how_to_get_more_patients_without_relying_on_doctor_referrals (1080p)
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[00:00:00] How do you get more. How do you get more patients without doing doctor like marketing and getting doctor referrals all the time? I got tired of chasing my tail too. So you're here for it. My name is Wong. I'm an occupational therapist and certified hand therapist, and over 10 years ago I started my therapy clinic in Miami and over five years ago I started hand therapy secrets to help therapists develop their clinical skills.
And now I share business skills every week on Wednesdays. Um, so let's. Dive in into how you can get out of that, like chasing of doctor referrals because sometimes it's for the birds. Uh, so I'm gonna share with you three things. How to get more patients without referral, without relying on doctor referrals.
Okay. Three of 'em. 'cause you know, I love threes. I don't know why. All right. Direct to consumer marketing. We can talk about organic or we can talk about paid, but you [00:01:00] are like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna be sure. That I'm an occupational therapist and I'm speaking directly to people who need occupational therapy.
By the way, they never need fucking occupational therapy, but I'm gonna dive into that a little bit. But I can do organic or paid, but I'm, that's me talking directly to people with, uh, particular types of problems, right? Number two, you can write, you can write blogs, you can write articles for magazines. Um, you can write books.
Um. Um, sometimes they're paid, sometimes they're, you know, you just have to start your own thing, such as writing blogs and writing your own book. So go into details about that. And of course the last one is. So getting a more patient is word of mouth. Now, word of mouth is very powerful, but it's very slow.
So let's talk about the stuff that can help you fast. So I often talk about two things. It's a bank of today and a bank of tomorrow. Um, so sometimes if you want, [00:02:00] you know, um, to get people in today. You're gonna have to go directly to the consumer, go fishing into that pond, right? Wherever you live, there's a mile radius around you.
Or if you want to extend the radius around you, but talking about specific problems, then you can do that. Now I see different, um. Um, groups ask this question and I honestly, yes, this is hand therapy seekers. I talk a lot about hand therapy and stuff like that, but honestly, if you're a therapist, it doesn't matter if you're peds, geriatrics, hand therapy, you know, whatever it is that you specialize in.
I specialize in hand and upper extremity and spine. So I'm doing a lot more spine in my clinic. Um, but direct to consumer marketing, I do two things. I do paid and I do organic. So I had to perfect, I don't wanna say perfect, I had to really practice my organic, so then my [00:03:00] paid was much more valuable. Now, did I fuck up along the way?
I sure did. It's okay. Um, everyone does, right? That's how you learn. So. I am trying to embrace more and more every day, the power of failing, the power of doing and failing so I can get to my success earlier. I wish I knew this early on. I thought I did, but then I, there's that resistance that your body is just like, no, I don't wanna fail.
Please. You know? And so you're doing all this stuff not to fail, but actually if you failed faster, you would. Grow faster, you would make more money and you'd grow faster. But one of the things I did is, uh, when I first started getting into organic and then I started paying a little bit because I was so scared to spend my money, I would boost my posts and it's like the worst thing that you could do.
But since Meadow wants your money, they're gonna be like, boost this post. Don't fucking do it. Don't do it. Don't do it, you know, it's a waste of money. [00:04:00] But what I do is I wanted to get better and better with my marketing. And so I was constantly working on reading marketing books. I was, um, consuming videos on it.
I. Paid to go into several different programs so I can like really improve my marketing. But that's the what's called direct to consumer marketing, because as a therapist, I was always taught to go market to doctors, and the way we market to doctors was all wrong anyway. So it, it's not that helpful. So I'd be like, oh, my name is Juan.
I'm an occupational therapist and you know, you should send me your patients. 'cause I'm a certified hand therapist, right? So I would get them, but I would always get them because they were very. Very particular about a certain way they wanted to do things, or it was because insurance was very particular about the way they wanted to do things.
And so depending on who [00:05:00] you want to work with, you now can go direct to consumer. And we never used to have that before. It was always like, oh my God, let's go to the doctor. No, no, no. With social media. It's free. You can go direct to whoever you want to talk to and talk to them. Say, Hey, these are my services.
This is what I provide. If you have problem one, two, or three, I can help you and here's my cost. It is literally that simple. Um, yeah, you wanna say it nicer or, you know, in a way that's more compelling, but for the most part, that's the formula of the message, right? Um, you can do it organic. So first I, you know, I would recommend.
Posting as much organic as possible across different platforms. And then once you start getting the language of it and you're like, oh, this is doing well. This sounds really good. Put some money behind it. Again, you have to, you have [00:06:00] to, um, live in a certain amount of uncertainty of like, I'm gonna spend this much money and then I'm gonna make money on the backend.
Not earning money or not getting phone calls to your business will tell you if you're shitty or not. Right. Every therapist thinks they're really wonderful and really great, but we're going into the business world and we're not probably as great as we thought we were in the therapy realm. You know, taking just 'cause we're great therapist doesn't mean like all of a sudden we're great at marketing.
So you have to hone that skill and you have to practice that skill so that you could speak to people in a way that they understood like. Feel understood so that they'll come and do some work with you. So direct to consumer marketing, go out there and and talk to them. I do that for my clinic. I go out and I make videos very specific on problems people have.
I answer specific questions that people have, and then I share my information freely. [00:07:00] And then if I see certain things work, then I will put some money behind it. And that's how I market direct to consumers, and that's how I get more patients. Without any doctor referrals. Number two is, for the longest time I was writing blogs.
Sorry, my eye is itching. Um, for the longest time I was writing blogs for my website. And the reason why that's still really good is because of, um, search engine optimizations. Some people say it's dying, but the people who are saying it's dying is 'cause they want you to pay in ads in ad spend. But for as long as I've been in business and longer, SEO is still like.
Really important. It's still, you know, one of the biggest metrics of being found on the internet. Like there's so much on the internet. Like if your consumer or even your doctor can't find you, then they can't send you any patients. Now we get calls, you know, almost [00:08:00] every day. From various doctor's offices where their front desk is looking for a therapist to send their patients to because maybe they're, they don't have anyone that goes and markets to their clinic and all that good stuff, and their, their patients are asking for certain things, and so we'll get doctor's office calling and saying, oh, you know, do you take insurance?
Oh, where are you located? I'm like, that should be easy. Didn't you find me on my website? Writing will help you with that. I think writing also helps you put concepts down and helps you to organize your thinking so that when you write stuff down and it organizes your thinking, then you can go and do the direct to consumer marketing really well.
You can use your words. You can create videos. You know, however you wanna do it. I think there's a lot of power in videos, but there's definitely, um, a huge space for words. It comes in the, uh, form of blogs. You can write [00:09:00] articles if you're really big into pr. You can, you know, picture stuff to different magazines.
You can pay to have your articles and magazines. I find that things are, that come out only once a month. Don't do as well as things that come out weekly. So I used to write and I used to pay for it to be in certain magazines or newspapers. Now, even though it's kind of dying a little bit, some areas do really well and some areas don't.
Like I live in a really huge, um, city and so each municipal, right, a city within a city has their own newspapers and stuff like that. And um, I used to be in one, but the one that was once a week. They always did better than the ones that came out once a month and I was paying like almost the same, whereas the once a month, actually the once a month was more expensive and I would never get anyone freaking calling me.
I would use the same articles that I wrote and the ones that are weekly. You get like your [00:10:00] frequent readers, but also you have to think about who's reading them. Right. So, um, if you don't, if you're not going for an older patient population, then why would you put your shit in an article? Right? You're better off making tiktoks.
It depends on where your population, where your patient population lives and spends their time. But writing is really great. Uh, writing a book can be really good as well to help you market. So I wrote a book for my therapy clinic over six years ago and I still use it to this day to help, you know, market my clinic, set myself up as an expert in the area of hand and upper extremity.
And, you know, between watching my YouTube videos and seeing my, seeing my social media posts and. Seeing that my book is on Amazon and that I have it available at my clinic, that I've spent that much time writing it now. It's a legit book. I didn't just like put this shit together with AI and whatever, like I [00:11:00] literally sat here and wrote it for the year.
I. Got an editor. I had two editors. I had a regular general editor and had a line editor, um, to make my book sound real. 'cause I wanted it to be this real book that I put together that was gonna help somebody, therapist by that book, people in my area buy that book. Um, it's not like a ton of people buy it, um, but I do use it to give out in my clinic as well for people who are a little bit more skeptical or they just wanna learn more about, you know, what they can think and what they can do.
It's just to start someone out. It's. Not to like, oh my God, I'm gonna fix your trigger finger. Like, I can't, can't like, fix everyone's problems in one book. So, um, but it, it starts them understanding what's going on from a fundamental, um, uh, framework so they can really think about what they need to do, you know, to, to help fix their [00:12:00] problem.
So anyway, um, writing is still really powerful and it is a form of direct consumer, direct to consumer marketing. Now the third one I think is really important, is the most powerful. It's word of mouth, but the thing with word of mouth is, as strong as it is, it's very, very slow to like get on. So the way that word of mouth works is that you have to be really consistent about it.
And some people can automate it, but if you're really small, like I'm small, um, I have one clinic. Right. I, I'm not trying to set up these huge automations of constantly sending people like, Hey, leave me a review. We ask our patients, we manually ask our patients, we send them the link. Um, we ask them how you know, to share their story.
Basically because people are looking at Google reviews to decide whether they should come to you or not. Here's the thing. Even [00:13:00] shitty therapy clinics get good reviews because it gets some people to just say great things. Right? I know in my town, okay, I'm gonna talk shit right now. I know in my town some of the shittiest therapy clinics.
Right, because I have heard, and yet they have five star reviews. So to me, getting five star reviews isn't enough to be a strong, powerful word of mouth referral source for me, a strong word of mouth resource for, uh, referrals. Source for me is when you tell a story of how I was able to help you. So even though on our sites we have people who say, oh, this, you know, five stars is great, I want to hear how.
It was great. And it's because people look and [00:14:00] say, oh, do they actually do this? Oh, do they fix this? Right. Oh, do they help people with hand problems? Oh, do they help people with neck problems? So you're not gonna get everyone to do it, but you, if you get a good amount of people to do it, um, people will gravitate to your place via word of mouth.
Um, just from really, really great. Google reviews, right. I love the reviews when people are like, I went to another therapy clinic. I did this at No, I, and I didn't get the results, and I came here and they helped me X, Y, Z, make a decision. Do the whatever it was that got. Them. I personally love that on my program side.
Oh, I was unsure. I'm working in A SNF, but I wanna move into hand therapy. And when I took Huang's manual therapy course, blah, blah, blah, when I joined her mentorship program, blah, blah, blah. You know, I've had people in my business program say that, oh, [00:15:00] I've joined other business programs, and it just sort of like helped me get started.
But I didn't really know how to price my, my, uh, products. I didn't really know how to market or create a marketing system that would help me, you know, be able to grow my. Here we go. Right. So I like those types of very specific stories, and I would encourage you if you are working and you want a certain amount of word, listen, we all need a certain amount of word of mouth.
Okay? Like it doesn't have to be one or the other. It's one and the other. It's all of. This, right? It's all of this. Um, but word of mouth, those, they're very strong. It's just slow to get, and you have to, you have to provide that outcome in order to get that referral right. So it's very, you know, it's, it takes a lot of work, but anything worth getting is worth the work.
Keep that in mind. [00:16:00] And that those are the three ways. That I get business for my clinic and I do it for my program side. None of it. None of it's different. Literally the same. Whatever I've learned to do for my clinic, I'm literally doing for hand therapy secrets. Um. I hand therapy secrets for my courses, for my exam prep, for all of that, for my business course, I am writing.
I'm actually launching a new book, um, at the end of this month. I'm not sure when you're gonna see this video, but I'm launching it May 26th. Um, it's a practice exam book. It's very, a specific book, very, um, it's a book very specific to help someone study for the CHT to become a certified hand therapist.
So, in your realm, whatever you're doing as an occupational therapist, um, whatever your specialty is, how can you write your book? I'm writing my book. It only took me six years, [00:17:00] but I've been doing other shit. It's not like I've been sitting around doing nothing, but this book has been in my mind. On my mind and in my mind for years, right?
Ever since I started the exam prep and it took off and I started doing all this work for it, I was like, one day I'm gonna write this book, and now it is here. It just took a while because I have other shit going on, and that's okay. I'm doing exactly the same thing. For that, that I am doing for my clinic side.
So don't think that just because your business looks different from my business or, uh, you're working with kids, or you're in home health, or you're working with geriatrics, that somehow your population of patients are so different from mine that you cannot employ these three things. Let me know if that makes sense.
Let me know if you have any questions, leave me a link, uh, you know, comment or whatever below. But if you wanna work with me personally, my links are below. [00:18:00] And if you wanna get on my email list just to get more insider tips, my link is also below. All right, I will see you next week.
