E674 | Why You Need Content Marketing In 2024

In this episode of the podcast, Doc Danny explores the significance of content marketing for physical therapy clinics and local service-based businesses. Drawing from her own experience in building Athletes' Potential over the last ten years, he shares valuable lessons learned.

One of the key takeaways from the discussion is that content marketing involves providing valuable information to educate people without directly asking for anything in return. This content can take various forms such as written articles, videos, or audio recordings. Doc Danny emphasizes the importance of creating content that caters specifically to the target audience or patients, rather than other clinicians.

Building trust and familiarity with potential clients takes time, and consistently providing valuable content is an effective way to achieve this. Doc Danny suggests various content ideas, including blog posts, podcasts, exercise videos, and recording/reusing local education events like workshops. He even highlights how artists like Beyonce and Taylor Swift repurpose live content to generate additional income.

To make content more effective, it is crucial to consider the "avatar" – the specific person or audience you want to reach. By writing or explaining things at their level of understanding, rather than targeting other clinicians, you can effectively connect with and engage your intended audience.

Content marketing not only helps improve search engine rankings by optimizing for common search terms but also provides value that warms people up to your business before they become clients seeking a solution. Doc Danny also emphasizes the value of recording local events, as this allows for repackaging and reusing the content in various marketing initiatives, such as social media, the website, or as opt-in content. This strategy positions the creator as an expert in their field, educating others.

Developing a consistent content strategy is crucial for visibility and building trust, especially when competing with other businesses. When combined with other marketing efforts, content marketing can also supplement word-of-mouth referrals.

Tune in to this episode to learn more about the importance of content marketing in the context of physical therapy clinics and local service-based businesses.

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Podcast Transcript

Danny: Hey, real quick, if you're serious about starting or growing your cash based practice, I want to formally invite you to go to Facebook and join our PT entrepreneurs Facebook group. This is a group of over 6, 000 providers all over the country. And it's a pretty amazing place to start to get involved in the conversation.

Hope to see you there soon. Hey, are you a physical therapist looking to leverage your skill set in a way that helps you create time and financial freedom for yourself and your family? If so, you're in the right spot. My name is Danny Mattei and over the last 15 years I've done pretty much everything you can in the profession.

I've been a staff PT I've been an active duty military officer physical therapist. I've started my own cash practice. I've sold that cash practice And today my company, physical therapy business helped over a thousand clinicians start growing scale, their own cash practices. So if this sounds like something you want to do, listen up, cause I'm here to help you.

Hey, what's going on doc. Danny here with a PT entrepreneur podcast. And today we're talking about content. Something that is a vague. Term, right? What is content? It can be anything. It can be written. It can be video. It can be audio. This is content it's information that people are paying attention to and learning something from right we talk about content marketing This is how you market to people through the education of things that you think that they would benefit from so as an example when I first started athletes potential.

I actually started it in technically the first Month that I saw patients was the beginning of June 2014. But starting in January of that year, I had started creating a blog content for our website. I wrote two to three blog posts a month, and then I started doing YouTube videos that were really just Videos that I was banking to be able to use as home home exercise videos for patients.

And at the time I was in Columbus, Georgia, and I had started to see just a handful of people, probably six, seven people total over the course of the first six months that I started seeing anybody in a cash based practices was in Columbus, Georgia. Technically the first people I saw were actually in Columbus, Georgia.

But it, but I didn't really have a business. I was just seeing people on the side. Just seeing, Hey, if this works in Columbus, Georgia, it'll probably work in Atlanta, Georgia, right? So it's a bigger market. There's more people, more disposable income. And granted, Hey, Columbus, Georgia works great too.

Eric summer first down there, one of our, one of our mastermind clients. And he's doing a great job. So these mid markets, like I had, this belief that it would be easier in one place than the other. I actually don't think that's true, but at the time, that's what I was trying to test out.

For me, it came down to sharing knowledge, right? Sharing what I thought people cared about. And what I learned from content marketing was I was sharing information that clinicians cared about. And this is a big, this is a common mistake for clinicians is you share information at a level of understanding that is equivalent to what another clinician would need to know, or somebody that's like a high level.

trainer of some sort or coach, right? They find that stuff interesting. You understand what you're talking about when you're talking about why hip internal rotation is important in the squat, right? But the average person, you write an article about something like that. The average person probably isn't going to give a shit about it because they don't actually know what you're talking about.

They don't know what internal rotation is or did a hip even does that. And they just care like. Why does your hip hurt when you squat? Probably a far better title than why you need intro notation. You squat, right? So the mistake number one that we see with content marketing is that you are educating.

The wrong group of people you're going above the heads of the people that you want to work with very rarely is it below the level of somebody that you want to work with? When we talk about working with, patients these are people that do other things besides physical therapy and training.

These are people that are accountants or that are teachers. They work in lots of other fields. This isn't something that they spend time focusing on. That's why they're coming to work with you, but they need to have information chunked down in a way that makes. Sends to them. Otherwise, they're just going to bypass what you're talking about.

So for me, what would tend to actually caught on, which was interesting was the home exercises that I was doing that I was putting up on our YouTube channel. Again, mainly I was making these for my patients. I was doing like one exercise at a time describing what I wanted them to do in very simple explanation and detail of exactly what I'd want them to do for home exercises so that they could review it and make sure they were doing things correctly in between sessions that I would come and see them.

Go figure. What do you think caught on right? My, why you need hip rotation, intro rotation, wherever you squat, which is like too high level or this Exercise. It's like how to do a split squat correctly or something like that. Like something that was very simple. And directed towards my own patients.

It was definitely the videos because they were directed to my patients, right? They were directed to the right avatar. And your avatar is the person that you're making the information for. So when you go to create content, when you go to create anything, it's going to be educating somebody that you want to work with on a topic that you hope to be able to help them with, which by the way, if you listen to this podcast, guess what?

Content marketing is happening right now. It's like inception. It's a dream within a dream. Welcome to it. It's happening right now. I'm creating this for you, and I'm trying to distill down lessons learned over the last decade, and over the last, six, seven years now that we've been working with other clinicians with their businesses to hopefully help you And you start to see, Hey, this shit works.

This guy isn't a psycho. I think I might want to work with this guy's company. Maybe I should talk to their team. That's how it works. And it's a, it is, it takes a long time usually because I can't build trust with you in a few minutes. I can't build trust with you in one podcast. Even, it might be an hour long.

It's going to take weeks and months and that's fine because we're not going anywhere, and if you have a business that is a local. Service based business clinic. You need to take the same strategy, the long game, the long relationship content, education based marketing game is so great for a base of how you start to build relationships.

And it goes like this. It goes from them not knowing who you are to then becoming familiar. And they might be coming from a place of I have a problem. I'm looking for a solution. That's actually not that many people. That's probably one out of four, maybe less knows they have a problem. They're looking for a solution.

That's somebody that's like Googling hip pain, Atlanta, right? We're looking for somebody that's looking for. A solution to that problem in our area versus there's people that are on YouTube. There's people that are on Instagram, Facebook, and they're just living their life, man. They're looking at pictures of cats and their cousin's baby.

And they just happened to stumble upon a video you have that's talking about. Two exercises to help alleviate neck pain if you sit at a desk and you're like, Oh shit, my neck hurts when I sit at a desk, let me check this thing out. Next thing you know, Danny Mate doing some neck exercises.

You fumble around, try to do the same things. And all of a sudden, if you're like, wow, I feel like. marginally better. That was cool. And then you forget about it. But you're now warmed up to who I am, to who my clinic is. And now the next time that you see that there's association there with, Oh, that was helpful.

What else does this person have? And as long as we do a good job of continuing to add value to your life, continuing to add something to your life without asking for anything in return directly. And we wait. Eventually, You're going to be ready to say, yeah, I think it's time I got my neck looked at, or maybe your significant other is tired of you complaining about your neck and they book an appointment for you to go see somebody, but either way, eventually, if you do a good job providing value, you're going to create a positive association with that relationship that then is going to lead to.

Things like maybe they opt in for something on your website to learn more. Maybe it's like a deeper more robust piece of content or something that they want access to. Or maybe they call your clinic or they set up a time to talk to you, your staff about if you're a good fit to work with them or not, or maybe just get some general advice on I don't know what's going on with this.

And that turns into maybe you coming in for a visit and that visit turns into you deciding. Solve a problem through a plan of care. And now all of a sudden your neck pain is gone. And you say to yourself, man, I'm like 20 pounds heavier than I want to be, but like my knee hurts every time I try to run.

And now we move on to the next step, which is going to be, Hey let's work on performance improvement. Let's look at, let's look at wellness. Let's look at the holistic person. Let's talk about sleep and nutrition and movement and stress management. And now all of a sudden, a couple of years later.

Your life is in a completely different place from a health standpoint, and that all happened because you saw some video of some guy talking about why your neck might hurt if you're sitting there at your desk. That's how content marketing works, and what's interesting is there's multiple variations in which you can do this, right?

I'm talking about videos. This is what. It started to work really well for us. Unintentionally, like I said, I was putting videos out there just for my own patients and I didn't know how to list them privately or publicly. I didn't know shit about YouTube, so I just put them up. I posted them and I would share those links with with patients that I had.

After, a couple of years, we had like thousands of subscribers on YouTube that I didn't know who the heck they were or how they got there, but they would lead to us seeing patients from that as well. So that's an example of education based marketing that is intentional. Me actually.

Putting something together specifically to inform somebody. The other thing, like I had talked about previously, writing blog posts can be education, written content on a topic that you're trying to help somebody with, but you got to make sure that it is written to a client, potential client.

or patient, not to another provider. Otherwise, you're going to get providers that are going to either agree, most times, either agree or disagree with you. This is a great litmus test if you are writing to the right person. The first, probably dozen blog posts I wrote, all I got was either comments from clinicians that were like, yep, this is spot on, or comments from clinicians that were like, you're an idiot.

And there was no in between. That was it. But none of them. We're people that I was actually going to work with. There were all other clinicians. That means that my direction was wrong. My avatar was off and this is really common. So don't fall into that. But if you want to write blog posts, which you could totally do.

Hey, sorry to interrupt the podcast, but I have a huge favor to ask of you. If you are a longtime listener or a new listener and you're finding value in this podcast, please head over to iTunes or Spotify or wherever you listen to the podcast, and please leave a rating and review. This is actually very helpful for us to get this podcast and really help them develop time and financial freedom.

So if you would do that, I would greatly appreciate it. Now back to the podcast.

This is a great way for you to. Type out your thoughts, form, form your ideas, your own approach to how you're viewing things or what people need to do or not do based on whatever you're trying to teach them and do so in a way where they can read that online. And this also happens to be a really good way to create searchability online.

So these blog posts, they get indexed in search engines. And if you're writing them in a way that. Is related to what people are searching for in a specific area that you are making sure that you have in your blog posts, that it can help you rank for people that are searching for these things. This is how search engine optimization works, where people write content, rich blog posts or videos do the same thing.

And then when people search for things, they get. In terms of, Hey, we think you would, this would be good for you. This is what Google does. They're saying, Hey here's some links from top down. This is the one we think is most accurate or you're paying for it. That's what a Google ad is. It's a sponsored ad at the top where you show up in a map feature.

But if it's a good article, then it'll show up. If people are going to it, it becomes more and more of a trusted resource in Google, preferentially.

So it's a win, but again, you're still providing value. You're doing so in a way that is more written based, right? I talked about podcasts. This is something that even for us, like many of the practices we work with, they have local podcasts where they interview other people in the area, other providers, other health And wellness experts, sometimes their own patients they have interesting journeys and it's a great way to do networking locally to build your relationships with providers or with other business owners that you want to establish relationships with or curate relationships with and really highlight them, make them look good.

It's a great way to really maintain and build a local referral based relationship. But again, you're providing value to a certain group of people that are going to listen to this, or in some cases. Like we're talking about you're providing value to this other referral partner that you're then highlighting to your audience.

You're making them look good. Now they're getting visibility to their business through you. That's a huge plus one for them. The last thing, and this is something that previously last week I talked about going to see this this Beyonce movie where it was basically, it was like the concert.

It was like part of the concert. That she did and it was like an hour of like document documentary Footage from the behind the scenes of everything. I love shit like that documentary anything i'm into it And I started thinking about this, okay doc. This is something that You know beyonce did taylor swift did and they're making buttload of money off of Reproducing content that they already, basically reproducing something from a live event They already did so think about that for a second.

How smart is that? I said, okay i'm gonna do this show people are gonna pay a ton of money to come to these shows Because it's so hard to get a ticket. It's expensive but instead of like just that, I'm going to record this, I'm going to make a movie out of it. And then I'm going to, I'm going to put that up.

And now all of a sudden they take this show they've worked really hard on and they can recreate that into a movie that creates another income stream for them. And to me, it got me thinking about local marketing. And by local marketing I really am referencing like local education events.

Maybe you're coaching you're training coaches. Maybe you're doing some sort of like specific education for potential clients on whatever it is that you're good at. Let's say it's, let's say you work with runners and you do a running workshop. And let's say you do this at a running store, right?

So you're at a running store, you're doing this running workshop. Let's say it's an hour and. When you're done with that, you're done with it, right? Nothing else comes from that. If we were smart, like Taylor Swift and Beyonce. We would record that, and then we would have a chance to reuse that, chop it up, use it for short videos for longer videos.

Maybe there's something that you can send to potential clients that are interested in, working with you. Then there are runners. Maybe it's an opt in piece of content that now you can package up and you can have somebody opt in for on your site. I did literally hundreds of education events.

I didn't record and reuse any of them. What a dumb ass. What the heck was I thinking? I didn't even I didn't even realize that this was, something that I should be doing until I was watching a dang movie of somebody's concert that I'd already seen. And I thought to myself, shit, I've already seen this.

But it's still interesting because I am re watching. I forgot a lot of stuff that happened there. I remember the whole two hours and I definitely didn't see any of the behind the scenes stuff. So you got to think of how can we take these high level Marketing initiatives, which by the way, Taylor Swift, Beyonce, marketing geniuses, them, their team.

Unbelievable. Look at how much money the two of them brought in with their concerts and these movies this past year in 2023 and some of them are going to. I think Taylor Swift still has like other shows in Europe and things like that. But it's an astronomical amount. Genius. So smart. And recreation of kind of reusing content is such a smart way to do this.

So here's what I'm getting at for you from a local standpoint. The next time you do a local event, you do an education event, you're doing something cool, maybe where you're working with a group of runners that are like high level runners, maybe you have a private group of runners you work with that, you're doing running mechanic stuff with, or you're doing individual assessments, you can.

Mic yourself up, get somebody to take an iPhone and, hold it, or they can even get a gimbal. I think it called like the Osmos, a gimbal where it's like more fluid and they can actually just. Follow you around. You can talk through a stream of consciousness of what you're looking for or what you're seeing with that athlete.

Or if you're doing an education event, just go through it normally and have that person follow you around and they can get, the video of you and the people you're working with and location you're working with, it looks different. And now all of a sudden you have an hour's worth of raw video that you can either have somebody edit, you can outsource that to have somebody edit that and say, Hey, I'm looking to get, let's call it from this hour.

I want to try to get. 10 to 12 short one minute clips that are really good. And I'm going to use those in my marketing initiatives. On Instagram, you're going to use these as reels, or you're going to use these on your website in some way, or you can edit it and say, Hey, I want to repackage this into different modules.

And I'm going to use this as an opt in piece of content for people that come to my site. Or maybe it's like a good chunk of it. It's man, this really hit home. This is where I'm going to send to people that are on the fence about working with me. Maybe have somebody that even is a they're just an attendee and they're like, Oh my gosh, this is so helpful.

Like I didn't realize it was supposed to run like this or this and you can get that on video. And now all of a sudden you can reuse that in your own marketing, in your, on your website in so many ways, social media. If you're going to put the time into something, if you're going to put the time into going and actually doing local marketing, doing one of these events, educating, and you feel really confident.

And confident about your ability to educate other people, record that shit, reuse it, outsource it to an editor, edit it yourself. Or if you feel like you have time and you could do that, I can't do that, but somebody can do that. Outsource it, tell them what you're looking for, get it chopped up, use it in your social media, and it's going to help tremendously, way more.

Then just your standard. Hey, here I am talking to you about why your neck hurts. Like I talked about before that has its place. You could do that, but you mix that in and they see you as an authority as a subject matter expert because you are now educating other people. And if there's even a small group of people, let's say there's eight people there.

You look awesome in comparison to you just standing in your office by yourself. You look like somebody that all these people want to work with. They're all listening to, they're all paying attention to you. And I kick myself for the number of workshops that I did, and I didn't record a damn thing because I was, I didn't even think that of doing it.

And I'm sure there's plenty of people out there that are already doing variations of this. If you're not doing that, I think this is one of the easiest low hanging fruit ways for you to get content to use in your business is just to get the raw video of what you're doing anyway. Maybe it's as simple as following you around the clinic for a day.

You get somebody to follow you around the clinic. It's your day where it starts talking to them over your lunch break, in between patients about what you're seeing and whatever else. Get a day's worth of a video with your patients as long as they're cool with it. Make sure they sign off on it of what you're looking for, what kind of technique you're doing, talking through this stuff, talking to them, just having your day as a background information piece of content.

Very similar to seeing, in the Beyonce movie where she's talking about what she's looking for when she designs these sets or how they want to have the led. Background set up and how hard it is to put this thing together and take it apart. And they had to have three sets, three different sets that they would, it takes so long to put it together.

They would have to have two being built while they were doing a show in one city. So the next two cities they were building the entire set for these two other cities while the other show is going on. And then that show gets rotated to the third site and that's so interesting to me. It's oh my gosh, this is crazy, right?

But like Now I have even more of an appreciation for how crazy the led background lights were because now I know how hard it is for them to put it together and how long it took. So even for you, think of it as background information where they see the day to day they see behind the scenes of what's going on with you and how you run things.

And they get to see a little bit of you, or maybe it's your staff and the personality of your off or your office manager or the patients that you work with. And they're like, Oh man. That's similar to me. That's cool. I didn't know they worked with middle aged runners. They were just trying to run their first 10k.

Oh, that sounds like me. Now, all of a sudden you've built that rapport. You've built that trust. So think about this as you're looking at your content strategy going into 2024. If you're not doing any sort of content strategy, I highly recommend you start creating something that you're educating people on, putting it out there.

It may suck at first because you've never done it. Chances are probably not going to be very good. But everybody's bad at something when they start. That's how it works. I was bad at lots of things. I've definitely bad at content, and, but I got better and better. And as you do that for months and years, you get better at it.

And then, from there you get, you start to find your voice and it feels more natural and like you understand what to say and not to say and what things you want to get into. So you got to think, who's my avatar? What medium do I feel comfortable with? Is it writing? Is it video? Is it live education events that I can recycle?

All these things can be a part of your content strategy. But if you don't have a content strategy in some capacity in your business and your competitors do in your area, you're going to have a hard time winning because they're going to get more visibility. They're going to build more trust with people that don't really know each of you.

And the only way. If that can really work, let's say you do no content, you do no marketing whatsoever. You just have to be like the world's greatest clinician and have a team of the world's greatest clinicians and just be like viral from a word of mouth standpoint. But what if you're amazing at what you do and you have that virality of people referring people your way and you later on.

Some amount of education based content on top of that, not to mention, local marketing, like we're talking about. Maybe you sprinkle in some digital ads and things like that on top of it. And all of a sudden you're talking about a clinic that there's one guy that's really busy, like one clinician is really busy is schedules maxed out.

And now you have a clinic. That's a million dollar clinic that's not just built around you. That's the difference in terms of marketing and what happens. So content has to be a part of it. It's going to be just as big, if not bigger this year as it was last year, because people continue to view this as a channel in which they assign credibility, they look for answers on their own and they're searching for solutions to problems more and more in these channels.

So content is going to be huge in 2024. blog posts, exercise videos, recycled content from education events or day to day things that you're doing on a daily basis. All of those things can be massively helpful when you're constructing a content strategy for you to actually win and get really well qualified.

Clients that you're going to love working with, they're going to love working with you in 2024.

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