E517 | Google vs Facebook Ads Right Now

Today's episode revolves around digital marketing and how I think you should approach this within your business. This is a topic I have touched on in the past, but I wanted to revisit it because these digital marketing advertising platforms are constantly changing which can make it a bit challenging if you are unprepared. Enjoy!

• Organic vs. paid
• The key main differences between Google vs Facebook Ads

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Podcast Transcript

Danny: So there's all kinds of hidden fees within your business that are just part of doing business. One of those is credit. Processing and for us, we didn't even realize how much we were paying in credit card processing with the first management software we were using for our practice. And when we switched over to PT everywhere, we just realized we were saving literally hundreds of dollars a month with credit card processing with their partner with Card point versus who we were using with our prior.

Software. This has made a massive difference. It's more than paid for itself. It allows us to decrease our overhead. It allows us to have more cash flow to reinvest in our people, in our technology, in our facility, in marketing and everything that's gonna drive the business. So don't get abused by credit card processing companies.

Make sure you're paying what you should pay. And if you're looking for a management software, highly recommend PT everywhere directly integrates. Processor makes it very easy and their rates are super, super competitive. So it's saved us a ton of money and it probably will do the same for you if you don't know what you are getting charged.

So head over to PT everywhere. Take a look at what they've got. I think you really like it. So here's the question. How do physical therapists like us who don't wanna see 30 patients a day, who don't wanna work home health and have real student loans create a career and life for ourselves that we've always dreamed about?

This is the question, and this podcast is the answer. My name's Danny Matte, and welcome to the PT Entrepreneur Podcast.

What's going on guys? Doc Danny here with the PT Entrepreneur Podcast, and today I got another little tactical tip, little tactical podcast for you guys. Like I said, I don't always go just a tactical route. I think it's important that we talk higher level things. Personal development, theory principles, things that are gonna help you make decisions.

Not necessarily just be told you know what to do but in some cases, It's helpful to know what to do, just specifically. And this one in particular revolves around digital marketing. Digital marketing is something that we do quite a bit of within, whether it's our own practice or within PT Biz and other businesses that we're, that we are loosely involved with they all have some element of digital advertising and my stance on digital advertising for practices.

Really, I think it makes a lot of sense to try to build yourself organically, a base organically where you are building a strong reputation. You're understanding, your avatar, how to create content, how to, fulfill and how to have a sales conversation before you layer on.

Digital advertising because you're gonna have far less qualified people coming your way in comparison to a referral, or from a workshop where they just spent maybe an hour with you. And if you don't know how to handle those, then your ROI on ads is gonna be really bad. So I think the sweet spot for a lot of people is if they get somewhere between, 10 to $15,000 in revenue, Per month by, grassroots building their reputation, building social proof and things online through reviews and, like Google reviews on their side and having a solid website as well.

All these things they need in place to really make paid advertising stick and work for you. And it should supple. The lead flow that you have in your business, it shouldn't be your only lead flow. I think this is a dangerous mistake that I see business owners make where they solely focus on one channel.

I have one channel for leads and if something happens to that, then. They have no lead flow and they end up getting into trouble. So I'm a big fan of, the idea of multiple sort of poles in the water. Lines in the water. If you're fishing, if you, if I can throw six out there, I have a better chance of catching something than if I have one.

So I want to have multiple Marketing opportunities on different levels that also don't necessarily correlate with each other from a safety standpoint to make sure that, the new volume that I'm getting, the recurring volume that I'm getting, even if you're marketing to preexisting clients that is consistent and it is separated in some ways, so that way it's diversified.

In particular today what I wanna talk about was some information and some things we're seeing with the difference between Google and Facebook ads, which are the two primary options that people have for running digital ads for a local service business. So for a cash-based practice in particular.

And Google Facebook ads and Google ads are things that we've now been using for. Six years in our practice specifically and, helping people with, these type of ads along the way. They are, they change quite a bit. They are somewhat difficult to learn. It definitely you can learn them.

But it's something that. Is definitely necessary to have as part of your practice at a certain point. But what we've seen now with six years of really with both of these I would've said hands down, Facebook has been the winner in terms of. Return on investment for ads, for a cash-based practice at least.

With my experience with this, I can also tell, tell you from the standpoint of spending a significant amount of money on ads with PT Biz, where we're starting to see differences as well. And up until about probably eight months ago, maybe getting close to a. Hands down, I would've said I would've, biased more of our ad spend towards Facebook than Google.

And the primary reason I would've done that is because, they were just tracking everything. They know all your behaviors and They know more about you than you probably know about yourself as far as Facebook is concerned. Google's the same way, but there was an update that was made to the iPhone.

It was the, it was an iOS update that basically allowed you to opt out of being tracked basically your habits being tracked on social platforms and when you're not on those social platforms. And they're definitely doing a lot of tracking of things. Was this associated with your buying behaviors, your interest behaviors?

And they were accumulating all that information as data to, to allow for marketing for people to pay for ads and they were very accurate because of that. So with this iOS update, this is all Apple products. Facebook, it's like Facebook now has like their eyes closed in some ways in comparison because they they opt out.

Of that in particular, some of this has to do with big companies sort of beefing with each other. I wouldn't be surprised as if Apple has some variation of advertising they're working on. Eventually. It's a huge market, and I'm assuming they'd probably want to capitalize on their own devices.

But as of right now the one that they really shut down more than anything was was Facebook an Instagram, which they, Instagram is owned by Facebook. So we saw this. Trend down of the ability to target and outcomes. Now, you can still use Facebook successfully to get leads.

It's just the roi of that is significantly lower. So your return on investment's significantly lower than it was in the past, but even still, it's still worth doing because you can still get a good roi. You can get people to come in the clinic and if you have a good offer and you can sell that, then it can be an effective use of your advertising.

Now with Google's a little bit different because people are specifically searching for a problem. People don't go into Facebook and type in what to do for shoulder pain, right? But they do that in Google or they go to YouTube and they look at the same thing. And YouTube is owned by Google. So the data points that Facebook has right now, and this is really based off of some information from a consulting group that we recently talked to.

Facebook has about like 500 touchpoints of your traits and your demographics and behaviors and all kinds of stuff, which sounds like a lot, right? You're like, oh, shit, and they know 500 independent data points about me. Google, it's somewhere between 60 and 70,000. So their predictability and their understanding of people on their platform.

Significantly higher because they track so many more things and have been doing so for a long time, and they don't get the same bad publicity that Facebook does about invading your privacy. But they're doing the same thing and at a significantly higher level and have been doing so for a long time.

And they own the search engine market. There's nobody else there. There's plenty of other social platforms and things that people spend time on, but there's you go to one search engine pretty much across the board, especially in the us. The other thing is they have map features and they have YouTube, for instance, with the map feature, if you're looking for a practice in your area, you can type it into your map, around where you're at in your phone and Google Maps and it will show you and it will highlight how many reviews certain practices have, as well as it will preferentially rank some of those just as if you are searching for certain key terms in Google and you're ranking with that with search engine optimization, let's say on like a page or a blog.

So what we've seen in the last few months in particular is that Google. Outperforming Facebook in, in regards to return on investment. And a lot of it has to do with they just haven't been hindered the same way that Apple has many of our colleagues, especially in this space of like where we're at with consulting and education They have turned a lot of their of their marketing ad spend and attention away from Facebook and onto Google and YouTube in particular because so many more people are spending time there and using those platforms and migrating away from some of the other ones.

Even though the massive user base with Facebook and and Instagram there's a trust factor there that they've lost. And the advertising intelligence is not. Quite what it was before Apple shut 'em down. It definitely has affected them quite a bit, especially if you even look at like their revenue.

It's down dramatically from this time last year when the, this wasn't going on. So something to think about if you're looking at, or where do I allocate money? Which ones should I. You know, find somebody to run or, learn to run or whatever. I think they both work and they're both working.

But what we're seeing is the trend is definitely leading more towards Google, over Facebook because of the ability to have far more data points to understand where people are at and buying behaviors, more they can even understand. At what point of a buying cycle somebody's in after enough time and deliver them a message that's unique to that with artificial intelligence.

Like it's, I don't actually even understand what, how they do some of this stuff. All I know is it works and it drives business. So something to think about. If you haven't looked at Google in a while definitely recommend taking a look at Google. And with Google, what's cool is like if you do a Google ad and it's video, they'll actually show it on.

Even without having to have a big YouTube channel or something like that they showed across both platforms because they're connected. Interesting that you can play in both worlds at the same time. But again, both work. But I'm definitely seeing a shift towards Google starting to, outpace Facebook.

With practices at least, and even with our own business with PT Biz. So I thought I was shared with you guys a little tactical information tactical Thursday podcast that we're dropping on you guys. And I hope this help hope, I hope this helps you make an informed decision about where you're spending your money.

Because, we have small businesses. We can't afford to be wrong. Not as much as big hospitals and things like that. We just, we have to be very efficient with our ad spend, with our time and our energy, with our, what we're learning, what we're putting money behind. So hopefully this helps you.

And as always, guys, thanks so much for listening and we'll catch you.

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Hey, real quick before you go, I just wanna say thank you so much for listening to this podcast, and I would love it if you got involved in the conversation. So this is a one way channel. I'd love to hear back from you. I'd love to get you into the group that we have formed on Facebook. Our PT Entrepreneurs Facebook group has about.

4,000 clinicians in there that are literally changing the face of our profession. I'd love for you to join the conversation, get connected with other clinicians all over the country.

I do live trainings in there with Yves Gege every single week, and we share resources that we don't share anywhere else outside of that group.So if you're serious about being a PT entrepreneur, a clinical rainmaker, head to that group. Get signed up. Go to facebook.com/groups/ptentrepreneur, or go to Facebook and just search for PT Entrepreneur. And we're gonna be the only group that pops up under that.