The Basics Of Digital Marketing And Advertising – Websites, SEO, Ads, Etc. – Adam Robin With David Straight Of E-Rehab

Part of building and expanding any PT practice requires a marketing strategy. And a costly part of that strategy is all things related to digital marketing – creating a professional website (the “face” of your clinic online), search engine optimization (SEO) to direct people to your space online, ads to get in front of potential clients, etc. Added up, these components can be overwhelming for a physical therapy owner to handle on their own, and who to utilized can be even more taxing. In this episode of the Physical Therapy Owners Club podcast, Adam Robin sits down with David Straight of E-Rehab to discuss some of the basic things to consider when putting together your digital marketing strategy. Tune in and learn how to get your target audience’s attention online and take your practice to the next level!

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In this episode, I’m here with a new friend, David Straight with E-rehab . What’s up, David? How are you?

I’m good, Adam. How are you doing?

I’m doing good. I appreciate you being on the show.

Thanks for having me. I appreciate the opportunity.

I’ve worked with a few different digital marketing agencies and have jumped into that world. I needed some help with my website and whatnot. As our company has grown, I decided to seek out a new relationship to get a little help with our website, some email campaigns, and some foundational support with reputation management, SEO, and those types of things. I kept on hearing, “E-rehab.” We have a few members and coaching clients in our group who are using your service with E-rehab so I thought it would be fantastic to bring you on, learn your story, and learn a little bit about what you do with E-rehab.

Thank you for that. I started treating patients in the ‘90s and enjoyed the communication aspect of it. I also noticed that a lot of people didn’t know much about physical therapy. I always had an affinity for digital tools. I built my first website for the practice back in 1996.

What did you build it on?

The first website I built was Dreamweaver and then maybe Microsoft FrontPage. I then started to learn the code itself but my big challenge was when I was owning a private practice, we lost half of our business to physician-owned clinics. Forty-eight percent of our business went within 3 months to 2 big orthopedic groups that brought it in-house. I had to get good at sales and marketing. Part of it was the digital side of things.

I started running online ads when it was a service called GoTo. GoTo was bought by Overture and then Yahoo. Google Ads have become popular. I was building websites and then ran an email newsletter through Microsoft Business, a service they added. I realized that a lot of my clients didn’t have these tools either so I found a great partner, John Mason. We started E-rehab in 2003 and started with email newsletters and websites.

We added things like SEO and mobile became popular. We started running paid ads in 2007 and then social became popular as well, and reputation. We’ve always liked video so a little bit of video. We’ve been doing it ever since for over 2,000 clients. It’s helping people get the foundational elements online and use good leverage too. I always like to say, “We want to do the $10-an-hour job so you can do the $100-an-hour job. That way, your time is best served doing important things.”

At the same time, if you do it yourself, practice owners tend to go with whatever’s cheap because they don’t know all the important nuances of things and then they don’t touch it at all. We wanted to be somewhere in the middle where we could provide a managed service for people, keep their website fresh, and up-to-date, and redesign it for them when they need it. Also, help them make sure they’re ranking well and reputation and keeping their brand in front of their past patients as well. It’s what we do.

You still own a practice, is that right?

I don’t own the practice anymore. I sold it in 2005. That’s a funny story between Paul Gaspar and I. We’re better friends now than we were then but I’m still part of his marketing team to support him and Jason in the practice as well. I’m still in the practice interface with the clinicians and ownership and understand what’s going on with the day-to-day. The two big challenges, which everyone knows, are staffing and payment.

That’s where we’re positioned well. We understand that the average margin for a practice is somewhere around 10% nationally. They have to spend their money very efficiently. That’s where we come into play. We provide an efficient and affordable suite of tools. It’s the low-hanging fruit as I call it to get people started. Once we built a great mousetrap, we’ve helped them differentiate themselves in their community. We still have some good strategies for differentiation.

If they want to venture onwards to the four-figure month types of strategies, and that’s lead generation, social media marketing, and things of that nature, they can have that but they know that they’re going to get everything right with us foundationally before they dive into some of those other things. A lot of people don’t. A lot of practices tried the 4 and 5-figure month types of marketing and haven’t had great success with it, especially when they look at the financials, which I know you’ve helped people understand quite well.

We tell them that marketing’s not just online digital marketing. It’s offline marketing and sales for the community. We are still huge fans of reaching out to referring physicians where the opportunities do exist and helping maximize referrals as well as providing solutions for the physicians in the community. That’s been one of our best initiatives that we still put at the top of our list. It’s not so much marketing. It’s sales, face-to-face, and belly-to-belly. We like to make sure that they understand the component of that and provide a lot of training and content around that as well.

I love a few things that you said there. Number one, you mentioned we do the $ 10-an-hour job so the owners can do the $ 100-an-hour job.

It’s good leverage. The problem with a lot of small business owners is they spend so much time treating and then doing things that take up their time where they could outsource those things and then they can spend their time on more valuable activities. I’ve got hundreds of people that still treat but they have to be more efficient. That comes down to a skillset that we didn’t learn at all. That’s learning how to manage people. For us, it’s not so hard to manage people as long as you provide them with systems and processes as well as you take an interest in making sure that they’re not only doing a good job for you but enjoying their work and committed to being on the bus so to speak.

The problem with a lot of small business owners is that they spend so much time doing things that take up their time when they could just outsource those things and spend their time on more valuable activities.
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I work with practice owners who are in different stages of the business but what comes to mind for me is the small owner, who’s maybe a solo practitioner, maybe a front desk, or an assistant. They’re wearing a bunch of hats in the clinic. They want to start ramping up their marketing. When people come to me in that stage of business and they say, “I need to get more referrals in the door,” I’m like, “Let’s start building relationships.” They immediately say, “I’m thinking about starting a blog.” They’re going to write their blog. We’re going to start posting to social media every day and writing all the content on there. We’re going to start shooting videos. It’s all great things.

They all have a little bit of value but I always like to say that healthcare is hyper-local. It’s a 5 to 10-mile radius around your practice. You got to get out of your practice. Many of the practices that I know are known in their community because they give back to the schools and senior centers, or they belong to Rotaries. They have relationships with other businesses in the community. There’s an awareness of their existence, not through somebody reading a blog post or not about the social post.

We could talk about why those aren’t top priorities at all but they’re outside of their office. That comes down to managing your time wisely but also thinking about marketing more in the broad sense like a professional marketing strategy and plan would be. That’s not just, “I do digital stuff and that’s all I do.” That’s limiting in our experience.

Here’s the thing. You can write your blog every week but it’s like, “How many weeks in a row can you write a blog and still have the energy to hire people, hold people accountable, manage your statistics, and write policy and procedure?” It’s draining.

It’s a distraction. What we found with blogs or creating that kind of content is what you would ideally do it for. If it’s something that has some scalability to it, you could write a blog post. You would hope that if you wrote it, you could get it to rank on Google for a local search. You could take that blog post and publish it on social media.

However, since organic reach or the number of people that see your post is pretty much dead, you would have to pay to get that post out into the community in front of eyeballs. It truly is like the old days, the offline method. It’s like putting it in a newspaper and you hope somebody sees it because it’s going to be on the 77th page and you hope somebody has a problem that might have a need. Like with any type of outbound marketing, the percentage of people that might have any interest in it is small single digits.

As far as ranking, Google’s pretty upfront saying there isn’t any content that we haven’t seen published already. Ranking content is especially for things that are information types of searches. You wanted to rank for back pain treatment in Biloxi or neck pain treatment in Encinitas. You might be able to rank it but the number of searches is extremely rare. The chance that somebody’s going to be in your area that you serve and read that blog post is even rarer.

The chance that somebody’s going to come in, become a patient, and go through a plan of care is even rarer. I don’t think that kind of strategy makes a lot of sense for practices at a foundational level, especially if you’re in a situation that you talked about in a 1 or 2 PT shop. You’re looking to move, get to capacity first, and then think, “How do I scale and hire another therapist?” It’s not going to be through writing blog posts or using social.

That’s our experience and we got all the data to prove it. That’s the good thing about doing this for many years. We have 1,500 locations and data across the United States about what pages people are going to, what search phrases people are using, and where those people are located when they’re doing the searches. When it comes to SEO, we are very consistent in saying, and this is contrarian to what a lot of other gurus like to say, “We want to do our best to rank for transactional searches.”

When I say transactional, these are people that are looking to buy. It’s physical therapy, physical therapy near me, and physical therapy in your city. It’s by far the most important search because the APTA survey in July 2022 of consumers and the 2023 APTA survey of consumers says that 64% to 85% of consumers are referred. What’s the most important search to show up for? It’s your business name. When somebody’s referred to you, they’re going to be referred to your business name. That’s quite easy to do unless you have some generic name.

If your name is Physical Therapy Service, that’s not very unique. That’s a common phrase but almost to everybody, Adam Robin Physical Therapy or Southern Physical Therapy Services is a unique enough name that you’re going to show up. It doesn’t take anything but an SEO-friendly website to do that. That’s our search strategy in a nutshell. Those things are far more affordable than if you were to hire an expensive SEO company. The SEO itself, if it’s automated, it’s about $800 to $900 a month.

If you have somebody who knows SEO, you’re looking at $2,000 to $3,000 a month. It’s hard to get a return on investment for those kinds of dollars because they’re also asking for, “Give me a year commitment on that.” They have to because Google isn’t going to rank something that gets a lot of visitors and searches next week or next month or even in a few months. It’s going to take several months of consistency to build up that trust in the Google search algorithm.

That’s why you and I align so much on this idea. I always envision like, “If you want to get referrals in your door, you got to be the hometown hero.” You’re not going to go drive 150 miles East to this random city and start generating referrals. You need to be the hometown hero. That circle of influence is very small, maybe 5 to 10 miles around your clinic. Those are the only people for the most part that matter. Maybe 90% of the people who are in that area have lived there, have been living there for a long time, and don’t have any intention of moving for any time in the near future.

The only way to build relationships with them is to get involved in the community. There is this outer sphere of people who are moving into the community, who don’t know you, and who don’t have relationships built. That’s a smaller percentage of people who are going to do some cold searches online for places in the community. That’s where the digital marketing helps. Here’s the thing. People get referred to you by their friends.

If I say, “David, you need to check out Adam at Southern Physical Therapy Clinic.” You’re already building some trust with me and getting some social proof that Adam has it going on over there. He’s the guy and the hometown hero. When you go online, it confirms what you already know about me. That’s where you help me because you confirm what the community has already established. Very rarely are you going to convert somebody organically online like that.

We like to think of the classic model. There are a lot of different ways to think of the funnel or sales pipeline that people go through but they first have to have a need for your service, know you exist, and like you. When I say like, they have a need, you fulfill that need, and then they have to trust that you can do the job for them. It’s know, like, and trust. For those people who don’t know you at all, they’re doing the geographic searches or searching for physical therapy or physical therapy near me.

For people that are in the middle of that process, they know you. They’ve got a referral from a friend, family member, or physician. They’re going to go on your website and check you out. They may Google you first but they’re going to Google your business name. You pop up right away. You also have multiple links to your business. There’s one to Facebook and Yelp. They’re all working well and together. They see that you’ve got 200 five-star reviews that confirmed for me.

I pop over to your website. Half the people are influenced by your website and making a business choice. They then read a story that is memorable and logical. It’s fast and easy to digest. The call to action is right there for them. That’s easy for them to take the next step. We like to understand. That’s why we ask our people in our practice and other practices how they buy. Looking at the data too, it’s easy to see what you need to be doing. It doesn’t have to cost you four figures a month to get it right.

You shouldn’t be just doing it yourself and then forgetting it because you have pretty big traffic but your average location’s getting a couple hundred visitors a month. You have to remember that you’re a service business. People can’t test-drive you. They can’t try you on and they judge what they can’t see about your PT service based on what they can see.

There’s plenty of consumer research around that in service businesses. When you have your act together, it doesn’t raise any doubts in their mind. It becomes an easier path. As Google says, “Fast, easy, and friction-free,” to get to the next point, which is the phone call or an appointment request. You do your magic once they come in the door. You do a great job of providing exceptional customer service.

We even like to say before they even come in, send them a message through email. A lot of EMRs have the system or we have a system for it. Let them know what’s going to happen before they even come in. Allow them to fill out their forms before they even come into the practice. Think about how you’d like to be treated and the experience you’d like to have. Try to view it through their filters.

It’s not that difficult to do things right. You don’t have to read 60 books. You have to start taking not only massive perfect action but also some action rather than taking another course, reading another book, and wondering what you should do. You got to dive in but you’ve given them the blueprint probably a dozen times. I gave them the print. You got to start doing it.

Taking massive imperfect action is better than taking another course or reading another book.
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We’re talking about marketing but we can apply this same principle to business or anything to be a good parent and person. Identify the handful of simple things that you need to do well and do those. Don’t overcomplicate it. Get a good team around you. In this case, we’re talking about E-rehab that can support you on the things that you don’t have time, energy, knowledge, or bandwidth to do. Do a few simple things well. Get out in the community and build relationships. That’s your marketing plan. You can build a great physical therapy clinic that way that is better than most.

I’m so fond of going to referring physicians. I went through everything everybody else went through when it came to selling to doctors like self-doubt. They know more than I do. They don’t care. The more I study it, the more I find those are all self-limiting beliefs. They’re busier than we are. They do care. They’re churning through 2 to 3 more times patients every day and they tend to follow the same habits. They do have problems like we do. They don’t know a thing about physical therapy even in 2024.

Most PTs won’t approach the doctors. I’ve asked multiple primary care doctors and they said, “We don’t care about the orthos anymore. They all have their in-house PTs. We like to go to the GPs and the internists and establish those relationships. We know what’s better for their patients than they do.” A patient walks in the door with acute back pain, shoulder pain, or knee pain.

We know what’s better for them than they do but they are the gatekeepers. If you educate them based on the best research, you repeat that process staying in front of them. Most PTs go once and never go back to the doctor because they’re too busy. However, if you do that and do it to twenty different doctors, you’re going to get a few.

You’ll land one.

That’s if there are cold calls. If you have relationships with the doctors in the community, tear those into gold, silver, and bronze, the ones that keep feeding you, the ones that send you a few, and the ones that don’t send you any at all. I always say to start with the silver ones and try to get them into gold. Never forget who’s feeding you. Keep the gold people happy. If you have any time, reach out to the bronze-level doctors.

People hate doing lunches. I’m not opposed to doing lunches every once in a while either. People will spend $5,000 to $10,000 on social media marketing and won’t get anything out of it. I always counter them and say, “What if you took that same amount of money and bought lunches for all those different doctors?” You could answer this. I’d be curious but have you ever had a case where you bought lunch for the doctor’s office and they didn’t at least throw you a bone?

You are spitting fire, David. The answer to that is no. Here’s the thing. If you’re an owner, which everybody reading this is, you have to learn over time how to sell your plan of care and position yourself as somebody who knows what they’re talking about. You learn charismatic traits about yourself. You know how to build relationships. The thing that I love about you, David, is I remember when we were doing some onboarding with your company. I even told you, “I’m thinking about doing some Google Ads for my new location.”

You talked me out of it. You told me, “Adam, is there anything else you can do with that money?” I was like, “Yeah, I could.” It’s so awesome to hear you. You weren’t just after my money or sale. You were genuinely interested in helping me build my practice. You’re so right. People are on TikTok and Instagram Reels. They’re seeing all these flashy, “Go high level,” lead acquisitions, and all these fancy ads.

They think that that’s the answer to all their problems and that they’re going to outsource having to build relationships in the community. I love what you’re saying. I agree that maybe not never but as it is, you can’t outsource that. You can’t spend money on Facebook and replicate building an authentic and genuine relationship with somebody in your community.

What I typically say to people in ads is, “Do it for four months. The first month is to set it up, optimize it, and then run your campaign for three months. Make sure that you’re tracking the result to the end so you know if the patient calls and schedules an evaluation.” If you are good with your business math, you would go back and take that person who’s scheduled, find out how many times they came in, and how much money you made from them. You go back and see how much you made versus how much you spent.

The other thing that people rarely do is don’t factor in the value of their time. You’re spending money on me. I’m spending money on you. They’re spending money on looking at ads, learning ads, or going through reports with somebody. All of that stuff matters. That’s why I always like to talk about opportunity cost. Where is the best way you can spend your time and money on generating new business?

The funny thing about marketing is great results are usually single digits types of percentages of success. It’s not that digital advertising doesn’t work for some people. It’s not that Facebook or social funnels don’t work for some people but you have to have the time, interest, and support around you to do it well. You have to have endurance.

When you start any type of marketing or sales strategy, especially going out to doctors or the community, you suck and then you get better and better. One of the foundational concepts that we built our systems around is simplicity. We don’t want our owners to be doing the things so much that are required but we want the support step. We want everybody to be able to do it.

If I give you a 10-step process, 3 sites you need to log into, and 4 other things you need to do in the process, you have to do that every day, check the results, go back, change things, and work with us to change it. Very quickly, it gets very inefficient. We’re all about simplicity. Simplicity may not be quite as good on a small scale. If you send out 100,000 emails to a group and then you say, “I send out 100,000 emails and have done some segmentation,” you might get a slightly better result.

However, the effort and the money that takes to execute usually gobbles up all of your profits and time in doing so. That’s why we’ve thought very carefully about what we do. If people can get these fundamentals in place, then they can go focus on equally or even more important things and that’s getting out of their office into their community and meeting people. It’s amazing when you meet people because they’re all struggling. It’s the same thing. You’ve got a business. I have a business. How can we help each other out?

If somebody feels threatened by that, then maybe that’s not the right person to talk to. I guarantee you there are about 50 other people you could talk to in the community. Nobody’s going to convert all 50 into referral sources but if you get 5 or 7 of those people out of 50, they have a need, and you have some value, you’re helping each other out. It snowballs from there. I like the hometown hero concept. It’s a great idea.

Hometown hero and consistency.

That’s the cornerstone of marketing and sales.

Quality builds a relationship. Don’t just drop off flyers and leave. What’s their name? What are they into? What are they like? What problems are they trying to solve? How can you help them? It’s quality, quantity, not just one but a lot, and consistency. If you can do those three things forever, it’s impossible for you not to get a referral. It’s just the world.

There are some situations but they are the exception. I still know based on the rule that you can’t break into the narrow network. They have to refer in-house. That can be a challenge. I’ve read many stories of people doing creative things to find solutions for that but for the typical community, most communities can get a little bit online, get a few referrals, and get some repeat business because you stay in touch with people. You have the doctor send you some business and maybe even have a simple system to get your patient to refer you to a friend or family member. Those things are cheap and easy. You just got to do it.

You’re talking my language. I do have another question for you. We talked a lot about paid ads and both agree that for the majority of in-network practice owners in this country, paid ads aren’t the first thing you should be looking at.

I wouldn’t say it’s the first thing you should be looking at all.

Let’s flip it. Who needs to be considering paid ads? This was a question I thought of as we were talking. I don’t have a good answer to this. I’ve got some ideas.

Here is my response to that. For most people, after they’ve fulfilled the top online priorities consider paid ads but you have to be willing to test it and then be willing to move on. You also have to understand the math. It depends on how you look at the business math. Also, you have to have a budget for it. In many markets, between 2020 and 2022, Meta and Google essentially doubled their click costs.

The cost per click for somebody searching for physical therapy is anywhere between $7 to $15 for a click. You’re not appropriate for paid ads if you ever worry about people clicking on your ad that are a competition or somebody that has no interest in physical therapy but clicks on your ad and you’re like, “I spent $15 every time they click.” If that worries you, don’t think about ads. It should never worry anybody because you look at the result though. “I spent this much money in. I got this much money out.”

Try for four months. Make sure that you have the right sensors in place to understand what’s going on. Also, recognize and we’ve seen this across multiple ad campaigns, that there are some things you cannot track. There’s the old vague saying that rising tides raise all ships. By getting your name out in front of the community and people doing all these different searches, you may not be able to track that your ad contributed to them coming to your practice. There’s a little bit of that that happens because we’ve seen people when they run ads, they get 3 to 5 patients a month but they’re like, “I’d rather spend my money elsewhere. It’s real money.”

They turn them off and then they don’t get anything for not just one month but a few months. It’s not because of seasonality. There is some branding that goes on with having your ads show up all the time that you can’t measure but you should be able to measure what’s coming out the other side. Anybody can test those. It varies widely in different markets. Some markets have great success. In other markets not so much. Over time too, markets change because you’ll get a lot of people that go into Google Ads over several years period and then they figure it all out and they’re like, “I’m not getting anything.”

I spoke with a guy and he’s in Long Island. He was running ads and spending $2,500 a month on ads in a couple of locations. He turned it way down. His budget was $10 a day. It’s $300 a month. He couldn’t tell the difference about what was coming in. He didn’t have the right sensors in place to find out what was going on with his ads. At the end of the day, it probably wasn’t making much difference for him.

You don’t have those in place. You should run ads if you’re willing to track and budget. You’re looking at about $1,000 per location per month minimum. You should test for a few months to see if it’s worthwhile. You have to think about the business math. If it costs you $900 to take a patient through a plan of care, you make $100, which is about a 10% margin. I had $99 in and $900 out for expenses. You’re spending $150 or $200 to get that patient. With that $200 to acquire, you only profit $90.

One way to look at it is you’re losing money. The other way to look at it though is to think of it from the standpoint of if you’re not quite a capacity but you are making a profit, which means you’re paying yourself and your staff, and you’re making a little bit of profit, then maybe you’re willing to spend that $100 to get a little bit more money in. It’s not costing you incrementally anymore. You already paid your staff. You paid your rent. There aren’t any real variable costs associated with that patient coming in.

You might say, “I’m willing to spend that money because I already got all my costs covered. My staff can treat 2 or 3 more patient visits in a week,” so that’s worth it. People often talk about the lifetime value of the patient. That’s a fuzzy number though because they’ll say, “If you got 10 patients from Google Ads at $2,000, half of those patients are going to come back for free because of the lifetime value.”

That equation looks like ten years long. A patient comes in one time. They may not come back for 2, 3, 5, or 10 years down the line. While the lifetime market value of the patient does matter, you have to realize over what period that patient comes back for free. You have to think about those things too. If you’re willing to dive in and you understand those things, give it a shot.

Always ask yourself the simple question that I learned a long time ago. “If I’m spending X and I get Y, if I spend X again, where could I get Y-plus more? Where’s the better place I may be able to spend that same amount of money and get a better return?” If you think about that simply, you might think, “If I’m going to spend $1,000 on ads, I’d rather buy 5 lunches.” I’m going to get five patients. I may get 6, 7, or 8 patients out of that. I might build a relationship and push somebody in the corner or over the hump of befriending them and getting to know them even more. All of those things matter.

I heard you talking and I’m thinking about, “Who should consider ads?” I wrote down if you’re a cash-based practice or an out-of-network practice where the sales cycle is a little longer.

My response to that would be it doesn’t matter what kind of practice you are because, in the end, it’s about the finances. I don’t know that the sales cycle is any different for a cash-based practice. If somebody needs therapy and they have the option of cash-based practice or in-network practice, they’re going to need the care right away in both cases. It’s not a longer sales cycle but it might be a harder sale is a good way to put it. You have to have a better-defined sales process, which is a full discussion on its own. There’s plenty of free training out there on how to learn how to sell patients into the plan of care.

I also put on here that if you’re an owner with not a lot of time but you have a lot of money, then maybe you could consider. If you’re somebody who’s opening two clinics at the same time, you’re going after multiple opportunities at once, you don’t have the marketing team to support it for whatever reason, and you need some support digitally, then in my mind at least maybe paid ads could potentially benefit you. I also wrote down that if you’re going to use paid ads, then you need to have some type of way of managing them and not only outsourcing them. Spend the time to track them and make sure that your money’s being spent well.

I think of it from the owner’s standpoint. It’s like, “I run the ads. I have the proper sensors in place to measure the results. Do I get the report? Can I understand that report so that I know if I’m making a profit or not?” I don’t think it takes too much to manage it if you find the right company to manage them with but it’s more to one of your other points. You have to have some endurance with this stuff because you’re not going to get 40 patients if you’re running ads. You’d have to cover a huge geography and have a huge budget.

People aren’t going to drive that far either for a traditional orthopedic problem. If you have a niche service like we do, we treat cardio and pulmonary patients. We see a lot of these dysautonomia patients and stuff. We have the universities calling us. It has nothing to do with me. It’s my great friend Paul. He’s so good at what he does. He’s better than anybody else. He’s niched himself and is so good that he’s a rare resource.

Do something like that, like a blue ocean where he’s created his market. He’s created his type of thing. He’s not competing with anybody else. He’s not just better. He’s new and different because he’s applying physical therapy and exercise physiology principles and his knowledge that no other cardiac rehab and pulmonary clinic is doing. He has the latest and greatest technology.

That’s more of a discussion about niche practices and stuff. You don’t need ads in that case. You’re going to be in greater demand than supply typically. There are plenty of reasons why you might want to do some ads but you have to know if it’s worth your time and money. You don’t have extra money or time to waste.

There are plenty of reasons why you might want to do some ads. You just have to know if it's worth your time and money because nowadays, you don't have extra money or time to waste.
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Are you the CEO and owner of E-rehab?

Me and my business partner John.

What do you see coming down the pipe in the digital marketing space? What does the future look like for digital marketing? Is it more of the same or do you see anything exciting coming down like the latest technologies or new innovations or strategies that you have your eye on into the future?

It’s going to be more of the same for the vast majority. A lot of people like to look for different and new things but for the vast majority, it’s going to be more of the same. AI is an important part of things but we like to think of AI as a first-draft tool. It’s a good tool to create. I am a big fan of videos. I’m not talking about influencer stuff where you post 20 or 10 videos a week. That’s a whole different business model.

However, we do like video. Have a video welcoming people to the practice. Let them see who you are. Communicate that to them. Not the importance of stretching a calf or hamstring but how about the importance of seeing a physical therapist in your practice versus a chiropractor, expensive tests, surgery, or anything of that nature? That’s understanding your value and communicating your value proposition to people who are comparison shopping. Video is important. You can facilitate a lot of that through the use of AI.

Google’s still going to be relevant for a long time. Their new Gemini was a complete mess but that will get better. As far as we’re positioned, we serve typically the 1 to 4-location private practices. We have a few of the bigger chains but we serve the small mom-and-pop practices for all the reasons we talked about previously and who’s in need of care. Let’s step outside of cutting-edge technology and think about the market. That’s what’s most important. What’s going on in the marketplace?

It’s Baby Boomers and even Gen X-ers. They’re the ones who are using physical therapy more than ever. How do they use digital tools to find, choose, and work with a physical therapy practice? Some of the greatest threats that private practice faces, people will say corporate roll-ups and decreased payment. It substitutes. Insurance companies provide digital tools and online tools for self-care so they don’t even need physical therapy. That would be something that I’d think, “How can I compete against that?”

There are all kinds of ways you can message about the value of physical therapy like the hands-on stuff or the face-to-face stuff. I was in the minority of people as we were going through the pandemic who thought telehealth was great. It didn’t equate to me as a board-certified and fellowship-trained manual therapist. I touched and watched people in the three-dimensional space. It’s not that there isn’t value in some of that stuff but I thought, “This is a way for insurance companies to pay us less money.”

We won’t deliver real value to patients if we can’t see them, touch them, have verbal and nonverbal communication, and get to know these patients. Also, what their true goals and aspirations are, which happens over time. There’s so much value that we still offer in that space but you have to be different. You don’t have to necessarily be different in the sense of having new programs or expensive modalities.

How about differentiating on being the best, getting into this show and probably a dozen others you have done, and saying, “How can I be the best in the community, the hometown instead of just another orthopedic physical therapy practice?” It’s hard to compete if you aren’t a clinically excellent therapist and you don’t have any reputation in town. It comes down to you truly being a commodity. How close are you? How much do you cost? You got to be different.

If you don't have any reputation in town, then you truly are a commodity.
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I know a lot of people know who you are and what you do but if somebody wanted to get in touch with you, learn a little bit more about your services, and see if you might be able to help support them with their marketing, what would they need to do? How would they get in touch with you?

It’s super easy. You can go to E-rehab.com. There’s a big orange button. You can schedule some time on my calendar. There’s a phone number you could call. You can certainly send me an email to Dave@E-rehab.com. I love to connect. Like you, I have a passion for helping the small private practice owner get the low-hanging fruit and the important things right.

When you get those important things right and focus on the details of those things first, then oftentimes, you’re not left wondering, “What am I missing? What am I doing wrong? What’s the next bright and shiny object that’s going to save me?” Those things don’t exist. It’s the fundamentals and getting the fundamentals right. Also, understanding how to run your business, which is what you teach. If you do those things right, there’s still a market out for us and there will continue to be.

It sounds great, David. I appreciate it.

Thank you.

You are a wealth of knowledge. I love your approach to marketing. Thank you for your time. We should do this again sometime.

I would love to. Thank you, Adam.

David, have a good one.

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The post The Basics Of Digital Marketing And Advertising – Websites, SEO, Ads, Etc. – Adam Robin With David Straight Of E-Rehab appeared first on Physical Therapy Owners Club.