5 Highly Effective Marketing Strategies without the "Ick"

In this episode I review 5 highly effective marketing concepts that feel a lot less icky with a little mindset work including

• an example of how a little positive pressure can be helpful to a potential patient/consumer
• the micropractice feature that is marketing gold
• ways you can make potential patients feel more confident/comfortable with their decision to join
• the argument for unapologetically tooting your own horn

Influence by Robert Cialdini: https://a.co/d/3JjCkRv

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Connect with me on IG @soniasinghMD
Email me at sonia@micropracticemama.com
Learn more at www.micropracticemama.com

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Transcript

Sonia Singh MD 0:01

Hey doctors. You're listening to the Micropractice Mama Podcast, a podcast for women physicians who are striving to practice primary care sustainably and creatively with autonomy, authenticity, and joy. I'm your host, Sonya Singh, internist, PCP, and proud mother of two human babies, one for a baby, and one life-changing micro practice. I wanna empower you to push past whatever is holding you back and make the leap to launching a practice. That aligns with your values and priorities, and finally allows you to take care of your patients, your family, and yourself in the ways that you want and deserve. Are you ready to make the leap? Let's do it. Hey doctors, I hope you're having a good week. I did not record last week. You may have noticed between the webinar I did on Wednesday night and then the follow up emails and I had a technical issue with the recording and then I was going out of town on Friday, so it was a really crazy second half of the week, and I just. Did not get to recording. So apologies that we skipped a week, and I'm back now and I wanted to get this episode out today as soon as possible because today is the last day of the sale on the Micropractice 1 0 1 e-course. I basically tried to do the webinar every 4 months or so, and then afterwards have a one week sale on the course. And so we are. On the last day of that sale right now the Micropractice 1 0 1 e-course is normally$3,000. And then during these one week sales, it's 2,400. So it's a pretty substantial discount. And in case you're wondering like, why I am doing a sale sounds like an infomercial. We're actually gonna talk a little bit more about that strategy today. But, the main reason I do that is. To give people a little bit of positive pressure to force them to be on some type of timeline. It also helps me not have to talk about the course and feel like I'm trying to sell it to you all day, every day, year round. This allows me to focus my energy on advertising it during certain times of the year. And then I think it also helps people join in cohorts and then those people can be going through the material at the same time and connect with each other so anyway, there's a lot of reasons I do that. But it seems to be working out as a good model. And, I tend to get a handful of doctors enrolling with each cohort. And so far I have several and I'm excited to see if anybody else is interested in joining today. If you're listening to this on Wednesday, September 17th. Today is your last chance, I got a lot of emails this week about people who are on the fence. So tried to, I tried to answer all of those. Hopefully none of them went to spam. But anyway. So if you're thinking about the course, today's your last day, the next sale. I don't know whenever I've had time to do the next webinar. Last year I said it was gonna be in January, and then I ended up doing it in February. Sometime January, February, after the holidays, I will probably do another webinar and there will be another sale at that time. That's all I'm gonna say about that. But it's a good segue into the topic for today, I'm really excited to do this episode because I honestly think it's gonna be eyeopening and helpful for a lot of people because this is a topic that a lot of doctors struggle with, which is marketing. What I hear a lot about marketing. People saying, oh, it just feels so sleazy. It just doesn't come naturally to me. I don't wanna do it. It just I hate the idea, sometimes I'll start mentioning a marketing technique and I'll just see people's face immediately be repulsed. Like I would even suggest that they do this, but I, for me, what I realized, and I would've had the same reaction, had somebody said some of these things to me, six or seven years ago. But what I've realized now is that. Mindset is a big part of this. And I think we as medical professionals as scientists like we're so far from this world that we just have this kind of knee jerk aversion to all things business and marketing are not everyone, but a lot of us do. And you have to really. Shift your mindset around some of these things in order to see them a little bit more objectively and also to be able to use them well. And what I'm trying to teach when I talk about marketing in my course, in this podcast anywhere is really techniques of ethical. Persuasion, like we are trying to encourage people to do things that we believe are going to benefit them and benefit us that are going to be mutually beneficial. This is not about, like intense pressure on somebody who's trying to decide whether to buy something. This is not about manipulation. This is not about, pulling a fast one on someone like. We are providing a very high quality, valuable service that we believe this person would benefit from and that we also benefit from. And my goal is to teach you ways to do this that, that feel fair and reasonable and ethical and true to you. And do not feel sleazy or ick. So let's get into a few of them and give a few examples. These are more general strategies. I have a few other episodes, like one where I talk about growing your practice through Facebook groups. I have one that where I talk about networking. So those are other specific, very specific marketing. Techniques or things that you can do. This is more talking about some general strategies that you can apply in a lot of different ways. So the first one is, and I thought I read this term in some book somewhere, and now when I was Googling it, I was like, did I make this up? I don't know if this is the right phrase for what I'm describing, but. There's something I think of in my mind as positive pressure or a little bit of time pressure or urgency. I don't even wanna call, I hesitate to call it urgency, but I would say some kind of time pressure. And this is a thing that I think a lot of people are very quick to be like, oh, I hate that. Bye now. Bye today. Act now. I hate that feeling. It just reminds me of an infomercial. But I'm gonna give you an example that whole hopefully illustrates what I mean by this. I met a therapist several months ago who just reached out and said, Hey, I am starting a new independent therapy practice. I was wondering if I could, have coffee with you and just tell you about myself. And that way, if you have patients who are looking for a therapist, you can recommend me. I said, sure. I met her and she mentioned that she trained under Brene Brown. She's A-L-C-S-W social worker. She was trained in this program called the Daring Way Program, and that as part of her practice, she's gonna be doing these classes that are based on the work of Brene Brown. And there was a few different ones. There's one on overwhelm I forgot what the third one is, but the one I was interested, there's one called Wholehearted Growth or Wholehearted Living or something like that. So these were these weekly workshops that she was gonna run. So she told me about them, and I always joke that my practice is 90% evidence-based medicine and 10% Brene Brown and Brene Brown's, lives in Houston, where she's like a local celebrity and I'm a fan girl. So I, when I heard her describe this, I was like, ah, sign me up. I wanna do that. And I definitely told her at the time oh yeah I'm so interested. That sounds great. I would love to do that. And I, I really. Try. I remember when I was first starting my practice and how local women who seemed very successful in running their businesses were very quick to, once they found out about me and met me and, oh, I like you, like the practice idea I'm joining. They were so quick to support me and I just, I so wanna pay that forward. So when something comes up like this, I just think, okay, I'm interested in that. I wanna support your business. I wanna support your practice. I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna sign up. So she left my office and I think a few days later she sent me a follow up email with all the information about the classes. And then I clicked on the link and I looked and, looked at the price. Price was a little higher than I thought. I think it was, it's$700. And I, in my mind I was expecting like 3 50, 400. So I was like it was a little pricier than I thought. And then I thought, oh, maybe I'll just run it by my husband and see what he thinks. Not that, I don't have to ask his permission or anything, but I feel like anytime I'm spending more than$500, I'm usually just yeah, I just. Let you know I'm gonna do this thing. So I was like, let me tell him about it. So then, I told him about it. He was like, yeah, do it if you want. That sounds good. And, checked my schedule. And then there was like a discrepancy about the time on the website. So I tried to reach out to her and ask about that. I think she responded about that. And once that was clear, I was like, okay, now she's clarified I should sign up. And then I went back to the website and I think I clicked on the wrong link. And instead of sending me to sign up, it just sent me to like a. More information form. And then I was like, oh, maybe she's filtering, or she's screening the people who sign up now. So I filled it out and she had just opened the practice, so I'm, I think maybe she didn't even get that. It probably went to some website purgatory, like her contact form. But anyway, I didn't hear from her after that. And then I was like the time was getting closer when the course, the class was about to start. And I was ah, do I really wanna do it? Is it worth the money? Should I maybe just skip it and, join the next cohort or whatever. And then finally, a day or two days maybe before the class, I was like, man, it's starting on Monday. I should just sign up. And I went back to the website and I clicked around a little bit more and I found the place where you join and I signed up. Okay, I wanted to take this class. I immediately, when she told me about it was like, that sounds right up my alley. I would like to do that. That sounds like a thing I would like to do. And now I'm in the class, we've had three or four sessions so far and it's a combined art and group therapy. Like we do all this stuff with our hands and we draw and this week we made little clay pots that we wrote things on, and then we smashed them, and then we glued them back together. It's a, it's so fun. I'm getting so much out of it. I knew I wanted to do this class. I was sure I checked all the boxes, thought about it, considered the price, talk to my family, like I was sold on this class. There was not really like a, I was pretty confident I wanted to do it. When it came the moment to part with the$700, I had a little bit of resistance going on, but. Not really. Like I had given this a lot of time and thought and was pretty sure I wanted to do it and because there was no pressure going on, I, there ultimately there was pressure'cause the class was gonna start a certain date. So that was really the only pressure I had. If this was a on demand class where I could have taken it any time, I a hundred percent never would've signed up. I just wouldn't have signed up. It would've kept falling off the to-do list. And I would've eventually, as much time would've gone by, my enthusiasm after meeting her would've faded, and then I would've just been like, eh, whatever. And I would've forgotten about it. And if that was the case, I would've missed out on this wonderful experience that I'm having, that I'm probably gonna tell other patients about. Actually, one of my patients is in one of the other classes. But I would've actually appreciated, I was thinking about this as a business owner after I went to the first couple sessions and I was like, this is awesome. I can't believe I almost didn't do this. Is that, when I think about her as a business owner, I, I would I will eventually give her the feedback. Hey, I know you're trying to not be pushy about this. But you could have given me a little bit more pressure. You could have definitely sent a follow-up email after I first inquired about the date and been like, Hey, just checking in. What do you think? Are you gonna sign up? Because when it's a human being trying to get a response from me, I'm usually pretty quick to feel like I need to respond. And I would've responded and said, yes, I'm signing up right now. But she put no pressure on me. Which, I think a lot of people would look at that and say, oh, it's great, and no pressure. But I needed the pressure. I as a consumer. Needed the pressure. Otherwise I was gonna keep pushing it off and keep not doing it. And I especially think, like for my demographic and my practice, which is busy professional women, a lot of them look at a service like what I provide and think that's just a luxury. I don't know, do I really need that? I can get by without it. This whole thing, we tell ourselves about what we actually need and what we deserve and all of this. And so people in that situation often just need a little bit of positive pressure. And I don't look at it as me trying to Push them into something that they don't wanna do, or trying to talk them into something that they're hesitant about. It's if someone in a meet and greet says, oh my gosh, I'm so excited. I would love to join the practice. I would love to be a part of the practice. And then I don't hear from them for a while. It is not being pushy to message them and check in and say, Hey, just wanted to check in. Haven't seen you join yet. Is there any other questions that I can answer? It is not. So again, I'm talking about this as a general concept of positive pressure. I, I think it can be applied in so many different ways. Like I said, just if someone expresses interest to you and then you don't hear from them for a while, it's not pushy to just check in with them and say, Hey, did you have any additional questions? Was there anything else holding you back? Happy to chat, Other examples of putting some positive pressure on people is setting some type of time limit. So if you're doing a pre-enrollment where you're giving people some kind of discount, just. Saying okay, up until this date, I'm pre-enrollment at this rate. After that not so much, or when I, at the end of my first year raised my prices, I sent out several blast emails to everyone I had done, meet and greets with who hadn't joined yet to everyone who was in my current practice, who had friends or family that they were. Telling about the practice or thinking about adding to the practice. And I said multiple times as of January 1st, everybody who joins is going to join at this higher price. And that drove a lot of, growth right at the end there because people were feeling a little bit of time pressure to make a decision. And I even had people email me the first week of January. Oh my God, this was on my to-do list and I just I'm meant to sign up and I did it. And you would be surprised at how much, just that little bit of pressure will prompt people to actually take action. And again, it's, you're not asking people to do something they don't want to do. You're not, forcing them into a decision, like you can still join the practice later. It's just like you're telling them like, Hey, it's. It, I'm telling you that there's a discount now and there's not always gonna be a discount or there's, the price is good now. It's always not gonna be this good later. Okay. So that's some positive pressure or some urgency. Okay. So the idea is that you're. You're nudging them, you're just giving them a nudge to do the thing that they've already expressed interest in doing. I think we sometimes have these stories in our mind about why somebody decided not to join or why they're not joining. And I have found from following up with a lot of people over several years, that often, especially my demographic, they'll just be like, oh, I just forgot about it. Fell down on my to-do list. I just, I wasn't sick for a while and I just didn't think about it anymore. And a lot of times those people will pop back up later when they do have an issue and then they realize, oh, I should have just signed up for that before. Okay. So that's positive pressure. All right, number two. Is talking about scarcity or, emphasizing scarcity in some way. So again, for me this is really about sharing the facts of your practice and of micro practice more than it is about I don't want you to create a false sense of scarcity. I don't want you to say, I'm. Full. Don't say you're almost full if you're not almost full. Don't say you're booked out. If you're not booked out. I, I actually think quite a few people falsely make themselves seem busier than they are in order to appear in demand or successful. I think sometimes that happens in the private practice world, and I just think that's silly. I actually think when you are in the startup phase. It's fine to be, like, right now I only have 50 patients. That means I have so much time and energy for each of you, but at the same time, I think you should emphasize that a micro practice is limited. I'm not talking about shoving in their face all the time. Like time is gonna run out. I'm gonna fill up so fast. On my website, I literally had one tiny sentence. That was just enrollment starts blah, blah, blah, blah. Membership is limited. That's it. That tiny sentence. And people get it. People get that right away. That, okay, this thing is not gonna be around forever. On my Instagram profile for my practice, I actually had a little bit of a countdown going. So originally I think it said 200 spots remaining. And then it said one 50 spots remaining and then it said 100 spots remaining and there's a less than 50 spots remaining. And I do think that prompted people to if they were thinking about it, once you see less than 50 spots remaining, you think, okay, now I should just schedule that meet and greet and just decide whether I wanna do this thing or not, because. It might not be an option in a year or two. And none of that was false advertising. That was all true. Micropractice is small and so you know, another time that you can emphasize this, and I don't know if I would put this in the same bucket of scarcity, but to me, like scarcity is just. Sharing the facts about how small your practice is. So in my meet and greets, sometimes people say so you're still taking new patients. So on this topic, a lot of times I will take the opportunity to tell them, look, I never intend to have more than 200 patients. And a typical primary care doctor sees a panel of 2000 and sometimes more. So think about how much time and energy and bandwidth I have for each patient when I have one 10th the number. And this prompts them to also think about, what is that PCP dealing with? Who has 2000? And yeah, I guess it does make sense that they can't return my forms for five days. And I guess it does make sense that I can't see them sometimes for a few weeks or that I can't get in with them the same day when I'm sick. Again, I don't think this is false advertising in any way. This is just emphasizing the facts, but in this case, the facts about how small micro practices communicate scarcity to the patient and scarcity is a known motivator for consumers to to purchase something or to actually commit to a service. Okay, so number two is scarcity, okay. Number three is social proof. So I think sometimes people feel a little sleazy or uncomfortable just asking a patient for review or encouraging them to leave a review. I have a whole actually separate episode on reviews. I think it's called The only Reviews That Matter. So go check that out. If you wanna learn more about. Reviews generally and how to ask for reviews and that sort of thing. But I think a lot of people feel icky asking about reviews, but here's how I would reframe this in your mind. Collecting reviews from real patients that you've seen. So not your friends, your family, your neighbor, your husband. Real reviews from patients you've seen, gathering those, encouraging people to write them and to put them in, third party places like Google and Yelp and whatever. Google is really where you want them. Getting people to leave reviews on Google is really helping your potential patients. Feel more confident in their decision. So it is providing social proof that who you say you are and who you appear to be on your website is who you actually are. It is giving them hope that you are who you say you are, and you're going to deliver what you say you're going to deliver. And I wouldn't even frame it in your mind as necessarily some marketing technique. I would think of it as something you're obligated to do, to provide some evidence to somebody who's debating spending, a couple grand a year on the service that you're providing. So that piece is really important. I think especially as more doctors get savvy and make really nice, slick websites and, more people start doing the very superficial aspects of marketing better. Right now, honestly, a lot of doctors don't even do that. But once more people get hip to that game and start, having really nice, slick websites and nice, social media profiles. That social proof, of reviews in other places is going to be more and more critical to prove that you are who you appear to be on those other, places that you have control over. To, to me it's almost this is like patient driven marketing. This is your patients convincing other patients that, hey, this person's the real deal. You should do this besides reviews themselves. Other examples of social proof would be testimonials. If you just get a message from a patient and they're like, oh my God, I can't thank you enough for doing X, Y, and z. I would've ended up in the ER if I hadn't been able to text you. You can just say to them, oh my gosh, I. So happy. This is why I love this model. This is why I do medicine in this way. Would you mind if I shared this text anonymously on my social media or in my newsletter or wherever you wanna put it, and most people are gonna say yes, especially if it's anonymous. And so I think that's a great way to demonstrate your DPC wins or your patient wins. Sometimes even share my patient wins. If they just tell me something wonderful that they've done or progress they've made with their health sharing that and just demonstrating that those things are happening in your practice is very powerful for people. So number three is social proof. All right, number four. Number four is addressing your customer or patient's pain points. I'm really big on this, like doing this in your website, doing this in your social media, doing this in your meet and greets is really trying to understand like what is this patient's struggle? What are they dealing with and how. Would I and this practice model serve them best and address some of these pain points? And it may on the surface just sound ah, yeah, that's just like a marketing technique. But the reality is when you are addressing pain points, you are providing empathy and validation. You have to have a very deep understanding of their experience to truly know what their pain points are, and to empathize with them, to articulate them, and then to know how to address them. So I don't want you to think of it as just oh yeah, of course. Marketing stuff, addressing the pain points. This is an opportunity to. Actually build real trust and connection with a patient. And like I said, you can do this in your website and you can do this in your social media messaging. You can do this in meet and greets when you're talking to people one-on-one. But it's not actually an easy thing to do. I think there's probably a lot of doctors and practices and businesses out there that really have not done the hard work of putting themselves. In the customer or patient's shoes and thinking about what is it exactly that they're wanting and how can I address that? Okay, so last one is. This idea of establishing authority. So I left this one for last because I think a lot of doctors have trouble with this idea because it feels like bragging. They're just like I don't wanna say I. Harvard trained physician. I don't wanna say, that I, got this whatever humanism award. I just don't wanna brag about being nominated for Top Doctor. It doesn't feel good to go around tooting my own horn like that. And I had. I a hundred percent had that same feeling like I think I've talked about before that, when I was in the planning stages of my practice and I had decided, okay, I'm gonna do this thing. My husband was like, you're gonna have to market and go out and sell yourself. And I was like, oh, like it just sounded so disgusting. But here's the reframing. I think actually when I. Emphasize how many years I have trained the places I have trained. I actually think the potential patient hears that and it comforts them. It makes them feel more safe. It makes them feel like there's some, again, outside assurance that this person. Is of high quality or is who they say they are. I think it makes their decision feel easier because, even for instance, for myself, when I'm trying to pick a therapist, or gosh, when I'm trying to pick a mechanic, when I'm trying to pick anything you're asking yourself is this person a good version of that? And reviews can tell you so much and your friends can tell you. And you can get that information from so many places. But the reality is, the more places that kind of point to this. Person being legit and being good at their job, the more comfortable you feel making that decision. And by saying in the first line of my bio, I am a Stanford trained internist, I think I'm immediately giving some people a sense of ease of okay, yeah, who knows what her bedside manner is, who knows if she's gonna understand me and my issues. Who knows if she is a good fit in other ways. But at the very least. This person worked hard enough to go to a program that I have heard of, and of course you, and I know the caveat, which is that just'cause you go to a program with a big name doesn't mean you're a good doctor. Doesn't mean you're good at DPC. Doesn't mean you have good, it doesn't mean that much, but again, it's one piece of evidence among a lot of other things that the person is probably. Analyzing to decide whether to make this decision or not. And so I actually think by establishing authority, you are reminding that patient that you are very well qualified to take care of them and take care of their health, which is one of the most valuable things that they have. And so it's normal for them to have a little bit of reluctance or hesitation about entrusting a new person with that. I would constantly reframe it in your mind as I am doing this person a favor by giving them the comfort of knowing that I have this many years of education and training behind me at these places. And so actually that's part of the reason I, you know, I, when I designed my office, I didn't wanna do anything predictable or anything the way that you were supposed to do it in a medical office. So part of me didn't even wanna put my diplomas on the wall. I thought let me just go with some crazy mural or some art or whatever. And ultimately I decided to put the diplomas up because I think to see that you're like, oh, yes you remember this is not an influencer. This is not somebody who did a weekend certificate. You're like, okay, this is a legit person who has gone to a lot of years of school. And so if they're telling me X, Y, and Z, perhaps I should treat that differently than what I saw on Instagram yesterday. And as we know, there's a lot of non-doctors in the game. There's a lot of people on social media with no credentials at all, who are, providing medical information. And so I think this is the time to, wear all of those credentials proudly and loudly and to not feel. COI about sharing those or, pointing them out So anyway, those are my five marketing strategies just to review. That's, using some time pressure, positive pressure, scarcity. Social proof, addressing pain points and establishing authority. A great book if you wanna do a deeper dive on marketing is so I feel like a phony telling you to read this book.'cause I didn't actually read this book. I just I listened to a summary of it and then. A lot of times I'll forget some of the concepts and then I'll just ask Chad, GPT remind me of the main points of this book. And so the book is called Influence and I will link it in the show notes, but it emphasizes this, idea of ethical persuasion and I think a lot of the concepts in it are just very fundamental marketing concepts that can be applied to so many different. Industries and types of businesses and so I found a lot of those to be very nice and simple. There's another, I think there's another book called 22 Laws of Marketing, or Mutable Laws of Marketing. That one's also good, but I felt like that one was a little bit more something you might read when you're. Designing your practice.'cause I remember some of the tips from that were really how to distinguish yourself from your competition and how to stand out in the market. So anyway, those were two of the ones that I remember most clearly. But these are my high level take home points about marketing in general and how to make it feel a little bit less icky. Okay. So that brings us to the end of the episode. As I mentioned, I will tell you again today is the very last day that the course is gonna be on sale. There are no guarantees about exactly when I'll do the next webinar and when the next sale will be. So if you have any questions please email me today. I'll try to get back to those as soon as possible. The sale ends at midnight Central time. So if you're still on the fence reach out. Once you're in the course it never expires, so there's no time limit. You can use your one-on-one consulting sessions whenever you want. I understand. This process can be like three months or it can be three years, and I'm, there's no rush in terms of trying to get your one-on-one scheduled per in some particular period of time. We have monthly office hours, which are Wednesdays at noon central time at the last Wednesday of the month. So once a month. And going forward, since the size of the group is getting larger, I will probably be recording those and sending those out for people who are unable to make that time.'cause I know so many people are employed. That was a common question that I was getting and that you want clarification on or you're on the fence. You're welcome to reach out to me, sonya@micropracticemama.com. I will now take a break from. Podcast for a few weeks and enjoy the holidays with my family. So I hope you do the same and I will be back come the new year with new episodes. So until then, bye-bye.