• Connect with Michael Buzinski on Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
• Visit the Buzzworthy website and connect with them and LinkedIn.

Joe Sanok 00:00:01  I'm so excited to introduce you to the best website designers out there. We have a brand new partnership with session sites. It is where good therapy meets brilliant design, and they get your website switched over or built in less than two weeks. They fine tune your messaging, use science backed user experience methodology, and work exclusively with mental health professionals. In fact, new clients right now are going to get three free therapy marketing strategy calls with their creative director of session sites. If you book today, you're not going to want to miss this. Head on over to session sites. Com forward slash Joe. Again that's session sites.com/joe get the website of your dreams today. Session sites. Com forward slash Joe. This is the practice of the practice podcast with Joe Santos. Session number 1165. I'm Joe Santa, your host, and welcome to the practice of the Practice podcast. I am so excited to be hanging out with you today. All month is marketing month. We are going to be talking to all sorts of marketing experts around different angles and thoughts, and digging into very specific things and also looking at some very big picture things.

Joe Sanok 00:01:28  And you know, this comes from we did our 2024 State of Private Practice survey with all of you all. And the number one pain that people noted was marketing. So we're dedicating a whole month around marketing. And, you know, I get that when I had my counseling practice before I sold it in 2019, marketing was just constant spaghetti at the wall. You know, I'd hear something on a podcast, I should do this to my website. I change my website and try that for a bit. I'd hear about boosting posts for pay per click marketing. I try that for a bit, you know? Once in a while, I'd hire the, you know, local newspaper or local magazines to run some ads and test that out. There wasn't a cohesive marketing strategy. And so our hope is during this series is that you bring together a bunch of ideas. Maybe you resonate with some of the folks that we're talking with here, and we dig in and we talk about marketing. And hopefully by the end of this, we've got a lot of really awesome resources for you.

Joe Sanok 00:02:26  And that's where Michael Basinski, who is a decorated US Air Force veteran, serial entrepreneur, international speaker and bestselling author, comes in. He is our guest today. He goes by buzz, dubbed a visionary marketer by the American Marketing Association. Buzz has simplified digital marketing success with the rule of 26 to help entrepreneurs avoid the time drain and frustration of managing profitable digital marketing campaigns. Buzz, welcome to the practice of the Practice podcast.

Michael Buzinski 00:02:57  Thanks for having me, Joe.

Joe Sanok 00:02:59  Yeah, I'm really excited about this. today. I want to hear so decorated vet and, entrepreneur. Like, were you already an entrepreneur when you went into the service, or did that kind of come out of that?

Michael Buzinski 00:03:15  no. I started my entrepreneurial career very young. I think my first entrepreneurial venture was picking up walnuts. my grandfather would pay me $1.25 per gunny sack, which were about as big as me back then. And, that was like the first taste of, like, how to make your own money type of thing.

Michael Buzinski 00:03:35  But now I was in working bands for 15 years, so. Oh, nice. Me too, I started. Yeah. All the marketing was always, like, built into whatever I was doing. Marketing and sales. Very young. Flipping burgers was not my thing. After my first time doing that, I was like, nah, this is not what I'm doing with my life. So I feel like when.

Joe Sanok 00:03:53  You're in a band that like, there is just something I didn't even realize how much marketing I was learning. Like we would make more off of our merch than we ever made off of any of the actual shows we played shows.

Michael Buzinski 00:04:05  Pay for like, yeah, when you're working musician shows, pay for the next album. And if you want to make any money, yeah, you gotta have the merch. Yeah.

Joe Sanok 00:04:13  Well, cool. So you were an entrepreneur? kind of at a young age. I remember there was a kid that I had a walnut tree, and he and his dad approached to see if they could get him.

Joe Sanok 00:04:22  and for me, I didn't even pay the kid because I just was like, I want him out of my yard. And he was shucking him and selling him to all these high end restaurants locally. So it was like local hand shucked walnuts. And, he was doing all the work and, you know, making a killing with these local restaurants, which was cool.

Michael Buzinski 00:04:37  Especially if you shucking them for them because, oh my gosh, those are hard.

Joe Sanok 00:04:42  They were hard. And I was just like, get these out of my yard. Well, so you have this book, The Rule of 26 and, you know, some marketing tips, website tips that we'll get into. But I want to just start with, you know, you're working with and training so many people around marketing and going to conferences and things like that. what are some myths that therapists probably have around marketing that we just got to start with deconstructing before we get into what to actually do.

Michael Buzinski 00:05:08  Sure. Yeah. I think the biggest myth is that in this day and age, therapists don't need a website, period.

Michael Buzinski 00:05:16  And there's a bunch of different reasons I hear. the first one is that while we have social media and I get all of my, all of my referrals or all my business from referrals or a referral network in the medical, industry from like, insurance or referrals from other specialists or wherever that is. Right. And so, like, I have all the business I want there. Unfortunately, what they are neglecting is the fact that 68% of all consumers, especially in the service based businesses like therapy, they go to websites to find out more about the practice. And, you have a better chance. Just because somebody refers to to you doesn't mean that they are going to go with you because they gotta, they gotta like you. Right. The, the first thing that happened was that somebody passed on their trust to you. So yes, a lot of those folks are just going to take that blindly. but 68% of them historically go and find out more about you. Now, social media can, basically, bridge that gap.

Michael Buzinski 00:06:25  But really, that is a social snapshot of you. If they want to learn more about your practice and what your ethos is or anything like that, I find my very successful therapy clinic or therapy practices that are multiple therapists. They're growing because they can show a variety of personalities within the clinic. So that way, you know, so if they do get referred and they're like, well, I don't really. So say, Joe, you were the guy, you know, and it's like, yeah, Joe. Yeah. For some reason, I just don't I don't I'm not connecting with Joe's smile. Right. But Joe's got a practice. It has maybe. Susan. Okay, well, then I like Susan. I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna call this practice because Susan was there. But that only happens because Joe had a website.

Joe Sanok 00:07:12  Yeah. And I think that, you know, one of the things that we see is, you know, we've spent time, you know, building up our audience on say Instagram or Facebook.

Joe Sanok 00:07:19  We thought about going into TikTok a bit, but it's going to follow the same flow where you know, the bigger the audience you have, the more that those social media giants want to charge you to reach your own audience. And, you know, that really seems like the algorithm has switched, and rightfully so, into what the consumer sees. So, like, even if I look at what I'm seeing on Instagram or TikTok, it's it's people that I watch their videos longer and they so there can be people who have 26 followers, and I'm seeing them all the time because I like what they're creating, which is great for me, but also just that idea that you have to have a larger and larger marketing budget just to reach the people that you've already developed in your audience, versus having a website that you build SEO around or whatever organic search or even some paid that, then people go to. I love that you're kind of pushing back on that idea that they don't need a website. What other myths are there that we got to deconstruct before we dig in?

Michael Buzinski 00:08:14  Well, before we go to the next one.

Michael Buzinski 00:08:15  Another thing to remember is that you own your website, you own the content, you own everything about it. You dictate what's on that website. The algorithms and the policies and the terms and conditions of each one of those channels. Social media channels that you mentioned can change at a drop of a dime, and they do on a regular basis. If they don't like what you're talking about, maybe you're a controversial, practitioner, right? You're like, hey, I want to I'm challenging the norm. And because you're in the related field, in the medical related field, your your accounts are more under scrutiny than anybody else, right? And so you can get completely shut down regardless of how much money you have. Because if they blacklist you, you're done. Right? So your website, your email lists and those types of assets are things that you own and have full control over. And that's what we're coming into that age of first party data. What do you the information you own is the most valuable.

Michael Buzinski 00:09:16  You can lend your visibility to a social media channel for a certain amount of time until that's either that social media channel shuts down or your audience moves away from it altogether.

Joe Sanok 00:09:29  Yeah, and it's interesting even seeing with with Google how it's pulling from all these things. You know, I forget what it's called like zero clicks or something like that, where, you know, I'll search for something and instead of sending me to the top three websites, it's sort of with it's I consolidating a lot of that where, you know, it seems like we're moving away from even people going to websites. So I'd love to dig into that too, if, do you see that? I think that's that.

Michael Buzinski 00:09:52  That would be the next myth is that people aren't using websites. And if you look at the position zero, which is what you were referring to, there are in search engine optimization specifically, and this is where most practitioners are going to get their organic inbound marketing. Okay. And because people have a problem now there are four intents of search.

Michael Buzinski 00:10:16  There's informational navigational commercial and transactional. So position zero is really good at handing people their information. So if they're an information intent that means they're in research mode. They might have a pain, but they don't know why that pain exists or what that pain is. They just have symptoms. Right. So they're trying to figure out like, why do I feel this way? Why am I not able to get a full night's rest? What are the tricks of dot dot dot. Right. So they're looking for information. So in research mode okay. And that's where in that position zero you get most of that? They're just looking for answers. And they do usually, end up with no clicks. So zero position, no clicks because it's more information you got your navigational or those who are looking for somebody specific. So they're going to use the Google Maps. You put in an address, they're going to give you, hey, this is where this place is. That's that's not right. Then you go into commercial.

Michael Buzinski 00:11:12  Commercial is when people understand their pain, but they might not understand what solution they're going to go with. So now they're comparing options. And then below that and that is where I is actually Gemini on Google is actually getting better and better at putting in even in position zero commercial intent. But then including the link to the website that they're pulling that from. so it's not as much that the owner has, control of what is read in the headline of the response. But a I is going to answer the question better. And if I can answer that question better and they go, wow, that's it. That's oh, this is good. And then they want more. They're going to click on that link that's in that answer. And now they're on your website. The last one excuse me is transactional. These are people who know their pain. They understand a solution. They're just looking for a provider for that solution. Again, that Gemini can pull up your information if you're ranking the highest for that in their geographical area.

Michael Buzinski 00:12:23  If they said, you know, best, therapist for depression in Georgia, right. So anybody who's in Georgia that has, therapy, therapist therapeutic, or therapist practice for depression specifically, they're talking about that on their website, and they are a thought leader in depression and solving for depression in Georgia. They're the ones that are going to be at the top.

Joe Sanok 00:12:50  Right? Yeah.

Michael Buzinski 00:12:50  So even with AI, you're going to have that now if you say, okay, well, now they're using ChatGPT. Yeah. Gen Xers and Boomers are not doing that. Millennials are 50 over 50. Gen Alpha and Gen Z. Yes. They're using a lot of that. But as they come of age and have more money, they're going to find out that they can't find a provider through ChatGPT. They're going to have to go to a search engine to find who they're going to go to. So those commercial and transactional keywords become more and more valuable.

Joe Sanok 00:13:24  Yeah. I think that idea of, you know, we find those of us that are like in marketing or in, you know, kind of hopefully more at the cutting edge of technology are using ChatGPT all the time.

Joe Sanok 00:13:37  Like this morning, I spent probably half an hour working through creating a chatbot that acts like me for pre consulting because, you know, there's people that are just ready to go with with consulting, and they don't need to wait a week to meet with me, to talk for 30 minutes, to wait a week to start consulting. Like they're ready to go right now. And like, if we can just train a bot to be able to walk through kind of the same things I walk through. Yeah, if they get to the end and they're like, no, I still want to talk to Joe. Totally cool. But you know, if 30% of our people can just convert without ever talking to a person like that just helps us in so many different ways and so. Right. You and I see the value of AI and sometimes even, you know, before we started rolling, we're talking about getting sick of talking about some of the AI, but it's also so few people are using it for the kind of potential that I think it has to be used.

Michael Buzinski 00:14:24  Yes. And I think that you, you you're hitting on a point, though, it's like it is replacing the mundane, right? Like these are questions and answers that must be in a in a predetermined sequence. Right? And depending on the answers is either going to result in a further conversation needed or oh, that's what I needed right now. Thank you very much. And then they have a nice day. Now Joe has more bandwidth. The whole and it's the thing is this that bot itself has to be found somewhere. And so you're either advertising it or you're making yourself visible through organic inbound marketing somewhere.

Joe Sanok 00:15:01  Yeah.

Joe Sanok 00:15:09  I am so excited about alma. When I had my private practice, I struggled building my caseload, attracting the right clients, managing the business side. And honestly, one of the reasons I didn't take insurance was it was so difficult to navigate. So many of my consulting clients deal with these problems as well, and almost supports clinicians in building rewarding private practices with simplified insurance credentialing in under 45 days, enhanced reimbursement rates, and guaranteed two week payback, plus a free profile in their searchable filter directory, making it easy for clients who are the right fit for your practice to find you.

Joe Sanok 00:15:49  Learn more about how alma could support your private practice at. Hello, alma. Jo. That's hello alma.com/jo to learn more. Are there any other mindsets we gotta challenge before we dig into what to actually do?

Michael Buzinski 00:16:08  No, I think that that, like some of the what we actually do is some mindset work, right? the the biggest thing that I see people do is that they build websites about them. So tell me if you've if this sounds familiar, you go to a practice's website and it says, we provide this solution for those who do this because we are this type of, expert. And we have experience doing this for our clients. And dot dot dot. Right.

Joe Sanok 00:16:42  Yeah.

Michael Buzinski 00:16:43  So it's not about you. It's about them. And so when I wrote the rule 26, that was one of the things that I was looking at was really the rule of 26, where we can hop into the rule 26 because we talk about all of this. I wanted a way for for people to understand how simple your strategy can be to increase revenue from your website.

Michael Buzinski 00:17:10  And I wrote this during the beginning of Covid, when we had so many businesses out there that couldn't do business as usual. And, and therefore they didn't have money for marketing, right. So I'm like, okay, how do I help as many people as possible? Well, maybe I can create a strategy that they can understand do on their own for the most part, and only cost you 15 bucks to get it right. You know, buy the book. Right? And that's really what we started with. And so I looked at all of the KPIs out there. Right. And some of the myths are that, you know, one of the big things that it's not a myth, but it's a misnomer in marketing is that we need to look at all of the KPIs, the key performance indicators, right. But I found is that there are a lot and the majority of KPIs that marketers talk about are vanity metrics. They don't actually move the revenue needle. And so I'm like, okay, what if we only focused on which ones move the revenue needle.

Michael Buzinski 00:18:09  And I boiled it down to three. And then with those three I'm like, okay, what type of impact if we're increasing each each of these incrementally have the biggest impact. And I found that if you increase your unique traffic by 26%, your conversion rate, the amount of people reach out to you once they've hit your website and give you a call or schedule an appointment, or do your bot whatever you consider as a move to becoming a patient by 26% and your average revenue per client by 26%. Each of those incremental increases create 200% or double the revenue that you had before.

Joe Sanok 00:18:53  So much. Just buy those things. You know, it's funny because like we'll in consulting often talk about tracking how many phone calls are coming in. Then how many are scheduling an appointment, how many are actually coming to that intake appointment. and then what's the lifetime amount of appointments they have? And a lot of therapists aren't even looking at those really basic numbers. And we'll look at, yeah, if we increase the phone calls by just 10%, if we increase the amount of people that are actually scheduling by 10%, the amount that actually show up, like every one of those things has, you know, follow up calls, reminder texts, you know, send me a calendar invite that can increase the likelihood that someone even shows up for that first session.

Joe Sanok 00:19:33  And we know that if someone comes to the first session, they're more likely to come to the third session. And if they get, you know, their treatment plan and all that and have some sort of customer service auto text, that's like, hey, is therapy going great for you? You know, we'd love to hear from you that that increases longevity. And so what you're saying is, you know, all those little tweaks count where 10% here, 10% there ends up being 50% growth with just doing smaller things that aren't even major marketing pushes. And I think that's where those numbers get me excited, even if maybe I don't, you know, I'm not I wouldn't call myself a numbers geek. But I do think that when we when we see the final result, it's we're serving more people and we're making more money and don't have to work as hard.

Michael Buzinski 00:20:11  Right. And I think that's the biggest thing is, is that like the biggest one that I start with, the first one that we usually start with, with clients is the RCP the average revenue per client.

Michael Buzinski 00:20:22  Right. This right here can if you usually if your average time that you serve a client or a patient is over a year. We usually break the RCP down to the first year, okay. If it is less than a year, then we go okay, lifetime value. But either way, it's how much revenue is coming from each new Client in the first year and a lot of people. And sometimes we're just not charging enough. Right. And and I've run into it in every industry. Somebody's always going around. Well, I feel for these people. And so I don't charge the premium that I probably should. Blah blah blah blah. I'm like, okay, so who are you giving a disservice to? Because if you discount the value you bring to your clients, does that mean you're coming at 100%? Because if you give it, even if you're not charging, if you're only charging 80% of what your value is, that means you have to work 20% more, which means you can can't.

Michael Buzinski 00:21:23  You have to see more clients, which means that you can't spend as much time on each client, or you won't have as much energy. You'll only have 80% of the energy to give to each client, because you have to see 20% more clients, because we only have so much energy every day, right? And so sometimes it's as easy as looking at what you're billing. The second part of the RCP is. Who are you serving? Not all patients are good patients. We all know this. And if we look at our practice as a business, there are certain types of therapy that we enjoy. We are better at more or more proficient. We get better results than others. And if we start looking at what our actual value that where we who we bring the highest value to and we start just focusing on that, we're going to get better and better and better at what we're already good at, which makes us which puts us in a position of no competition because we are the best. Right? And people don't think about that in their marketing.

Michael Buzinski 00:22:28  They try to say, well, anybody who's got depression, I'm just using depression as an example. Anybody who has depression, well, there's a lot of types of depression, right? So are you talking about women who are perimenopausal? Are you talking about kids who are going through puberty? Are you talking about Dads who now have to deal with divorce and being a single dad? Which depression are you going to be the best at? Because if you can get really focused on who you serve and how you serve them the best, that average revenue per client is going to go up. Because the more specific you are, the more specialized you are, the higher your value becomes, the higher you can build.

Joe Sanok 00:23:06  So awesome. So how do we bring this together with the rule of 26? Like what? Like, how does that all kind of line up with with the book and kind of some of the teachings of the book?

Michael Buzinski 00:23:15  Sure. So when we look at that and we go, okay, if we're not raising our prices by 26% or we're not finding ways to get people in programs that will actually help them and then therefore stay longer, 26% longer, however that works.

Michael Buzinski 00:23:30  Now we can take the messaging that we've now identified. Right. Because now we understand who our most profitable patients are. We know what programs are going to be the most profitable for them, which makes it most profit for you. The most value you can bring, the more profit is for you, right? That's the business we're in. We bring value, right? We solve problems for people. They pay us for that expertise. If you're if you can't figure that out, don't own your own practice. That's just that might be controversial. But that's what I, I tell people, it's like, if you can't get into the business of the practice, do not be a owner of a practice because somebody has to run the business, right? Because it is a business. You got to put the lights on, you got to pay people, you got to pay the insurance, you got to do all those things. And if you don't run it like a business, you're going to go broke or you'll start what we call entrepreneurial poverty, where you just basically have a lifestyle business that's barely pays the bills and you're always worried about the next cycle, right? So once you have all of that and you know who you want to serve and you know who you bring the most value and who will pay you the highest, retainers for those.

Michael Buzinski 00:24:28  Now, you can take that message and apply it to their website. And the biggest thing I see when I remember I said the wi us. Right. That's a we a syndrome I we us I do this? We do that when you come to us, right? If you can take all the IUI and us out and apply you and your to the the personification that you've just identified in increasing your average over client. So whatever that perfectly profitable prospect is, and you put the you and your and talk about it through their lens, you're going to increase your conversion rate on your website. And once you've done that and you can actually see more for every 100 people, more people are reaching out. Then you can start looking at increasing your traffic. And we talk about unique traffic. So we're not talking about the bots, and we're not talking about people who come back multiple times talking about the new traffic coming in. We can increase that in and the quality of that traffic. So who is actually coming there? Because a lot of people are like, well, I get a thousand people come here.

Michael Buzinski 00:25:34  It's like, well, who are those thousand people, right? If they're the wrong type of people, they're never going to convert Because you might be bringing putting out the wrong message to attract the wrong prospects. So they all work symbiotically in that they, they, they are basically leveraging each of themselves, both mathematically and strategically.

Joe Sanok 00:25:59  Now where do you see. So you know people have been buying this book. They've been learning from you the rule of 26. so we had the original mindsets that people kind of need to get over. They start doing some of the, these techniques. kind of thinking through it, where do people drop the ball, where do people learn it and then not enact what you're teaching?

Michael Buzinski 00:26:20  So it's funny because different people will drop the ball in different places, because you can start the rule of 26 and eat any of those KPIs. So some people are like, well, we know who we serve. We know how. we have a really high average revenue per client. We just need more of them.

Michael Buzinski 00:26:38  So then it's like, okay, well then you know you're going to start in conversion rate, right? And then we can come back to RCP later on with other strategies. But the but if they start there, they don't they're not willing to do the market research that it takes to get really good at conversion rate optimization. Conversely, you'll be like, well, I really like my conversion rate. And they just they discount the fact that they can get incrementally better at any of the KPIs. Right? So they're like, well, we're okay with our, with our, our conversion rate and our ACP. RCP is really good. We just need more traffic. And so they just start dumping traffic in there and never look at the other two KPIs. But it's a leverage play. It's a leveraged strategy. If you just put in 26% more traffic, you're only getting 20%, 26% more business if all other, KPIs stay the same. But what happens is that as you're increasing your traffic, you will see fluctuations in the other KPIs.

Michael Buzinski 00:27:46  You have to look at all of them holistically. And that's where we see people drop the ball.

Joe Sanok 00:27:53  So 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?

Michael Buzinski 00:28:02  I would ask them a question first, and it's a personal question, and everybody's going to have their own answer to it because it's it's for them, right. If you own if you're in, you are a practitioner. Are you looking to build a practice or are you looking to enrich your career? Because if you are looking to build a practice and become an entrepreneur in the industry, your mindset is going to be much different there. And so when we look as a practitioner, the things like the rule of 26 and ways to leverage Your growth as a profitable practice is much different than those who are just looking to be them. Maybe a couple assistants and their book of business as a lifestyle. And if you're going to be the latter, don't buy into all of the hype.

Michael Buzinski 00:28:54  Be focused on who you are and who you want to serve and what makes you happy and pays the bills, right? But if you're the the practitioner, the the practitioner, practitioner, builder, then you must look at your practice as a business. And sometimes that means that you will have to do less of the consulting and give that to those who are of the latter, who just want to be practitioners and not entrepreneurs.

Joe Sanok 00:29:25  So awesome buzz, if people want to hang out with you, if they want to hear more about your work, if they want to get your book, where should we send them?

Michael Buzinski 00:29:32  you can always check us out at Buzzworthy Biz. if you'd like a free copy of the rule of 26, all I ask is that you pay the shipping handling, but I will sign in and send it to you personally. Go to rule of 26. All of our social media and everything is at the Buzzworthy Biz website.

Joe Sanok 00:29:52  So awesome. Well, thank you so much for being on the practice of the Practice podcast.

Michael Buzinski 00:29:57  Thanks for having me, Joe.

Joe Sanok 00:30:06  What a great offer to get a free copy of Buzz's book. Make sure you head on over to that website to grab that. If you ever aren't sure you know one of these links, or you're driving or running. You can always go over to practice. Practice. Com we have the show notes. We have the transcriptions. So maybe you're putting your kids to bed and you can't really listen to it. And they're like hey sit in the room. I know my kids used to do that all the time. I just sit here and you want to read something. You can read through the transcript of this over there, and all those links will be there as well. also, if you're looking for a website. Looking for a website update. Update on one of our newer partners session sites. If you go to session sites.com/joe, they will get you a website in 14 days. They have automated this process. It's insane. So head on over there. Also, we couldn't do the show without our sponsors.

Joe Sanok 00:30:53  Head on over to Alma's website. Hello alma.com/joe if you want help with credentialing. If you want help with reimbursement rates and be guaranteed two week payback. Again that's hello alma.com/joe. Thank you 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. Silence is 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.