116. From Broke to $130K/Month Marketing Agency Owner

0:00Running social media ads can feel like a gamble. In fact, over three quarters of advertisers lose money on their campaigns. Shocking, right? But those who've unlocked the code to successful ads can get over 10x return from their ads. And today, we'll catch a glimpse of how it's done. This is Alex Freeman, and you're listening to the Upflip Podcast, where we uncover how great businesses are built, how they're run behind the scenes, and how you can replicate their success. My guest today is Nathan Bentley, the founder of Practice PhD. He's an expert in digital marketing for chiropractic clinics on a mission to connect patients with the healthcare services they need to live life to the fullest.

0:39Nathan went from being a physical therapist in a small clinic to running an agency making$130 ,000 in a single month. In this episode, I'll find out which social media platform he thinks is the best for marketing in 2024, along with his tips and strategies to maximize the value of digital marketing across all platforms. Nathan, welcome to the show. I'm excited to be here, Alex, man. Great podcast. Awesome, awesome. So to get things started, can you kind of give us the overview of what you were doing before you started Practice PhD and how that ultimately led to you starting the business? Yeah, absolutely.

1:14I think I had a little bit of an interesting start. A lot of people might see, especially in the marketing agency space, they might see like a Tai Lopez kind of course online and that's how they get started in social media marketing. But my start was a little bit different. I wanted to be a doctor. So I was working in clinic while I was in medical school. And while I was in clinic, I did everything for them. I handled x-rays, treated patients, did all the treatments in the office. And then COVID happened. And unfortunately, the mentor of mine, who was the owner of the clinic, ended up getting COVID.

1:48And unfortunately, he passed away. Oh, wow. Yeah, it was pretty crazy. And at the same time, his cousin came to me who was a chiropractor. and he's like, Nathan, I'm working with this marketing agency. They're dropping the ball. They don't know really what they're doing. They're getting me leads all over the place. I know you haven't done marketing before, but you're a smart guy. Can you take a look at it? I was like, sure. And then in the first month of ever running any ads before, I was able to generate him$40 ,000. So I was like, wow. Wow. Either I'm a super genius at this or these other guys kind of suck.

2:20Maybe a little column A, a little column B. Yeah, maybe a little bit of both. How do you go about gaining those skills? Because obviously when you meet somebody who has built a life that kind of came out of that young entrepreneurial spirit where they were trying to really find any way they could, especially early in life, I find that they become really good at skill building really quickly. And so I'm just curious how you did that with digital marketing. Like where did you turn to build that skill really quickly? Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I got my marketing degree from YouTube University, essentially, and, you know, grinded through quite a bit of YouTube videos.

2:54When I started out, I didn't have access to capital to invest in coaching, consulting, et cetera, that I do now. But starting off, I ripped through pretty much every free resource I could find. And I just spent an overwhelming amount of time locking in and really focusing on learning one skill set. So I did all the certifications that I could see online. You know, there were some free certifications and courses you could take around digital marketing, Google ads, Facebook ads, and some of the different advertising platforms. So I went in all in on those. A little bit of it was trial and error, like actually doing the thing.

3:28But it was just, you know, when you're learning a new skill set, when I was starting from zero, I had to do all the free resources. Now that I have access to capital, my recommendation is if you can find somebody that knows the skill that you're trying to learn and then pay them to teach you is always the easiest way to get a jumpstart and a high level overview. What are some of those like primary mistakes that you see businesses, whether in the healthcare space or not, doing when they're trying to market their business and maybe what should they be doing instead? I think that, you know, marketing and sales are probably the two most important components of any business.

4:04And if you spend 90, 95 % of your time actually on the fulfillment side of things and delivering on the service and only 5 % of the time, you know, generating new consistent flow of new patients, customers, sales, et cetera. It's a really important switch that needs to take place and having that balance because most doctors are very ethical and they just want to treat people. They didn't want to focus on the back end of the business, marketing, Facebook ads, SEO, et cetera. So most of the mistakes that they make is one, it's very hard to learn these skills. It takes a lot of time. I got lucky right in the beginning.

4:38I was blessed with certain tech savvy skills and an extreme amount of focus to learn these skills. But a lot of business owners don't have the time, energy, and effort to put into actually acquiring those skills. And I love my doctors. I love them to death, but I've seen some doctors struggle to open up Excel spreadsheet. So I know that there might be a certain lack of tech skills where there is really good technicians on the fulfillment side. So that's where a partnership with an agency that can take away some of those services for you guys and really implement quality results is super important.

5:13When they're not taught these skills, they don't really want to learn these skills. They're very difficult and high level skills to learn in the first place. And all that compounds into why they would want to hire a marketing agency versus just go out and learn the skills themselves. Listeners, we'll be right back with this conversation with Nathan after we head over into the business section of the podcast. If you're thinking about starting your own marketing agency, make sure to watch episode 164 on the UpFlip YouTube channel to find out how Eric Su invested$2 to start Single Grain, now a$14 million a year digital marketing agency.

5:48We're back with Nathan Bentley, the founder of Practice PhD. Nathan, I want to get into some more nitty gritty of marketing as we dive into it. So I guess let's start with from the healthcare space that you work in from chiropractors and their practices. Let's say someone's opened a new practice, what should they be doing from a marketing standpoint to get those first few patients in the door? I think marketing is a primary focus. When you open up a new business, a lot of people are like, oh, I need to set up with my chamber of commerce or, oh, I need to get my decor set up right and I need to paint the walls this color.

6:21But as a business owner, 90 % of your time should be focused on client acquisition or patient acquisition, sales acquisition, and essentially getting new business in. So most of the time I would focus on what the best revenue stream is for most of our doctors, which is Facebook ads. You can turn on a Facebook ads and you can immediately get a new stream of people that are interested in your products or service pretty much immediately. That's why I like advertising as compared to a social media organic route where it takes a while to build up a big following or website SEO where it takes a while to rank locally.

6:57Paid ads, you can pretty much turn them on immediately and they work that same day in terms of getting you leads that if your sales process is dialed in turn into patients walking in the door. So I feel like that's so important in starting a new business where so many different new businesses start focusing on all this other like kind of frivolous fluffy stuff that's not as important as the main driver which is revenue producing activities like marketing and sales. When a business is in that growth mode whether it's you know they just opened their doors and they're trying to get those first customers or they've been open for a while, but they want to grow, how much should they be spending on advertising?

7:37Because obviously it is a place where they could spend, you know, there's almost an unlimited number of zeros they could put at the end of the number of how much you could spend on advertising, but like what should they be looking at spending? From an advertiser's perspective, I'm going to say as much as you possibly can. That's what we try to do in our business. We spend about 30 % of our top line revenue on actual advertising. Why do we do that? Because it works. It's the best way for us to get new clients for our business. So then when we hold the frame of this is what will generate you the best clients for your business, it holds true in that aspect.

8:11So the correct answer, it varies, but essentially if you create a vending machine where you're sitting in there and you're putting$1 into a vending machine, it's producing$3 out or$4 out or$5 out. Any entrepreneur is going to sit there all day long feeding$1 bills into that machine. That's essentially what you can create with marketing and advertising is knowing, okay, if I put$1 ,000 into Facebook ads, I'm going to get$3 ,000 out. Or if I put$10 ,000, I'm going to get$30 ,000, et cetera. So you want to increase your ad spend. Once you are profitable with your ad spend, you know you're getting a good return.

8:46You want to keep accelerating and spending as much as possible until you hit that limit. You know, essentially it's maybe like a one to two X return. So, you know, at first you might spend$5 ,000 and get$50 ,000 in return. Well, then you want to push until you get about a one to two X return and really hit that cap to see what that limiting factor is. So, you know, once you get like a one to two X return, that's when you might say, okay, we're hitting the theoretical, you know, ceiling of how much we can spend in our particular area of market, et cetera. But most business owners never really get to that point.

9:20And it's a lot higher than they think. Most of our clients for local businesses, we'll start them at$1 ,500 to$3 ,000 a month. So they can see the system, they compound, they get some sales from it. And then we build up their ad spend from there. But the correct answer is as much as you possibly can. And then make data-driven decisions going forward to keep spending more on that advertising until you hit that ceiling or theoretical limit of how much you can spend in your market. We love partnering with other podcasts and we have a great one for you. Are you in the home services industry and looking to elevate your sales game?

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10:26Or use the link in our show notes and start turning those cold estimates into huge jobs. You've mentioned Facebook, and so I'm curious if that is the best ROI platform or kind of generally speaking, what are those best platforms for ROI on ad spend? Yeah, it varies between different niches, different companies, different business types. For right now, Facebook is still number one for us. It's still number one. It's the most evergreen. We get the biggest outside returns. I personally only run ads on my business on Facebook. Why? Because we get the best returns. Google ads and TikTok ads can work in specific situations.

11:04Sometimes they can outperform Facebook, but for overall speaking, 80 to 90 % of our clients are strictly on Facebook ads with us. Why? Because they tend to get the best results. So Facebook is still number one for us. Talk to me about TikTok because I know that that also features kind of pretty heavily in what you're doing for clients. So talk to me about how TikTok factors. Yeah, I think TikTok is a really nice platform because it's new, it's fresh. Anytime there's a new advertising platform, the CPMs and the cost to get in front of people are lower. But with that, you might see particular drawbacks.

11:38So for TikTok, for example, it's a lot cheaper to get leads, but the leads might not be as quality. And it again, really depends on the niche and business that you're in. I know a lot of e-commerce businesses that are crushing it on TikTok, but for local-based businesses, for our chiropractic medical agency in particular, or tend to target a broader demographic that's a little bit older. So TikTok might not be the best platform as compared to like a Facebook or Instagram. So that's a couple of factors, but I really think it comes from market analysis and knowing where your market is at. If the market and the people that you're trying to get in front of in your ads are on a certain platform, then you absolutely should be investing in that platform and then invest in the platform that the majority of the people that you're trying to get in front of are actually on.

12:24For us right now, it's Facebook and Instagram. TikTok is awesome. One of the things that's interesting is it introduced short form style ads. So a lot of our ads that you guys might see online are short form content, TikTok style videos, that vertical videos that's like kind of short with some hyper edits in there. Those coincidentally perform really well across all ad platforms like Facebook and Instagram. But TikTok really started that of UGC and user generated ads. That was a huge trend that they started. They also do really well with influencer-based ads, you know, day in the life of here's what I'm trying or here's this cool product I found and having influencers review that.

13:02That was a big trend that TikTok really started as well too in their advertising platforms. So TikTok's really paving the way in terms of some new fresh outlooks on advertising, but overall, Facebook is still the number one that we see for our business and our results. You know, one of the things that people get skittish about around social media is the amount of time that it takes from a business owner's perspective to kind of invest that time if they're not hiring somebody to take care of it for them. Do you have any advice for a business owner who maybe isn't yet at the point where they can bring in a marketing firm to handle that work for them to make themselves better at utilizing social TikTok, both in Facebook?

13:39That's why I feel like running ads is such a powerful tool. I hate recommending this advice, but you can even start out with like boosting posts and build up from there as you learn the platforms, etc. because you might have to learn it yourself if you're tighter on funds. But the reason why I love paid ads as opposed to organic, it can take months, years to build up a localized organic following. And then anytime you post a video just naturally on your Facebook or Instagram feed, you can't control who is getting in front of that ad and who that ad is actually being shown to. But with an advertisement, you can essentially make sure that I only want this video to be seen by females from the age of 35 to 65 in a five mile radius of my clinic.

14:23And then that really helps in terms of targeting down and getting in front of your ideal client archetype. Whereas social media content is so broad, you know, you post a video on social media and it can go to India, China, Japan and get a lot of views. Whereas with ads, you can ensure that you're only getting in front of the people that you actually want to get in front of. And if you have, even$8 to$10 a day to spend on Chipotle or Chick-fil-A or whatever your meal of choice is, then you probably have enough money to start running on advertising and build that skill set, learn, make some mistakes, and figure out that process if you're tighter on a budget.

15:00That's essentially what you have to do. So obviously, the market analysis side of it, understanding your ideal customer is very important. So I do want to ask your advice on developing that persona to then run ads against? I think it's a great point. A lot of people like shockingly don't really know what their ideal client archetype is. If you don't know and you don't have a good thought, a quick way to do a test is look at where the top 20 % of your customers are. So who is the top 20 % of your customers that have the longest lifetime value, stay with you the longest, purchase the biggest amount?

15:36What demographics, what interests, what nuances do they have in common? And then you can make data-driven decisions as to who your ideal archetype is and then really honing that in. And that's so important in marketing in general because there's this big quote that if you speak to everybody, you're really speaking to nobody. So when you hone down your ideal audience and you know exactly who you're trying to get in front of, it not only makes it easier to target those because you can set up those demographics and targeting interests, but also your ad spend is going to be tremendously more effective.

16:09Your messaging, your offer, your creative is going to be much more dialed in versus running some broad interest targeting. So most of the time you can do some self-analysis of like, what is my most ideal client? If you can't figure that out, look at your top 20 % of your clients that spend the most money, have the longest LTV, and then look at their demographics, interests, et cetera, and then find some commonalities. And that's probably your ideal client archetype. Real quick, I wanted to take a moment and thank our loyal listener, Imagination Creations. They recently reviewed our show and said, There's no better podcast to listen to while I am having a boring day at my 9 to 5.

16:45There's so much to learn here and I plan to put it to use. Imagination Creations, that's awesome. And we are looking forward to hearing your success story. Return listeners, if you could take a moment to give us a share and a review, it helps us to reach more people who want to start and grow a successful business. We really appreciate it and we appreciate everybody out there listening right now. Why do you think so many businesses and business owners don't actually understand who their ideal client is? In my own life as a sales rep, I remember wanting to pull my hair out as I would ask people that question.

17:15They'd be like, oh, it's kind of for everybody. And I'm like, no, it isn't. So like, why don't people know that about their business? Oh, absolutely. This is a lesson that I had to learn to probably the hard way where when I started my marketing agency, I so clearly had a specific niche where I was working in chiropractic clinics. I ran chiropractic ads, but I've discovered this skill and I'm like, oh, I can do this for everybody. I can do this for solar providers. I can do this for any doctors or medical providers. I can do this for other big companies, like cryptocurrencies, I can market for them.

17:47But the thing is, is like when you run a business, you really want to have a systemized and streamlined process for fulfillment too. Because not only on the front end in your marketing is it much easier if your message is going to one specific person versus going to everybody, but also fulfillment operations and et cetera is a lot easier on the back end. But I think most business owners start that way because they learned a cool, unique skill. They started getting cash flow and getting paid for their services. And they just have this like big, grandiose idea that, oh, I can do this for anybody.

18:21I can do this for everybody under the sun. But they don't know that when you speak to everyone, you really speak to no one. And having a specific niche in terms of targeting your messaging and your ads, your offer, your creative, your landing pages, you know, and then also dialing your service to get the best results possible is really important as well. Because if you try to do everything for everybody, your results are also not going to be as good on the back end versus if you can really hone in on one niche and get so good at that niche that nobody can compete with you in that particular space.

18:56So I think it's really important, but most of the time it's like businesses learn this new skill. They get so excited about the skill that they want to just help everybody. And it's a good thought in theory. They're like, I can make millions of dollars with this, but you know, you have to start with one niche, get really good at that particular niche, and then you can scale horizontally or scale vertically into other niches. But until you get really, really good at one specific thing, I don't recommend anybody scale and have multiple different services, multiple different offerings. It just creates way too much complexity in terms of your messaging, offering creative, and also fulfillment on the back end is a pain.

19:30I feel like in digital, especially when we start talking about the social media space, there's always the other voice in the room that's shouting. But if I build my email list, then I own the platform. And a lot of marketers will then say, yeah, you should be doing both things, building up your social and your social advertising and building up your email list. So how does email marketing fit into what you're doing with your company? Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a great point as well, too, because there's multiple different marketing avenues. And based off of the company, the type of service you're providing, the niche and the ideal client archetype, that's where it really depends which particular method of marketing you use.

20:09I feel like in general, once you build up your business, you should get to the point of where you have paid ads, email marketing, organic marketing, affiliate marketing, all the marketing sources are really good, but I think it's important to scale one first and then kind of build the other. So email marketing could be great. But again, if you have 10 leads in your CRM and you have 10 emails, it's not going to be as effective. So the first step is getting a bunch of emails, which comes from lead generation, running paid ads, building up organic, et cetera. But email marketing is a big portion of our business.

20:43I would say in sales terms, about 16 % of our booked calls actually come from email marketing. And a lot of business owners might get a little bit lazy when it comes to email marketing, but it's so easy nowadays. You guys can literally have ChatGPT write 15 email marketing email campaigns for your specific niche and then just drip feed them out and then find the best ones that get the most booked calls, the most sales, et cetera. And then know, okay, let me build out more of those types of emails. Because from our perspective, the most effective emails for us really comes down to three things.

21:19It's really testimonials. So increasing the perceived likelihood of achievement in our customers, they are actually going to get the outcome that they want by seeing other people getting that outcome is huge. So testimonials is very big for email marketing campaigns. The second is education, educating them on why you're different than other things they've tried in the past, educating on nuances on your services, your products, etc. is really important because you know every nuances, nook and cranny of your businesses, but people over you might have seen one ad or one opt-in and don't know as much.

21:54So education is important. And then also just the generalized offer. It's amazing to me how many CRMs out there and how many businesses have a CRM with thousands of leads in there. And they don't know that they could send out an email to that whole list and then boom, get some appointments, get some schedules, get some sales pretty much immediately. So I'm a big fan of email marketing. I'd say it's about 16 % of our actual booked appointments come from our email marketing campaigns. And then we're rocking and rolling. And another quick sales hack is when you run consistent email marketing campaigns, like you can start with ChatGPT, have them write you 15, 20 emails, put them out as like, you know, biweekly or three times a week emails to your list, and then look at your best performing emails.

22:36And then you can add those as nurture sequences. So when somebody opts into your system, they give you their name, funder, or an email, you can have your best performing testimonials, educational emails, and offer-based emails in the actual nurture sequences that go out in order. So you can make data-driven decisions behind the emails that you're actually cranking out. I want to pick up that ChatGPT thread. How are you utilizing automation and AI to improve the marketing campaigns you're running for your own business and for your clients? I feel like right now there's a balance where we don't go all in on AI and we're like, we're going to change our whole business, our whole fulfillment, which I feel like a lot of businesses are leaning into right now.

23:16But it depends on the business that you're in. So there are certain things where ChatGPT has been very beneficial for us and other AI tools, like we use AI video editing tools that can chop up an entire podcast and switch between speakers on video. So those are really cool. But ChatGPT, we have a few use cases for it. It's the email marketing campaigns. That's what's really nice. Contracts. Don't talk to my lawyer on that one. But we have used ChatGPT for some contracting, some generalized email threads, basically some SOPs and operations. That's where it gets really, really killer because there's AI tools from a business owner where you can record yourself doing a task and it will essentially create an SOP step-by-step Word document that outlines the exact processes that you're doing when it watches you perform that task.