Tea Nguyen, DPM (00:53.846)

In the last episode on 235, I said I would do a three part series, and today is part two. Once you have a great signature offer, what people are going to buy, pay out of pocket for, you're going to need clients. So where is the best return on investment to creating this funnel where people hear about you, decide they want to work with you, and then finally show up in your office? Is it going to be through paid Facebook ads or meta ads?

Is it through Google? Is it going to be TikTok or other social media? Where do you want to spend the most of your time? Before I get to that, you have to know that if you were from an employed situation where you were taking insurance, the funnel was through the insurance. So if a patient had insurance, they would just look up who's in network and then choose their doctors. But when you opt out of insurance, you have to create your own funnel. So that's what we're talking about.

Where do these people come from? Your patients, your prospective patients who want to work with you, who need you. So we really need to understand how direct care actually works. And the answer as to which one of these are the best return on investment to create these funnels are going to be revealed in today's episode. The reality is there is no magic trick. There is no one thing. When you're building a business, this is all about relationships.

It's about building trust so that those who need your services like you enough to do business with you, trust you enough to do business with you, and are finally ready to pay out of pocket for you to solve their problem. Direct care exists because people are starving for that connection. They are tired of being passed around in the insurance merry-go-round, waiting for months to be seen, and end up spending just a few minutes.

With their doctor. Even though the doctor is doing their best, you're doing your best. You're likely being tied down to charting and getting constantly interrupted with messages, inboxes, meetings, or unexpected events that pack your schedule and put you behind. And it's often hard to breathe when the system treats you like a factory worker. Now, a lot of doctors leave the insurance model because they want to provide excellent medical care without the constraints and frustrations that's typical with the insurance model.

Tea Nguyen, DPM (03:16.938)

Often the constraint is time. These doctors want to spend more time with patients. They want to be able to provide education and guide them through their treatment plans instead of just tossing another prescription at them. And the only way we can repair the relationship between the patient and the physician is if we had more time. And with more time, you can have more energy to connect with your patients. Patients are choosing us because they want ease, they want connection, and they want efficient solutions.

So let's figure out where the best places are to find these types of patients who are willing to pay out of pocket for your growing practice. We call this patient acquisition. We are acquiring patients or prospective patients, and the best return on investment is a story as old as time. Can you guess what it is? The funnel that we must create for the right people to come through from the highest impact, which is also the lowest cost, is actually word of mouth.

I know that may not sound totally sexy, and I bet you were thinking it was going to be some new technology, especially now that we have AI at our fingertips, which is literally doing everything for us. It's answering phone calls, it's creating PowerPoint slides, it's creating websites and so on. But the best conversion of a prospective patient to an actual paying patient for direct care is still word of mouth. If you focus on this and only this and trust that time.

Will allow that to marinate, you actually don't need to spend that much money on an advertising firm quite yet. You can be sustainable in the first few months or even in the first year of your practice if you focus solely on word-of-mouth marketing. So, how do you get word of mouth? It starts very simply. And I want to caution you to not overthink this one. It starts with your phone, your phone book.

Or I guess back in the day it was a Rolodex, but now we've got smartphones and you can just go through your contact list or people who have emailed you or social circles you're part of. Maybe you're already on social media, Facebook groups and the like. Start with your existing network and talk to them and tell them what you do and what you're asking for. Now a lot of doctors are going to hesitate here because they don't want to come off as salesy or

Tea Nguyen, DPM (05:41.292)

or pitches or they're just simply very shy to tell people that, hey, I have practice and I'm looking for patience. But you know what? Other small businesses are great opportunities for you to align with because we all have the same problem. We need clients. We need patience. So connect yourself with your local business, which is a great place to start practicing having these really awkward conversations of pitching what you sell and how you can help people.

and getting out of your comfort zone. You can also look to your current and past patients. Now if you're coming from an employment situation, there's going to be some kind of clause in your contract that you're not going to quote unquote steal patients, right? And bring them to your new practice. And it's important that you are creating your business out of integrity and respecting that because those businesses invested in inquiring the patients for you. But don't be afraid because there are plenty of patients to go around that will need your help.

So look at current patients you're actively treating and past patients who you've already treated successfully and let them know you have a practice and you're looking for people to help. Now you can ask them when you see them face to face. That's usually the best way to do this. And the second best way is usually in the way of a newsletter or some kind of reactivation campaign. So if you have a CRM, which is a customer relationship management system. It's where you can collect people's emails and send out newsletters. It's separate from just Gmail or your email account. It's a lot more sophisticated and you can start with something very simple and free. There's a lot of different programs out there that you have access to that you can get started with, but knowing how to put together a newsletter is incredibly valuable because that's how you keep in touch with people who are not in front of you or

within your arm's reach. So reactivation campaigns mean people who have entered into your world and you're just tapping them on the shoulder and saying, Hey, I've got some educational material that you would like, you send it by email and you remind them I'm accepting new patients. The word of mouth requires you to show up. It requires you to ask and be persistent, not in a pushy way like, hey, I haven't seen you refer to me. What's going on? Not confrontational like that at all. It just means that you continue to provide value

Tea Nguyen, DPM (08:01.014)

And reminding them of the services you provide. And if you provide a lot of services, more reasons to have more touch points. Now you want to think about patients who don't know who you are, prospective patients, and people who need you, but they don't know how to find you. You want to think about where do they hang out and who could be a good connector. So think about where do they hang out? Where can you be in front of them so that if they're looking for you, you're right there.

An example of that might be in the way of a community talk. Communities love it when doctors show up and share their time and provide consumer-friendly educational material that's digestible. Because they're bound to have a friend, a family member who has concerns around the stuff that you're very good at. You also want to think about the connectors who have access to your audience. So as you're building this funnel, as you're building an audience, you can borrow somebody else's audience.

So think about the businesses that are in alignment with what you do, not a competition, but who may be seeing adjacent medical problems that you can connect with, do some networking with, or do a combined community event or a talk with. You may have already heard about doing lunch and learning at different medical offices or health adjacent offices, which is a really great strategy because you've got the doctor's attention, you've got the staff's attention.

And people just really love being able to ask the doctor directly, which shows that you are accessible and easy to approach. And people love that. Now, if you focus on doing this a hundred times, a thousand times, there is just no way you cannot be successful. You will be successful because you're building the muscle of discomfort of going out there, putting yourself out there, telling people what you do, who you can help, and how they can find you.

If you keep doing that over and over and over again until you collect this dream team of a hundred different referral sources, you would have created your funnel. And once this is set up, down the road when you think about selling your practice, the next person who walks into your practice or acquires your practice doesn't have to do the heavy lifting. So now you've got a beautiful asset that you can decide to sell later on, but you do have to build it first. And I believe no matter what technology comes out in the future, word of mouth.

Tea Nguyen, DPM (10:18.944)

Is always going to win because it is relationship-based. Number two, where does paid ads play a role? Putting money into ads makes sense when you have a great offer. You have something that people are already buying, they're excited about, and they're getting results from. You might want to revisit the last episode to dive deeper into providing an excellent offer. I also have a workshop down in the show notes. If you want to hop on a call with me, I'll help you through this so that you're ready to go before you put any money into your ads.

So there are a lot of direct care doctors who are not doing any paid ads because they're relying on word of mouth. And what has helped a lot of practices is having those Google testimonials and having a strong social media presence and a great newsletter. But if you're wanting to add fuel to the fire, paid ads can help get you more exposure. So in my personal experience, paid ads are worth it if your offer can cover the cost of your ads and then some.

So for initial consultations, I charge $275, $275 for a 30-minute visit. Patient's experience stops there at the consultation. We have a diagnosis, we have a treatment plan, and they're done. Then to me, it was a great lead, but it but it didn't really give me that much money back. So if I'm spending, let's round up the numbers. If I'm spending $500 on Google Ads and I have 10 people who call.

But only one of them qualifies, they're willing to pay. I have a 10% conversion. That means my staff has to answer the phone call 10 times before one person decides to pay for that office visit. Now I have to pay for my staff's time. What makes it worth my money and my time is if on the back end I have an offer where I'm selling a package that is going to cost more than that initial visit. I hope you're following along. So realizing that that initial consultation is just one transaction.

But if there is a treatment plan for a higher valued service that I can sell once I come into the office, then yes, that investment in the Google Ads makes total sense because not only does it pay itself, it's converting to a higher ticket offering. So that's when it's worth it for me. If you offer something that's five X, ten X of what you're paying into the ads, that's when you want to do paid ads. Now

Tea Nguyen, DPM (12:39.074)

I'm not an expert, so this is my loose recommendation. You might choose to work with a marketing company and they may tell you something totally different. But ultimately, what I think you should know as a business owner is you don't want to just throw money without knowing what's going on with the money. If there's a leak within the pipeline of the patient's journey from seeing your ad to when they book the phone call, you're gonna want to fix it. And where in that process might there be a leak?

If they're calling your office in volumes, but the first question they're asking is, do you take insurance? And 99% of the time they hang up before you can complete your sentence because maybe you said no, I don't take insurance. You're getting exposure, but you're not getting the right kind of person to call. You don't have the right offer in front of them. It might be a volumes thing. So marketing ads will tell you you've got a lot of eyes on it, but you don't have enough volume or you're not putting enough money into it for your ad to be shown to enough people.

for the data to make sense. And if there's a leak in the offer, if you have a great service but you haven't packaged it or been able to communicate it in a way where people understand the value, you gotta fix the offer. And there could be a sales pitch problem. They call the office, they're interested in moving forward, but when it comes to the sales pitch or the educational conversation as to why it's worth their time to come in and pay out of pocket.

Maybe the insurance doesn't pay for it, for example, if that conversation is not smooth, if they don't understand why they need to pay out of pocket, that's a sales pitch conversation, you gotta fix that leak. So you see, throughout this entire patient journey, there are things that need to be dissected in order for you to know where the leak is and to plug it up. But if you're just throwing money at ads and you don't know what the actual problem is, your marketing agency is saying, we have a lot of eyes on it.

But the conversion from those eyes, what is that percentage to them becoming a paying patient? If you don't know that number, then you really don't know if your machine is working. So in short, if you're going to do paid ads, you have to set up the funnel so that you can track what your money is doing. And then at the end of, let's say, a 30 day period, you reassess and see what needs to be tweaked a little bit so that you can improve the quality of the types of patients.

Tea Nguyen, DPM (15:05.006)

Calling and becoming patients. Now I didn't know all this before. I didn't know this until I spent thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars on a marketing agency. They did a great job, but they didn't really show me where the leaks were. And so I'm sharing that with you so that you understand the process and you come in more well informed if you choose to work with a marketing agency. They do great things, but you also have to know what they're doing and be able to have conversations around what's working, what's not working, and where do we need to fix the leaks. And the last question I'll answer here is what about social Media?

Is it worth the time to create content? Does it actually get the right kind of patients into your door? Here's my opinion about social media after being on it for over a decade. And it feels so silly for me to even say that out loud. I've been on it for a little bit. Social media is a really great tool for you to practice being in front of new people and reminding your existing people that you're still around, that you have a lot to offer.

So I use it as a tool to practice public speaking and to connect with my local community. That was my primary reason to take social media seriously. It also gave me an avenue to practice what I really enjoy teaching. So the way I educate, the way I frame the first sentence, the way I structure things.

It's all an experiment as to how what feels good to me and what is actually resonating with the people who I'm trying to reach. But if you don't show up on social media, you don't get to practicing, you don't actually get better in front of the camera. And people want to see who you are. As soon as they hear about you, they're going to check to see if you even have social media. So if you don't exist yet, this is a great way to get exposure. And yes, it's gonna feel weird.

But listen, we're doing this in community. We're gonna do it together because for me it has been worth it. I have had people drive from all over just to get my care, even though between me and where they live, there are hundreds of other doctors who can help them. They still chose me because on social media, we are creating a world where they can feel like they're having a relationship with us without me actually meeting them until they show up at my door. So I think it's incredibly powerful.

Tea Nguyen, DPM (17:14.687)

If you know how to use it. Now you don't need a big production. All you need is a basic mic for your iPhone or your smartphone and good lighting. And good lighting could be you facing a window. It doesn't have to be anything fancy. Once you get the hang of it and you want to invest, you can purchase a light on Amazon. They're usually pretty cheap, anywhere from $50 to $100 to get better lighting so that people can visually want to look at your stuff. And you can get a basic wireless microphone.

called a lavalier or the equivalent. I've had mine for at least four or five years now. It still works just fine. So very basic setup. You don't need a whole lot to show up on social media. People just want to experience what it might be like to work with you. So if you show up exactly as you are, that's exactly how you should show up because you don't want them to be surprised when they get to your office and are like, I thought this was going to be the curated version of you, right? You don't want to mislead them that you're somebody who you're not.

At least that's my impression. That's how I show up. However I show up, that's exactly how I am in person. There's no surprises. All that to say, I wouldn't break the bank to trying to get all the gadgets just to show up on social media. People are getting tired of AI. They're getting tired of seeing things so perfectly curated. They want to know you're human at the end of the day. And don't forget, that's why we exist in direct care. We are creating connections. So the more real you can show up, the better that will be for your brand, for your practice. So

All that to say, if you do these things in excess volume, you create your funnel, you meet with lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of people. you got the point there. You have no choice but to succeed. You will succeed. Your doubts, your fears of being seen, your fear of wasting time, the fear that it's not working, these will be very loud. But if you persist, you do the work, you are detached, and you don't keep looking for the outcome each and every time.

you will actually win at this. So remove the pressure of having to perform to perfection and expecting a specific result at a specific time because too often we just want things faster than it actually takes. We are so used to Amazon Prime. We wanted all of this two days ago, right? That's not how it really works. This is the recipe for your visibility to be more persistent than that voice in your mind that's telling you to play it safe.

Tea Nguyen, DPM (19:39.554)

You should aim to be uncomfortable frequently because that is who is going to win in this whole game. And business is absolutely a game. So treat it as such. If you're someone who's ready to leave insurance or you're just in the beginning phases and you're looking for more guided support, follow the links below for the free resources I've put together and to get on my email list. That's where I'll announce the next workshops to help you ascend to the next level of your business. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Until next week, have a fabulous day. Thank you for listening to the Direct Care Podcast for Specialists. 

Remember, you always have the power to choose. So what will you be choosing today? Wishing you peace and possibilities.