Healthy Living by Willow Creek Springs
A podcast about practices to promote healthy lives featuring experts, businesses, and clients: we gather to share our stories about success, failure, exploration, and so much more. Our subscription episodes feature some personal and vulnerable, real-life stories that are sensitive to some of the general public.
Healthy Living by Willow Creek Springs
Marketing Medicine: The Business Side of Healing with Andrew Newland
Ever wondered why your exceptional clinical skills aren't translating into a thriving practice? In this eye-opening conversation, Andrew Newland, founder of Functional Medicine Marketing, reveals the missing piece in the puzzle for many healthcare practitioners.
Andrew's journey begins with his own health transformation through functional medicine after years of struggling with weight gain, chronic pain, and allergies despite growing up in a health-conscious household. This personal experience fueled his passion to help practitioners reach more patients through effective marketing strategies.
The discussion tackles a painful truth many practitioners face: exceptional clinical skills alone won't build a sustainable practice. While word-of-mouth referrals may initially be effective, they inevitably plateau, leaving many practitioners scrambling for solutions. Andrew debunks the common myth that occasional social media posting will solve this problem, revealing that organic business posts typically reach only 2.6% of existing followers, making them virtually useless for attracting new patients.
Instead, Andrew advocates for a comprehensive approach centered around search engine optimization (SEO), explaining how this foundation supports all other marketing efforts. He breaks down the three critical components every practitioner should understand: technical SEO, content creation, and local optimization. Just as functional medicine addresses root causes rather than symptoms, effective marketing requires addressing the fundamental visibility issues that prevent potential patients from finding your practice.
Through compelling success stories, Andrew demonstrates how this approach transformed practices from struggling to thriving, including one that went from acquiring fewer than one new patient per month to consistently adding ten, and another that grew from 15-20 new members per month to over 100.
Ready to transform your practice's marketing approach? Visit functionalmmedmarketing.com for a complimentary website evaluation that will pinpoint specific opportunities to enhance your online presence and patient acquisition strategy.
Intro for podcast
information about subscriptions
Here is the link for Sunday's 4 pm Pacific time Zoom meeting
Well, hello and welcome back to the Healthy Living Podcast. I'm Joe Grumbine, your host, and today we have a very special guest. His name is Andrew Newland and he's the founder and CEO of Functional Medicine Marketing, and he's a digital strategist works with functional and integrative medicine clinics clinics. But this guy has got a lifetime full of medicine and health-related experiences and I'm excited to have this conversation. Andrew, welcome to the show. How are you doing today?
Speaker 2:Hey, thanks so much, Joe, I'm doing fantastic.
Speaker 1:Well, this is an interesting conversation, as everyone tends to be, and you know you work with businesses health related businesses which is important. We have a lot of listeners that are practitioners or people in training to be practitioners, and people don't realize that you know, the passion of working with health and medicine and all of the different modalities is one side of it, and running a business is the other one, and oftentimes those two just don't have anything to do with each other. Myself included, I'm the worst businessman there is. I've been spending most of my life, you know, helping people get well, so why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, tell us your story? Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:So I'm a Colorado Springs native. If you're familiar with Colorado Springs at all, it's very rare to find a native because we have so much, so much military. We've got five different military installations around the city. Very, very transient, but my family has actually been here for five, six generations. Very transient, but my family has actually been here for five, six generations, and so we love Colorado. Obviously I love Colorado because of the clean air and just the. It's perfect weather, as long as you're up your mountain high. That's right, if you don't mind some extremes, for sure I actually. So.
Speaker 2:On the health side, I love talking about health and a lot of that comes from my, my parents, upbringing. I'm the third out of three, so I'm the youngest. Health, and a lot of that comes from my parents' upbringing. I'm the third out of three, so I'm the youngest. I have a brother and a sister, my parents. So my mom graduated as a dietician from Colorado State University, as a dietician. So we always grew up, you know, she was very much into health and loved following the trends. Then, on the other side, my dad was diagnosed celiac before I was born.
Speaker 2:This was back when Nobody knew about gluten. Nobody knew. Yeah, gluten-free wasn't cool, right, there wasn't anything out there gluten-free. My mom, obviously, she's a dietician and an amazing cook and chef and so she just she made everything from scratch to be gluten-free for my dad. I remember going over to a friend's house once as a kid and his dad ate pizza and I'd never seen a dad eat pizza before. In my little brain my thought was all dads don't eat the same thing that I can, yeah, and it just blew my mind.
Speaker 2:Now obviously there's gluten-free pizza, like everywhere, and my dad's happy as a clam now because he's 83, 84. And you know he'll get that gluten-free pizza when he can. He gets his pizza. I love it, yeah for sure. So so growing up, you know, and so my dad, he, he did juice cleanses. He was every Sunday we would make fresh juice. You know that was back in the eighties when the juicing was the big craze.
Speaker 1:The Vitamixer was out there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely the Champion Juicer. That's what? Oh man, the big motor man that can't get juice anything? Uh, my dad drank so much carrot juice he turned his skin orange.
Speaker 1:You know absolutely. I think we've all done that a little bit, if we're exactly exactly so you know, health wise.
Speaker 2:so then I I got asthma as a kid, I had, uh, my appendix burst when I was, had pneumonia numerous times. So just a lot of you know, a lot of gut wrecking things that happened to me. And then my wife and I met in school, in college, and got married and then we had kids, really young. We had a. We had a different business at the time, landscaping business here in Colorado Springs and and and just you know, you start eating the fast food and you start just all of the fat.
Speaker 1:I have the worst diets ever.
Speaker 2:Oh, totally. I mean, we were so exhausted with four little kids and I was shoveling rock all day and you know. And so obviously you start, you put on the weight and you put on and you start getting symptoms and you get all the stuff right.
Speaker 1:It's all becomes your, your companion.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Yeah, it's taking ibuprofen every night, tums every night, started getting allergies. Never had allergies before. Put on 40 pounds, just, and you know you hit your thirties and your body can't handle that stuff anymore. Yeah, and so we, we, we stumbled upon a functional medicine, doctor and kind of, and then we got super excited. My, my wife and I both had that history growing up where both of our parents were very healthy and you know, so that's kind of it was easy for us to go. What are we doing? And come back to this health wise, and so just, totally, I mean, you know, lost all the weight, got rid of the heartburn and the headaches and finally putting on muscle, and you know, just feeling the best I've ever felt, and so with that Probably the good thing was is that you had a healthy body previously and so generally you recover quicker.
Speaker 1:muscle memory recovers. Your body knows how to be healthy when it's been healthy.
Speaker 2:And that's, and that's exactly it. So you know, I'm every day very thankful to my parents for that, that foundation, right, that healthy foundation. And in your thirties you still bounce back pretty fast, which is wonderful. I wish I was still, of course, but that time we had. We transitioned from having a landscaping business and we started a marketing agency and that was going pretty well. We were helping just kind of everybody local businesses, used car dealerships, local banks, public schools I mean we're helping everybody.
Speaker 2:But then, after our experience with that functional medicine practitioner, we got to thinking this is amazing, we want to help, we want to change the health of our communities. We're not practitioners, but what can we do? We know marketing. So that's why we started Functional Medicine Marketing and our mission is to help practitioners, help more people. So help you, help more people. Yeah, yeah, I love it. And there's also a lot of correlations between getting to the root cause of our health and getting to the root cause of marketing issues. And if you're out there today and you have a practice or you're thinking about starting a practice, make sure you have the same mindset of getting to the root cause and not looking for magic pills when it comes to marketing 100%.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's just like everything. People think that somebody comes along and sells you a silver bullet and generally there's a half filled with snake oil, because most problems don't have a single solution Generally. You know I'm I'm in the process of overcoming a very aggressive cancer right now and the um that the solution was so many faceted that you know it would make your head spin. But but the truth is everybody came to me with you just got to do this, just got to do that. And you know it would make your head spin. But but the truth is everybody came to me with just got to do this, just got to do that. And you know it's not like that.
Speaker 1:Business is the same. It's a complicated world we live in and there's so many variables in in every aspect of it, so you can't think that just one thing. As a self employed guy, I fell victim to that myself. I was like, well, if I just put out a good product, it'll sell itself, I won't have to do shit. Yeah, exactly, you know, it works for a while, to a point sometimes. But then you fool yourself and you think, oh, that's all I got to do. And then something happens like COVID, and everything comes crashing down on you and you're like, oh man, I don't know what to do. Now comes crashing down on you and you're like, oh man, I don't know what to do now Exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I and I talked to a lot of practitioners that are amazing with patients. They're just I mean they're detectives when it comes to health. They can dig in for hours and hours on lab results and I mean they're just amazing at getting health results, but, like you said, horrible at business and they just think it's like the old movie, right, field of Dreams If we build it, they will come Exactly and that doesn't work at all.
Speaker 1:Maybe, like I said, sporadically, it might work here and there, but for sure, for sure. Business has to be consistent and growth has to be consistent, or it's not business anymore. Exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and everybody, and everybody I talk to when I hear about their story about starting a business. They all started with word of mouth. And that's how you grow you talk to family and friends, they talk to family and friends, and then you start producing a great result or service or business and that word of mouth started expanding but Hands down every time it either plateaus or starts dropping off.
Speaker 1:Right, whether it's where people don't talk to each other enough to sustain growth. And you know, I mean I guess occasionally there's a practitioner that hits a spot and says I'm good and maintains their clients and grows enough, and you know, but most businesses don't work that way. They take on an employee, take on an office. All of a sudden you get overhead. Next thing you know you need growth or you start going backwards.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's exactly it. And it's easy to think okay, I need growth and I want it, and so maybe I'll put a few Facebook posts out or something. And it does. And you I love how you're laughing because you know that doesn't work. Oh, at all it doesn't work. And if I can dispel one myth, today you could post on Facebook and Instagram 20 times a day. Yeah, and never get a new client or patient. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Or maybe once in a while one will, but not enough to sustain it. You can boost it all day long. You can do all that, and I don't know anybody that's built their business that way for real.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and we all. We all see the influencers right where they're getting all this traction.
Speaker 1:They're like one hundredth of one percent Exactly, and they're not local.
Speaker 2:They're tapping into a national or worldwide. They're in Singapore, or national or worldwide audience Exactly.
Speaker 2:They're in Singapore or somewhere yeah, exactly yeah, and here's a statistic for you. So when you post on, like a business page, your Facebook business page, if you just do an organic post, which means you're not putting any money behind it, you're just posting, right, it's free. You make a video or you have a graphic or something, statistically you'll be lucky if you reach 2.6% of your followers. Right, those are already people that follow you. Yep, so you have 1000 people that follow you. You might reach 26 people that already follow you. So if you're trying to reach new people, right, it doesn't happen, it's virtually virtually impossible. Like you said, you'll get. You know, you'll get occasionally randomly, something will happen.
Speaker 1:But you know, you can flip a coin a hundred times, a thousand times, 10,000 times, maybe once it'll end on its side, but you're certainly not going to. You know, make a living doing that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly that's not. Yeah, not reproducible marketing, for sure.
Speaker 1:And I can attest to that. You know I have a small business and I post things just so that it's a lighthouse and maybe somebody will see it, but I have no expectations of business growth. It's just a way for me to put out a message here and there and it makes a record of things for me.
Speaker 2:But that's it. It's vital, don't get me wrong, it's necessary. But in the marketing world, all these different services, all these different platforms are different pieces to the marketing puzzle and we need all of the pieces to make a good marketing puzzle. And those organic posts are much more support to your website and to your online presence. So you know, a common user journey is somebody. They hear about functional medicine or they've already known about it, but now they're getting a symptom of some kind. So what do they do? They go to Google and they type in thyroid doctor near me or functional medicine, hormone clinic or whatever it is. Sure Comes up. They go to the website, they look around for a little bit. They never read all the content right. And then what do they do?
Speaker 1:You're going to get a 1.2 minutes if you're lucky. If you're lucky Like you just scored.
Speaker 2:You got it and so often they'll read a little bit and they'll scroll down and go to the social platforms to check you out. So you need content because if you haven't posted in six months you're going to stop. You're subconsciously losing some trust and authority. So it's a support, not that active piece out there getting in front of people. There are great ways to do that, but just posting on Facebook, instagram or TikTok is not it Correct, agreed?
Speaker 1:For sure. So let's say, I'm a practitioner and I'm listening to this and I'm like, wow, that sounds interesting. What sort of things do you offer?
Speaker 2:So we are a full service agency, so we do everything. So, from website builds to maintenance, edits, to SEO, ad campaigns, google, facebook and Instagram ads, we do the social media posting emails, integrations, automations, all of those. But at the center, the pinnacle and the cornerstone of our marketing strategy is SEO. And if you're not familiar with SEO, seo stands for search engine optimization. So back to that kind of user journey I talked about. What do people do? They go to Google. So if you're on the second to third to fifth page of Google, nobody's going to find you.
Speaker 2:So SEO the goal of SEO is to get your website and your Google listing up on that first page for a lot of great keywords. So if you're a functional medicine doctor, you for sure should be showing up for functional medicine in Colorado Springs or wherever you're at. So SEO is that pinnacle point, because the most trusted platform to grow your practice is Google. That's the most trusted platform where people are going to go. They might see something on social, they might read an email or a blog, but in the end, when they're looking for a practitioner or a provider, they're going to go to Google, and so that's what we center on and then everything else supports that. It's very much like back to functional medicine or just our health in general. It's getting to that root cause, fixing the foundation which raises. It's like the tide that raises all the boats, right, you start seeing symptoms going away because you're taking care of your gut health, because you're you know you're getting good sleep, you're getting good exercise Right right, right.
Speaker 1:There's a cascading health effect, just like a cascading negative effect can happen and that's just good.
Speaker 2:Marketing strategy is keeping all of those things in mind. I need a great puzzle. I need a full puzzle. I have clients that want to look at one puzzle piece and go, this isn't working and throw it out. We can't really do that. That's like throwing. You know what? I'm not sleeping. Well, let's throw that one out or give it a shot. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so really, seo.
Speaker 2:The problem with SEO is it takes a lot of time, it's terribly slow, and I will never set up some kind of unrealistic expectation that we're going to solve all your problems in a month. If somebody comes to me and says, hey, I got to turn the ship around, or else I'm going to have to close my doors in a month or two, I tell them don't hire me, keep that money. And so you can go on a little bit longer, because I can't solve anybody's problems in a month or two. It's just like you know, I'm 45. The problems that I have now, you know my knee or a little bit of extra weight that I need to get rid of. I didn't get it overnight, so I'm not going to get rid of it overnight.
Speaker 1:I think that's interesting, though, because, as a small business owner, we don't know these things, and so you know, for me, I've always avoided the SEO stuff because, for the reason that you just mentioned, I look at it, and every time somebody talks about something, you hear the same thing Well, it takes time, and you're like, well, ok, what does that mean? You know, you think yourself you're getting into this black hole because there's no, nobody can guarantee you anything, nobody can can give you even a point to stand on to say, well, you can expect this at this sort of point, and everything costs a bunch of money. So you're just like, well, okay, how does this make any sense, Unless maybe you've got the perspective of seeing it work and realize that, well, sometimes things do take a lot of time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and there's there's KPIs that we want to meet at each kind of benchmark point, right, and so a lot of and that's the other thing. Seo is so ambiguous, right, it's. So. There's so many things that you can do on the backend and there's a lot of agencies out there saying they're doing SEO and then all they're doing is they're doing a simple listing management service, which you do not need a marketing agency to do listing management. There's so many platforms that you can do that for 30 to 50 bucks a month.
Speaker 2:But I can tell you this just doing listing management is not going to move the needle for SEO. So this is if you have a company out there or you're looking to hire a company, here's the three things that you need to ask that company what they're doing for SEO. Say every month what are you doing for technical SEO? What SEO content are you writing? And then, what are you doing for my local SEO? So that's the three parts to a good comprehensive SEO program technical content and local. All of those things that we have a strategy that we've specifically created for functional, integrative and obviously that's a very general term for really anything in the health industry as far as yeah, why don't you get into so?
Speaker 1:a lot of our listeners are new and they're coming into this just looking to find answers for health. But when we talk about functional medicine, why don't you talk about the range of services that you're dealing with?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely so. Functional medicine is really just a super general term for non-allopathic medicine. So you've got traditional medicine over here where there's a symptom and you give. You know it's kind of a pill.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, obviously there's great things about traditional medicine mindset, but but functional medicine's goal is to get to the root cause. So there's a lot of different kind of nuances within functional medicine. Nuances within functional medicine. Integrative medicine tends to pull in more kind of technical modalities where maybe they're doing, you know, they'll do a lot of IV therapy, they're going to do a lot of red light therapy and and there's just, you know, multiple different things within energy and vibrations and electricity. You know, because we're, our bodies, are very electrical and so there's a lot that you can do with that. So integrative tends to pull in a lot of those modalities, whereas strictly functional medicine doctor is going to be more let's, let's do some deep lab testing and really get to you know more than just what your traditional primary care doctor is going to do. Let's really dig down and see what's going on in your blood. Kind of the motto of a functional medicine doctor is we don't guess, we test, and then they can work with your full lifestyle. So it's going to be diet, it's going to be exercise, it's going to be sleep. Some of them really delve into more emotional, spiritual things, as we are very you know, it's very holistic as far as our bodies go.
Speaker 2:So you've got MDs that are functional medicine. You got integrative that's they integrative does a lot of holistic cancer care or care support, and then you also have acupuncture. You've got chiropractor. You've got all the way to you know some more of the more East, very Eastern type medicine and obviously we'll help anybody because we understand the whole gamut as far as that goes. So we also actually help a lot of direct primary care practices as well, where they're still traditional but they're offering a medical membership. Basically. So you can you pay, just like you know, for Netflix, you're paying a monthly to watch shows on Netflix. The same goes for DPC, where you pay to get direct, quick access to your primary care doctor.
Speaker 1:So, as a marketing business, how do you focus your practice, if you will, on this topic, rather than just you know, marketing is marketing.
Speaker 2:Yeah for sure. So I hear a lot of times say a functional medicine practice or acupuncture clinic, they had a marketing agency, but they just had to take so much time to educate the marketing agency and what they actually do, because it is still unique in our society and our culture. So one of the things that we have to offer is we understand functional medicine and all of the peripheral things. So when we write content, say for SEO, there's not a lot of back and forth with the doctor. I hear all the time I get you know, today I had a bunch of approvals on content and they said this looks great, this is perfect, and these are hard to please doctors when it comes to content.
Speaker 1:So what you have the vocabulary down, you have the context down and you don't have to learn the topic in order to exactly things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, in the end, in the end, seo is seo, sure, running great google ads is is going to be the same um, but um, the you know the thing that separates us one we have comprehensive, uh, personalized. Everybody gets a unique strategy depending on their clinic, depending on the area that they're, that they're reaching, so nobody's shoved into a template box or anything like that. But we also understand, you know, we understand what they do, who their ideal new audience is and how to reach them consistently.
Speaker 1:So give me an example of a client that came to you and you know it was sort of their, you know remarkable story For sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, actually, a clinic. We have, you know, practices and clients all over the country. I don't think we have any international currently, but you know all over the country. But somebody actually pretty close to me actually he's my doctor a functional medicine practice in Woodland Park which is just adjacent to Colorado Springs. They came to us. They tried some other kind of fly-by-night marketing strategies that promised that they were going to get you know, the 30 new patients in 30 seconds for 30 cents. You know it's that magic pill concept which clearly didn't work. So they sunk a bunch of money into that and just wasted cost. So they came to us kind of hesitant. Of course there's a lot of persona around marketing that you know, we're kind of the used cars, used car salesmen of the digital world and so we, you know we never ask anybody to sign a contract, we just go month to month to earn that trust. We don't have any hidden fees. We get back to people very quickly.
Speaker 2:So we started working for them and at that time so they offered a high ticket functional medicine kind of program. So they were helping people with severe autoimmune disease, lyme disease, just really entrenched. So their program was a little higher cost because it needed to be, you know, a lot of time. So when they came to us they were getting less than one new patient a month. Now, one new patient obviously would provide a good bit of money for them because the program was a little more expensive. So before they started with us, you know one, maybe they would get 10 welcome calls, something like that kind of discovery calls that were turning into less than one patient a month. After about eight months working with us they were consistently hitting 10 new patients a month. So you know that didn't sound like a terrible lot obviously, but for them that was monstrous growth, right, I had another clinic in Boston and also their clients are not a one time shopper.
Speaker 1:Generally you have somebody. If you're doing your job right, you've got. You end up getting friends and family out of them and they come back multiple times.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's something that we call the lifetime value of the patient. So, it's rarely. Hopefully it's not just that first you know first appointment or the first program, but you're going to have them. Generally in functional medicine you'll have a patient for two plus years. So it's important to understand, and you know in any business what's the lifetime value of your client. So that's you want to calculate that when you're deciding okay, how much am I going to spend on my marketing? What's it cost to acquire this new client or patient?
Speaker 2:There was another clinic in Boston and they had more of a membership kind of a functional medicine membership model, and when they came to us they were getting about 15 to 20 new members a month. In that, after I think it's five, six months, they were getting 100 new members a month working with us. Obviously that's a lower cost, right, and they would kind of they had a membership model and they would move that if they had more severe issues they would move them into more of that, you know, more intense program. So, yeah, a of different things there. In the end the thing that really gets me jazzed up is I'm helping practitioners, help people like I was helped. There's this hopelessness we get, you know, we get told well, you're just old, you just got to get used to the pains and the tired.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, this is just. This is just normal. It Unfortunately normal, but it doesn't have to be who. You are right, and so often the tests that get run, we get put into this normal. Well, everybody I talk to feels bad. So the normal is bad.
Speaker 2:Like I want to be better than normal, I want to thrive, and so I love it when we're helping, you know, we're helping a client, and I see testimonials coming in or Google reviews coming in.
Speaker 2:Where they were hopeless, they had no, you know, they just kind of given up and this was their last, you know, kind of their last ditch effort, and now all of a sudden they're sleeping at night, their anxiety is going down, they're dropping weight that they could never drop, you know, maybe they're they're decreasing weight that they could never drop. You know, maybe they're they're decreasing their diabetes medication or even getting off of it, and so you know, and so I take a little bit of that because I brought that person in so I get to facilitate life change. Obviously I could talk about marketing all day long, but really my passion is let's change the health of our communities by getting to the root cause you know of, okay, what's actually going on, and then let's educate people on, hey, what you put in your mouth is going to cause you to feel certain things you know, so all of that's important, so I get jazzed about that.
Speaker 1:I know that's fantastic. Well, we're just about short on time. So this is the part where you get to tell everybody how to get ahold of you.
Speaker 2:Oh, would love to chat with anybody. If you're out there and you have, you have a business, you have a practice, even if it's not functional medicine. I would love to just give you some advice. I make a a free website evaluation video, very specifically focused on SEO, really as a way to educate and to tell people hey, here's some things that you can do, whether you hire us or not. So if you go to our website it's functional med marketing comm, functional med marketing comm and you can reach out to me there. I've got my cell numbers on there, there's forms, my email you can just reach out and say hey, I'd love to chat, I'd love to get your perspective on my website. That's something I'd like to offer for free, is it's? I do about a 10 minute 10 to 15 minute website evaluation at no cost.
Speaker 1:Nice Well, andrew, it's been a pleasure speaking with you and you know as much as I'm all about. You know the total picture. I think this is an important facet and we need to support our practitioners and let them practice their medicine.
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely, Joe. I thank you so much for the opportunity to be here. It's been a pleasure.
Speaker 1:Absolutely Well. This has been another edition of the Healthy Living Podcast. I'm your host, joe Grumbine, and I thank you for all your support. We'll see you next time.
