By Barbara Hales
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• How powerful brand names and slogans can stick in people’s minds
“It’s not just logic that sells—it’s emotion that makes things stick.” – James Bond
Website: www.BrainGlueBook.com
Twitter: @DrBarbaraHales
YouTube: TheMedicalStrategist
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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 James Bond, one of America’s leading behavioral management specialists and author of the award-winning book Brain Glue. This book is blowing people’s minds and changing how they sell their ideas, products, and businesses. For 13 years, James ran one of Southern California’s leading behavioral management firms and has worked with a ‘who’s who’ of American business. Early in his career, he ran an advertising agency in Montreal. Welcome to the show, James.
James Bond: Hi Barbara, thank you for having me. Your show is awesome, and I’m just privileged to be here.
Dr. Barbara Hales: You must get this all the time, but how does it feel to have the name James Bond?
James Bond: (laughs) Well, my parents had a sense of humor. I was born after the books and before the movies, so it wasn’t until the movies came out that people started noticing. But yes, it sticks—just like Brain Glue! I find it fascinating how certain names, like James Bond, are easy to remember, and how powerful that can be in branding. People don’t forget my name, and that ties into what I talk about in Brain Glue—how certain names and slogans just stick in people’s minds.
James Bond: When you’re selling a product, an idea, or even yourself, having a name that sticks is crucial. Think of the slogan “Blue Emu: It works fast, and you won’t stink.” When you hear that, your brain latches on, and you remember it. It’s not just about having a good product; it’s about making people notice and remember it.
Dr. Barbara Hales: So, what is it about certain words or phrases that make them so sticky?
James Bond: In Brain Glue, I explain how tools like alliteration, rhyme, and metaphors activate the brain and make messages memorable. For example, Johnson’s Baby Shampoo’s slogan “No More Tears” is brilliant. It directly connects with parents’ emotions and creates a bond with the product. Similarly, the Morton Salt slogan “When it rains, it pours” is another example of a simple, powerful message that sticks.
Dr. Barbara Hales: You mention rhyme as one of the key elements. Why is rhyme so powerful?
James Bond: Rhyme is incredibly powerful because it’s easy for the brain to retain. Think about “Jack and Jill went up the hill.” You probably learned it as a child, but you still remember it. Rhyme helps phrases stick in our minds long after we hear them, and this tool is often used in marketing. Remember, “If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit”? That stuck with the jury during the O.J. Simpson trial, and it’s a perfect example of how rhyme can drive a message home.
James Bond: Another powerful tool is the use of metaphors or analogies. For example, John Gray originally wrote a book called Men, Women, and Relationships, but it wasn’t selling well. One day, during a seminar, a woman said, “It’s like men are from a different planet!” And that’s when it clicked—Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus was born, and the book became a bestseller. The metaphor made it relatable and easy to remember.
James Bond: Let’s take the example of Squatty Potty. Originally, it was just a toilet stool. Not a very exciting name, right? But the creator thought, “What’s another word for toilet? Potty. And what are you doing? You’re squatting.” And so, the name Squatty Potty was born. It’s catchy, almost rhymes, and sales skyrocketed—over $100 million in a few years, all because of the power of a name.
James Bond: When creating a brand or slogan, you want to grab attention. For instance, Brain Glue sticks to the brain like glue. The key is to make sure your message stands out from the crowd. If you’re using rhyme or alliteration, your brain engages differently. That’s why brands like Coca-Cola, Best Buy, and PayPal are so memorable—they’re using repetition of sound to stick in people’s minds.
Dr. Barbara Hales: How have public figures like U.S. presidents or civil rights activists used these techniques?
James Bond: Great question! John F. Kennedy’s famous line, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” uses a technique called chiasmus—reversing the structure of a sentence. Malcolm X also used powerful metaphors, like “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock; Plymouth Rock landed on us.” These tools resonate because they engage the brain in a memorable way.
Dr. Barbara Hales: So, what final tips can you give to our listeners about using Brain Glue in their own marketing efforts?
James Bond: Start by using metaphors and analogies to make your product or service relatable. Then, play with rhyme or alliteration to make it stick. You want to create an emotional trigger that makes people remember your message. And remember, as Zig Ziglar said, “Selling is nothing more than the transference of passion.” If you’re passionate, that emotion will connect with your audience.
Dr. Barbara Hales: James, thank you so much for sharing these insights today. I’m definitely running out to get your book!
James Bond: Thank you, Barbara! It’s been a pleasure to be here.
Dr. Barbara Hales: You’ve been listening to Marketing Tips for Doctors with your host, Dr. Barbara Hales, and James Bond, author of Brain Glue. Until next time!
The post Brain Glue: How to Sell Better first appeared on The Medical Strategist.In this episode, Dr. Barbara Hales and Dr. Sherita Gaskins–Tillett discuss:
*Why professional women struggle to find balance between their careers and personal lives
Key Takeaways:
“Self-care is anything you do intentionally to make things better for your mind, body, or spirit.” – Dr. Sherita Gaskins-Tillett
Connect with Dr. Sherita Gaskins-Tillett:
Connect with Barbara Hales:
Twitter: @DrBarbaraHales
YouTube: TheMedicalStrategist
Books:
Dr. Barbara Hales: Welcome to another episode of marketing tips for doctors.
I’m your host. Dr Barbara Hales. Today we have Sherita Gaskins–Tillett with us. She is a board-certified obstetrician-gynecologist, a mother, a wife, a wellness enthusiast, and an event planner; I’m just exhausted saying all of that. After several years of trying to meet the demands of Family, Career, and Community, she found herself exhausted with all that, no surprise, and lost in her own life. Fortunately, a well-timed vacation provided the awakening she needed to realize that her life was not sustainable. She returned home on a journey of self-discovery that resulted in a reordering of her priorities and a complete overhaul of her professional life. She is now able to show up as the wife, mother, physician, and friend she wants to be, and that her tribe deserves in conversations with colleagues and friends, and through social media musings, she realized that she was not the only professional woman feeling tired, lost and less than.
Doctor Sherita is on a mission to empower women to create lives that they love. Recognizing that there is strength in community and desiring to normalize the struggle, she founded the Boss Lady Dream Builders Facebook group where she helps professional women who want more connect with like-minded sisters, rediscover their priorities, reclaim the reins of their lives and find a balance so they can live with more joy, authenticity, and purpose.
She’s also the host of- “She built it, Boss Lady Chronicles”, a weekly show that features the stories of women who own the power to build the life of their dreams. Dr. Sherita also hosts virtual and live events for professional women. Her signature event, a weekend for me, is a three-day cocoon for busy women to indulge in radical self-care, rediscover their bliss, and be inspired to chart a course to their ideal future. Welcome to the show, Sherita.
Dr. Sherita Gaskins–Tillett: Thank you so much, Dr. Barbara. Thank you for having me.
Dr. Barbara Hales: The question I have for you that other people might want to know is, what do you mean by self-care?
Dr. Sherita Gaskins–Tillett: Self-care is anything that you do intentionally to make things better for your mind, your body, or your spirit. So, it’s taking care of yourself. It’s things that feed your soul. And when I think about self-care, I think it is very individualized. So, my self-care is not necessarily your self-care. There are some people I love spa days and massages. Other people don’t like to be touched, so that would be stressful to them. That wouldn’t be self-care. So, it’s really whatever feeds your soul and your spirit.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Well, you know, I certainly look forward to that myself, so I can’t imagine that. Not everybody does. How are the women different after attending “A Weekend for Me”?
Dr. Sherita Gaskins–Tillett: You know, it varies, but I think with many women, it’s an awakening. We do sessions to get in touch with who you are, your core values, and your priorities. And often, the women say they haven’t thought about those things ever, or if they have thought about them. They haven’t been in a long time. So, I think they go home with a deeper awareness of who they are, what they want, and why they want it.
We also do vision casting while we’re there. So, we look at the future. You know, what is your ideal future? I asked them if there were no red lights, only green lights, no restrictions, no certifications, nothing that you have to have standing between you and your dreams. What would they look like? And you know, many people have never thought about that because even when we dream, we put limitations, you know, we say, well that, you know, we might have a thought, I’d like to be an astronaut? Well, I don’t have the qualifications to be an astronaut, you know but, but to dream, like to just dream wildly, and then to begin to chart, to set goals, to chart a course toward those dreams.
Dr. Barbara Hales: How many people generally attend these sessions?
Dr. Sherita Gaskins–Tillett: Well, it’s been bearable. But the last one was in a small villa, which was limited. There were six women there. The largest was 19.
Dr. Barbara Hales: And, I’m assuming they feel great after, but do they, you know, how did they present themselves after this is done?
Dr. Sherita Gaskins–Tillett: They say they are different like I said. It’s like an awakening. They have a deeper connection to themselves. They institute some new practices. Because we also talk about habits. Because, you know, in this, people want to have a different life, and the reality is, you can’t have a different life unless you do different things. So, we talk about establishing a morning routine, writing and reviewing goals regularly, and, you know, revising those goals and checking in with yourself regularly, maybe instituting a regular self-care plan. So, you know, they go home equipped to do things differently so that they can have a different outcome.
Dr. Barbara Hales: How have you been changed by seeing these people’s participation?
Dr. Sherita Gaskins–Tillett: Oh, my goodness, I can’t even, I can’t really articulate it. It’s been amazing. You know, this is my calling. It truly is. And to see something that I’ve conceived of for a long time in my head, to see it in living color, has been so gratifying for me, and humbling. You know, just the response that the women have to the retreat, it really is humbling for me, and I’m gratified to know that I’m making a difference in their lives.
Dr. Barbara Hales: How did you originally come up with this idea?
Dr. Sherita Gaskins – Tillett: Well as you mentioned in my bio, I’m an event planner of sorts. So, before I went to medical school, I actually worked for the government, and in my capacity in that employment, I planned conferences and meetings and events, and I actually loved it. And I, you know, plan parties for friends and other things. So, I’m an event planner at heart. And if I weren’t a physician, I’d be an event planner. And so, you know, having gone through my own epiphany, actually, on a beach, unsimilar to that which is behind you, for those who are watching.
After having that epiphany, I, you know, started a personal development and self-discovery journey. And then I was I was better. I had made some pivots and done some things that helped my life. And then I realized that other women were suffering too. Because I think when we’re suffering a lot of times, we think we’re the only one. And so, I would see these Facebook posts, and these women would say, you know, I’m not keeping up as a wife, I’m not keeping up as a mother, I’m not keeping up as a doctor. Please tell me I’m not the only one. And so that’s when I said, well, you know what? We need some time together so that people can see that they’re not alone, that to kind of normalize the struggle that we’re all having this experience, and, you know, everybody’s kind of siloed off, but it helps to know that you’re not an outlier and it also helps to know that there are options, there are things that you can do to make things better. And so that’s when I decided to marry my two things, my event planning and personal development into a weekend for me and a weekend for me, because it’s time for you, just to get away. You know, sometimes I’ll have women ask me. Can I bring my spouse? Can I bring my children? And I say, that defeats the purpose.
It’s a weekend for you, not a weekend for them. So, you know, but it really is time just to be a way and to connect with yourself, but also just to be pampered. And, you know, I’m very much about making the women feel seen, heard, appreciated and loved. Because, you know, we’re the caregivers here most of the time, and oftentimes we are not poured into we’re doing the pouring. And so, I make a very conscious effort to pour into the women while they’re there, and to make sure that they know how special they are.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Well, this is something that I would have sorely needed and jumped at immediately had it been available when I was first starting practice, because there were so few women in those days. You didn’t want to just act like a man. You wanted to bring your femininity to it. But by the same token, by doing so, you were additionally ostracized. So, you know, like it was a fine line that we traveled, and I’m so happy that things have really evolved to the point that women can appreciate themselves for who they are, and still, you know, process all of their other hats.
Dr. Sherita Gaskins – Tillett: Yeah, and I think a lot of what’s happened to is social media. Because when I first, you know, when I first finished a residency social media, it was just in its infancy, and so I was not much of a social media person, so I didn’t know, and I think I would not have been aware of the commonality, had I not if it wasn’t for social media. So, I think the advent of social media too has helped to make the world a little smaller and to connect us to people that we wouldn’t otherwise be connected to.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Yeah absolutely. And then we find out, you know, what, we all have the same process and the same goals and the same things, you know, really take us from being burned out and, you know, make us feel more like a human being again, despite all of our responsibilities.
Dr. Sherita Gaskins – Tillett: Yes, yes. And really, for me, it’s about helping women to figure out what their priorities are today. Because what I figured out for myself was that I had designed my life as a single OB GYN, and then I married, and then I had a child, but my schedule still remained that of a single OB GYN, and it’s like we don’t give ourselves permission to make those changes. We try to make our lives fit into medicine, rather than making medicine fit into our life. And so, once I realized that I my priorities had changed significantly from the time I designed that original schedule, then I gave myself permission to start to make changes to the professional schedule.
Dr. Barbara Hales: And that’s so important, and it’s so great that you recognize the need for that, and, you know, and acted upon that.
Dr. Sherita Gaskins – Tillett: Well, I honestly, Barbara, I didn’t have any choice. I was drowning. I was miserable. I was drowning. I, you know, was an older mother. I realized I was only seeing my baby about two hours a day. And I was thinking, you know what, these sucks. I don’t know how to make this better. It sucks. And, like I said, you know, just kind of, you know, going through the personal development paces, and, you know, learning more things about myself kind of empowered me to do things differently. And so, I started small, you know, I started by asking for a shift in my hours, you know, to start a little later, so just things like that, to honor the priorities that I have. I wanted to be able to be at home a little longer in the morning, so maybe I could see my daughter wake up, you know, and then I’d like to think that I was, you know, brilliant enough to say, Okay, now it’s time to do something completely different. But I can’t take credit for that. I was in a practice that had some administrative changes, and it became obvious that I was going to need to make a shift. And honestly, I had always thought that I would retire from that practice, because that’s what people had done, you know, it was one of those kind of, you know, institution type practices.
When I realized that I couldn’t stay, I looked around, and I started looking for jobs that were pretty similar to what I’d already been doing. And then I thought, well, why don’t I see what else is out there? Because I had been telling myself the story that there were no other jobs that were going to pay enough for me to pay my student loans. So, I graduated with a significant amount of student loan debt, but that was a story I was telling myself. I hadn’t done any investigation. And so, when I actually investigated, I found that there were other opportunities that were comparable in salary, but also gave me more, you know, better quality of life for me. So, I actually pivoted from full time, full spectrum OBGYN to hospitalists at that point.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Well, that was great for you. At this point in the broadcast, I have the next phase where I ask you to give us two tips that our listeners could use, you know, and implement right now to make their life better.
Dr. Sherita Gaskins – Tillett: So, one thing that has been a huge game changer for me is a morning routine. And so, it helps to set the tone for your day. And it can be really small. People get overwhelmed. They think, well, the morning is such a rush time, I don’t have time to do extra things, but it can be small, but it’s just some time for you, and it’s whatever. Again, it’s things that feed you, and so my morning routine is comprised of drinking water, praying, reading and exercise, you know. But again, it can be done in 10 minutes, but it just helps to set the tone for your day, so that it’s almost like you’re taking control of the day instead of the day taking control of you.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Yeah. I think great advice, yeah.
Dr. Sherita Gaskins – Tillett: So, morning routine, and then the second thing would be a gratitude practice. So, you know, because we to bend toward negativity, just it’s just the way our brains are set up. Up, and so we remember the negative, but not the positive so much. And it helps to write down the good things that are happening in your life, to make a record of them so that you can go back and you know when you’re telling yourself, nothing is working, everything is bad, you actually have written proof in your handwriting that things are actually not as bad as they might seem at that moment.
Dr. Barbara Hales: That’s such great advice. And I think that we all should, you know, take heed and follow your example. I think that’s great,
Dr. Sherita Gaskins – Tillett: Yeah, yeah. And then also, I’m sorry, Barbara, one second, I’m gonna something just crashed in my house. I apologize. Okay, I’m sorry. My daughter’s home sick today, and so I just wanted to make sure that she was okay. Okay, yeah. One other thing that I would say, too, is to give yourself permission to make changes. You know, the world wants to put you in a box. Put us all in a box, but you don’t have to stay in the box. You have a choice. There are always options. What I like to tell women is you are never stuck. There is always something else you can do. I think part of the problem is that we think that the decisions we make are permanent. I was talking with someone yesterday, and she’s kind of in this state of inertia. And I was explaining that, you know, nothing changes unless you do something. So, you feel like things are not moving. You know, you want things to be different.
You don’t want what you have, so you have to do something else. And I told her to just try something. Like putting on clothes. Try something different. If it doesn’t fit, take it off and put on something else. But we think, okay, I’m going to make this decision, and it’s going to ruin my life. There are very few decisions that you make that are permanent, or that have to be permanent. So, you know, if you like, you know, for instance, decide to pivot in your career. You want to try a different track; you can always go back to what you’ve been doing. There’s nothing to hinder that.
Dr. Barbara Hales: That’s also good advice, because so many, so many people, not just women, but people in general, feel that they are stuck, that they’ve made a decision, that they’re walking along, you know, a path in their journey, and you know they’re committed, whereas they don’t realize that on any given day, you could analyze the path that you’re on, and yeah, no, change it if it’s not working for you anymore.
Dr. Sherita Gaskins – Tillett: Right and that’s actually, you know, what we do at the what we do at the retreats as well. We look at what’s working because, you know, I’m not encouraging my path is my path, and that’s what worked for me and for my family. But I’m not encouraging people to leave medicine. I’m encouraging people to take control of their lives, which means, you know, make it, make the schedule work for you, make the work, work for you so that and give yourself permission to ask for what you’re looking for. Because, again, we will tell ourselves that this isn’t available. There’s nothing like this out there. But there are people who are doing all sorts of things now. There are practices that hire people for one day a week, a half-day a week. You know, there’s all sorts of different things. You just have to look for it and ask for it.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Yes, that’s great advice. Well, at this point, I’m going to say thank you very much for being with us today. You have been listening to Sherita Gaskins – Tillett and you can reach her from our show notes. You’ll find out where she can be reached. And think about taking a retreat, because I think that could really just alter your life for the better. This has been Marketing Tips for Doctors with your host, Dr Barbara Hales, till next time.
The post Creating the Life that You Love first appeared on The Medical Strategist.“People are getting younger and younger on social media, meaning that it is so important to have that online brand to stay on top of mind.” – Myles Youngblood.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/myles-youngblood-916469123/
Twitter: @DrBarbaraHales
TRANSCRIPTION (167)
Dr. Barbara Hales: Welcome to another show of Marketing Tips for Doctors.
I’m your host, Dr. Barbara Hales. Today we have with us Myles Youngblood. Myles is a very interesting guy. He is, well, you know what, I’m going to tell you a little bit about his story. He owns his own digital marketing agency that helps YouTubers and content creators grow their following and communities online. He primarily does this with a short-form content strategy. He also hosts his own podcast. The show is called Beyond Ordinary. This show highlights the different facets of entrepreneurship. The aim of the show is to connect with great people doing great things to inspire others to do the same. Welcome to the show, Myles.
Myles Youngblood: Thank you so much, Barbara, for that intro. I greatly appreciate you having me on.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Why is having an online brand important?
Myles Youngblood: Oh, man, an online brand… Why is that important? I could talk for days about this. So, right now, we are in a digital era, right, where a lot of people are on their phones a lot. That’s how a lot of people get their news, right? I remember when I was growing up, and I got my first iPhone when I was, I think, in high school. But my sister, when she was growing up, got her first—her first phone was an iPhone. Mine was not, right?
And so that just goes to show you that people are just always on their phones. They’re always using social media. People are getting younger and younger on social media, meaning that it is so important to have that online brand to stay top of mind. When people think about, “Oh, what do I want to go eat?” people are like, “Scroll through TikTok and figure it out.” I’ve literally had this happen to me—you know, scroll through TikTok and figure it out. So, that being said, having an online brand and constantly being in people’s faces is just so important, especially if you are an entrepreneur.
Dr. Barbara Hales: How does one decide on what their brand is or how they could establish their brand?
Myles Youngblood: Good question. How to establish what they want their brand to be… Honestly, I would say just do a brain dump. Like, where do you see yourself in five years? What do you want to be known for? And kind of reverse engineer. What does that ideal avatar look like? And kind of cultivate your brand and your style around that. That’s what I would say.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Okay, and so for our listeners that are not into marketing, could you tell them what an avatar is?
Myles Youngblood: An avatar? An avatar is really just… How do I describe it—an avatar?
Dr. Barbara Hales: Well, it’s a symbol of your target market.
Myles Youngblood: Right, exactly. So, do you mean like a personal avatar, or like your target market—like, what?
Dr. Barbara Hales: So, if I had an avatar, it would be somebody that I made up to look like the people that I was trying to market to.
Myles Youngblood: Right, right. So, can you repeat the question one more time? You said, what?
Dr. Barbara Hales: I don’t have these questions written down.
Myles Youngblood: No, no, it’s okay. I remember your question. You said, “What is an avatar?” Honestly, if you… This is a show about doctors, right? And I’ve been thinking about, before I came on here, I was like, “Man, if I was a doctor, what would I do, right? How would I market myself to reach my ideal avatar?” And honestly, I would really just make short-form content. And I know I feel biased saying that because that’s what I do for my clients, but I have just seen so much growth from not only doing it for me personally but doing it for my clients.
My clients are on YouTube, and they’re a little older, and I’ve just been able to take their long-form content, batch it up into shorts, and post it every day. Now, granted, I know everybody doesn’t have an online brand to just cut up their long-form content. But if I was a doctor, I would just do either day-in-the-life videos, vlog videos—people like just having that authentic person. Because you have to think about, if you did an email campaign and you sent out just a bunch of emails trying to be like, “Hey, are you looking for a free consultation?” compared to somebody who is, you know, just being a regular person doing everyday stuff on Instagram—who are they going to more likely step into the office with? So that’s what I like to think about.
Dr. Barbara Hales: So, Myles, how did you get into this? What brought you to that point where you said, “Hey, this is me. This is what I want to do, and this is what I want to represent?”
Myles Youngblood: That’s actually a good question. So, I started my podcast relatively recently, right? I started about three months ago.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Congratulations, by the way.
Myles Youngblood: Thank you so much. And so, before I was doing the podcast, I was doing some… I was trying to pivot my business into some consulting—some consulting. I bought a consulting program and everything, and I was going to utilize… I wasn’t going to do… I was targeting, like, accountants. I was pivoting completely out of the way, right? And I remember I was watching Alex Hormozi one day, and he said, “Hey, if the best thing happens, happens, then what?” Right? So, I sat back, and I was like, “Okay.” I closed my eyes and was like, “Okay, I’ll be making, let’s say, six figures a month, but I’d be doing this accounting stuff. I’d be talking about accountants.” And then I was like, “I’d be making content for accountants. Is that something that I want to do?” And my answer was no. And so…
Dr. Barbara Hales: Why did you even choose accountants? Do you have any relationship to them other than tax time?
Myles Youngblood: Yeah, exactly. I really don’t know how I came to accountants. I think I was just like, “I think accountants struggle to get clients outside of tax season, so let me try and help them.” So that’s pretty much how I landed on it. There was really no methodology, if I’m being honest. But actually, shout out to that program that I bought, because how I came into podcasting is what they told me to do. They wanted me to, like, make content and run ads to the content, and I told them about my clients for the short form, and they said, “Hey, use podcast interviews with your clients and utilize that content for social proof.” So I did that, and I did my first episode, and I was like, “You know what? I actually like this, and I could actually see myself doing this long term.” And so, I kept doing it ever since.
So, to bring it back to answer your question, really just ask yourself that question, like, “Is what you’re doing really what you want to do? Is it something that you can see yourself doing 5, 10 years from now? If the best-case scenario happens, would you be happy doing that?” And that’s what I did. In terms of short form, how I came into doing that—because I have a business and a podcast—how I did that is I just saw that a lot of long-form creators were not utilizing short form, right? Short form was relatively new, and I know TikTok, I believe, has been around since 2016, and it really blew up over the pandemic. When you see that there are these billion-dollar companies like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube—all of them literally scrambled to make their own version of that in 2021.
So, if these billion-dollar companies are literally changing the way they are doing things to compete with TikTok, then obviously it’s something to look into. /So I did, and I just started reaching out to different creators and letting them know that, “Hey, I can cut up your short form, post it on all platforms for you, and then you can skyrocket your growth.” And it’s been up ever since. I’ve been doing this for several years. I’m actually going to meet up with some of my clients next week at a conference for content creators. So, it’s been really great being in the content creation space, for sure.
Dr. Barbara Hales: From the business side, what do you think is the future for TikTok? Because, you know, you can’t really go on the news without hearing that Congress wants to ban TikTok unless an American firm buys it out, which we haven’t heard anybody coming forward to do. And for people saying, “Well, if TikTok’s future is in doubt, why would I spend all this time and effort to do content on it?” What are your feelings about that?
Myles Youngblood: Yeah, that’s a great point. So what I would say to that is, part of what I do for my business is we post on all platforms. The reason why we do that is exactly what you just said. I don’t want my clients to be pigeonholed onto one platform. A lot of my clients were only on YouTube, and that’s not really good because, especially in cancel culture nowadays, it only takes a click of a button—YouTube takes you down, and you’re done, right? So that’s why it’s good to be on TikTok, it’s good to be on YouTube, it’s good to be on Facebook—all these different places. And I would say, not just on social media but just in general, I don’t think it’s good to rely on one source. So, say you don’t have an online presence, but you just rely on email marketing or something like that, or you rely on your email list—that’s not really good. You want to always have some sort of backup, some place where you can always tap into, like, “Okay, if this goes down, at least I have this as a back end to kind of funnel people to.” So that’s what I would say.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Yeah, what I tell people is, even if they are not going to be on a particular platform, or they’re not going to be active on it, it pays to go on every single platform, just to be able to put your profile on. There is no limitation for that. And this way, every platform profile will be directing any traffic that you get from your keywords back to your website.
Myles Youngblood: Exactly, exactly. I want to piggyback off of that point. Oh my, it infuriates me so much whenever I see people who have an Instagram bio or something, and they have a Linktree with like five links in it—it’s literally a no. So what I do, and I always tell my clients this, and I do this for myself, is: one link, one funnel. So whatever you’re trying to promote, if you want people to go to your website, just have the website, right? So, like on my Instagram, for example, even though I have a TikTok, I have Facebook, I have YouTube, I have all that—I don’t have a Linktree that has all of them because I know that if someone clicks on that and they see five links, they’re going to click off. I just want to make sure that they go to that one thing. So that’s what I tell people—just promote whatever is most important in your bios and your social profiles.
Dr. Barbara Hales: So you’re referring to calls to action?
Myles Youngblood: Exactly. Call it whatever—call to action. Make sure to optimize your profile so that when people land on your page, they see, “Okay, this person has this expertise, and this link that I’m about to click is going to take me to wherever.”
Dr. Barbara Hales: What call to action do you recommend for your clients?
Myles Youngblood: Call to action. So that’s a good one because I’ve been kind of testing to not always, because it’s not… what I’ve seen is you don’t always want to just always show people. It’s like a kind of a ratio that you want to figure out, whether it’s 80/20—sometimes you have a call to action, sometimes you don’t, right? So sometimes I’ll have my clients, for example, a lot of my clients, they are in the finance YouTube space, and they teach people how to trade stocks, and they have Discord. So sometimes they’ll talk about their Discord in a video, and in the actual video, we’ll put like, “Link to Discord in the description,” right? But every video isn’t like that. Some videos are literally just educational—”Hey, this is a stock pick that I’m looking at,” and that’s it. I don’t think that you should always have a call to action because if you always have a call to action, then people are going to be numb to it, and then they’re just not going to even take action to begin with.
Dr. Barbara Hales: So, do you recommend lead magnets for your clients?
Myles Youngblood: Lead magnets? A lot of them don’t really have lead magnets. What I would say about a lead magnet—well, at least for them—is that they already make content that’s pretty much… they’re making free content on YouTube, and it’s like, okay, they get to see all the free game that they’re giving. And if somebody, you know, follows them and they make some money with their thing on, with whatever stock pick on YouTube, then obviously, they’re more than likely going to opt into their Discord. So, they don’t really have lead magnets; they have pretty much a natural lead magnet.
Dr. Barbara Hales: What are two tips that you could give our listeners that they could implement right now to be more successful in their brand establishment?
Myles Youngblood: Two tips… um, I’ll probably say two things. I’d make an Instagram if you don’t have one. And then second, I would… well, be active on Instagram—at least post. I post probably like once, at least once a day. But I know everybody isn’t savvy like that, so maybe do once every other day—story posts, maybe an Instagram reel here and there, something like that. And then two, I’d probably build an email list, if I’m being honest. I know that’s something that I’m looking towards—being able to just have a massive email list so you could literally just have people’s data. I think data is just so important, which is why these phones are always listening to you, and they have all these updates because data is so important. So if you could build an email list, I think that’s probably like, like, top of the top. Because it doesn’t matter what social media tries to cancel you; if you have an email list of 10,000 people, you’ll be able to start over like that. So that’s what I would say.
Dr. Barbara Hales: What is your feeling about a company like Hootsuite, where you just get to a weekend, you sit, and you knock out like four hours’ worth of content, you give it to Hootsuite, and then they drip it out over the next week or two?
Myles Youngblood: Oh yeah, that’s—I would 100% recommend that. Like, batch—what you call batch—recording your content. Like, take a day to record everything, and then take another, you know, day or two to, you know, edit it, and then just distribute it. Then utilize different third-party applications to be able to distribute it on all platforms. I would 100% recommend doing that because trying to wake up every single day, script, record, edit, and then you do that every single day… like, you’re not going to want to do that. So I would definitely recommend trying to, you know, block out certain days or weekends or whatever to get your content out for, you know, the coming weeks or months, for sure.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Is there a particular company that you like to work with?
Myles Youngblood: Oh, I use Metrical. That’s what I use for scheduling content for not only me but my clients.
Dr. Barbara Hales: That’s great. Well, we’ve really enjoyed having you here today with some very interesting content. This has been another episode of Marketing Tips for Doctors, with your host, Dr. Barbara Hales, and you have been listening with myself and with Myles Youngblood. Well, that’s it for today, and till next time.
Myles Youngblood: Thank you.
The post Unlock the Power of Online Branding first appeared on The Medical Strategist.
*What’s the root cause of having low team morale in the medical field?
“Every day, you’ll come across challenges, but it’s to prepare you for tomorrow. So if you look at every day as a training day to prepare you for a brighter tomorrow, that should keep you going.”
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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 person by the name of Frendhel Fejeran. Welcome to the show.
Dr. Frendhel Fejeran: Thank you so much, Dr. Barbara, I’m so excited to be here. I appreciate your time. Thank you so much.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Friendhel helps dental employers who struggle with sustaining high team morale, positive culture and energy with tired, exhausted employees. We certainly know how that goes. What solutions do you have to resolve this struggle?
Dr. Frendhel Fejeran: Yes, I love it. Thank you so much for asking. And there’s so many parts to this answer. One, you definitely have to understand where it’s coming from, like, what is the cause of this type of energy, you know? And sometimes it could be a collective thing, or it could be a team-related thing, or it could even be something that’s individually related. So we have to get to the bottom of it. And so you need to find out what is causing it.
Secondly, once you have all that information, you be able to sit down, assess and really look at each employee that you have. Really see what is going on in their personal life. Maybe it’s something at work that is causing them to feel exhausted, overwhelmed. What is it? And then create a devisive plan, custom made, I like to say, towards each individual, and cater to it. And so by doing that, that will help alleviate the stress levels, it will bring up the team morale. That’s definitely the first part, right?
Also, what’s really important to some of the causes of feeling stress or having a bad energy in the office and low team morale is coming from the top, from the doctors, you know, like, what is it that they’re doing that or they’re not doing that may have caused it? Are you guys having team huddles, are we doing anything to show our team that we appreciate them? Are we listening to them when they bring up their issues and challenges? Are we listening to them, but not only listening to them, are we really trying to make a change? And so those are some of the things I want to help teams do.
Help doctors do that because doctors, they’re patient forward, right? They are occupied helping patients from beginning to end. So you need that person, that extra help to tell the doctors, have a bird’s eye view of the entire practice. See the need, be a coach, right? Be a coach to all the team, to all the employees. And so by having that type of service, by the time to see what’s going on and to develop a plan that will work for the Office, for the individual, that will definitely help keep things, help keep the team morale up. So that’s some of the solutions. I know that was a very loaded question. I could probably talk for hours on how to do each of those things, Barbara.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Do you do site visits to speak to them on a personal level?
Dr. Frendhel Fejeran: Yes. So we would just, I would do site visits, but mostly virtual. So I would make appointments, get online, just like we’re doing right now on Zoom, and really building the rapport first, talk about work, talk about personal goals, and just really get to the bottom of it, ask them the questions that will empower them to get answers for them, to find the answers for themselves.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Are they honest with you, or is it hard for them to open up?
Dr. Frendhel Fejeran: You know, I’ve been blessed. I thank God for the type of energy that I have, and I’ve been able to help people open up, and if they’re not ready during that first meet with me, it’s all good. Then we’ll keep things more surface level, keep questions surface level, and then we just continue to build. I’m not here to force anything out of anyone, and until an individual is ready to open up, and until they admit and realize that they do want the help, that is the time where they’re going to get it, get the things that they need, the strategies that they need, the concepts and methods that they need, and really apply it. So it does take time. That’s why it can’t be done in one session or one sitting. It’s a continuous basis. So every couple of weeks we touch base.
Dr. Barbara Hales: When you take the job on, how long is it for?
Dr. Frendhel Fejeran: It really depends on the the employer. I am not huge yet. That’s the goal here is to help more teams. So I work with two offices, and I’m glad that with one of them, I get to meet them on first, it’s like three months with the team. First it’s like once every month with the team, like a collective and then individually, a couple times a month.
Dr. Barbara Hales: How did you start with this? I mean, how did you get involved in this? What is your backstory?
Dr. Frendhel Fejeran: I’ve been in the dental field, next year will be 20 years. I’ve started off as a dental assistant for 15 years, and the last 4 years, I’ve been helping out with management for an office. And what I’ve learned by working with doctors from different upbringing, different understandings and perspective, working with them, working with women, providers, assistants, doctors, hygienists, people, because we see people all day, it just really gave me the love to bring positivity to the workplace, to the people that I encounter. And so, because that’s always been my life mission is just to be a lighter energy. I demand it actually in a team that I work with, especially that I’m older now in my career, I want to make sure that my work environment is going to bring peace to my team.
And so because of that passion, I find myself always, when I see a team in need, team member in need, I make myself available. See what’s going on, check in. They tend to come to me for advice, and I’m always there to teach them what I’ve learned, right? It’s all what I’ve learned, and I’m just paying it forward. And by doing this on my own personal level, and at my work, I’m like, I can help many more people. And so I saw the need for it. And so that’s what made me develop this and hopefully more practices will see the need, more doctors will see the need for it. I know that there are a lot of marketing companies out there, not marketing companies by itself, but consulting companies. If you were to look at the breakdown of what they do offer, which is all wonderful things, how to build your business, how to get more patients or clients, how to do your practice management, how to market your office, but nothing solely devoted to the individual, and if the individual can find a sense of accomplishment in their personal life, they will be able to bring their best performance to work.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Did you find that when you were working in the doctor’s office that you or the people around you were disrespected?
Dr. Frendhel Fejeran: In the beginning of my career, so as I was new, because I went through different offices, not too many, the only reason why I would leave is because I relocated. But I’ve encountered team. Like when I was a dental assistant, I felt like I was in, like when I was a brand new dental assistant in a brand new office, helping a brand new dentist, no one was there to help me. I did not feel any kind of team work at all. I felt like I was in boot camp for like months. I would cry every day. And that is not a place where people need to be at work. That is not the type of workplace that we need. And so I felt it firsthand. I’ve had patients that can be rude. So I’ve learned a lot from them.
I’ve worked with individuals that didn’t want to be at work, so they always brought this energy that was toxic to a workplace. And so I’ve seen it, I feel like I’ve seen it all like in the matter of 20 years. And I know what I want. And I know there are bosses out there, managers out there that know what they want, to help their team thrive, and what they don’t want is for people to feel burnt out, overwhelmed, a bad energy, low team morale. That’s what we don’t want.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Of course. The fact of the matter is that health professionals really are working this on the same side as you are. Because with unhappy professionals, you are going to have a big problem with retention for staff, and you don’t want to have people constantly swinging through the door and having to find new people to work as your employees and have to then go over your routines and your systems, and have to constantly be training new people. If you can retain the people that you have and everybody is happy, it just makes for a much more successful practice.
Dr. Frendhel Fejeran: Yes, I couldn’t agree more, Dr. Barbara. 100% yes. I’m working with an office right now that has had quite the turnover, but it’s all circumstantial. However, couple of the reasons why people will leave is because feeling overwhelmed. But then they come to find out it’s because they are not managing the stress in their mind when it comes to their personal life. So if people can just learn how to manage stress, find the coping mechanism, like mechanisms to whatever it is that they need help with, that will help them feel confident in the job that they have. Help them manage the work you stress, right? Will help with the retention. And when they believe in themselves, they’ll stick around. There are some instances where they are like, this is not for me, like, I’m trying, but did you really try? Or are you really giving up? You know what I mean. So, yeah, it’s definitely important to keep people. It helps.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Yes, do you suggest meditation or yoga, pilates? What is it that you suggest to get them to de-stress?
Dr. Frendhel Fejeran: One, we have to talk about it. What is it that’s really stressing you out? Do you have a goal? So let’s say there’s a goal, right? And then, okay, so this is your goal. We’ll make it a SMART goal, right? I don’t know if our listeners are, I think everyone knows what a SMART goal is, right? It’s Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound. So we sit and make a goal, and then we look at what’s happening in your day. How can we manage your tasks in such a way that will lead you and align you to your goal? Because sometimes, oftentimes, people will have something in their mind to reach, and then if things are coming their way, like curveballs, and they don’t know how to manage it, that would bring stress to your day. So it’s like, how do you manage curveballs in line with your agenda? Like, how can we integrate it into your agenda in helping you reach these goals? And a lot of it is perspective too.
Another way too, it’s really a mental game, Dr. Barbara. One of the things I really stress on is really having a fit mind is with that mental toughness, it comes perspective, right? A growth mindset is understanding that everything that you encounter, everyone you meet, everything that you experience is for your benefit. There’s so many lessons to be learned. So if you keep that in mind, no matter what kind of energy comes your way, you’re going to say to yourself, you know what? What am I going to learn from this person? What am I going to learn by this like, you know, energy? How can it serve me the best me possible? So it’s really just, that would be the first thing, Dr. Barbara. That’s the first thing that I would always touch on is your mental gain and how you perceive things.
Dr. Barbara Hales: At this point, I would like to ask you to give us two tips for our listeners that they could implement right away to keep from getting burnt out or reverse that process, to get them happier and feel more adjusted in and looking forward to going to work.
Dr. Frendhel Fejeran: So first tip is to find someone that you trust and talk about work with the intent of gaining something positive from this talk. Sometimes you just have to de-stress and vent it out. And then secondly, know that every day is training day. Again, it’s a mental game. Every day, you’re going to come across challenges, but it’s to prepare you for tomorrow. So if you look at every day as a training day, to prepare you for a brighter tomorrow, that should keep you going, and you need to believe in that.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Well, I think those are two good tips and listeners, I hope that you can implement them if you find yourself in this rough patch now. Thank you so much for being with us today, and you know I will let our listeners know that someone like you can help them.
Dr. Frendhel Fejeran: Appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me, Dr. Barbara. I really appreciate your podcast. Thank you so much.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Okay, this has been another episode of Marketing Tips for Doctors with your host, Dr. Barbara Hales. Till next time.
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*The role of AI in content creation and its assistive capabilities
“AI is a buzzword, but the way I think about AI for marketing is that it helps us do marketing smarter and faster. It’s an assistant to help us.” – Chuck Aikens.
Website: https://chuckaikens.com/
Twitter: @DrBarbaraHales
Dr. Barbara Hales: Welcome to another episode of Marketing Tips for Doctors.
I’m your host, Dr. Barbara Hales. Today we have with us Chuck Aikens, founder of Tymoo and a seasoned expert in content marketing and leveraging AI. For those who may not know, AI stands for Artificial Intelligence, a buzzword nowadays. With over two decades of experience in website development, search engine optimization, and digital marketing, Chuck brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise in creating impactful branded content that connects with your target audience.
In this episode, he’ll share his innovative approach to content strategy and reveal how entrepreneurs and marketers can harness the power of AI to elevate their brand presence and connect more effectively with their target audience. Chuck will also introduce his Tidal Wave Content platform, a comprehensive suite of training, coaching, and processes that help brands create consistent, engaging content across multiple channels using AI-assisted tools. Welcome to the show, Chuck.
Chuck Aikens: Well, thank you, Barbara. What a great intro.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Well, there’s a lot to be impressed by. You’ve done quite a lot. Chuck, you’ve been in the digital marketing space for over 20 years. How has the integration of AI changed the landscape of content creation? Because that’s all we seem to hear about now. Nowadays, instead of creativity, it’s like the computer is assisting us in doing everything for us. What is your feeling about that?
Chuck Aikens: Yeah, so, you know, 18 months ago when OpenAI released ChatGPT, it did change the landscape. AI was around before that, and I had been using AI products in content development and marketing, but ChatGPT opened it up to everybody. It got everybody thinking about how they can prompt AI, how they can get rid of some of the work they don’t like doing, how they can plan their vacation, how they can find a recipe. So, yes, AI is a buzzword, but the way I think about AI for marketing is that it helps us do marketing smarter and faster. It’s an assistant to help us. It should not replace creativity. It should not replace the human element. At best, even years from now, I hope that we maintain a balance of no more than half marketer, half machine. We need to stay in control of marketing our businesses, brands, facilities, and practices.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Absolutely, but it does give us some good ideas. I’m waiting for the time when it does the dishes and vacuums the floor.
Chuck Aikens: Yes, it needs to put the laundry from the washer into the dryer and go to the grocery store for me. Then we’re onto something.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Many people jump straight into using AI for content creation. Why do you emphasize the importance of foundational work before leveraging AI tools?
Chuck Aikens: Yeah, so all of us have probably tried it. We’ve said something like, not “Hey Siri,” but you know, “Hey Claude, hey ChatGPT, make me a blog post, write an email,” whatever it might be. And you know, when you access a large language model in generative AI, you’re accessing everything that has ever been written or thought about. Billions and billions of parameters in a large language model just put words together. The reason you need foundational documents, which for me include things like: Who is your target audience? (There might be multiple personas.) What is your brand promise to them? What are the pain points and value propositions? What’s your tone and voice? What about your practice or what you do as a doctor? All these inputs are built into foundational documents before I ever start prompting. Then, when I prompt the large language model or ChatGPT, it has a direction to go. It knows what I’m trying to do and doesn’t run off in different directions. It stays on-brand, on-message, on-point because you’ve taken the time to document that.
You do the same thing with an employee. If you hired a consultant or talked to your lawyer, you wouldn’t let them just do whatever. You tell them what you want, you write it down, you send an email. You have to instruct and interact with the large language models and ChatGPT the same way. So the real work is before the prompt, and by the time you get to the prompt, you’ll get better outputs if you’ve taken the time to put together a strategy, voice and tone, target audience, and personas. I work with businesses, brands, and people. The first step is to identify your audience. From there, we can do different things with your content marketing.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Okay, let’s be honest here for a moment. Have you named your AI?
Chuck Aikens: I have. I have a piece of AI that I’m working on. It’s actually called CMO Charlie. CMO Charlie can send some emails, and there’s a little chatbot. But yeah, I’ve named my AI. I also have personas for myself that I use in my marketing and with clients. Naming and avatars and personas are a big part of marketing and should be a big part of content marketing. It should be something that you can give to AI.
Dr. Barbara Hales: You mentioned the importance of micro-segmenting your audience. Can you elaborate on this and explain how AI can help in this process?
Chuck Aikens: In that realm of personas, you could have a lot of different personas. It could be patients, for instance. That would be a persona. You could also have a persona for a front desk person or an admin if you’re putting out a wanted ad. This idea of looking at the different folks you want to interact with, whether you micro-segment your clients, your patients, or different people you might be interacting with, thinking about who is receiving your communication is key. You can’t do enough work with this.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Well, that’s very good to know. Can you explain your tidal wave content concept and how it helps brands create more effective content strategies?
Chuck Aikens: Yeah, so the idea is that if you’re going to become an expert in your particular space, whether it be knee replacement or, let’s say, dentistry, you need to be seen as an expert and someone that’s helpful. To do that, I teach a concept of having a wave of content that is informational, answers all the questions, and explains how you’re different. It also lets people experience you, whether that’s via video or other produced content, so they can have that human connection.
What I’m actually doing is the classic marketing funnel: awareness, consideration, and conversion. People go to the internet looking for the remedy or treatment for their pain. They have a lot of choices, so it’s about awareness of your services and ultimately deciding to visit you. This wave of content that needs to be produced includes search, website, social media, video, audio, and photography. It’s not just one prompt or one email; it’s all got to work together. That’s the approach the tidal wave takes in helping people market themselves.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Why is each content wave important in and of itself?
Chuck Aikens: So what I just explained involves three waves. There’s the awareness informational wave, which is usually simple things like FAQs or symptoms and treatments. It’s very informational, low effort but high frequency. The next wave is a bit harder; it’s about differentiating yourself and showing how you specifically solve pain points and why someone would choose you. This requires more effort and is less frequent. The last wave, which is a lot of effort but low frequency, might be a video of you talking or a Q&A with a patient. That human connection is why people would choose to reach out to you or become a patient. These waves have different goals—awareness, consideration, and conversion—and you need to think about each one differently and how you produce and market them.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Can you walk us through your process of using AI to turn a simple interview or conversation into a full content strategy?
Chuck Aikens: Yeah, no, this is one of my favorite techniques. And it starts at that connection level, often through a 45-minute interview. By me just asking some simple questions and you answering them, hopefully with good answers and verbose, but coming from you, we can transcribe it and develop content that comes right from your voice and thoughts into video clips, social media posts, blog posts, or articles.
When you combine the words, knowledge, and expertise that come directly from you via an interview with the informational content that can be somewhat built through large language models and good prompting, the combination of these two types of waves goes a long way. It introduces people to you through a query that maybe they read something, but then they get to experience you, which is just something that has to happen. They need to know who you are. So that’s how I would start with an interview and then use that to create ideas. Instead of doing keyword research or topical selection, let’s figure out what you’re truly passionate and expert about and let’s go talk about that because that resonates with folks depending on what their particular situation is.
Dr. Barbara Hales: How can small businesses and solopreneurs use AI to compete with larger companies in terms of content production? You would think with their large staff that smaller companies and smaller businesses just would not be able to compete with them.
Chuck Aikens: Yeah, so just using even the interview example, a large company has a hard time getting their CEO or visionary on video and then turning that into content. As a solopreneur or as a single practitioner or if you have a small practice, you can be more nimble. What used to take five or ten hours with AI can be done in an hour or two. So this ability to leverage AI to come up with ideas and give you some base copy or use it to write transcripts and extract ideas means you can be much more nimble and not need all the coordinators, staff, and fancy tools that larger content providers, like WebMD or Healthgrades, or even hospitals, use. You can compete if you niche down and have a voice, talking about what you can truly be an authority on. If you micro-segment your audience, the way you compete is by being nimble but also having a smaller target and then being the best in that pond. That’s a way you can compete and rise above the noise on the internet.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Well, that certainly seems like the way to go. How do you approach creating content silos or topic clusters to establish topical authority in Google’s eyes?
Chuck Aikens: Yeah, it’s going to be similar to how you need to be relevant or resonate with someone who has a particular ailment or situation. You’re going to do the same thing with Google. All Google wants to do is put who it thinks is the best person, doctor, or practice at the top of the results. The way to do that is to show them that you know the most about a particular subject matter. So creating a content silo, which could be a set of five or ten pages or blog posts, starts to establish that you are helpful in your content production and comprehensive, making you a great resource.
Google uses a concept called E-A-T: expertise, authority, trust, and experience. I got those out of order, but it’s trying to find real people who have real experience and expertise that it can trust as an authority. The algorithm is looking for this. If you can put that out there as a doctor or as a small practice, you can be rewarded with search visibility on Google as a topical expert.
Dr. Barbara Hales: How do you leverage AI to analyze competitors’ content and identify gaps or opportunities in your own content strategy?
Chuck Aikens: Yeah, the easiest hack to do is, whatever the topic or specialty you’re in, go look and see who’s at the top of Google and see what they’re covering. See the words and topics they use. It won’t help you find a gap, but it will establish table stakes. If you look at the top ten results, which is where all the traffic from Google comes from, you’re going to have to replace one of these guys to be in the top ten. So you need to gather an understanding of how other websites, brands, practices, and doctors are covering the topic. You can either do the same thing or, more importantly, do it a little better or fill in a gap that’s not being covered. AI can help you analyze that. There are a lot of tools and technologies that will process large amounts of data quickly. With the right prompt or tool, you can find these gaps rather fast.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Can you walk us through your process of using AI to turn a simple interview or conversation into a full content strategy?
Chuck Aikens: Yeah, so specifically, I got watched you through it a little generically a minute ago, but yeah, just yesterday or in the last week, there was someone I was helping. They have a dog training business and are always outside training the dogs or the dogs are going in the kennel, whatever it might be. So I got him on the phone and said, just talk to me about the types of dog behaviors you are working on in adult dogs. He started rattling off all the things he does every day, everything he’s passionate about. Out of that came five blog posts and three video clips because I had him on Zoom just like we are right now.
Social media posts, this content silo around adult dog behaviors that a professional dog trainer can help with. One interview, 45 minutes of content, just little sound bites here and there led to blog posts where the owner and trainer was quoted, video clips, and different things. AI was able to read the transcripts, come up with the ideas, help me understand the timestamps for me to send to the video editor quickly, just help me work through it. It’s the same thing I used to do, but to do an interview to build that wave of content in the old days when I had the agency or if I did it by myself, you might be talking about ten hours of work. It now can be done in 90 minutes. That’s how AI can help you get more done. As an assistant, it does the same thing that we used to do, but it just took a lot more copying, pasting, and typing.
Dr. Barbara Hales: How do you get your AI to speak in your voice and know your personality?
Chuck Aikens: There are a couple of ways. I’ve played with having AI do some of my work for me, like answering emails and stuff. In the email example, what a piece of AI software would do is go back and read the emails that I’ve written for the last two years. That’s one example. The other example, and they call it RAG, is the equivalent of having a knowledge base. If I want AI to write and sound like me, I can give it all kinds of examples. Right now, with Claude projects, you can load like 5,200 documents in this knowledge base written by you or examples of how you talk. I’m a pretty formal, structured talker, right?
You would be surprised if you know, like you would know if something’s coming from me, very linear, right? It would pick up on that. I can also give it instructions on how to write. Whether it is actual guidelines, voice, and tone that you can create, like writing this way, writing in second person, writing structured, whatever it might be. It can also just analyze things that you’ve already done to arrive at that. You’re not trying to trick AI or make people think that it’s you. It’s just easier to enrich and edit the copy if it starts out in your voice because it should always be behind you as an assistant. You should be reviewing, adding to, and taking things out of anything that gets produced. But man, it’s easier if you have a good starting point.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Have you ever heard your AI laugh at a joke?
Chuck Aikens: I have not. I’m not that funny.
Dr. Barbara Hales: How do you use AI to craft compelling headlines that capture both the essence of the content and entice readers to click? You know, how do you get that hook?
Chuck Aikens: Yeah, hooks are hard, but AI can be clever. If I have the copy all done and I might take it to social media or I’m looking for an email subject line or maybe it’s a LinkedIn headline, whatever it might be, what I tend to do is ask AI to brainstorm between seven and nine. If we have to pick a number, let’s go with nine. Look at nine hooks for me. Then I look at them and pick three of them and say, “Okay, I like these three. Now write the one for me.”
This process of having it brainstorm and then telling it what you like a little bit to make a final selection is a good process to go through to arrive at the hooks. Only you are going to have that intuition as to what might creatively hook somebody. AI can take direction and be creative and try to do a hook, but you’re going to know a good joke, a good hook when you see it. Even if you don’t pick the best one, you pick the second-best one. If you start with nine, get down to three, and pick one of them, it’s probably going to be a better hook than if you just randomly thought of something and didn’t go through the thought process real quick.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Can you share some strategies for adapting content for different formats like blog posts, social media, or email newsletters using AI tools?
Chuck Aikens: Yeah, so I have prompts for, and there’s prompts out there that, once you have something that’s long format, by using prompts. You can produce an excerpt for your newsletter, a LinkedIn post, Facebook post, or even a tweet. This ability to take a large format piece of content and then shrink it down to different formats is something that AI does really well. You can even say, like, “write me a 75-second video script so I can do a talking head about the blog post concept.” So you have the ability to take long form down to short using prompts and tools. But in the interview process or a quick sound bite or video clip, I can also expand. If we’ve talked about something like a wave of content, I could take 30 seconds of a video clip, feed it into AI and have it write a blog post around the concept that I was talking about for review. This ability to compress or condense and also expand out concepts is something that AI does really well when prompted.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Okay, so our listeners may be saying, I have no experience with AI. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know how to use it. Do I actually need it? I’m at a loss here. So for those people, could you give us two tips that they could implement right away to bring them up to speed?
Chuck Aikens: Yeah. So first you got to use it. Go to OpenAI, go to Claude, set up an account. I would even encourage you to spend the $20 a month because that is cheap for what you’re accessing, but start out with a free account. First, just do it. Now, where I tell most people to start is not in their business, it’s in their personal life. Just take something from your personal life, or even something you don’t like doing in your email or answering somebody. Take these real simple use cases and try to plan a vacation, build a shopping list, just learn how to talk with it. Like, you know, how I had to learn how to talk to my teenage daughter. You just need to learn how to interact. There’s no right or wrong way. Just understand how the interaction takes place.
When social media first came out, we all had to figure out what is Facebook? What is IG? What is TikTok? You have to understand the ecosystem. Just interact with it, and then pick simple use cases. I encourage people, don’t start with trying to grow your business. Start with getting rid of the things you hate. We all hate different things. Some of us hate creative work, some of us hate vacuuming, some of us hate planning a dinner party, whatever it might be. If you can start to use AI for things that you’re trying to solve, things you’re trying to get rid of, you’ll eventually be able to understand how it works and then move over into making it an agent of change, something that can make your business and your life better. But it often starts with just solving simple problems.
Dr. Barbara Hales: And the second tip?
Chuck Aikens: The second tip would be, if you’re more advanced and you are ready to start thinking about this from a business application, start with the foundational documents. A little bit of a pitch here, but there’s no money involved. I’ve built free tools on TidalWaveContent.com. If you sign up and go to tools, you can build a persona. I ask you 10 questions. You answer them, and you have a persona. If you want a voice and tone, I take you through some word choices and some pictures, and then you have a voice and tone. I believe that having these helps you start interacting with AI. So I’ve provided those tools free of charge, and just by signing up on the website, you can get access to them.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Which is easier? AI or teen talk?
Chuck Aikens: Oh, boy. Actually, for me, AI is easier, but I’ve learned a lot. She’s 17 now, and I’ve had a couple of years of practice, so I’m doing pretty good at the teen talk too.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Well, this has been thoroughly fun and interesting speaking with you today. This is another episode of Marketing Tips for Doctors. We’ve been speaking with Chuck Aikens. Thank you so much for being here with us today and till next time.
Chuck Aikens: Alright. Thank you, pleasure. Bye.
The post Leveraging AI For Content Marketing first appeared on The Medical Strategist.In this episode, Barbara and Dr. David discuss:
“Experiencing stage fright or speech fright makes you perfectly human.” – Dr. David Lee Fish.
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Dr. Barbara Hales: Welcome to another episode of Marketing Tips for Doctors.
I’m your host Dr. Barbara Hales. Today we’re lucky to have David Fish join us as we delve into the world of performance anxiety with veteran educator Dr. David Lee Fish the creator of the Five-Day Stage and Speech Fright Solution. You may be wondering why I would have an episode like this. The reason is, as we promote ourselves and try to attract prospective patients, we need to get up on that stage and talk. As you may have heard in the past, people view talking on stage as more deadly than death itself.
Dr. David Lee Fish: Absolutely. It’s the irony.
Dr. Barbara Hales: David Fish explains the science behind stage and speech fright, provides an overview of the course, and offers actionable advice for those struggling with anxiety. No matter who you are, this episode is packed with valuable insights to help you take control of your presence in front of others. Welcome to the show, David.
Dr. David Lee Fish: Thank you so much, Barbara. You know, this is fascinating for me. I’ve been working with my students on performance anxiety, speech fright, stage fright, and the anxiety that athletes experience. It’s essentially the same thing. It’s all performance anxiety, right? And it strikes in so many different ways.
It’s absolutely the most common fear among people; something like 75% of people suffer from performance anxiety to the extent that it mars what they do to a certain extent. You gave an example, the sort of traditional example of speech fright, being in front of an audience, maybe at a lectern or something like that. But it can be anything, like me right now in front of the camera, and you’re not even in the room with me.
Dr. Barbara Hales: You know the true secret is to write everything down and practice, practice, practice, just like you’re going to Carnegie Hall. Otherwise, if you think that you’re going to just wing it, you will just be a deer in headlights and you’ll get up on that stage and all of a sudden you look out at the sea and you lose your voice.
Performance Anxiety
Dr. David Lee Fish: Absolutely. You know, I think it’s a little bit more than that. I’ve come to the realization that there are three factors that play whenever anyone experiences performance anxiety. The first one is you do something in front of others. The second one is that you feel like you’re being judged.
You are being judged, or you feel like you’re being judged, right? It could be something as formal as an audition or a job interview, where you are definitely being judged. But even if you only feel like you’re being judged, it still factors into this. The third one is if that judgment of the people or person is negative, it would constitute some type of threat to you. You don’t get the job. You lose the respect of the people that you’re speaking to.
And frankly, all the preparation in the world will help, but it’s not going to get at that root cause of performance anxiety, that at some level you’re fearful of being judged. And if that judgment is negative in one way or another, it’s going to be a threat to you.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Can you walk us through the five-day solution course that you have and tell us what participants who sign up can expect to learn?
The Five-Day Solution Course
Dr. David Lee Fish: Sure. I call it the Five-Day Solution because of the book that I wrote about five years ago. Now we’re launching an online course, and it’s still called the Five-Day Solution, but it’s one day a week. When I do this, I also lead live workshops, and we can actually do it in five hours. I want to make it clear that it’s not necessarily five days in a row. The normal way that I offer it in my online class is one day a week, so that would be over six weeks, I guess.
Dr. David Lee Fish: The first thing I should emphasize is that at the center of what I do with the Five-Day Solution is mindfulness. Mindfulness has become very popular over the past five or ten years, maybe too popular. It’s maybe suffered from its own success.
But there’s something very simple, effective, and scientifically proven about the benefits of mindfulness. The Five-Day Solution teaches students over those five days to learn what mindfulness is, develop their mindfulness skills, and then begin to apply it to speaking or performance.
Personal Experience with Stage Fright
Dr. Barbara Hales: What inspired you to create this program? Did you suffer from stage fright?
Dr. David Lee Fish: Oh yeah. In fact, in the recorded webinar for one version of this, which is more for performers, I tell about the very first time I performed when I was in high school. I got a chance to play in the band backing Sonny and Cher when they came through Tucson, Arizona. That really tells you how you can do the math and figure out how old I am from that, right?
Dr. David Lee Fish: Okay, so I’m in high school. This is my first gig ever, Barbara. And I’m in front of thousands of people before Sonny and Cher come on stage. The spotlights are turned on and in our faces, and we start playing. The band starts playing, the rhythm section starts playing, and I play saxophone.
The rhythm section starts playing, “down bom bom bom bom bom bom bom bom,” which is the vamp from one of their songs, “And the Beat Goes On.” So I’m just nervous too. We call it fight or flight, right? There’s the third part of it, which you probably know, freeze.
So with all of this happening, I froze. The rest of the band starts playing, and I am just holding my saxophone. The only thing that snapped me out of it was the director of the band saying, “David!” So yeah, I’ve known about stage fright from my very first time on stage.
I became a professor of popular music at Catawba College in North Carolina. I started a program of study for students of popular music. Many, if not most of them, suffered from stage fright as well. And you know, nobody does anything about stage fright, the most ubiquitous fear. Most people think there’s nothing that can really be done.
So with my students, I wanted to do something because I saw them suffering like I suffered. So being the savvy guy that I am, I thought, “Well, I’m going to write a book about it.” Problem was, I didn’t know anything. So I decided I better find out something. My way of doing that was to partner with a therapist to co-author a book.
We started writing sessions once a week. About a month into it, she said, “Well, what do you do about your stage fright?” I said, “Well, it’s kind of quirky, but I studied Zen when I was very young. When I was 20, I actually lived in a Zen Center for a year in California.
The Zen master taught us about detachment. That was the best way to handle your fears, anxieties, doubts, whatever—just detach yourself from them. They don’t go away, but they fade into the background.”
I’ve used that approach all my life since those days, and she said, “Well, that sounds like mindfulness, this new form of therapy that’s coming along. You don’t need me to co-author anything; just teach them this.”
So I started looking into it. Here’s the remarkable thing, Barbara, Jon Kabat-Zinn, the developer of mindfulness, studied with the same Zen master I did. So I thought, “Well, I actually do know something about helping others with performance anxiety.”
That’s how I got started helping my own students, my music students, the students in the acting program at my school, and then other students, like those giving reports in my classes, and then beyond that, the professors and so forth.
Dr. Barbara Hales: I know for me, not that I suffered from stage fright, but what helped me tremendously in my skill as a speaker was getting out of my own head. I stopped thinking of myself and how I was being perceived and judged.
I was told, “Listen, it’s not about you at all, it’s about them, your audience. You are there to teach them something, to give them valuable advice, to speak to them like friends, like you speak to people every day.” Taking that approach really helped me tremendously.
Dr. David Lee Fish: Oh, that’s absolutely wonderful. Absolutely great words of wisdom. When you do get, and I like how you put that, just getting out of your head, it often leads to something called peak performance or psychological flow. You find that it’s almost like an out-of-body experience as you’re speaking. It can just be the message and the audience, and you all become this sort of one thing.
Dr. Barbara Hales: What role does mindfulness play in the Five-Day Solution?
Dr. David Lee Fish: It’s absolutely the central role. The wonderful thing is that mindfulness is now being found to be so beneficial for other issues that plague people, from overeating to ADHD, you name it. It’s being proven that it’s beneficial. The great thing is that it doesn’t take long to learn. That’s why it’s a Five-Day Solution.
Dr. David Lee Fish: Mindfulness is a skill. Like any skill, the more you practice it, and I give students ways to practice their mindfulness and then apply it to their speaking, the stronger your mindfulness will be. The more you can rely on it to be there when you need it. After all these years, it’s my old friend. Whenever I get nervous, I just call on it, just rely on the mindfulness. So it’s the central aspect of the course, for sure.
Dr. Barbara Hales: What are some of the most common misconceptions about stage and speech fright that you address in the course?
Dr. David Lee Fish: Yeah, a wonderful big one is that there is a one-and-done cure for speech fright. You may know this, but it’s known as the dead man’s school. It’s like anger or sadness, saying, “I’m going to find a cure, I’ll never be angry again, I’ll never be sad again.”
That’s the dead man’s school because only a dead man can achieve that. The same thing with stage fright. Even politicians, actors—one of my friends, a well-known Hollywood actor who has appeared in hundreds of movies, still talks about getting stage fright.
Dr. David Lee Fish: So, the first thing is to stop trying to conquer it, stop trying to look for some elusive one-shot cure. The second thing is, we touched upon this earlier, 75% of people get stage fright or speech fright when the conditions are right. That makes it look much more like a natural human condition rather than a phobia.
It’s not a phobia for most people. In fact, experiencing stage fright or speech fright makes you perfectly human. Those are the two big ones: you’re not broken if you experience speech fright or stage fright, and there’s no one-and-done cure for it.
Challenges and Approach
Dr. Barbara Hales: What challenges have you faced in your career with performance anxiety, and how has that shaped your approach to helping others overcome it?
Dr. David Lee Fish: Yeah, well, you know, a wonderful question. I face it almost every day in one way or another, given all the different situations where speech fright can rear its ugly head, from talking on the phone to someone you don’t know, to doing an interview over Zoom, to all sorts of formal and informal situations. It does all the time for me, and I think it does for most people, or at least for the 75% of us who experience it. There is that 25% who don’t. It keeps me humble.
I am always challenged to deal with my stage fright and speech fright. But thanks to my mindfulness training with the Korean Zen master, I’ve learned how to set that aside and, as you said, get out of your own mind, get out of your own head.
Dr. Barbara Hales: What is flow, and how does your course help participants achieve this?
Dr. David Lee Fish: Yeah, I think given your audience, they will appreciate this. This comes from the psychologist Abraham Maslow. Maslow came around at a time that was a little bit later than Freud, but he thought, “Why are we looking at people who are abnormal and trying to figure out why they’re not normal? Why aren’t we looking at people who are super normal and figuring out what’s their secret?”
He found out that the one thing they share is this ability to have psychological flow. Meaning, we all experience it in one way or another, whether it’s reading an engrossing book, watching a movie that absorbs you, skiing if you’re an avid skier, or maybe jogging.
Dr. David Lee Fish: Paul Simon had a line in one of his songs where he said, “Have you ever experienced a period of grace when your mind takes a seat behind your face?” That’s kind of it. What song was that? Oh, I think it’s called “Think Too Much.”
And the point being, there are times when the thinking mind melts away, and we become absorbed in what we’re doing to the point we lose track of time, we forget to eat, whatever it might be. That’s flow. The more you can tap into that as a speaker or performer, it typically leads to peak performance. So, that’s what it’s all about.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Can flow lead to rambling?
Dr. David Lee Fish: We see that with some politicians. Sometimes they flow so much that they don’t stick to the message they’re supposed to be delivering, and they begin speaking about Hannibal Lecter or something. It’s wonderful to watch, but it can be counterproductive.
Dr. Barbara Hales: For our listening audience out here today, can you please give us two tips that the listener can implement right now, even before taking your course?
Dr. David Lee Fish: Yeah, absolutely. In fact, I sometimes kid and say that the Five-Day Solution could be a five-hour solution or a five-minute solution. I can tell it to you right now. What my course does is help a student activate that. But simply stop trying to—when you have negative thoughts, fearful thoughts, and nervous thoughts when you perform or give a speech—stop trying to fight them.
Let’s start with stop thinking there’s something wrong with you. There isn’t. There’s some type of threat, and there’s a legitimate reason you’re nervous. Sometimes that threat is very obvious, other times it’s very subtle and buried down.
Dr. David Lee Fish: In therapy, they have a thing called the downward arrow. To give you a quick example, if we have time, I had a student who was a very talented singer-songwriter, but got really nervous during performances. I asked him, “Why?” He said, “Because I’m afraid my voice is going to crack.” I said, “Well, big deal. That’s not the end of the world as a performer, a singer-songwriter.” He said, “There’s got to be something deeper than that.” He said, “Well, if my voice cracked, maybe it would happen again.”
I asked, “And if that happened, then what?” He said, “Well, then maybe people wouldn’t want to come hear me anymore.” I asked, “And if that happened, then what?” He said, “Well, I’d have to give up my dream of being a singer-songwriter.” And then, “Well, I’d have to give up on something very important to me.”
So there’s often a legitimate reason for why you’re nervous, even if it’s not on the surface. Sometimes it’s very obvious, like auditioning for Juilliard School of Music, an important job interview, or asking a boss for a raise. Other times, it’s there, it’s just buried.
So, first of all, stop thinking there’s something wrong with you and stop thinking you’re getting nervous over nothing. You are getting nervous for something. Give yourself a break.
Dr. Barbara Hales: What is the second tip?
Dr. David Lee Fish: The second tip is to stop trying to combat that fear. Just when it comes to your mind as you prepare, perform, or speak, just bring your mind back to the job at hand, speaking or performing. Just bring it back, just bring it back, even if you need to do that over and over. Just keep bringing your attention back to what you’re doing.
I know that seems simple, but that’s the idea. You want it to be simple. When you’re in the heat of battle, when you’re nervous, you don’t want some complicated regimen that’s going to desert you. You want something simple. Just keep bringing your mind back to what you’re doing. That’s number two.
Connect with Jonathan
Dr. Barbara Hales: For those people who may be saying, “Man, this course was just made for me. This is something I could really benefit from,” how would they sign up for this course?
Dr. David Lee Fish: Yeah, I like everybody to start with a recorded webinar that I offer on my website. I spoke about there being parallel universes. One is the Stage Fright Solution, the other is the Speech Fright Solution.
So for those listening and watching this, you would want to go to speechfrightsolution.com. On that homepage is the link to the webinar. That’ll talk you through in more detail some of the things we’ve discussed today and more about what the course is about. Then they can sign up from there.
Dr. David Lee Fish: Now, I’m happy—this is the middle of July here, and people may be watching this five months from now, so it won’t apply anymore—but I’m actually offering an early bird special through the end of July because we’re just rolling out the course. So it’s a good time for them. If you’re watching this in the middle of July 2024, hop on it because we’re offering a significant discount.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Well, that’s great to hear. I found this episode to be quite interesting. Thank you so much for sharing it with us.
Dr. David Lee Fish: Oh, well, thank you for the opportunity, Barbara. It just goes to show you how ubiquitous this problem of speech fright is if doctors who are interested in finding ways to market themselves see a connection between that and speech fright. I’m not surprised anymore, but it is remarkable, isn’t it?
Dr. Barbara Hales: This has been another episode of Marketing Tips for Doctors with your host Dr. Barbara Hales. Till next time!
The post Conquering Stage Fright first appeared on The Medical Strategist.*What are the key legal considerations for doctors when marketing their medical practices?
“You don’t go to the doctor after you have the heart attack. You go to the doctor so you don’t get the heart attack. That’s why you come to me – come to your lawyer first, so you don’t have a heart attack.” – Andrew Contiguglia
Connect with Andrew Contiguglia:
Website: https://dontskipthelegal.com/
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Dr. Barbara Hales: Welcome to another episode of marketing tips for doctors.
I’m your host, Dr. Barbara Hales. Today, we have with us Andrew Contiguglia. And he is a seasoned business attorney and founder of the Contiguglia Law Firm. That’s right. With nearly 30 years of legal experience his business focuses on business law, corporate law, complex litigation, and risk and crisis management. He and his team are dedicated to assisting startups, entrepreneurs, and established businesses navigating legal challenges, and ensuring their success and compliance with the law and brand management.
He is the author of Don’t Skip the Legal: The Startup Guide for Entrepreneurs and Business Owners and host of the Don’t Skip the Legal podcast and YouTube channel. For more insights and comprehensive legal solutions tailored to your needs, visit the Contiguglia. We’ll get back to that letter. I think that trying to pronounce it is just going to make you, as well as me, remember the name all the more.
Andrew Contiguglia: I know. And listen, you are in a hefty group of really great people who couldn’t pronounce my name. But now that you know and you see it and you put your eyes on it, you’re like, oh, yeah, now Contiguglia once you learn it it’s easy.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Yeah. I’m just going to practice its night when I’m when I’m going to sleep.
Andrew Contiguglia: That’s right.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Okay, so the overview of key legal considerations doctors must be aware of when marketing their practices must be pretty hefty. What is it that you see in that?
Andrew Contiguglia: That’s a great question. And I’m glad you brought it up. Because the industry for doctors, I think is a lot like the industry for lawyers. And we were kind of talking about this before we started recording, we’ve got those client confidentiality, or in your case, patient confidentiality issues that you need to manage and deal with. There are ethical, other ethical considerations. And you know, the hardest part about being a doctor or lawyer, I think is you’ve got these governing bodies, who really like to toy with you, and play with whether they’re going to take your license to be a doctor away, and you get a grievance or something in that respect, you have to defend that. So, I find myself as a lawyer really tiptoeing a lot in in certain areas. And I can imagine that your listeners and doctors are in a similar situation when it comes to, you know, managing their practices and trying to, you know, promote their businesses all at the same time.
I grew up a doctor son, so I’m familiar with the way it was my father was a nephrologist, and owned a kidney dialysis unit here in Colorado for, you know, decades. And I remember growing up and going on rounds with him and meeting his, you know, patients and stuff like that. I don’t think he could do that today; I think with some of the requirements, you know, that were there.
But I also know that they never did any marketing. It was always like, people show up, they go to their general practitioner and they get a referral, go see Dr. Contiguglia , my father, not me, for you know, you got kidney problems, go do that kind of thing. And so, I never really saw that in the buildup of his business over the years that, you know, I sort of watched him do that. But over the years as a lawyer doing this now 30 years, I love the marketing space, and it’s given me this opportunity to work with companies, I’ve worked with dentists, I’ve worked with medical doctors, I’ve worked with other law firms, to really help them navigate some of the issues that come up in the marketing space.
Now, you’re niched in real deep when it comes to doctors, but some of these issues when it comes to the legal issues of marketing, I think could extend anybody. But I’ll you know, but as we discuss this in the, in the form of, you know, how we’re doctors are going to need to manage this. I think it’ll be applicable to pretty much anybody who is looking at marketing and, you know, working with their business. So, I think the first thing really is issues of with like copyright and trademark and that’s a big, a big piece of what we do in marketing. Here you are at, you know, looking at your copyright. Imagine you created some really cool brand or logo or drawing some.
Don’t worry if you’re blogging, and you want to make sure that this creation of yours is not used without your permission. So, all of these doctor offices, these doctors, they might want to protect it legally. You know, we’re getting away from this idea of building businesses around our own name. Now, I’ll tell you I’m old school, and consequently, a law firm. Come on, in my own name. But as we all know, in the advertising and the marketing business, our life in terms of succession, like what comes after contact, Lilia, we need to think about the next person.
And so, in the medical field, I’ve noticed you get like North Denver radiology. And so, there’s these real generic names that sort of come up for the doctors to sort of consider what’s going to happen when I sell my practice later on down the line, what branding or what, you know, intellectual property, can I create as a business owner outside of being a doctor can I create because I’m trying to build a business, in addition to saving lives? So, looking at, go ahead.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Do you find that artificial intelligence is now a threat to trademarking?
Andrew Contiguglia: I don’t think it is. And I’ll tell you why. The interesting thing about the Copyright Office and the trademark office is, you know, when it comes to copy copywriting things, it we’re talking about creations of creative creations of creative works, things that like books, stories, music, songs, TV shows, paintings, drawings, you know, that kind of thing. The Copyright Office now has a component when you apply for a copyright, about whether you use artificial intelligence in the creation of the item. And if you have, you won’t get a copyright on it. So, one of the requirements under the copyright laws is that the items that you are looking to copyright must be human-generated.
Dr. Barbara Hales: How can they tell?
Andrew Contiguglia: You’re right. Somebody could lie. Somebody could certainly lie under the penalties of perjury when they apply for a copyright and say that they created this. If it turns out later on to prove that, that it’s proven that they didn’t really create it, that it was a work of artificial intelligence, they would not have the copyright protections. They’re hoping to protect and so they don’t have enforceability. They don’t have the opportunity for fines and costs and attorney’s fees when it comes to enforcing those things.
Now, my personal opinion on that subject is going to be I think the Copyright Office is going to have to, you know, change the way it evaluates copyrights, we don’t have a lot of litigation in the area. We don’t have the copyright office, rejecting people for artificially made logos and things like that, yet, they haven’t gotten to the court system to be litigated about how much effort did Barbara Hales put into the creation of the prompt that would then create the image that you are now seeing today because there is a bit of human interaction when it comes to artificial intelligence and the creation of creative items, whatever it might be.
So, I think we’re going to see some transition from a legal standpoint in looking at it in that standpoint. So, we’ve got that when it comes to trademark, you know, trademarking is a little bit different. Think of a trademark as your badge of identity for your brand. You know, hails marketing may create enough of notoriety and have enough you know, foundation in the marketing community that you have developed your own identity think Michael Kors, in the fashion industry, somebody’s name that has been into that, but you’re looking when it comes to trademarking, things like company names, logos, slogans, product names, those types of things, you still have to argue, are your brand identity before the trademark office, which is different than the Copyright Office is going to issue you that trademark.
So, creating a logo for your business and coming up with a catchy slogan, a trademark is going to ensure that you can use that logo you can use that slogan in the marketplace. So, think of trademarking as your brand identity versus a copyright as sort of your shield or the protection of the things that you create.
Dr. Barbara Hales: What steps do you recommend for physicians to register and protects the trademarks for medical practices, ensuring the practice name, logo, and the slogan and that they’re legally secured?
Andrew Contiguglia: Yeah, that’s a great question. And a lot of it comes down to how much have you used those items that intellectual property in your community as a business? So, when you file for a trademark, you can take one of two approaches to it. You can take what’s referred to as a usage trademark, meaning I’m applying for my trademark today, because I am using it today, I have you know, use it in the community, it is a component of my brand identity. And then it’s up to you to prove to the trademark office that you actually have the brand identity that you’re looking to trademark, it has to be unique. It has to be authoritative in your industry, there’s a number of different factors to be considered when it comes to your trademark. So that’s the first way of doing it, establish it first, then trademark it second, that’s number one.
Number two is you can file what’s called an intent to use a trademark. So maybe you come up with an idea of like hails marketing, it’s the sky’s the limit, and you want to go ahead and identify that as your trademark slogan, but you just came up with it today, you want to make sure nobody out else out there named hails is going to, you know, take your slogan, so you might file what’s called an intent to use with the trademark office to sort of hold your place in line. And then over the next six months, you’ll be allowed to develop your trademark and your brand around that slogan into the future. And then you could submit it after six months to say, hey, trademark office, we’ve done it. And they’ll make a decision based on what you’ve done. If you haven’t done it by that point, you can extend it an additional six months. And you can do that up to three years. So, you’ll get 246 extensions of an intent to use before the trademark office is going to say, Yeah, we’re not going to hold this spot for you any longer you got to go.
Now that seems like it might be an easy thing to do. But every time you ask for that extension, it’s going to cost you I think the filing fee for that is $375. But don’t quote me on that. So, you’re doing that six times that can be expensive.
Dr. Barbara Hales: What happens if you’ve gotten the trademark, but you don’t renew it through a lack of being aware? Like five or six years?
Andrew Contiguglia: Yeah, so that’s a good question. So, your trademark is going to be valid, and you have and you have an obligation to enforce it. So, when you are using it, if you see anybody infringing on it, you have an obligation to actually go and tell people you can’t use it, you have an obligation to bring lawsuits against them or apply cease and desist. Because if you don’t do those things, you’re going to lose your brand identity. And that’s the thing. And the nice thing is with the trademark office, they tell you when your mark is starting to expire and give you an opportunity to renew it and things like that. So that’s always a good opportunity.
Dr. Barbara Hales: What’s the difference between trademarking and registering?
Andrew Contiguglia: For a copyright?
Dr Barbara Hales: Yeah.
Andrew Contiguglia: Okay. So that’s a great question. So, think of a copyright being for creative works, things like artwork, writing, a logo that you create for yourself something artistic, the blogs, you write, excuse me, the content up on your website, that’s going to be covered by copyright. Trademarks, on the other hand, are going to be things that are brand identifiers, things like your logo, or name, product names as it comes to your particular industry. Duration, also, I think, is a big difference. Copyright protection is for a set period of time. And it’s usually the life of the creators. Plus, if I remember correctly, it’s 75 years. And with a trademark, you can really that can last forever with proper use and renewal requirements going on. If you remember, there’s a few things that are coming up.
So out of copyright protection, you have Winnie the Pooh, came out of copyright protection and so now it’s going to be part of you know, everybody can go and make whatever kind of Winnie the Pooh this or Winnie the Pooh that you want Disney that’s gone. Same thing with Mickey Mouse that is coming out and coming into the public domain, too. So, you’re going to see some very interesting, creative works now coming out with these new ideas with that.
The last thing also I think is between the two is really the purpose. Copyright stops people from copying your creative works without your permission. And trademarks prevent other people from using your brand’s identity so your name or your logo in a way that could confuse customers. So, think of trademarks as a way to identify and brand yourself independently from everyone else to make sure that nobody else can be confused with you. Versus copyright, which is you want to protect the things that you have created.
Legal Do’s And Don’ts For Doctors Using Social Media
Dr. Barbara Hales: Let’s move over for a moment to social media. And it’s something that we’re all on, some more than others, to try to get our name out and get name recognition. What are some legal do’s and don’ts for doctors using social media to market their services, including patient privacy and ad Advertising guidelines, as long as you’re not using patient name, and what you do are the other things that we should be looking out for? Absolutely.
Andrew Contiguglia: And I want to caveat this response with everything, everybody is different, every case is going to be different. So, what one doctor does is not going to be dispositive of what another doctor does in the same lane. You know, I think nowadays with advertising regulations, the Federal Trade Commission really governs what people put out there into the world. And they are starting to crack down on social media influencers and people in the social media space about how those individuals are advertising their services or advertising products.
So, I could certainly see a situation with a doctor being sponsored by I’m using that term loosely, by a company that wants to promote a stethoscope, let’s say, and so the doctor is going to go, I can hear everything with my, over the ear stethoscope, and you know, here you go, everybody should go out and buy one, the link is in my bio. And yes, I get a $25 commission for every time you buy one of those, I could totally see a doctor wanting to get into sort of that brand identity and use things in the areas of nutrition.
Nowadays, I get a lot of that with supplements, there’s a lot going on with that. I have yet to see it in the area of pharmaceuticals and things like that. But I certainly see that that could be something down there in the future. So the reality here is in when it comes to the Federal Trade Commission, and when you are promoting a product of somebody else’s, you have an obligation, a legal obligation, not an ethical one, but a legal one, to notify your consumers or the people who are observing your broadcast, that you have a stake in what you are promoting, whether you’re going to get a kickback from a sale, whether it was given to you for free, whether you have a stake in the company that is trying to promote those things. That I think is something that the FTC is going to come down and really crack down on you in that process.
There have been some really high-level influencers, who have been busted by the FTC for promoting brands and not telling people that they are affiliated with that brand in some form or fashion that they’re either getting a kickback or royalty or something like that. So, I think it’s really important, any doctor who is advertising for somebody else, to promote a product, absolutely, you gotta give that up and say, Listen, I have a stake in what I’m selling you. Because the concept of truth and advertising really needs to be pushed on the end consumer, they need to know that you’re biased in what you are promoting to me. And so, as a result of that, I need to know that I could be buying something that could help you.
Now the opposite of that, I don’t think it’s true. Now there’s sort of a divided lawyer, you know, opinion about this, which is, if I’m not getting paid, if I’m not getting endorsed, it just so happens, hey, I went to the store today and I picked up this thermometer, I have to tell you, this is the most accurate thermometer I’ve ever used in my medical practice, it doesn’t matter what hole you stick it in, you’re gonna get the best, you’re gonna get the best reading of the body temperature no matter what. Now, if I’m not getting paid by that thermometer company, but I’m telling you what I like about it, I don’t think I have an obligation to say, I’m not getting paid.
But if the thermometer company comes to me and says we’d really like you to promote this, and we’ll give you a penny for every one of these that gets sold. Now I’ve got an obligation to do that. So, I think that space is really the big, the big piece of that. And also, you got truthfulness, I think that’s a huge part of it. Every advertisement that you’re bringing up must be truthful, shouldn’t be misleading, that is not only akin to the products that you’re promoting, but it’s also about you’re the nature of your business. I don’t think, you know, doctors may be a little bit different like but in the legal community, unless I’m in a jurisdiction that allows for me to say that I quote unquote, specialize in business law, I’m not allowed to promote that. I’m not allowed to say I’m a specialist, maybe different in the medical field as the specialists around all the time.
So, I think every state is going to have a different requirement about what you can and cannot do to tell people about your specialty, or whether you just say I’m an orthopedic surgeon, or I’m an orthopedic surgeon who specializes in hip replacements. That would be something you know, a little bit different. I think testimonials creates some issues. I think we’ve got patients, you know, telling people about their experience with you. And I think that it’s very important when a doctor uses testimonials from one of their patients that they get their consent and a waiver of any confidentiality and the process of doing that I think you need to put a limitation on what you can and cannot use any of those testimonials for, hey, Barbara, I would love it, if you would give me a testimonial about the, you know, the cast I put on your arm the other day, that would be awesome.
Understand, I’m only going to use it on my website in this section called testimonials, I’m not going to use it anywhere else, because you want to make sure that the relationship with your patient is protected. Because the last thing that you want to see is that I’ve now taken that interview, I’ve spliced it up. And now I’ve put it into different areas, and it’s now on a YouTube channel for something completely unrelated. And it’s just you as a soundbite with, you know, Best Cast ever, whatever that is, that does or doesn’t necessarily agree with what you consented for me to use your imagery for.
So I think you need to really play that one, you know, on a case-by-case basis, when it comes to, you know, your patients and that comparative advertising, I think that many instances when you’re trying to compare yourself to, you know, Dr. Jones down the street, you know, when Dr. Hills is the best tip, Doctor, you gotta be careful about bad mouthing, you know, Dr. Jones down the street, for botching you know, a hip replacement at some point, if there’s any Dr. Jones out there, I completely made this up. This is not about you at all.
You touched I don’t, I don’t want to upset anybody. I’m making names up and I’m pulling them off my screen as I’m sort of going through my notes. I think you and I touched briefly on patient privacy, HIPAA compliance, I think that’s pretty much a no brainer when it comes to that kind of thing. I do also think that nowadays where doctors can really kind of see themselves into the Dr. Oz Dr. Phil celebrity space, which I can’t imagine any doctor isn’t hoping they get into, you know, you’re looking at your likeness and the things that are important to you and your business and being able to present their qualifications and credentials to other people. So, you need to make sure that you’re properly licensed, if you have a certain brand that you’re sharing licenses appropriately.
If you’re using content from someplace else, that you’ll that you’re properly licensed. I’ll tell you a horror story about that in a minute. So, remind me in about two minutes about a stock about stock photos and things like that on websites, I think that’s a big piece of it. I think, you know, accurate representations of your qualifications, making sure that your information on your website is up to date those things credentials, keeping up to date, if you’ve lost a credential somewhere or acquired new ones, making sure that any of those changes are properly reflected in your marketing materials. Again, this all comes down to truth in advertising, the last thing you want is somebody you know, a patient coming to you because they expected that you were still doing hip surgeries, because that’s up on your website, as some of you do. But the last one you did was 25 years ago. And here we are the complete, you know, methodology and process of doing a hip replacement is different than it was 25 years ago.
So, you need to sort of evaluate those. And I think also the scope of your practice accurately representing the scope of your services, and what you’re legally allowed to provide, making sure that you’re niche down and not breaking anything in that respect, when it comes to doctors utilizing marketing services, so I’m going to throw you into the mix on this. I did some research on you, you’re a content creator. So, you like to help create, you know, content for doctors and Misumi. But you create things they put on their blog, they put on their website, you help them create, you know, dialog that they’re promoting out there. I haven’t reviewed your contract, but I at some point might want to, because I’m curious about after you create it, who owns it. Because this gets back to that copyright question we brought up at the very beginning, where the copyright stands with the person who created it.
So, Barbara, if I hire you to create the best medical blog in the world, and you’ve written some great stuff that I put up on my website, and I go to try and copyright it, it that doesn’t belong to me, it belongs to you. And you have given me, you know, a limited opportunity to use it on my website. So that really depends on the nature of your contract with me and what services you’re providing to me. And I think that doctors really need to be careful about how much authority they want to give to marketing individuals about how much stays in the hands of the marketing professional. I have run into problems with other lawyers who hire marketing groups that say, hey, we’ve got this best personal injury denver.com that we’d love to, you know, put all your stuff on, and they and you go great. And you use their services, they take everything that you have, and they build this beautiful website of your best personal injury lawyer denver.com. And now all your stuff is there, and you’re doing it, you’re doing it you’re doing everything’s great, all of this brand, you’re getting calls and calls and calls and then all of a sudden, you say, great. I added the personal injury, amount of the personal injury business or something else comes up, you get in a fight with your marketer, because guy that never happens, does it. And now the marketing company has gone. And now you want all this content that you created, and the marketing company is gonna go, no, it belongs to us, that was all proprietary from what we had created on your behalf.
And that belongs to us, you don’t get it. And now I have had calls from other lawyers, other business owners who are like, well, what happened? I mean, those images are of Me, the content we created as of my practice area, and all these things, what am I going to do? And I’m like, well, let’s look at the contract. And unfortunately, these aren’t work for hire contracts. Because when I hire you, I want to make sure that I maintain the ownership of the things that you create on my behalf. That’s the whole concept of work for hire contracts. But if that’s not there, guess what, you’ve lost all of that. And in many instances, you see these web designers or other marketing companies holding your content hostage until you either pay them a fee, pay them, well, we’d created it’s $25,000 worth of stuff that we created. So, pay us $25,000. And we’ll give it all to you. And now you got to decide, well, what’s my brand worth? And what was their what’s really, there. So, like, if you look at my website at Contiguglia.com, everything in there is original, with the exception of the things on the blogs, which we get through stock services, but all my photos and everything I take, I want to make sure that I have ownership in everything that I create. So, when I use marketing companies, and I do I use content creation companies, I use people who help edit my podcast, I have people who help write my blogs, and do web design and things like that.
And every one of those contracts, I make sure it says that I am accountability and accountability law firm owed anything that you create, at the end of the day. I have yet to really get any pushback from anybody on that. But when marketers say no, this is mine, I’m going to create I’m like, Great goodbye. You’re not the right person for me. So, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter under those circumstances. So, I think that is that’s an important piece. Got I’ve covered a lot in this. I haven’t stopped talking. So, I’ll give you an opportunity to ask some more questions and follow up from all of this. I could talk for hours on this stuff. Clearly, I like it right?
Dr. Barbara Hales: It’s kind of amazing that lawyers themselves get caught. And in that quagmire, you would think of different specialties. But you wouldn’t think that lawyers themselves would not check more into that.
Andrew Contiguglia: It’s funny because I represent a lawyer marketing company. And in my discussions with the owner of that company, we talk all the time, because they also run a podcast and one of the episodes of their podcast was those types of horror stories about companies holding the lawyers content hostage to either get paid or elbow out the lawyer out of that stuff. And I mean, think about all the energy and the time and everything that you put into building your brand. Think back to copyright and trademark from the very beginning. And now it’s being thrown out the window and in the hands of somebody who you are in a legal dispute over. And sometimes you have to sort of sit back and go, well, what’s it going to cost me to recreate everything that I’ve just now created over the last five years. And that can be expensive. And it may be enough where you could say Alright, here’s what we’ll do, let’s offer, and you can do this.
I’ve gotten to marketing companies and said listen; I will get in a legal argument with you. I will sue you over this. Let’s avoid it. My clients willing to pay you $10,000 for all this content. What the hell is it from you for you? Why do you care? Give me the content. What? You can’t use it for anything else. Barbara, if you’re putting Andrew Contiguglia for the Contiguglia Law Firm up in your marketing stuff, you can’t use Andrew Contiguglia, his face when you’re doing John Doe’s website on the exact same stuff. So, the fact that you have all of Andrew Contiguglia as mug and content and videos and everything in your possession has zero marketability for you unless you’re going to try to general realize it but then you always do have this opportunity to say, well, you don’t have my, you don’t have my permission to use my likeness in that context as whatever you’re doing. So, there are ways that you can protect yourself. Another one, I’m going to give you another horror story. God, I hate being the bearer of doom and gloom, I feel like a doctor.
But let’s, but here’s this, I have seen situations. And this happened, I had an in-house marketer for a while. She was great. I had to teach her about the legal issues when it came to marketing. And so, she put together some great marketing material, and she presented it to me. And she goes, well, what do you think of this? I said, Listen, it’s beautiful. I think it looks great. Like, but where did you get those images? Oh, I got them from Google image search. And I’m like, okay, you need to go find other images. I’m like, we are subscribed to Adobe Stock go to Adobe stock images from there. Well, why? Why? Why? Because we don’t own the rights to that. We don’t have licensing to use those images. And I think people have this tendency, Barbara, to think just because they can find it on the internet. Or if they type it into Google, and it shows up in an image bank, that they have the right to use that. I have clients who got sued over it, and it’s expensive. It’s like $7,500 a violation. And if you’re making money off of those, you have a responsibility then in a successful lawsuit against you to pay anything that you might have received as a result of that.
So, copyright infringement can be a huge, huge problem for you if you’re being dinged for that. So, I always make sure that if I’m hiring a marketing company, and they’re creating content for me, and they are going to pick your stock source for materials, that they’re promising that they have the right to use it, that they’re not, that they’re not stealing it from somebody who’s later going to come back, that happened to me, I had, we call them copyright trolls. They’re lawyers out there who love to go around and find people who are infringing on other people’s trademarks. And they go around and they shake him down, they shake them down for, 10s of 1000s of dollars, because they know because they’re gonna come to you Barbara, they’re gonna go, hey, Barbara, I went on your website, and you have this image from my client, it’s of a plant. This is based on a true story, but the names have been changed to protect the innocent. You have this plant on your website, and my client took a picture of that plant, that picture is copyrighted, you owe us for this.
And we had to literally, they’re like, so they walk through and they go, here’s, you know, it’s been up on your website from our math 18 months. So that could be one infringement 7500 bucks, it could be multiple infringements, depending on how it is operated. It was also to promote a product that my client was selling. So, then there was revenue generated as a result of that image. And so, you add all these up, and these lawyers are very creative in the way that they you know, Max everything out, and they say, hey, if we have to sue you, we’re coming after you for $350,000. And you’re going you look at your clinic goes; I can’t afford this $350,000 What should I do? We write back and we say, Yep, here we go. What do you want? They go, Yeah, well, we would be happy to settle this for $7,500. You go to your client, you go pay this $7,500 buck, like what are you talking about? They have a claim, you didn’t do what you’re supposed to do. And by the way, that $7,500 is a fraction of what you’re going to pay me to litigate this for you. So now you decide what the business and these lawyers coming in there, they will file hundreds of these. And if they’re getting $7,500 bucks per pop on each of these, and they’re filing 100 of them a year, do the math that’s 750k of like, low hanging fruit in legal fees that you can get on these things. And they do that.
So, you know, in the case, I had somebody reached out to me for a picture I had up on my website. Now I’m smart enough because I know that I go to a stock service and I am licensed for those images. And so, they tried to shake me down. I said, I’m sorry, but I have a licensing for this. They’re like, well, we need you to prove it. My great. Here you go. So, I went through the process with Adobe. I am not a paid advertiser of Adobe. I use Adobe and I love it and their stock services are awesome. I get no kickback from this see FTC now rolling back around. But we’ve got now I had to prove to them like, here you go. Here’s the licensing and everything. They’re like, Great, thank you. We appreciate it. Have a good day. And they were gone. That was it just proved it. And I think that becomes I think the most dangerous atmosphere for doctors to be playing in when they’re not using their own original content. And then when they want to create their own content, they need to make sure that they retain ownership in that content. And after the photographer, the videographer, the blog writer, the content creator, has produced it, I think those are the biggest pieces of it.
Dr. Barbara Hales: I think that’s so true. And, in speaking about that, I just want to point out to the listeners that when you see that an image is royalty-free, sometimes it can be royalty-free for personal use and not commercial use.
Andrew Contiguglia: Absolutely.
Dr. Barbara Hales: They are all different ways that something is royalty-free, and you have to make sure that you’re getting it for the purpose that you are using it.
Andrew Contiguglia: Absolutely. And I think that that’s a really good distinction. Also, if I am putting up, you know, a video that I created on YouTube, for my own personal use, I can use YouTube’s you know, laundry list of songs and you know, sound bites and things like that, that they have available to me as a creator. However, if I’m creating things for Barbara hills, and Barbara Hills marketing world, I may not be the license may not allow me to use the license from YouTube that I created for you. It would be your license that you would have to go get independently for me.
Not only that, but I see people, you know, marketing companies using the same image in more than one publication. I think that creates a problem. I think, depending on the license that could create a licensing violation that you know, the creator that content could come after you for. And I think you think that anybody who is using a company needs to make sure that they are indemnified, meaning that in the event, I’m sued, and I have to pay something out that I can get paid back by you for violating the law that I got blamed for. I think those indemnification provisions are important in every one of those contracts. So, we want to make sure that the doctors are protected in that respect, as they build that out.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Absolutely. Tell me how does one structure agreements to ensure clarity on deliverables? Which is something that we’re we’ve been talking about, as well as confidentiality and dispute resolution?
Andrew Contiguglia: Absolutely, I think those are. That’s great. And getting back to the marketing company that I represent our legal marketing company; we have been working on their master services agreement for months now. And it has gone through a number of different variations. And I think the perspective of the information I’m about to give really depends on whether I’m representing you as the marketer and the creator versus the doctor who’s entering into the agreement. It is my belief that, Barbara, if you’re providing a marketing service to Me, you should be providing the contract to me for my review, and that you should stand fast on the terms that you want, hey, if you want to Barbara hills, to do your creative marketing and do your content marketing, you got to agree to my terms. Hey, when people hire me, they have to agree to my terms. I’m sure every one of these doctors that listens to this podcast, every patient that comes in through the door has to agree to do things the way the doctor says. That’s just the world we live in. I think it would be different if I’m providing you Well, yeah, Barbara here, I’ll provide you my marketing contract. And then you’ve got to agree to my terms. That doesn’t always work out that way.
So, I think, you know, I have seen horrible marketing contracts. I’ve seen ones that last forever, I see ones that you can’t terminate. And I will say these bad contracts are still binding. And without somebody going through your agreement with you, like I don’t mind if you enter into a bad agreement, Barbara, but let’s sit down and let me go through it with you. So, you know what you’re getting yourself into. And at least we can discuss your though any way that you might be able to get out of this contract under, under what circumstances because I you know, you see these things where marketers hold websites hostage, they hold branding hostage, they hold images that they create hostage, all of these things, and you want to make sure like, Listen, you want to agree to this stuff, great. But understand what you’re getting yourself into. And I think we’re explaining it and walking through it with somebody who has the background in it, I think is going to be imperative and really helpful in the way that you look at hiring a marketing company. So, I think that’s the first thing.
What other terms should be in there? I think you need a term like how are you going to get out of this? I think every contract should have a form of termination. Because, Barbara, I love you. You’re great, but I might not want to work with you forever. There might be somebody else that I want to go work with, or here’s something that happens a lot and I’ve run into this, representing other marketing companies that have gone out and purchase bought smaller marketing agencies in order to grow their companies. I’ve seen it where, you know, company A says we’re gonna go acquire company Z, and they go and they acquire company Z. And all the people who are working with companies Z hate Company A. And so, somebody comes in Barbara, I have a contract with you Company A comes in and buys your company. I mean, I like working with those people. No, I am a true bar believer. I’m working with Barbara and nobody else. How dare you do that. Now, of course, from a customer service standpoint, hope you would talk to me about it before selling it. But it doesn’t always work that way, especially in the marketing industry, when you see transition after transition after transition, where you want to retire, and your associate is now running your company. So, we want to see those things. But I may not want to be around for that long. And I might want to get out. So, termination clauses.
Dr. Barbara Hales: But an interesting thought, though, because if a contract is with a certain company, then is it you know, if the company changes, or the people that signed the contract change? Doesn’t that, in and of itself, make it less legally binding,
Andrew Contiguglia: It doesn’t change the legally binding nature of the agreement. So, let’s it really depends on the nature of the contract, and the nature of the acquisition that happened. So let me walk through a situation with you. So, let’s say you want to buy marketing, company B. And your part of what you’re buying are all the contracts that marketing company B has. So, you’re buying Marketing Company B, you know, you work in Florida and East Coast marketing, company B is all California doctors, you’re like what a great market for me to get into, I’m going to buy this agency up. Perfect.
Now one of the things that you need to look into when buying that other company is, are you buying just the assets of that company? Or are you also buying the stock of that company, because if you’re buying the stock of the company, nothing underneath that company changes because you’re buying the ownership interest in the company. However, when you’re buying just the assets of the company, its customers, its intellectual property, its products, its, you know, know-how and other foundational requirements, that may not be it. So, when you’re buying somebody’s contracts, you need to make sure that the contract you’re buying can be transferred to you. So, we call that assignability. So is the contract assignable. If the contract is assignable, you don’t have an issue with it, because the owner is just going to transfer it to you, they’re going to assign it, we do that through what’s called an assignment and assumption agreement. And any contract, any cut, let me rephrase that any contract is transferable unless the contract prohibits transfer.
So, what that means is I can contract I can transfer any contract I have to you so long as the contract doesn’t prohibit me from doing so. But you’ll see that many lawyers are smart. might not think that but we are sometimes and we put in these non-assignability clauses for exactly this. Because we want to make sure that you can’t transfer your duties and your responsibilities to somebody else. And as a result of that, we want to make sure that we have an anti-assignment provision in there.
And get dinged by that later on where the clients like, yeah, and now, you know, you went out and you bought, I mean, imagine this, you buy this company out in California, they have 1000 customers that they’re dealing with, and you’re thinking to yourself, I’m buying all I’m buying 1000 $100,000 contracts, because each one of these contracts is $100,000 deal for me. And every one of these now is like Yeah, guess what? No, we don’t agree to the assignment. And we’re out and you’ve just now paid all of this money for a marketing company that now you can’t use those contracts. I’m gonna make it even worse. I represented. It’s funny. I represented somebody and this was actually in the medical area.
That’s the asset you’re buying is all those contracts with all those other doctors and he’s like, Alright, so we started getting copies of all the contracts, that there’s other that this other locum’s company was utilizing with all of its locums doctors. And every one of those contracts I kid you not, there was probably about 15, or 16 of them was different. Oh, my, some of them had mandatory arbitration. Some of them had venue in California, meaning that’s where you’re going to sue.
This is going to create more headaches for you later on down the line. And ultimately, my clients like, yeah, you’re right, I don’t want to do this, this is not worth it to me. So, we end up backing out of the deal. But that’s part of you know, what we do in due diligence when it comes to buying other companies, which, you know, it’s not a marketing issue for doctors, but I’ve represented a ton of doctors and selling their businesses and buying other businesses, I think it’s a great way to, you know, when you’re coming out of med school, and your residency and fellowship and all and you’re looking to jump into, you know, building a company, there you go. And that was my dad’s exit plan, he sold his nephrology practice and his dialysis unit to a very large health one company, and retired very happily from that.
Dr. Barbara Hales: That’s great. Let’s shift our conversation a little bit to your book, which has a very catchy title. If I were to buy your book, what kinds of things would I find in it?
Andrew Contiguglia: Oh, it’s a guide book so there’s nothing real fancy about it. And it really walks you through how to start and set up your business for success. Or if you are current business owner, the book has in it like things that you could think about whether you should be hiring employees or what or your workers should be classified as employees or independent contractors, walking you through some of those legal issues.
With beneficial ownership interests. In companies you’ve probably heard about that you have now the financial crime Enforcement Network(FINCEN), requiring owners of businesses must register with FINCEN anybody who has a beneficial ownership interest in their company, meaning if they own 20% or more in a company, you have an obligation to put FinCEN on notice of your ownership interest in that company.
So, if you had a sales rep working for you, who was awesome, and you fire, you can’t prevent that person from going across the street to an accountability as marketing agency and competing against Barbara Hills marketing agencies can’t do that anymore. So, this whole prohibition on non-competes I think is really important. so, it doesn’t prohibit people from putting nonsolicitation agreements in place so you can’t call my clients you can’t work with my clients, you can’t call my employees that kind of thing that you can still be protected.
So those two big changes I think within the last year or so have really come down and it just becomes one more box we have to check as we start helping people with the startup of their businesses or running an operating their companies down the line. And also making sure that those things have been done when they look to succeed from their business whether it’s selling it or transferring it to another person.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Well, I assume that we could buy your book on Amazon.
Andrew Contiguglia: That’s right. You can find it on Amazon. Yep.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Is it available in the audio file as well?
Andrew Contiguglia: Not yet. That is something I’m in the works but you can it’s on Kindle I think you can even maybe Kindle read it your computer might read it to you might be boring. You don’t get this much entertainment with a computer. But you can buy it you can buy it in hardback or sorry paperback and on Kindle. Also, if you go to Dontskipthelegal.com, you can find you can get access to my podcast, which is the Don’t skip the legal podcast. See how we’re working on the trademarking in the branding. That’s how this all fits it. You’ll see my logos which would be copyrighted. Also, you can check out any of the videos that I’ve done on YouTube I put a lot of those out too over the years and been working on that so that’s where you can find me and if you want to find me on any of the socials, it you can find me @AJCEsq. So, @AJCEsq so find me at Twitter, Instagram. Pick it, I’ll be there.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Okay, so we’re going to give our listeners two tips that you can implement right away.
Andrew Contiguglia: All right.
Dr. Barbara Hales: What two tips would you like to leave them with?
Andrew Contiguglia: That’s a great question. I think the first tip would be to pull your contracts and review them. Because what I have found is, many of these individuals sign these contracts, they don’t know what they mean, or now that they’ve here we are, we’ve been chatting for about an hour or so. Now they have all this new insight and knowledge as to how to approach and view some of these things. But I think that they should look at the contracts now with this new light, and sort of critically evaluate whether these are the right deals for them to be in. That would be the very first thing.
The second thing would be, I would make sure that you have ownership of every image that you have on your website that you use in your marketing protocol. I would do as much as you can to steer away from using any of the stores, or your stock photos and things like that. And I would create all original content. So, hire somebody, make sure you retain the ownership interest and create all new content. From the beginning. It sounds like it’s an ordeal but break down into time. Over time, you’ll get it done pretty quickly.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Well, I think that the thought that would go through every listener’s mind after listening to this podcast is I need a lawyer.
Andrew Contiguglia: What’s funny, you should say it’s actually the very first chapter in my book is why you need a lawyer as part of your business team. I mean, everybody has, everybody has an accountant, right? Like you need you need a lawyer like a PC like your primary care doctor, right? You don’t go to the doctor after you have a heart attack, you go to the doctor so you don’t get a heart attack. That’s why you come to me, come to your lawyer first so you don’t have a heart attack. That’s really what it comes down to.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Well, I think that you have really encouraged us all to run out and give you a call.
Andrew Contiguglia: That’d be great. I’d love to work with people.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Thank you so much for being on the show today, listening to another episode of marketing tips for doctors, till next time.
Andrew Contiguglia: Excellent. Thanks, Barb.
The post Top Legal Considerations to Market Your Medical Practice first appeared on The Medical Strategist.In this episode, Dr. Hales discusses:
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Dr. Barbara Hales: Welcome to another episode of Marketing Tips for Doctors.
I’m your host, Dr. Barbara Hales. Today, we will explore innovative solutions in the healthcare industry as we delve into transitioning from a traditional medical practice with third-party payers and insurance reimbursement to a concierge model. We’ll uncover the benefits, challenges, and key considerations for physicians and healthcare providers looking to adopt this patient-focused approach.
Benefits of Transitioning to a Concierge Medical Practice
Dr. Barbara Hales: Transitioning to a concierge medical practice represents a significant shift in healthcare delivery, as it emphasizes personalized care, enhanced patient experiences, and sustainable practice models. A huge benefit is not relying on insurance reimbursements, which are beyond our control and may decrease over time. I had a wall in my office where Medicare and third-party payer checks were taped. The value of the checks ranged from $1.38 to $2.50. It was more meaningful to have patients see this for visits that I had spent almost an hour on. I couldn’t believe the value, and I knew my patients couldn’t believe it either.
The shift in transitioning to a concierge model requires careful consideration of patient communication, financial structures, and navigating regulatory requirements. What are the key strategies for communicating this change to existing patients and attracting new clientele? It’s essential to establish clear communication channels to educate patients about the enhanced services and benefits offered through the concierge model. Focus on building strong patient-provider relationships, prioritizing continuity of care, and ensuring transparency throughout the transition process and transitioning to a concierge model.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Several considerations are vital for success: tailoring patient communication and engagement strategies to convey the value of personalized care and the extended services offered, implementing a sustainable and ethical pricing structure that aligns with the practice’s value proposition and the needs of the patient population, embracing innovative technology solutions to streamline administrative tasks, enhance communication, and uphold data privacy and security standards, establishing collaborative care networks and partnerships to provide comprehensive, coordinated care for patients and meet evolving healthcare needs.
The key takeaway here is transitioning to a concierge medical practice offers practitioners and patients a unique opportunity to redefine the healthcare experience. This transformation requires careful planning, open communication, and a commitment to patient-centered care. By embracing this model, healthcare providers can strengthen their connection with patients, promote wellness-focused care, and build sustainable practice models rooted in a foundation of trust and collaboration.
Dr. Barbara Hales: How do you keep from losing patience when going to a concierge model? This is something that I think many doctors worry about. And the fear of this is what keeps them from changing over to the concierge model. Transitioning to a concierge medical practice involves a significant shift in the way healthcare services are delivered, which can understandably raise concerns about patient retention during the transition. To address this, it’s important to implement clear communication strategies and transparent processes To minimize patient attrition and strengthen trust, here are eight effective approaches to help mitigate patient loss when transitioning to a concierge model.
First, clear communication. Communicate the transition to a concierge model well in advance to provide patients with ample time to understand the changes and ask questions. Secondly, we need transparency. This is a key to addressing patient concerns and building trust during this period of transformation. The next value proposition clearly articulates the enhanced value and benefits that patients will receive through the concierge models such as extended appointment times, proactive wellness programs 24/7 access to the physician, and personalized care plans, emphasizing the added value and improved patient experience that the concierge model offers. Let’s face it, what patient doesn’t want to have a lot of time addressing their concerns with their doctor as opposed to the five minutes of face time that many patients get in their doctor’s offices now?
Next, we have education and engagement and host informal sessions, open forums, or webinars to educate patients about the concierge model and its advantages. provide a platform for patients to voice their concerns, share feedback, and engage in open dialogue regarding the transition. Customized outreach, tailor your communication to address specific patient concerns and preferences, provide personalized information, answer individual questions, and offer one one-on-one consultations to discuss how the transition will affect each patient’s care.
Options for existing patients offer flexible options for existing patients who may have concerns about the financial implications of the concierge model. Consider offering reduced rates or extended payment plans for a transitional period to ease the financial burden for loyal patients. Continuity of Care emphasizes the commitment to continuity of care and the ongoing relationship with existing patients. Assure them that their medical history, treatment plans, and ongoing care will be seamlessly transitioned to the concierge model without disruption.
transparent pricing and services clearly outline the pricing structure. Services and additional benefits associated with the concierge model provide detailed information about how the new model aligns with patient needs and contributes to improved healthcare outcomes. Finally, highlight the patient-focused nature of the concierge model underscoring the increased attention, time and personalized care their patients will receive emphasizing the provider-patient relationship at the core of the concierge model and its positive impact on overall wellness.
By implementing these structures and these strategies, healthcare providers can effectively navigate the transition to a concierge model while minimizing patient attrition. Open communication. Personalized engagement and a steadfast commitment to patient-centered care are fundamental in assuring patients of the ongoing value and benefits of their healthcare experience within the concierge model.
Dr. Barbara Hales: You may be wondering now, can doctors accept insurance for surgery but not for office hours? The answer is yes. Doctors can choose to accept insurance for surgical procedures while not accepting it for office visits. This approach is commonly seen in practices that operate on a concierge or direct primary A-care model. In this scenario, the physician or practice may opt to accept insurance for specific medical sir services, such as surgeries, hospital admission or complex treatments, while providing primary care services, routine office visits, and preventive care through a membership-based or fee-for-service structure. This answers the fear that patients may have, saying: “Okay, well, I’m willing to pay for office visits, but what happens if I need an expensive surgery? I don’t want to negate my insurance and have to pay for that also out of pocket.”
The decision to segment insurance acceptance in this manner is often driven by the desire to maintain a greater degree of control over the patient care experience, optimize administrative efficiency, and enhance the quality of primary care services. By not relying on insurance for routine office visits, providers can reduce administrative burdens, streamline patient interactions, and focus on delivering personalized comprehensive care without the constraint of insurance, billing, and reimbursement complexities.
It’s important for healthcare providers considering this approach to clearly communicate to patients how their services are structured, transparent communication about insurance acceptance, out-of-pocket costs, and the scope of services covered under various payment models is essential to ensure that patients understand their healthcare options and financial responsibilities. Physicians and practices should also be aware of the regulatory and compliance considerations when structuring their practice in this manner, it’s advisable to seek legal and regulatory guidance to ensure that the practice model complies with applicable laws, regulations, and ethical guidelines.
Ultimately, the decision to accept insurance for specific medical services while not doing so for office visits is a strategic choice that should align with the practice’s overall goals, patient population, and commitment to delivering high-quality personalized care. It is important to look into what regulatory laws apply to accepting insurance for surgery but not office hours.
Dr. Barbara Hales: The regulatory landscape surrounding the acceptance of insurance for surgical procedures, while not accepting it for office visits, is multifaceted. And it’s vital for healthcare providers to navigate this territory with a clear understanding of the relevant laws and regulations. Here are the key regulatory considerations that may apply to this practice model.
First, we have the insurance contractual obligations. Healthcare providers who choose to accept insurance for surgical procedures must understand their contractual obligations with insurance companies. Providers need to review their participating provider agreements and contracts to ensure compliance with the terms and conditions stipulated by insurers. Secondly, we have state insurance regulations. healthcare practices operating within the United States are subject to state-specific insurance regulations. It’s essential for providers to be knowledgeable about state laws governing insurance reimbursement, provider network participation, patient billing practices, and any restrictions or obligations related to the scope of covered services.
Next, we have the scope of practice regulations. state licensing boards and professional regulatory bodies define the scope of practice for healthcare providers. It’s important for physicians to ensure that their practice model aligns with relevant laws and regulations pertaining to the performance of surgical procedures, office consultations, and the delivery of medical care in various settings. Next, we have fraud and abuse laws. Providers must adhere to anti-fraud and abuse laws, such as the federal Anti-Kickback Statute and the Stark Law, which govern financial relationships and arrangements in healthcare. These laws are designed to prevent improper inducements, kickbacks, and improper financial incentives in relation to patient referrals and services reimbursed by federal health care programs. patient protection and informed consent is next. Regardless of the practices reimbursement structure, healthcare providers must uphold patient rights, confidentiality, and informed consent practices, compliance with patient private laws and regulations, as well as ethical standards for patient communication and informed decision- making remain essential in all aspects of care delivery.
Lastly, we have billing and reimbursement compliance, providers must adhere to billing and coding regulations, including accurate reporting and documentation of services provided compliant coding practices, and transparent patient billing practices. This includes adherence to coding standards set forth by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and private insurers. Given the complex regulatory landscape, healthcare providers considering this practice model should seek legal counsel and regulatory guidance to ensure compliance with applicable laws, regulations, and ethical standards. Additionally, ongoing vigilance and proactive monitoring of regulatory developments at both the state and federal law levels are essential to stay abreast of any changes that may impact the practices operational and billing practices. The thing also now is that if you are using an electronic health record system, the coding and the coding concerning your procedures are built right into the software.
Dr. Barbara Hales: How common is a hybrid model of medical practice with accepting insurance for surgery, but not for office visits? The practice of accepting insurance for surgical procedures while not accepting it for office visits, often seen in hybrid medical models such as concierge medicine or direct primary care is a relatively uncommon, but emerging trend within the healthcare industry. So if at this point you are considering transitioning from an insurance payer model to a concierge model, you are trending.
While traditional fees for service and insurance-based models have historically been predominant. There is a growing interest among healthcare providers in exploring alternative practice models that emphasize patient-centered care, enhanced access, and personalized services. The hybrid model where insurance is accepted for specific medical services such as surgeries, hospital admissions, or complex treatments, while primary care services and routine office visits are provided through a membership-based model or fee-for-service basis, represents a departure from the traditional practice of relying solely on insurance billing for all medical services.
Although the adoption of this hybrid approach is not yet widespread, it has gained traction in certain segments of the healthcare landscape. Its appeal lies in the potential to offer a more personalized and comprehensive care experience for patients freed from the constraints of insurance-driven administrative burdens and billing complexities. An increased number of healthcare providers are exploring innovative practice models that prioritize meaningful patient-provider relationships, proactive wellness initiatives, and streamlined care deliveries by leveraging a hybrid model that combines insurance services with membership-based or direct payment options for primary care providers aiming to create a more patient-centric and sustainable practice framework.
As the medical industry continues to evolve, it is anticipated that the adoption of hybrid practice models that incorporate a blend of insurance accepted and direct payment services may become more prevalent, particularly as providers seek to address patient demands for enhanced access, continuity of care, and personalized health care experiences.
Dr. Barbara Hales: As we conclude today’s episode, we extend our gratitude to those colleagues who have shared their experiences and transitioning to a new model and guiding our audience through the transformative journey of transitioning to concierge medical practice. We hope that this episode has provided valuable insights and inspiration for healthcare providers seeking to embrace innovative care delivery models. Stay tuned and remember to prioritize wellness, innovation, and patient-centered care in your practice. This has been another episode of Marketing Tips for Doctors with your host Dr. Barbara Hales. Till next time
The post How to Adopt a Concierge Model first appeared on The Medical Strategist.*What Is The Importance Of Understanding Patient Needs And Providing Personalized Care
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Dr. Barbara Hales: Welcome to another episode of marketing tips for doctors.
I’m your host, Dr. Barbara Hales. Today it’s an honor to introduce Kevin St. Clergy, a luminary in the field of medical marketing, whose contributions over the past two decades have reshaped the landscape of medical practices nationwide.
Kevin’s dedication transcends the accolades. His true fulfillment lies in enhancing the professional and personal lives of his physicians. And to them, 1005 Kevin founded a pioneering online marketing consultancy that now boasts a clientele of over 2000 locations across various medical specialties. Despite the successes and the scale of his impact, Kevin finds the greatest joy in witnessing the transformative power of simple, yet profound changes and how medical practices operate, ensuring they serve not just as a livelihood, but as a gateway to a fulfilling life.
Join us as we delve into Kevin’s insights and experiences charting the path to a thriving medical practice. Welcome to the show, Kevin.
Kevin St.Clergy: Thanks, Barbara. I appreciate you having me.
Dr. Barbara Hales: What is your actual agency called for our listeners?
Kevin’s Online Marketing Agency
Kevin St.Clergy: We have two names depending on the river multi-specialty group, which is for small and medium-sized physician offices called Practis. Practis.com. Spelled a little differently. We’re also an audiology hearing aids and ear, nose and throat doctors’ offices through a name called MedPB which stands for Medical Practice Builders, and MedPB for short medpb.com. And then for our 50-60 physician groups and larger or major and minor or smaller hospital systems. We own a company called Dobies Marketing. So, we acquired digital marketing agencies to bring them all together. So now we can service a small practice with just one physician, one front desk, or a very large hospital system with their strategies and what they’re trying to do to get more new patients through the door.
Dr. Barbara Hales: How many people work for your agency?
Kevin St.Clergy: We have I think right now we’re at what 107. We’re about to bring on another company which will bring us to 129, I believe.
Dr. Barbara Hales: What inspired you to pursue a career in medical marketing?
Kevin St.Clergy: Well, I started as an audiologist. Believe it or not, I come from a family of audiologists and audiology is this hearing and balance. My aunt was an audiologist, my cousin was an audiologist, my brother wore hearing aids. I’m 51. Chris is 49 for 48 years, and I got in and I ran a clinic successfully and took it from a struggling clinic to being very successful, I think we were doing about $5,000 a month when I took over the clinic. And we grew it to over $650,000 within the first year. Then I had another clinic and then I started working with ear nose and throat surgeons for a referral basis. We ended up getting some contracts there so made a pretty good name for myself and the ability to grow a practice in a private practice setting. And then they said, you know, you’re good at this business stuff, we’d love for you to go out and just consult the physician offices that we work with and go in and help them grow their businesses.
We did a good job with the territory we had, we took it from about half a million dollars in business to 5.5 million in four years, me and another assistant that I had, and it was mainly just going into physician offices and saying, look, let’s go through this assessment, find out where there’s some holes in the bucket, let me see if I can plug the holes. At the time, it was everything from soup to nuts and recruiting training. And then I just got to where I love the marketing aspect of it no five, I started a marketing agency.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Well, that’s very impressive. How would you say you got past the gatekeeper to let physicians know you were available?
Kevin St.Clergy: Relationships. I was big on that. So, once I had a core group of customers, at first, it was cold calling and just trying to get on the phone with them to let them know what we could do, but already had some relationships in the profession. So, manufacturers that were looking to help with medical device sales for themselves, but also for the physicians, especially private pay money that a lot of physicians were after at that time and still are. Many of them. We’re looking to grow and I had some success stories early on. And the manufacturers would refer me to certain clinics and then once I had a certain base of clinics I got a lot of referrals from physicians and then I learned a valuable lesson because I wrote a book on digital marketing.
And once you write a book and I usually encourage whether you’re a physician or an agency owner Two things these days one does a TED talk, I don’t think it hurts even a physician who’s trying to brand themselves in a local market. A TED talk will give you instant credibility and lead to other opportunities for growth. And also writing a book because it’s an instant expert on whatever it is that you do. And well I’ve written six. So, the first one that I was in the audiology space was called The Death of Audiology. At the time, there were a lot of changes going through the industry and the profession at the time. So, it got people’s attention.
It was my first experience with sometimes bad press is good press. Because people didn’t like the title. But a lot of people once they read the book, and they read the messaging, and we’re working on other things to have my next book is coming out is called Blind Blaming. And that is going to be my TED talk that’s coming up here very shortly. We’re sometimes we don’t always see the problem. But we start blaming other things that aren’t the actual problem and focusing too many, too much energy on places that aren’t going to fix the problem you have.
Cold Calling Marketing Strategy
Dr. Barbara Hales: So, when you’re doing cold calling, did you find a lot of physicians just didn’t get it in terms of the need for marketing?
Kevin St.Clergy: I did? Well, first, it was hard to get through the gatekeepers. I found that very difficult. But once I had found a way to get through, and it was for my book, writing the book and getting the books, I would send the book and then follow up with a phone call. And the book was a motivator to get the physicians to call and say, Listen, I don’t want to be the doctor in that story, because it was a business fable. I don’t know if anybody’s ever read a book by Patrick Lencioni. It’s called Death by Meeting one of my favorites. But he writes his he writes his books and a fable format. Mine was a story of a private practice Doctor who was struggling with her business for practice, and she met somebody to help her turn it around.
So that’s how I got around the cold calling. But I think the biggest challenge was a lot of doctors didn’t feel they needed to market or the fascinating thing is nobody felt like their patients were online in their market. Because audiologists deal with older people, nobody thought old people would ever use the internet, obviously wrong. But now everybody uses the internet, and it’s getting more and more prevalent.
Challenges In Growing A Medical Practice
Dr. Barbara Hales: Yes, this is true. What were your biggest challenges as your agency grew?
Kevin St.Clergy: That’s a good one, I’d say people, I learned very quickly to hire slow and fire fast. I learned that it’s very important to align the people that you’re trying to bring onto your team. And we teach this to physician groups as well. It’s really important to find people with similar core values. But finding the best people was probably the most difficult challenge that I had. But once we figured out how to attract and retain the best employees with similar core values, a different interviewing process, we would do several things with them, we know they can answer the traditional interview. And if they did well on that, we’d simply take them to lunch, and see how they did in a social environment if they were fun to hang out with. And they did a good job. And they seem interested in other people. And they were nice to the waitress and had to seem to have good core values. We’ve had much more success doing things like that.
Dr. Barbara Hales: You still take them out to lunch?
Kevin St.Clergy: Still outside my company anymore. I did sell. So, I worked for the folks I do. I’m part of the company now. But I do work for the folks that I sold to. But yeah, if it’s somebody that I’m interviewing for other projects that I’m involved in, absolutely, always do. Because I’m a big believer that whether you’re a physician in private practice, or whether you’re an agency doing medical marketing, the biggest competitive advantage that you have is the quality and quantity of the personal relationships you build. And if you’ve got somebody on your team that doesn’t fall in those lines, it’s not going to build relationships and get people to the point where they know you love you and trust you. I think you’re doing yourself and your customers a disservice.
Dr. Barbara Hales: No, I agree with you completely. What do you think is the hardest part about growing a practice in 2024?
Kevin St.Clergy: Oh, well, the new axis of evil are now insurance companies. So, I think that’s the biggest challenge that we have. Figuring out some ways to get private pay cash through the door. I’ve always admired my primary care physician; she is doing a great job with say buying IoT with some cash-based stuff that I’m a patient of that because I’m getting older and things happen. But you know, talking to her and her staff, she’s like, you know, we really liked the cash side of the business. It’s a lot easier when we get our money up front, things like that. I’ve seen a lot of physicians who have told me that they’re struggling because of insurance companies reducing their fees and they’re now having to see two to three times as many people to make the same amount of money that they were before not that money is their primary driver. 99% of the time, but I think with what they went through and the education they have, they deserve to make a decent living. So that’s what I’m seeing.
Dr. Barbara Hales: I don’t think it’s a question of feeling that they deserve it or that they want to get rich, I think it’s a question of wanting to pay the bills.
Kevin St.Clergy: And true and pay their staff who needs to feed their families as well. So yeah, I don’t think keep doing that. But that’s where I think our national organizations need to get a little bit more involved and, and helping us negotiate and do things like that, which we’re not there yet. Interestingly enough, though, when I was in Canada, because we do have some customers in Canada, they are doing a pretty good job of protecting some of their private pay fees, and stopping some internet, you know, people that are doing some things, they shouldn’t be doing that or they’re allowed to do in the United States.
They’re not necessarily what they do in Canada and different professions. So, I thought that was interesting. But they when I asked him about it, they’re like, Yeah, that’s one thing. I’ll give credit to our national organization. They lobbied and fought really hard to make sure these companies can’t do business up here like they do in the States. I thought that was an interesting comment.
Growing A Medical Practice Through Clear Values, Coaching, And Excellent Patient Care
Dr. Barbara Hales: But on the other hand, if there is elective surgery that needs to be done, like a hip replacement, for instance, patients have the choice of waiting a few years or coming down to the States.
Kevin St.Clergy: Oh, yes, no, it can be argued both ways. This was just one situation where there are organizations that protected them from an insurance company that was doing something in the states from doing the same thing in Canada, that’s all I met. So not saying I agree with their healthcare model at all. I like ours. That’s why I live here. But that’s what I think the biggest challenge is.
I’m hearing that over and over again. And that’s where I encourage physicians as we get into some of their digital marketing, and we’re helping them get more new patients to the door, improving their web presence, helping them get more reviews, we always ask, you know, how’s everything else going, because for some value, add services that are to make our company more attractive, we’ll help them with all aspects of their practice, we’ve got a lot of what we call success tools and things like that, and just teaching them how to create an environment that people actually want to come work in and being honest and upfront with them, helping them get the right people on board. That’s the second biggest challenge that I see that I hear often from physicians, so we try to help them with their recruiting, with how they’re writing job descriptions, all of that goes into a play or goes into the big equation. But the biggest thing is, do people align with your core values? Have you sat down and outlined your core values in writing so that you can share them with other people and find the best folks?
Dr. Barbara Hales: In your experience? What key factors contribute to building a successful practice?
Kevin St.Clergy: Well, I think getting very clear, I’d say clarity, making sure that you’re very clear on what you want the type of practice that you want to build. I do think it’s critical to have a coach what I always tell physicians is, or ask physicians is how many Olympic athletes won a gold medal Do you know of one that didn’t have a coach? And a lot of times we get on this island and use your background a little bit we get on this tropical island, and we don’t want to ask for help. And I don’t know many very ultra-successful people that don’t have a coach. I’ve had a coach for many years at least 20. Some of the most successful people that I work with have coaches, my coaches have coaches.
Next, I would say consistency with actions, meaning if I don’t think a lot of physicians are paying much attention these days, to the patient experience, or the patient pathway, as I like to call it that’s where you look at every aspect of a patient’s experience with your office and you need to make sure that it’s consistent. Are they getting the best care? Are we building relationships?
Are we showing them that we do care about them and their health and who they are. And so, marketing’s job is to make the phone ring. It’s the physician’s job to convert that patient into an appointment for revenue-generating appointment. After that our staff needs to give them a great experience so that they leave a positive review. And that positive review can lead to more referrals from family members and friends and people who don’t even know us because people trust reviews a great deal.
And then finally getting a community together that’s looking at other successful physicians that you can be around and share ideas and bounce ideas off. We have a mastermind group that we’ve created for physicians and we have one coming up here. Oddly enough in May in my house, we have about 55 physicians coming down. We have them get up in front of the room and they share their biggest give which is their best idea that they’ve done to grow their practice. They also asked the group one question to them to help them have something they were struggling with. And when you get several million dollars plus practices in a room and you start sharing ideas, it’s one of the most incredible things I’ve ever been part of so community is the next one or not all that leads to confidence in what you’re doing. So that’s my five-step process for growing a practice and it works well.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Yes, sounds good. How do you approach patient care and customer service when coaching practice to build strong, long-lasting relationships with patients?
Kevin St.Clergy: It goes back to what I call creating a great experience. And this goes back to what I said just a few minutes ago that I think we forget, sometimes we get so bogged down with insurance and we’re having to see 50-60 people a day, sometimes in certain practices, the sitting down and saying, Okay, guys, what are we doing to give them a great experience, for example, when a lot of our clients we work with, we have some marketing automation in place when a patient schedules an appointment, and they show up, they get a personalized handwritten thank you note from the physician in their handwriting. The physician never touched it.
But you can’t I can’t tell you how many doctors are calling me saying, well, I think I can learn a lot from you guys. I’m blown away by how many patients said thank you for the thank you notes, you’re the only one that I got this year. Or when we’re we have other things that we do like we have some marketing automation, where on their birthday, the office gets together and records a recording that we use for everyone. And they’re delivered a voicemail that skips the phone call and goes right to their voicemail of the physician’s office singing that patient Happy Birthday, on their cell phone.
So, there are little things you can do to make deposits into what I call an emotional bank account. So, when the topic of your practice or what you’re doing comes up, people immediately think of you because I don’t think our I know that patients don’t have the technical know-how to judge the success of their appointment. If they feel better, I get it. But a lot of times they’ll revert back to feeling instead of results. And if they don’t feel like the doctor talked to them or spent enough time with them, or they were mistreated by the front desk, or they didn’t get a handwritten thank you note or the personal phone call like my physician did after she heard something happened to me and I, unfortunately, go to the hospital. Those are the types of things that I think it takes to build really good quality relationships that are gonna get you the referrals that we all want and need.
Growing A Successful Medical Practice
Dr. Barbara Hales: Yeah, I think you’re right. Before you start marketing for a client, is there anything that makes you unique in this approach?
Kevin St.Clergy: I say results, we try to find out, we interview the client to make sure they’re going to be a good fit for our values, and that they actually want to grow. Are they going to make time to show up for the call? So here’s an interview that we take our physicians through to say, Okay, can you make this a priority, or at least have somebody on your team that can take charge of this, to make sure that you’re very clear on the results, you’re getting the return on investment that you’re getting, and we like to meet with our clients live on the telephone, once a month, preferably once a quarter at a minimum so that we can convey those results that they’re getting?
And there are also things that we find when we’re starting to work with a physician group, for example. I had somebody last week that said, you know, I’m not really impressed with your marketing. And I said, really? Well, let’s go look at the results. I’m showing 22 new patient calls from your tracking numbers online. Yeah, but we only scheduled two new patients. I’m like, well, wait a minute, let’s talk about responsibilities here. My responsibility is to make the phone ring and generate a text message; a form fills your team’s responsibility is to convert that lead into an appointment. So, we try to go through and make sure that we’re working with somebody with a growth mindset, meaning they’re not suffering from what my TED talk will be about. Paradigm paralysis or paradigm blindness, is where your way of doing something becomes the only way of doing something and you become uncoachable. And things are changing, and the patients are changing and their expectations are changing. If we don’t change with them, then the practice is going to go away.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Do you ever have an initial assessment in person or is there?
Kevin St.Clergy: Not in this day and age, if they’re on some of our advanced coaching programs, some people just pay us for digital marketing. Other physicians pay us to work with their entire practice. If they’re paying us and one of those higher-end coaching models, we do try to go out to their office at least once, preferably twice a year. In fact, I’ve got to go to a team retreat in Long Island. In June, for a very large client where we twice a year I fly in, we get their team off-site, and we close the office for a day, which freaks a lot of physicians out. But it’s so addictive. Once you start doing and you start developing your team, they actually start to look forward to it. And it’s not a bad thing we meet from 9 am until 2 pm. We do some team-building exercises, we look at some challenges, and we get some goals of what we need to do better or differently. We look at habits that we’ve got and each position in the practice to see if there are some things that we can do to develop the team as well. And we provide training. So yes, I absolutely try to get out there as much as I can. If they’re on that particular package with the digital marketing. Usually, a Zoom calls each month is plenty, or once a quarter if that’s what they prefer.
Dr. Barbara Hales: What advice would you give a physician who is struggling to grow their practice?
Kevin St.Clergy: I would advise them to get somebody who’s outside of their organization. Sometimes there’s a book called The Structure of Scientific Revolution. In that book, it talks about scientists and when they’re doing studies and the reason Also those studies fit into what they expected to happen, their paradigm, their way of thinking their set of rules, everything was fine. But when the results started looking differently than what they expected, it was almost like the data didn’t exist, they were incapable of seeing that this was real, and what the solution was or what the solution wasn’t to the run the test over and over again, definition of insanity. But I think the same thing holds true with physicians if you’re struggling with growing your practice. Sometimes, as that book proved, it’s physically impossible for us to see the solution without bringing an outside perspective.
That’s why I’m number two in growing a successful practice, I use coaching. Because if you can bring in a professional coach who can pull you out of what you’re doing, make an accurate assessment of what’s going on be honest and upfront with you. Sometimes employees want to keep their jobs, they’re a little shaky to rock the boat, which is another discussion, another call someday, having feeling good enough to where you can be honest in your organization about what’s going wrong. But I think pulling in a coach to assess from outside that’s not tied down with your paradigms, your rules, your way of thinking, is the best thing. I can know how or join a mastermind group where other successful physicians can help you step out of the box and take a look at the way you’re running things too.
The Importance Of Online Reviews For Medical Practices
Dr. Barbara Hales: I think that’s good. Now what I’d like to ask you, which is what I ask everybody that I’m interviewing is, could you at this point, give us two tips for our listeners so they can then implement right away to help them be more successful?
Kevin St.Clergy: Oh, yes, I’d say the first tip, and this is something that a lot of physicians don’t pay attention to that I’m finding, and that gets online reviews. And I would automate the process, which is the second tip is to use marketing automation. A lot of people don’t know what that is. And I’ll go into it briefly. But if you look at one thing, a litmus test for your practice, I always ask physicians, I just did a talk at an academy meeting last week, and I just asked the entire group, you know, how many of you have looked at a review in the last 30 days and 100% of the room raise their hand. And then when I asked, well, how many of you have looked at your reviews, and about half the room, raise their hand.
And so, get as many reviews as you can, Google is looking for the quality and quantity of the reviews that you get, and also the percentage of reviews that you respond to. And depending on who you look at there are HIPAA compliance issues. A good way a bad way. Wouldn’t be careful with that. But I see it time and time again, when a physician contacts us and says yes, a little slower than it has been before. We just Google their practice and their town or what they do in their specialty. So, urology, St. Louis. And we can see that first of all, sometimes they’re nowhere to be found. That’s a whole other issue. But when we do find their reviews, and they’ve got a 4.5 rating, and there’s other with 20 Reviews, and they’ve got other physicians that have 200 reviews, with a 4.8 rating, which physician are you going to click on first, which one I would choose.
Dr. Barbara Hales: What I have always found surprising is that, you know, if I go for a manicure, and I leave the salon, within an hour of leaving the salon, I get a text message from a service asking me to rate how many stores and Anna review from a salon. And the same goes for when my dog goes for a spa treatment or any other like ancillary program, you would think that, if so many other avenues of our life are taken up with, you know, this automated review request that, you know, professionals would jump on board. And certainly time.
Kevin St.Clergy: Yeah, I’d save some time. And I’m telling you, this is one of the few services I’ve ever offered in 20 years I’ve been doing this where we guarantee results, we have a HIPAA-compliant solution that hooks it to EMRs. And it works 100% of the time if they don’t get more new reviews in 90 days with using the system. Because what we do is when we automate things, it eliminates the human element. When people are trying to do it manually. People forget we get busy. There are 15 People in the waiting room, and 510 calls are coming in every minute for busy practices, they don’t have time and when we automate it, but also write the emails in a way that sounds like they’re coming from a human being.
It’s pretty amazing what can happen. I mean, we have the graphs that can show the dinking along a few reviews here and there. But when they start to market automation, and they just ask it goes up. But what I’m finding is a lot of physicians are scared to ask Do you know why? They’re scared they’re gonna get a bad review. And I think what they need to understand is that it’s not a matter of if you’re going to get a bad review. It’s a matter of when and if you don’t have a process in place to get the patients who know you trust you love you. To leave you a good review you run the risk of only having the bad people tell their opinions of your practice.
Dr. Barbara Hales: That’s for sure. Now, do you recommend that patients go to Yelp? Or are there other sites that you would also recommend?
Kevin St.Clergy: Without getting in trouble? I don’t, I don’t like Yelp, because it’s a pay-to-play model. And they can argue with me all they want. But I don’t think Google is a big fan of Yelp, either, because they’re not showing them in the searches as much. I could be totally wrong. But I’d say Google is your best bet. They do a good job of monitoring the reviews, they’re starting to pull reviews that they feel are fake or not real. They’re catching people that are doing some shady things. So, I find that Google is the best place to focus on and I think for patients too. It’s a great place to go.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Okay, well, that’s great. This has been very interesting. Interview. I’ve really enjoyed it. And I’m sure our listeners have also, thank you very much for being with us today.
Kevin St.Clergy: You’re welcome. Thanks for having me.
Dr. Barbara Hales: This has been another episode of Marketing Tips for Doctors with your hosts, Dr. Barbara Hales. Til next time!
The post How to Build Up a Medical Practice first appeared on The Medical Strategist.The podcast currently has 206 episodes available.