• Visit BDOW! as well as Davey and Krista’s website. Listen to their podcast and connect on LinkedIn.

Joe Sanok 00:00:00  You're someone with a vision for your practice, for your side hustle, and for your personal journey. But when it comes to establishing your path and how to get to where you want to be with your practice, things get a little messy. You're also someone who'd prefer to go in person instead of to groups and listening to everyone else's story. To me, it sounds like you could benefit from one on one consulting with our experienced practice of the practice consultants from 595 a month and up, you can work with a consultant that will give you more direction and practical, tried and tested tips matched to you and your goals. For more information, visit practice of the practice. Com forward slash apply. Again, that's practice of the practice. Com forward slash apply.

Joe Sanok 00:00:53  This is the.

Joe Sanok 00:00:54  Practice of the practice podcast with Joe Cenac session number 172. Welcome to the Practice and Practice Podcast. I'm Joe Sarna, your host, and we love helping you to build a thriving private practice you absolutely love. the way we're doing that this month is we are talking marketing.

Joe Sanok 00:01:16  So if you missed the rest of this month, we've had a ton of sessions. that kicked off in session 1162. We've talked digital marketing. We've talked the rule of 26, we've talked about online reviews. That's sometimes a ethical question in regards to online reviews. We've talked about workshops and course creation, social media marketing like a mega practice owner and location pages on your website. And today we're digging into websites even more, talking about optimizing a website. And so we're chatting with David Jones, who is the CEO of Baidu, which is formerly sumo, which helps business owners create pop ups and forms to build their email list. He's previously co-founded two agencies, including Davie and Krysta, a brand and website design agency that specializes in helping people create brands that book through custom brand and website design and consulting. After years of running agencies that have managed millions of ad spend, he's seen firsthand the power of effective lead generation. Divi. Welcome to the practice of the Practice podcast.

Davey Jones 00:02:18  Yeah, thanks for having me here.

Davey Jones 00:02:19  Really excited to talk about website optimization and contribute to this conversation about marketing.

Joe Sanok 00:02:24  Yeah, yeah, I love doing these series around a particular theme because it then becomes this big kind of standalone, almost like Masterclass. So yeah, we've got 15, 16 hours of content just on marketing in the last month.

Davey Jones 00:02:38  Amazing. Yeah.

Joe Sanok 00:02:40  So how'd you get into marketing?

Davey Jones 00:02:41  Yeah, that's a great question. you know, I have an undergraduate degree in, theology. And, you know, I was a high school teacher, you know, right out of school. So you could you could say that, like, entrepreneurship and marketing wasn't exactly on my radar. when I graduated, my wife and I got married right out of school. and she started a wedding photography business. And at the time, I kind of thought, you know, that's fine. You know, that's cute. you know that she had this business that she was doing on the side. she went to school for website design. and very quickly, she started, making enough money to replace not only, you know, her salary as a website designer for this, nonprofit that she was working for, but then also, enough money to replace my teaching salary.

Davey Jones 00:03:29  And so all of a sudden, I went from, like, oh, that's a fun, side hustle to. Okay. Wow. This is like, a legitimate business that has a lot of potential. So, eventually it got to a size where, she needed help. And so we discussed me stepping away from teaching and helping her with that business, helping her grow that business. And, eventually, that's what I did. and basically, you know, we had this question of like, okay, we have pretty consistent work, but how do we continue to scale this business? And that's where I really got interested in things like, advertising and SEO and blog content, you know, and eventually podcasting. but that was really my entry into, marketing. And that's always the side of the business that I really loved. like I said, my wife's background is website design, and currently, one of the businesses that we run together is a brand and website design agency. So that's what we, you know, that's what we do for people.

Davey Jones 00:04:26  you know, in addition to my role as the CEO of Beddau. but my, my interest has always been in, you know, how do you scale a business, how do you find more work? So that's how I got into it. there's been a couple different businesses along the way. but most of what we do is brand and website design.

Joe Sanok 00:04:44  So how do you get new business? I love that, so therapists are listening there. They don't know much about marketing. They oftentimes went through grad school. And, you know, we went into this to help people. And then now we're like, oh my gosh, I need to learn a lot more about websites, about getting new clients. what are some of the ways that people can find new clients easier?

Davey Jones 00:05:05  Yeah, that's a great question. I think a lot of people overcomplicate what it means to find more clients, I think. you know, naturally, when we get into a business, some of our first clients come pretty, pretty easily, because we just find those clients in terms of, like, friends and family.

Davey Jones 00:05:21  Right? We have conversations with people. They're like, oh, that's interesting. Like, can you help me? Right. And that's where we find our first few clients. but from there, sometimes we think like, oh, we have to become a proper business that does things like, you know, scale. And we get away from thinking about marketing as just having conversations with people. and we dive too much into, you know, tactics, you know, oh, if I just make these tweaks on my website, then all of a sudden all these people are going to inquire, and become clients. But I think, like, you know, when it comes to lead generation, there are only two ways to generate leads. You can build relationships, which means having more one on one conversations with people. I think that this is, a, tactic that's vastly underrated in a world that's all about scale, and engagement and things like social media. But, I imagine for therapists that there's, power partners out there, right? There's people that they can build relationships, relationships with that are going to send a lot of leads their way.

Davey Jones 00:06:23  So, for instance, I would assume that, building relationships with maybe like, primary care physicians, you know, I imagine that when somebody's, looking for a therapist, maybe one of the first sources that they go to is their doctor and just say, hey, you know, I'm feeling XYZ. Do you have any recommendations for me? You know. but I imagine that there's, places like that that they can go, to build relationships with people who can refer them work, but having one on one conversations. The other way that they can do it is by creating content. So again, just building relationships or creating content. And I think content is just having conversation at scale, right. Like the best content when you think about it, is just being able to enter into conversations that people are already having. So I think those are two of the best or really the only two avenues of finding new leads.

Joe Sanok 00:07:16  Now talk a little bit about paid advertising. I know that we're talking about optimizing your website.

Joe Sanok 00:07:21  but you know a lot of people are talking about pay per click and things like that. How does that fit into some of the equation?

Davey Jones 00:07:26  Yeah, absolutely. I think something like pay per click, and Facebook ads, things like that. or ads across just media in general can be really effective, especially for local businesses. you know, I think pay per click in particular, you know, you're, you're capturing people, while they're searching for a solution, like, like yours. So, I think especially for a local business, looking to maybe, spend some advertising dollars. That's a good place. or if they have money for advertising, that's a good place to start. is doing something like, pay per click.

Joe Sanok 00:08:01  Now, you know, I know a lot of people will, you know, pay for pay per click or they'll be doing all this networking and and then people get to their website like I was just looking at, at a website for a new consulting client and it was just like, oh my gosh, like, you definitely need a website update before we start sending more people to your website.

Joe Sanok 00:08:19  what are some of the things in 2025 that are essential for websites, and what are some of the things that you would say are like, bonus icing on the cake kind of stuff?

Davey Jones 00:08:29  Yeah, I think at the end of the day, websites, you know, website design is another thing that can be very much overcomplicated. you know, when it comes to, you know, if we're talking about advertising and we're sending people to specifically to a landing page, there are a couple of things that we're looking for on that landing page. You know, if we're doing something like pay per click, one, we want a very clear offer, you know, or some sort of, transformation statement, in the hero spot of, the web page. So the hero spot is that page that's, you know, above the fold, basically that area that you can see without doing any scrolling on the page. So you want to see some sort of value proposition there? and it should get at the transformation that you're, you know, promising that, that you can offer.

Davey Jones 00:09:13  it should also be congruent with whatever search terms that you're targeting, you know? So, you shouldn't. And this is true of ads in general. Like, you don't want somebody to click on an ad that says one thing or feels one way, and then you get to the landing page and then it feels and sounds a lot differently. So you want congruency between your ad and the landing page that you land on. From there, you want to focus on benefits and outcomes rather than deliverables. Right. so you want to really focus on the transformation that you are offering somebody a really helpful activity for. People can be sitting down and outlining what somebody's old world is versus the new world that you can offer them. So what they're experiencing and feeling and struggling with today and after meeting with you, what that transformation could look like, what their new world could look like, you really want to focus on those things? I think a lot of times, service providers of all types do this. They focus more on features or deliverables, you know, like the fact that you offer a 60 minute session or, you know, flexible scheduling or, you know, something like that.

Davey Jones 00:10:22  All of those, all of those details are important, but they're secondary. So you want to first focus on that transformation, and then you want to focus on, things like the deliverables. Any time you can incorporate social proof, that's great. You know, it sounds like you just, had an episode on, reviews. I'm sure that there are probably some rules, especially when it comes to like, therapy practices, including reviews on their website. but social proof is like one of the most, if not the most powerful purchasing decision. So making sure that you incorporate social proof any time you make a claim, right. If you can back it by social proof, that's the most powerful way to present it, and then simply just making it easy to reach out. But you can take those elements and you can apply it really to any page on your website. Really, I think that when you look at a website, there are certain elements that I'm looking for or certain elements that are highlighted on each page of a website.

Davey Jones 00:11:22  So, we just talked about, you know, 4 or 5 elements. Again, they would be present on every page. But the home page, for instance, you know, I see the focus of the home page being clarity. When somebody lands on your home page, you want to be able to establish what is it you do, who you do it for and if relevant, where, where you're located, you know, right there above the fold, so that when somebody lands on your home page and they have to make that split second decision as to whether they're going to stick around and keep scrolling or not, they know whether you're for them or not. Whereas like the about page, I think the focus or theme of the about page is empathy, you know, establishing yourself as the guide. And I think that's key. Establishing yourself as the guide and remembering it's not about you, but it's about how you can help somebody reach their goals. you know, going on to the services page, the theme of that being more transformation, again, really tapping into, you know, through your services, how can you bring somebody from this old world into this new world?

Joe Sanok 00:12:22  Yeah, I love that exercise of what did it look like before and what will it look like in the future? One thing we often say is the pain to transformation formula.

Joe Sanok 00:12:31  So what's the pain? My kid keeps getting kicked out of school. And the transformation. You have a good plan for behavior. So you know, at mental wellness Counseling, we help kids who keep getting kicked out of school to have a good plan for their education, to cause less stress for the parents and child, or something like that. and to just have like that one line pain for pain to transformation formula. when you think about optimizing a website, what are a couple of things that a lot of therapists probably are doing wrong on their website?

Davey Jones 00:13:02  Yeah, I think probably not focusing on on that specific transformation or a specific transformation that they offer. I think probably a lot of this comes back to not having a clear idea of your ideal customer. Right? trying to speak to everyone and then thus not speaking to anyone. I think that's a struggle that a lot of service providers, face. maybe because they offer a lot of different kinds of services. So, especially when you offer a lot of different kinds of services, I think it's important to have, specific pages, for each of those services, instead of a single services page that tries to cover them all.

Davey Jones 00:13:43  By having specific pages, you're going to be able to speak, specifically to, like different pain points, and the transformation that you can offer, and it will help you speak to a specific, customer as well. I think a lot of what we see is, again, people using really generic language, you know, especially on their home page. And if people are given, if people are given the choice between, you know, let's say, you know, going back to your example, maybe you have, kids who are struggling or whatnot. if a parent is looking for a solution for their kids, or for them to, to help them with their kids, they're going to go with the specialist over the generalist, you know, nine out of ten, ten times. So the more specific you can get in speaking to your ideal customer, the more powerful that page is going to be.

Joe Sanok 00:14:33  Yeah. I think sometimes people fear that. Oh, well, if I say I only help angry kids, no one's going to assume that that I also work with anxious kids.

Joe Sanok 00:14:43  what do you say to that when people, you know, kind of question that whole niching down?

Davey Jones 00:14:48  Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, first, you know, if you help, like, let's say again, using that as an example, angry and anxious kids, like, if you can establish a link between those things, you could, you know, potentially end up speaking to, you know, the parents of kids who struggle with, both. Right. So, but it's a matter of, you know, maybe, maybe it presents as anger to most, most parents. And you can suggest through your sales copy that it's, you know, also it's actually, you know, stemming from anxiety or something like that. Now, of course, I don't know, because I'm not a therapist. but at the end of the day, you know, you want to make sure if you think about, like, how many, parents have kids who struggle with anger. That's a lot of people.

Davey Jones 00:15:36  And so if you can really speak to that pain point, and offer up a solution for, you know, a potential solution for, parents of those kids, you know, there is even if it might just be a, subset of, you know, kids who struggle with or have mental health struggles. it's still a huge market. So, again, what happens if you try to speak to both of those, though, is that you end up speaking to neither of them, and it presents an opportunity for somebody else's practice to come in and really speak to that pain point. And if they're given the opportunity to choose between, you know, that competing practice and your practice and their practice specializes, they're going to go with the practice that specializes.

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Davey Jones 00:17:41  Yeah, I think, doing things like having a reviews page on your website, we'd recommend, we always recommend, including social proof throughout your website. So any time you make a, make a claim, ideally you have social proof that's not too far behind.

Davey Jones 00:17:58  social proof doesn't only come in the way of, testimonials. Although, you know, testimonials are certainly a powerful form of social proof, but it could come in the way of, like, places that you've been featured. you know, maybe you've contributed, you know, academic articles in different places or maybe you've received some sort of award. You know, those are the sorts of things that you would want to include throughout, throughout your website, having a clear call to action. And, you know, if you think about your you want to you want to make sure that you understand your customer journey. So, I think a lot of times, we create websites and think like, oh, we just want to make it easy to get to anywhere. But really, at the end of the day, you want to guide your visitor, through your website in a way that makes sense. And so, in your hero spot, for instance, you have you should have a clear call to action that either gets them to the conversion that you're hoping for or one step closer to it, but you don't want to have just links that go to everywhere, because that can be really overwhelming, for the user.

Joe Sanok 00:19:05  so really pointing people to that contact us page or schedule an intake page or getting closer to that.

Davey Jones 00:19:11  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of the things that, you know, for instance, we do at Beddau, we provide advanced form and pop up tools. And so, you know, when you understand the customer journey and you use one of these tools, you're able to, meet visitors where they're at. So, for instance, you could create some sort of pop up message, whether it be, you know, a traditional pop up or a smart bar on the website or whatever that targets just new visitors to your website, and maybe it promotes some sort of, you know, new visitor or welcome offer. but yeah, at the end of the day, you want to make sure that you're pointing people to the steps that you want them to take. Sometimes, it doesn't make sense to send them straight to the contact Us page, right? maybe you are a practice that has a certain specialization, and you want to walk people through what your process looks like.

Davey Jones 00:20:01  Maybe on in the hero spot of the homepage, it's, you know, see, or learn our process for, you know, solving anxiety in three easy steps. and it brings them to a services page that walks them through that experience of working with you and the transformation that you offer and examples of transformations that you've offered other people. And then from that services page, it might make sense to have a contact form at the bottom so that people can reach out or, or in addition to that, rather having buttons along the way that bring people to the contact page where they can reach out.

Joe Sanok 00:20:39  Now, what are some more advanced techniques like, things that you're seeing people do with their websites that maybe isn't the standard, but they're just like cool features that could really help people take it to the next level.

Davey Jones 00:20:52  Yeah for sure. So I just alluded to one of them, you know, I think that, as we move into 2025 and beyond, websites, I feel like used to be basically digital business cards.

Davey Jones 00:21:05  and now I think that they're becoming more and more of an experience. that's why, you know, we build, website experience tools over at Bidwell. especially in the way of pop ups that have advanced targeting features. So you can target visitors based on, really? Whatever. You know, so if they're a new visitor to your website, you could, target them with a specific, message or offer, if they visited a certain amount of pages or if they visited specific pages, again, going back to a service provider who offers multiple services. This way you can, target different pages, with different pop up messages. you know, I think in a previous episode, you had somebody else talking about, website optimization and you talked about lead magnets and the value of generating leads. getting somebody to opt in to, give you their email is a great intermediate step between, maybe booking them as a client. Maybe they're not quite ready to reach out. But you have, you know, sort of a three step, program that people could follow on their own to maybe reduce anxiety throughout the day.

Davey Jones 00:22:18  And you offer that as some sort of e-book or, you know, audio meditation or whatever it is that people can opt into on your website. You could offer that in the way of a pop up, and that could go on a page that's maybe targeting, or speaking specifically to anxiety, whereas, you might have other services pages on your website, that speak to, you know, other issues that people are facing.

Joe Sanok 00:22:44  Beyond pop ups. what else are you seeing on websites that improve that user experience?

Davey Jones 00:22:49  For sure. things like quizzes, that help people get, you know, especially if there's a number of different potential solutions. I think something like an online quiz. Again, it adds that experience factor and it feels personalized toward people. again, I think especially with the rise of AI, you have, you know, people, you have more opportunities to offer a personalized experience for the people who land on your website. something like an online quiz is easy to implement on a website. and then also, People feel like they're getting results that are tailored to their answers.

Davey Jones 00:23:25  So those are some some of the things that we see people doing on their website to add a little bit more of a personal touch.

Joe Sanok 00:23:33  Other platforms that you like that do quizzes. really.

Davey Jones 00:23:37  Well yeah. Interact is probably my favorite platform. that does quizzes. and there's a number of others in addition to interact. Interact would be the first one I check out. another one is score app. that's another platform. that's a good quiz platform.

Joe Sanok 00:23:53  Awesome. Well, the last question I always ask is if every private practitioner in the world were listening right now, what would you want them to know?

Davey Jones 00:24:02  Yeah, absolutely. I would say marketing is about conversations. And my guess is that many therapists, became therapists because they like having conversations with people. So I think if marketing feels tough for you, there's a simple mindset, mindset shift that you can make. and you know what? If I made this more like a conversation. Like, what if I went a little bit more back to the basics and try to think about all the ways that I could have more conversations with people? And again, I think that comes down to having more one on one conversations, looking for people in your network that could be good referrers of leads for you, and going out and building relationships with them, and then looking at the kinds of content that you can create as well.

Davey Jones 00:24:42  And I think, you know, the best content is just the kind of content that you would that would come out of having a conversation with a friend who is maybe looking for an answer to a problem, and creating that content and blogging about it or creating a podcast, you know, and I think those are just things like blog content and podcasts. It's just an opportunity to over and over and over again, show that you really can offer people, a transformation.

Joe Sanok 00:25:12  So awesome. Well, if people want to connect with you, if they want to follow your work, where should we send them?

Davey Jones 00:25:17  Yeah, you can find me in two places. You can find me over at Broadcom dotcom. Over there we offer advanced forms and pop ups. and again, these, these pop ups, you can target the right visitor, with the right message at the right time. so check us out over there. also, free to create an account. so if you're just getting started, definitely a good place to start.

Davey Jones 00:25:44  you can also find me over at Davey and krista.com. that is where my wife and I, we run a brand new website design agency. and we specialize in helping sort of space businesses.

Joe Sanok 00:25:54  So. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being on the practice of the practice podcast.

Davey Jones 00:25:58  Yeah. Thank you so much, Joe.

Joe Sanok 00:26:07  You know, I mean, so many of those things to go back to, of niching down, of knowing your audience, of making that user experience, the solid. Yeah. You use somebody to help you make a better website. It's such low hanging fruit. and to look at even your analytics, you know, recently I was looking at our Google Analytics. So just look at how much of our traffic comes from what sources. And so to look at like 60% is just organic search. probably about 20% is direct links from other websites. So 80% right there. and then, you know, our social media was only driving 3% to our website. and so, you know, that begs the question of why are we putting time and energy as much as we are into social media? And so we want to evaluate these things.

Joe Sanok 00:26:54  We want to look at what's working, what maybe worked in the past isn't working. What can we try? Where can we throw spaghetti at the wall to see if there might be some changes? and you know, if you're like me, you like to save time. and one of the best ways to save time is to use gusto for your payroll solutions. gusto to me, is is the best. It's who we use, here at practice. The practice for time tracking. Health insurance 401 is onboarding commuter benefits. We don't have that because I commute from, you know, my my kitchen to my office in my house. But if you have people that are doing all sorts of different things, it helps you focus on the things you need to within your business instead of doing all those other things. You know, accountants are charging so much money to run payroll and you could do it so much cheaper and so much better through gusto. Head on over to gusto.com/joe again. That's gusto.com/joe and get started today.

Joe Sanok 00:27:45  Thank you so much for letting me into your ears and into your brain. Have a great day. I'll talk to you soon. Special thanks to the band Silences Sexy for that intro music. And this podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is given with the understanding that neither the host, the producers, the publishers or guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical or other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.