Nitin C: Today, I have the privilege of interviewing Dr. Larry Benz, PT and pioneer in private practice in the United States. Larry is the founder of physicaltherapist.com, evidenceinmotion.com and I can actually go on and on about his resume, Larry has been on the APTA advisory and on practice and the board of physical therapy specialty. He is the recipient of a number of business and physical therapy awards including the Kentucky physical therapy outstanding physical therapy award and the Ernst and Young entrepreneur of the year award. Larry, I’m so happy you took the time out from your busy schedule to speak with us for a few minutes today, thank you again.
Larry: You’re welcome. Glad to be here.
Nitin C: Our topic for today is what physical therapists in private practice can do to improve their business using the internet. A lot of PTs in private practice are recognizing the importance of a website and what it can do for their practice. What advice would you give to a PT in private practice who is looking to use the internet as a medium to get more patients or offer more relevant information to patients?
Larry: Well it’s a great question because I think the internet is a great way of obtaining new patients but what I think, physical therapists have to gain a greater understanding is the fact that consumers are leading the way. They are skeptical, demanding, they want access, they want twice the transparency, they want unlimited choices and they want high quality. What you have is a little bit of age compression. You have certainly from the middle age of your baby boomers on up, they might not be as savvy as the younger set in terms of building access information on the internet. But they are paying attention, they are listening. The younger set from what I would call a sort of a four year old on down to the generations after that, they have a genuine distrust of healthcare providers right now. They are going into information and finding things about you. Whether that would be in the social networks you travel in, the services you provide and who is recommending you to others. The enabling technologies whether they be everything from ratepts.com to networks such as FaceBook, Twitter and other blogging services, people will find out about you. They will self-diagnose and they will seek out your service.
Everything starts off with your basic website. What is my company and what do we stand for, what are the services we offer, what are the timings or the convenience factors. That’s the basics, and most PTs kind of use their website as how-to or general information and they kind of end it. What they don’t understand is, they can use various mediums within the internet technology to create more memorable experiences for their patients resulting in engaged experience, which further results in patient-loyalty which further results to word of mouth marketing, the best kind of marketing that exists.
Nitin C: So you are saying that the internet actually empowers patients to get more information, which is a good thing but we also ought to be cautious as therapists to provide people with the right information and should be internet savvy ourselves, correct?
Larry: That’s exactly correct and not only savvy but *in tune* to what the patients are saying about us. I saw a provider who happened to be a friend of mine few weeks ago, and just some of the basic internet searches that I get routinely delivered to my inbox, and so I called him and said, this is somebody making a comment on your practice, you might want to call them. But it occurs in kind of a multi dimension, where you got people saying about you, you’ve got the information you are trying to get to patients and in between is additional information or value add that you can provide for your patients being your resource for your expertise, on exercise, on healthy behavior.
Nitin C: It’s interesting you say that, because the APTA has the new brand beat campaign, its tempting to do exactly that and educate such therapists to do that, but here’s the interesting thing, Larry, I’ve been a PT for a few years now and you’ve been in the game much longer, do you believe that the traditional model of referral generation which is, talk to a physician, build a good relationship, which is an important model no doubt , do you feel it’s becoming less important and the ability to reach patients directly either through public speaking or mechanisms like direct mail, or even the internet, which is just one medium, is gradually increasing? What is the future of physical therapy referral generation? Are we heading more towards reaching patients directly and placing less importance on traditional modes of referral generation?
Larry: Again, a very pointed question, I think it revolves around the generation of patients that you are doing. Let’s take a typical, outpatient physical therapy clinic which is some sort of orthopedic, who see the garden variety, low back pain, neck pain, shoulder pain, knee pain, that practice has to have a multitude of strategies for accessing their patients. They have to have some traditional marketing because there’s a boat-load of physicians who don’t know about us. They also has to have a consumer driven strategy because information now is getting to a point, consumers want to access information before they make their choices. Let me give you a couple of examples. The FDA, they know and understand that 75% of their time, the patient asks the physician for a certain drug that they saw on a TV commercial.
We need the same kind of information to build our practices and more importantly, build our profession. We need patients asking for physical therapists. We need them asking for specific PTs when they directly access their position. On the flipside, we need to create enough information overload so that it’s a natural reaction when a patient says “You know, I’ve just hurt my shoulder. I’ve got an ache and pain. I need to access my physical therapist.” We need to create such kind of binary type plan. The physicians need to hear and know and understand us, consumers need to build a access information about physical therapists and in between that, we need to provide a mechanism or better communication between the patients and the therapists.
Patients will seek us through their sort of self-diagnosis or information that they get and we can argue whether that’s information or misinformation, but the bottom line is, they are obtaining it then seeking services. It’s sort of opposite of what the past generations did which is, they got diagnosed by a practitioner, then maybe sought information of their condition afterwards.
Nitin C: Correct. Well said.. One of my favorite authors is Seth Godin. One of the things he talks about is transitioning an individual through various stages; calling them relationship stages from a stranger to a prospect, from a prospect to a patient, and from a patient to a referral generation source, and from a referral generation source to a raving fan. I find it very interesting because I feel that most of what we as therapists do, is we treat the patients within the clinic and when they are in the clinic, they are with us but when they go on, they go on. I believe that if a website is structured correctly, if it is interactive, if it obtains a patient’s name and email in exchange of a free report, or a free ebook on low back pain can be used as a tool to keep in touch with patients via email and transition them through the relationship stages that Seth Godin and other experts talk about. Do you believe in a strategy like this or have you seen it work in your clinic or other clinics?
Larry: Oh yeah, we take a very patient-centric approach, very service oriented approach and we do that because we believe that it retains patients. We also believe that it adds value to them and that’s kind of what our model is, we want to add value to whoever, whenever, wherever, however.. And with patients, they are enhancers and so, if you follow up with an email after seeing a patient that provides them with specific links, or specific resources about their condition, it’s a Wow factor, what we call in our customer service program. It’s amazing, it’s a zinger. You then follow up routinely with that patient with a multitude of mechanisms, maybe they subscribe to your newsletter, maybe they want to follow you on twitter because you know you are going to provide them physical therapy links. Perhaps that patient will follow up with you at a patient reunion, or some other enhancer experience. We firmly believe the best marketing strategy is what we say in the south, “milk your own cows first”, meaning you take your patients and create ambassadors, evangelical missionaries for your business and likelihood of your profession and you do that b creating those memorable experiences. Patients in general may not remember your name or where they met you, but they will remember how you made them feel. What we have an opportunity to do everyday is touch, educate and counsel our patients. And, we can enhance that experience using mediums that the internet allows us to do, whether its email, whether that be video or social networking where we are resources for them, where we are an asset to their medical experiences they may need in the future.
Nitin C: Another well known marketer, Dan Kennedy, is known as the ‘mail marketing guru’ across the world. One of the things which he said I find pretty interesting is, he says, build a herd of customers. When he uses the word herd, he says that there’s always a competitor looking to get our patients or influence our patients to go to theirs instead of coming to us as physical therapists, so what I’ve gathered from his learning is that we, as PTs need to be learning to build a wall around our patients that keep reminding patients that instills in them, a belief that I am the physical therapist of choice. It’s all a part of brand building and maintaining communication regularly with patients either via emails or phone calls. Do you agree with that?
Larry: Absolutely, there are a number of other ways too. You have direct contact, patient reunions, a database where you remember their birthday, or you get their email where you get a sort of permission marketing concepts that’s as good and ascribes to and ultimately you create a tribe of them, a multitude of patient ambassadors that are really there to create your evangelical campaign that not only spreads the word, but keeps you informed of what’s going on in the community, and hold you accountable for a level of service that is high and is always continuing them to improve.
Nitin C: Larry, for a PT who doesn’t know much about search engine optimization (SEO) but wants to appear on page 1 of google for his local search term, lets say, I’m in a town called Hackensack and have a physical therapy clinic in the same town, what do you recommend? Should I aim to appear in the search engines for the term ‘physical therapy Hackensack’, and if so, any tips on how PTs can achieve that?
Larry: Let me answer your question in a couple of different perspectives. I think its worthy to have some level of SEO consultation by somebody you trust or somebody that has been recommended that has a reputation as a noted expertise because all of us now in today’s world, everybody’s an SEO expert. The analogy would be several years ago, one of the best advices people would say is you need to have your name in the phonebook, you need to have it bold, and on a page that says sports medicine providers and physical therapists and rehab. SEO is really doing that to web searches. So you have to have an SEO function, either by default, meaning you have no function, you wont show up anywhere, or you spend a multitude of dollars and engage somebody you trust so that you get to those top-level searches. That’s one perspective. The second perspective is kind of interesting to me, because last year, in the US, there were 300 long tail searches on Google about healthcare and only 50 million short searches. So, for example, long tail search might be something like “I hurt my back while gardening”, a short one would be “low back pain”. The large health media corporations, the revolutionary health, the health centrals – they are very good at the short tail. Low back pain, you are going to go to a local clinic, not a large chain. Because its such a regulated industry though, the stuff you see on physical therapy as it relates to the low back pain, frankly is crap, as its one of the most generic, downsized basic information because they have liability as a very regulated industry. The flip side is, if I enter a search term, “low back pain for gardening”, I’m going to come up with a million different hits and they are probably going to be PT providers that might have been on their website, they might be chiropractics or maybe another profession and is a very broad and dispersed industry on long tail searches. That’s where I think we can have an impact on the SEO side in equation coupled with a formulated strategy on your web for “What do I want people searching for me for? Is it expertise? Is it just in low back? Is it just in Spine? Is it all things Sport medicine? Is it pediatrics?” Or whatever the case may be for your practice, buy yes, I think you need to have a dual strategy, one is simply, I need information so people can access me just like putting it in the phonebook, and secondly I need SEO expertise because I got some legitimately good information on my website, I got to make sure it shows up in some of the long tail searches.
Nitin C: The interesting this is. Google is mainly now an off-page web search engine. What that means is, it does matter what you put in your website. There was a time a couple of years ago, I remember a time, because I’ve done a lot of SEO of my old sites in the good old days before I started having another consultant or company do it, the days of making sure that the keywords are there in your page are almost over. Google now wants to know how many people now are linking back to your website, Google wants to know how long a visitor stays on the page, Google can track that, and track how many people visit your website, and a person actually takes actions on your website, like clicking from one page to another, seeking out your contact info, so all of these things indicate that the more credible your website is in terms of patient engagement and outside referrals, the higher your rank in the search engine. Is that something that you’ve been following closely?
Larry: Oh yeah, we have a multitude of sites, I mean we have the largest social networking site in industry based site in my physical therapy space. We also have a blog, which we know from Google analytics is the largest PT blog in the US. We have our evidence in motion site and physicaltherapy.com site. So we track Google analytics extremely closely. We also have lot of other measures, like well, how much time a user is spending on their site, how did they get to our site, where did they get off from our site, and we are actually spending a lot of time analyzing the information and trying to take advantage of it, not only from a marketing perspective but even more so how can we add value to the multitude of physical therapists that are out there, looking for resources that offer a lot of incline and conversational oriented, in a collaborative atmosphere in lot of free items. We don’t claim any expertise at this time.
Nitin C: Do you believe that as PTs we need to become more internet-savvy or do you feel there’s already a large section of PTs that are already internet-savvy? I would be curious to know how many PTs in private practice might want to sign up for a course on internet marketing for PTs for example.
Larry: Well, you raise a lot of issues there; first thing I would say is I think PTs and everybody in healthcare, practitioner wise are very late about technology at large. And as it relate to anything internet-techie wise, I think it’s a very small percentage, but again, I would say that our younger generation of therapists are much more savvy than the baby boomer PTs that are still there. So its another one of their lessons that they better get with the program or the program will get with them.
Having said that, I think there are a number of elements to it. You raised the idea of an internet marketing course that you can take over the internet. I think that’s a great idea. I don’t know what the levels of interest would be there but there are some good educational sites that are offering traditional CEUs of the internet. It’s around for a while but the thing that concerns me is the whole method of really providing CEU credits within the PT domain. It’s different in every state. We don’t have a universal standard like physicians have and that makes it very difficult. I’m very fond of the techniques for example, I think PTs if they look up a systematic review in the internet and they read it, and integrate that into their practice, which would be the whole purpose of reading it to begin with, ought to receive educational credit for that. They do in the physician sector. I’d rather drive and prove my practice by driving people to read systematic reviews and read the internet enabled tools that we have including traditional CEUs such as examining a course on internet marketing, or participating in online education. One of our companies, evidence in motion is the largest in US in terms of residency training from an APTA credential residency in orthopedics and its because I think we deal with channel partners across the country and our therapists are able to access the didactic portions of it online. We still have traditional weekend courses but it becomes a more friendly, balanced kind of way in training and education. I suspect that programs such as that will thrive in the future.
Nitin C: I tend to agree with you, Larry. In terms of using the internet to market themselves, are you a big proponent of hiring SEO companies to optimize your website, or do you believe a PT can do/should do most of the SEOs themselves?
Larry: I don’t know any PTs that can do the SEO themselves. Though I’m sure there are some, you’re probably one of them. I think its an expertise that they have to see.
Nitin C: Sure, and one final question. Do you think that PTs tend to get it wrong when it comes to setting up their website? I’ve noticed many sites that have a lot of technical information that are loaded with information that makes sense to PTs but makes it very difficult for a patient to get relevant information, schedule an appointment and find out some quick tips on pain relief or get access to patient handouts. Do you believe that we as PTs should improve the ‘patient-friendliness’ of our websites?.
Larry: I don’t think there’s a question about it. It’s a delicate balance between having an optimized site, that’s feature-enriched, yet again streamlined so that it’s very simple to use. I think the current in thinking in success are those sites that aren’t extremely busy but yet have some advanced features. The analogy that I’d like to use is southwest airlines website. It is dummy-proof. You go there, make reservations, check in online, its simple yet really optimized behind the wall. Very feature-rich. Contrast that with other travel websites or airlines where a number of keystrokes and the number of clicks and the things you have to go through are very very complex and really lead to a lot of jumping-off. What we need to do in PT is have a number of resources to enrich our patients and encourage them and bait them coming in as a resource yet we don’t need to perplex them, we don’t need to make things more complicated than what the need to be.
Nitin C: I think this has been an amazing interview. Do you have any closing comments for PTs who are considering using the internet and using websites to market themselves better before we wrap up the call?
Larry: I think there’s a lot of fear, because they are not intuitive to do it, therapists to do it. Yet there are resources put there, resources like yourself and you become your own resource in expert like getting your hands around it and digging deep into it and doing it aggressively because I strongly believe that consumers are winning the battle of healthcare. They are seeking information first and then they are seeking you, and if you do things right as a PT, they’ll seek you for both, information and you personally fear your expertise.
Nitin C: That’s well said Larry, again Thank you for your time, I greatly appreciate it and there’s a lot that we can learn from this interview and from your websites.
Larry: Oh thank you, I appreciate the compliments, have a good day.
