2360 - The Doctor’s Playbook for Standing Out in Today’s Healthcare Market with GrassRoots Medical Marketing's Laura Woodard

0:03Laura Woodard:Welcome to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur. If you're committed to growing your business by serving audiences with generosity and real expertise, you're in the right place. This is a daily 15 minute show featuring leaders who believe real impact comes from generosity, not hype, which means as a listener, you're going to get the good stuff. In fact, we created podverified.com to give thoughtful leaders like you free tools to show up better on podcast stages, like this one. That includes your free PodVerified score, free PodVerified guest training, a free media kit builder, and so much more. It's the first ecosystem of its kind built by podcasters who genuinely want to help guests thrive and grow in podcasting.

0:46Laura Woodard:Visit podverify.com if you'd like to be featured as a future guest. I'm Josh Elledge. Let's get into it.

0:56Laura Woodard:with us right now it's laura woodard just down the road from me here over in tampa laura you are the founder and ceo of grassroots medical marketing you're found on the web at grassrootsmedicalmarketing.com laura it's great to have you super to be here josh yeah well uh listen before we get going talking about the work you do and and i really love working or love uh having conversations with uh experts and and leaders who specialize in particular niches in industry. So I'm really eager to get your take on your industry in particular. But before we do that, you always love hearing what high level leaders do for fun or kind of into outside of work.

1:34Laura Woodard:What have you been into lately? What are you geeking out on? So one thing that I absolutely love to do, I grew up dancing. And a few years ago, I started taking flamenco dancing lessons. So I have castanets and the dress and fans. Oh my gosh. All sorts of things. When did you, how long ago did you start this? I took it about six years ago and I just restarted this past year. Wow. So that was like shortly before COVID and you just kind of picked up this. What was it that enticed you to give it a shot? So interestingly, I'm from Tampa and one of the very popular restaurants here called the Columbia Restaurant.

2:19It was started in 1905. And so it's an institution here. They are a Spanish restaurant and they have flamenco dancing as entertainment. And so I grew up my whole life. We'd go to the Columbia and we'd see the flamenco dancers. And I love to dance. And so I thought, well, that's kind of interesting. And a really more interesting thing is my father's classmates, who were 40 years older than me, they took flamenco dancing at the same place I was taking it. Oh, my gosh. So it was an absolute blast, and it was very fun.

2:56Laura Woodard:Yeah. And so, you know, obviously there's a, you know, kind of a healthy living, you know, kind of fitness component to it. Do you find yourself getting a workout? Flamenco dancing seems like you're moving a little bit. Absolutely. I'll tell you what, it is the hard, I've done all types of dance. It is the hardest dance that I've ever done because you're using your feet as a percussion instrument. You're using your hands as a percussion instrument and then your arms and your legs. And it's just, it is a beautiful, beautiful sport. All right. All right. I know that's, that's the only, that's the only tempo I know.

3:36Laura Woodard:So share with us the work you do with grassroots medical marketing. So I founded grassroots medical marketing out of a need that I had. I have 30 years of marketing experience and I've worked all over the United States. I've worked in nonprofits, large corporations. and about 10 years ago, I found that I was in a caregiver situation. I was taking care of my mom and her younger sister and I was the official caregiver and the doctor would say, well, we need to go see a specialist and so they may or may not give me a name, but then I would go online and I I've tried to find doctors and I kept saying over and over again, why is it so hard to find a good doctor online?

4:30And it's kind of interesting because doctors put so many years into becoming specialists and they do fellowships and they do all of this study. And then when they start their own practice, they're also expected to know how to do marketing. And so to them, having an online profile or having their website is just, it's a necessity, but a lot of times they're not kept up. And so I decided when I got the opportunity to start this business, I said, I am going to focus on private practice physicians and surgeons and help them get found by the right patients.

5:11Laura Woodard:Okay, so in that space, I would imagine that there's some unique things that you experience there. You know, my suspicion is it's kind of noisy, like that, you know, and so I'm curious about what your observations of that versus like any other industry out there. Well, an interesting statistic is more than 80 ,000 physicians have left private practice since 2019. And so it's an interesting dynamic because a lot of doctors are being hired by hospitals. They're being hired by venture capital firms that have kind of gone in and swiped up a lot of smaller doctors offices and also insurance companies.

5:54And so what makes it unique is with these larger corporate organizations coming in, they all have full-time marketing departments. So they're all marketing their doctors. And now you have the private practices who are there being the best doctor that they can be, but they're getting swamped by all of this marketing, a lot of noise, like you said, a lot of noise from these marketing departments that are corporate. and they have full marketing departments. And so that's where we come in. We help create a foundation of marketing for doctors so they can compete with these corporate organizations. All right.

6:37Laura Woodard:Well, million dollar question, Laura. What's working well in marketing for doctors today? So if they do a few things right, they have a great foundation. And obviously to me, the most important thing is to have a great website. and it doesn't have to be bells and whistles. It has to be fast. It has to be customer centric and it has to have a call to action on it. And then the next thing that I always ask my doctors to do is to make sure that their profiles online are fully filled out. That's one place that a lot of these corporate doctors or the marketing departments are kind of falling down. They, or the insurance companies, they don't fill out the whole profile.

7:24And so a patient doesn't have anything to grab onto when they see the doctor. It's important to have a picture, information about them, and even sometimes just have something about them personally that may connect with the patient because they're really in a people business. And then the last thing that I always encourage is that they pay attention to their online reviews because oh yeah there are so many statistics around online reviews 98 of patients will read a review before they go to a provider

8:01Laura Woodard:that's critical yeah it's it's mandatory for me i mean you know if i if i if i have to choose a new provider for some specialty or whatever. Yeah. I'm not guessing. I'm not, you know, coming up with like whatever comes up first in the Google search results. Yeah, no, I appreciate that, but I'm going to look at the reviews. So, you know, regarding, do you, do you get much into like, you know, kind of reputation management and review management? Can you share some tips for that? And again, as tactical as possible, please. Yeah. So there are a few things that can really make a difference in any industry.

8:39And one of them is to make sure that you have a lot of online reviews, because you could have a 5.0 and have a five star review. And maybe only five people have given you reviews. Okay, well, that's your mom, your dad, your brother, like, they want people People want to know that you have a lot of people reviewing you. And it is okay to have a few negative reviews because everybody will. You can't make everybody happy. But the key is to have a large number of reviews. And the interesting thing is 65 % of people will leave a review if they're just prompted to leave a review. So just ask people for reviews.

9:27another thing that's a tip is if you get comments to comment back google loves when you respond to reviews and it may seem like a little thing you don't have to do it every day you could just go in once a week just respond to your reviews specifically for doctors you have to be careful because there are HIPAA regulations and you can't have personal health information so you have to kind of answer in a generic way but you still should be acknowledging yeah i sure hope that

10:01Laura Woodard:cancer gets better like yeah exactly don't say that don't say that right which again i think if you're just focusing upon the you know the interpersonal i mean that's really you know what yeah i mean just i think most doctors are going to know the rules of the road but that they might be tempted to outsource or, you know, have someone else within the organization. The doctor might be like, oh, I don't want to deal with any of the Internet stuff. And so they need to make sure that they know what those rules of engagement are. But, you know, again, just keeping in mind that all of this is being read by your future potential clients.

10:44Laura Woodard:So I would think, you know, warmness and appreciation is, you know, And then sometimes you might get a negative review or someone might say, you know, I really can't stand that front office dude or lady or whatever. Like they are rude. They didn't pick up the phone. I mean, that's going to happen sometimes. Absolutely. And we do. We're actually putting together right now a course about customer service. because that is the one thing that I hear and read online a lot is the front desk staff is not friendly and so you know that's like your second front door your first front door is your website but your second front door is that person sitting at the front desk and they need to make sure they look somebody in their eyes and welcome them because when you think about it going to the doctor is such a personal thing and you're putting your life in this doctor's hands.

11:46The relationship is one of the most important things. And so it goes beyond the relationship of the doctor. It's also the staff that needs to have that really high quality relationship.

12:00Laura Woodard:All right. So when you engage with your client, how does that typically start? and what does it, do you just kind of work month to month? Do you normally set terms of engagement? What do you usually do? So what we do is we have a specific formula that we follow. And when we're introduced to a new potential client, we go in and we follow our grass formula. So the first thing that we do is we go in and we gauge where their marketing is right now. And so from that, we recognize from all of that information. So we'll go in and test the speed of their website, look at them on a heat map and see where they're landing, look at their reviews.

12:51Have they claimed their Google business profile, which is extremely important. It's amazing how many businesses have not claimed their Google business profile and optimize that profile. So we go in and look at what are they doing now? And then we recognize where are the places where they really need help. So we don't really have a one size fits all. There are things that are common that we need to do, but really recognizing. So then we accelerate their growth with a strategic plan. So once we've recognized what they need to do, we develop a plan for them and then we execute that plan for them.

13:33it's we're not a do-it-yourself kind of business we're a done-for-you business so we actually go in we have experts on our staff and we do search engine optimization we build websites we do social media we have experts in all of those areas and then the last thing that we do is the last letter in the grass formula is S for success. So we go in and we measure everything that we do. And then we also optimize because sometimes you do something and it just doesn't click. It's not working. So we move that to other areas. So the way we usually work with someone is we go in, we do our grass formula, we make our recommendations, and then based on how quickly they want to ramp up, we have specific choices starting with their foundational work.

14:31Laura Woodard:All right. So Laura, to our friend that's been listening, and maybe they know somebody who is a doctor, they've got some offices, and they want to make sure that they're keeping up to date. Because also a lot of things have been evolving. I mean, AI has certainly changed marketing in a huge, huge way. And that could mean either, you know, the folks in their, I mean, it's, that toothpaste is out of the tube, right? And so it's creating other unique facets of all marketing and certainly, you know, business and sales development and growth. But Laura, let's share some next steps for our friend that's listening, including maybe free resources that you'd recommend for someone that just wants to spend a little bit more time getting to know you.

15:21So if you go to our website, grassrootsmedicalmarketing.com, one of the very first things we have on the site is a medical marketing quiz. And so we have a short quiz. It takes less than like four or five minutes. And the doctor or the practice manager can go through and answer these questions. And it will give them a grade on how they're doing. And it'll also give them recommendations of things that they can try. And so once that happens, a lot of times they will then call us and say, oh, my gosh, I need help with my marketing. And so try to do our medical marketing quiz. We have a monthly newsletter that we send out.

16:05And it's really it crosses industries. So it's specifically for private practice physicians. But anybody can get great tips out of it. This month, we're actually talking about the importance of websites. And then we're on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube. And I have a wealth of information on those. On YouTube, I have more than 90 videos about tips for marketing. So check us out there too. And you can, if you go to our website, you can just click at the bottom. It has our little Facebook, YouTube, and just click there and go to any of our social media.

16:48Laura Woodard:Laura Woodard, you are the founder and CEO of Grassroots Medical Marketing. Your website is grassrootsmedicalmarketing.com. Laura, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks so much, Josh.

17:02Laura Woodard:Thanks for listening to The Thoughtful Entrepreneur. If your goal is to grow your business, increase revenue, and build authority without gimmicks, this show is designed for you. Each episode gives you practical insight from leaders who have turned trust and credibility into real business results. If you value short, thoughtful conversations that respect your time, make sure you're subscribed. We publish daily 15-minute episodes focused on growth that actually compounds. And if you're interested in being a guest or you want to turn podcast appearances into measurable business growth, visit podverified.com.

17:38Laura Woodard:You can start for free with your pod verified score, along with free podcast guest training and a free media kit builder. These tools are built to help you get booked on better shows, deliver stronger interviews and convert audience trust into revenue. No more desperate sales. You truly can enjoy all the business you like by generously sharing your wisdom. Everything we offer is built by podcasters for guests with a focus on trust, organic growth, and long-term business success. Thanks again for spending your time with us. I'll see you next time.