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Power Hour Optometry
Golden Nuggets of Marketing & Technology: Insights from Eugene Shatsman and Daniel Rostenne
00:46:44
Are you ready to uncover practical marketing tips that can drive real growth for your practice? In this latest live Power Hour episode from Vision Expo West, Eugene Shatsman sits down with Daniel Rostenne – CEO and Founder of Eyecarepro, to share...
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- [00:00]
Daniel Rastan
Foreign.
- [00:07]
Eugene Shotsman
Welcome to the Power Hour. I'm your host, Eugene Shotsman, and I am super excited about today's conversation. This is another show that we got to record live in Vegas and I am so glad that we got to do this one in person because I really think the conversation is incredible and the beneficiary is you, our listener. Let me explain. I hear all the time that listeners like the show for its golden nuggets, right? The one or two little things that you can pull out and do differently in your business tomorrow, or something that you could look at more carefully, critically evaluate, or something you can learn. So I shared this with my guest while we were sitting and recording live in Vegas and we challenged each other to go back and forth with golden nuggets for basically 20 to 30 minutes of this episode. So this is like golden nuggets on steroids. And this episode is one of my favorite topics and our guest is one of my favorite collaborators. Daniel Rastan from Icare Pro and I discuss very closely what marketing and technology opportunities look like for practices in today's environment. This is really fun because we both help practices with marketing, but Daniel's approach is very technology driven and mine is very data and testing and strategy driven. So together during this conversation we tease out at least 10 to 15 things that every practice should be paying attention to when it comes to marketing in today's ridiculously fast paced world of AI, Google, Facebook, email, SEO, website, and so on. Specifically, we talk about things like video search engine optimization, search, generative experience, patient recall, Google Ads, appointment scheduler, split testing, new features, and my favorite snack pack, and of course, so much more. I love the dynamic of this fast paced conversation that we had and I really hope that it helps you find some untapped potential in your practice. So again, reminder, this is a show. All the conversations, all the time that our team puts in, it's all to be a resource for you, for our listeners. So if you're listening today, I want to hear from you. Send me a note with your thoughts, ideas, what you'd like me to cover, who you'd like to hear from, or if you just have questions. This helps me plan all the future shows and make sure that this continues to be a great resource for you, the listeners. You can do this directly by contacting me@eugene shotsman.com or at the Power Practice website. Either way, I'm here to support you. I'm here to hear from you and I'm excited to know what you think. Right now, let's jump into Today's conversation.
- [02:34]
Daniel Brosten
All right, welcome, everybody, to the Power Hour. We are live in Vegas and we are here in the Avalux booth. I am with industry legend and I think a dear colleague and friend, Daniel Brosten. And the interesting thing is today we're talking about innovation. So a lot of people come to Vegas. This is a show about innovation. It's innovation and technology. It's very appropriate that we're doing the show in the Avalux booth. This is a newer product for the industry as people are exploring it. But I think, you know, you have been running a technology and marketing company focused on innovation for several decades, and I think that you guys are constantly evolving to make sure that we're meeting the industry needs. And so there's lots of ways to approach this innovation question. And I'm excited to have you on the show. First of all, Daniel.
- [03:23]
Daniel Rastan
Likewise, Eugene. Thank you.
- [03:25]
Daniel Brosten
Well, so let's talk about innovation in general. And I think that when you think about innovation, the reality is that you have to start by thinking what are the kinds of things today that are driving innovation and what's fueling the opportunities in the marketplace for innovators to step in and really make a difference?
- [03:45]
Daniel Rastan
I'll share some of my observations from Icare Pro. But there are many aspects of the industry right now that are affecting innovation. I'm going to choose one if you take a look. Broadly speaking, as consolidation happens in the industry, private equity, etcetera, there's only so much complexity that large organizations can handle, and therefore they tend to reduce the practice of optometry in most cases to maybe the lowest common denominator, which means the opportunity for practices to innovate and become specialty practices abounds because a lot of markets now are no longer serving the specialty market. So it's a different form of innovation. It doesn't mean you have to come up with something totally new. You can borrow what's out there, but if it's new to you, it's innovative to practice.
- [04:26]
Daniel Brosten
You can compete on service or compete on offerings that other people don't have. And as you're, I think, as you're pointing out, as optometry sometimes drives towards a corporatized model, unfortunately, that means that there's fewer options available for patients in certain. Exactly. And in fact, that's an interesting dichotomy because at the same time, what we're finding when we're looking at data, specifically data from Google and specifically data around demand, what we're finding is that, interestingly enough, there's more demand than Ever for certain specialty services. For example, I was just looking at this in terms of demand. Myopia management. Demand for Myopia Management, 23 to 24 year to date, up 18%, 18% year over year. There's more patients who are more solution aware, who are looking for more solutions and they're probably looking for them over and over because they're not always finding them.
- [05:22]
Daniel Rastan
Yep, agreed. And I mean, practices can do well by getting into obviously myopia and other specialty services, but they won't be found clearly if they don't have the content on the site. And it's interesting that now practices have the dual role of how do I educate Google about what I'm doing, but at the same time, how do I educate my patients about what I'm doing? And the two of them don't always want to receive the same education.
- [05:44]
Daniel Brosten
Right. And it's, you know, obviously it comes down to content. Right. The age old concept in digital marketing. Oh, content is king. And then it was content is queen. And you know, there's something else going on. The reality is that content's important, but the types of content that are necessary, as you said, sometimes to educate a patient versus to educate Google don't always agree. So what makes good content in today's environment and for which purpose?
- [06:09]
Daniel Rastan
Yeah, we'll have to take a look at both purposes of the content. Google content still needs to be mostly written at the moment. And if it will be video content, Google looks for the transcription of that to determine what the content's all about. So Google needs written content, but as humans, we need video content. And so just like the power hour here, we're providing video content. You need to start providing that video content to your patient or else they'll get to the site. Nobody's reading the power hour, they're watching it.
- [06:35]
Daniel Brosten
Right. And I think it's interesting because humans have generally we've evolved to respond to motion. Right. Obviously, you know, when you're out in the savannah and whatever and the lion is running at you. We have evolved to respond and to pay attention and to remember things that are moving and so you can read something and you'll remember some percentage of it, I don't know, 10% or something.
- [06:58]
Daniel Rastan
Yeah. The stats are that if you listen to something, you'll remember about 10% of it three days later. But if that's accompanied by any pictures, 65% of that will stick into your memory and you'll have a much more meaningful learning experience.
- [07:11]
Daniel Brosten
So we're going to come back to video in a little bit. I want to ask you about a big trend from an innovation standpoint. Remember, this is the innovation episode. So AI, you know, it's a big topic here at Vision Expo. I was asked to speak on AI yesterday. I think there's other speakers talking about AI on a regular basis. I know you guys are experimenting a lot with AI in your business. Let's talk about what's happening with AI in the marketplace and how practices could be using AI in a beneficial way.
- [07:41]
Daniel Rastan
A number of practices have started to adopt AI, but I think there's obviously the majority right now that don't exactly know how easily AI can benefit the practice. So let's take a simple example. You probably have policy guidelines, policy manuals, etc, for both how staff should behave in the office, for pto, et cetera. You can simply take that, you can put it and create what's called the GPT and you can feed that in. And now your staff have somewhere to go where they can easily ask questions about any policies, procedures, etc that happen in the office. Easily answered, saving obviously a lot of effort.
- [08:10]
Daniel Brosten
And it's a brilliant move because if you think about it, all of those questions are probably being asked to the office manager, sometimes to the doctor. These are some of the most valuable people in the practice and sometimes their time is already short and they don't have time for just a minute questions. Where do we put this? How do I reserve that? Where do I get that? Who do I call about this? And you're right. If you just take all of the stuff that you have or even just record their answers and then plug that into the GPT to plug the transcript of that into the GPT, you could have a really useful answer bot in your practice. I love that idea. I think that's great.
- [08:44]
Daniel Rastan
Yeah. And there's more things that the practice can do. It starts to get a little bit more complicated to leverage AI in the exact in the exam room. But the key is feed it the information that you have right now that's readily available, any policies and procedures about anything, how staff should go ahead and sell, how they should serve patients, et cetera. The second you have that, you can now have a bot that can help you.
- [09:02]
Daniel Brosten
Yeah. And you know, it's interesting because there's lots of different ways that there's lots of different applications of that same exact thing where you could create a bot, where you could have a bot that trains your staff. Right. You think about all of the onboarding that you could potentially have in your practice. You Got to explain the vacation files. You got to do this, you got to do that. All of that stuff oftentimes happens in person on, in a time slot that's usually could be spent doing better things or that person has to sit there and read. And we just talked about what happens when someone reads. Well, what if you take that stuff and you feed it to an AI avatar? First of all, you feed it into a GPT and then you feed it to an AI avatar. And now the person can, number one, listen to it in video format. Number two, they can read about it, or I'm sorry, they can ask questions to the bot and they can get all the answers that they need as they're onboarding the practice. Just another application of the exact same thing you just mentioned. Just a simple, you know, just a simple alternative application.
- [10:00]
Daniel Rastan
In fact, you don't have to be the one that creates the content. Your incoming patient calls are excellent content for AI to analyze all the incoming patient calls to determine how effectively your staff's answering the phone and actually converting those calls into patients. Most practices don't have the time to listen to each one, but AI can listen to each one and tell you how you're doing.
- [10:18]
Daniel Brosten
I love that idea. I will tell you, we've been testing, in our business, we've been testing that. We've been testing a tool where, you know, the calls are actually answered by AI because we, you know, we've listened to lots of calls, I think tens of thousands of calls in our business. And what we've heard is that in general, practices tend to waste money on the phone. And so one solution is, what you're saying is listen to the calls. We'll come back to that in a second. The other solution is answer the calls for them, right? And so of course you can have a call center solution. But I was curious in this last quarter and my team and I tested a number of solutions that can actually answer phones for practices and you can program these things. However, it's still not market ready. I've been testing it and I think the latency is still not good. Meaning that it doesn't sound like a natural conversation. It's too much of a pause when you say your thing and then the thing starts talking. Then what happens if you interrupt it or something like that? So that's one point. I think another problem is that sometimes there's an issue with the actual content. It hallucinates a little bit. It doesn't necessarily necessarily provide all the, all the right things. It doesn't say it exactly the way it should. But I think that technology is not so far away now. But what you can take advantage of right now, I think, is what you're talking about, which is listen to the calls. Because there is this really big problem of a lot of calls, and especially in times of decreasing demand, which is a season that we might be in right now where there's a little bit less demand than there was last year or. And I think in all reality, one of the ways to combat this is to just be better with the opportunities that you have to start measuring things. And one of the things that I challenge every practice to measure is what is your capture rate on the phone? And there are. There's technology that'll tell you that without you having to listen to every single one of those phone calls.
- [12:08]
Daniel Rastan
Yeah, I think that I was on a power hour with Bethany. It was a year or two ago. Exactly. About AI technology that can listen to the calls and give you excellent stats on exactly how all your practice is, answering the phone, capturing the call, turning it into a patient, et cetera. So lots of good stats out there. What we're actually doing really, is you want to look at the entire funnel is really where you want to go with this, because the phone call is just one aspect of the funnel.
- [12:34]
Daniel Brosten
Right. And when you say funnel, it's just. It's really like from the point that a patient becomes interested in finding a solution, to the point the patient spends dollars in your practice and hopefully the maximum amount of dollars in your practice. So there's a whole funnel. And we marketers refer to, you know, top of funnel, bottom of funnel, you know, content at the top of funnel. But in all reality, it's not a complicated concept to grasp, because what happens is that you have a. You have an initial thing that happens that prompts someone to potentially desire your services, and then ultimately they take steps and steps and steps and steps over time to become a patient that spends money and comes back and comes back more often.
- [13:12]
Daniel Rastan
In fact, we can. We'll talk about lots of aspects of the funnel and as a practice owner, and you listen to the points that we're making about how to improve the funnel. There may be 3, 4, 5 points in the funnel where you feel that the practice is doing well, but if you can catch two points in the funnel and each of them can have a 10% lift, you're making a major improvement to your conversion rate. So optimizing the funnel is key.
- [13:37]
Daniel Brosten
So I think this is where some of this innovation comes in. Right. Is that you think about. Everybody here at Vision Expo is here for a purpose. Maybe they're shopping for a piece of technology, it's going to make their practice better. Maybe they're looking to learn about something that ultimately can make their practice better. I think there's a whole concept of learning things and understanding new opportunities that are available to you to make improvements. And the things that we're suggesting from an improvement standpoint is things that can ultimately improve the overall, the overall conversion rate or the overall optimize every part of the funnel of, from somebody potentially becoming aware to somebody spending the maximum amount of money and getting the most amount of help in your practice. And so I think it's interesting, you know, and I think it's interesting when we think about why people are here at Vision Expo.
- [14:27]
Daniel Rastan
If you, if you stretch the funnel concept, it's not just getting somebody into the office, not just getting to an exam, not just getting a pair frames, et cetera, purchase, but you can follow that all the way through to the billion, all the way out to the other end. There's so much of the funnel that people are trying to optimize and that's why everybody's here and learning in all different modes here at Vision Expo.
- [14:48]
Daniel Brosten
Okay, so we're on the Power hour and I think one of the things I hear as feedback on the Power Hour all the time is that people are listening for a golden nugget in the show. People will listen to an hour long show to find that, you know, golden nugget or something super valuable that can help increase their practice. So I have a little bit of a challenge and I, you know, I want to see if you want to play along with me on this whole thing is that I think about how we can serve the industry best sitting here at a show with thousands of people who are going to be listening to the show later. But also, you know, we've got a little bit of an audience that's gathered here as well. What's interesting to me is I wonder if you and I can best serve that audience by just feeding those short golden nuggets because I think when people are here at the show, they're not looking for a, you know, they're not looking to walk up to a vendor booth and then read their webpage for, you know, read, read 10 pages of their web website for, you know, for, for 20 minutes. I think they're here for a, you know, 12 minute interaction that ultimately helps them make decisions. And so why don't we try something like that, what do you think?
- [15:56]
Daniel Rastan
A mix between elevator pitch and golden nuggets. We got elevator nuggets.
- [16:00]
Daniel Brosten
Let's go elevator nuggets. This is golden elevator nuggets. This is, you know, totally appropriate for Vegas. I could totally see someone creating some golden elevator nuggets at some point in the future in Vegas. So why don't we try this? I mean, we both have expertise in, we both have expertise in, in practice growth. Let's set some ground rules. This cannot be a commercial for National Strategic. This cannot be a commercial for Icare Pro. Though I think both companies do an excellent job. We're both in the same space. We, we serve the market slightly differently. However, we both learn from the things that we're doing and we can both educate from the things that we're doing. So let's try, let's try to use this innovation episode to educate the marketplace in short bite sized chunks that ultimately can help provide short insights and fill this episode. Fill the rest of our time here live in Vegas with some golden elevator nuggets.
- [17:01]
Daniel Rastan
If I may lead off then, Eugene, I will start at the top of the funnel.
- [17:04]
Daniel Brosten
Okay.
- [17:05]
Daniel Rastan
You can't get a patient unless the patient actually comes and schedules an appointment. How does Google know if they should be sending you that visitor? Okay, golden nugget number one. Google is obviously in the business of making money. They only make money if Google does a good job of sending people to good websites. You could have built a website yesterday though. It says all the right things. How does Google know that you're actually a real business? They look for what are called off page links or off page indicators that you're a good practice. Which means you got to get out there and get links from all sorts of businesses in your community. Those links are the strong signals that you send to Google where a real we're a legitimate business, give us the traffic. When Google does that, they're confident that the visitor is going to have a good experience. So yes, your website has to say all the right things, but if you don't have those off page signals, you're not going to do a good job online.
- [17:51]
Daniel Brosten
Yeah, and I think you heard maybe them referred to as backlinks. There's a backlink strategy for your off page SEO. That's a great way of explaining and demystifying it. Daniel. And I think that there's a real value to making sure that there are as many websites referring back to your website as possible because then Google recognizes that you are in fact a valuable contributor of content.
- [18:15]
Daniel Rastan
The more in your community, the better, the more local backlinks, tools are best.
- [18:19]
Daniel Brosten
Yeah. And you know what?
- [18:21]
Daniel Rastan
So now, Eugene, once they find you, they're looking at you on Google. Let's throw it over to you.
- [18:26]
Daniel Brosten
Fine. Next golden nugget, why don't we tackle reviews? Okay, so I think everybody is at this point aware that reviews are important. I remember close to a decade ago when I was trying to shout from the rooftops and say, I think these things on Google called reviews are going to be important. In all reality, I think at this point, more than half of the marketplace trusts Google reviews more than a recommendation from a close friend or family member. Which I think is saying a lot for the value of those little stars on Google. Right. The truth is, and this is, you know, nobody's super surprised you need more than 40 reviews to be taken seriously. If you don't have 40 reviews, I'm not really sure that, you know, I think you need help. Right, Obviously. So we all agree more reviews, and then there's data that says more recent reviews. You have to have reviews within. I think 57% of people say they're looking. They're only looking at reviews left for your business within the last month. So you got to have a lot of reviews every week in order to feed those people who are curious about what are people saying about your business recently. So here's my golden nugget. That was just the setup. It's pretty good. Okay, well, the setup's pretty good. But I think that the real golden nugget is that most people get reviews using a piece of software. That piece of software is probably doing the same thing today as it was doing two years ago and three years ago. My suggestion is treat your reviews like a science experiment. Split test. You have 20 people coming to your practice today. Send half of them one message that requests a review. Send the other half another message that requests a review. See what you learn. We've been doing this, we've, I think, sent hundreds of thousands of messages requesting reviews for clients over the course of the last year or two. And what we've learned is that, you know, you can split test all of them. And we constantly split testing, I think six or seven versions for all of our clients. So what we're finding is that some patients in some parts of the country are responding well to one type of message. Some patients in some parts of the country are responding well to a different type of message. But in all reality, the one pattern that we found, for example, is that if you have a question in your review request. So, for example, something like, could you please let us know about your experience? Question mark. That performs 58% better than. If you have something like, we'd love to hear about your experience, please click this link. So a question tends to perform better than not a question. And that, you know, is one of the tests. I'm not saying that everybody should always go. Just change to only questions, because then you're not testing. So my real insight, the golden nugget, is treat your marketing and especially your reviews, for example, because we know they're important in helping patients make decisions. Treat your marketing like a science experiment. Split test, split test, split test. And when you split test, reviews challenge the norm.
- [21:18]
Daniel Rastan
The easiest way to do that, practically speaking, set one message for a month, look at the reviews you get for that month, change the message up for the next month. You don't have to go all scientific. This will be very easy way for a practice to test.
- [21:31]
Daniel Brosten
Absolutely. I think that's the easiest way to do it. There's also software out there that'll. That, that'll do the scientific test as well for you.
- [21:38]
Daniel Rastan
Now you're getting a lot of reviews. Let's move to the next golden elevator nugget, which is people come, they look, they see.
- [21:46]
Daniel Brosten
I like this, by the way. We're gonna brand the whole concept of golden elevator nuggets. I'm not sure it sounds good now. I mean, maybe tomorrow we'll reconsider.
- [21:53]
Daniel Rastan
Feedback is welcome.
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Daniel Brosten
Yeah, yeah. All audience members, please tell us now.
- [21:58]
Daniel Rastan
Once you've got the reviews, obviously people are coming looking at the reviews. What impact do reviews have? And do responses to reviews have an even greater impact? Everybody obviously intrinsically feels that responding to review is better, but the magnitude of difference that it makes is huge. The number of people, three quarters of all people, trust companies more that respond to reviews. Google says that if you respond to reviews, you've got a 1.7 times higher chance of being considered far more trustworthy. Not Only that, but 89% of all people believe the review responses, and 76% are likely to actually go with the company based on what they read in a response. So review responses are off the charts important, but they're often a drain in the practice. Any advice on how to get review responses in there, Eugene?
- [22:46]
Daniel Brosten
Well, I think that's a little bit of a setup, Daniel, because I know that Icare Pro. We said we, but.
- [22:51]
Daniel Rastan
But I didn't say anything.
- [22:52]
Daniel Brosten
You didn't say anything. But I, I. You know what? I'll put in a Plug. So I know you guys offer, you, you build a technology that automates review responses. And in all reality, I think you can't have the same response to every single review. So what you have to do is have different responses to different reviews based off conditional logic. And I think that that would be a way to save time. Right. And I don't know if you guys.
- [23:14]
Daniel Rastan
Are Precisely what we do.
- [23:16]
Daniel Brosten
Right. I don't know if you guys are thinking about putting AI into that. That would be super cool. If you could somehow build SEO signals in that and build AI into that, that would be incredible.
- [23:24]
Daniel Rastan
Precisely what we're doing next.
- [23:27]
Daniel Brosten
Great. I'll contribute to your roadmap. I'm happy, happy to do that. Ready for another golden nugget?
- [23:33]
Daniel Rastan
Yes.
- [23:33]
Daniel Brosten
All right, so let's think. Okay, so people are on Google. They have found you. Where have they found you? More likely, more often than not, they will have found you in the Snack Pack. Right? The Snack Pack is a decision driver. We know that people make decisions in the Snack Pack. We also know that people make decisions from your website. But the big interesting part is how, what percentage of people, how often is your Snack Pack listing going to come up versus how often are people actually going to show up to your website? And I think what people don't realize is that 84% of the time your Google Business profile, which is the thing that shows up in the Snack Pack, in that little pack of three with the reviews, that thing is going to be seen 84% more or no, 84% of people are going to see your Google snack pack listing. 15.6% of people are going to see your website. So what does that mean is, you know, I think people have a meticulous level of detail that they invest in building their website. People spend a lot of time critiquing the content, reviewing the pictures, understanding, you know, keeping it updated, all of that stuff. There's a lot of effort that goes into your website, but let's understand that that's only 15% of the views that come in, and that's 15% of people are going to see that. 85% of the people, or 84% of people are going to see the stuff that's on inside your Google Business property. So are you keeping those pictures current? Do you. Have you updated them with some video? Have you made some improvements? Is that accurately reflecting what your practice really looks like and the message that you're trying to send to your community? Because that's where you're going to get more views and so that's the golden nugget, is that make sure that you realize that that's where the eyeballs are. And so that's the thing that you're optimizing first and sometimes more often than your website.
- [25:21]
Daniel Rastan
Exactly. Would you consider spending five times as much money and effort on your Google Business Profile as your website? Most practices obviously don't. They spend the opposite. Far more time on the website, but five times as many people viewing your Google Business Profile than they do the website.
- [25:35]
Daniel Brosten
And that's a relatively recent trend because that number has been climbing and climbing and climbing. And what we've also found is that the conversion rate from the website, from the Google Business Profile, if you're ranking is much higher, much more, many more conversions come from your Google Business Profile than your actual website.
- [25:54]
Daniel Rastan
In fact.
- [25:55]
Daniel Brosten
Wait, is this the next elevator nugget?
- [25:58]
Daniel Rastan
Yes, it is.
- [25:58]
Daniel Brosten
Okay, let's go.
- [25:59]
Daniel Rastan
Perfect segue. In fact, Google has introduced something called Google Reserve, where now Google will actually put book now schedule exams now buttons all over your Google Business Profile, all over your Maps listings, all over your Google listings. I know this isn't a plug for Icare Pro, but it so happens we're one of the only companies in the industry right now that is able to put that Google Reserve Book now link. And it's proving to have a 20 to 30% increase on appointment conversions, which means there's even more opportunities to optimize your Google Business listings right now with Google Reserve.
- [26:34]
Daniel Brosten
You know, I've seen that, and what it looks like is what a typical Google Business profile that has been optimized looks like is that there's a, if you scroll down, it says appointments and then there's a link for appointments, but you got to scroll down your thing that you're talking about. And it's actually available in a lot of like hair salons. I'm not sure why Icare, it came to like kind of last, but it's available in hair salons. You can do it in the minute clinic. If anybody looks up a CVS minute Clinic, they'll be able to see what Daniel's talking about. But there's a button that says Book now right at the top. And if you click that button, book now, then you could potentially, I think more people are naturally going to click that thing. And it's really kind of interesting, the impact that it has actually.
- [27:17]
Daniel Rastan
According To Google Stats, 70% of all the appointments booked through the book now are new patients. So it's a great driver for business to the practice.
- [27:26]
Daniel Brosten
You know, the other part of that, if you really think through the way that the patient is looking, the patient has less time than ever to make a decision. And this is another decision driver opportunity to drive more business to your practice.
- [27:41]
Daniel Rastan
Now, if we continue down the funnel now, at this point, the practices. The patient has reached the practice's website.
- [27:46]
Daniel Brosten
Okay?
- [27:47]
Daniel Rastan
And we know how to construct a nice website. We don't need to tell anybody about that. But Eugene, I'm going to challenge you to hit us with the next nugget, which is, I've got a website. It's operating pretty well. I want to make it better. What should I do?
- [27:57]
Daniel Brosten
Okay, if you got a website, I think the first thing you should do is change your mindset about the role of that website. Okay? I think everybody needs to just understand the purpose of a website is to drive conversions. Right? Conversions is basically a phone call or an appointment click. Or if you don't have an appointment scheduler, then let's. Then maybe it's a form fill. But in all reality, the purpose of a website is to turn visitors into patients. Okay, fine, we understand that. And so I have to ask the question, why most people only build a website once every two or three years and then treat it like a flashy brochure. And then when it gets outdated because, you know, you change doctors or your location looks better or you got bored or whatever, or wasn't working at that point, you then decide, okay, I'm going to build a new website, new flashy brochure. I'm going to update my digital brochure and I go next, in our opinion, and it's kind of in line with the point I made earlier, is treat it like a science experiment. Why not treat it like a science experiment? And why not challenge and test everything? A website is a really easy place to test. And you can create one experience for visitor A, one experience for visitor B. Even if they show up to the website at the exact same time, one goes to a slightly different version of the website at the other. Now, I wouldn't have two websites, but I might change the button color, I might change the what the button says, because those are the things that people click. And you know what we found, which is kind of interesting, is that by just changing the language on the button, on the conversion button, conversion element of the website, you can get a significant difference in results. So, for example, Daniel, we found that if you change the language to include the word your ownership, something about your on a desktop device that drives conversions by over 20%, meaning you can get 20% more conversions from the same amount of people. You don't have to pay for more people to come to your website. You don't have to pay for more ads to drive people to your website. You can just get 20% more people to click the book now button or schedule your appointment on desktop. But we also found that that doesn't work on mobile. On mobile, the thing that works is urgency. So now schedule, now schedule an appointment. Now book now, the now on mobile urgency makes sense. So you might have to consider a slightly different experience for your mobile users versus your desktop users in terms of conversion rates. But in order to optimize your conversion rate, you just constantly have to keep testing. And that might be what works today. I challenge everybody to run enough tests so that you know what works today, what works tomorrow, what works the next day. Because that's really where the opportunity is, just to keep testing and optimizing.
- [30:47]
Daniel Rastan
Agreed. I mentioned earlier that the funnel is so deep you can pick any couple areas in the funnel to optimize will have a big impact on your conversions. Now, you talked about book, book, book. Booking requires an online scheduler. I'm sure many practices out there have an online scheduler, but not all. And if you don't, you're missing a huge opportunity. About two thirds of all patients prefer to book online. And those that aren't booking online are phoning your office. A quarter of them are phoning your office when it's closed. So that's actually just a very huge, simple drain on the potential patients that you have put the scheduler in. Make sure it's available all the time, obviously, and you'll get far more patients out of it.
- [31:23]
Daniel Brosten
What percentage of practices out there do you think you don't have a schedule and just have a, and just have a fill out a form to request an appointment type of thing.
- [31:32]
Daniel Rastan
Now you're embarrassing. I don't know the stat, but I feel like it's heading, maybe it's about 30, 40% do not have a schedule. Do you have a better number?
- [31:40]
Daniel Brosten
I don't, but I was just curious what you found. I found that it's a surprisingly high number and oftentimes it's not because the technology isn't available to them. It's because they made the conscious decision to say I don't want to do this because I don't want to empower the patient to book an appointment because they're going to book the wrong type of appointment and my schedule is complicated and I don't want To I don't want a patient. The reality is you're missing something like 20% of appointments if you're not, if you don't have that schedule. You could have a lot more appointments in your practice if you just had that scheduler built into it.
- [32:11]
Daniel Rastan
And in fact, not all schedulers are created equal. If you're, imagine you're going to look for an appointment, you land on the website and the first thing that it says is available. Appointments vs what is your name? Insurance. What kind of appointment are you looking for? Which doctor? You're five steps in before you see what's available. At that point, the second people don't see an appointment they want, they're gone. But you've made them go through these five steps. Much more effective to show appointment slots right up front. You'll get a lot more conversions.
- [32:34]
Daniel Brosten
True, That's a really, really good point. I think that's. So having a scheduler and having an optimized scheduler is absolutely, is absolutely important. Great golden elevator nugget.
- [32:48]
Daniel Rastan
Now they're on the website. Lots of ways to convert. We talked earlier about content and what content, gene, in your experience, any particular content that's going to help increase conversions on the website?
- [32:58]
Daniel Brosten
So, you know, we ran this test and I just keep talking about testing. This is the mindset, right? Treat marketing like science, right? That's the big if. It's a, any, any takeaways, you know, your marketing needs to be scientific. So one of the scientific experiments we ran had to do with video. So we did something which was kind of weird, which is we took pages that we knew weren't going to have traffic increases to them, and we just added videos to them. Some of them were long videos, some of them were short videos, some of them were, you know, quick, quick, quick overview videos. Some of them were kind of more sophisticated. And what we learned very quickly was that videos, those same pages with no extra traffic, those same pages drove very different results by simply having a video on there. So, and those results, you know, some, some of them you would expect, some of them you might be surprised. One of the surprises for me, well, one of the things that, you know, I expected was, okay, people spend twice as much time on the website, okay?
- [33:58]
Daniel Rastan
Video, right?
- [33:59]
Daniel Brosten
So now they're watching a video. That kind of makes sense. Okay. Not surprising. One of the things that did surprise me, however, was that you got more phone calls and you know, how much more phone calls you got from people who visited that page.
- [34:10]
Daniel Rastan
Because the video, because of the video.
- [34:12]
Daniel Brosten
The overall conversion rate went up by 68%. 68% increase in conversion rate because people added video to the website. Everybody listening to this, everybody out there. You should be adding video to your website because that's content that's resonating with the patient, just like Daniel was saying earlier. You know, the written content, that's helping Google understand the website, the video content is helping your patients make decisions.
- [34:36]
Daniel Rastan
They invest more time into it. And I guess it's got this implicit, well, I've invested enough time, let's go.
- [34:42]
Daniel Brosten
Yeah, and I see what, I see what I care about. I mean, the video obviously can't be just total junk. You can't, you can't just, you know, have a video of, I don't know, like a cat walking across the parking ladders maybe. Actually, that might be an interesting one.
- [34:55]
Daniel Rastan
You should test it, Eugene. I will test it in the interest of science.
- [34:57]
Daniel Brosten
In the interest of science. We'll test like random pets walking across the parking lot for practices.
- [35:03]
Daniel Rastan
On the topic of content. There's something interesting obviously that's happening now, which is with the advent of AI everywhere, the way in which people query is changing. Because it used to be that you went to Google optometrist near me, optometrist near me, that does myopia. But now you're used to asking AI very complex queries such as, you know, I have three kids, they're this age, one of them has astigmatism, One leads this and I need to bring them all to the get an eye exam. But it has to be after school and it has to be in this area. And the query goes on and on and on. And there's even price mentioned in the query. Now think about it. Is your website providing the information to AI to answer that question? And 99 times out of 100 those answers are not found on your website. But people are asking that way now.
- [35:52]
Daniel Brosten
Yeah, and it's interesting because your Google is just trying to read the content and summarize it and put it in front of the user. Right. And it's trying to put it in front of the user without that user ever going to your website. And sometimes it'll cite your website. So I mean, that's, it's, it's fascinating to me how you have to have one set of content for Google and I mean, how would you even create that content? That's a, that's a.
- [36:18]
Daniel Rastan
Well, I'll back you up one step. Think about what Google's doing. They're trying to provide all the answers up front with A Google reserve book. Now link. They don't want any traffic to go to the website.
- [36:27]
Daniel Brosten
That's right.
- [36:27]
Daniel Rastan
But how would you create that content? Well, right now I would just urge our audience to consider all the questions that are asked when a patient comes into the officers on the phone. They want to know how long it's going to take. They want to know if the things are going in the eye and how long that thing is going to take for my eyes to stop dialing. They don't even know what it's called. They want to know price questions and answers. They want to know how long they take. Do I have to buy the glasses for you? Do I not have to get my prescription? Not. You can ignore those questions and say, I don't want to put them on my website. But they're asking. And now what's going to happen is Google is going to be drawing that information. So what I just urge you to do is consider the questions that you're asked right now. Talk to your web person and just read them the answer that you would give and have them put that on the website. Google will be digesting that information and using it in the search results.
- [37:10]
Daniel Brosten
Yeah, I think that's such a, such a profound, simple thing to do, which is just simply keep like a notebook in each exam line or in each optician's top drawer. You know, like anytime they're asked a question by a patient that isn't in that notebook, just write it down in the notebook and then tell your web person there's a question that, you know, could create content around that and then just start answering.
- [37:33]
Daniel Rastan
Now from there, obviously there's a final aspect of the funnel, which is the patient has been in the office and now you can start to recall patients afterwards, right?
- [37:41]
Daniel Brosten
Yeah, yeah. So this is where I've been trying to challenge the norm for a really long time when I think about this, because in the past I think a lot of people talk about recall and reactivation in the same way. I'm going to kind of make it. I'm going to delineate it and say recall is getting patients in who should have been in, you know, because it's 12 months, maybe 13 months, whatever reactivation is anybody over 13 months. And we've had success going out from 13 to 60 months out since the last visit, five years since the last visit, you can bring that patient back. In fact, we found that 13 to 60 months, we can bring 20% of patients back and we can do it much faster than they would have normally come Back or if at all. And the way we can do it is, again, you have to challenge what is currently happening in the industry. Right now, most people are using software and that software does something. And if you look deeply, one of the things that it's doing is, it's that software is simply saying the opportunity for a patient. What that software is saying is, hey, Daniel, it's time for your next eye exam. Please click here to schedule 16 months.
- [38:51]
Daniel Rastan
13 months doesn't make it right.
- [38:52]
Daniel Brosten
Well, it usually sends it at, you know, 13 months, maybe 15 months, maybe 18 months, maybe 24 months.
- [38:57]
Daniel Rastan
But the message never changes.
- [38:58]
Daniel Brosten
But the message never changes. And the reason it doesn't send it more often than that is because they don't want you to unsubscribe. Well, if you're going to send the same message, if I look at my phone sent, if I look at the text messages that are coming in from this one number, and it's all the same message over and over and over again, I'm just gonna unsubscribe. And people don't want to lose subscribers. So then they, that's why they send the same message, but they don't send it too often. I would say the logical thing to do, which is something we've tried to do, which is, well, send different messages and send them more often and try to make those messages useful to the demographic. If it's a younger patient, maybe send them a fashion related message. If it's an older patient, maybe send them a disease, an eye disease. Eye health, overall eye health related message. But of course, you know, keep in mind that the goal is to book an appointment, but send them something different every time you communicate with them. And I believe you should be communicating with them once a month if they've missed their appointment, because that demonstrates that you care about them and you care about their eye health. And you're doing it in a way that is, in fact, that they can be receptive to. And what we found is when you do that, you can get 20% of those patients 13 to 60 months, you can get 20% of those patients to come back.
- [40:06]
Daniel Rastan
Well, that is the preeminent approach to caring for your patient's health. I care about your health and I want you back. Now, I would be remiss in participating in a Power hour episode if I did not talk about Google Ads. That's true, because we can look at all the marketing we want and all the conversions and everything, but there is one magic button which is turn on Google Ads. And if Properly constructed, it should send you patience.
- [40:29]
Daniel Brosten
Okay. Yeah. And this is where, you know, I think you, you really do have a lot of expertise. I think that one of the things that happens is that people waste a lot of money on Google Ads because they do hope that it's that magic button. So they plug In a budget, $500, $2,000, whatever, they push the button and bam, nothing happens.
- [40:49]
Daniel Rastan
So let's take a look at what impact Google Ads actually have on a practice. Now you might not realize this, but let's take a scenario whereby you're booked out for the next week, but the next three weeks after that are not booked. Does it help for you to run Google Ads this week? And the surprising answer is no. Because it turns out that most of the appointments that are generated by Google Ads are generated within 24 to 72 hours after the ad. Which means if you're book this week, running Google Ads this week is not gonna help you very much.
- [41:16]
Daniel Brosten
So the people who are clicking on the ads want an appointment 24 to 72 hours.
- [41:20]
Daniel Rastan
That's correct. One to three business days out.
- [41:22]
Daniel Brosten
That's an interesting insight.
- [41:23]
Daniel Rastan
So now what happens is you should actually be looking ahead 24, 72 hours. What's my availability like? But not just that your availability might fill up naturally on its own because it always has some kind of lift just by people calling in and the recall. So you have to now judge carefully. Is it going to hit that mark? If not, do I need to pump in some Google Ads to get that up to the right volume? So it's not so simple. If somebody's running Google Ads for you and they're not quite aware of these dynamics, it may be money wasted.
- [41:51]
Daniel Brosten
So it's. So what you're saying is that somebody needs to be aware of what your schedule looks like when they're running Google Ads. Otherwise you could potentially be wasting money on Google Ads unless your schedule is wide open. No appointments that you get some Google Ads. Okay, great. So I think we just went through like, I don't know, what, what do you think? 10 golden nuggets.
- [42:12]
Daniel Rastan
Hopefully the elevator's full.
- [42:14]
Daniel Brosten
Perfect. I like it. I am really, really curious in, you know, I see some, some live audience members here who are, who seem to be interested in some of these golden nuggets. I'm really curious in terms of, you know, there's gonna be thousands of people who listen to this episode. I am very, very curious whether you and I should continue, like if we should challenge ourselves to continue doing these short, bite sized chunks of golden nuggets for practice growth. And you know, whenever we discover something and we learn something or you know, again, when we get asked a question, we have an interesting insight. Maybe we should just continue doing this, you know, in our separate organizations and to our separate client bases. I think we should. I think it's a great way to help with educating the industry and supporting the overall growth and helping the industry expand.
- [43:06]
Daniel Rastan
Agreed. It's basically, this is how people want to learn. A short, bite sized video. That's informative. But Eugene, we just have to continuously challenge each other to make it a real aha moment. Not a duh. I knew that moment. Let's make it a real aha moment. That's actually worth that minute.
- [43:21]
Daniel Brosten
And what's the difference?
- [43:22]
Daniel Rastan
A duh moment is. Yes, thank you. I know that reviews are important. An aha moment is did you realize exactly when you have to ask for reviews? How many reviews you should be getting at what period of time? How many more than your competitors do you actually need to know how many reviews? So that's the difference between. Yes, thank you. I knew that. Versus Aha. That's a good point. I didn't realize that.
- [43:42]
Daniel Brosten
That's great. Okay, so I think I'm in. I'm in as well. So we'll challenge ourselves and I'll ask the audience to participate and just tell us if this is useful. This is interesting. If we should continue doing this in.
- [43:54]
Daniel Rastan
Publishing and if there's any particular topics that they want us to cover from a marketing perspective, let's do it.
- [43:58]
Daniel Brosten
Absolutely. I think that's great. Well, Daniel, it has been an absolute pleasure to have you on the Power Hour. I think there's been a fascinating discussion again, you know, sitting here in an innovative booth that provides an innovative service. You know, we're sitting at a trade show where people go to learn. I'm so excited that you got a chance to join me on the show and to help share some of the things that you're excited to teach.
- [44:23]
Daniel Rastan
Thank you, Eugene. The Avulux booth, as you can see, has been busy most of the time we've been here. No, no thanks to us. But video does help.
- [44:30]
Daniel Brosten
Yeah, maybe it is thanks to us. Maybe everybody just showed up and, you know, we'll see. But it is, it's exciting. And thank you everybody for joining us today live. And thank you everybody for joining us today on the show. Daniel, thanks for being here.
- [44:44]
Daniel Rastan
Thank you, Eugene.
- [44:45]
Eugene Shotsman
Hey there, it's Eugene. And I've got a question for you. Do you do medical billing in your practice. What if we took 10 charts and looked at them pretty closely? Would they be good enough to pass an audit? Or would you owe the insurance company some money? Or would there be some found revenue that you could put back in your pocket? So looking at 10 charts is a new service that's now available from the Power Practice and it's called the Power Audit. What happens during the Power Audit is that some of the most knowledgeable billing experts in the country are going to do a friendly audit on your charts and see if they can find opportunities. By the way, in auditing hundreds of charts, nine out of ten charts they look at, they find something. And typically that something fits into two categories. One, something that better protects your practice, or two, something that can make you more money. In fact, almost every single audit they do uncovers under billing areas where you can get paid more for what you already did.
- [45:36]
Daniel Brosten
So let's just play it out.
- [45:38]
Eugene Shotsman
You send them your medical charts and a few weeks later they provide you with a detailed report and analysis or write up a coaching guide that helps you prevent any issues in the future and again, helps you get paid more for what you're already doing while protecting your practice. So if you're doing any amount of medical billing in your practice, this is a service that's well worth the $2,500 it costs. And as a limited time opportunity, 10 listeners from this episode can get a $700 savings certificate for the Power Audit. So the price is only 1799, but the opportunities that the Power Audit uncovers are worth many, many, many multiples of that. So go to the Power Practice website. Up near the top you can click Request a Power Audit. Now, you're not committing to pay anyone at that point. You're just locking in your $700 savings. But you will get a chance to schedule a 10 minute phone call to get your questions answered and to see if the Power Audit is a fit for your practice. Again, that's the Power audit. On the powerpractice.com.