Generating Great Marketing Content Starts With Strategy With Peter Decoteau

Crafting a content strategy can be daunting, but with a little forethought and planning, it can make the process easy, consistent, and impactful. As Director of Marketing of a large PT group, Peter Decoteau has to create plans and strategies for large marketing efforts. Every year they put a lot of focus on content strategy – essentially determining what content his company wants to produce throughout the upcoming year. In this episode he shares what his content strategy consists of.

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I’m bringing back a guest who has come on with us in the past. He has contributed significantly to monthly articles in the Impact Magazine of PPS and is the Director of Marketing at Physical Therapy & Sports Medicine Centers in Connecticut. Peter Decoteau , thanks for joining me. I appreciate it.

Thank you for having me back.

It’s good to have you on because you bring a marketing perspective. You’re not a physical therapist but you bring the marketing perspective and apply that to physical therapy, which is not common among physical therapy owners. We don’t have a marketer like you that is overseeing this and has a background in it. It’s nice to get your perspective on how to generate and do better marketing on behalf of our physical therapy clinics. For the sake of the audience, would you remind us a little bit about who you are, where you came from, and what you’re doing?

I’m the Director of Marketing for Physical Therapy & Sports Medicine Centers in Connecticut. We are Connecticut’s largest private practice physical therapy provider. We have 31 locations throughout the state. My experience in marketing started in the nonprofit world years ago. I moved on to working for a private school for a little bit in Connecticut and then I worked for an agency for a bit where we worked with education, banking, and healthcare.

I did start in healthcare working with an agency and had been doing some freelance work for the group that I’m with now and then moved to this group, PTSMC, full-time when they were looking for a full-time marketing director. I had gotten my toes wet a little bit in the industry but I certainly had a lot to learn. I have been with PTSMC for years and have learned a ton from the PTs, the owners, and all the experienced professionals that I work with every day. Hopefully, I bring a lot to them to learn about marketing as well.

You have full-blown different marketing strategies and whole kinds of plans, programs, and whatnot but we want to focus a little bit on content. For me, simply generating content is like nails on the chalkboard. It’s to sit down, have to write and find something that is 1) Engaging and 2) Worthwhile. I hate doing it. What you’re going to share with us is a little bit about content strategy. It’s going to help me and hopefully, helpful listeners as well generate better content that’s more engaging and pulls people in.

It’s funny that you say that you try to avoid or certainly don’t look forward to doing the content piece because that’s one of the things that getting into marketing I most look forward to. I started my education in journalism. I’m creative on that end doing copywriting and journalism, writing, reporting, and all that stuff. In working with some of the other places, I got into information design, multimedia, videos, and stuff like that. If you’re more creatively minded, you look forward to it.

As much as PTs are getting very creative with their treatment methods and exploring new ways to treat their patients, this is not the version of creativity that they look for. In putting together the idea of content strategy and content marketing, I try to rip the Band-Aid off a little bit from that process and try to make it so that you can plan it out. Be very strategic and considerate with what you’re doing so that there’s more of an analytical or scientifically-based approach to putting your content together. That scratches more scientific itch that the PTs tend to have as opposed to the creative part of it.

I do want to clarify first that when we talk about content strategy and content marketing, I think about those things as two different things. One is the higher-level piece of the other. For content strategy, at PTSMC with my department, we put together a content strategy annually that works into our entire marketing strategy, the entire organizational strategy, and the goals that we’re trying to reach.

That is the broad roll-up of everything you’re trying to do in terms of messaging, branding, brand awareness, and the audiences that you’re trying to reach in a considered and goal-oriented way. The content marketing piece is the actionable execution of that strategy. The strategy is based on everything that you can do to attract, engage, and retain either prospective patients or past patients to get them back and retain them as people within your audience base. Content marketing is everything that you’re doing and all the tactics that you do to execute that.

The content strategy is necessary to come from the owners, leadership team, and a higher perspective. When you look at this and someone in a smaller clinic develops a content strategy as we’re going to talk about, do you have any qualms against then working with someone on Upwork or something like that to then develop the content? Do you have any issues or recommendations for that? If an owner develops a strategy but doesn’t necessarily want to or have the team in place to then generate a lot of content, have you found that being successful using a third party?

Yes. We, at PTSMC, have the privileged position of having a marketing department. From my perspective as the director, the department could always be bigger and have more people and professionals doing their niche work. We have the people to do the graphic design, the web work, the copywriting, and the relationship development in that they are taking the content out to the audiences interpersonally. We try to create that cross-professional avenue for the content.

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It is something that has come up a lot at PPS with the marketing committee and the administrative network, which I’m also a part of, in how we approach introducing these concepts of marketing strategy, specifically content strategy, to clinic owners or clinicians who do not have a marketing team. You can put together a strategy that at least focuses on key goals, key metrics, and KPIs or Key Performance Indicators. Things that you’re trying to achieve in breaking down the key messages that you’re trying to reinforce the brand identity that you have. The key platforms that your audience might be on and the key media that they’re going to be engaging with.

If you can create those things, break that down, and make them very clear, then you’re putting yourself on a good path to have someone execute them. Bringing in somebody who may not be familiar with either the industry or your particular organization creates a little bit of a gap that you need to cover in terms of getting them on board or at least getting them into the clinic so that they can be working with the clinicians. It gives them a good idea of what your goals and the key messages are that they should be enacted to try to achieve those goals. There is a way to do it. It requires a lot of consideration and planning on the part of the clinician.

Using someone off of that website would be beneficial but they’re going to be a little bit lost in the woods if you don’t have a strategy like this in place. They’re starting from scratch when you’re expecting some branded content specific to certain demographics and that stuff.

If you don’t have all those things that I was talking about, you’re going to be missing a piece of it. If you don’t have goals, then you’re putting things out there to what end. Whenever we talk about what is a good content marketing strategy, the first thing I would say is it is not posting something every day that is photos of people in your clinic or reposting news links, videos, or memes from other people because you’re not telling a story, pushing towards any goal, generating leads, and converting those leads.

Starting there is important but also having brand messaging, a brand identity, and a personality that are consistent and conveying that to the person who’s putting the content together. That will all help in concert with making sure that the right messages are reaching the right audience. You’re creating a form of awareness engagement recall that will end up converting the people into patients and getting them back as patients because otherwise, you’re talking to the void.

You’ve mentioned a few portions of what makes up a content strategy but to clarify, where do we start when we’re looking at developing a content strategy? Feel free to take us through the process. If you don’t mind me asking questions here and there, I would appreciate it. Where do we start if we’re thinking, “I’m going to develop a content strategy?”

The first thing you do is figure out who you are as a brand or PT provider and what are the things that are high level. You probably have these things as a part of your marketing strategy but if you don’t have them, then you can start there.

You’re talking about your purpose, values, vision, mission, and that kind of stuff.

It’s all that stuff and how that fits into your brand identity as much as it differentiates you from the other PT providers in your area and state. It’s not that you have those things but how do those things make you different, better, and unique? It might not make you better overall but it might make you a better provider for athletes, elderly people, or post-op. Start there and hopefully, you already have that.

If you’re looking strictly at starting the content strategy, you start with what are your goals. When I say goals, I mean hard level. Mostly, we’re talking about getting new patient volume or visit volume. That’s typically what we’re talking about. You can be a little bit more specific than that and talk about, “We have enough new patients when it comes to referring doctors but we want to beef up our direct access patients and self-referred patients.” Maybe that’s the goal.

How do we get past patients re-engaged? Those are the low-hanging fruit. You want to stay in touch with them and you have to have those kinds of goals and focuses.

You might say, “New patient volume is the thing. Where’s the low-hanging fruit?” You might also say, “We want to focus. Our clinics are maxed out with new patients but we want to shift our patient base to younger athletes or something like that.” You might have to consider a strategy that’s more focused on a niche goal as opposed to a broader goal. Starting there and figuring out what your KPIs are and how are you going to measure those metrics is the important starting point because that’s going to drive everything else that you do.

Once you do that, make sure that you have a foundation for generating and converting those leads. Mostly, that means, “Do we have processes and systems set up that are optimized to make sure that the people that we engage or at some point when they decide they need physical therapy, it’s very easy for them to do that?” We talked about the last time I was on the idea of lead generation, lead nurturing, and lead conversion.

Making sure that those things are set in place is super important because otherwise, you can’t reach your goals if the people are getting to a point and then dropping off. Once those things are set, and those are the baseline things, you move to look at the key platforms and the key media that your target audience is going to be engaging with the most and they use the most. If we’re talking about trying to reach broad adults and people who need PT the most or low-hanging fruit, we might be looking at Facebook or email campaigns and things like that.

If we’re looking to move to younger demographics, we might start looking at Instagram, TikTok, and things like that. Once you’ve decided where your audience is, you have to figure out what are the messages that they’re going to engage with the most and the ways that you can speak to them that would be the most interesting to them. You marry those things together to create good content.

As you’re going through this step-by-step approach, the thing that’s going through my mind is, “What’s the difference between a marketing strategy and content strategy?”

The two conceptually overlap a lot but in action, they are going to be different. Mostly, the marketing strategy in totality is driving all of your marketing communications. If you’re figuring out your brand identity, your messaging, and where your audience is but you’re doing it on traditional media like radio, TV, or print, then the execution for that is going to be a little bit different.

You might be doing those things but doing it through relationship development with doctors, community events, and sponsorships. You were taking those messages, and brand identity and moving them to those avenues. The difference for the content piece is taking them to the right platforms and media and then getting to the next point, which is strategizing and planning the content that you’re putting together, which is when you get to the content marketing piece beyond the strategy of how we plan out for the year, the quarters, the months, the weeks, and daily what the content is going to be.

That comprehensively encompasses all of the platforms, the media, the messages, and the key topics that we want to focus on in a way that is considered and consistent and speaks to the audiences we’re trying to speak to but isn’t hammering this one thing or this other thing. It’s comprehensive. It flows pretty well throughout the year.

The content strategy is a subset of the marketing strategy in that it has to do with those channels that you’re using that are going to require content, whereas marketing could be community-based physician relationships but that doesn’t necessarily relate to the content that you’re putting out via email, social media channels, and text.

One of the things we’re trying to do every day with our strategy for the whole year and the years ahead at PTSMC is to find the best ways to integrate these things together because, in execution, they are different but in conception, there should be a lot of overlays. How can you look at new ways to use the type of content that you might be putting together digitally for a social media audience? How can you take that and use it for relationship development? We’re looking at new ways.

I mentioned this in an Impact article or maybe one that’s coming out. An example of this would be we started putting together a quarterly print newsletter that we put together for referring physicians as a way to have a reason to follow up with them, have news to share with them, and introduce new concepts in physical therapy to them and things like blood flow restriction or things they might not be familiar with.

We’re also putting together videos that introduce something like blood flow restriction to our audiences online specifically, let’s say, young athletes and active adults. How do we share that type of video within the newsletter that we’re putting together? You put together an article that’s speaking the language of the physicians. The QR code that goes to the video that we put together shows that in action. You’re trying to find ways to cross-pollinate these pieces of content from digital to traditional. That’s where these things overlap.

It sparks an idea in my mind that I heard from another podcaster who does webinars, classes, and that kind of stuff. His rule of thumb is, “Whenever I generate some content, I want to see a path in which I can reuse it at least three times.” One time is for the initial purpose but chunks or pieces of it are for a social media ad or some testimonial. He wants to create content that’s going to be used over and over again in different portions of his business. To think of it as an opportunity to take advantage of that content is a good mindset to have.

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Especially if we’re talking about clinic owners or clinicians whose main job is to treat their patients or run a business. Saying you got to create five videos a week to be sharing or whatever you’re going to be doing is not tenable for their sanity or productivity. Creating one good video and finding different ways to use it across mediums, platforms, channels, and things like that is the best use of everyone’s time.

Finding ways to move that to the traditional or the real-life world as well is beneficial beyond the digital and social world. As we talk about this, I want to move back to the idea of a topic calendar. A topic calendar is different than a content calendar. Putting both of those things together is also the best way to be doing that.

When we’re creating these things, we map that out for ourselves and say, “Differentiate the topic calendar for us.” We break out quarterly what are the key 3 to 4 broad-level topics that we want to focus on with much of our content, not all of it. An example of that might be this. It’s spring and we want to talk about TPI golf fitness performance training, preventing injuries for spring to sports athletes, the benefits of dry needling, and then maybe something else.

We’re going to map it out, “We’re going to do one video for dry needling. We’re going to do two videos for this. We’re also going to do an information packet that links to those videos. That’s maybe five pages long and gives a broad overview of the benefits of dry needling and things like that. We’re going to do a couple of infographics with statistics that cover it.”

“We’re going to pre-create all that stuff and have it ready to go and then create our monthly, weekly, and daily content calendar and start to plug and play. We’re going to do one dry needling thing every single week. We will cover that for every Tuesday and plan it out that way.” There’s a way to be considerate about both what you’re creating and also how you are using it consistently and across these platforms without having a struggle and flying by the seat of your pants.

That’s one of my issues. The beauty of this concept is you are predetermining the topics well ahead of time because to sit down in front of a screen and think of what am I going to talk about this time drives me nuts. I have no clue what to do at that point. I have to spend a lot of brain energy deciding what topic I’m going to create content about. You’re saying part of the content strategy, however, is to predetermine that content ahead of time. That way, you know what you’re going to talk about. You have to create the content for it. You don’t have to pick a topic.

It’s strategic and intentional as well like, “We’re going to focus on these topics for this time of year because this is a new program or I have this new employee.” Predetermine those topics ahead of time so that you don’t have to spend your energy on determining what the topic is. When December rolls around later, then we know in December that the topic is predetermined. We now just have to create the content.

The goal is that it builds back up or fits into your marketing strategy with the messages, the topics, and the key things that you want to be promoting for your brand. Your goal is to increase new patients with active adults by introducing it to them. Let’s say that’s the goal. The objective within the goal is to introduce to those audience ways in which physical therapy is both cutting edge on the healthcare front and also is an option for injury prevention or injury treatment.

You can start building out your topics on things like dry needling or blood flow restriction and figuring out the way you present that message. Content-wise, it’s interesting. It says interesting things about what you’re doing. On the broader scale, it’s presenting a message about physical therapy as a whole, the type of benefits that we provide to patients, and your organization. More specifically, it aligns with you or positions you as a forward-thinking and progressive physical therapy provider. That might be one of your differentiators, “We don’t provide this old school style of PT. We’re cutting edge.” It’s all rolling back up into these broader messages.

I love that you’re talking about it because the majority of the time, what you see and consume from physical therapy owners is a little bit more generic and general like, “This is how you get rid of low back pain.” It is content whereas, with a little bit of a strategy, intention, and forethought, you can be more specific about what is out there nowadays and how it’s incorporated into your practice. You can also speak specifically to the demographic that you’ve already predetermined that you want to focus on and what issues they’re having instead of being so generic and broad that you’re almost irrelevant and a voice in a crowd of voices. When you have some intention and some strategy behind it, you can speak right to the point and to the person that you want to talk to.

It’s the difference between talking about why physical therapy is great, which we should all do all the time because there are so many more people we can be reached with these services. We know that. I mentioned this last time. You’ve probably heard the stat of how 90% of people who need PT don’t get it. There’s not a big enough pie for everyone to be getting to but if we’re only talking about the benefits of PT and not the specific benefits of our type of PT, then you’re not telling anyone why they should come to you. You’re just telling people why they should come to PT generally.

That’s a great message to be putting out there. We try to do that as well. Is it the culture of your offices that you present? Is it the individualized approach? Is it the younger staff that you have that speaks more to the younger people who you want to see? Is it the cutting-edge thing? Any of these things could be differentiators. I’m sure most people would say yes to all of those things but I’m being a little bit broad on purpose. You’ve got to find the things that speak specifically to you.

It’s important to do both of those things but the more considerate and intentional you can be about that, the better. I want to qualify one more thing because I don’t want it to sound like we have the rest of the year planned out day by day for what we’re going to do. We try to plug and play certain things that we know we’re going to do. We try to do Tuesdays as Testimonial Tuesdays. We might not have that content put together yet. We try to preload it for a month maybe. We at least know that Tuesday is going to be Testimonial Tuesday.

We typically try to leave maybe one day open a week for relevant news stories, photos that we get from the clinics, or things like that. The rest of the time, it’s like, “We may not have this video put together yet but we know we’re going to put a video together focusing on the topic of vertigo and vestibular.” If we plug it in for Monday, June 6th, we’re going to reach out to someone, try to collaborate, and have that put together for that date. As a marketing team, we have the benefit of being able to do that.

If you as a clinician or clinic owner at least have the time to sit down for a couple of hours and put together for the next two quarters what your topics are, what your monthly focuses are going to be, and how that builds into a weekly schedule, you can start talking to your clinicians like, “Rob, would you mind putting together a two-minute demo for me on how you might assess a patient coming in with suspected vertigo or vestibular issues and then plug that in?” It at least provides you the opportunity to start to reach out to others and have them do the work for you. If you’re working with an outside agency, you can have them build that in.

I love what you’re talking about because it’s a time management thing, essentially. You’re building in your time management strategies for your content strategy or content production. I recognize the same thing on a lower scale. I put out monthly newsletters to the physicians that refer to us for EMGs. I know that I have to put it on the second of each month. I have it on my calendar. I set aside an hour specifically to generate the newsletter content for that month.

I don’t have the topics predetermined as you do but what I do have is a bank or a library of past newsletters that I can refer to and say, “I’ll scan through those and see what content I can copy and paste, generate, and reuse some of that stuff again as I talked about.” S etting aside the time on your calendar helps a ton. That’s one thing that is the most important about our overall marketing strategy.

One of the deficiencies that I see with most clinicians is that their marketing strategy isn’t consistent and it’s not calendared. They don’t look forward ahead and plan it ahead enough to make it consistent and ongoing. It’s almost like the calendar reminding you of what needs to be done instead of you thinking, “That’s right. Weren’t we going to do a testimonial on a Tuesday sometime?” The calendar guides you versus leaving it up to any individual to create that content. I love that aspect of it.

It’s the tail wagging the dog. You’re getting wagged by your calendar, especially for clinicians. You have set schedules and you might have 1 block or 2 but you can build that into your schedule once a month. I’m sure many of the clinicians reading does that for their notes and things like that. It’s building that time in as much as you can twofold to figure out those content pieces and how they work in the topics that you set but also to take a step back to think about how this work towards our goals. Think about the bigger picture for a second, “How does this reinforce our brand identity and the messages that we want to focus on for this year?” It gives you some more perspective too. That’s all helpful.

The way I’m envisioning it because I’ve never come up with a content strategy before is that it doesn’t have to be a long and drawn-out process, especially if you’re a smaller operator. You have a team and 31 clinics but on a smaller scale, coming up with some of what we’re talking about could all fit on one page. You have your purpose, values, and mission statement at the top, who your demographic/avatar is, what KPIs you want to measure this next year, how you want to affect them, and some of the resources that you’re going to use or channels that you want to use, and where that demographic is going to be.

You want to go to their watering holes and then you start laying out some of the strategies for the next year without having to come up with all the content. Strategize what some of the topics are that you want to hit for that demographic and when you want to do it and put it on the calendar. Are you close to being done at that point?

It’s like creating a map before a long road trip. Even nowadays when you’re not going to have a physical map with you but if you’re going to do a multi-day road trip or something like that, you’re going to lay out, “This is the route that we’re going to take to get to this end goal. We know that we want to stop every two hours for a bathroom break and to grab a snack.” We need to set those parts of the route to say, “What are we going to want to eat because we don’t want this or this?”

You might move your route this way a little bit. You might say, “We want to go see this tourist attraction.” You’re like, “We know what the end goal is. We’re starting to fill in the pieces of how do we get there in the way that is most appropriate for us and what we want to do.” Taking that time is most of the work. At the end of it, it’s doing the drive or my thing.

Although creating content depending on how much you want to put into it can be time-consuming as well. That’s where it comes into the concept of templating things out. I’ll go back to the Testimonial Tuesday to say that we try to do one video testimonial a month because that takes a little bit more time. We have a graphic template that we have already created. We plug away reviews that come in on Google or that people send to us via email. We might ask some patients, “Would you be willing to write something and take a picture?”

Value content is like the meatier pieces of content that you're putting together.
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That’s low-effort stuff. It’s the recurring things that you’re doing. How can you create a template for it that makes the effort low for you? There are the more high-impact pieces that you want to do like videos, info packets, or blog posts. You can spend the time doing that and not have to worry about sitting down on a Tuesday like, “How the hell am I going to put this together?”

Is there a whole lot more to it than that in terms of the content strategy? Is there anything we’re missing at this point?

When you’re thinking about putting together the topic calendar and the content calendar and getting it going from the year, quarter, month, week, and day, there’s a big consideration. This is more of a broad marketing concept that comes from Gary Vaynerchuk who’s very well-known. I’m sure you know him. It’s the 75%/25% rule. That’s how the percentages broke down mostly. The idea is that 75% of the content that you’re providing brings some value to the audience and 25% of it is the ask. It’s 75% giving something and 25% asking for something.

If you take anything from that while you’re building out your calendar, you don’t need to start doing the mathematics of like, “Am I doing this 75% of the time.” The majority of the content that you’re putting together should be giving something to your audience and not asking for something in return. One of the main mistakes I see in content that people are putting out is that they might share a news link or a photo one day. The next day, they ask for people to come into their clinic, or if you’re looking at a restaurant, they ask for people to come to their restaurant or whatever it is.

They do it back and forth. It’s half and half. The worst ones are the people that self-promote to say, “This is why I’m the best. You should come to see me.” That’s not interesting to anyone. Nobody wants to engage with that. You have to think first, “What are we giving of value to the audience?” Once you’ve created that engagement, then you can put out the CTA or the calls to action. If they’re also relevant, you’ve primed the pump a little bit.

The overall generalization is that it’s okay to provide information and value but it’s also okay at times to intersperse that with a call-to-action, “This is what we do and why we’re great. This is why you should call us.”

First of all, what you said is good. It’s okay to provide information and stuff like that. A lot of the people that I’ve talked to in the past both in physical therapy and outside in other industries struggle with that concept if they’re not in marketing. It is okay to do something with theoretically no benefit to you. You’re giving this away. I even talk about this with some PTs, “Why would we tell people how to deal with their low back pain on their own for now when we are the ones who want to be treating it?”

He’s like, “It’s because you want to create trust for the audience and have engagement with the audience. You want them to trust you and see you as a legitimate authoritative voice in the field so that when they do need to come to see you, they’re going to trust that you’re the right person to do it.” It is a long-term consideration but it also is the best way to create a strong and engaged audience.

That brings me to a point that I wanted to bring up when we were moving from the concept of content strategy to the actionable marketing side of it. It’s this idea of what is good content because we were talking, “What is good content is not this or just reposting.” I would recommend to people who are thinking about this and trying to figure out the best way to go about it for themselves to look up something called the Content Marketing Matrix.

It has a good, simple, and clear visual breakdown of what they designate as the four key components of good content. A lot of these things overlap. It’s a matrix where some of the things might be closer to the center and some might be farther out. Good content is either entertaining, inspirational, educational, or convincing. Some of these things sound like they overlap for a good reason.

Educational versus convincing might be similar but convincing would be just good stats that you have that show the benefit of seeking a physical therapist before seeing an orthopedist or something like that. Educational would be an info packet that uses those stats to tell a whole story about why PT first for low back pain is the right approach. That’s going to be in the middle there.

If you can put those four things together, certainly you can make all those things entertaining, which is very hard to do, then you’ve got good content. It doesn’t need to be polished either. When people hear me say that, they think that I’m saying you need to hire a video production team to put together this polished and coordinated video but it could be one of your clinicians speaking to the camera with the aid, showing off these things, and having some personality while they’re doing it. Keeping those things in mind is a good way to create some good content.

I have to remind myself at least when I’m generating these newsletters to physicians. As I’m creating the content, I have to remind myself that simply getting out the product is more important than the content itself. Is there some truth to that at all?

Yes if the product that you’re getting out there covers one of those bases. That’s the content matrix piece of it. There are three things that I like to focus on too that build into that. You mentioned one of them. It’s consistency. In this particular definition, I’m using consistency to talk about your brand personality, messaging, topics, and things like that. If you are creating something that is either entertaining, inspirational, educational, or convincing and it’s got your consistent brand messaging or promotional messaging involved in it, then that’s worthwhile.

Do you have a clear message? Are you muddling it with some other things? It’s consistency, clarity of message, brand differentiation, and things like that. Frequency as what you were speaking to before is the piece that’s saying, “We’re creating these clear and consistent messages but we’re doing it once every other week.” That’s not helpful for anyone either. That’s the key component once you’re putting good content together. It is making sure it’s doing what it’s supposed to be doing.

Creating good content is a portion of that. You used the phrase value content in the past. Is that another part of creating good content?

Value content is the meatier pieces of content that you’re putting together. Those are typically the pieces that you can cross-pollinate with other channels and start taking out into the real world too. Good content might be a video that you put together that talks about the benefits of physical therapy for vertigo patients. It might be a fun little video that tells you one little thing. It’s fun, entertaining, and a little educational. That’s great.

Value content would be that info packet that you can serve digitally and in person. You can print it out and give it in person. It has links or QR codes to other things that inform. It’s more comprehensive. It’s got a lot of valuable information in it. We did one in 2021 that we saw a lot of engagement with. We put some budget behind it to promote it to a targeted audience. It was adults 35-plus than our service areas. Those were the 13 Daily Mobility Exercises that you can do to feel and move better on a daily basis.

How much value can we bring to a target audience that speaks to them and gives them things that they’re looking for, that would be helpful for their lives, and that doesn’t bring anything back to us? What it does for us is it creates brand awareness, brand trust, authority, and recall if they’re looking at it and using it on a daily basis so that if and when they do need physical therapy down the line, they think of us first.

That’s what you were alluding to when you mentioned Gary Vaynerchuk. Gary Vaynerchuk’s words came to my mind when you were talking about providing content that’s 75%, not the 25% because when he was talking about it, he was saying, “You’re telling them what to do but they’re going to come back to you to figure out how to do it.” I can tell you all kinds of stuff about my coaching program, how to help you be a better PT owner, how it’s going to get you profits and freedom, and write a blog post on that every day but to get you to implement it is a different story.

I can tell you the what but how is when they’re going to come back and use you. Plus, it’s also going to set you up as “the expert.” They’re going to want to talk to the expert because there’s always nuance to it. There are custom issues that come up in different clinics no matter what the program is. They will want someone to apply that information to their lives. T here’s value in that.

That’s where that idea of trust, authority, and leading comes into play. Can you create that level of trust that the audience truly believes? Because it’s true, this isn’t some underhanded thing. They believe that you have their best interest at heart and that you are not looking for anything from them. You are giving them good information. They come to you because they trust you. It’s a win-win on both sides. It’s a long-term game.

If you want to get a little bit more in the weeds about it, which I always tend to do because this stuff is super interesting to me, the real benefit of something like value content that you can use across these different channels is in creating it as a legitimate lead generation piece. It is to say that if you can start gated the content, this would mostly be digital, although you could do it in person. I’ll give you an example of what that means.

You create something like the 13 Daily Mobility Exercises and put a budget behind it on social media within the channels or platforms that you know the audience is going to be. When they click through to it, they get a little bit of the information, and then they can download the entire packet for free. We need their name and email. That’s called gated content. They get the thing for free. We get their name and email.

Always start with the goals and then always think about what is the conversion point to reach those goals.
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In-person, that would be if you are at a race or an event and you have a bunch of these printed-out packets, you can give them out to people. You want them to sign their name and email. It’s easy enough. You say, “We’re not looking to sell you anything. We’re going to send you some follow-up information.” You have their name and email. You have a lead. They have gotten something of value that hopefully, they find useful so that they’re trusting you in a way.

You can start doing follow-up communication with them with the other good and useful information. Maybe the next time you reach out to them, you say, “It sounds like you might have some mobility problems because you downloaded this packet. Here’s some information or a video that we put together about alleviating low back pain.”

Maybe the 3rd or 4th time you reach out to them, you say, “We’re doing a special for this.” In our case, we might reach out at the end of the year and say, “Did you know that if you’ve met your insurance deductible, you can come to see a physical therapist at likely no cost because the deductible has been met and also without a doctor’s referral?”

There’s the ask. It’s maybe 2, 3, or 4 emails or communication points down the line. You’ve nurtured that lead the entire time. They’re like, “I didn’t know that I could come to see you at no cost with no doctor’s referral. Also, I trust you. You’ve given me all this good information. I’m going to come in and see you.” It’s a win-win. There’s always great information. At some point down the line, you make the ask and you’ve earned it.

The entire time, you’re telling people to never go to another community event or race without getting names and email addresses, so you can capitalize on that information and send them some content later on.

For that type of event, sponsorship, or anything, what other way do you have to prove the return on investment?

You’re hoping that your goodwill translates and that your name gets out there but how quickly do people forget? They don’t even remember the name of the person that was helping them maybe at the race or talking to them about their condition at the fair that they’re at. If you’re able to capture that name and email address, you can continue to send them content and get in front of them going forward.

This has been an ongoing friction point for a lot of marketers versus clinicians or owners. It’s the value of something like free assessments. If you want to call it a free consultation or whatever it is, you say, “If you want to talk to me for five minutes about why your shoulder hurts every time you raise it above your head, let’s have that conversation.” I’ll prove that I’m not looking for anything from you because I might say to you, “Take some time and don’t do any lifting for the next two weeks. If it’s still hurting you, here’s my card. Give me a call.”

It’s even better if you can say those things and then say, “Put your name and information here. We will follow up with you and make sure everything is good. We will send you some information on stretches you should be doing to alleviate shoulder pain.” We’re not asking for anything from you. You’re still creating that connection. That is a form of content or value that you’re providing. It’s much more interpersonal. There tends to be some pushback to that but I see it as valuable. Any way that you can create that connection is good.

Is there anything else you want to add in terms of content strategy for our purposes?

I would roll it back up because this is what I tend to do when I start getting down into the granular. I need to pull back and say, “What are we talking about?” Keep in mind that this is rolling up into your broad marketing strategy. Always start with the goals and then think about what is the conversion point to reach those goals if it’s getting new patients in the door, depending on which audience you’re talking to. If you’re talking to older people, it might be a phone call. If you’re talking to younger people, it might be an online submission or whatever it is.

What are the ways that we can engage with those audiences? Move backward to what are the ways that we can make them aware of us, to begin with? The entire content strategy working down into the content marketing that you’re doing still fits within the framework of lead generation, lead nurturing, and lead conversion. You’re fitting it there. What are the pieces of content that will create that type of awareness and engagement? What are the pieces of content that will nurture these leads? How can we convince them to convert once that need is there?

Thanks for your time in the chair, Peter. I appreciate it. If people had questions, are you open to sharing your contact information?

My email is Peter.Decoteau@PTSMC.com.

I see your articles almost monthly in Impact Magazine . Thank you for doing so. That’s awesome that you share that marketing information. I refer people back to those articles to check out the content that you’ve shared in the past, for sure. I look forward to them in the future. Thanks for sharing.

We cover a lot of ground in those. We do a lot of content stuff but we also talk about a lot of traditional media, return on investments, proving that with benchmarks, and stuff like that.

You cover a lot of information within the marketing arena. To even the smaller practice owners, I would recommend you read those because you will always be able to pull out singular nuggets of information that you can implement into your practices fairly easily considering the broad topic that you’re usually talking about or all the intricate parts of it.

That’s the goal. I always say, “The rising tide for PT lifts all of our boats.” There’s a big portion of the population out there that we’re not reaching yet and lots of opportunities for all of us.

Thanks for joining me. I appreciate it.

Thank you for having me.

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