Healthy Wealthy & Smart 486: Jennifer Thompson: Marketing Through a Crisis
In this episode of the Healthy, Wealthy and Smart Podcast, I welcome Jennifer Thompson on the show to discuss how to adapt your business during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Jennifer Thompson has served as President of Insight Marketing Group since 2006 and helps physicians and private medical practices throughout the U.S. attract and retain patients and rock-star employees. Jennifer has 20+ years experience in marketing and business development for start-up organizations and as a marketing director for a Fortune 500 company.
In this episode, we discuss:
-Understanding the Impact of Online Reviews on Your Bottom Line
-Why You Need to Provide Cross-Generation Communication Training to Your Staff
-The Death of Social Media Marketing and What to Do Next
-5 Ways to Create Big ROI with a Small Budget
-And so much more!
Resources:
Insight Marketing Group Website
Insight Marketing Group LinkedIn
InsightMG Podcast: Ep. 193 | Understanding the Impact of Online Reviews on Your Practice
InsightMG Podcast: Ep. 221 | How to Get Started on Telemedicine in a Hurry
InsightMG Podcast: Ep. 219 | How to Communicate During a Health Scare or Natural Disaster
A big thank you to Net Health for sponsoring this episode! Learn more about Four Ways That Outpatient Therapy Providers Can Increase Patient Engagement in 2020!
For more information on Jennifer:
Jennifer Thompson has served as President of Insight Marketing Group since 2006 and helps physicians and private medical practices throughout the U.S. attract and retain patients and rock-star
employees. Jennifer has 20+ years of experience in marketing and business development for start-up organizations and as a marketing director for a Fortune 500 company.
In 2010 & 2014, Jennifer was elected to the Orange County Board of County Commissioners where she made decisions that impacted over 1.2 million citizens and 60+ million visitors. Jennifer was often recognized for her use of social media and community outreach in her elected role. In 2013, Jennifer’s company helped a client win the Social Madness competition in Central Florida and go on to place 8th nationally.
Jennifer is a serial entrepreneur who wakes up every day at 4 am ready to change the world. She has been invited to share her knowledge at multiple MGMA association meetings and conferences, the Florida Bones Conference, the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons and AOA-36 on the topics of social media, reputation management, and leadership. She is also the co-host of the DrMarketingTips Podcast available on iTunes.
Read the full transcript below:
Introduction (00:07):
Welcome to the healthy, wealthy and smart podcast. Each week we interview the best and brightest in physical therapy, wellness and entrepreneurship. We give you cutting edge information you need to live your best life, healthy, wealthy, and smart. The information in this podcast is for entertainment purposes only and should not be used as personalized medical advice. And now here's your host, Dr Karen Litzy.
Karen Litzy (00:41):
Welcome back to the podcast. I am your host Karen Litzy. And in today's episode our discussions around covid-19 and what health care businesses, physical therapists, physician practitioners, what they can do to continue to help their clients and their patients during this time. So today I am so happy to have on the program, Jennifer Thompson. She has served as president of insight marketing groups since 2006 and helps physicians, physical therapists and private medical practices throughout the United States attract and retain patients and rockstar employees. Jennifer has 20 plus years of experience in marketing and business development for startup organizations and as a marketing director for fortune 500 companies. Now in today's episode we talk about how healthcare companies need to change the way they're doing things during the covid-19 pandemic. Jennifer's very specific and goes through certain phases that your company must do to continue to help people in your community. We also talk about understanding the impact of online reviews.
Karen Litzy (01:57):
This is during a pandemic and once we get through this, why you need to provide cross generation communication training to your staff, the quote unquote death of social media marketing and what to do next and then ways to create big ROI or return on investment with a small budget. I'm telling you, everyone take out your pen and paper, your computer, take notes. Everything in this episode is practical. You could start doing it today and for those of us who are anxious or struggling because maybe we're not seeing the volume of patients we used to and our incomes are starting to see that, starting to reflect that most of the things that Jennifer is suggesting we can do takes very little or $0 million to achieve it. So I want to thank Jennifer for her time and her expertise. And if you are a health care practice owner, you must listen to this podcast from beginning to end.
Karen Litzy (03:12):
So much good information there. So a huge thanks to Jennifer Thompson and if anyone has any questions, you could go to the podcast show notes at podcast.healthywealthysmart.com. You've got all of Jennifer's information there, all of the things that we talked about, one click will take you to it. So a big thank you to Jennifer and of course I want to thank you, the listeners for tuning in each week. We would love it if you could leave us a review on Apple podcasts and tell your friends, tell your family thank you so much and enjoy.
Karen Litzy (03:51):
Hi Jennifer, welcome to the podcast. I'm happy to have you on and I feel like you're here at like the perfect time.
Jennifer Thompson (03:58):
Absolutely. Thank you for having me. It's great to be virtual and all of us are kind of hunkering down at home, but this is a great way to pass some time.
Karen Litzy (04:07):
Exactly. And like I said in your bio, you have helped physicians and private medical practices attract and retain their patients. You've been doing this for a very long time, but I have to think the recent pandemic has kind of shifted things a little bit for medical practices. So before we get into the kind of the bulk of what we had originally planned to talk about a couple of weeks ago, I would love to get your professional outlook on marketing, on finding patients on how we can do that in these times of this pandemic.
Jennifer Thompson (04:50):
Yeah. And I think that like it's just the right place at the right time. So when all of this was starting to come to fruition and it looked like we were going to be on restrictions and stay at home orders our team, that really shifted very quickly to reach out to all of our clients and say, Hey, look, we want to be a resource to you. You're not set up yet on telemedicine, but let's get you set up. So we've had the opportunity to help about two dozen practices get up and going with the Titan telemedicine solution in about 24 hours. And so once we got them all going and everybody's kinda rocking and rolling right now we started shifting the conversation to, okay, well how can we take telemedicine now as an option? Like a tool in your toolbox and market that and how do you market the practice when you're only, you know, maybe you have or you have limited hours or you have limited access and maybe you still have providers coming into the office, but you know, it's just a different environment.
Jennifer Thompson (05:50):
And the telemedicine in general is a different environment. So I think the first phase of how you attract, retain patients in this new kind of unchartered territory first is you got to do the stuff that's immediate and you have to kind of put out all of these immediate fires. And so that's like, you've got to update your website. You've got to reach out to your existing patients to let them know you're still seeing patients. And maybe it's just a different method. You've got to go out and update all your Google my business listings to include telemedicine, to include it in kind of changes to your hours. So there's some immediate things that you have to do. Of course you've got to update all of your social media and you need to, you know, start thinking about one, you want to let people know you're doing telemedicine.
Jennifer Thompson (06:39):
But then second is you want to figure out how is this going to look for the short term after I've put out the immediate fire, how am I going to now get more patients in? One area that we've seen a bunch of success in is going old school, you know, like your referring partners. And there's so many times where we'll send somebody from the office over to our referring partners to bring them lunch or to kind of build those relationships and whatnot. Well, we can't do that anymore. So now there's only one industry left in the entire world that actually has fax machines. And I just sent out faxes this morning for a couple of clients where we're sending out big bulk faxes to all of their referring partners from their EHR. They're pulling it out, pulling down that data.
Jennifer Thompson (07:28):
And we're sending out kind of, Hey, we're open and accepting telemedicine appointments. And so yeah, there's some things that you have to do that are thinking outside of the box. And that was kind of the immediate, and then the second piece is what do you do now to keep yourself relevant? And so I was on a call yesterday morning with a bunch of orthopedic surgeons. We always meet at like 6:30 in the morning because that's always pre-surgery. And we were talking about the numbers of, you know, new patients versus returning patients and how are we like balancing the telemedicine appointments in terms of other appointments. And it looked as if the marketing, it's good right now, you know, you want a market that you have this as a tool in your toolbox, but it wasn't necessarily driving new patient counts. The telemedicine option, what was happening is your internal sales, your internal folks are the ones that are driving telemedicine appointments because you're looking at those followup appointments, people coming in for you know, second and third appointments and trying to get your, the ones that you at the end of the patients that you already had on the sheet and getting them into a telemedicine appointment instead of a standard.
Jennifer Thompson (08:41):
And then now, Oh, we're looking at kind of the big issue with practices is that not only do folks need to know we're doing telemedicine, but for most practices, still maybe not in New York city, but for most practices, you know, in areas not as populated. They're still up and running for business. You know, they're still doing emergency surgery and things of that nature. So how do you let patients know that you are up and running and do it in a way that's memorable or that is going to cut through all the noise and the clutter. And so like before when I was saying you gotta to put out the fire, you put out the fire, the immediate. So part of the immediate plan is you need to put a red bar and we say red because Red's a good emergency color that in healthcare you really shouldn't be using.
Jennifer Thompson (09:26):
You put a red bar at the very top of your website and you go straight to your covid-19 resources or any of your important announcements. But that kind of red bar, you know, people aren't going to your website to check it out to make you relevant. So now we need to think about how do you brand yourself and how do you brand yourself in a way using social media. And because social media is still free and if you're good at it, you'll get some traction. And, I talk a lot about this idea that social media is dead and I will say social media, if you're just on it, it is dead now. But if you're in it, it's very much alive. And so now's your chance to be in social media and to get your message across. And what I mean by that is we have a group this morning orthopedic group who wanted to really get the point across that they're still open, put together a great little video of a doctor with an athlete who was in there for a knee injury.
Jennifer Thompson (10:24):
She signed the waiver, the release on it. They put together a great video showing how they're treating patients. So they're both in their mask. He's washing his hands, you know, and he does the quick exam. Then he washes his hands and she sits in a chair. He's about 10 feet away. They've got the video, they've got some music to it, and it's just, Hey, we're here and we're open. We have a PT practice that we're working with. They've started doing telemedicine across 26 different office locations and all day, every day they're sending us videos and great photos of them in practice showing how the physical therapists are doing their job with a computer screen and showing us the different things that we're doing. So it's just how can you be relevant now and kind of spreading that message and having fun with it. Because when people are at home right now, they're either watching TV where they're scrolling through their feeds. So how can you create that thumb stopping content?
Karen Litzy (11:27):
Excellent. And I love in the putting out the fires, the Google my business listings saying that you're doing tele-health. Hello. I have to do that today. The moment we end this call, I am going to Google my business and putting that in there. I did not even think about that cause I'm thinking about, I'm calling all of my individual patients, I'm emailing people, I'm keeping people updated, I've updated my website, I've done all that stuff, but I have not done that piece so that I need to do that as that should have been my phase one. And then I love the kind of how you're getting new patients because it's true. I think you're seeing in a lot of practice, at least what I'm hearing is that you're existing patients are doing tele-health, but how can we get new patients on board? So do you have any advice, let's say a new patient contacts me, I do a free 20 minute consult with them, kind of explaining tele-health. Are there any sort of must have pointers or any way that we can close that to help that prospective patient feel confident that they're going to get what they need?
Jennifer Thompson (12:37):
Yes, and I think that, I think part of that falls on you making sure that the patient is ready for what this new experience is. But we were so my teams, we do marketing, so we have, we're in the trenches on the marketing side of things and then we have a training side of the business. And so we were looking at updating a patient experience training that we've got currently. And then, how do you update it kind of with this telemedicine and telehealth component to it? Because we've been having a bunch of conversations about, it feels a little bit like the wild wild West and when the regulatory environment was kind of opened up, we would see providers and some of them, a lot of the ones we would work with. And we would call and say, Hey, do you want us to get you set up?
Jennifer Thompson (13:22):
And they would be like, no, I've already got this covered. I'm doing it on FaceTime, I'm doing it in WhatsApp. And we were like, no, you've got like they may be, they may be allowing you to make some mistakes right now just to get through this. But you've got to train at your patients from the get go of how you want this. And so you can't take somebody from a FaceTime call to later on doing a HIPAA compliant portal that they have to log into a remember a password. So we want to train our patients from day one. So I think that's part of the decision that you as a provider have to make is what's going to work for you. Not just for today but for long term. And then from the training side of our business, of course, we're always looking for a way to have fun with it from patient experience we put together and I'll send the student, cause we put together these great, I think they're great videos a day in the life from the provider's standpoint.
Jennifer Thompson (14:14):
And it's a series of tips of things that you should remember. Like for example, you shouldn't drive your car and do a telemedicine appointment. You shouldn't. That seems reasonable. You shouldn't, you should tell everybody in your house that you're with patients so they shouldn't be walking around in the background in their underwear because these things happen. I was going to say like it seems basic but it's not. Yeah, you gotta be patient with people because they're also going through this experience for the first time. Just because you’re not in the same room doesn't mean you have to shout. They can hear you. You've got to remember that you might have a great connection and you have, you know, your wifi is strong, but you may be talking to somebody and they're receiving it differently. And so we're all going through this for the first time together. And so I think understanding, like just taking a step back and remembering that this is unchartered territory. And so you know, are there things to pay attention to? Yes. But I think it starts with the provider and how you prepare the patient for that visit.
Karen Litzy (15:24):
Excellent. I love that. Yes. And definitely send those videos along and we'll put them in the show notes. At podcast.healthywealthysmart.com under this episode because I think people will definitely get a lot of value from them. And again, I can't believe you have to say like don't walk around in your underwear, do you as you're doing that. But like, like you said, the videos are made for a reason. So people were doing it.
Jennifer Thompson (15:52):
We had a provider this week or last week send something in. It was like a picture cause we asked everybody like send them photos of you doing telemedicine so we can use them for things. And he sent a photo and he had a shirt was like stained up and like, Oh over here. And we're like, doc, no, we didn't see patients day to day like this. So you can't see patients that way either.
Karen Litzy (16:17):
Yeah. And I think that's something that's really important I think because people think, Oh well I'm at home. I can be super casual, but you don't want to be casual to the point of a stained shirt and looking unprofessional. Right. There are ways to be casual, whether it be like smart athletes, your wear or a pair of jeans and a top, but you still want to look presentable because especially if this is a new patient who's seeing you on telehealth as a physical therapist when this is over, maybe you want them to continue to see you. So those first impressions still make a difference. So thank you for bringing that up.
Jennifer Thompson (16:54):
They absolutely do. And I think people just forget that. And you know, I think, I think it's okay to have fun with it too. Like, you've got to be professional and you need to be the regular provider that you always are. But from a marketing standpoint, a little levity goes a long way right now. And what are some examples of a little levity going along way, if you have any off the top of your head? Yeah, so we're having a lot of fun with these kinds of patient experience, customer service, telemedicine training videos, which we put out our first round of them yesterday. So we're just trying to have fun with them, like make fun of how crazy it is. We have a group that has it's an orthopedic practice that has a lot of athletic trainers that they employ.
Jennifer Thompson (17:38):
So one of the athletic trainers, because nobody's in schools right now, has been furloughed. And so what we're doing with him is he's got like a four year old son at home and he's doing a daily series on social media as the athletic trainer, providing tips on how you can stay active and how you can prevent injuries at home. So he's doing things like yesterday, he's sitting on the couch with the son reading a book and he's like, Oh, I see now you're here. You know, welcome to my living room. Here I am at home with my four year old son, Jackson. We're going to read two pages of book and then we're going to do jumping jacks and then we're going to run in place. But he's doing a series just so it's fun and it's cute, but it gets a lot of engagement at the same time. He's like getting the main message across and it's something that people are stopping on and he got great traction. Maybe a thousand people looked at it yesterday. So, Hey, it's good traction, no money. And it's keeping them relevant. Plus it's keeping him relevant in a furloughed position.
Karen Litzy (18:38):
Yeah. Oh, how great. What a great idea. Love it. All right now something that I think we can talk about that can help your bottom line and that can help your practice grow is the impact of online reviews. And that is one thing that I don't think has had that much of a change even during this time. So can you speak to the importance of those online reviews and understanding them?
Jennifer Thompson (19:06):
Yeah, I absolutely can. So I think a lot of times practices will come to me and say, what if I could only focus on one thing because I don't have any money? What would be the one thing that you would tell me to do? And I hands down, always tell them that you should focus on getting as many reviews as you can and not because reviews you don't need just five star reviews, but you need lots of reviews. And I referenced back to a study that that we found that was, that was cited in the wall street journal and it was a study by a company named Juan plea. And I will send you the details of this for the show notes. So wildly does study of at 25,000 freestanding medical clinics. And one plea is actually a credit card processing company. So they were looking at cash based business for 25,000 freestanding medical clinics and they were tying the revenue to the cash based revenue, two star ratings and reviews.
Jennifer Thompson (20:11):
And so basically the couple of the top line, top level findings that they have are like medical centers that claims their listings on three or more of those websites, meaning like rate Indies, healthcare, vitals, Google, things of that nature. See 26% on average more revenue than practices that don't. So if there's ever been a reason for why you need to really pay attention to online reviews outside of, it's the number one way people choose their provider and if there's ever been a reason, it's because it's directly tied to your bottom line. Medical practices don't respond to online reviews, make 6% less than practices that do. And I'm not suggesting that you, that you respond in a way that violates HIPAA, but you can respond in a way that doesn't even identify that somebody is a patient and you can provide them a phone number that if they have something negative that they can follow up on, that's a 6% difference in revenue.
Jennifer Thompson (21:10):
And the one that really gets me the most is that practices that are rated five-star across the board actually see less revenue than practices that are afforded to a 4.9 star. And that's because we all realize that everybody is not perfect and the general public is not ignorant to that. So they expect that you're going to have some negative reviews. But it was just most interesting that you can see that that indirectly court, there was a direct correlation and you know, focusing on star ratings and then going into reviews. And for me it's just, it was just good data because everybody loves good data. Sure. And I got really involved in, I mean we identified that reviews were probably a place to focus our business. You know, years ago and things were just starting out. But I was in politics for years and when I was in politics it was right when social media was starting to take off.
Jennifer Thompson (22:09):
And just like medical providers are limited in what you can say and respond to. As an elected official, I was limited in the state of Florida to the sunshine law and the sunshine law prevented a lot of what I was allowed to say and not allowed to say online. So I got really interested in this whole like immediate feedback. Everybody thinks that they've got an opinion now and how these opinions get shared and then what you can and can't say to them. And then I would have doctors that would come to me and the doctors would say, Jen, I just want you guys to get rid of that negative review. And I referenced orthopedics cause I have a lot of orthopedic clients and this would happen a lot with them, but when it was a work comp case and somebody who didn't want to go back to work or if it was somebody that wanted opioids and they just couldn't get their fix, they would go online and just bash these doctors.
Jennifer Thompson (22:59):
And it got to the point that work comp aside, I would have to say to the doctor, doc, if you're consistently getting negative reviews, we've got to deal with what the root of the problem is and not keep dealing with the negative review themselves. And so we would start doing sentiment analysis on the reviews. So easy tool, especially if you're stuck at home and you've got some time on your hand, pull all of your reviews offline and take, hopefully you're using a service, you just couldn't get them in a spreadsheet. But look at the reviews and look at that data and figure out what it's telling you. Because usually it's not between the provider patient that somebody is upset, they're upset about a billion process or upset about a wait time. They're upset about some kind of follow through about some kind of customer service issue and that's how you can get to the bottom of your reviews and then make changes at the practice level that are actually going to have a real impact on what people are saying about you a lot in public. So I think reviews are just a plethora of good information. If we start thinking about how we can use them to make small adjustments at the practice.
Karen Litzy (24:05):
Great. And how do you recommend clinicians ask their patients for reviews?
Jennifer Thompson (24:15):
I used to say suck it up and just ask for them and then it got to the point that I would say, here's a card to tell your patients where you want them to go. Now I would prefer the clinician not even be involved in the process at all. I would prefer that every practice out there work with some kind of third party partner that has a secure file transfer where you can send your list over of patients on whatever frequency you want. And then that provider, that software sends it out to your patients and they ask your patient for reviews. And that way every single patient gets treated the same. And you guys focus on delivering the best care possible and stop worrying about, you know, I'm not a sales person, I just want to focus on patient care. I don't want this person cause they might've been upset or I forgot to ask, don't worry. Like do I think that you should just remove yourself from that equation and just find a way to automate the process.
Karen Litzy (25:11):
Nice. And what are some examples of third party partners to help automate that process?
Jennifer Thompson (25:17):
So I exclusively use doctor.com now. But there's a bunch of them out there and so there's like review conciergedoctor.com. There's a bunch of them out there.
Karen Litzy (25:29):
Okay, cool. I've never heard of those, but that's really helpful. Thank you.
Jennifer Thompson (25:33):
Yeah, it is. It's a good way to get reviews and not to have to worry about it. And I will suggest this too, if you're at a practice that has like a lot of high volume have a page built on your website where you can capture internal feedback and then put signage up. Because that way if somebody is sitting in your waiting room and they're getting pissy that they'd been there too long, give them a way that they can get something off their chest so they feel like they need to go do, you know, leave you a negative review.
Karen Litzy (26:03):
Smart, smart. I like that. Right? So they can say, Oh, I've been here forever. Oh, I can complain here instead of complaining on Google or, Oh, fabulous. Exactly. Fabulous. So that could just be like a page on your website or something that says, Hey, if things weren't optimal for you, what can we do to help? Something like that. Feedback and feedback pages are very easy and everyone knows what to do. Yeah. Oh, excellent. Excellent. This is such good information. I'm taking so many notes. That's why I'm asking questions. I'm like, let's drill down into this further. All right. So something that seems like has been a constant theme from when we started about how do we kind of get through this pandemic in a way that's a positive for everyone involved and talking about reviews is communication. So let's talk about communicating with your staff and what do we need to provide within that communication training. I know it's a big question.
Jennifer Thompson (27:13):
So no, I love that you're asking it and I love that. I have some kind of relevant examples right now. So we do training for staff a lot around kind of employee engagement and everything kind of around how do you enhance the patient experience. So, and we put this together because of these docs saying, fix my reputation. And we said, you can't fix your reputation, so you focus on your people that plus unemployment's been at record lows. I mean, totally different conversation right now, but unemployment was at record lows. So how do you engage your employees? But we've been able to use the platform. So that's on demand training, delivering like 10 minutes a day type of thing. But we're using the platform to communicate with employees, but you don't need a platform to do this.
Jennifer Thompson (27:59):
So I think the very first step when you have a crisis is just to come up with a game plan and don't forget to think about it from a marketing perspective as well. You know, if you're going to communicate to your patients that you are offering telemedicine, don't assume that your employees know what's going on. And so, especially, if you're a large practice and you have people that work remotely or you're in multiple locations, consider putting together a weekly, maybe it's a video that you can send out. There's a great tool that I use all the time called loom L double O M love it free. You know, there's no reason not to and you don't have to house the videos. You can send it to people. Consider an email, like a regular email chain for those employees. But I've got a practice that I'm working with now that we actually got this off the ground this week and they have about 300 plus employees and they have multiple locations and a surgery center.
Jennifer Thompson (28:59):
And what we've done is basically we created a closed Facebook group for them and we are solely using it to communicate with employees that are now, some are in the practice, some are at home, some are furloughed. And the big concern is, especially in healthcare, is the bottom's not going to drop out from a revenue stream down the road. In fact, in a couple months, we're probably going to be working our tails off Saturdays and Sundays and nights because people are still going to want surgery. They're still gonna need their therapy. They're still, everything's going to happen. So you can't afford to lose furloughed employees. So now more than ever this practice in particular doubling down on communication and what they're doing is we're working so we manage the social for some of these accounts. So we're working on a patient facing social media, but now we're working on employee facing into closed groups.
Jennifer Thompson (29:56):
So now I'm reaching out to doctors saying, Hey, give me, send me a video offering words of encouragement. Show us how you're working from home. And then it's employees show us, you know, what you look like in your PPE. Show us how your eyes are having social distancing, talk to the people that aren't in the office and tell them how much you miss them. Celebrate birthday, celebrate anniversary. So it's this whole other thing. And I think that because social media allows us to create that sense of community and sometimes we lose that and not everybody's paying attention to emails and official communication. So it's working and it's a lot of work, but it's working and I think that it's going to do what it's supposed to do.
Karen Litzy (30:37):
Yeah, it's a great idea. And I think, I mean I have my own practice, I'm not an employee, but if I were an employee of a company and I saw that CEO or our owner getting on and giving us encouragement and at least acknowledging that we're still part of the company, even though maybe were furloughed or maybe were from home or now we're part time, I think that goes a long way. So I think that's a really a really great idea. And I'm assuming on these Facebook closed groups, you're not exchanging sensitive patient,
Jennifer Thompson (31:13):
Nothing like that. No, this is like top level and the CEO, this one, I've really got to commend him. He's being transparent, which I think is so important. Sharing the uncertainty of what's going on. You know, the practice applied for a PPE loan, they may not have gotten that PPE line. They've got about $3 million a month that they've got to deal with and overhead. So that's a big one. You know, as they typically give pay increases for working anniversaries, they had to tell everybody, you're not going to get these pay increases right now. We're going to deal with it in a couple months. Right now you're not. So just kind of communicating and answering questions that people are afraid to ask, but getting in front of it. And I think that that's a big kudo to that CEO.
Karen Litzy (31:56):
Fabulous. Good stuff. Good stuff. All right. Now we'll finish up with one more topic that I think we want to cover and again, relevant at this time, but ways to create some big return on investment or ROI with a small budget because I think now everyone's tightening their belts. We have, like you just said, what if you can't get these loans? What if you can't do X, Y, and Z? Everybody's budgets are shrinking. So how can, what are some ways that we can get some big impact on our shrinking or smaller budgets?
Jennifer Thompson (32:30):
All right. Couple of things that we're doing with our clients. So this is like real world may or may not be working, but we'll see. Cause we're pivoting like on an hourly basis sometimes yes. But first and foremost longterm strategies is double down on your online reviews. Thousand percent do that. Pay attention to where people are having conversations and become part of those conversations if you can. I say that specifically because we tell a lot of our clients, you know, you want to create great relationships with your patients, you want to get lots of online reviews but really what you want are like raving fans and those fans that when somebody new moves into a community or has a need, the first place they're typically going is like to next door or to Facebook. And they're asking for recommendations for someone and you know, to help them with whatever their need is.
Jennifer Thompson (33:27):
And if you've got patients out there that are really like singing your praises, they will do this for you for these recommendations. And so you want to make sure that you stay top of mind and stay in top of mind. Doesn't mean spending a bunch of money. It means being visible. So it goes back to don't just be on social media and schedule some lame posts three days a week through a scheduling software. If you're going to do it, do it. And I think the pandemic is, is forcing us to think about sometimes some things outside the box that we've always said, I want to get to this, to create this great content, but I don't have time. Well, you have time now, so create the great content because in a couple of months you're going to be so busy, you're not going to know what to do with yourself.
Jennifer Thompson (34:09):
And so I think that's really important. And then maybe start thinking outside the box of things that you hadn't thought about doing before. I have a large practice that I work with that hosts an annual seminar, a biannual seminar where they offer CEUs to athletic trainers and allied health professionals lots of physical therapy people that come into this and they have their ortho doctors on their panels typically. And then they'll invite others from all over the country to come in. They'll get the CEUs and then they'll offer them, well, chances are, and they get about 700 people every time that come to the saying it's great for them, the chances are they're not going to be able to do it this year. And so we're already having discussions with their providers who they already have the credits so they can get in the next couple of weeks here, taking that all online and getting with for them particularly they're gonna focus on athletic trainers right now because they can offer those credits.
Jennifer Thompson (35:10):
But we're going to transfer that to an online forum and these doctors are going to give the same talks live in a zoom setting and at the end they can have the survey done and they can offer seat use. But it's a great way to build relationships that they typically wouldn't get that chance to do. And so just kind of things like that out of the box thinking like we have class or doing live Q and A's on Facebook and you know, taking those live Q and A's and then recording them and then we can use them in videos and other things down the road. So I think we just need to be authentic, you know, have fun with it, but have fun in a strategic way and then double down on being where your potential patients are being part of those conversations and then just making sure at the end of the day you deliver great customer service to everybody.
Karen Litzy (35:55):
I love it. And none of that takes a lot of money at all. No. As a matter of fact, a lot of that was free. Yup. It was all free for the most part. Yeah. Amazing. Amazing. Well, Jennifer, thank you so much. I mean you have given us so much to think about and ways that we can pivot our practices to be relevant in this time and to prepare for the future when hopefully things start to open up and return to different. I don't even want to say return to normal, but we'll return to a form of normalcy. I think it's always, I think things are always going to be a little different from now on, but to at least get out of more of a lockdown situation where we can actually see more people in real life. And I think it's like you said, putting out the fires are important, but then looking to the future is I should also be part of our plan. At least that's the big takeaway that I got from this. Absolutely. I think you hit the nail on the head. Yeah. Awesome. All right. Now the last question I asked this to everybody. Knowing where you are now in your life and in your career, what advice would you give to your younger self? Say straight out of school,
Jennifer Thompson (37:13):
Stop stressing out about everything so much. Just stop stressing out. You know, if you work hard and you put yourself in the right situation and you prepare yourself academically and through experiences, don't say no to things. Say yes, go in there. Experience so much of it and realize that as long as you're doing what you need to do, you're going to end up where you're supposed to be.
Karen Litzy (37:35):
Love it. Thank you so much. Now where can people find you? Where websites, social media.
Jennifer Thompson (37:42):
Yeah, absolutely. So you can find me at insightmg.com which is insight I N S I G H T M as in marketing, G as in group.com and you can find me on anything social under the under the handle at dr marketing tips. So that's dr marketing tips. And you can find us on iTunes at the dr marketing tips podcast as well.
Karen Litzy (38:09):
Awesome. Well thank you so much. This was great and everyone we’ll have all of those links and the show notes at podcast.Healthywealthysmart under this episode. Jennifer, thank you so much again. This was perfect for the audience and I think they're going to take a lot out of it. So thank you so much. And everyone else. Thanks so much for listening. Have a great couple of days and stay healthy, wealthy, and smart.
Karen Litzy (38:36):
Thank you for listening and please subscribe to the podcast at podcast.healthywealthysmart.com and don't forget to follow us on social media.
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