Marketing Tips for Doctors

Hosted by Barbara Hales

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This podcast is for you if you are a doctor, dentist, integrated health physician, chiropractor, or any other type of health provider. Learn how to free up your time, earn 5-star ratings, and learn marketing secrets that have been proven to work on this show with Barbara and her guests. As medical pros, you have to market yourself to be successful. Listen and hear more about how Barbara created her proven marketing system for her thriving private practice. Master the marketing techniques to attract ideal patients, develop a stronger rapport, grow your practice and boost your rankings!

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August 10, 202615 min

5 Video Mistakes You Make

In this episode, Barbara discusses: Dr. Barbara Hales explains why video is a powerful way for physicians to connect with future patients where they already are—on platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn. Dr. Barbara Hales shows that physicians already have endless video topics by turning common patient questions into short, helpful content. Dr. Barbara Hales warns against waiting for perfection and urges doctors to start recording imperfect but useful videos instead of obsessing over equipment or appearance. Dr. Barbara Hales emphasizes speaking in simple, patient-friendly language (not like a medical lecture) and getting to the point quickly to keep viewers from scrolling away. Dr. Barbara Hales highlights the importance of focusing on the patient (not the doctor’s credentials) and using strong visuals and demonstrations so videos build trust and are memorable. Key Takeaways: “Video works for physicians not because it’s perfectly produced, but because it quickly, simply, and visually answers the patient’s real questions in a way that feels personal, trustworthy, and focused on them.” Connect with Barbara Hales: Twitter: @DrBarbaraHales Facebook: facebook.com/theMedicalStrategist Business Website: TheMedicalStrategist.com Email: info@TheMedicalStrategist.com YouTube:@barbarahales LinkedIn: https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/barbarahales Books: Content Copy Made Easy 14 Tactics to Triple Sales Power to the Patient: The Medical Strategist TRANSCRIPTION (243) Chapter 1: Why Video Matters for Physicians [0:00:02 – Dr. Barbara Hales] Welcome to another episode of Marketing Tips for Doctors. I’m your host, Dr. Barbara Hales. Today we are going to be discussing something that has become one of the most powerful marketing tools available to physicians: Video, but ask yourself why your medical videos aren’t working. Today, we’ll discuss the first five mistakes most physicians make. [0:00:38 – Dr. Barbara Hales] Before you think, I don’t have professional cameras. I don’t know how to edit. I don’t have enough time, or I hate seeing myself on camera. I want to tell you a little story, because over the last few weeks, I’ve been learning something completely new, not medicine, not practice management, not marketing strategy. I’ve been learning how to create short-form videos, and let me tell you, it has been humbling. I honestly thought the difficult part would be coming up with ideas. It wasn’t. The difficult part was editing. One afternoon, I spent hours trying to edit what should have been a very simple product video. Hours. I watched tutorials. I clicked the wrong buttons. [0:01:45 – Dr. Barbara Hales] I undid things I had just done. At one point, I honestly wondered if I was ever going to finish. Then I had a realization: I don’t need to become a professional video editor. I don’t need to look like it was made by a professional. I need to become a better communicator. [0:02:14 – Dr. Barbara Hales] Those are two completely different skills. Technology can help me edit. Only I can communicate with authenticity, and I realize something else. If I felt overwhelmed, imagine how many positions feel exactly the same way. So, if you’ve been putting off video because it seems complicated. This episode is for you. Why now? Let’s start with a simple question: Why should physicians even bother making videos? Because that’s where your future patients are. Years ago, people searched Google. Today, they search Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, even LinkedIn. [0:03:15 – Dr. Barbara Hales] Patients don’t just want information anymore; they want connection. They want to know what kind of doctor you are. Will you explain things clearly? Will you listen? Will you make them feel comfortable? Video answers all of those questions before they ever schedule an appointment. Here’s another reason: you already have an unlimited supply of content. Every single day, patients ask you questions-questions you’ve answered hundreds of times, questions that seem routine to you-but those same questions are brand new to someone hearing the answer for the first time. [0:04:06 – Dr. Barbara Hales] Should I worry about this symptom? Why do I need this medication? How long will recovery take? Can I exercise after surgery? What’s normal? What isn’t? Those aren’t just questions. Those are videos. Seasonal illnesses, flu season, travel medicine, heat exhaustion, spring allergies, sports physicals, Heart Month, Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Diabetes Awareness Month. The ideas are endless, which brings me to what I think may be the most important sentence in today’s episode. Every question you answer in the exam room today. Is probably being typed into Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok by hundreds, if not 1000s, of people tonight. Then think about it. [0:05:16 – Dr. Barbara Hales] Those questions, the ones that have become second nature to you, they’re exactly what people are searching for. They’re looking for answers. They’re looking for reassurance, and perhaps most importantly, they’re looking for someone they can trust. Chapter 2: Mistake 1 – Waiting for Perfection [0:05:35 – Dr. Barbara Hales] If you’re the physician consistently providing those answers, you’re not just creating videos; you are building relationships before the first appointment ever happens. Now, let’s talk about the first five mistakes I see physicians make with video marketing. Mistake one: waiting for perfection. Let’s start with the biggest mistake of all: waiting until everything is perfect. I understand why physicians do this. [0:06:15 – Dr. Barbara Hales] We’ve trained to strive for precision. In medicine, details matter, accuracy matters, getting it right matters. So naturally, we carry the same mindset into marketing. We think, I’ll record a video after I buy a better camera. I’ll start once my office is renovated. I’ll wait until I learn how to edit. I’ll do it when I lose a few pounds. I’ll do it when I feel more comfortable on camera. [0:06:52 – Dr. Barbara Hales] Can I tell you something? Your future patients aren’t waiting for perfection. They’re waiting for someone who can answer their questions. Patients don’t expect Hollywood. They expect honesty. They expect clarity. They expect someone who feels genuine. Ironically, sometimes the videos that perform the best are the ones that feel the least polished. Why? Because they feel real. People connect with people, not perfection. [0:07:37 – Dr. Barbara Hales] If you keep waiting until every detail is perfect, you’ll still be waiting a year from now. Instead, record one helpful video, learn from it. Record another. Your first video isn’t supposed to be your best video. It’s simply supposed to be your first. Mistake two: talking like you’re giving a medical lecture. Once physicians finally press record, many make the same mistake. They forget who they’re talking to. You aren’t speaking to your colleagues. You’re speaking to Patients; patients don’t want to feel like they’re sitting through grand rounds. They want someone who can explain complicated information in a way that’s reassuring and easy to understand. Chapter 3: Mistakes 2 & 3 – Overly Technical and Too Slow to the Point [0:08:36 – Dr. Barbara Hales] One of my favorite communication tests is this: Could a high school student understand what you’re saying? If the answer is yes, you’re probably communicating well. Simple doesn’t mean you’re dumbing things down. Simple means you’re making knowledge accessible, and that’s one of the greatest gifts a physician can offer. Mistake three: taking too long to get to the point. You know this is something that we’ve all done at one point or another. [0:09:12 – Dr. Barbara Hales] Now let’s talk about attention. Years ago, people would patiently watch an introduction. Not anymore. Today you’re competing with 1000s of videos. If your opening doesn’t answer one question, why should I keep watching? People simply scroll instead of beginning with “Hello everyone, I’m Dr. Smith. [0:09:40 – Dr. Barbara Hales] Try beginning with three reasons your blood pressure medication may not be enough, or the biggest mistake I see after knee replacement surgery, or if you wake up with headaches every morning, don’t ignore the. Lead with the problem. Curiosity is one of the most powerful marketing tools you’ll ever use. Mistake number four: making the video about you instead of the patient. Chapter 4: Mistake 4 – Making the Video About You, Not the Patient [0:10:20 – Dr. Barbara Hales] Here’s another trap physicians fall into. They spend the first minute talking about themselves, where they trained, how many years they practiced, their credentials. Now, don’t misunderstand me. Credentials matter, but not in the first 30 seconds. Patients are thinking about one thing: themselves, their symptoms, their concerns, their questions. Meet them where they are, instead of saying, “I’ve been practicing medicine for 25 years. Try saying, “Here’s something every patient should know before. See the difference. The first sentence is about you. [0:11:13 – Dr. Barbara Hales] The second sentence is about them, and that’s where trust begins. Let me tell you something I’ve observed over the years. I’ve worked with physicians who had nearly identical credentials, excellent schools, board certifications, years of experience. Yet one physician always seemed to have a waiting room full of new patients, while another struggled. [0:11:44 – Dr. Barbara Hales] Why? Because patients don’t choose the doctor with the longest resume; they choose the doctor they feel they already know. Video creates familiarity. It lets patients experience your personality, your communication style, your compassion before they ever walk into your office. By the time they arrive for that first appointment, it doesn’t feel like they’re meeting a stranger. It feels like they’re meeting someone they’ve already come to trust-that’s the real power of video. It isn’t views. It isn’t likes. It isn’t algorithms. It’s trust. Chapter 5: Mistake 5 – Not Using Visuals and Overcomplicating Production [0:12:34 – Dr. Barbara Hales] Now, let’s talk about something I learned myself over the last few weeks. Video isn’t just about talking; it’s about showing. As physicians, we’re comfortable explaining things, but sometimes a simple visual explains more than a five-minute conversation. If you’re talking about knee pain, show a model of the knee. If you’re discussing skin cancer, show videos or diagrams when appropriate. If you’re explaining how to use an inhaler, you guessed it. Demonstrate it. [0:13:18 – Dr. Barbara Hales] People remember what they see, not just what they hear. I’ll give you a personal example. Recently, I was creating a short product video. The first version, honestly, it wasn’t very good. I simply filmed the product and started talking. It looked flat, so I stopped and asked myself, “How can I tell the story before I even say a word? The product happened to contain coconut, lime, and verbena. Instead of just placing the bottle on a table, I got a coconut. [0:14:01 – Dr. Barbara Hales] I cut it in half so you could see the inside. I placed fresh limes around the bottle. I put the bottle on a large natural rack, and I positioned everything beside a small palm tree. Suddenly, the video had a completely different feeling. Before I ever opened my mouth, the viewer already understood the product’s tropical theme. That experience reminded me of something we sometimes forget: video is visual. Every image should reinforce your message. [0:14:45 – Dr. Barbara Hales] Now, here’s the funny part. I actually drove around my neighborhood looking for the perfect little palm tree. After all that searching, I came home, walked into my backyard, and realized I. I already had the perfect palm tree growing there. [0:15:03 – Dr. Barbara Hales] Sometimes marketing is like that. We spend so much time looking for complicated solutions that we overlook the resources we already have. The same thing happens in medicine. Physicians often think they need expensive cameras, a professional studio, or a production company. [0:15:26 – Dr. Barbara Hales] Most of the time, what they already have is enough. One of these: a smartphone, good lighting, knowledge that helps people, and the willingness to press record-that’s where great video marketing begins. Not with expensive equipment, but with thoughtful communication. [0:15:51 – Dr. Barbara Hales] So today we’ve covered the first five mistakes that keep physicians from creating videos that connect with patients. Next week, we’re going to explore five more mistakes that can quietly destroy even a great video. We’ll talk about captions, why many viewers never hear a word you say, how to keep people from scrolling away, and the simple changes that can dramatically increase engagement. I think you’ll be surprised by how much difference those small details can make. So for this week, I’d like you to find one video you’d like to make and put it in the comments below. Okay, see y ou next week. The post 5 Video Mistakes You Make first appeared on The Medical Strategist .

July 29, 202629 min

Before You Buy Medical Ads

In this episode, Barbara and Neil discussed the following: Neil explains his255 method for Facebook and Instagram ads: two campaigns (warm and cold), five audiences, and five ads to systematically find winning combinations and scale. They discuss how Facebook charges per 1,000 views(CPM) rather than per click, and what that means for setting and spending a daily budget. Neil shares the story of launching Scotland’s biggest health and fitness exhibition, nearly failing, and then saving and scaling it purely through Facebook ads. They compare Google Ads vs. Meta (Facebook/Instagram) Ads for physicians, recommending Google for high-intent cold traffic and Meta primarily for remarketing, then broader cold traffic once scale is needed. They cover practical advertising guidance for doctors—starting around $20/day, using metrics like link click-through rate, balancing warm vs. cold campaigns, and choosing a proven ads expert with a strong track record and longevity in the field. Key Takeaways: “Facebook and Instagram and Google, TikTok, LinkedIn ads, all the ad platforms they learn really really quickly, and where the the best leads are, and if you spend $20 per day for five to seven days, you’ll have really good data as to which audiences are working well, which ads are working well, which ones are not, and you can start to make adjustments from there.” – Neil Shoney Connect with Neil Shoney: Instagram: neilshoneymac Facebook: www.facebook.com/neilshoneymac Business website: neil-maclean-marketing.mykajabi.com Show website: www.MarketingTipsForDoctors.com Spotify: The Shoney show Apple Podcasts: T he Shoney show YouTube: Neil ‘Shoney’ Mac LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/neilshoneymac Connect with Barbara Hales: Twitter: @DrBarbaraHales Facebook: facebook.com/theMedicalStrategist Business Website: TheMedicalStrategist.com Email: info@TheMedicalStrategist.com YouTube:@barbarahales LinkedIn: https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/barbarahales Books: Content Copy Made Easy 14 Tactics to Triple Sales Power to the Patient: The Medical Strategist TRANSCRIPT (242) Chapter 1: Introducing Neil Shoney and the Promise of Scalable Ads 0:00 | Dr. Barbara Hales [0:00:01] Dr. Barbara Hales: Welcome to another episode of Marketing Tips for Doctors. I’m your host, Dr. Barbara Hales, and today we have with us a very interesting character by the name of Neil Shoney. Neil is an ad strategist and go-to expert for service-based businesses that want a simple, proven, scalable Facebook ad system that consistently brings in premium clients. With 13 years of running ads and over 3,000 service providers helped, Neil is known for turning complicated advertising into clear, repeatable frameworks that work across different service industries. Because, unlike almost everywhere else you turn, Neil does not believe in a one-size-fits-all approach. After managing high-spend campaigns in the UK and US, Neil shifted into coaching full-time and created a library of 36 proprietary frameworks, including his 25-5 method, that helps service providers install a functioning, profitable ad system in days, not months, that they can turn on or off like a tap, whenever they want new leads. His clients span over 62 niches, with 21 of those niches hitting six-figure months through ads. Welcome to the show, Neil. [0:01:44] Neil Shoney: Thanks much for having me, Barbara. Appreciate you. [0:01:47] Dr. Barbara Hales: Could you explain the 255 method? Chapter 2: The 255 Method—Two Campaigns, Five Audiences, Five Ads 1:51 | Neil Shoney [0:01:51] Neil Shoney: Sure. The 255 method is at the heart of it, just a testing method for running advertising. So the majority of the time when a practice runs advertising through Facebook and Instagram or any other ad platform for that matter, they typically run what I call a one-one-one method. That is one campaign going to one audience with one ad, and there’ll definitely be people listening right now who are just like nodding along with bigger eyes, going, “That is exactly what I’m doing right now. I see it all the time, and what you have in that situation is you’ve basically taken your best guess at every single step of creating that campaign. So you’ve written the ad copy, and you’ve hoped that it’s going to be great. You’ve chosen your image or your video, and you hope that it’s going to be great. You’ve chosen your audience, and you hope that it’s going to be the right one. But with the Shony 255 method, we do it this way: first, we run two campaigns rather than one. First of all, you’ve already doubled your chance of finding a winner because not both of them have to be winners. You can find a winner and a loser, and then put all your eggs into one winning basket. Those two campaigns that we split out-one is for warm, and one is for cold. That’s people who know who you are and people who don’t know who you are. That’s the first step that a lot of practices get wrong. They only target people who have never heard of them before, who may not even be in the market, and yet you could put a very small amount of ad spend behind people who have already visited your social media pages, your website, etc., and simply get back in front of those people and have really, really high conversion rates. The first step there is two campaigns rather than one. The second step of the 255 method is where the first five comes in, and that’s five audiences rather than one. And so, quite simply, instead of, you know, saying people interested in this one thing and taking your best guess, you get the great opportunity to choose five different interests that somebody might have, or five different demographic targeting tools that we can choose from, and you don’t have to be right 100% of the time. You actually only need to be right once out of the five. Now, when we set this up, we hope that all five are fantastic. That’s great for scale. But if four of them are, you know, they just don’t work. That’s absolutely fine. We can turn off those audiences. We found our winner, and we can push all the budget towards the winner. And then the final step of the 255 method is the final five: having five ads rather than just one. And there are two reasons for this. Number one is it’s also great to find winners and losers inside your ads, and you know the things that don’t work. You can turn them off. People never have to see them ever again, and you can push all the budget towards the winners. But there’s a second reason as well, and you’ve probably experienced this yourself, Barbara, and so will so many people who are listening right now. Is that you show any level of interest in something that you see via an ad? You might not even click through to the website, but if you stop scrolling, you hit the see more button, you read it, or you watch the video, and then you start seeing the ad over and over and over again. That’s Facebook basically saying this person is interested in this, but they didn’t take the action that the advertiser wanted them to take, which is to click through, request a callback, book an appointment, whatever it may be. Now, if you set up your ads the way that 98% of people do, a 111 campaign, then Facebook’s only option is to show the same ad to the same person over and over and over again, but if you have five ads, they’ll show them ad number two, then ad number three, then ad number four, and it helps to re-engage people and get more people to take action. [0:05:53] Neil Shoney: So it’s a testing method to find winners and losers, and rather than just, you know, throwing something against the wall, and it’s either going to stick or it’s not. It gives you a much higher probability of running a successful campaign. Mathematically, there are 50 variations there, so there’s 50 chances to find a winning variation, and it allows for a lot of scalability because if you have multiple audiences that become successful and multiple ads that are successful, then there’s a lot of opportunity to increase the spend on the front end to get much more out the other side. [0:06:27] Dr. Barbara Hales: What a great idea! So, do the clients get charged by Facebook for someone clicking on View More, or only if they click through? Chapter 3: How Facebook Bills and Neil’s Origin Story with Ads 6:45 | Neil Shoney [0:06:45] Neil Shoney: Actually, with Facebook and Instagram, the way that it works is you’re charged per 1000 views, so it’s not charged based upon clicks and not clicks and things like that. As Google says, they are cost per click, and you know you’re charged whenever somebody clicks on the ad; technically, Google is still doing cost per 1000 views. They’re just choosing to send the billing notification once somebody has clicked. So it’s smart marketing on their side because they get to say You only pay if somebody clicks. People are going to click, so you’re going to pay anyway. But with Facebook, they have a cost per 1000 views, which is different for everybody. It depends on the ad, how many people you’re targeting, and who’s inside those audiences. But technically, you know, you set a daily budget, so it could be $10 a day, it could be $100 a day, it could be $1,000 a day, depend upon the size of the business, and you’re going to most likely spend what you set as a budget, as long as there’s a big enough audience there for Facebook to target. [0:07:47] Dr. Barbara Hales: How did you get into this originally? [0:07:50] Neil Shoney: Well, I actually 1314 years ago, something like that. I started Scotland’s biggest ever health and fitness exhibition, and I came straight out of university. I’d studied sport and exercise science. I always knew I was going to be entrepreneurial, and I just thought everybody would buy into my idea: a huge event at Scotland’s biggest venue, with a break-even of about 4,000 tickets needing to be sold for the weekend. I just thought that everybody would hear about it and think it would be incredible, and I ended up signing my life away with no money in the bank, hundreds of 1000s of pounds, or hundreds of 1000s of dollars, I should say, of contracts to be able to put on this massive show. And about five months into advertising, we’d sold around, you know, 50 tickets at $12.50 [0:08:48] Dr. Barbara Hales: That’s pretty scary. [0:08:50] Neil Shoney: Yeah, it was pretty scary. We were about four and a half months out from the show itself, and everybody was knocking their doors down for outstanding invoices and different things, and to be honest, going to Facebook ads was like a last roll of the dice. I’d already done everything that everybody does in the marketing space when they’re bootstrapping, which is posting lots on social media, cold outreach, finding email addresses on Google, sending emails to personal trainers and all sorts. No matter how hard I worked, nothing was clicking. And when I ran Facebook ads, I ended up doing something very similar to the Shony 255 method. And I think it was just a bit of luck that I went down that route of being like, “Oh, I can test out different audiences. I can test out different ads. That’s how that feels safer. So I just did that. That was the way that I set them up in the first place, and I ended up spending. I think it was around, you know, like $50 or something in the first few days, and I had returned somewhere in the region of I think it was 150 Or $250 something like that, in sales, and it was just this like penny drop moment where I was like, “Wow, I can track how much money I put into this thing, how much money comes out the other side, and if I know how much I need to put in to get something out, something specific out the other side, I can basically choose how many tickets I want to sell, as long as I have the cash flow, of course, to be able to reinvest into the ads, and that’s what we did. And we ended up not just selling, you know, more tickets, but we ended up almost hitting our target for tickets sold four and a half months later. The show was a big success. We ended up scaling it over the next four years, and then selling it to the country’s biggest event organizers. And we never ran TV ads, billboards, or radio advertising, as all of these big exhibitions do. We just ran Facebook ads, and that was it. So I never planned to teach anybody Facebook ads. I just tried to use it to save myself from a terrible situation. [0:11:05] Dr. Barbara Hales: Well, what a great story that was. Thank [0:11:09] Neil Shoney: you. Chapter 4: Google vs. Meta Ads and Leveraging Instagram Targeting 11:09 | Dr. Barbara Hales [0:11:09] Dr. Barbara Hales: When it comes to physicians, is it better for doctors to use Google Ads, Meta Ads, or both? [0:11:18] Neil Shoney: I would always lean into Google first if you’re doing cold prospecting. People who don’t know who you are, because of course people are going to go to Google or AI now as well. But Google’s still the frontrunner by a long shot. People are going to go to Google to find the providers that are close to them for the specific problems that they have, and so albeit that Google Ads cost significantly more to get in front of 1000 people, it’s so high intent that if it’s set up correctly, then you end up getting a very high percentage of people who click on your ads going all the way through to creating a booking with Facebook, the the next best step, or Facebook and Instagram, we should probably talk about them collectively because it’s the same ad platform. The best thing you can do if you’re on a low budget and you’re sort of just starting out with advertising for your practice is use it first and foremost for remarketing, so you can take your Facebook pixel and drop it onto your website. You can also create audiences of anybody that visits your Facebook or Instagram page, which some people may do before deciding to book with you as well. And we can create these audiences of people that already know who you are, and we can advertise to those people. And so, if you wanted to make the best use of your ad dollars, it would be Google first. It would be Facebook remarketing second, and then I would use Facebook and Instagram more broadly for cold traffic as your third step. So that would be once you already feel that you’ve already significantly scaled the first two; that’s where you go to find more customers at scale. [0:13:12] Dr. Barbara Hales: When someone advertises on Facebook, does it automatically go to Instagram as well, or do you have to request that? No, [0:13:20] Neil Shoney: No, automatically. You would actually have to uncheck some boxes to stop it happening. [0:13:26] Dr. Barbara Hales: Why would you want to? [0:13:27] Neil Shoney: No, you wouldn’t. [0:13:31] Dr. Barbara Hales: And people on Instagram would see the ads even if they don’t follow you. [0:13:36] Neil Shoney: Yes, absolutely. So anybody who is within your targeting can see your ads, so you can target people based upon, of course, age, gender, location. Which, of course, location is going to be very important for local practices. But you can also do some targeting based around certain things like their interests, and you know some things as well, like you can target people based upon not just whether they’re a parent or not. You can target them based upon how old their kids are. Like Facebook has a lot of data, and it feels accurate, and there’s a lot that you can do with the targeting tools. Chapter 5: Budgets, Metrics, and Warm vs. Cold Campaign Strategy 14:19 | Dr. Barbara Hales [0:14:19] Dr. Barbara Hales: Well, that’s a great idea. When a physician is considering ads, let’s say it’s a new practice, or he is providing a new service or a product that he didn’t have before, what do you advise them to spend on a daily basis for their budget? [0:14:39] Neil Shoney: So I actually suggest that everybody starts at just around $20 per day with any campaign, and that may sound to some people like, oh, it’s just plain small. The reason I say $20 per day is because Facebook, Instagram, Google-they learn so quickly. If you’ve ever been told by an agency the reason. The reason that you’re not getting results is that you’ve not spent enough, or because Facebook and Instagram take a really long time to learn. It’s actually their calling card: they don’t know how to get you results. Facebook and Instagram and Google, TikTok, LinkedIn ads, all the ad platforms they learn really really quickly, and where the the best leads are, and if you spend $20 per day for five to seven days, you’ll have really good data as to which audiences are working well, which ads are working well, which ones are not, and you can start to make adjustments from there. As soon as you have a positive ROI, that is the point at which we start the scaling process. So we don’t go with the mindset of your budget for the month is you know $2,000 So let’s figure out how much we need to spend per day to spend $2,000 The target’s not to spend $2,000 The target’s to find winners that bring in more revenue than you spend, and then you can start to scale towards spending $2,000 and that that’s the safest way to do [0:16:08] Dr. Barbara Hales: it. How can you differentiate between not getting responses because people aren’t interested in you versus it just not being a good ad that needs to be changed? [0:16:19] Neil Shoney: Yeah, well, there’s a couple of things. There, there’s a million different stats on the Facebook Ads dashboard, but there’s one that most people don’t even know exists. But it’s actually almost the tell-all of whether the ad is resonating with people or if it’s a landing page issue, like getting people to take action when they actually get to your website, and that is link click-through rate. So there are two. There’s one that’s just click-through rate, and there’s one that’s link click-through rate. That one is what percentage of the people who see your ads actually click the button to go to your website, right? So it’s not, you know, hitting the like button, commenting, or seeing more. That’s click-through rate. Link click-through rate, however, is people actually clicking to leave Facebook after they’ve read your ad. Now, if it’s over 1%, we typically say there’s nothing wrong with the ads. The ads are doing their job. It’s getting people to stop scrolling, to read, and to leave Facebook. If you’re not getting inquiries on the next page, we then focus on the page and how do we get more people to take action there? If, on the other hand, you’ve got an ad that is, you know, 0.5%, then we’re quite far off where we need to be in terms of the link click-through rate. Then that’s when I would look at the advert itself and say, how do we get more people’s attention? How do we get more people to take action from the ad? [0:17:53] Dr. Barbara Hales: Are ads best for cold prospecting or remarketing to people who hit my website? If both, how can this be maximized for the biggest ROIs? [0:18:07] Neil Shoney: Well, both of them have their place in terms of what we would want anybody to be running. You know, like one month after working with us, for instance, we would want everybody to be running both, because there’s your warm campaign, your remarketing, which is fantastic for a small spend and a high ROI. That’s amazing, but there’s only so many people in there, so there’s only so far you can scale with that. And once you’ve kind of maximized that side of things, if you want to grow faster and acquire clients faster, you have to go out into the cold market. You have to go out and find more customers that may be out there. So, in terms of what’s more important, I suppose to start off, if you’re not advertising at all right now, I would say the warm side of things, the remarketing. But if you’re really serious about scaling, then both of them are very important to make scale happen as quickly as possible. Chapter 6: Small Budgets, Getting Help, and Choosing the Right Ads Expert 19:12 | Dr. Barbara Hales [0:19:12] Dr. Barbara Hales: What would you say to someone who says to you, you know, I don’t really have a budget, you know, so I haven’t been advertising, and you know, is it worth it? You know, is it definitely going to work, or am I just going to be throwing money in the air? [0:19:28] Neil Shoney: Well, a couple of things. The first thing is, you don’t have to start off with a high budget, like I was saying. You can start at a small budget. You can see what happens with the ads. Just like my story with the events business 14 years ago: if it hadn’t worked, if I hadn’t sold tickets in that first week or a week or two weeks, I wouldn’t have continued spending money on it. But because I spent a small amount of money and made significantly more back, it gave me the opportunity to scale into that thing. The second thing is don’t go into it without some sort of guidance. And I don’t even mean that you need to work with somebody like me. Like you can go onto YouTube. Like you can go onto YouTube and at least get some tips and direction around how to do certain things, like for instance, some people right now will be going. How do I set up warm retargeting? How do I set up these warm audiences? I’ve literally got a YouTube video inside the ads dashboard where I set them all up. So, like you, you don’t have to go into this completely blindly, even if you don’t want to invest in, you know, courses and agencies and things like that. So do some research. Don’t just throw something against the wall and then determine that it doesn’t work. There are things that need to happen to make advertising successful, but a lot of it’s out there on YouTube. [0:20:56] Dr. Barbara Hales: As a doctor, if I was looking for somebody to just do it, I didn’t want to get involved. I just want them to do it. How? What criteria do I use to pick the right one? How do I recognize who is you know going to do it for me versus someone who you know read a course last weekend and doesn’t really keep doing? [0:21:18] Neil Shoney: Well, track records are really a really big thing. How long have they been doing it? It’s a massive one. So I mean, we have just an absolute crazy amount of testimonial videos, and if anybody ever goes through, like, my Instagram or whatever, every few days it’s another testimonial video or something that a client sent us or whatever it may be, and we’ve done that for like 10 years here, just like churning it out. So when you go on our landing pages, it’s sometimes like 120 videos that are on that page. So, like, what type of results have they got for clients is number one, but the second one is how long have they been doing this for? And the reason why that’s so important is Facebook and Instagram are changing all the time, and so if they only had the ability to be able to run advertising successfully in a pocket of time, when they had a system that worked with the Facebook algorithm today, for instance, as soon as Facebook announces two months from now that they’ve changed the algorithm, are they going to be savvy enough to be able to do the appropriate testing to figure out how to continue having their clients win in the new environment? So time in the game is also as important as the results that they’ve been getting most recently. [0:22:37] Dr. Barbara Hales: It does seem so unfair, though, that you know, like if we catch your game, you’re going to change it. Chapter 7: Regaining Targeting Control, Video Tips, and How to Reach Neil 22:41 | Neil Shoney [0:22:41] Neil Shoney: Yeah, they do it all the time, and they’ll always tell you that it’s because they want to help you. They don’t. They want to find plenty of ways to get you to spend more money. So that’s what the most recent algorithm update was all about. It was, hey, you don’t need to think about targeting anymore. Just let us choose the targeting, and we’ll find the right people for you, and that’s going to really help you get results. It hasn’t played out like that at all. What it turns out is that Facebook has lots of inventory for people you’re not trying to get in front of, and now they have permission from you to spend all of your ad dollars on those inverted commas, low-quality leads, if you will. So there are ways that you can take back control of your ads. There’s a button. This is probably one of the best tips I can give anybody on this podcast, by the way, because a lot of you are running localized businesses. So there are two big reasons. [0:23:42] Dr. Barbara Hales: Okay, because the next question I have for you, so you could put it in there, is for someone that is, you know, has heard you and said, okay, you’ve convinced me. I’m going to dip my toe in the waters. What are two helpful tips that you could give to our listeners that they could implement right away? [0:24:04] Neil Shoney: So this is the biggest one for anybody that runs a localized business in general, which is when you’re setting up your adverts, and you get to the second step. There are only three steps: campaign, ad set, and, for ease of understanding, that’s your audience who is going to get to see your ad. And then there’s a third step, which is setting up the ad itself. That’s the thing people are going to see. That middle step, right now, it looks like there’s not too much that you can do there. You set a minimum age. You don’t set too much targeting in terms of locations; you can technically set a locational target in there, but it feels like you are being relatively pinpoint about who is going to get to see your ads. But you’re not. What is actually happening there is you are giving face. A suggestion, and that is very dangerous for a local business, because when you say I specifically work with women between the ages of 30-five and 50-five in this 10-mile radius, they can show 20% of your your ads to men, and they can show another 20% of your ads to 18-year-olds and 70-two year olds, and they can also show your ads outside of that 10-mile radius. But there’s one button at the bottom of the page that you’ll see, which says “Further limit the reach of my ads. The wording is almost comical because it’s like, how much do they not want you to hit that button, right? So that they just can spend your ad dollars however they wish, right? But if you click on that button, it gives you the ability to go into everything I just said there: gender, location, age, and uncheck a box that says “use as a suggestion. When you do that, you take back pinpoint control over who can see your ads, and for local businesses, you might even find that it raises your cost per lead. Right, that’s not a bad thing, because what is the point in having low-cost leads if there are a bunch of people who can never work with you, who can never walk through your doors? So it’s not always that it’s more expensive. I’m just saying that technically it could happen, but I would rather have great leads, great quality, my target demographic, than a whole bunch of leads that would never buy from me. So that’s really important. The second thing is for these types of businesses, video is really powerful, and it doesn’t even need to be, you know, really high-quality video with transitions and a filming crew. I mean, it can just quite simply be a little bit of B-roll of, you know, somebody in the practice, which can obviously be set up. It’s not like you have to start recording your sessions, but just having that type of B-roll catches people’s attention. There is a great place for images inside your five ads, but videos work really, really well for localized businesses and service-based businesses. [0:27:21] Dr. Barbara Hales: Well, those are really both great bits of advice. The next question I have is for someone that wants to take a course from you or get advice from you. How can they reach you? [0:27:34] Neil Shoney: Well, there are a couple of ways. The first way is to quite simply go to Instagram and go to Neil Shoney Ads. So it looks like “Neil’s Honey Ads,” unfortunately, the way it sounds. But it’s Neil Shoni ads, all one word. And you can get loads of tips there and different things via the link in my bio. There’s a five-minute video that walks you through our whole system and how we work with clients. Or you could just send me a message there directly, or you can email me at neil@neilshone.com or neil@neilshoney.com if you want to sign up that way, and yeah, we can have a quick conversation from there. [0:28:17] Dr. Barbara Hales: Well, thank you so much for being on the show. I really found this, you know, very educational. I’ve learned a lot. I feel like I know more, and I’m sure other listeners feel that same way. Thank you so much. [0:28:31] Neil Shoney: Appreciate you. Thank you, Barbara. [0:28:33] Dr. Barbara Hales: This has been another episode of Marketing Tips for Doctors with your host, Dr. Barbara Hales. Till next time. The post Before You Buy Medical Ads first appeared on The Medical Strategist .

May 22, 202623 min

Scaling the Patient Experience

In this episode, Dr. Corey Malnikof discusses: Scaling from one clinic to 24 locations Building a patient-focused clinic culture Marketing strategies that work for doctors AI, SEO, and social media marketing Advice for growing a successful practice Key Takeaways: “Marketing works best when it comes from authenticity. If you truly love helping people, then marketing simply becomes sharing that passion with your community.” – Dr. Corey Malnikof “Scaling a practice requires systems, leadership, and the willingness to step into uncertainty before growth happens.” – Dr. Corey Melnikov “Doctors don’t always need bigger budgets to grow. Many of the best patient acquisition strategies are free and relationship-driven.” – Dr. Corey Malnikof Connect with Corey Malnikof Email: drcorey@palmercare.com Business: palmercaregroup.com Twitter: @palmercaregroup @coreymalnikof Connect with Barbara Hales: Twitter: @DrBarbaraHales Facebook: facebook.com/theMedicalStrategist Business Website: TheMedicalStrategist.com Email: info@TheMedicalStrategist.com YouTube:@barbarahales LinkedIn: https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/barbarahales Books: Content Copy Made Easy 14 Tactics to Triple Sales Power to the Patient: The Medical Strategist TRANSCRIPTION (241) Building a Patient-Focused Chiropractic Brand Dr. Barbara Hales: “Welcome to another episode of Marketing Tips for Doctors. I’m your host, Dr. Barbara Hales. Today, you’re in for a rare treat. We have Dr. Corey Malnikov here with us. He is the CEO of Palmer Care Group, a healthcare organization operating 24 chiropractic clinics across the whole United States. He is an entrepreneur, speaker, and leader known for building high performing teams, scalable systems, and world class patient experiences. Today we’re going to dive into what actually works when it comes to marketing for doctors, how to attract the right patients, grow your practice, and build something that truly scales. Welcome to the show.” Dr. Corey Melnikov: “Thank you for the introduction. Always fun to hear all of that in 111 share. Thank you.” Dr. Barbara Hales: “When you first started out, did you see patients at that time?” Dr. Corey Melnikov: “Yeah, no, I was a.. I’ve been in practice for 21 years. I saw patients probably up to about seven or eight years ago, I had about 10 clinics at the time, and so I was a full-time guy. I loved seeing patients that they literally had to kind of rip it out of my hands for me to stop, but I kept cutting back. I kept.. I went from full-time to Monday, Wednesdays, and then just Mondays, and then I think I got to the point where I had a patient laying down, I was listening to what my doctors were saying, I was listening to the front desk, I was thinking about the other clinics, and I just felt bad for not being there 100% for the patients, and so, yeah, it’s been probably seven eight years, and I’ve been running the clinics instead of in it, but is there a long time?” Dr. Barbara Hales: “What made your practice unique in compared to other chiropractic offices around? Did you have multiple streams of income? Where were there additional services that others didn’t provide? Were there products that you felt your patients could use? Like, what is it that made you different,” Dr. Corey Melnikov: “yeah. And I will say, you know, with 24 clinics, you know, when doctors are into different things, we do have all sorts of different techniques and instruments and things that we use on patients, but really, what makes us different is I always tried to create this atmosphere, you know, I was a big Starbucks junkie in the beginning, you know, and I was trying to open a practice, and you know, I thought I’d graduate, put a shingle up, you know, the Red Sea would part, patients would line up, I’d take care of them, and the reality, like most, most entrepreneurs find out, is you open up, and then you know nothing. So I studied a lot, I studied Amazon, I studied Nordstrom, I studied the Ritz, I studied Disney, and I studied Starbucks, and Starbucks talked about how Starbucks was meant to be the third home, right? You had home, you had work, and then Starbucks,” Dr. Barbara Hales: “but no, I thought no drive-through, right?” Dr. Corey Melnikov: “Right, exactly, no drive-thru, but I thought, you know, a chiropractic clinic, a wellness clinic, should be the third home, not Starbucks. And so I kind of wanted to create this atmosphere, and I was always really big into personal and professional development for my doctors, for my staff, and even for my patients. So we tried to build a place, and we always talked about when patients come into our place, if their anxiety is high, we’re going to lower their anxiety to peace, and if their energy is low, we’re going to bring their energy up. And so for us, it was all about the experience, the second you walked through the door, the way you were greeted, the way you were treated, the way your case was managed, and how we kind of had an impact on every aspect of your life, emotional, physical, chemical, and treatment. And so that was the goal, and for me, that’s what’s made us different. It’s just the culture and the place we created,” Scaling From One Clinic to 24 Locations Dr. Barbara Hales: “that’s wonderful. Now, before you had your first offshoot, you must have been a little bit nervous about doing that. Would opening up another location divide my patients, or would I succeed? You know, walk me through that, and how, and how you did succeed.” Dr. Corey Melnikov: “Yeah, I had no intentions of having 24 clinics. I had every intention of opening one clinic and trying to make it as successful as humanly possible, being a big part of the community and making that who I was. The reality was I opened a clinic, didn’t know what I was doing, figured out what I was doing, and then very fast grew it. I had been renting a room while I was waiting for my clinic to get built with from another chiropractor, and when he kind of saw how fast I built it, he said, “You know, my friend is selling a practice, I’ll go buy it, I just need you, you can be 5050 partners, no money, and you just fix it, and so that second clinic. Was just kind of like I couldn’t do anything else in my current clinic. My wife was about to join me, so we couldn’t, we couldn’t fit any more patients there. So the second clinic was like literally completely unpredicted, but man, it was fun. You know, I got to drive down, I was about 45 minutes away, go to this clinic that was, you know, pretty much failing, and then take it from where it was and grow it up, and so, yes, it was scary, but I’ll tell you, the scarier step wasn’t that second one, because the first one was successful, the second one was just fixing, but I went from two clinics to four clinics in a blink, and the scary part of that was, you know, I had no money, and then I started to make a little bit of money. Then we got the second clinic, and then I started to make a little bit more money, and I got four clinics, and I have negative money. So that was where I learned about the scariness of expansion. You know, when you, when you want to expand and you want to scale, you just, you have to be willing to step into this world of fear, where you’re going to take a few steps backwards before you step forwards, and that’s kind of been not to go off subject, but that’s been the whole thing, right? I went from money to no money, and then from four clinics to 10 clinics, where I went way backwards, and then got caught up, and then from 10 clinics to 20 clinics, and every time we make a massive growth, now I have to expect that fear and expect that, and just be willing to make that jump and be prepared.” Dr. Barbara Hales: “What’s really interesting is, I think many people hearing your story would think, well, by the time you got to the second or third one, you had, you had it down, and it was just going to be gravy after that.” Dr. Corey Melnikov: “Yeah, yeah. No, you know, it changes, you know. Five clinics is you right? I can see patients full time and still have my fingers on everything, but it’s not me anymore, right? There has to be a C suite. There has to be an infrastructure that I built and pay for for people to run our systems and run our marketing and run our HR and to run our everything, so with every clinic you add, you are limiting your ability to accomplish the job that you would normally do, and now you have to replace yourself with somebody who is paid and trained by you, so it’s a learning curve, because none of us, you know, on this podcast, I think your listeners, the doctors, none of us are trained entrepreneurs, trained businessmen, trained business women, we just have to learn as we go and study as hard as we can, and all of it’s a learning curve, but it’s a fun ride if you take” Dr. Barbara Hales: “it, when you started realizing that other people would be taking over the roles that you once were actively doing. Did you feel bad about it, or were you just so excited that it didn’t matter?” Dr. Corey Melnikov: “No, no, you know, you don’t want to let go of those. You grip them, death grip those. Not only do you not want to give them up, but then you know you have to learn very quickly that you can’t micromanage, right? So, like, I’m going to allow you to do second interviews and decide if this person has the ability to do the job, and I have to be able to, like, not give my approval on every employee that gets hired, and that is a very difficult thing to do, so no, every step along the way, every time you hand something off, you know, yes, you watch it a bit in the beginning, but you have to have the ability to not watch it if you want to grow, and that’s very difficult.” Marketing Strategies That Actually Work for Doctors Dr. Barbara Hales: “So, what would you say to them about that?” Dr. Corey Melnikov: “Yeah, so there’s so much, it’s never ending. I mean, you know this with all the people that are on this podcast, there’s just so much great stuff out there, but it really, for me, becomes very dependent on geography, because digital marketing is absolutely amazing, and it is so deep now. I mean, yes, you can do Instagram posts, Facebook posts, LinkedIn posts, Twitter posts, YouTube posts, there’s Google post, there’s Google ads, and all that stuff works amazingly. You’ve got to learn all of that and use all of that, but there’s some geographies, like I have some geographies in Texas, that are, have such a congested digital footprint, like so many people in that congestion, that the ROI and the responses for that, you know there’s no way I could scale clinics there if that was what we did, so like in Northern Virginia, I’ll spend a lot of money on Google Local and Google Ads, and on boosts on some of our social media, so that would become very well known in the, in the neighborhoods, versus you know, in Texas, what works very well is being out in the community, meeting all the professionals that I can refer to, and that can refer to me, that are doing health screenings at different health fairs, that are doing lunch and learns in different companies, and so we use all kinds of tactics. Now, do I also do some digital marketing in Texas? Of course, but I don’t spend a lot, and do I also do all the other things in Northern Virginia? Yes, but I don’t push it a lot, you know. You’ve got to figure out what’s working. I think you know when I talk to people on the phone and they’re trying to get their marketing to work. I think part of the problem is they’ve got 15 different things going, and then these don’t work, so they try this and this doesn’t work, so they try this. You know, you got to focus in, and if, if, if somebody else can get this marketing to work in your area, so can you. So, instead of quitting it, dive into it, you know, learn why, why it’s not working, what you can do to make it work.” Dr. Barbara Hales: “Absolutely, and you know people are, so you know, scrambling for AI in their practice, without realizing that some of the old school techniques really work the best, and that it’s not something that they should forget about. People, after all, want to have a relationship with you, they want to actually see you, talk to you and hear what your views are, so you know, getting out there and introducing yourselves to people, both you know, prospective patients, but also to physicians in the area that can refer to you.” Dr. Corey Melnikov: “Yeah, doctors and professional referrals. I mean, we talked to this about our doctors all the time, if the only thing you did was have two lunches a week with referral partners, and you did that every week, you’d have 104 lunches a month, and if 10% of those people like you, that’d be 10 people sending you patients every month. So there’s professional referrals, is one of the most amazing things. I will say old school is kind of funny, because we just started doing some postcards again. Now that’s from like a decade ago. I’m going to tell you, the response, the response in some of our areas on like these postcards is insane. So, there is some old school stuff.” AI, Social Media, and Modern Healthcare Marketing Dr. Corey Melnikov: “And AI, I right now, by the way, also, I mean, I know everybody wants to dive into it, and I think they should. AI, right now, is the wild wild west, because there’s nobody knows for sure, but we do know that feeding it, and doing, you know, AI, oh, doing, doing the search engine optimization, which is now for AI, is absolutely amazing. I think if I can give one piece of advice on something like AI, and even, you know, social media marketing, and things like that, I think that doctors, because we were, we want to be doctors, and that we don’t want to be the professional marketer. Too many times, doctors will go out and find this is the best company to do AI marketing for me. This is the best company to do lead generation for me, and they like hand it off and forget it. So, the one thing I would say is you’ve got to learn it right, and it’s not that hard. You can jump on YouTube and say, you know, put in a video, teach me how to do AI SEO, you can go into Chat GPT and just say, “Tell me the top 100 things I need to know. You really have to learn how to do it. So, I always like lead generation AI. I learn how to do it to the point that I’m dangerous enough that I could do it, and then I don’t. And then I hire a company, because then I can watch what they’re doing, and I can make pivots, and I can give suggestions, and I don’t just take the results for what they are. So, so get into AI marketing, get into all this stuff, but for the love of God, know what you’re doing first.” Dr. Barbara Hales: “Absolutely. How actively involved are you in creating videos for your patients on the sites” Dr. Corey Melnikov: “I I’m actively involved in, and by that I mean like maybe twice a month I get with our social media people, and they shoot videos with me, so that’s about as active as I am. And then they do all the editing and posting and everything for group, which is kind of the umbrella. The individual clinics is me giving them what I want them to record and do right, and then I have a separate crew that then edits and posts those, but at the end of the day I’m really just looking at how many posts are we doing, when are they going up, what are the statistics, what are the results. So I’m all KPI driven.” Advice for Doctors Growing Their Practice Dr. Barbara Hales: “That’s great, so what advice would you give to our, you know, physicians and chiropractors that are listening today? You know, like two pieces of advice that they could implement right away.” Dr. Corey Melnikov: “Yeah, well, number one, you know, when I talk to chiropractors and they’re like, I don’t have enough new patients, or I talked to functional medicine, I talked to any of these guys, and I don’t have enough new patients, right. And then it’s, I don’t have the budget for it, because there’s, there’s so much stuff that’s free. You can right now shoot videos and post it on six different platforms. You can right now go stop by an office and drop your cards and meet a professional. You can right now go bring bagels and coffee to a bank before they open. Introduce yourself and tell them about your clinic. There’s so many free things you can do right now. If you don’t have enough new patients, it is just because you are not trying hard enough. It exists. You just have to do it, and no one can make you do it. But you could post 50 posts on social media right now, if you wanted to, right, and talk about who you are, you know, talk about what you do, and your community will absolutely love it. And then, you know, the only other thing I would tell you is, you know, have a goal, like, okay, I don’t have enough new patients for the love, like, what is enough new patients, and why did you pick that number, like, and if that’s your number, give me the action steps of how you’re going to get it. So, there’s a million ways to get new patients, right? If you, if you’re stuck and your brain is like, I can’t come up with one, then go on Chat GPT, Chat GPT, and say, give me 25 ways to get new patients right now that cost me nothing, and then you can do it, but work towards a goal, right? Say, I want 27 new patients this month, and here’s the action steps I’m going to do. You do those two things. I just don’t know how you can’t have enough new patients.” Dr. Barbara Hales: “Do you have a program yet on how to instruct physicians to follow in your footsteps?” Dr. Corey Melnikov: “Yeah, that’s good question. No, right. So we have all the programs for all of our doctors and CAS, you know. For me, right now, it’s just that there’s so many people that reach out about what we’re doing. My thought process was, let me just give it out for free, let me answer any questions. There’s really nothing for me to gain from this, except for, hey, doctors are helping a whole lot of people. I want you to help a lot of people. I want you to do more, and if I can be of any help for you to do that, then do it. Use me.” Dr. Barbara Hales: “That’s wonderful. So, what else would you like to tell our listening audience that maybe I haven’t touched upon lately, you know? Yet,” Dr. Corey Melnikov: “Well, you know, your podcast is marketing. You know, the only, the only other thing I’ll say about. Marketing is this. I’ve always looked at marketing is, you know, if you love what you do, if you absolutely love what you do, then marketing is just your extension of your love for what you do out into the community. And how many different ways can you come up with doing that? And if that’s what you’re doing, if the only thing you’re really doing is sharing what you love with the community, because you know it will make an impact. Then all of the negative things that we think of when it comes to marketing, the sales process, the I don’t want to do this, I don’t want to do that, all that goes away because the second you are locked in to all I want to do is help, then that’s all you’re ever doing, you’re just offering your value, and because it’s coming from such an authentic place, it works. It just works, you know. I used to go out to health screenings, and my goal was I wanted to meet one person that I could show them an alternative to maybe a surgery they were doing, and because the only thing I was doing, they were sitting there talking to people about health and wellness. I ended up with all these new patients. It just has to be authentic. You just have to figure out why this means so much to you, and then all you have to do is share that, and that’s all marketing is. It’s just you sharing who you are with the world.” Dr. Barbara Hales “That is wonderful advice. And with that, I would like to thank you for coming here. And listeners, this is, you know, a great guy, as you have seen and heard, and his company is called Palmer Care Group, and you can reach out to him at Palmer Care group.com We’ll also have that in the show notes, in case you don’t know how to spell it, or you probably forget it, as I have said it, but you know this guy has some great moves, and you need to see what he’s done and follow along. If you do that, you’re sure you’re sure there’ll be bumps, but you know what, you’re sure to meet with success. So, thank you so much for being on the show today with us, Corey” Dr. Corey Melnikov “Thanks for having me.” Dr. Barbara Hales 22:10 “This has been another episode of Marketing Tips with the Doctors, with your host Dr. Barbara Hales and Dr. Corey Malnikof. Till next time,” The post Scaling the Patient Experience first appeared on The Medical Strategist .

May 13, 202619 min

Can Doctors Survive This

In this episode, Barbara discusses: Why video creates deeper patient trust than traditional advertising and why trust is the real currency in medicine. How simple, authentic smartphone videos outperform expensive, polished productions in attracting the right patients. How familiarity bias makes patients feel like they already know you before the first appointment. Key Takeaways: “The future belongs to physicians who learn how to combine technology with humanity, not one or the other.” – Dr. Barbara Hales Connect with Barbara Hales: Twitter: @DrBarbaraHales Facebook: facebook.com/theMedicalStrategist Business Website: TheMedicalStrategist.com Email: info@TheMedicalStrategist.com YouTube:@barbarahales LinkedIn: https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/barbarahales Books: Content Copy Made Easy 14 Tactics to Triple Sales Power to the Patient: The Medical Strategist TRANSCRIPTION (240) Introduction: Can Doctors Survive This? Dr. Barbara Hales 0:02 Hey, welcome to another episode of marketing tips for doctors. I’m your host. Dr. Barbara Hales, today, we’re talking about something that many physicians are quietly asking themselves right now: Can doctors survive this? And when I say this, I mean the exhaustion, the bureaucracy, the endless charting, the emotional depletion, the inbox overload, the pressure to see more patients in less time, and now, artificial intelligence entering medicine at lightning speed. Some doctors are excited about AI. Some are terrified of it, and many are simply too burnt out to even think about it. But today, I want to talk about AI differently, not as a threat, not as science fiction, but as a tool that may actually help restore some of the humanity medicine has been losing for years, because, let’s be honest, most physicians are not burned out because they stopped caring. They’re burnt out because they care deeply inside a system that often makes caring harder and harder to sustain. And I think that distinction matters. So today we’re going to talk honestly about physician burnout. What AI is actually doing right now, what concerns me, what gives me hope, and why the future may belong to physicians who combine humanity with technology instead of fearing one or the other. The Real Problem: The Machinery of Medicine Dr. Barbara Hales 3:24 The real problem, you know, when people outside medicine imagine physician burnout, they often assume doctors are exhausted because medicine itself is emotionally difficult. And yes, of course it is. We deliver bad news. We carry enormous responsibility. We witness suffering. But strangely enough, that’s usually not the part physicians complain about most. What many doctors are truly exhausted by is everything surrounding medicine, the machinery of medicine, the clicks, the forms, the documentation, the prior authorization, the inbox messages, and the constant interruption of human connection by administrative overload. I’ve heard physicians say I spend more time talking to my computer than my patients, and honestly, that’s heartbreaking, because medicine was never supposed to feel like data entry with a stethoscope. I once spoke with a physician who told me something that stayed with me for a very long time. He said I realized one day that I barely look patients in the eyes anymore, not because he didn’t care, not because he was cold, but because he was trying to survive the pace, typing, clicking, documenting, trying not to fall Behind, trying not to drown, and he said the moment that really shook him happened when a patient stopped talking in the middle of a visit and finally said, Doctor, are you listening? That hit him hard because he was listening, but the patient couldn’t feel it. And honestly, I think that’s one of the great tragedies of modern medicine, not that doctors stopped caring, but that the system slowly began interfering with the visible expression of caring. The eye contact, the stillness, the presence, the humanity. AI as a Tool to Replace Friction, Not Physicians Now here’s where things get interesting, because the same technology many physicians fear may actually help restore some of what we lost and before anyone panics, no, I do not believe AI is replacing physicians, at least not good physicians, not thoughtful physicians, not emotionally intelligent physicians, not doctors capable of judgment, ethics, intuition, empathy and trust building, but AI is beginning to replace friction, and that matters Right now. AI is helping physicians with charting documentation. Note, generation, administrative tasks, patient education, marketing, scheduling, and communication. And if that sounds small, you haven’t been in medicine lately, this is all administrative work, because reducing just one hour of nightly charting can feel life changing to an exhausted position. AI Scribes and the End of “Pajama Charting” One of the most promising uses of AI in medicine is the AI scribe: instead of physicians spending hours typing notes and navigating electronic medical records, AI can now listen during patient visits and generate documentation in real time. That means doctors can maintain eye contact, focus on the patient instead of the screen, and often finish charting before they even leave the office. Miracle of miracles for many physicians, this could dramatically reduce the exhausting pajama charting that steals evenings, weekends, and personal time. AI isn’t replacing the physician’s judgment. It’s removing the administrative friction that has slowly drained energy and humanity from medical practice. I recently heard about a physician who started using an AI documentation tool during patient visits. At first, she resisted it. She thought, I don’t want a robot in the exam room. Fair concern. But after a few weeks, she noticed something surprising. She was finishing notes before leaving the office for the first time in years. No more logging back in at 10 pm, no more pajama charting, no more sitting in bed, exhausted with a laptop, balanced on her knees, trying to finish documentation before midnight. And what struck me most was not what she said about productivity, but about her family. She said my children stopped asking me why I was always working. That’s not a technology story. That’s a humanity, a humanity story. And I think we need to start looking at AI through that lens. Not only can it replace us, but it can also help us reclaim our lives. AI for Content Creation and Online Presence Now, let’s talk about something many physicians know they should be doing, but often don’t have time for, content creation, patient education, social media, videos, blogs, newsletters, most doctors are already overwhelmed just trying to survive the work day. The idea of consistently posting online can feel impossible, but AI is beginning to change that, too. AI tools can now help physicians generate post ideas, create captions, organize educational content, and repurpose long videos into short. Clips, draft newsletters, and simplify medical information into patient-friendly language, and honestly, this matters more than many doctors realize, because patients today are searching online long before they ever schedule an appointment, and the physicians who communicate clearly online are often the physicians patients trust first. AI-Enabled Patient Education and Teaching Videos AI is also transforming patient education itself, with past educational videos often requiring expensive equipment, editors, designers, lighting scripts, and hours of production time. Now, AI can help physicians create teaching videos quickly and efficiently. Imagine a cardiologist creating a simple animated explanation of high blood pressure, a pediatrician generating a short video on fever management for anxious patients, or a gastroenterologist sending a post-procedure recovery video for patients to watch at home. These tools allow physicians to educate patients at scale while still maintaining their own voice and expertise, and better education often leads to better compliance, less confusion, less anxiety, and stronger patient Trust. Let’s look at the patient who finally understood. I heard about a physician who kept running into the same problem. He would spend 15 or 20 minutes carefully explaining diagnoses, medications, treatment plans, and lifestyle changes to patients, and by the next visit, many still felt confused or overwhelmed, not because they weren’t intelligent, but because patients are often anxious during appointments. They forget details, they mishear, and they leave things emotionally overloaded. So this physician started experimenting with short AI-assisted educational videos. After each visit, patients would receive a brief, two or three-minute video explaining their condition in simple, easy-to-understand language; some included animations, and some reviewed medications. Others explained symptoms to watch out for or how lifestyle changes could improve outcomes. And something remarkable happened. Patients became more engaged, more compliant, and less anxious. Staff phone calls decreased because many common questions had already been answered. But what really struck him was when an elderly patient said, “Doctor, this is the first time I actually understood what’s happening in my body.” That was powerful because AI didn’t replace the physician in that story; it amplified the physician’s ability to educate, reassure, and connect. Automated Patient Communication and Self-Scheduling Another area where AI may significantly improve both efficiency and patient satisfaction is in automated. Patient communication, AI-powered chatbots can already answer many simple, repetitive questions that flood medical offices every day, such as office hours, refills, policies, insurance participation, directions, pre-visit instructions, Portal, access, and follow-up information. And at the same time, many patient portals now allow patients to schedule their own appointments online without waiting on hold or speaking to front desk staff. That’s huge for me. I remember waiting a good 20 to 25 minutes before I got someone in the office who could actually give me an appointment. This doesn’t replace staff. It frees staff to focus on more complex patient needs and higher-level personal interactions. When used correctly, technology can reduce frustration on both sides of health care. The Danger Zone: Protecting Humanity in Medicine Let’s take a look at the danger zone now, with all that said, there are legitimate concerns and positions should absolutely be thoughtful and cautious, because medicine cannot become emotionally automated. There are things AI cannot replicate: compassion, intuition, emotional nuance, trust, moral judgment, and human presence. Patients do not heal simply because information was delivered correctly. Patients heal through connection, through reassurance, through feeling seen, and my concern is not that AI will replace good physicians. My concern is that systems may try to use AI to strip medicine down to efficiency alone and medicine without humanity becomes cold, mechanical, transactional, forgettable, we cannot allow that to happen. The Future: Human-First, Technology-Assisted Care I truly believe the future belongs to physicians who learn how to combine technology with humanity, not one or the other. Moving forward, the smartest doctors will not be blindly anti-AI, nor will they be blindly dependent on it. They will be balanced, curious, intentional, human-first, technology-assisted. And honestly, I think that’s where medicine is heading, not physician versus machine, but physician plus machine, with the physician remaining the center of trust, judgment, empathy, wisdom, and healing. And if this conversation resonates with you, whether you’re a physician, health care leader, or someone simply trying to understand where medicine is heading. I’d love for you to subscribe, share this episode, and join our growing community here on marketing tips for doctors, because these Conversations Matter, and the more honestly we talk about burnout, technology, humanity and the future of healthcare, the better chance we have of building a medical system that works not only for patients, but for the people caring for them. Thank you so much for being here today. This has been another episode of marketing tips for doctors with your host, Dr Barbara Hales, see you next time. Thanks. The post Can Doctors Survive This first appeared on The Medical Strategist .

May 8, 202613 min

Restoring Trust in Medicine

In this episode, Barbara discusses: How the podcast grew from frustration and concern about confusion, mistrust, and misinformation in healthcare Why does authenticity, clear language, and hearing a doctor’s tone and compassion help rebuild trust How patient education lowers fear and helps people ask better questions and participate in their care How podcasting lets doctors reconnect with their purpose beyond rushed, transactional visits How to approach conflicting health advice online without panic or blind trust A success story where awareness from a podcast led to timely, life-saving heart disease treatment A cautionary story showing how stopping medication based on online voices can cause serious harm Why medical podcasts should promote critical thinking, not fear, and support partnership with doctors Key Takeaways: “Responsible medical podcasts don’t ask for blind belief; they give people the clarity and context to think critically and make wiser health decisions.” Connect with Barbara Hales: Twitter: @DrBarbaraHales Facebook: facebook.com/theMedicalStrategist Business Website: TheMedicalStrategist.com Email: info@TheMedicalStrategist.com YouTube:@barbarahales LinkedIn: https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/barbarahales Books: Content Copy Made Easy 14 Tactics to Triple Sales Power to the Patient: The Medical Strategist TRANSCRIPTION (239) Introduction & Why This Podcast Exists [0:00:02] Dr. Barbara Hales Welcome to another episode of marketing tips for doctors. I’m your host, Dr. Barbara Hales. We are going to discuss why medical podcasts matter more than ever. You know, one of the questions I get asked a lot is, ” Why did you even start a podcast? And honestly, the answer has very little to do with marketing. This podcast was born out of frustration, concern, and ultimately hope, because over the years, I noticed something happening in healthcare that became impossible to ignore. Patients had more access to information than ever before, but somehow, they were becoming more confused. Doctors were exhausted. Patients felt rushed. Trust was slipping, and meaningful communication in medicine was quietly disappearing. People were turning to the internet for answers about their health, and instead of clarity, they found fear, misinformation, extreme opinions, miracle cures, and influencers posing as medical experts. At the same time, many physicians had tremendous knowledge and experience, but no real platform to explain things calmly, clearly, and humanely, and I realized something very important: education has become part of healthcare itself. That’s where this podcast came from, not from ego, not from wanting attention, but from wanting to help people think more clearly about their health, because here’s the truth: most healthcare decisions are no longer made only in the exam room. They’re being influenced on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook groups, Google searches, and yes, podcasts, which means the quality of medical communication matters enormously now, and that’s why these conversations are important. Authenticity, Trust & How Podcasts Connect [0:03:00] Dr. Barbara Hales People often ask why podcasts connect so deeply with audiences. And I think the answer is simple. People are starving for authenticity. They don’t want to be talked down to. They don’t want complicated medical jargon designed to impress other doctors, and they don’t want constant fear-based headlines screaming everything you’re doing is killing you. People want honesty. They want clarity. They want someone who can explain complicated things in a calm, intelligent, understandable way. And podcasts do something unique. They allow people to hear your tone, your compassion, your thoughtful process, and your humanity, which builds trust. Sometimes, patients feel like they already know a doctor after listening to several episodes; that connection matters because medicine works best when trust exists. How do podcasts help both doctors and patients? For patients, education reduces fear when they understand their conditions, medications, risk factors, options, and the reasoning behind medical decisions; they feel empowered instead of helpless. Educated patients ask better questions. They participate more actively in their care, and in many cases, outcomes improve. But podcasts also help doctors. And I think this is something people don’t talk about enough. Many physicians went into medicine because they genuinely wanted to help people. But modern medicine can become incredibly transactional, with 15-minute appointments, endless documentation, insurance battles, burnout, and teaching. Reconnects doctors to purpose. It reminds physicians that communication itself can be healing, and honestly, sometimes one thoughtful conversation can help more people than an entire week of rushed office visits when podcasts disagree, then what? When Podcasts Disagree & How Patients Should Respond [0:07:00] Dr. Barbara Hales Well, here’s where things get interesting. Patients will often hear two podcasts with opposite opinions. One says, Never eat carbohydrates. Another says plant-based nutrition is the answer. One says, Take this supplement. Another says that the supplement is useless. So how is the average person supposed to know who’s right first? Don’t panic. Different opinions in medicine do not automatically mean someone is evil or incompetent. Medicine is not mathematics. It involves science, clinical judgment, individual differences, risk-versus-benefit decisions, and evolving research. Reasonable experts can disagree, but patients need a framework for evaluating what they hear. So what should patients do? First? Never make major health decisions based on one podcast episode. A podcast should educate you. It should not replace personalized medical care. Second, be cautious of people who sound certain about everything. Real medicine usually contains nuance. If someone says this works for everyone, doctors are hiding the truth, or this cures everything, that should raise concern. Good Medicine acknowledges limitations, exceptions, uncertainty, and individuality. The third look at motivation is the person educating you or selling fear, because fear has become a business model online, and frightened people click very quickly. Now, let me tell you a story that beautifully shows how Podcasts can actually help patients when handled thoughtfully. Success Story: Awareness, Not Self ‑ Diagnosis [0:11:00] Dr. Barbara Hales A woman in her late 50s had been listening to several health podcasts to improve her overall wellness. One episode discussed early warning signs of heart disease in women, not dramatic movie style, symptoms, subtle ones, fatigue, shortness of breath, jaw discomfort, exercise intolerance, and she realized she had quietly been experiencing several of those symptoms for months now. Here’s the important part: she didn’t panic. She didn’t diagnose herself online. She didn’t start taking random supplements. Instead, she used the information intelligently. She scheduled an appointment with her physician and said I heard a discussion that made me wonder if I should get evaluated. Her doctor took it seriously. Testing eventually revealed significant coronary artery disease. She needed intervention, and afterward, she said something incredibly powerful. The podcast didn’t save my life because it gave me treatment. It saved my life because it gave me awareness. That’s exactly what responsible medical education should do, not replace doctors, not create fear, but encourage thoughtful action. Cautionary Tale, Confidence vs. Credibility & The True Purpose [0:15:00] Dr. Barbara Hales But now let me tell you the other side: a younger woman became convinced by several online personalities that all prescription medications were toxic. One podcast after another reinforced the same message: natural healing, only doctors overprescribe. You don’t need medication. So, without consulting her physician, she abruptly stopped her blood pressure medication. She felt proud, at first, empowered, like she had taken control, but several weeks later, her blood pressure skyrocketed, she developed severe headaches, dizziness, and eventually ended up in the emergency room with dangerously elevated blood pressure. Thankfully, she recovered. Others who do that wind up stroking out. But afterward, she admitted. Something important, I confused confidence with credibility, and that sentence stuck with me because sounding confident online does not automatically mean someone is correct. What is the real purpose of medical podcasts? The best medical podcasts do not demand blind trust. They encourage critical thinking. A good podcast should help patients ask better questions, recognize misinformation, feel calmer, and become partners in their health care. The goal should never be, believe me, blindly. The goal should be to become informed enough to make wiser decisions. That’s a very different mission. So, if today’s conversation helped you see healthcare a little more clearly, share this episode with someone who may need it too, because informed patients and connected doctors create better medicine for everyone, and honestly, that’s exactly why this podcast exists. I’ll see you next time. This has been another episode of marketing tips for doctors with your host, Dr Barbara Hales. Till next time. The post Restoring Trust in Medicine first appeared on The Medical Strategist .

April 30, 202633 min

Attract Patients Forever

In this episode, Dr. Barbara Hales interviews Bret Gregory, founder of DrTalks : Bret shares how his decade of running a marketing agency for doctors showed that virtual summits and podcasts are the strongest long-term patient-acquisition strategies, with summits often generating 20,000+ email leads and significant new-patient revenue. He recounts his entrepreneurial path, including selling a corporate wellness business after his brother’s terminal cancer diagnosis, attempting an eco-wellness community in Costa Rica, and learning online marketing to survive the 2008 downturn. Brett explains why doctors make in-demand podcast guests, how DrTalks helps doctors get booked for free using AI, and why nurturing an email list with a weekly newsletter is more valuable than social followers. Connect with Bret Gregory: sign in/up https://drtalks.com/ LinkedIn Bret Gregory Connect with Barbara Hales: Twitter: @DrBarbaraHales Facebook: facebook.com/theMedicalStrategist Business Website: TheMedicalStrategist.com Email: info@TheMedicalStrategist.com YouTube:@barbarahales LinkedIn: https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/barbarahales Books: Content Copy Made Easy 14 Tactics to Triple Sales Power to the Patient: The Medical Strategist TRANSCRIPT. (238) Dr. Barbara Hales 00:02 Welcome to another episode of marketing tips for doctors. I’m your host, Dr. Barbara Hales, and today we have a very interesting person with us by the name of Bret. Gregory Dr. Barbara Hales 00:19 Bret was giving that little pause there for excitement. What I wanted to tell you about him, which makes him so interesting, is that he is a healthcare investor and has invested in several health and wellness startups. So I’d like to say that over his 30-year career, he’s founded and built not one but four successful startups in the health and wellness sector, two of which empower doctors to build their brands and businesses through innovative approaches. His most recent one is called Doctor Talks. You can reach that through drtalks.com. Bret Gregory 01:11 Thanks so much. Barbara, I really appreciate you having me, and it’s wonderful to have a physician who is helping other doctors. It’s really exciting for me to have a conversation with you. I founded drtalks.com about six years ago, right when the pandemic started. And prior to that, I had a marketing agency for doctors for about a decade. And that entire time, while we were helping doctors, we were doing all sorts of marketing strategies, lots of social media. We were doing campaigns, emails, webinars, you name it. And then what I noticed is, over that decade, the marketing that worked the best, the long-term marketing that worked the best for doctors was very consistently virtual summits and podcasts and putting on a virtual summit where one doctor might interview 20 or 30 other doctors, and then we would launch that summit virtually. And every time we did that, they would grow a 20,000-plus-patient email list and convert it into a million dollars in new-patient revenue per year. And the only thing was, it was very hard. Took a lot of work. It was a lot of effort. And the same thing with podcasts. Podcasts took, they took a while to get going, but once they got going, they ended up being some of the best long term marketing strategies for doctors. Well over that decade, I was wondering, how come no one has ever created an entire platform dedicated to this? It’s kind of like YouTube for doctors. And after asking myself that for over five years, I finally said, Well, you know what? I’ll create it. And so I went out, maxed out my credit cards, borrowed $50,000, hired a few employees overseas, found my first 10 customers, and we launched in March of 2020, right when the pandemic started. I didn’t know what was going to happen. No one did, of course, but it turned out helping doctors with their online businesses was perfect timing. The pandemic gave us a tailwind, and now, six years later, we’ve grown into the world’s largest streaming platform for integrative and functional medicine doctors who want to reach our 11 million patient web visitors. And so we’re really on a mission now to democratize the Creator economy for doctors. What that means is we want to help you, doctors, make money off your information. I believe that doctors have been squeezed from so many different places, and now it’s time for doctors to monetize, to be able to get paid for their information while they’re helping people with their knowledge. So that’s the mission of doctor talks. Dr. Barbara Hales 04:04 That’s really great. But before we continue on this topic that you are clearly passionate about, what I would like to do is to turn the dial and go back to the beginning, because and you know other doctors and other you know, possible entrepreneurs here that you are an investor, that is something, I think, that you know, other than being envious, strike strikes the the question or fear in people. Well, isn’t it scary to start with something like that from the beginning, you know, and worry whether it’s going to fail and is going to lose all his money, or, you know, like, like, how that works. So take me back to the beginning and say, you know, most people would take the safe route. So, you know, they. Start a business, or they would, you know, work in a, you know, in a business that was either, you know, like, joint-vented with someone else. So let’s, let’s start from the beginning, because I know there are people here listening to this saying, like, what you know, like, how does this happen? So tell me how it happened. Like, why is it that you had all the confidence to, you know, be an investor and, you know, like, how that all came about? Bret Gregory 05:33 Sure. Well, I started out as an entrepreneur. Very early in college. I started my first business, started a painting company, and then right out of college, I went into the Employee Benefits business, and I started my own company there, and that was from about 1996 to 2006 I did corporate wellness programs, and I also started a radio show at that time. And what I accidentally discovered is that by interviewing real prospective customers, I was interviewing CEOs of companies in San Diego and interviewing people who could refer us prospective customers, we ended up building a really significant business in the corporate wellness sector over a 10 year period, and that was my my first business, sadly, in 2006 my 34 year old brother was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, stage four non small cell carcino carcinoma, and he ended up passing away nine months after that, And that just changed the trajectory of my life completely. Bret Gregory 06:44 Thank you. I appreciate that. But I tore off my suit and tie. I sold my business. I had about $3 million I moved to Costa Rica. I purchased a 164-acre property to develop an eco-friendly wellness community that helps as many people as possible change their lifestyle habits and heal from within, to the best of their bodies’ abilities. Now, I’m not a doctor. I know nothing about I don’t pretend to be one. I do understand marketing and sales. That’s really where my experience lies, but I was really focused on helping as many people as I possibly could, and I wanted to use that as my brother’s legacy. Well, I went and purchased this great piece of property down in Costa Rica, right across the street from the beach, and a new hospital is under construction. Now it was a great time to sell my corporate wellness programs business, but it was a terrible time to invest in a speculative real estate development because we closed in 2007, right before the 2008 global financial crisis, and I was really worried. I thought I was going to go bankrupt. I very quickly learned online marketing. I learned how to build websites, drive traffic, build lead magnets, grow an email list, and in just about 12 months, we were able to do about $1.4 million in sales to customers we met on Facebook, and this was now in 2009 2010 it was just enough to avoid going bankrupt, but it wasn’t enough to raise the money that we needed to raise to develop a large eco friendly wellness community. So I had to put that project on hold, move back to San Diego, and that’s when I started. It was called “attract customers now,” where I helped doctors grow their practices. And I did that from 2010 to 2020, and that’s when I learned about the different techniques that can help doctors grow their practices and attract patients online. Dr. Barbara Hales 08:54 Did you use that property for wellness retreats? Bret Gregory 08:58 That was the goal. Unfortunately, we were never able to really recover from the global financial crisis, and that was the whole idea and goal. We wanted to build a wellness community for retreats. We just weren’t able to do it. Dr. Barbara Hales 09:14 And that’s unfortunate, because it seems like such an absolutely beautiful place. Bret Gregory 09:19 It is truly, truly beautiful. Feels very magical, feels very nurturing and healing, and that was the idea. Dr. Barbara Hales 09:29 So I understand that one of the ways you recommend physicians, you know, become visible to their prospective patients is by putting out podcasts. Do you recommend they guest-podcast on other sites before considering creating their own? Bret Gregory 09:51 Yeah, well, guesting on podcasts has become the hottest new way to attract patients online right now. Wow. And one thing: since I started drtalks.com about six years ago, I’ve worked with 1000s of doctors. There are probably 3000 doctors on the platform today. We’ve got lots and lots of Doctor-hosted podcasts, and I’ve coached. We’ve produced over 7500 podcast interviews on doctor talks. And one thing that I see very consistently is that doctors don’t always realize that they make fantastic podcast guests, and that podcast hosts love to interview doctors, and you don’t need to pay anybody or anything to be booked on a podcast as a doctor. As a doctor, your information is valuable to podcast hosts. You’re a sought-after expert, key opinion leader, and the podcast hosts want to interview you, so we’ve made it really easy to help doctors get booked on a podcast. And yes, I definitely recommend guesting first before you just run out and start your own podcast. What the doctors I’ve worked with find is that when they become guests on a podcast, they love it. They usually, you know, it’s unexpected how much fun it is that they really enjoy it. And then, of course, the side benefit is that they get the word out and educate the public, which is something that pretty much every doctor I know wants to do, and they can attract new patients online, as well as new clients and customers for their business. Dr. Barbara Hales 11:40 So, as a representative of drtalks.com, do you have all the podcasts on the doctor talk site, or are you helping doctors get onto other people’s podcasts? Bret Gregory 11:55 Both? Yeah. So think of doctor talks as YouTube, but with all the content creators being doctors. So, when I say YouTube, it’s the world’s largest podcast platform. So YouTube is far larger for podcast consumption than Spotify. It’s far larger than Apple Podcasts. And so a lot of people who have podcasts, almost everybody that has a podcast puts their podcast on YouTube, and 1000s and 1000s of doctors that have podcasts also put their podcast on Doctor. Talks: It’s free to have a channel on doctor talks, just as it is on YouTube. So there are so many podcasts out there that doctors can get booked on really easily. And we’ve created a system that lets them set up a free expert account and start messaging and connecting. We have an AI that connects them directly with podcast hosts, and they can start pitching themselves. And we’ve made it really easy for them to pitch themselves and get booked on a podcast. It’s easy, it’s free, and it’s a lot of fun. Dr. Barbara Hales 13:08 That’s great, and certainly financially, it beats paying for ads and hoping that people will see those ads Bret Gregory 13:16 much it’s much better than paying for ads. It’s much better. There are podcast booking companies and agencies out there that charge, you know, 2000 to $5,000 a month to book people on podcasts. Well, we can do that for free. And like I said, we’ve got hundreds and even 1000s of podcasts. If you’re a doctor, it’s free. You can create a free expert account on drtalks.com and start getting booked right away. And the one question that you know some of your listeners may have, because I’ve heard this from many, many doctors, when I am always encouraging doctors to be a guest on podcast, is sometimes they say, why would anyone want to listen to me and aren’t there already so many experts talking about menopause or hormones or peptides or whatever, whatever your expertise is in. And let me tell you, you are still that key opinion leader. You’re still that sought-after expert that the podcast host wants. You still have so much to offer. If you can help one patient, you can be a great guest on a podcast, and I just want to encourage you to give it a try, because you’re not only probably going to love it, you’re going to help people, and you’re probably going to start to attract new patients, clients, and customers Dr. Barbara Hales 14:39 are physicians who are functional into functional medicine, or maybe non-traditional medical care. Welcome to your show as well. Bret Gregory 14:50 100% yes, so any doctor can make a free expert channel on doctor talks. Uh, the great thing about doctor talks is that there are 11 million patients visiting the web. Most patient web visitors come to look for alternative treatments. They, you know, usually want to figure out, how can I use diet, lifestyle, exercise, and how can I work with a doctor that’s going to, you know, work with me. Listen to me. A lot of cash-paying patients on drtalks.com, and so it can be great for integrative Functional Medicine and even traditional doctors. Dr. Barbara Hales 15:30 That’s great. Now, I did notice when I looked at the site that in addition to podcasts and videos, you also have summits. So maybe you could tell the audience here the difference between a podcast and a virtual Summit? Bret Gregory 15:46 Sure. So, virtual summits and podcasts are similar in many ways: there’s usually one host, or a host and a co-host, who interview other doctors. But the summits tend to focus on one subject. So we just recently completed the Reversing Heart Disease Naturally Summit, hosted by Dr. Joel Kahn, a cardiologist, and Dr. Joel Fuhrman, a nine-time New York Times bestseller. They interviewed approximately, I want to say it was maybe, I think they did 20 interviews each. So they did approximately 40 interviews, and almost everyone they interviewed was also a doctor, but it was all about how to reverse heart disease naturally. And so they record all those interviews, and then we do a summit launch. And so, usually, all the experts on the summit will send an email to their patient email lists, inviting them to watch the summit for free. So the summits are free to register for and attend. And our summits usually have between 20,000 and 40,000 attendees, and they’re all virtual. They’re launched over approximately a five-day period, during which everybody comes together to watch the summit for free. And we have summits on lots of different topics. We’ve done summits on Alzheimer’s and diabetes and Hashimoto’s, and we’ve produced over 100 summits in the past six years, at doctor talks, Dr. Barbara Hales 17:25 When a person is having a podcast, versus, you know, being head of a summit or leading a summit in a particular group, is the one leading the summit considered, you know, prospectively, a higher authority than someone that just has a podcast? Bret Gregory 17:47 Well, I wouldn’t necessarily compare it to having a higher authority than someone with a podcast, but certainly, hosting a podcast can help you raise your authority and become that key opinion leader. Definitely, hosting a summit can also help you raise your authority and be a key opinion leader. I think one of the main differences is that if you’re hosting a summit, you’re going to grow an email list that should be highly valuable and profitable to your practice, and so in both cases, you will be able to elevate your key opinion leadership. Dr. Barbara Hales 18:22 So, with a virtual Summit, you can grow your email list faster. Bret Gregory 18:33 Definitely, yeah, usually, again, when we have the host, we will get a copy of the email list that we can produce with the summit. That email list should be worth half a million to a million dollars a year to a doctor who has a practice. You know, whether it’s even if it’s a brick and mortar practice or even if it’s a virtual practice, the it’s you know, think about an email list of 20,000 prospective patients, you’re going to have a lot of you know, great value in that, and that’s something that the summit does. Now, summits are they’re considerably harder than a podcast. Podcast is a much easier place to start. But I would also suggest, again, if you’re really starting out from scratch, start out as a guest with one podcast interview, and we can help you get booked for free on drtalks.com. Dr. Barbara Hales 19:30 Well, one of the great benefits of having a summit is that, for whatever topic this summit is highlighting, the people who have signed up for it are the ones who are raising their hand, saying, ” You know, this is a topic that I’m interested in, Dr. Barbara Hales 19:59 when a person. And signs up. Is there a little blurb at the bottom saying, “By signing up, you give permission to receive information,” or is that the first email you send after you get the email list? Would you like to keep getting information? Bret Gregory 20:17 Yeah, it’s the first part. So they have to acknowledge that they’ll be on the host’s email list. And that’s why they have to check a box to agree to it in order to register. So it’s very clearly labeled up front that you’ll be joining the doctor’s email list. And then, of course, like with any email system, you should be able to easily subscribe with one unsubscribe with one click. Should you choose to do so? Dr. Barbara Hales 20:47 Surely. Now, do these people who sign up get any kind of lead magnet, or is the Summit and the summit information enough of a draw that nothing else needs to be sent to them? Bret Gregory 21:00 Usually, we’ll have four to five ebooks, and, as you said, you can refer to them as lead magnets, but they’re typically high-value. Many times they’re authored by the host; sometimes they’re authored by premium guests who have, you know, really high-quality information aligned with the topics. So, for example, on the reversing heart disease naturally Summit, there were, I think, about four or five ebooks that were all related to reversing heart disease naturally. And they’re very, very high-quality ebooks, Dr. Barbara Hales 21:40 which is a very important topic these days. Bret Gregory 21:43 Yes, absolutely agreed. Dr. Barbara Hales 21:46 So when a doctor gets an email list, well, I think first of all, we can all agree that one of the most valuable assets a doctor or any businessperson has is that email list, right? So once the doctor gets the new email list, what do they do with it? Bret Gregory 22:06 Great question. Yeah, this is one of the most important things for a doctor, and really for any business, is your email list. And the email list should be far more valuable. And let me just help give some perspective here. Would you rather have 10,000 Instagram subscribers or a 10,000-person email list? You would much rather have the email list. You could likely turn a 10,000-person email list into hundreds of 1000s of dollars of revenue, where you could almost never do that with 10,000 Instagram subscribers. So if you ever hear this phrase from people who teach marketing, “the money’s in the list,” it is absolutely true. So you want to really focus on building your email list. That can be done with a newsletter. It could be done by hosting a summit. There are many ways to do that; we won’t get into it right now, but the most important thing is to nurture your list. So you want to send, ideally, a weekly email newsletter that drives traffic back to your website. This is one of the most valuable things we can help doctors with who have podcasts: many doctors forget that if they have their own podcast, they should send out a weekly email as part of their newsletter. And it’s really this. This last part is really important in the if you’re going to release a weekly podcast episode instead of driving traffic to Spotify or Apple or your YouTube channel, you drive them back to your website so you can put your podcast on your website, and whenever a new episode comes out, you would send that email in your newsletter once a week and send traffic back to your website that right there could be worth six figures a year in driving traffic from your existing patient email list you don’t need, you don’t need a giant list. You could have a 1000-patient email list, and that would generate, you know, probably six figures per year. So what do they do with the email list that you want to nurture it? The best way to nurture it is with a newsletter. The easiest way to do it is news. To populate your newsletter is like having a weekly podcast. Dr. Barbara Hales 24:32 When a person signs up to the website, of course, they’re seeing everything that you are. You know, believe everything that you believe in, everything that you teach. But you know, when people look to see how many subscribers you have, obviously, if they’re going to the website as the primary exposure. Or that there is no, you know, subscribing button. So do you say, well, it’s more important that they see your web list than a subscriber number. Bret Gregory 25:13 Well, great question. So the subscriber number that you see, whether it’s on YouTube or your Spotify followers, I like to refer to as social proof. Often, those are vanity metrics. So you might see a lot of people with hundreds or 1000s of followers on Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok; those tend to be what I refer to as vanity metrics. The exception is YouTube. If you have YouTube subscribers, those tend to be a lot more valuable than, say, Facebook subscribers. That all being said, I would still rather have the email list and when you drive traffic, if you’re going to drive traffic somewhere, you always want to drive traffic to your website, and when, for anybody that is, you know, if you’re just getting started out, one of the things that you would do is make it easy for people to sign up for your newsletter, and so you just Have a form on your homepage where it’s very easy for people to sign up for your newsletter, and then you send them a weekly newsletter. That’s the nurturing that we were talking about earlier. And if you do it once a week, you can send people traffic to your website, whether it’s reading a new blog post or perhaps seeing your latest podcast interview. Anytime you can get your patients back to your website, you have the opportunity to let them book a consultation or purchase anything else you might offer. Dr. Barbara Hales 26:54 Well, that’s really great advice. So, at this point in the podcast, I like to ask my guest: What are two tips you would give to the listening audience? So let’s say a person you know is not just starting out in the practice, but is not, you know, towards the end of their practice, either they’re you know, like midway, they’d like to, you know, they’d like to improve the numbers, or if they’ve decided recently, which is even more important, if they’ve decided to transition away from an insurance dependent model to a concierge now, it’s as though they are starting from scratch, because now they need to let people know that that’s what’s going to be happening. They need to attract new people and convince existing ones that paying for something is worth it. So, absolutely like, what tips would you give? Bret Gregory 27:58 So my biggest tip, and you know, I’m certainly biased, is that I think doctors should be a guest on a podcast, but because it’s free, it’s easy. And, you know, we have a way to make it really easy for you to get booked on podcasts. My tips would be to get booked on a podcast, and one of the easiest ways to do that for any of you, if you use any kind of AI out there, if you like ChatGPT or Claude, whatever you use, go and open up a window and type in this prompt. Help me come up with a catchy podcast title. And here’s where you fill in the blank that might be, wherever your area of expertise is, peptides, menopause, heart disease, diabetes, whatever your specialty is or area of expertise, and then let it run, and it’ll come up with a bunch of really catchy podcast titles. Find the one that resonates with you, and it just hooks you. That’s the key. Find the one that just really hooks you. Go, ooh, that one would be great. Use that when you approach other doctors who have podcasts. So again, on doctor talks, you create a free expert profile. You can quickly start messaging our AI, which will match you with other podcast hosts. You could start messaging those doctors and say, “I would love to be on your podcast.” Here is my and you can call it your signature talk. Here is my signature talk. Copy and paste that catchy podcast title, and that’s going to hook them into wanting to interview you. It’s totally free, and it’ll give you a really great opportunity: once the last step is taken, you can ask your favorite AI chatbot to help you come up with great interview questions. And have come up with approximately 10 questions that should be good for about a 25-minute interview. Try to keep your interviews to approximately 25 minutes. It’s just a good rule of thumb. You don’t want them to go. Too long, and those are my tips that can really help you. Dr. Barbara Hales 30:04 Those are great tips. And if I might just throw one in, following up on what you said is, you know, when you find that title or that hook that you think is wonderful, the thing is, someone else might have thought it’s wonderful first. So, before you actually make that your podcast, get the URL. If the URL is not available, then think again, because sure, you don’t really want to be promoting someone else’s podcast. Bret Gregory 30:41 Yeah, I was referring to if they were going to be a guest, as opposed to hosting their own podcast, you’re 100% correct. If they’re going to host their own podcast, you need to put a lot more thought into the title, the name of the show, but I was thinking more of a catchy podcast, title of an episode, of an episode, then in that case, you’re absolutely right, yeah. Dr. Barbara Hales 31:05 Well, you know what? I thoroughly enjoyed speaking with you today, as I’m sure the listeners are, you know, interested in what you have to say. They’ve, I’m sure, gotten a lot of value out of it. So I just want to remind listeners that you can visit drtalks.com, browse the site, and sign up. It’s free. You are getting nurtured by one of the best. Yeah. Bret Gregory 31:39 Thank you so much. Well, yeah, for anybody who’s listening, you can create your free account. If you’re a doctor, go to doctor talks.com that’s D, R, T, a, l, K, s.com, forward slash, connect. Then you can sign up, create your expert profile, and get started. Our AI will connect you with podcast hosts, and you can start getting connected. And our team will be happy to assist you if you need any help Dr. Barbara Hales 32:01 well. Thank you so much. This has been another episode of marketing tips for doctors, till next time. The post Attract Patients Forever first appeared on The Medical Strategist .

April 22, 202610 min

Smartphone Videos Beat Ads

In this episode, Barbara discusses: In this episode, Dr. Barbara Hales breaks down why video is becoming the most powerful trust-building tool in modern medicine. While traditional advertising may create visibility, it often fails to build the one thing patients value most—trust. Dr. Hales explains how simple, authentic videos recorded on a smartphone can outperform high-budget productions by creating a sense of familiarity and human connection. Patients aren’t just looking for credentials—they’re looking for a doctor they feel comfortable with before they even walk into the clinic. You’ll also learn why perfection is actually hurting your visibility, how familiarity bias influences patient decisions, and how even camera-shy physicians can start building authority and attracting better patients with short, consistent videos. If you’re a physician (or any professional) looking to grow your practice, build credibility, and connect with your audience on a deeper level—this episode is a must-listen. Key Takeaways: “Stop chasing perfection and start showing up. Patients don’t need a cinematic ad—they need a real doctor speaking clearly and calmly on camera.” -Dr. Barbara Hales Connect with Barbara Hales: Twitter: @DrBarbaraHales Facebook: facebook.com/theMedicalStrategist Business Website: TheMedicalStrategist.com Email: info@TheMedicalStrategist.com YouTube:@barbarahales LinkedIn: https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/barbarahales Books: Content Copy Made Easy 14 Tactics to Triple Sales Power to the Patient: The Medical Strategist TRANSCRIPT (237) Introduction: The Power of Video for Doctors Dr. Barbara Hales 0:02 Welcome to another episode of marketing tips for doctors. I’m your host, Dr Barbara Hales, today, we are going to talk about why doctors should speak on camera. Let me start with a question: if you needed surgery tomorrow and had to choose between two surgeons, one had a beautiful website and glossy ads; the other had a simple website but dozens of short videos where you could see them explaining things calmly, intelligently, and clearly. Which doctor would you trust? Most people choose the second one, not because the ads were bad, but because video creates trust, and trust is the real currency in medicine. Today, we’re going to talk about something many physicians avoid speaking on camera, and here’s the truth: you do not need a studio, you do not need expensive equipment. You do not need to become an influencer. What you need is something far more powerful. You need to let patients see who you are, because when patients feel like they already know you, they walk into the office trusting you, and that changes everything. Today, I’ll show you why video builds trust faster than ads, why authenticity beats production quality, why doctors who speak on camera attract better patients, and how to start doing this, even if you hate being on camera, and along the way, I’ll share a few stories, because this shift is happening everywhere in medicine right now. Here’s the uncomfortable truth: Patients don’t trust the medical system the way they used to, not because physicians are less competent, but because the system feels impersonal. Patients feel like numbers. Appointments are rushed, and doctors are overworked. Everything feels transactional, so patients go online looking for answers, and when they do, they’re looking for a human being, and They’re not looking for a brochure, not a marketing campaign, just a real person, someone who explains things clearly, someone who seems thoughtful, someone who actually cares. The Trust Gap in Modern Medicine Dr. Barbara Hales 3:24 Video does that instantly: when a patient watches you speak for two minutes, they subconsciously evaluate things like, “Does this doctor seem calm?” Do they explain things well? Do they seem rushed? Do they seem arrogant? Do they seem compassionate, and do they make a decision, not consciously, but emotionally? I once worked with two cardiologists in the same city, both excellent physicians, both highly trained, both board-certified. Dr. A had a massive marketing budget, Billboards, radio ads, and print ads. Dr. B did something simple. He started recording two-minute educational videos, nothing fancy, just his smartphone, talking about time. Topics like what chest pain actually feels like, when to worry about palpitations, and what a stress test really means. Within a year, patients were walking into his office saying something fascinating. I feel like I already know you think about that before the first appointment even started, the relationship already had trust, and that trust started with a video on his iPhone. If your physician is listening to this and thinking, I probably should be doing this. You’re right, and here’s the simplest place to start. Record one short video answering a question patients ask every day. That’s it, not perfect, just helpful, because education builds trust faster than advertising ever will. Why video works so perfectly, so powerfully, you think video communicates things that text never can: your tone, your pacing, your expressions, your calmness. Patients don’t just hear information; they experience your presence. And presence is powerful. There’s also something else happening psychologically. When patients repeatedly watch your videos, they experience a phenomenon called familiarity bias. The Brain prefers what feels familiar, which means when patients finally meet you in person, you already feel like the safe choice, and that’s incredibly powerful in medicine. I worked with a dermatologist who absolutely hated being on camera. She told me I went to medical school, not broadcasting School, which is fair, but she agreed to try something simple, one video per week, two minutes. That’s it. The first few were awkward. She was stiff. She looked nervous. But something interesting happened. Patients loved them. Why? Because she was authentic. Six months later, her new patient visits increased significantly, but the bigger change was this. Patients arrived educated. They already understood basic concepts. The visits became more efficient, with better conversations and better relationships, and she later told me something funny. I still hate being on camera, but I love what it does. Case Studies: Video vs. Traditional Marketing Many doctors delay video because they think it needs to look perfect, studio, lighting, professional editing, expensive equipment, but the truth is almost the opposite. Patients trust authenticity more than polish. In fact, overly produced content can feel like advertising, and patients are skeptical of advertising, but a doctor speaking calmly in their office that feels real, that feels human, and patients trust humans. An orthopedic surgeon once hired a production company. This was the $40,000 video that didn’t work. They created a beautiful promotional video, drone shots, cinematic music, and perfect lighting. It cost nearly $40,000, think of that. They spent $40,000 on these videos, and it looked amazing, but it didn’t move the needle. Why? Because it felt like marketing. Later, he started recording simple, one-minute educational clips, just explaining common injuries. ACL, tears, shoulder pain, and knee arthritis. Those videos started getting shared by patients, and suddenly, new patients were saying, I saw your video explaining knee pain. Not the $40,000 production, it was the 62nd explanation, because education builds trust. Advertising rarely does something interesting happen. Why Video Works: Presence, Familiarity, and Psychology When doctors start speaking publicly, they begin clarifying their thinking. Teaching forces clarity. Explaining medicine simply is a skill, and when physicians develop that skill, their authority increases. Patients see them as leaders. Colleagues see them as experts. Opportunities appear. Speaking leads to visibility. Visibility leads to authority. Authority leads to opportunity, and it often starts with something incredibly simple, a two-minute video. An internist started making short videos during COVID. He simply explained complex medical topics calmly, no drama, no politics, just clarity. People share them because they feel trustworthy. Within two years, he had a national following. He was invited to conferences, media interviews, and educational panels, and none of that was the goal. The goal was simply to help patients better understand medicine, but clarity and credibility have a way of spreading. Overcoming Fear and Perfectionism on Camera If you’re a physician considering this, here’s the good news. It’s much easier than you think. Start with simple topics that patients ask about every day. Examples: What causes fatigue? When should you worry about chest pain? What does high cholesterol actually mean? Keep videos short. One idea per video. Two Minutes is perfect. You don’t need perfection. You need sincerity and consistency; one video per week is enough, because over a year, that becomes 52 moments of trust. Practical Tips for Physicians If you are a physician who wants to build trust with patients, start speaking, not because you want to become famous, but because patients need doctors who explain things clearly. And if you’d like more ideas like this on how physicians can grow their practices, communicate better with patients and build more sustainable careers. Be sure to subscribe to marketing tips for doctors. And if you know a colleague who’s struggling with practice growth or patient engagement, share this episode with them, because sometimes one small idea, like recording a simple video, can completely change how a practice grows. Thanks for listening till next time. The post Smartphone Videos Beat Ads first appeared on The Medical Strategist .

April 17, 20268 min

How to Start a Telehealth Practice

In this episode, Barbara discusses: Why video builds stronger patient trust than traditional marketing and why trust drives patient decisions in healthcare. Why simple smartphone videos often outperform high-budget productions in attracting and retaining patients. How familiarity bias makes patients feel comfortable with a doctor before the first appointment even happens. Key Takeaways: “Stop chasing perfection and start showing up. Patients don’t need a cinematic ad they need a real doctor speaking clearly and calmly on camera.” -Dr. Barbara Hales Connect with Barbara Hales: Twitter: @DrBarbaraHales Facebook: facebook.com/theMedicalStrategist Business Website: TheMedicalStrategist.com Email: info@TheMedicalStrategist.com YouTube:@barbarahales LinkedIn: https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/barbarahales Books: Content Copy Made Easy 14 Tactics to Triple Sales Power to the Patient: The Medical Strategist TRANSCRIPT (236) Introduction: Why Video Matters in Medicine Dr. Barbara Hales 0:02 Welcome to another episode of Marketing Tips for Doctors. I’m Dr. Barbara Hales. Today we talk about why doctors should speak on camera. Think about this. If you needed surgery tomorrow, you choose between two doctors. One has polished ads and a perfect website. The other has simple videos explaining conditions clearly and calmly. Most people choose the second doctor. Not because the ads are bad, but because video builds trust. And trust drives decisions in healthcare. Many physicians avoid video. They think they need a studio or professional gear. That is not true. What matters is letting patients see you, hear you, and understand how you think. When patients feel like they already know you, everything changes. The Trust Gap in Modern Medicine Dr. Barbara Hales 3:24 Patients no longer trust systems automatically. They look for people. They want someone calm. Someone clear. Someone who explains things without rushing. Video shows that instantly. When patients watch a short video, they judge: clarity tone calmness empathy confidence These judgments happen fast and emotionally. A cardiologist once shared educational videos from his phone. No production team. No ads. He explained simple topics like chest pain and palpitations. Patients later said, “I feel like I already know you.” Trust is formed before the first visit. Start simple. Answer one common patient question. Keep it short. Keep it clear. Case Studies: Video vs. Traditional Marketing A major insight here: production quality does not guarantee trust. One orthopedic surgeon spent around $40,000 on a polished promotional video. It looked professional but performed poorly. Why? It felt like advertising. Later, he switched to short, simple videos explaining injuries. Those videos got shared. Patients referenced them. New bookings followed. A dermatologist who disliked being on camera started with one short video per week. She stayed consistent. Her patients responded positively. Her visits improved because patients arrived informed. Conversations became easier. Authenticity performed better than polish. Why Video Works: Presence, Familiarity, and Psychology Video creates three things: Presence Patients experience how you think and speak. Familiarity Repeated exposure builds comfort before the first visit. Clarity Teaching forces simple explanations, which builds authority. There is also familiarity bias. People prefer what feels known. When patients meet you after watching your videos, they feel familiar with you. That reduces hesitation. Overcoming Fear and Perfectionism Start small. Pick topics patients already ask: fatigue chest pain cholesterol common symptoms Keep each video focused on one idea. Around two minutes works well. Do not aim for perfect delivery. Aim for clarity. One video per week is enough. Over time, that becomes consistent trust-building. Practical Guidance Video is not about visibility. It is about clarity. Doctors who explain things well build stronger practices over time. Start with simple explanations. Stay consistent. Improve as you go. If you want growth in your practice, communication is part of it. One clear video can change how patients see you before they ever meet you. The post How to Start a Telehealth Practice first appeared on The Medical Strategist .

April 8, 202617 min

How to Work Less, and Take Back Control of Your Practice

In this episode, Dr. Barbara Hales discusses: How physician burnout is a systems problem, not a personal weakness. How AI scribes reduce documentation friction, giving doctors more mental space and presence with patients. How small changes telehealth, better communication, and workflow redesign can reclaim control and improve care. How redesigning your practice allows for hybrid concierge models, fewer patients, and better patient relationships. Key Takeaways: “Less friction is more presence. More presence is better care. Better care is better practice.” Dr. Barbara Hales Connect with Barbara Hales: Twitter: @DrBarbaraHales Facebook: facebook.com/theMedicalStrategist Business Website: TheMedicalStrategist.com Email: info@TheMedicalStrategist.com YouTube:@barbarahales LinkedIn: https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/barbarahales Books: Content Copy Made Easy 14 Tactics to Triple Sales Power to the Patient: The Medical Strategist TRANSCRIPT (235) Introduction: Redefining Physician Burnout Dr. Barbara Hales 0:02 Welcome to another episode of marketing tips for doctors. Today we discuss the Freedom Stack for physicians. Burnout isn’t because you’re weak. It’s a systems problem 21st-century medicine trapped in outdated workflows. AI and process redesign can restore presence, reduce cognitive load, and improve patient care. AI Scribes: Reducing Documentation Friction Dr. Barbara Hales 6:34 AI scribes listen, structure, and summarize patient encounters into notes. They don’t replace judgment they reduce friction, giving you mental space and emotional presence. Physicians using AI scribes report better focus, more family time, and improved decision-making. Telehealth and Communication: Optionality and Control Dr. Barbara Hales 11:36 Telehealth expands reach and flexibility. Efficient messaging reduces phone tag and builds trust with patients. These tools give doctors control over their time and improve patient experience. Attracting the Right Patients Through Trust Dr. Barbara Hales 11:36 Small marketing changes like sharing educational videos attract patients who already trust you. Trust improves conversations, care, and practice efficiency. The Concierge Shift: Rebuilding Your Practice Dr. Barbara Hales 11:36 Physicians who implement small changes AI scribes, telehealth, better communication often transition to hybrid concierge models: fewer patients, more time, better care. Doctors reclaim why they chose medicine without leaving the profession. Practical Tips for Physicians Dr. Barbara Hales 16:08 Start with one change. Download tools like AI scribes, improve communication, and leverage telehealth. Change begins with awareness and one actionable step. The post How to Work Less, and Take Back Control of Your Practice first appeared on The Medical Strategist .

April 2, 202610 min

Everyone Using Opus: Are You?

In this episode, Barbara discusses: Why tools like Opus Clip are popular and what they actually do Why using AI tools alone won’t grow your audience without a clear strategy How to build a simple workflow using tools like CapCut, Descript, and Submagic Key Takeaways: “The tool doesn’t create growth. Clarity does. Tools only amplify what’s already there.” Dr. Barbara Hales Connect with Barbara Hales: Twitter: @DrBarbaraHales Facebook: facebook.com/theMedicalStrategist Business Website: TheMedicalStrategist.com Email: info@TheMedicalStrategist.com YouTube:@barbarahales LinkedIn: https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/barbarahales Books: Content Copy Made Easy 14 Tactics to Triple Sales Power to the Patient: The Medical Strategist TRANSCRIPT (234) Introduction: The Opus Question Dr. Barbara Hales 0:02 Welcome to another episode of marketing tips for doctors. I’m your host, Dr. Barbara Hales. Let me ask you something. Why is everyone suddenly talking about Opus Clip? Everywhere you look, TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Instagram, people are pumping out short videos like a content machine. And if you ask how they’re doing it, they all say the same thing. “I just use Opus.” So the real question is this: Is Opus Clip the magic solution? Or is something deeper going on? Because here’s the truth: The tool is not the strategy. What Opus Clip Actually Does Let’s break this down simply. Opus Clip is an AI tool that takes long-form content a podcast, an interview, a talk and does three things: It finds what it thinks are your most engaging moments. It clips them into short-form videos. It formats them for TikTok, Reels, and YouTube Shorts. That sounds powerful. And it is. Because the hardest part of content creation isn’t editing. It’s deciding what’s worth sharing. Opus removes that friction. Where People Get It Wrong Here’s where things go wrong. People think, “If I use Opus, I’ll grow.” That’s not true. Because Opus doesn’t understand your audience. It doesn’t understand your positioning. It doesn’t understand your message or authority. It’s making guesses based on patterns. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it gives you clips that feel flat, out of context, or forgettable. So you end up posting polished content that doesn’t connect. Why Video Works What Smart Creators Actually Do Smart creators don’t rely on Opus. They use it as a starting point. Here’s the real workflow: Record long-form content, let Opus generate clips, Review and refine. Enhance the best ones. Because virality isn’t found. It’s shaped. The AI suggests. You decide. A Practical Strategy for Doctors If I were building a medical brand today, here’s exactly what I would do. Record one strong, thoughtful long-form video. Not 20 random clips. One. Then let Opus generate 10 to 20 short clips. Then ask: Which of these actually reflects my message? Not which one is trendy. Not which one is flashy. Which one builds trust? Because in medicine, trust is everything. The Truth About Tools and Talent Here’s something most people miss. The people winning with Opus were already good before Opus. The tool didn’t make them better. It made them faster. If your content is unclear or generic, Opus just helps you produce more of that faster. Building a Smarter Workflow So yes, use Opus. But don’t stop there. The real advantage is your workflow. After Opus, I would use CapCut. This is where you improve the hook, control pacing, and create impact. The first two seconds matter most. CapCut lets you shape attention. Improving Long-Form Content First Next, I would use Descript. If you’re recording podcasts or long videos, this makes editing simple. You edit like a document. Remove filler. Clean your message. Then send that into Opus. Better input leads to better output. Why Captions Matter More Than You Think Then I would add Submagic or a similar caption tool. Because captions are not decoration. They are the content, especially on platforms with silent autoplay. Good captions highlight keywords, add rhythm, and hold attention. That’s what makes people stop scrolling. The Simple System Here’s the full system: Record → Descript → Opus → CapCut → Post. Or keep it simple: Record → Opus → CapCut → Post. That’s it. The people winning aren’t using better tools. They’re using better workflows. Final Advice: Focus on What Matters If you’re a physician trying to grow online, start here: Don’t focus on doing more. Focus on saying something worth hearing. Then let the tools amplify it. Closing If you need help turning long videos into short-form content or building this workflow, you can reach out. Visit the medicalstrategist.com forward slash contact. We can talk about how to build this for your practice. This has been another episode of marketing tips for doctors. I’ll speak to you next time. The post Everyone Using Opus: Are You? first appeared on The Medical Strategist .