Why a Physical Therapy Marketing Assistant is Worth the Cost
Too many physical therapy business owners make the mistake of not hiring a marketing assistant for their physical therapy clinic from the start. Most physical therapists rely on petitioning doctors for their long term marketing tactics.
If you are a physical therapy business owner and you have NOT hired a marketing assistant yet, your business must not be busy if you have the time to be out marketing.
Are you a bad physical therapist? Likely, no. But imagine the chef at your favorite restaurant on the streets doing all the marketing for their restaurant. If they’re preoccupied with marketing efforts, then who is doing the actual cooking?
We all know to grow a business, you need a marketing department. You need a marketing person to help you do the things that you haven’t got time to do while you are treating a patient. Ultimately, if you spend more time marketing your clinic, your patient care will suffer.
Hiring a marketing assistant does not have to be costly. All you need is something that is trainable, outgoing, friendly and easy to approach. Finding someone for $12/hour for 5 hours a week, will actually save you in the long run. Get 1 patient a week and it pays for itself, if not more!
Think about it, if you hire someone whose specific job is to run your physical therapy clinic’s marketing, the work is much more likely to get done than if you, the business owner, are left to do it in your spare time.
Really think about saving your valuable time for the patients and running the business, and utilize a marketing person to be out there in the community spreading the word about you. For just a few hundred dollars a week you could be delegating marketing tasks to someone else…and it will pay off!
Today, I have a very important message for you, especially if you have a marketing assistant. I’m about to teach you how NOT to manage a marketing assistant.
How Not To Manage a Physical Therapy Marketing Assistant
So let me begin with a story.
A client of ours and their marketing assistant were on a coaching call and asked me a question. This marketing assistant had been with the business for two to three weeks. Her business had done a wonderful job recruiting a very skilled marketing assistant.
But here is where this went wrong, and here is where there is a real lesson for you.
So, this girl asked me, “What should I be doing? I’m not 100 percent certain of what I should be doing.”
That’s totally fine, it’s a valid question. Now ideally, what we know about hiring somebody is that there is a very detailed score card and conversation that takes place that says “Here’s your job. As a marketing assistant, I want you to do this, I want you to do the other. Whether it is creating an email marketing campaign, or monthly newsletters, social media marketing, writing a blog every week, or getting five five-star reviews for the company…” and so on.”
That really is the tactical thing that a marketing person could and should be doing for you.
But here’s where it got interesting. Of all the things that this person could be doing, this clinic had their marketing assistant doing their Google ads.
Again, so far, so good. Now I asked this girl this specific question: “What is your number one skill? What are you good at? When it comes to marketing, what do you think you are best at?”
She immediately replied “I’m good at writing. In fact, I am an English major, I love to write.”
I said, “So then why are you spending time on Google? Because Google is numbers based; it’s math. It’s all about conversions, and percentages, and ratios, and looking to improve cost per click. To be able to do that, you have to have an analytical or mathematical brain.”
So this is something I’ve been talking about for quite some time now, and one of the big challenges that I see that will impede your private practice’s growth is a failure to understand what the requirements of the role are for a marketing person, and ultimately how you deploy the asset.
So this person that you are hiring, whether you’re paying them $40,000 a year, $45,000, whatever; ultimately this is an asset, and you’re paying out that salary, and you want to see a return. The odds of getting a return increase significantly when the person is actually doing something they are really good at.
To have somebody that is good at writing doing Google ads is probably not the best use of that asset. But sadly, this is something that we see inside of physical therapy clinics, pretty much all day and every day.
This is why we have created that Marketing Sherpa program, which I’ve been talking about recently.
We are responding to a problem that we’re seeing with business owners who want a marketing assistant. This clinic that I have spoken to, they want the best for their marketing assistant; they want them to succeed. They don’t want that marketing assistant coming into work everyday feeling bad about themselves because they don’t know what they’re doing to help bring in prospective patients.
The problem is most physical therapists will privately admit that they’re not very good at understanding what a marketing person should be doing, which makes sense.
They know what a physical therapist should be doing, so they are very comfortable hiring a PT. But when it comes to marketing for physical therapy, there isn’t real expertise there. There isn’t real knowledge, or understanding strategically of what a marketing person should be doing.
As a result, what you find is a precession of marketing assistants who are hired, respond to a job ad on Indeed, they take the position, they arrive at the clinic two or three months later, and then are asked to leave because there aren’t any good results coming back from their marketing strategy.
I think that one of the problems is that the owner of the physical therapy practice, the PT, doesn’t know how to get the best from that person and for that person. Because I think this is a two-way street.
We want something from the marketing person, but they want something from us.
What is your marketing plan for your physical therapy clinic? What marketing materials have you created?
Are you putting on workshops? Are you creating new free reports? Are you sending out newsletters to past patients? Are you sending out an email every Sunday? Is there a blog going up? Are you improving your SEO? Are you getting reviews on Facebook, Bing, Yelp, on any different site? Is your Google listing updated regularly?
These are all of the things that your internal marketing person should be doing, but a majority of the time we find that because Facebook and Google can be so successful with paid advertising, the business owner is in a rush to make that work. So, they’ll hire somebody with a degree in marketing to go and do Google or Facebook, but online expertise is something wildly different from the creative or the writing style of your traditional marketing person.
To learn more, check out this video where I speak more on this topic:
How to Train Your Marketing Assistant
As a physical therapist, if you have a marketing assistant, you may be interested in our Marketing Sherpa program where we guide you, direct you, we give you the support that you need to help your marketing person in your clinic be successful for you.
We will provide support for your internal marketing person.
So, if you have a marketing assistant who is a strong writer in your office, they should really be doing your social media posts, not paid advertising. They should be doing videos, and testimonials, or editing and posting blogs.
My marketing person edited and posted this blog that you’re reading right now to go up on my website, and to be distributed on social media. Who is doing that for you? What guidance do they need? Are you giving out referral leaflets? Are you asking your front desk staff to make sure that they ask for referrals and email addresses? If not, it’s the job of the marketing person to do that for you.
If you’ve got a marketing assistant, and you feel like they need some guidance, and you want us to help them create the plan, help them with what exactly they should be doing every 30 days and giving them a custom content plan.
We can find out exactly what people in your area are searching for right now, and we can guide your marketing assistant on what the content should be on your blog, on your social, and the subject in your emails.
All of this is the guidance and direction that I absolutely know 99 out of 100 marketing assistants need. I am imploring you to consider it. If you’ve got an internal marketing person in your office, and you feel like they could do with some guidance and direction from my team, that’s what the Marketing Sherpa program is all about.
We a team of people who will run your online advertising, Google, Facebook, Bing, etc., but we’ll also give you a member of my team to check in with you, to guide, to coach, to support, to hold accountable. You’ll get instant access to everything that we’re doing in the Paul Gough Physio Rooms, including checklists, documents, processes, ads, anything that we’re doing, you’ll get that same guidance. You’ll get that same view of running your business and your marketing department that I’m getting at my physio business.
If you are interested, head over to www.paulgough.com/team, fill out the form, and have a conversation with us about joining the Marketing Sherpa program, where we basically become the missing link. We will not only take care of your Google and Facebook Ads, we will also provide guidance, direction and coaching for your marketing assistant.
With all the extra time, you will be able to focus on running your clinic, getting on with treating your patients, and doing the things that you probably enjoy significantly more than managing a marketing person.
Is Your Marketing Assistant Out of Their Depth?
Are you 100% sure that your marketing assistant is producing the best content and creating a marketing plan that will bring in the most leads for your clinic?
Perhaps you are struggling to coach your assistant to be a strong member of your team.
Our Marketing Experts at Planet Paul will support you by offering your Marketing Assistant content strategies that will complement the current online marketing you are already doing.
Let us help your clinic use the TOP marketing strategies that really work for hundreds of PT clinics around the world