website and that's all well and good. But it's not going to pay the bills. It's actually interesting that people who build a website on Google sites, it's one of the only things you can't set up Google Tag Manager and track things on. So just go figure with that one anyway. But for everything else, we can set up tracking using GTM. And tracking is actually getting better at the moment with the introduction of code in how it can start to track things. So for embedded booking, links, which have previously been such an issue, we can now start to have some better tracking through this. But the key thing we want to understand is… Sorry, just interrupt there, Pete.

Jack O'Brien: If you're working with a Google Ads agency and they haven't figured out Google Tag Manager and embedding tags in embedded booking links, it's time to shift.

Peter Flynn: It's getting there. But what I'd say is we're going to have what I would call conversions and conversion actions. And a conversion action to me is we can track how long someone spends on a call, we can track if they've typed your phone number in from your website. These are really important things. Now, often when I look at someone's Google Ads account, The threshold is set at, if someone calls for longer than five seconds, that's a conversion. It's probably not long enough to say, hey, this is a new client. For me, I'd say 90 seconds at an absolute minimum is the threshold, and I wouldn't call it a conversion. I'd call it a conversion action. It's a strong leading indicator that someone may want to book an appointment, but we have no idea whether they actually book. And so we want to lump those over here and go, these are conversion actions. Now, booking online, we can be more confident with that. So if someone clicks book online through the book online page, we call that initiating book online. That's a conversion action. But then once they complete the book online process, that's a conversion. And so that you can see the distinction between those two. It's the same for a lot of say NDIS type clinics, more PEDS clinics will say, we don't want people to book online because they have to go to a specific therapist. So we're going to get them to fill out a referral form. And so clicking on the referral form to start it is a conversion action, but then completing and submitting that conversion form is a conversion. And so that's how I would- It makes a lot of sense, right?

Jack O'Brien: Because there'll be clinics who maybe have 20 form starts, but only 15 form completes. And really we want to measure our conversion based on form completes or booking completes, not just booking starts or form starts. Yes. I like it. And so really, it's that mindset shift away from clicks through to conversions. Hannah, I'm curious, in your clinic, how do you think about conversions? Do you track initial clients booked, initial presentations showed up, or second visits show up? How do you think about conversions?

Hannah Dunn: Um, we don't do a lot of work around it, honestly, but we do have that metric as how many new appointments people had. Um, and then we look at their discharge rates as well to make sure they're not too high, but, um, we're probably more interested in the longevity of a client that we have.

Jack O'Brien: And it's that lifetime value. That's the, the key, right? It's yes. We want to attract interest. Yes. We want to attract first time bookings, but ultimately if they're, you know, I'll say, um, to use a cliche, if they're just tire kickers who are coming for one or two sessions, that's not helpful for them predominantly. It's not economical for us as a business. And so, Pete, this is the third shift that you spoke to that focus on lifetime value. And, you know, sometimes we think, oh, a new client costs me $30 or $80 or $260 to get a new client. That's a lot of money. Well, it's only a lot of money relatively, but could be quite a small amount of money. Can you speak to this shift, please, Pete?

Peter Flynn: Yeah, I think we have to understand the whole picture of the clinic to understand what we're willing to pay to acquire a client. Because when we can pay more to acquire a client, and we understand those numbers, and we bid appropriately, then we can pay more to acquire a new client than the competitors can, and so we can grow faster. Some clinics, some of the NDIS-type clinics I've worked with have lifetime values that are $10,000, $20,000, $30,000, so quite substantial. At the same time, often I'll talk to the clinic owner and they'll say $100, that's all I'm willing to spend to acquire that client and they start to get a little bit anxious if it goes higher than that. Which is a little bit nonsensical when you think about it in the grand scheme of things, but when you're looking at it dollar to dollar, day to day, it can feel like a lot. And so we have to understand where does this fit in as part of the whole picture? And where does this fit into the growth strategy? Because let's say you have a, some people still have contract models. If you still have a contract model and you are paying let's say $150 to bring in a new client and your sessions are $150, you need two sessions to make that back, to break even. If you got an employee type model and that person's sitting there doing nothing anyway, well when you bring them in, that's worth a full $150 to you, right? We think about in gross profit terms but when you have people sitting there with white space in their diary that you're paying them to be there, Realistically, you don't have to think about gross profit so much. I need a speech therapist. I would also look at what phase of business you're going through. If you're trying to grow and quite aggressively, think of Uber and those kind of businesses, they would pay quite a lot to acquire a client in order to fund growth and then they'd pull back the marketing spend and become profitable overnight. And so it depends on where you're at in your sort of growth journey versus sustainability.

Jack O'Brien: Okay, let's talk more about this because you've challenged my thinking about it and it's really important for clinic owners to understand the economics and the metrics behind it. So just to double click on what you said there, if a clinic is already paying an employee to sit there, and have white space in their diary, that cost already exists. And so if we're to attract a new client, essentially that entire appointment fee is gross profit because the expense was already being absorbed anyway. That's essentially what you're saying, right? Correct, yes. Interesting. So, you know, sometimes we're worried about that ROAS is the technical term of return on ad spend. How quickly, if I'm spending, you know, $200 to acquire a client, how quickly can I generate $200? It makes the maths make a lot more sense when your gross profit is effectively 100%.

Peter Flynn: And the other thing to consider, which is the other side of this is, and we talked about this a lot at PhysioFit, Andrew and I, is how do we make every client turn into two more clients? And so if you've got someone focusing on bringing in the right type of clients, and then you're working with your team on, how can we be 1% better every day? How can we just be outstanding compared to everyone else? How can we show that we just care a little bit more? How can we go over and above where applicable? How can we get amazing client outcomes, have brilliant plans, have the different places we touch base? How amazing is the admin team or the non-admin team if you're at risk? But looking at all those things and go, all right, if we nail these, this person refers in their friend, their family. And whenever I would say I've had great clinicians working for me, I know that if I give them a new client, they're going to see the whole family within a month. And so that's the other side to it. Marketing is it's more worthwhile to invest in when you work on this concurrently with your team.

Jack O'Brien: Hannah, can you perhaps speak to that mindset of $200 to acquire a client is a lot of money? It's like, well, nothing is or isn't a lot of money. It's all relative, right? And maybe sometimes we're stuck in this, oh, we only generate, you know, $190 odd in the first session. I don't want to pay $250 to acquire a $190 appointment. We have to zoom out and some clinics can do that and some clinics can't. Do you want to speak to that?

Hannah Dunn: Yeah, I think this is really new information for the NDIS clinics and paid clinics. And I think even just having the framework of understanding that you can look at this at a value of a lifetime of how long you'll have this client for. And I think what we know is that when we do it well, that value can be really high, as you mentioned previously. And so we do need, like even thinking of that as a percentage of the revenue will show you how low that actually is. And so I think it's just about educating ourselves and really getting an understanding of what does it truly mean because that end dollar or the dollar that you present as how much it can cost can seem really high. But I think, you know, we are used to thinking about this in regards to doing seek ads and for recruitment and, you know, what is the cost of truly acquiring a clinician? And now it's just about doing that with our clients. And I think as Pete said, like people feel good when they refer someone else to your service, they do, you know, it makes us feel good when we can connect people. And so we want to create a space in which they do want to be able to do that.

Jack O'Brien: Yeah, totally agree. Here's a really practical formula for NDIS or PEDS-type clinics. When you're thinking about lifetime value, and maybe that feels too hard to think about, think about how many sessions the average participant or patient might have across the course of a year. Maybe they're booked on a fortnightly schedule, and so you see them five times a term, four terms a year, that's 20 appointments at round figures, $200 a session. And so we can say that the average participant may be worth in economic sense. Of course, our patients are worthless, priceless. But we can say they might be worth $4,000 per year to our practice. And so, we can then extrapolate that over how many years we might work with them. We've talked about the ways that clinics can waste money, but talk to us about those clinics who are ready to go. What are some of the signals that you see or what are some of the things that you'd listen for when you're talking to a clinic when it's like, yeah, right, you're in a great position to get the most out of your paid advertising? If paid advertising is simply the microphone that reveals, as you said on this slide, who are those clinics who are really well positioned to pour gasoline on the fire?

Peter Flynn: Let's say they have a really clear understanding of who their ideal clients are and they know which ideal clients they're willing to or they're able to get through something like Google Ads. They've got a clear brand voice and messaging for how they want to talk to them and how they want to connect with them. They have a website that is fast. That's really important. Really, really important. The website is fast. It's clean. It's beautiful. They're proud of it and it reflects their brand well. They look at it and they go, yes, this is beautiful. This reflects us and our team and what we deliver here. That's important.

Hannah Dunn: Can I ask, how do people know how fast their website is? Like I think we'd have people.

Peter Flynn: Go to Google and just type in page speed insights and then copy and paste your website across there and have a little. It kind of gives you a traffic light result, doesn't it Pete? It does. It does. It will give it for mobile and desktop, so you can switch between the two. And then the other thing on the website, make it really obvious what is the call to action and how does someone take the next step. I'd say there's been a lot of NDIS-type clinics that have inquired over the past six months as they need to start advertising for the first time ever for many of them. And I go on the website and I'm like, how does someone book or contact you in it? Because for so long you actively needed to make it hard. But now there's so many barriers in the way someone gets there and they go, I'm confused. I don't know where to go. I don't know what to do. Going to go on the next one.

Jack O'Brien: It's a really greenfield opportunity for NDIS type clinics to get ahead, to ensure you're a market leader, that you're in front of mind in your participants, in your community's minds. We can really boost that know, like, trust factor through some of these paid marketing strategies while the rest of your peers are floundering or as we alluded to at the top, spending their days doom scrolling in the comments thread of some Muppets Facebook group. We can, it's time to get ahead and think about how can we speak to our ideal clients better.

Hannah Dunn: Yeah. And I think if we think about ourselves, like how do we run our lives? Like I'm a mom to three. I have no time during the day. It's actually crazy. And so if I'm booking a service, I want to be able to jump on a website at 10 PM at night and just book in something. And so if we can create ways to do that and make it so easy, then that is what is going to win in the end.

Jack O'Brien: Great distinction, Hannah. Yeah. Pete, what about, so we're talking about clinics who want to get started and when they've got some of those things in place, I've got a question but you need to finish your thought.

Peter Flynn: Before we go, the one extra thing that I'm seeing that's really impactful is have your prices on your website. Controversial. You are off the fence. You've changed Peter Flynn. I'm definitely off the fence on this one. The majority of people because we can see where do they go when they come from an ad. One of the key things they want to know is roughly, what is it going to cost me? And if they can't find that, they often click out pretty quickly and go into the next one. Now, it's unlikely that you're going to be so expensive that they go, oh my God, that was not what I was expecting. But they just want to know ballpark, this is what it's going to cost me. Because for a lot of people, this is a meaningful investment. And for them to book online often means they're booking or requesting an appointment without knowing what this is going to cost. At the moment, especially with everything that's in the news, finance and money is front of mind for people. And the other thing is you can control the narrative on the page. You don't just put the fees up there and that's it. You get to explain the value provided, what you do, the experience of your therapists. So control the narrative but have it there and easy to find for people and I think you'll find your conversions increase.

Jack O'Brien: Wonderful.

Peter Flynn: Back to you, Jack. I love that.

Jack O'Brien: And a plug here for health.com. H-A-L-T-H. Health without the E. Health.com.au. They spoke at the summit alongside us and it's a great way to help your private pain clients understand how their health fund will interact with the fees. And so, Yes, you might have your full fee listed up there but patients will be able to see what their rebate is upfront and be able to be really transparent around that and that's really key for a lot of families that are looking to invest in their care to understand how their health fund interacts. So, Pete, if I'm a clinic owner and I'll say, you've convinced me, you've twisted my arm, I'm ready to go, can I just throw my credit card at Google Ads and can we just spend 5 grand, 10 grand straight away or how should we think about getting the most out of our ads, particularly in the first couple of months.

Peter Flynn: I mean, to start with, it comes down to the planning. Like, what are the goals? What are the end goals we want to get to? What is the plan that we create? What are the ideal client avatars that we're going to go after? What is the language and the brand voice that we want to have? Whereabouts in the website are we going to be sending people? I think all of these things really come first before we even think about how much are we going to spend. And then we look at, well, let's reverse engineer. If you're a physio clinic in the MSK world, we might look at it and go, well, I'm may expect that it might cost us around $90 to $100 per client to begin with. We can improve this over time, but if I ballpark that to start with and you say, we want to get an extra 12 clients per month, well, okay, let's invest $1,200 per month into Google. Let's start finding what works and then once we find what works, let's start to scale that if we need to go further. I always think about it like this, I've been a healthcare clinic owner myself, everyone in this room has and we don't operate on profit margins of 80%. We know that it's important in healthcare to look at where does every dollar go and making sure that every dollar counts and it's especially true in marketing. So we don't want to just spend money for the sake of that, we want to think about I'm not spending this money the way I would spend my own money as a healthcare clinic owner because this dollar has to generate far more than one dollar to make this work for me. potentially in another type of business, I might start with a much higher number on Google ads, but here I might start with a lower number, really scale the efficiency before we scale the budget.

Jack O'Brien: I really like that. And, you know, we see clinics spending five, 10, multiple thousands of dollars a month on ads, but the average clinic is, you know, classically in that one to $3,000 of ad spend per month. Pete, I guess one of the sub questions of what I just spoke to is, Should I expect to see results in month one? What are some of the learnings that my ad account has to go through in the first couple of months?

Peter Flynn: I mean, yes, we should start to see conversions in month one. I would hope so. But will it improve over time? Yes, because we'll start to see how you're performing against other similar clinics that we work with, how some of your headlines, your keywords, your search terms compare. We can look at that and we can improve your account because of this. It's kind of like a bit of a network effect because we only work in in healthcare. We can improve and refine your negative keywords so you're getting less of the wrong traffic coming through. And that takes time. We can look at increasing and decreasing budget per specific keywords as well. And again, that helps to improve things. We're going to change our headlines, our descriptions over time. We're going to play around with different site links. We'll look at what quality score does Google give you, and that takes, you know, four to six weeks anyway to give us anything. But then when we make changes, we have to leave it for, call it, 14 days, because you can't just make a change every three days. We have to leave it, we have to test it, we have to measure it, we have to play different ads and ad sets against each other, split test a few of those things, take that data back, and then make decisions from that data, and then test and measure again.

Jack O'Brien: It's a really good distinction and we take quite a scientific approach to Google Ads. There's a bit of art to it in the wording and how our audience and clients respond. But ultimately, it's quite scientific and data-driven, which is super exciting. As we land this plane, Pete, do you want to remind listeners or viewers, but particularly listeners, the URL that they can go to if they've never done Google Ads and want some help or if they are running Google Ads and they want to know if they're wasting money or not?

Peter Flynn: Yeah, so if you go to clinicmastery.com forward slash Google dash ads or email me at Peter at clinicmastery.com, I can always just flick it straight through to you. But at the moment, we're offering a free complete audit. It goes into depth in about six or seven different areas. I will personally find where you are wasting money. It's quick and easy and I'll be able to send that through to you. We can talk it through and look at what you could do to fix those and plug those holes and how we might be able to support you to do that for you.

Jack O'Brien: Thank you, mate. And Hannah, for those clinic owners who are feeling a little nervous or anxious about starting this journey of paid marketing, it does feel big and scary for some folks. So what advice would you have to those who are a little bit intimidated or uncertain whether this is right for them?

Hannah Dunn: Yeah, I'd say something that you often say, Jack, which is what is the cost of inaction and what will it be? Are we going to get another three to six months down the line and you wish you'd taken action now? So I'd say educate yourself about what all the things that Pete just spoke about and then make a decision on what you're willing to invest in that area.

Jack O'Brien: Yeah. I think that's really sage. Not because you're quoting me, but it is. It's sage advice. I think we want to have a scientist's mindset to this. A mentor of mine often says, everything can work, but sometimes it's a game of finding out what does work for you. You know, it's the right idea at the right time and the right execution is the right idea. If it's a great idea and the wrong execution, it's the wrong idea. And so we really do need to test and measure and be open to different hypotheses. And particularly if paid marketing is a new frontier for you, then now is the time to get amongst it, to experiment and stay ahead. Because frankly, if you're, not that I'm frank, but frankly, If you're really battling and in a couple of months time, you're really behind the eight ball, it's going to be that much hard or feel that much harder to get started. And so now is a great time to think about what can I do before I'm at DEF CON 5 levels to make sure that my clinic remains healthy, my team are consistently well utilized, and ultimately, we're able to continue helping more people that really need and deserve our services. There we go. Okay. Well, thank you, Pete. Your keynote at the summit was wonderful. Your Taylor Swift rendition is getting dozens of clicks inside our learning portal, members only. Really looking forward to what you might bring at the Palm Cove Retreat in a couple of weeks. We will have live karaoke for you or a version thereof. Travis, the entertainer who joined us in Noosa a couple of years ago, will be back. I think I've just erect all Daniel Gibbs's spoiler alerts. Thank you, Pete, for joining us. You've given your email address, peter at clinicmastery.com, if people want to get in touch. But thank you, Pete, for joining us on this episode. Pleasure, mate. Thank you. And Hannah, this has been good. Shall we invite Ben back?

Hannah Dunn: I think we can let him back in after his holiday. We'll see how he goes.

Jack O'Brien: Gallivanting around the countryside. All right. Well, I look forward to it. Folks, if you want the notes from this episode, it's clinicmastery.com/podcast. All the timestamps, links out will be there. Head over and peruse the website. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for your reviews in advance that I know are coming through. Join us over on YouTube for our next episode and I look forward to speaking to you again really soon. Bye for now.

Hannah Dunn: Thanks, Pete. Bye.