Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

In this episode, Barbara and Sean Garner discuss:

 

  • The challenges and importance of marketing for local service businesses, especially for health and wellness professionals, and how a “fractional CMO” service can help smaller practices oversee their entire marketing strategy without the cost of a full-time CMO.
  • The risks for business owners who do not maintain full ownership over their digital assets, such as websites and data, when working with marketing agencies, and the importance of asking the right questions to ensure control over these resources.
  • Key red flags to look out for when hiring a marketing agency and an introduction to practical SEO strategies that help health clinics rank higher locally, including adapting to changes brought by AI and search technologies.

Key Takeaways:

 

“Nobody wants your products or services. Nobody wants a doctor, Barbara. They want health. Nobody wants a personal trainer. They want to be fit. Nobody wants an accountant. They want their taxes done right.” – Sean Garner

Connect with Sean Garner:

Website: https://www.seangarner.co/ 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seanagarner/ 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seangarner/ 

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@SeanGarner 

Facebook: https://web.facebook.com/SeanGarnerConsulting/ 

Connect with Barbara Hales:

🐦 Twitter: @DrBarbaraHales
📘 Facebook: facebook.com/theMedicalStrategist
🌐 Business Website: TheMedicalStrategist.com
🎙️ Show Website: MarketingTipsForDoctors.com
📧 Email: Barbara@TheMedicalStrategist.com 

▶️ YouTube:@barbarahales

💼 LinkedIn: https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/barbarahales

Books:

 

TRANSCRIPT: (222)

 

**Chapter 1: Introduction & Sean’s Background**  

[0:00:02] – [0:03:38]

“`

[0:00:02] Dr. Barbara Hales: Sean, welcome to another episode of Marketing Tips for Doctors.

I’m your host, Dr Barbara Hales, and today, we’re fortunate to have Sean Garner with us. Sean is an entrepreneur, marketing strategist and the founder of Sean Garner consulting a full service agency and fractional CMO partner for local service based businesses with over a decade of hands on experience, Sean has helped health and wellness companies, medical clinics, law firms, coaches, consultants and home service providers, and he’s helped them grow with clarity, confidence and consistent lead generation. In other words, Sean is just everywhere and helps everyone. If you’re a professional, Sean is there, drawing from his background as a gym owner, firefighter, and faith-driven family man, which is the other end of the spectrum. Here, Sean understands the realities of running a business while juggling life’s priorities. His superpower is simplifying marketing, turning confusing tactics into clear, actionable steps that drive real growth, whether it’s through story, brand, messaging, website design, or sales funnel strategy. Sean empowers business owners to take control of their marketing and become the trusted go-to choice in their market. So again, welcome to the show, Sean.

[0:01:54] Sean Garner: Thank you so much for having me. I definitely think somebody on my team wrote that, because I wouldn’t have said that much about myself. It’s an honor to be here, and I’m looking forward to serving some people here and hopefully giving them some good marketing tips for our docs.

[0:02:08] Dr. Barbara Hales: Okay, well, the first thing that some people may have asked themselves while I was chatting about you is, what is fractional? CMO, What? What? How does the word fractional play a part?

[0:02:21] Sean Garner: Yeah, absolutely. So typically, when somebody is hiring a CMO, right? This usually big enterprise companies, well, if you are a private medical practice or, you know, you’re just an individual practitioner running your own clinic, you can’t afford to hire a full time chief marketing officer, and it doesn’t really make logistical sense for you, because there’s probably not a lot of other staff members for them to manage. For smaller businesses, we offer fractional CMO consulting services —one of the services we provide. So what you can do is have that person overseeing your entire holistic marketing strategy, working with other vendors, different internal team members, and so on. So you have that person, but it’s fractional, so we’re also doing that for other companies at the same time, so you don’t have to worry about, like, full-time salary and benefits for somebody to come in and still oversee all of your marketing and vendors.

[0:03:10] Dr. Barbara Hales: You work with. Another thing people may have wondered about while I was talking about you is that you were a firefighter. Now, in many villages and towns, no matter what a person’s career is, they volunteer as firefighters to make sure their town doesn’t burn to the ground. Was that the case for you? Or were you a regular full-time

 

**Chapter 2: From Firefighter to Entrepreneur**  

[0:03:38] – [0:05:59]

“`

[0:03:38] Sean Garner: protection No, ma’am, yeah, I was, I was a full-time firefighter paramedic, and I did that for about five, about five and a half years. And that’s kind of, honestly, what drove me into entrepreneurship. Because when you’re working as a firefighter, you’re on a shift like the one I was on: 48 hours on, 24 off, so you have a lot of free time. And so that’s how I got into fitness. It’s because I wasn’t, I was like, this skinny video game dorky kid growing up. I wasn’t an athletic girl, anything like that. But then, once I was trained, I started training to become a firefighter. That’s how I got into fitness. And then once I was on shift, you know, you’re only working 10 days a month, and so with this extra free time, that’s how I got into fitness. And we started our entrepreneurial journey by opening gyms and going through the whole process. Well, I did

[0:04:21] Dr. Barbara Hales: Don’t know that you only work 10 days a month. That’s pretty remarkable, and it leaves a lot of time to think about other things. So I guess you could say that after being a firefighter for five years, you were burnt out.

[0:04:38] Sean Garner: No, I’ll be. No, not really, if I had to. I’m very blessed Miss Barbara, to do what I do now, and to own all the businesses and companies that my wife and I do and but I always like joked, but was also serious, if I had to go back and, quote, unquote, get a real job and we didn’t have our own business, I would 100% go back to being a firefighter. I love that job. It was amazing to get to. You know, unfortunately, people are typically calling you not because they’re having a great day, but because they love what I did as a firefighter. But I ended up stopping because, whenever we started the gym, they grew way faster than we ever expected. So what was supposed to just be a part time job very quickly became a scenario where I was making dramatically more money from running these gyms, and I was as a firefighter, so I had a choice to make, you know, do I want to, you know, hire somebody to take the gym off and run it, or maybe even sell it and just stay being a firefighter? Or do I want to go all in on this entrepreneurial journey? And that’s what we ended up. My wife and I, after we talked about it, were like, “Let’s go all in on this.” And as soon as we did that —like it was already successful to begin with —once we were able to put our full focus on something, that’s when it really blew up and was really successful.

[0:05:49] Dr. Barbara Hales: So when you were running the gyms, was it then that you realized you needed to know about marketing so that you could promote the gyms?

“`

**Chapter 3: Digital Asset Ownership & Common Pitfalls with Agencies**  

[0:05:59] – [0:13:54]

“`

[0:05:59] Sean Garner: Yeah, absolutely, so kind, especially how I run and have my eight marketing agencies set up. Now, unfortunately, I got burned by multiple marketing agencies throughout the gym process. So my kind of entrepreneurial journey was once I started the gyms, yeah, we hired a marketing agencies to help us build our website, do our SEO and get our name and our branding and stuff out there, but I was always frustrated by how they were doing things, because I didn’t feel like I had any input or say or control in it. And then Ms Barbara found out that they actually ended up owning everything. So they own the website. They own the domain. So whenever I went to find another provider, they owned everything. I thought that I did. And this is unfortunate. What we see now with many of the clients we work with is that they feel they own their website, but they really don’t. They might own the domain, like www.yourpractice.com, but they don’t actually own the website, because it’s built as a third-party tool that the marketing agency specifically owns. So if you ever want to separate from them, well, you lose all that content and all that web stuff, and so learning all of that and seeing how that was done, that was a really frustrating experience for me. And so then, whenever we moved to Miami, Florida, and I did, I was still in the fitness space. I did a lot of stuff in the online fitness space. I was a writer and Fitness Advisor for Men’s Health magazine. I did a lot of online coaching and online training. And as I started doing that, that’s where I really started learning digital marketing because I began to learn how to sell things online, and then throughout covid, when everything shut down, I had already been doing this for other gym owners and personal trainers, but then my wife started her a medical practice, and she’s like,

Hey, you’ve been doing all this digital marketing stuff for the fitness industry. Do you think that it would work for my medical practice, which she was starting? Well, yeah, it’s the same stuff. Let’s do it for you. And did it for her practice, and her practice exploded. And I had my attorney come to me, and he was like, Hey, you did this for your wife. You’re doing this for these fitness people. Don’t you think it worked for me? It’s like, well, yeah, I would. So I started doing it for him, and then the agency slowly evolved to where it was less about me coaching people and more about us being a full-service agency, doing story and brand copywriting for people. We’re building websites, sales funnels, search engine optimization, and now even AI optimization to make sure people are showing up, and things like ChatGPT and, now and then, fractional CMO services. So that way, we make sure that, especially as a private practice, you’ve got all your marketing and stuff covered so the right patients can find you. Well,

[0:08:18] Dr. Barbara Hales: I can hear all your passion. We’re going to backtrack a little bit. Yeah. As you know, most people would be kind of shocked to hear that they don’t own their website and think they’re paying someone to create one. Naturally, they pay for it. It’s theirs. So finding out that they actually don’t own it is probably pretty shocking to them. So, since most professionals do what they do best, they’re going to hire a marketing agency. What are some, you know, scary stories or things that people should look out for before hiring a particular marketing agency?

[0:09:07] Sean Garner: Barbara, this is a great question, and the best one I’ve ever been asked, because that’s a better question: what to avoid? A lot of people want to know what they need to be doing in marketing, but when they go to a marketing agency, they don’t ask these questions, and they end up in bad situations. So here’s a couple of quick, dorky marketing terms for people to know and understand and differentiate, because a lot of times people interchange them, and that’s where the confusion and stuff come from. So the first thing is to know, like a domain or a URL, the address you type in a search bar to pull up a website. So you can own a URL, which is typically hosted on platforms like GoDaddy or similar, where you own the address people type in, but that address is just that. It’s an address, then you have your website, which is typically built on a CMS, or content management system. The. It is very popular. Public platforms like WordPress, Squarespace, Shopify, Wix, and Webflow are good options because they are easy to transfer from person to person. But then there are also ones that are called Private CMS, and so that means it’s something that the agency has made, and I’ve seen this, unfortunately, Barbara, a lot in the medical profession, people that like to specialize in just private practice medicine or, you know, dental or functional medicine. Providers like whatever it is. Because what happens is, for the agency to scale, they have to create systems. I love systems, but what they’ll do is make it super scalable as they templatize the CMS, so it becomes their proprietary system. So you, as the provider, might own the URL that people are typing in. You might even own the words or the content on the website, but you’re not going to be able to take that and move.

You can move the URL —the address —but you can’t take everything from the website and instantly put it on another website. So, unfortunately, what has to happen is that whenever you do want to separate from them, you have to pay an agency to rebuild everything for you. So because of that, that’s unfortunately what we see a lot of our clients that come to us is, I always joke with them is like, we’re everybody’s second or third favorite marketing agency, because they’ve typically gone to a marketing agency gotten burned, and then they come to us like, oh my gosh, I didn’t realize all this stuff. Because when we start, you know, asking questions, to start doing all of their setup for them, we find out those things that, well, hey, just so, you know, you don’t own your website. And a really scary thing is they don’t own their data. So what a lot of marketing agencies will do is they will host things on their, you know, CRM platform, or on their Google Analytics or Google Ads account. So all the data the practice has been collecting, like patient interactions and stuff, is handled at the agency level. So whenever you separate from that agency, you lose all that historical data, tracking, and everything else. So what I would say is Miss Barbara. I actually just put a YouTube video out on this a couple of weeks ago from a marketing agency. Red flags I want to look for are, like, a 40-minute video of me just ranting for a little bit. But the main thing you always want to know is: you want to own everything.

Ask the awkward questions now up front, hey, if we are to separate and stop working together. What can I take with me? What do I keep rights to and be very specific on? Well, what CMS, or is this built on, or what platform is this built on? Because there are no dorks in my world, and I’m one of them, I will debate like, which one is better. But the main thing is, you want to be a public one, so another agency can easily step in and get it. You want to make sure you own all your data, that you are the admin or owner of everything the agency creates, and that they give themselves manager access. Because another thing that people will say is agencies will be like, well, you know, we’re not going to give you ownership access, Miss Barbara, because you might accidentally go in there and mess something up. And so to protect the website from you, we’re going to keep ownership access and let you in every once in a while. That’s not how we want it, because the analogy I give to people is if you built a brick and mortar building, you wouldn’t expect or want the general contractor and the real estate agent to open the front door for you every day or to let you know when you could change the paint on the walls. But when it comes to our digital storefront, which is our website and everything, that’s what we expect. Like, although that’s the marketing agency’s job, they’ve got it, and unfortunately, they’re they’re not all bad because, because we’re one of them, but there are people that, whether intentionally or unintentionally, just because of their systems and process, people can get taken advantage of if they don’t know this stuff going into the practice or to that to the agency.

[0:13:44] Dr. Barbara Hales: That’s really very interesting. So, what SEO tips would you give our listeners to help health clinics rank higher locally?

 

**Chapter 4: SEO & Effective Website Strategies**  

[0:13:54] – [0:23:22]

“`

[0:13:54] Sean Garner: Yeah, this. This might be a long answer, but there are several factors, and what I would say is that you need to understand what SEO is, how it works, and what it’s becoming now. So I think a lot of times people think of SEO, so it’s Sir, it’s been known as search engine optimization, and what that typically means is making sure whenever customers or potential patients go to places like Google and Bing and type in what they’re looking for, your business shows up. If somebody goes to Google and types in your practice name and your practice shows up, that’s technically SEO, but that’s not what we’re looking for. We’re looking for people who are searching for problems, symptoms, and treatment protocols, and then your website shows up, because that’s how we acquire potential patients we wouldn’t have gotten before. Now, SEO Barbara has access to these LLMs, or large language models, like ChatGPT, GPT-4, and Bing. Now it’s not necessarily that we stopped calling it SEO for search engine optimization. Internally, we call it search everywhere. Optimization, because the practice is still the same, as far as making sure that whenever your potential clients are searching for something, your business is found wherever that search may be taking place. So in order to do that, try, I’ll try not to dork out on this stuff, but you have to have a holistic approach to SEO. So there’s not just one thing that you can do to pull the lever.

There are actually five, especially for a local business: five different levers or pillars of SEO that you need to understand to make sure they affect your ranking. Because it’s not something as simple as, oh, I need to use the word’ Dallas functional medicine practice’ in my headlines and website. It’s way more in-depth than that. So the first thing that we have to understand with how SEO works in these pillars is what’s called the technical and so there’s a lot of technical things that happen whenever it comes to SEO, and that’s doing things like your site title tags and your meta descriptions, which is just letting Google know what the content on that page summary is about. So there are lots of things to make sure that the page is set up properly so Google can read it. Because if I could simplify SEO, it would be this: be clear to Google, be clear, and prove it. That’s all it is. Google and these search engines and everything—they don’t want to have to work to figure out what it is you do, and they want you to prove it. So if you think that you should be the number one, you know, private practice in Denver, I’m sure you think that, and every practice in Denver is going to think that. But what we want to do is make sure we are clear with Google about why and prove it. So, how we do that from a holistic SEO standpoint is that our job as the agency is to take your knowledge and expertise in the real world and put it there digitally. There is a chiropractor we just started working with in our local city who’s been a chiropractor for 25 years, but his website is the lowest-ranked one in the entire city, and he’s like, “I don’t know.” I don’t know. I don’t understand. I don’t have all this experience. How come this guy, who just got out of med school, you know, his website’s already number one? I said, well, because he has done a better job of putting his knowledge on his website.

You’ve been in practice for 25+ years, but your website hasn’t really changed since then. So, in Google’s eyes, it doesn’t know all the new treatment protocols you were using, or the types of treatment you were treating. You have to tell it that, so Google doesn’t have to figure it out. And then, man, you’ve told me you’ve treated 1000s of patients. We only have about 10 Google reviews. So, in Google’s eyes, you haven’t treated 1000s of patients, so you have to take what’s happening in the real world and spread it digitally. And to give a quick recap, it’s a technical SEO to make sure all the technical stuff is set up. It’s the authority, so those are things called backlinks, citations, or brand mentions. Now, with these AI overviews, we want to prove to Google again that it is a digital referral. So a backlink is another website linking to yours to show, Hey, this is trustworthy. You can trust this one right here. Another one is called the UX, or the user experience. So when somebody goes to your website, do they actually take an action, or because Google showed them a result based on what they typed? Did they stay on that website and do something, or did they click off and then leave? Another big one is local, and that’s with something called your GBP, or your Google Business Profile. If you are a local clinic and you want to be found in more places, you have to optimize your Google Business Profile. That’s going to mean making sure the profile is completely filled out, up to date, and accurate. You’re adding new content to it regularly —images, FAQs, and reviews —and you’re always making sure it’s optimized, so when people are searching for you, you’re found. I can talk a lot about SEO because that’s what we specialize in, but that’s kind of a not-so-quick overview of what it all is and what you can start

[0:18:58] Dr. Barbara Hales: doing. Yeah, one of the misconceptions people have when they get their website up is, well, you know, ‘my website is up.’ I don’t really need to do anything further about the website. And so, over time, it just becomes old because nothing is added to it, which begs the question in viewers’ minds: “Well, did this guy retire?” Did this guy die? You know, like, how come there’s, like, nothing up there since he first put it up, like, 10 years ago? So in addition to the fact that the perception of the quality of his care is going to, you know, drop, because people will say, Well, if his website and all the information on the website is old, is he current in his medical care and his medical knowledge, or is it all just old?

[0:19:58] Sean Garner: Yeah, it’s like the same thing. Analogy, like, whenever you go to a restaurant and the bathrooms are filthy, it’s like, okay, if the toilet is dirty, how clean is the kitchen really going to be? And so it’s the same thing. Whenever we refer to our websites to our clients, we tell them, This is a digital storefront. So think about all the things you know: you clean your office regularly. You probably update the painting on the wall, the signage, and the brochures and stuff out front regularly—you’re constantly changing what’s out there. We’re pretty good at taking care of our brick-and-mortar, but the digital — what I’ve noticed, unfortunately, especially in a lot of the medical community —is that they build it up like, oh yeah, I got a website. I’m good. No, no, you may have a start, but now we need to get people to come to it. Because we’re just, we don’t want a digital business card. We want a place that is actually pulling in, tracking, and converting potential patients into our new patients.

[0:20:48] Dr. Barbara Hales: Absolutely, people don’t realize that they still need to do blogs. They need to update the about page, too. You know what I say is that the about page is not just yours, you know, like about you the doctor, you know, it should also be of each one of your staff members, and what their, what their, you know, Job is in that office, so that when a person comes in, they’ll say, oh, there’s Mary. She’s the front desk person, and she’s going to take my information. There’s a bill, and he’s going to go through my insurance. And you know, so even when a person has not been in the office before, they have some sense of what the office flow will be, what the procedures will be, and they’ll recognize the people that they’re coming in contact with.

[0:21:46] Sean Garner: Yeah, it makes them feel connected, and they even before they show up for the first time. And one thing that we have seen a lot, I used to not put a significant emphasis on about pages, but now what we’re starting to see is that is becoming a pillar of trophy content for these large language models like L, like chat GPT, being perplexity, what they’re doing is they’re crawling and looking for those about pages to look for things like brand mentioned. So whenever people are searching for you in ChatGPT and similar platforms, that’s one of the types of content pages they are looking for to see all the information — your experience, awards, reviews, your staff, and things like that.

[0:22:25] Dr. Barbara Hales: Yeah, another thing that most people really are not as diligent about is the reviews and rankings. You know, they may want to see that the reviews they get are good. But there are people out there that have, like, no reviews and one star, and again, you know, you have to say, Well, is this person still in practice? You know, did he retire? Did he sell the practice? Did he die? You know, like, why? Why is there nothing there? And for people that are, even if a person is opening their practice for the first time, you know, there’s got to be something. I mean, they have to, you know, be networking with people. And, you know, like to have nothing there. It really, you know, speaks very poorly for that practice.

[0:23:22] Sean Garner: Yeah, and that’s something that we actually automate for all of our clients. So we own one, I guess. Side note of context: I should have said that, with all of this stuff, this is not just a guy who owns a marketing agency coming to give some marketing tips. I also do the thing too. So my wife and I own a functional medicine practice. It’s a private practice. It’s been in business for about five years. We also own a medical spa that does IV therapy. So we’re doing everything from Myers cocktails, bags, to high-dose vitamin C treatments and some really advanced cancer stuff called RGCC. And so we’re doing some really cool medical stuff. That’s how I am. That’s like my secret here. That’s why we know how it works. And so this isn’t just theory. We are actually doing it. So one of the things we do is automate that whole process, because if you leave it up to the front desk to ask, or “Oh, tap this little thing and scan a review,” you’re not going to get that many. So, what we do —and how we have it set up for the Med Spa —is that, as soon as they check out and swipe their card for their final payment, they’ll be sent through a review request sequence. And then the same thing: how we do it for the medical practice side is because, typically, they become patients, and it’s a private practice, membership-based medicine. And so after that, the automation is set up so that after my wife flags, they’ve done their first lab review call with her. Then it sends them through the automation. And what we have found is we have to go ask them three times, two different places. So what the automation typically looks like is that, as soon as it fires, they’ll get an email and a text asking for a review. Then it waits three days, and it’s going to ask for another review via text and email, and then three days later it asks for another review via text and email. And what we found was to get the majority of them, actually. On the second and third questions, that’s where it’s essential to have this automated, because if you’re asking your front desk staff, they’re not going to take it seriously. They’re not going to do it. But by having those automations and stuff set up, it’s all hands-off. It’s done for you. And that’s how we’re able to rank number one in our cities, because we dominate everybody with reviews where we have several hundred, where the competition has, you know, a couple of dozen.

 

**Chapter 5: Marketing Automation, Myths, and Actionable Tips**  

[0:23:22] – [0:36:20]

“`

[0:25:21] Dr. Barbara Hales: When you see your manicurist with this funnel, and as soon as you leave, you’re getting the requests. And you get it until you do it. When you see your dog groomer, do it. When you visit, you know, the newspaper delivery guy doing it makes you say, well, if these, you know, like, ancillary services are doing it, like, why aren’t professionals doing it as well? You see, it’s like, Wake up and smell the coffee. You know, you’re like, part of society, and you have, I do get a lot of you know, it’s not just a question of opening the office, putting the shingle out, and expecting everybody to come.

[0:26:05] Sean Garner: Yeah, I do get pushback from the medical community sometimes, because they’ll instantly be like, well, I can’t do marketing because of HIPAA and stuff like that. So there are some nuances that I will say is so like, with I know that there’s certain HIPAA things like, Well, you can’t if somebody leaves a review, even if they say what they were being treated for, you can’t follow up and like, let’s say they say, Hey, I’m so glad I went to well spot functional medicine. Courtney’s done a fantastic job of helping me get my testosterone levels in check. Technically, you can’t respond to the review and say, Thanks for trusting us with your hormone therapy. You have to thank them for the view and acknowledge it. So sometimes, because people don’t know or understand those nuances, they will do nothing. And that’s why the people who are at least paying attention and figuring things out can get light years ahead of somebody who is maybe just operating in fear and choosing to do nothing.

[0:26:58] Dr. Barbara Hales: Yeah, it’s something that is going to have to be done. You know, when I would approach doctors and ask them whether they marketed their practice, and this was, you know, like several years ago, so at least some people are waking up now, they would say, I don’t have the time for that. I don’t have the budget for that. I don’t know how to do that. So I’m just going to do what I do best and take care of my patients. And then I say to them, Well, you know, marketing, technically, is telling people what you do, your services and products, and where you’re located, and it’s as simple as that. So, you know, would you not want to tell people what you do? Would you tell people what you do, but not where you’re located? I mean, when you say it that way, like everybody laughs, because it really is ludicrous. And you know, when they realize that if they want business, you know, they have to tell people which door to walk through,

[0:28:02] Sean Garner: Yeah, if it doesn’t show confidence in your treatment protocols, if you don’t want more people to find you. And I genuinely believe you just said, “Good marketing is doing a couple of things.” One: creating a message and distributing it. It also does a really good job of attracting the right people and repelling the wrong ones, because you are not for everyone. Your practice is not for everyone, but for me, ultimately, down to the core of what it is —and kind of why I believe everybody should do this — is that, if you are an entrepreneur, you are that; it’s a calling, and you are doing it for a purpose. And so there are certain people that only you are called to serve, and how unfortunate it is that you aren’t able to reach the people that you can genuinely help and impact and serve, just because you’ve either been ignorant and not known how to do this stuff, or sought out the help for it, or you just chosen not to take the action because there’s somebody that is at their house right now dealing with a problem that you know how to treat and solve. They can’t find you. If you genuinely want to make the most significant impact you’re called to make, you need to get your message out.

[0:29:11] Dr. Barbara Hales: Okay, so now I am an entrepreneur, and I want to get my message out. What are, but you know, so many stories abound or swirl around marketing, especially for someone who’s never done it before. So it could be overwhelming. So what are some marketing myths that one should be aware of?

[0:29:38] Sean Garner: Yeah, great question. So some pervasive marketing myths are that you’re going to build a website and start getting a ton of business and stuff from it. A website is a place for people to find you. But just like the Field of Dreams, cheesy dad joke, I always say, it’s just because you build it, it doesn’t mean they will come, so like, you can create this website. Right, and it might look awesome, it might have all the right words on it, but if you are not continually, exceptionally as competitive as things are getting online with all the noise that’s out there, if you are not breaking through that noise, people will not find you. It is not just enough to have these things in place. It is about truly leveraging those things. The other thing is that, well, I don’t really have to do any organic or SEO type of marketing just because I’m just going to use paid ads, it’s going to be okay like that might be a tactic that works right now, but if you really want to make sure that you’re maximizing your return on your investment and leveraging everything that you have, why would you like to pay for something that you could get for free by just optimizing your SEO and your website a little far. And I would say another thing is that marketing doesn’t work.

I tried to grow my whole practice through referrals. That’s awesome, and that’s great that you’ve been that, you know, blessed and fortunate with that, but marketing does work. Bad marketing doesn’t work. And if you’ve been growing your business through referrals. I have found only one person in my career who was getting their business from referrals because they had a referral system. Most people use that as almost a cop-out for ‘I’m lazy,’ and they don’t want to say they’re lazy because they’re just not a priority for them. But they’re like, Oh, I get all my business from referrals. Well, what’s your referral system? Oh, well, you know, sometimes patients will tell people, “Okay, so it’s your marketing system for referrals—it’s just hopes and wishes, like you don’t have a proper system.” Hopefully, you gotta have a patient who had a good experience, who tells other people about you, but you don’t have a proper referral system. So I think those are definitely specific to the marketing or medical field that I see when it comes to marketing myths. Those would probably be the top three that I would see.

[0:31:50] Dr. Barbara Hales: I would I would agree with you there. So if our listeners want to implement something right away, what are two tips you could give them they can start now?

[0:32:02] Sean Garner: Yeah, great question. So what? Ultimately, whenever we talk about marketing, we teach a framework called the marketing domination framework, which revolves around the sales funnel process. And so before you have that sales funnel in place, it’s tough to do proper marketing, because you’re going to be spending money doing things, and things and things are just going to be falling through the cracks. So the first thing I would recommend everybody do is open your website and let it load. Don’t scroll; let the page load, then look at the page and see if you can answer these three questions. And it’s even better if somebody who doesn’t know you or the practice can answer these three questions. What do you do? How do you make their life better? And what do they need to do to get started? Most businesses, because I’ve seen 1000s of websites and I’ve looked like that, they assume that people know what they do, because they’ll open up the website like, Well, yeah, I’m, you know, I’m, I’m a dentist, I’m an eye doctor, I’m a functional medicine provider, like in private practice, like, they think that it’s clear because there’s like, a picture of a doctor, of a header, like, no, no, be very clear and say what it is that you are. The second one is to say how you make their life better? Like, okay, that’s awesome. You are a —you know, I keep using this because that’s what we have: a functional medicine provider. How does, why do I care about that? Because I’ll tell you this, nobody wants your products or services.

Nobody wants a doctor, Barbara. They want health. Nobody wants a personal trainer. They want to be fit. Nobody wants an accountant. They want their taxes done right. And so a lot of times, people lead with their service. But that’s not what people really want. They want a specific problem solver. So we want to say that at the very top of the website. And then the other thing, this will instantly start getting you more patients booked if you do this. One thing: add a clear, direct call to action, and place it in the top right-hand corner of your website and in the center of the page. And a clear, direct call to action is not contact us. It is not to learn more. It is things like becoming a patient, booking your first consultation. Call now to schedule your appointment. It is an obvious, direct first step people must take to work with you or become a member of your practice. So, the first thing I would do is make sure the header section clearly answers those three questions and includes a clear call to action. And the second one I would do is go to my Google business profile. If you don’t have one, I would create it —it’s free —and start collecting Google reviews. And one thing we are actually going to give everybody who listens to this is that we talked about automation, where we asked three times in text and email. We have the whole automation and scripting done, which we’re giving to people on our website. If you go to Sean Garner.co it’s S, E, A N, G, A, R, N, E, r.co, scroll to the bottom of the page and click Google. Review scripts. It’s free. You can download that, literally copy that message, and start sending it out to previous patients, friends, families, and colleagues today to start getting more Google reviews. So I would clean up the header of my website with those three questions and start getting Google reviews.

[0:35:15] Dr. Barbara Hales: Well, that was great advice and some great tips, and I’m sure that people will be clamoring for the information that you have on your website. So, what is your website? It will be in the show notes anyway,

[0:35:31] Sean Garner: Yeah. So our website is Sean Garner.co it’s S E, A N, yeah, S E, A N, G, A, R, N, E, R, dot C, O, not.com. Sean Garner.com, some guy wanted to sell me for $15,000, and I don’t think I’m that cool. So it’s garner.co And on there, we’ve got tons of free stuff. We’ve got a marketing domination podcast where we’re teaching Marketing Tips for local businesses just like yours. We’ve got tons of free guides, like Google review scripts that you can use, marketing checklists, and everything. And if any of this stuff even sounded remotely interesting to you today, and you don’t want to have to figure it out, well, that’s what we do. We help medical practices — just like yours — love to hop on a free strategy call to see precisely what you’re doing. We’ll do a full marketing audit. It’s going to be with me, hopping on the call with you, saying precisely what’s working, what your competition is doing, and what you need to do to be number one.

[0:36:20] Dr. Barbara Hales: is that audit for free? Yes, ma’am. You guys are hearing that on the call. Okay, that’s great. And thank you so much for being a delightful guest today. This has been another episode of marketing tips for doctors with your host, Dr Barbara Hales. Till next time.