[JOE SANOK] This is the Practice of the Practice Podcast with Joe Sanok, session 800. I’m Joe Sanok, your host, and welcome to the Practice of the Practice Podcast. I am so glad that you are here today, episode 800. For today’s episode it’s going to be an Ask Joe about paid advertising because I don’t want you to just have a celebration episode for episode 800. We’re hitting these like every, like episode 700 was just a little bit ago because we’re doing four of these a week. So I am going to answer a question today, but I just want to pause and say 800 episodes. Thank you so much for listening for 800 episodes. I mean, I don’t know if you have personally, but someone has, even if the people listen to the beginning maybe aren’t listening anymore because their practices are amazing. But we have had so many things over the years. We went through a time where I would just record as I was driving over to my private practice on my phone. Not the safest thing, but would just record episodes of what I was thinking. I think we called it smidgens with Joe, snippets with Joe, something like that. I used to have some music in the middle of the episodes with some like copyright-free music like I was some sort of DJ. We’ve this year been testing out four episodes a week and doing some Ask Joe’s to just create more content to see if that helps. We’re routinely hitting 80,000 plus episodes a month, I’m sorry, 80,000 plus listens per month. So really amazing. Our membership communities are continuing to grow. People are excited from Level Up Week that happened in September of 2022. So we’re trying new things and the market continually changes. A potential worry around a recession and worry around inflation has people buying differently this year than maybe a year ago. So we have to like think through how do we make practice the practice sustained, keep offering you free and amazing content while also realizing we have a staff to pay. We have 15 or 20 people now that are on the payroll with Practice of the Practice. That’s a huge responsibility for a leader, for our chief operations officer, Sam R, for all of us that are working really hard within Practice of the Practice to help you grow your private practices. I just want to thank you the listener for taking time out of your day to just listen and learn and enact what we talk about. Well, on today’s Ask Joe I have a question here that I’m going to pull up. If you want to ask these questions, all you have to do is head on over to practiceofthepractice.com/askjoe. There’s just a form there that you can submit your question. If you want your name to be included you can. We have Sarah Epstein who asks this question. Sarah lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Sarah asked a bunch of questions. So over the coming weeks we’re going to pepper in some of Sarah’s questions and some of the other ones. The first one is around paid advertising. Like how do you use it? Should you use it? How do you calculate the return on an investment for paid advertising? Are there companies that can help you do this? Do Facebook Ads work? So many great questions in there around paid advertising. Paid advertising first, when should you do paid advertising? I would say that you want to try, especially when you’re first getting going to exhaust most or some of your free advertising, so networking, SEO, things like that, because you just want to do that right from the beginning. If you don’t do that right from the beginning then you’re going to be doing cleanup later. Also I would say paid advertising is good when you want to grow faster. Maybe you’re on insurance panels and they’re not kicking you as many referrals. Maybe you’re not. Maybe you’re private pay and you want to grow faster, you want to get in front of other people. When you look at how many ads actually are getting in front of people there’s not a ton of people in any community that are typically just Googling therapists, but do you want to be at the top of that search through a paid advertisement through Google or through Facebook? Let’s talk about some of the different, we’re going to talk about the different types of paid advertising in this. We’re going to talk about AB testing, return on investment, when to outsource and when you shouldn’t and shouldn’t be doing some of that paid advertising. But first, before we even dive into what types of paid advertising there are, I want you to understand one concept, and that’s A-B testing, A-B testing. A-B testing is where you run two advertising campaigns against each other to see which one wins, A versus B. For example, when I had my private practice, I bought a January ad in two local magazines, one was Grand Traverse Women’s Magazine, and one was the Traverse City Business News, so two different ads. They were similar in content. There was a couple things that changed because Traverse City Business News has a different audience than the Grand Traverse Women’s. But you really want both ads to be relatively similar so there’s not too many variations between them. You have the biggest variation to be two different places that you’re running these ads. Typically, you may have it one that’s in a Facebook Ad and then one that’s a print ad and that’s obviously going to be very different. But you want to have them be somewhat similar. I had these ads about New Year’s goals, meeting goals, all sorts of different things and reached out to each company and said I have $500 to spend. I see that that usually gets a quarter page ad I’m doing an A-B test to see whether you or this other magazine does better and which everyone does better I’m going to plan on doing more ads in the future with. They each gave different bonuses. One gave me a half-page ad, one gave me also an email to their list and a sponsorship for their women’s luncheon. Oftentimes when they know that they’re competing against another ad place, especially small local ads, they’ll give you more. They’ll say, oh, we can throw in at the bottom of our email, we’ll put a link there or something. So ran the ad and one of the ads got zero people to come to my counseling practice and the other one got one. You might say, okay, on the advertising side, just spend a thousand dollars to get one client. That’s not very good. That goes into the ROI stuff we’re going to talk about but I know the lifetime value of my clients. At the time I was charging $150 per session. We typically would do at least a minimum of 10 sessions so that means the lifetime value of that client is $1,500. So I spent a thousand dollars to then make $1,500. Sure that wasn’t just like I had to show up for those sessions, but that was a new client. It was building momentum in my practice when I needed new clients. So thinking through some of that ROI, we’ll get into how you do that a little more advanced, but the idea of A-B testing is, so Traverse City Business News won that. That then stays the A and then I try another B. Maybe I want to do $200. I reach out to them and I say, I’m going to do $200 with you and I’m going to do $200 in Facebook Ads and I’m going to see over the same period of time. That magazine was out for three weeks or so, during that three weeks, maybe I set a budget of $200 on Facebook. Then in that I say, oh, that really worked, or no, that didn’t work. So A-B testing is a concept that you want to have, be part of what you do if you’re going to do paid advertising. [RECEPTIONIST] When I had my group of practice, I was so sick of running to the lobby to see if my next appointment had arrived, or even more awkwardly to have a bunch of therapists run to the lobby when we heard the door open. Maybe you want a more discreet, stress-free way for your clients to check in. Take a deep breath. The Receptionist for iPad empowers your practice to create a zen-like check-in experience. This episode is sponsored by the Receptionist for iPad. It’s the highest rated digital check-in software for therapy offices and behavioral health clinics used by thousands of practitioners across the country, including many who are just getting started. The Receptionist for iPad is super simple. It’s an inexpensive way to allow your clients to discreetly check in, to notify providers of a patient’s arrival and to ensure your front lobby is stress-free. The software sends an immediate notification to the therapist when a client checks in and can even ask if a patient information has changed since their last visit. Start a 14-day free trial of the receptionist for iPad by going to the thereceptionist.com/practice. Again, that’s thereceptionist.com/practice. When you do, you’ll also get your first month free when you sign up. [JOE SANOK] All right, next, you want to understand return on investment. So return on investment means you invest a certain amount, you want to hopefully get more back than what you invested, otherwise, you should’ve just kept that money. Most marketing companies will say that you should be shooting for a one to five ratio, meaning for every hundred dollars you put into something, you get $500 in business. Other places, so e-courses for example, a typical affiliate commission for an e-course is 50% meaning that if we’re selling Podcast Launch School for $500, that if someone sends people to purchase Podcast Launch School, they typically would expect to get $250 for that referral, for that $500 product because that’s new business that I didn’t have to work for. It’s just extra money for me for my course. There’s different industry standards in regards to ROI, but you want to first understand the lifetime value of a client. The average client, when you look at your numbers, do they come five times? Do they come 20 times? Do they come 40 times? If you were to look at in Therapy Notes, the average number of sessions that someone comes, what would that be? Then multiply that times what you charge per hour. We also want to look at for every 10 people that come, how many make referrals? So then you can add that in as part of the lifetime value. For most clients if you have a typical going rate and they come 10 to 20 times, you’re looking at least a $2,000 lifetime value meaning if you spend less than $2,000 to acquire one new client, the ROI is good. So if you spend a $100 in Facebook ads and you land three new clients, that’s a tremendous ROI. That’s a $100 to get, say, six grand in new business. Now when we’re talking these numbers, I’m not diminishing the human value, the human impact, any of that. We’re just talking to the numbers today in regards to advertising and ROI. Then knowing the ROI, the return on investment, you also want to include some of that in staff time. So maybe staff is designing some of the images, designing other things that’s part of the costs. All right, next we want to look at our Facebook ads or pay-per-click ads worth it. So paper per click, paper click, paper clack, paper clack sounds like a children’s book, pay-per-click ads is where you’re paying per time that someone clicks on it. Facebook and Google do this differently. In Facebook you can pay per impression, meaning that it’s just in front of someone so if you’re doing some sort of awareness campaign where you just want to get in front of people you don’t care if they click, it’s just, I want to be seen on somebody’s feed, then you’d pay per impression. If you want to pay per click, then maybe it’s shown, but you only pay when people click on the actual ad. They’re usually higher because someone has to take an action. Then you’re thinking, okay how many clicks do I want, want to my website? Then you want to know what your click through rate is. If someone clicks on it, how many people? Every 10 people that click how many schedule an intake appointment. You want to be able to know those numbers to start to do the math to say, okay, if I run an ad where there’s 50 people that click through and then of those 50 people, I get five intake phone calls, and of those five intake phone calls, one converts into a long-term client, that means if I want two long-term clients, I need to have at least a hundred people clicking on ads to be able to do that. Then you can start to run those numbers to say, okay, what’s normal for my ads for my clickthrough rate, for my booking rate, for my long-term counseling rate, to be able to understand those things. That’s where testing with small amounts of money can be really helpful. Maybe for one day you say, I’m going to put in 50 bucks and I’m going to see if I get any new phone calls and I need to ask people, how’d you hear about me? Or have that on the form or be able to track that in some way. All right. Are there companies that can help with this? Yes, there are but I want to tell you a horror story. So a good friend of mine, she makes tons of money off of e-courses. She recommended her Facebook Ad specialist to me. He was really expensive. He worked really well with her and he through his techniques got our Practice of the Practice Facebook Ads account permanently banned from Facebook. We’ve tried to fight it, we’ve tried to say we are not sleazy but he had put all sorts of things around Podcast Launch School that went against the Facebook policies. There were warnings that I didn’t know that we had been given by Facebook. They were disregarded by this individual and then I have fought it tooth and nail. I’ve showed that we fired the guy as soon as we knew. If you have anyone in Facebook that can help us get that reinstated, please do. But we have to figure out workarounds, do it through my personal account, do it through Google, through LinkedIn, through other places if we’re going to do ad campaigns, which is terribly frustrating. So I say that because there’s a lot of people that say, oh yes, we can do this but the reality is when you look at their skillset around helping therapists or you look at their ethics because they may be embedding things on your website, that directly goes against confidentiality. If someone comes to a counseling website and then they start getting popups promoting counseling, that feels pretty icky. Whereas in other industries, if I look at a certain pair of shoes and I’m like, have them in my cart, and then I forget about them, and two days later I see that up in an ad, it’s like, oh, that’s right. I got to go back to my Zappos account and check that out. I loved those shoes. I want to get those shoes. It’s helpful for me. It can feel that way in counseling. Like, oh, that’s right, I wanted to do counseling. But it can also feel really creepy and unethical. So that’s where you really, really, really want to make sure you’re understanding the confidentiality side, the tracking side, the data side. Have a strong business associates’ agreement with that company to make sure that if it comes back that they did something unethical that you very clearly can go back and not learn the lesson that I learned unfortunately through my negative experience with that Facebook Ads specialist. So there are a lot of people that will tell you that they can do it. The proof totally is in the pudding. Like, are they getting you clients? Are they showing you with a dashboard each month that it’s working in a particular way? The last thing is, when should and shouldn’t you do ads? I mentioned a little bit of this at the top of the show. When you want to grow quicker, that’s a good time to do ads. I would say that continuing an ad campaign, even when you’re busy is important. You want to keep that trajectory going. So even if you’re just spending 50 or 60 bucks a month on ads, to keep a handful of people coming in so that as you lose clients, you’re not starting from scratch, that you’re able to continue to grow and expand and go into different areas. You want to make sure that you know the clear ROI for your community. You want to know what ads are working, which ones aren’t working, you want to learn a little bit around Google ads and at some point, yes, you may want to outsource this. I do think that this is an area that is probably smart to at least have a working knowledge so you don’t get taken advantage of. There are so many tech companies out there that want to take things off your hand, but if you don’t have just a working vocabulary around some of it, you will get taken advantage of. That’s unfortunate but it’s true in my experience of working with tons of different consulting clients. I had one consulting client that in the first meeting we were able to save them $2,500 because they had been upsold on junk. There were no clear outcomes. They were doing social media management and all this marketing, but there were no outcomes. Also when we actually dug into what was going on, like she just needed to cancel what she had with this company. We were able to connect them with a different company for a couple hundred bucks a month. So that’s where, whether it’s a consultant that can be your advocate like us or someone else as you’re going into this, can be really helpful. Those are some advice, that’s some advice, some tips on specifically paid advertising for this Ask Joe. Again, if you want to ask me a question, head over to practiceofthepractice.com/askjoe. If you’re interested in any of that consulting practiceofthepractice.com/apply is the place to go for that. We could not do this show without our amazing sponsors. Today our sponsor is the Receptionist. This is the software I wish I had in my lobby when I had my group practice. It is the highest rated digital check-in software for therapy offices and behavioral health clinics. The software sends immediate notifications to the therapist when a client checks in, and it can even ask the patient if anything’s changed since the last visit. Just start your 14-day trial over at the Receptionist for iPad. Just go to the receptionist.com/practice and when you do, you’ll also get your first free month when you sign up. Thanks so much for letting me into your ears and into your brain. Have an amazing day. I’ll talk to you soon. Special thanks to the band Silence is Sexy for your intro music. This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. This is given with the understanding that neither the host, the producers, the publishers, or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.