E475 | The Power Of Social Proof

One thing that I don't think people leverage enough in their businesses is social proof. It can be one of the most powerful tools in marketing and today I wanted to give examples of what I mean by this. Enjoy!

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Podcast Transcript

Danny: So I was having a conversation with one of our staff members about documentation and he had come over from a in-network practice that he was working at and he was talking about just how long it would take him to document and click through and the workflow and how, just how time consuming it was and how much easier it's been with the software that we use, which is PT everywhere.

And I know for us, we're very aware. Sort of time leaks within our staff and our own schedules. And it's just one of the worst things you can do is just waste time on things when you could be doing them more efficiently. One thing for us is we have to document. It's something we need to do and you need to do it as efficiently as you possibly can because that's where you're gonna save a lot of your time.

We were seeing our staff members save upwards of an hour a day as far as cleaning up his documentation, making it more efficient. What if you got an hour of your day back just from documentation? What if all of your staff did the same thing? Highly recommend you take a look at PT everywhere.

It's been a huge time saver for us and really has made a big difference in our efficiency of our practice. You can check 'em [email protected]. I think you're gonna really like what they have. 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? Dr. Danny here with the PT Entrepreneur Podcast. I'm going to apologize ahead of time. I I'm a little sick caught the fall flu here, over the last couple days If I sound weird, that's why. Or if I start coughing randomly same thing. But I wanted to record a podcast to talk about something that I think is one of the most powerful elements of marketing and something that I feel like people don't leverage enough and could definitely leverage more, and that is social proof.

I, if you think of social proof, I think the easiest way to look at this is Amazon. Amazon has done an amazing job creating social proof within their buying platform, and we all do this now. If you get on Amazon, and let's say you're looking for socks and you're like, all right, I need to get some new socks.

So you go on Amazon, you type in socks, and then you start looking at all the different options they have, which is a massive amount. Now what you're probably gonna do is look to see which ones have the most reviews? And that is based off of social proof, right? So you click on it and you start reading the reviews, and that gives you some inherent, I guess comfort in terms of, oh, these other people like this thing.

I probably will like these socks. And then you order it, right? But what you basically did was you trusted the opinion of a random stranger. On the internet. That's it. Versus let's say you saw a video of the person who owns that sock company talking about, how much time and effort they put into their socks and what type of materials in it, and how they stitch it together and all the, whatever, benefits of their sock.

You probably don't really care because that person's biased, right? They own the company. Of course, they want you to buy their socks. So you're not gonna put as much faith in that as you are in some random person that lives in Houston that says, these are the best socks I ever had in my life. And that is the way that our psychology and buying psychology works.

We want to know what does somebody that has no skin in the game think about this product or service? And that's where social proof comes into play. So well now for our businesses in particular, this is something where we can highlight social proof in a number of different ways. And I think it's easy to forget about this, especially as you get busy.

Because you have other things you need to do and you forget to start building and continuing to compound your social proof. But there's a few areas that really make it a big difference. One of those is Google reviews. Now, these help for a number of reasons. The more Google reviews you have, this is one of the first places that people are gonna.

Especially if they're searching in their area for your particular service. The more Google reviews that you have, the more highly your actual business page will rank in the map feature of Google, as well as show up in the the web browser, Google search as well. Once you have, I think it's five Google reviews, your business shows up with some orange stars next to the name of your business.

This is a big difference between three or four where it doesn't show anything. So you definitely wanna give five. There's five is where you get some orange stars and there's a little more visibility associated with that. What you want to think about with this is you want an overwhelming amount of social proof.

So much so social proof. The people start to question themselves for questioning whether they should work with you or not. And that is, is the key. So if you were to go to our practices Google Page and you look up athlete's potential and you can do this. We have I think 143 Google reviews, something like that.

And if someone is searching for, physical therapy or some similar term in our area, this is something that they're gonna see pretty frequently. And there's some pretty compelling social proof within those those reviews. That's something that's taken us a long time to build to this number.

But over and over again, when we get new patients, one of the first things that they say like, how'd you hear about us? Why did you decide to choose to work with us? It's 80% of the time, unless they're directly referred from somebody else, it's just yeah, my friend said you're awesome. Gotta work with you.

It's, it has something to do with the Google reviews that they read have something to do with them coming in. So that's a big one. And if you want to get more of those, First thing you do, you have to ask for them. You have to ask people if they'd be willing to do that. And especially if they have a Google account, let's say they have a Gmail account that, that's very easy for them.

Because if they don't, then they actually have to create one to leave to leave a review. So anybody with a Google, like a Gmail account, like that's a great person to ask cuz it'll be very simple for them to actually leave you a review. You can. Leave them an example of what, parts of of review usually encompass, right?

So you can actually say, Here's an example of what other people like a framework of how they would break it up. This is why I chose to work with this group. Here's where I was at when I started, here's where I was finished. This is the outcome. And give them a framework of what they can work through.

Cuz people get writer's block and they mean they're not very good at that. So you can give them an idea of what to write. That can be very helpful. So emailing them, making it very simple for them to be able to do that and give 'em an idea of what they should. That will actually help quite a bit as well as ideally not necessarily referencing just the provider, but more the business.

That's something that can help long-term as well as far as social proof for the practice versus social proof for the individual provider. The other thing that is beneficial, Is video video testimonial sort of case studies of people. This is something that we've done. We've done a few of these.

We've done two different sort of variations where we hired agencies, video agencies. We didn't even hire them actually. We did a trade out of services. They were patients of ours, so we did a trade out of services. We had 'em come in, shoot some video, cut it together into a cool. Patient story.

And those are on our website. And those are really compelling as well. And people will watch those. And people they put themselves in the shoes of that person. So if you have a patient that is a videographer or they do content or something to that effect you might be able to just trade out with them services and and you give 'em a 10 pack of visits or whatever and they.

Shoot a couple videos for you and it's a win-win. So that can be really beneficial too. And what we found is highlighting, not necessarily just like a straight testimonial, but really the story of like, why's this person like working to get back to what are they doing? Why is it important to them?

If it's a runner, why is running important to them? What did we help them get back to being able to do Do they choose to work with us? And what are they doing now? Think of like a framework of a movie or a really compelling story. That's what you want to have.

And video is very compelling for people because they, it attracts their attention. They can see themself in that person. It's just like watching a movie. So video can be really helpful for that. It's also something you can leverage. Via social media on your website, and even in directly in ads, if you decide that you want to put some ad dollars behind some of these videos that you have done that, that maybe are really, really good.

So those are the two areas that I think that you can really focus on from what we've seen that are Very beneficial as far as an ROI goes. And, but easy to forget about, especially the reviews. Like you're just, you're busy, you forget about it. You're trying to fulfill on all the stuff that you have going on.

But keep chipping away at that and try to get a, a few of those every single month. Don't try and get like 20 in one day, by the way, cuz that's actually a red flag. So don't email a bunch of people you know are gonna write your review and try to get it all in one day, that could actually shut your account down.

So try to drip it out and slowly accumulate those so it doesn't look fraudulent. And try to build up. Cuz if you look in your area, like who has, who in your area has the most. Google reviews. And that's similar to you. Like you want to be at the top of that or very close to that if you're very far behind.

Cause that will make a big difference and people will definitely review those. They'll look at those and it will be part of their buying decision. So hope this helps. Social proof is one of the most compelling parts of marketing that you can that you can have. So make sure that you're continuing to build those social proof assets that will help you a ton with marketing your.

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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.

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