Marketing Your Practice Podcast

00:00 Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening folks. Welcome to another episode of marketing, your practice podcast. The podcast where I get to simplify the marketing and the mindset necessary so that you can increase your income, your impact and your enjoyment in practice.

00:15 At the moment I'm deciding whether I'm going to upgrade my phone, my iPhone, the iPhone 13 is out. Now I'm telling myself that the reason I should update my phone is because the camera is apparently a lot better on the iPhone 13 and given that we've now got sunny, in our lives.

00:31 I'm justifying that the new camera is needed so I can take more photographs of my baby boy. That's probably the emotional reason.

00:39 I'm trying logically. There's lots of different reasons for this. Now as a part of me wanting to make this decision, what I've been doing over the last 48 hours is I've watched a bunch of YouTube clips.

00:48 I've been reading reviews and going in different forms and I'm listening and reading and seeing what people are saying about the camera.

00:56 That this sort of research that I've been doing actually has a name and it was a Google exec that named it about a decade ago.

01:03 It's called the zero moment of truth. And it's relatively new. We didn't do this kind of research before the internet was around.

01:11 Now, your and my patients do the same thing. Many of them before coming to visit us. They will jump on the socials.

01:17 They'll look at their Google reviews, your help reviews. They'll visit our website. They'll ask their friends. We need to know how to master and make the most of this zero moment of truth.

01:27 Now, I have an expert On Z-Mot, as it's called, his name is Paul McElwitz. He's a digital marketing expert, has his own agency, but he focuses on helping people, particularly with regards to this zero moment of truth.

01:38 And that's what we talk about in this episode. We talk about the importance and the growing need for you to optimize things like voice search.

01:45 What is it that people are really looking for in your social media? What your website should be doing and not doing?

01:51 And the very first steps to begin in this whole journey of maximizing this zero moment of truth. It's a great conversation.

01:58 It's a very important conversation. This is something that you can't afford to be missing out. Now during out this conversation throughout there with Paul, Paul talks a little bit about a dashboard that he and his company have that help bring all this together.

02:12 He was telling me after the episode is that you can just get a hold of the dashboard. You don't have to use your services on going and to just have the dashboard that manages this all at once for you.

02:22 It's incredibly cheap. It's less than two hundred bucks a month to help you with all of that. If you're wanting to investigate this more, first of all, listen to the episode and then you can get a free trial of the dashboard, but he was a hell of a nice guy.

02:35 I really enjoyed my chat with Paul and I think you'll find this episode really valuable. And I'm going to buy the phone too, okay?

02:41 I'll take some photos. You can tell me if they look any different than what my previous photos did. All right, let's chat with Paul.

02:46 See you in there. Welcome to the Marketing Your Practice podcast, where we guide natural health and wellness experts through the pitfalls of marketing.

02:54 Each episode, you'll learn simple, effective, easily actionable and heart-centred marketing strategies. And here's your host, Angus Pike. Paul Macawitz, welcome to the Marketing Your Practice podcast.

03:06 How are you, my friend? I'm doing great, man. How are you doing? I'm doing good. Now, I'm going to start off.

03:11 I've got a very important question for you to begin with. Okay, a little off topic, maybe. But first, tell me this.

03:16 How many holds in one have you had? Oh my gosh, you're actually hitting a pain point early. I have none.

03:23 Really? I have none. No, I have an elbow truss. So I have a two on a par five. But not a single hole in one.

03:31 I've got probably a dozen and a half balls that I've left within a foot on the hole. But not a single hole in one.

03:39 I've witnessed three. So my group certainly gets that lucky charm for me, but unfortunately none for me. Yeah. Well, let me share my tale of woe with you.

03:51 I'm playing the 17th holiday golf course here in Melbourne. And I hit the ball out of bounds on the first.

03:58 It's part three. And then I hold out on my next ball. So I hold out for four. So there's part of my brain that wants to go, well, oh, sorry, it was a three.

04:07 So it was part of my brain that wanted to go, we have had a hole in one. I go, no, I haven't.

04:11 It was with my next ball. I feel I would rather not have had it. So, for our guests as they'll learn, Paul has had many backgrounds.

04:21 We'll talk about some of these backgrounds in the army, but as a golf pro as well. And then the work that you're doing now is in digital marketing.

04:30 In fact, let's jump into it now. But can you give our listeners perhaps a little bit of a background of your journey of what brought you to where we are right now?

04:37 Yeah. Yeah, so I'm actually pretty active in the military veteran entrepreneur community now. So anybody that knows me wouldn't have known us in the military until probably like two or three years ago when I actually branched off and started my own company.

04:54 I didn't have the greatest military experience. I was, after 9-11, I enlisted a few months afterwards, you know, felt a little bit of patriotic My duty, I was also a freshman in college, changed my major four times, had no idea what I wanted to do, figured this would give me a little bit of direction

05:11 , something along those lines. So I spent three years in the service, just a few months after getting out of basic and AIT, I was in Iraq, I spent a little over a year in Iraq back in 2004.

05:23 So we were the first artillery unit there. So I, you know, a while, a lot of West time being deployed and then I spent a last year or so, you know, I had a very odd military experience.

05:35 The last year when my unit all got moved to Washington State and I was stationed in Fort Polk, Louisiana as soon as I told them I wasn't re-enlisting, they said, well, we got to find something to do with you for a year now because we're not going to relocate you if you're not staying in.

05:49 So I played oppositional forces for soldiers that were training to go to Iraq. So I basically played laser tag and yelled in whatever Arabic I could remember to to discombobulate that the forces were training.

06:04 And so I did that for a while. When I got out of the military, I actually became a golf pro.

06:11 I always enjoyed golf and in the military, my sergeant, his favorite PT was called golf PT. So instead of how many strokes it takes you to get to the hole.

06:22 It was how fast you got to the hole. So you took a three wood, a seven iron and a potter.

06:27 We all teed off at the same time and write your name on your ball, y'all. Rip your drives, pick up your clubs and you take off.

06:32 So it's a bit of a dangerous game, especially if you got someone that hits a ball off into the woods, the first one, and you're all the way up on the green and balls are flying in it at you.

06:39 But it was great, and truly fine-tuned some skills, definitely the mental side of the game. It helped out, because when you're playing that fast, you're not really thinking.

06:50 And after that, I saw work for a company out here in the U.S. D*** Sporting Goods for a while in their golf department decided, you know what, I think I'll take a try at a golf career and pass the PGA Playability Test and become an assistant pro for a few years.

07:06 It was great. It was awesome. I was giving lessons all day and registering 180 rounds a year. It was a fantastic job.

07:14 I just couldn't make any money doing it. Yes. So that kind of brought me into some different career paths with exploring goods.

07:22 I have always had a passion for helping people, truly helping people to optimize their situation. And when I came to like a little kid coming to buy a baseball mitt or you know this old Duffer coming out trying to find a new driver that's going to finally fix the game or things like that.

07:38 you know I always enjoyed those conversations of really you know getting into somebody's passion and and figuring out you know what was gonna serve them best and you know staying within budgets and and all those things so I did the retail thing for a while and then I had a gentleman that I played golf

07:53 with that's actually a common common theme throughout my career is a guy I played golf with. He was opening an indoor golf simulator driving range bar restaurant entertainment center.

08:05 And with my experience in management, he needed somebody to come around in the entire thing. And so I came in and then ran the entire thing.

08:11 And I was running indoor leagues, all winter and like drive range contests, all summer and things like that. Eventually I got really sick of being in the Northeast.

08:23 I'm from Buffalo, New York originally. So I moved out to New Mexico and was playing around with golf. Metagogy who wanted to open a Scooter rental company.

08:32 And this was before, you know, I'm not sure you guys probably have some sort of version out there, but we've got bird and lime and all that out here for these Scooter rentals.

08:42 Yeah, yeah, so Scooter as in like the little electrical scooters, not the kind of motorbike ones, yeah. Well, we were renting out where 49 CC, so a little bit more bespoke style, a little bit bigger, not the tiny little ones, but I took this guy's company and you know, put in a good chunk of my own money

09:00 , we bought a bunch of scooters and I opened five locations throughout New Mexico. I was just a little pop-up shop.

09:06 We ran everything off social media. Our entire company has run off of Google Maps or Google forums, Google Docs, and some scripts that I wrote for that.

09:16 And so I was kind of learning this digital marketing thing and how to integrate some of these awesome new technologies to really be efficient in what we were doing.

09:25 And eventually I got a job offer in New New York City, which was always a big dream of mine to go and live in New York City to work for a startup digital marketing company called Main Street Hub.

09:36 And when I got there, I was, I think I was like the 17th, 18th employee. When I got there, and by the time I left two years later, there were over 250 people in the New York City office.

09:48 And we had an entire other office in Austin. and so we were in the Inc. 500 fastest growing company two years in a row and I was a marketing executive with them.

09:57 So I really like it when it comes to understanding how to optimize social media and a big thing that we did with them was reputation management. You know how to use Yelp and your Google business listing and you know all these different directories that you're on.

10:09 So I got you know a real fast education in small businesses and that also really it took at my heartstrings quite a quite a few ways as far as interacting with small business owners and entrepreneurs.

10:22 And, you know, I always had that feeling a bit between working at the golf location, you know, having my own scooter company, you know, I felt like the wait of what it was to be an entrepreneur, but now I was talking to dozens, hundreds of entrepreneurs about the struggles that they were facing with 

10:38 their marketing. And I truly started finding a passion And then the last few years have been very interesting about my now wife in New York City six months later we moved to Miami together.

10:52 I started working with a different digital marketing company that focused mostly with attorneys and they did website design and SEO was more their bread and butter.

11:01 So I came from reputation management and social media to SEO and website and then my wife got her dream job.

11:08 I was listening to Los Angeles, which is what we are today. She's in the hospitality industry, so this is a great place for me for her, me doing digital marketing.

11:16 I can basically work from anywhere. So when we came out here, I opened a new office for that company that was in Miami.

11:23 A little bit after that, I felt, you know, I spent all, I spent my entire career, you know, making money for this guy with his golf company and making money for this guy with a scooter company and making money for these digital marketing companies.

11:35 And I was like, I think I have the skill set. I think I have the demeanor, the personality, the drive to go and do something out of my own.

11:44 And so a little bit, it would have been October 2019 as one I launched a hashtag Smart Marketing. Yeah, what a great story.

11:53 You've moved a lot over that time. From one side to the other up and down, you've done some miles. I know we touched on beforehand.

12:02 And, you know, I fell in love with marketing. When I kind of had this realization that so many small businesses, you know, entrepreneurs get into business because they've got a skill.

12:14 You know, it's a co-op actor want to help people. You know, whether it's, you know, my family story early on, my mum always wanted to open up her own little kind of clothes store to sell clothes and homewares and stuff like that.

12:28 And sadly, for many different reasons that business ended up almost making us bankrupt. You know, my folks were both schoolteachers beforehand.

12:37 I've actually never told the store in the podcast. You know, my folks were both schoolteachers. It was a dream particular of my mum's.

12:45 And she had a great skill in being able to pick clothes and wonderful taste. But there was never any marketing.

12:52 Never. I look back on it now, no conversation on it. It was as though you had to just sit at the door of the business and pray that people came in, and she was good with some people, and there was some word of mouth, but it's a really slow way.

13:07 I often think that if I had the skills then that I have now, how fun it would have been to market that business.

13:13 And it's so sad that the reason that so many businesses fail,  is not that they don't have a good product.

13:21 I mean, some of them need some work. Let's be clear about that too. But a lot of them are really good at what they do, and they just, You know, they just need more people to know about them.

13:30 One of the things I was super interested in chatting about today is this, I'm a big fan of an acronym, so we'll get straight into, as we like to say here, Z-MOT, but you'd like to call it kind of Z-MOT there as well.

13:45 Why don't we talk about the introduction, so for people that are listening, Z-M-O-T or Z-MOT, as it's often referred to?

13:54 But tell us about that and why our listeners, our co-practors need to understand this concept and what they can do to make the most of it.

14:03 Yeah, this concept came out from Google actually about 10 years ago. So this isn't something that I've brought out. This isn't something that this brand new concept that people are trying to introduce.

14:14 This has been talked about for a while, and it gained popularity pretty quick. And then it slowed down a bit mostly because people got really heavy into, oh, let's just advertise on social media, let's run a paper, click advertising, let's do this.

14:29 And the concept of the zero moment of truth didn't gain as much popularity as I would have thought. Now, COVID-19 amped that up a ton, mostly because more and more buying desserts are being made online strictly through comparison in shopping.

14:47 So to give you an idea with the zero moment of truth is the traditional marketing style, it was always a three step process.

14:53 There was the first moment of truth, which is basically your awareness, like I see that commercial for Coco Puffs, you know, or for that long year you're discharging, you know, something, something makes me aware of a product.

15:04 The second moment of truth was always the shelf experience. So this is, I'm now at the grocery store. I'm looking at Coco Puffs and Fruit Loops.

15:12 I remember that Coco Puff commercial, I'm going to grab that one and try them out. The third moment of truth was always the experience.

15:19 And this is where, you know, I've eaten my cocoa puffs. I've now decided these are awesome. I want to tell the world about it or that I'm never going to buy them again.

15:27 So, you know, that traditional marketing was a three step process. As the internet gained popularity and as they access the information has increased.

15:38 We now have this zero moment of truth, which is talked kind of like right, right in between the first and the second.

15:44 They kind of lodged in there, which is this comparison step. So now I become aware of a product or a service or a business and what do I do?

15:53 I'm gonna Google them. I'm gonna look at the reviews. I'm gonna look at the community that they've built on social media.

15:59 I'm going to look at their competitors. I'm gonna see what the best value is, whether I'm buying on price or I'm buying on convenience or buying on location through mapping systems.

16:10 So the zero moment of truth is just ensuring that, you know, when you are compared to all of those other businesses services in your industry that you truly stand out, you look the best. Your perception online is matching the reality of what people are seeing in house.

16:27 And honestly, it's a really sad situation that so many businesses don't grab onto that and take control of that perception because, you know, one thing I say to our clients a lot of the time is, you know, perception is reality.

16:39 If you're a 2.5 out of 5 on Google, there's a reason that people aren't choosing you and not going to your business and not, you know, you're losing business to your competitors and your businesses and growing in the way you imagine.

16:54 It's because of who you are to every single person that's finding you. And so, So the media that people will consume in that zero moment of truth, is it like our website is one of those pieces of media as well, can we count that?

17:11 Or is it really kind of external to us? Or does it not matter? No, your website is definitely included in it.

17:19 Especially anything that somebody could pull in it to form an opinion about your business online. And so if I'm going to your Google Business listing, you know, that better be the right website link to it.

17:29 Or, you know, you could even have a particular page linked to that Google Business listing. So you know, you know, that's what people are seeing from it.

17:37 You just want to control that, control that perception as best you can. And really your website is the main hub of it.

17:43 That's the one place online where you control everything. You know, it's not exterior reviews or or clients added images or anything like that, your website is your hub.

17:55 So that should truly reflect the personality of the business, that should reflect your value points in very clear ways, that should reflect the conversion points that you feel are most important for your business for chiropractors, that could be signing up for a free consultation, that could be, you 

18:10 now, Paul now, that could be, you know, fill out a form submission, you know, there's multiple conversion points that you could go to, but in designing your website, in designing what in website design is called the top of the fold.

18:23 It's like the very first thing I see comes from newspapers, you know, you've always put the top headline on the top of the fold.

18:29 So when I get to your website, that top of the fold, what emotion is that conveyed to me? Like what direction is that pointing me as far as a buying decision?

18:37 If I'm seeing smiling faces or I'm seeing like five stars or I'm seeing something that is going to cue in my mind, Oh, this is the best option for me.

18:44 You've got that eyeball on your website at that moment. And you better be going for a conversion. There better be one button call right there.

18:52 There better be a form submission just underneath that image. Eyeballs are very, very difficult to get online. People pay tens of thousands of dollars for paper click advertising.

19:03 And then you send them to a landing page. And when I see a global landing page, I'm like, oh man, it hurts my heart.

19:08 Like I know how much money those people, especially like I work with medical and attorneys. So attorneys right now in Los Angeles to be like personal injury attorneys for Los Angeles PPC right now it's about like $180 a click.

19:22 So I mean talk about that money you're just flushing on the drain if you know one item that you're talking about the website and the main conversion point that you have is not is not taken care of you know that's a that's a big red red flag for me.

19:36 Yeah, I feel like so many of the co-practors that I speak with, many of the health practitioners have kind of forgotten about their website.

19:45 It's like it's all 2000. You know, that's a 20 year old website. It's all about social media now. And so when I look at their website, it clearly hasn't had anything done to it since then.

19:55 You know, it looks dated, the photographs on there, it's slow to load all of these kind of things and they've put a lot of their effort it into social media there, and I wonder, some of the challenges now in terms of attribution, the idea of, you know, when, you know, for the last 25 years in my practice

20:14 , when we had a new patient come in, coming to see us, one of the things I wanted to say is, hey Paul, how did you hear about us?

20:20 I wanted to find out, the challenge now is that you might say, well, I, you know, look, I just did a Google search, but you probably didn't just do a Google search, you did a Google search, I popped up, you might have looked at my Google ranking in there, my Google my business, you jumped on my website

20:35 , you had a look through there, maybe it looked at my social media as well, that we're looking across all of these things and it's this whole suite that people are looking at that we need to make sure that we're managing.

20:48 Is there a, like if somebody was starting from scratch, is there a hierarchy of what you would tell them to make sure they clean up and get sorted first?

20:59 Yeah. So the very first two places I tell just about any business is one, your Google business listing. That is the most important listing that you're out there.

21:07 By far, anybody that's taking map based buying decisions, people are lazy, we like to find things that are nearby us.

21:16 The Google also, by the way, has done an amazing job of expanding out the features and functions of a Google business listing.

21:24 They're now product cards on their service cards on there, you can utilize badges, tags for your business like we're tags as a veteran own business and so we come up you know higher and in things like that where you know whether you're LGBT community friendly you know all women own business there's all

21:42 These different tags you can put on there. The product cards though are incredibly important. Yes. So the fact that businesses don't utilize these more really blows my mind because they show up right in your map listing.

21:54 Another thing that's very important is you can actually post to your Google business listing. Yes. So when people think all the time, oh, I've got to put this special that I'm putting on Facebook out there, well, what about that person that's looking on maps and they click on your listing?

22:08 If you're posting on your Google business listing, that's showing up right there. If you've got a special discount you're posting or a value proposition that you want to ensure people know a conversion point.

22:18 I mean, right on those service cards, the top button on it is called. So you put your phone number right on it and then you put a link on on that to the individual page on your website So now you're not just sending them to your homepage then well who knows what they're doing at that point But if you're

22:32 sending them to say I've lower back pain and they click on that one thing takes them to a blog page about lower back pain. They're now utilizing you as a resource for information and that now, you know, you want to talk about that trust factor. Who are they gonna choose?

22:46 Well now I've already established myself as an expert, and it all came directly through Google Business Listing.

22:53 I didn't even search, you know, Google Organics, necessarily. I didn't find you on social media. It's from a map system. And so, like, utilizing those resources is incredibly important.

23:03 So, Google Business Listing first, here in the States, definitely Yelp. Yes, because a whole lot of people don't know, so you can have a little test yourself.

23:13 If you have an iPhone, I'm an Android user, so I can't really do it myself. But if you have an iPhone to say, hey Siri, you know, find me a chiropractor in my area and see where that information comes from.

23:23 Voice search is increasing exponentially every year, people are using more and more voice search. Apple doesn't have their own mapping system fully yet.

23:31 And so it piggybacks off of TripAdvisor, Yelp and a few other sources, the main one being Yelp. Yes. So when Apple Maps opens up, you'll notice there's not a whole bunch of little red dots like it does on Google Maps, it's actually little Yelp logos everywhere.

23:45 So if you haven't claimed that listing, if you haven't optimized the amount of information you can put on there, it's funny.

23:51 I actually had one of my doctors that I worked with, we were doing some listings and I set up a listing breakdown of where information was not complete or where we felt some areas of need were.

24:05 And he's like, no, my help listing looks fine. I got my name, my phone number, my address, and my website.

24:10 I'm like, yeah, that's great. You don't have a single picture. You don't have any client testimonials, you don't have any reviews, you haven't answered any reviews.

24:17 You haven't put the proper badges on it like, why would you not deliver that information? All of those are value propositions that, you know, who knows what client could potentially see that.

24:27 And that is the motivating factor to making that buying decision. So first, I always point to Google business listings. Next, I always point to Yelp.

24:36 Third would be industry specific directories for my doctors, it's, you know, Zachdoc, rate MD, you know, areas in that health grades is another big one.

24:47 So, it's optimizing those listings. For one, those listings are high authority sites. And, you know, we can get into SEO and all those pieces that get a little bit more technical.

24:58 But Google basically places an authority score on every single website out there. And if you have a high authority site that links back to your site, or your site's linked to a high authority site, Google sees more value in you as a business, in your online presence, you appear higher in search rankings

25:12 , you appear on higher maps. It's just like a win-win-win scenario. And then lastly, I, you know, before I even addressed the website or anything along those lines, I do a directory search because if you're not you know listed on, you know, Manta or HotFrog 4-square, like there's all these different directors

25:34 out there, chances are nobody's going to go to four squares and then decide to go to your business. It's just unlikely.

25:40 However, that's the link right to your site. That's more authority on your site. You're going to peer higher and search more searches.

25:45 There's one, two, never know. Like, you know, you could have an elderly lady who's been using Yahoo for 15 years now.

25:53 She's not swaying and so she's going to Yahoo Maps and she's certain there. So if you don't have a listing on Yahoo who business, then you just missed out on the client.

26:02 And there's services out there, you know, Yaxx is the perfectly fine one. I think signups and other really good ones.

26:09 We can get into this in a little bit, but one of the big things that was the biggest value proposition I wanted to bring to the market when I started Hashtag Smart was our dashboard, which actually has an API connection built in with the Yaxx backbone.

26:25 So you can control all of your business listings right through our dashboard. So it's really, I mean, my whole goal was to simplify and make digital marketing as efficient as possible.

26:38 I had heard countless stories like, oh, I had this guy do my business listings 15 years ago, and you know, they're all incorrect now.

26:44 And like, and every incorrect or broken link on your website, you know, Google penalizing you. You're showing lower and lower rankings now.

26:52 So finding a way to clean that up, finding a way to manage it in a simple way. That was one of my big, big goals in starting my own company.

27:01 I think you're kind of touching a couple of points there too that I did a training recently where I went through just a little checklist of people's social media, just to make sure links and stuff, astounding how many of them had the wrong phone number on there, one gal had been paying thousands of bucks

27:19 a month for somebody else to manage this, getting no results. A wrong phone number was on there, like it's, you know, little things like that as well.

27:27 I'm interested in your opinion on this, particularly with regards to Google my business. I wonder whether Google is wanting that to virtually become our new website, whether they're pushing towards as they're expanding information, I can post on there, I've got images on there, it's opening up

27:42 Its ability, where do you think it's going long-term for your GMB listing? So Google's already, if you pay attention to kind of what they're at the different types of products that they roll out, so like Google Workplace, which replaced their old Google Suite, it's actually now a much more robust complete

28:01 company management program. I could very easily see them rolling out a CRM at some point, you know, some email marketing systems, like they're going to keep going in that direction.

28:10 As far as websites go, they've already released Google sites, so it's, I would say , comparable to GoDaddy websites. I'm not a big advocate of them just because they're, it's kind of taking your business and putting it into a cookie cutter box and saying, oh, I hope this works for you.

28:27 It's not providing a dynamic experience. You know, you can't really do too many in-late videos or things like that.

28:33 Those cool conversion points that I like to push, but I mean, they're already going in that direction. websites themselves, though, with the massive expansion of multiple extensions you can use.

28:48 So, getting into like .us.io's, you know, things like that. We're going to keep ending up with more and more different variations of websites and things like that.

28:57 I don't think websites will ever completely go away. I think that they're going to become more of a specialized hub.

29:08 I could see that, though, because a lot of buying decisions, you know, you're right. I don't have to go to a website to get the information I need anymore.

29:15 You know, I can get all that right from a Google business listing or a Yelp page. But I think that for the foreseeable future, the websites are still incredibly important because that is your centralized hub of information.

29:26 So maybe in five, 10 years, but I'm also not going to concern myself with that too much until the writings on a wall a bit more.

29:34 If there was something that I would say is much more pressing, I would say voice search. There's much more pressing than websites and things like that.

29:42 So I'm assuming if you're voice searching through an Android or Alexa, are they going over to the Google map side of things to find the information there too?

29:54 Or where they're broken down into they all have their own independent contracts. So Apple generally works with Yelp generally on a lot of their data mining.

30:07 Google has their entire own system. So when you're on a Google home or asking you to pay Google on your phone, I have to be sure mine's not listening here.

30:14 I got everything off. So Google's all tied into its own system. Apple basically and Yelp is kind of their own ecosystem.

30:23 Alexa also uses Yelp. They don't use the Google system. So Alexa's a little bit more it pulls from multiple data sources.

30:32 Apple releases mostly like two or three of them. It's Yelp trip advisor, the biggest ones. Alexa is much more buried in everything they do, but it's not on the Google side.

30:43 So you just kind of, I mean, there's programs and systems out there that you could say, like, okay, optimize for Alexa.

30:49 And I want Alexa to know this particular business information and you can go right into the system and change it.

30:55 So, you know, it does offer the business some control over things like that. But so many businesses just don't know to do that right about.

31:04 Let's jump on over into socials. Now we've talked a little bit about Google my business, you know, third-party kind of reviews through e-opened, TripAdvisor, etc.

31:15 What do our societies need to look like? Is there a preference between Facebook and Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube? How present do we need to be there?

31:24 What kind of content should we be posting? Yeah, so social media, it's an interesting beast. So what's funny is I find myself the more that I work in digital marketing, the less and less I want to have a look at social media sites.

31:38 Yes. However, I'm also very efficient in what I do and I certainly have an entire team that does all of the social media work, so I don't have to.

31:46 But the biggest thing around social media is building community. Regardless of the platform, what you're trying to do is convey to people why you made the right decision for them to choose for their buying decision making process here.

32:01 Like why am I going to choose this character over another? If I say I could go to a character's Facebook page and I see that I'm talking about American football, I love the Buffalo builds.

32:15 I'm a die hard bills fandom and you're drinking out of my bills cup. So like if I see somebody that likes football, like I know I'm probably going to like this dude.

32:23 Like, or, you know, I spend a lot of money with fellow veterans' own businesses. And, you know, if I see that and that's the community that they're part of, you know, that's, that's a great thing.

32:34 One of the things that I, I look to do for a lot of my clients, like, find partnerships around them or find something about yourself personally that you can interject into your online presence.

32:47 So one of my attorneys, he's really big into getting back and doing talks for local youth communities within partnership with the police station in his local area.

32:59 So when he goes and does these talks, I take advantage of that, like either I go or I have one as people do it or send somebody to go out there and record it.

33:07 So, you know, we've got this amazing moment of this guy, he's a really great guy in his community and people wouldn't necessarily know this about him and his business unless we've portrayed online somewhere and he's too, we'll say maybe too proud to to reserve so you don't really want to do yeah, too

33:26 modest to you know he doesn't really want to do it himself so I you know I have to push some of my clients to say like it's okay to tell the world that you like this thing it's okay to you know to display your passions online that's as half the reason people are going to choose you online is because 

33:41 you're relatable because they can understand you and so if you're real, you're gonna build stories or even just formulate your initial social media persona that you want to use.

33:54 I wouldn't stray too far from being authentically you. On our social media, what's fun about it is I post about Marvel movies because I dig Marvel.

34:08 We're doing our website right now and like my position as CEO slash Captain America. That's one of my guys called the Army veteran and entrepreneur and like I'm everything America here.

34:23 So I now post about football. I'll post about you know and anything that I that I personally enjoy would enjoy our conversation about you know would enjoy working with somebody that's also passionate about like there's no reason not to put it out there.

34:38 The other thing that I tell a lot of people about on social media is just whatever that fear is that's only and we are I mean to to avoid the top like too too much here but we are very like fear-based society right now people are very scared of their perception people are very scared of you know what

34:58 Anything they put out there it's gonna come back and invite them at some point I mean don't let whatever that fear is like keep you from being you so like if you if If you're acting in fear, you're really not able to spread your gifts to the world.

35:15 And you became a chiropractor because you want to help people because you want to positively impact people's lives around you.

35:23 Don't let that fear of what somebody might think or this bad comment you potentially could get on a post. You know, hold back from maybe the other 20, 30, 40 people that see it and relate to it in that sense.

35:34 And you want to engage with you in a business because of that. So as far as what platforms to be on and everything, I mostly look at demographics.

35:42 I look at, you know, say you're a chiropractor and you find that your favorite type of client to work with is, you know, a woman who's 35 to 45.

35:52 You know, then they need to be on Pinterest. You know, Pinterest is great for that. That's, you know, it's put pictures up of, you know, top five ways to reduce back pain, you know, top five ideas to, you know, make your life more vibrant in a stuffy workplace, you know, like those types of posts, you

36:08 now, if that's the demographic you like, and I talk about that a lot with my clients is like, who is your ideal client?

36:15 Like if they're going to tell me, I, you know, I enjoy working with women in this age group where I enjoy working with, you know, 20-year-olds at our work, you know, just getting into the world.

36:24 Awesome. Let's hit Instagram. Let's do that. So it's tough to kind of pigeonhole and say, like, this is the social platform you should be on because you always gotta look at the demographic that you're looking for, and you got to look at the community that you want to build around you.

36:37 Yeah. I think if we go back to what we're saying most at the beginning of those stages of marketing, where stage number one is awareness, then that's what we want to be using social media for.

36:49 Because most people aren't there to make a buying decision, not straight away, there's the occasional person, but it can be a beautiful tool for awareness.

36:57 You know, one of my marketing mantras is when all things are even, we like doing business with people that we like, which is kind of what you said before about the guy who's the Bill's fan, you know, fellow veterans, you know, when we have similar values and similar likes, that's, and so it's, I have

37:16 to encourage people, it's social media, and so it's important that we share a bit of that. And then I'm also, because this idea of this fear in around what will people say, will I get some stinky comments, those kind of things there are hundreds of practitioners that I kind of work directly with who 

37:34 are posting multiple times a week. So tens of thousands of posts a year and maybe less than five do we get really, it's so rare.

37:46 It's probably not going to happen that somebody says something to you that you're not going to be able to brush off.

37:51 We just, my wife, Paul's a co-practorist, well, we just had a little real-go viral. It's like 1.1 million views. It's mad, right?

38:01 But the comments in that are crazy. Like, you're read through them and so my wife is like, she's like, oh my God, should I delete this?

38:10 I'm like, no, babe, it's some nutter, you know, obscene stuff, but you know, but when 1.1 million people watch it, I said, babe, there's going to be some crazy people in there, and they're from all over the place, they're two.

38:24 It's like, it's okay. Let it go. Move on. It's probably never going to happen to you, but it is one of those things that kind of really holds us back as well.

38:36 If we talked about it a little bit at the beginning, perhaps even before hitting the record button, I'm always a fan of the fact that we need to have some basic skills ourselves as chiropractors.

38:48 You know, we can delegate this. And I think when we delegate this stuff completely blindly, you end up like those scenarios beforehand with people having wrong phone numbers on staff, broken links, all those kinds of things there too.

38:59 But if the time has come that somebody's kind of looking for some help, what are the things that they should consider before choosing a digital strategist like yourself?

39:10 What are the checklists they should go through when looking to work with someone? Yeah, that's a great question. So when I was building out the processes, I'm a big process guy.

39:22 I have lots of flowcharts. Love a good flow chart, but our biggest one is actually our onboarding side. So even though we're growing quite a bit as a company, I still prefer to be the final step in the sales process because I want to make sure that they know who we are as a business, what our values 

39:39 are, and what and set the right expectations for them. But by far, the biggest process we have is our onboarding.

39:46 And I think that you know a lot about a company real quick by how attentive they are to your needs early on and how much they actually invest time and effort into getting to know you as a business to be portraying you online.

40:02 So with that, I'm boarding calls. I try to keep them for around an hour. Most of them, I would say, probably like an hour and a half to two hours.

40:10 And if it's like a big client or a medical practice just that really doesn't have anything online yet. I like to go either to them in person or just do them by myself, just to really get a feel for their business.

40:24 And I pull out some of those questions that probably most marketers don't ask too often. I know that I've done enough research on the questionnaires that some marketing companies send out there.

40:35 And if they're like, what's your tone? Do you want to be funny? Do you want to be like, I kind of laugh at that because when I ask them, I'm like, if your online presence was a person, you know, who would it be?

40:47 I got the greatest answer the other day. This guy, he was like, I don't want to be like Paul Rudd.

40:51 I was like, that is exactly what I got. Because I can make Paul Rudd online. I can make, yeah, I can, you know, you just gave me a perfect visual that I can now work with and kind of build that thing.

41:01 So I think it is tough because, I mean, I'll be the first to admit, the digital marketing space is pretty shady.

41:10 Like that was one of the reasons why you know I even though I had struggles in the company working with these like inc 500 fastest growing companies you know I would see retention at like five months six months.

41:21 Like if you can't trust a business for five six months to do work for you like something's wrong with it.

41:26 And when that's like average retention like in the entire industry that screamed you know opportunity to yes and I know so many businesses like I don't try to talk down about any competitors or any other business out there because I think that there are some really good ones but I also you know I caution

41:46 against working with like really big companies where you're just a number and and the social media that they're generating for you is just like factory you know stick your logo on this image slide it out like you know that's that's not effective online you have to you know build a personality out there

42:03 you know, it's all about building that community and if it's just the same as every other chiropractor out there, you know, how great is that?

42:11 Like what's differentiating you? What's making me take that extra step in the buying decision process to say you're the one I've now chosen.

42:19 So I, you know, I don't even want our company to get all that big. I like the personalness of, you know, only working with a few clients.

42:28 So the director of I've always just got my team. I was like, we will grow into the point where I can't talk to at least every client once a month.

42:35 And I said, if we get to that point where my time is so booked out where I can't have, you know, an hour long conversation with each of our clients every month, like, you know, then, then, you know, maybe I have to start bringing in partners and looking at changing up our business model or something 

42:48 along those lines. But that would be the biggest stuff I'd look at is like, show me some of the content that you've created for past clients.

42:56 How would this be different for me? You know, how is it for me? Like, remember, you are the client, you know, us as marketing companies, we're trying to win your business.

43:07 You know, I'd like to get to that point at some point where, you know, people are trying to win my business for me to be that guy for them, you know, maybe be like a Gary Vaynerchuk type or something like those lines, but you know, that's a long way down the road.

43:19 Right now, I'm in competition for your business, because there are a ton of different options out there in marketing. So, you know, ask those questions like, how is this contact going to reflect to me online, as opposed to just cookie cutter, you know, pushing it out there?

43:33 How is my website going to reflect my personality and my value propositions? You know, make sure that marketing company is asking you the right questions before you ever sign on a dotted line.

43:43 You know, are they asking you what your goals are, what your strategies are, what you've tried in the past, you know, what your competitors are, what your competitors are doing.

43:51 You know, if they're not asking those types of questions, then you know, you might be in one of those kind of factory style situations, and you know, I'm a big advocate for small businesses.

44:02 I think the entire world of the US in particular would be a lot better if we had 50 state wide, you know, state size Amazon instead of one giant Amazon, you know, I think that when they're when the companies are a little bit smaller and more manageable.

44:16 you get better service out of it. You get more attention to your individual problems. And that would be my dream for a bunch of marketing companies. They only have 100 clients and they're able to talk to everyone every month and really understand and build those relationships.

44:32 So I guess to boil it down, I'd say make sure that they're in it for you and that you're not begging at them to do some work for you.

44:42 Good advice. Yes, the dream scenario for so many practitioners is for them to be able to handle their marketing and somebody else deal with all of it.

44:54 Is that realistic, or how much do they need to be involved, ideally? So I would say you always have to have at least 10%, I'd say the business always has to have a little bit of a hand in it.

45:11 Now, I have some clients that love to talk to me every week, love, you know, I see them constantly emailing back and forth with my team on creative stuff and that's great.

45:20 Like the more feedback, the better, you know, so the squeaky wheel gets the oil, gets the attention. So if you're, you know, working with a marketing company, don't ever feel bad about reaching out and like saying, hey, do this for me, make this better.

45:32 And if they can't, you know, then there's a bunch of marketing companies. You can always find someone else. So, I would say don't hesitate to be involved, but only be involved in the level you want.

45:43 Like you should never be designing your own social content. You know, if you really want to give them an idea, Canva is a wonderful product.

45:53 Canva's probably like the best $20 investment I'd say a small business can make. Oh, it's so wonderful and it's cheap, it's efficient, the photo gallery on there is great.

46:04 It allows you to pull some of your creativity out. So I don't know, some things I feel like I'm very creative at, most things I feel like I'm not.

46:11 But sometimes I can't, but also like 30 minutes later, I'm like, I put together some real nice stuff here. Just like it's cool, okay.

46:18 So Canva does tend, you know, if you can sit there and lock into a program and you know, we go around and there, but at 20 bucks a month or whatever it is, it's an amazing value to a small business.

46:31 I'm a big advocate of tools. That's one reason why our dashboard was the first thing we rolled out because I wanted to find something at a low price point that controls your entire online presence.

46:41 So as we were building that, it's got a social media scheduler in there. It's got API connections for all the review sites so you can see all your reviews and see your reviews.

46:50 It's got email marketing built-in, business listings built-in, SEO built-in, website analytics. So I wanted to build one singular hug where everyone could just come in and see their entire online presence.

47:02 And that's kind of what Canva is for graphics. I can build Instagram posts over there, Facebook posts, YouTube banner clicks, LinkedIn banners, like you can build anything in there.

47:13 And if a business is going to do some of these things on their own, I would say that's the first stop, because graphically you can cover nearly all of your bases.

47:25 If you are going to put all of your digital marketing into someone else's hands, be sure that you trust them.

47:38 I would say, don't do it for the first few months, for the first few months, be a pain in their ass.

47:44 Talk to them constantly about what the strategy is, kind of where it's going, what it's doing. And I encourage my clients to do that.

47:50 but what's nice is those ones that do it the most three, four months down the road. And I barely hear from them because I've now built up that trust level.

47:58 I, you know, we understand them really, really well as a business. And it came from me actually telling them, hey, it's fine to bug me.

48:06 It's fine to jump in my emails every day. Like, I will get to it. And, you know, I'll deliver that information to you.

48:11 And if I can't, I will find you the resource for it. But, you know, the day that you trust me and you say, you know what, just run with it, But it's going to be a great day for all of us, because at that point, all of your time is going to be freed up.

48:22 At that point, all of our creativity can really just go wild. We know who you are. We know how to portray you.

48:29 So that would be the biggest thing. It's always good to stay a little bit involved, but if you truly want to be hands-off.

48:35 And this reminds me a lot of what it's like when you're working with virtual assistants. They say, for every hour you want to save with a virtual assistant in your work life, you have to dedicate five hours to training them on that.

48:45 Right. So it's yeah, and it's the same thing with your digital marketing company. Like if you want to be truly hands-off with your digital, you have to pound into whatever company you trust, what it is you want, how you want to look, where your strategies are going to be.

49:02 Hound up, hound them for a while, get them trained, because again, they're working for you. Get them trained up, and then it becomes a lot easier to be hands-off.

49:10 I would say probably about three-quarters of our clients right now are pretty hands off. I call them up and I say, hey, I was business.

49:17 They say, business is great. And I say, awesome. Anything you need is like, nope, keep doing it. I'm like, great.

49:22 You don't play golf on Saturday? Yes. All right. Like, those are the best, you know, client calls that I could have.

49:28 But, you know, it didn't happen overnight. It's because, you know, we built that relationship and, you know, I really understand the business and we're able to put together a great online presence.

49:37 Yeah. There's a lot to be said for that mantra of, you know, hard first easy later, easy first hard later as well.

49:45 Paul thank you so much for your time today. I really want to encourage our listeners to go through and do a little bit of an audit of what the community is seeing of them?

49:55 If they do a bit of a search through, you know, Paul has given us so many tactical things from looking at Yale and other places like that, how would you show up in voice, run that check yourself?

50:07 I have you updated your Google My Business, is to have you kind of investigated things like product cards and again the two you know is it time for you to look at kind of handballing this stuff off and I love that idea of now if you're going to look for an agency you know looking at their past work interviewing

50:24 Then remember that you know they're your client not the other way around too so Paul if people want to investigate you and your crew a little bit more how do they find you where they find out more about the work you do?

50:38 Yes, so the main page that we direct people to is zimottexpert.com. And when you go on that page, we've got some buttons.

50:45 You can try our dashboard for free for two weeks. We also have a free snapshot report. So if you don't have the time to do that digging with your online presence and see how you're looking, you can click on there for a free snapshot report.

50:57 It takes us about 48 hours to check you out, check you out and kind of put together all the grading systems for it.

51:03 But it's nice because it's a good starting point at least, especially on the review sites and the directories because I think those are the two most probably impactful things that you can do pretty quickly.

51:13 I mean, if you're not answering reviews, you know, you can sit down for an hour, eight o'clock at night while you're watching whatever TV show that you're watching and answer some reviews, you know, you'd be surprised how impactful that could be on your business.

51:25 But what's great is I'm a big advocate for just making sure you have the right tools, making sure that you're setting yourself up as efficiently and easily as possible.

51:34 I also have a link right down there for Canva that you can get a discount of price on Canva is right on that page as well.

51:41 So it's zimacxpert.com. Z-M-O-T-E-X-P-E-R-T.com. Beautiful. I'll make sure I link all of that in the notes and I'll have a link to other socials as well.

51:52 But I thank you so much for joining me today. I hope that ice is coming your way sooner rather than later on the golf course too.

51:59 So maybe some good luck after this phone call, but he took care, had a beautiful afternoon. Thank you so much.

52:06 It was a pleasure, Angus. Have a great day. If you've enjoyed listening to this podcast, you have to come and check out my Community Influencer program.

52:14 It's my monthly coaching program where we take all this material and I'll work with you to help you apply it, implement it and systemise it.

52:22 The Community Influencer Group coaching programs designed to help you increase your practice income, impact and enjoyment. Join me over at AngusPike.com-forward-slash-join.

52:33 That's AngusPike.com-forward-slash-join. I'd love to see you there.