Activate Your Practice Podcast
The Activate Your Practice Podcast is hosted by the Chairman & Founder of Activator Methods, Dr. Arlan Fuhr. This podcast will cover a variety of subjects. Dr. Fuhr will interview guests from different backgrounds and professions, as well as talk about his 50+ years in chiropractic care.
Activate Your Practice Podcast
"Outmarket the Competition" with Special Guest Nick Doyle
When was the last time you calculated what a new patient is truly worth to your practice? In this eye-opening conversation with marketing expert Nick Doyle, author of the bestselling "Outmarket the Competition," we explore a revolutionary approach to marketing that's transforming how businesses think about customer acquisition.
Nick reveals why most marketing strategies fail: they focus exclusively on either brand building or performance metrics, missing the powerful synergy created when both work together. "Brand marketing is trust," Nick explains, drawing parallels to the branded products we instinctively choose every day. Meanwhile, performance marketing helps you "fish where the fish are" by targeting those actively seeking your services. The magic happens when these approaches combine.
The conversation takes a fascinating turn when Nick introduces his lifetime value framework—a sophisticated yet practical model that uses patient profitability to determine appropriate marketing spend. Rather than arbitrarily setting monthly budgets, Nick advocates calculating what a new patient is actually worth to your practice, then using that figure to inform acquisition costs. While the math might seem daunting at first, the principles can be applied by any practice that understands its basic patient metrics: visit frequency, average cost, and treatment duration.
What makes this approach particularly valuable for chiropractors? As Nick points out, local businesses often have an advantage since they're targeting a defined geographical area rather than competing nationally. The key is overcoming personal bias—designing marketing that resonates with patients rather than what appeals to the practitioner.
Ready to transform your practice marketing? Listen now and discover why Nick's book has become a bestseller across multiple business categories. The concepts may be advanced, but the potential impact on your practice growth is well worth the learning curve.
Hi, I'm Dr Arlen Ford, the chairman and founder of Activator Methods International. Welcome to Activate your Practice podcast. And today I'm honored to have a young author with us that we've known for a long time. We knew his dad well through chiropractic economics and then he works there also, but he wrote a book called Outmarket the Competition, and when my wife read it she said we have to interview him. That is a book worth reviewing. So, hi, nick, it's nice to have you. Nick Doyle is our guest today. Nice to have you here.
Speaker 2:Thank you, it's wonderful to be here and that's high praise coming from Judy.
Speaker 1:Well, that's like the good housekeeping stample of approval. So tell me, to start with, why did you write the book?
Speaker 2:I wrote the book because I couldn't find a text that combined two things that I think are pivotal in marketing. One, the combination of brand and performance marketing. A lot of groups excel in just brand marketing. A lot of groups excel in just performance marketing, but in order to truly out-market you need to combine the two. And then the second piece is that a lot of companies just take a budget-based approach to marketing. You know, with X dollars a month to spend as opposed to a profitability-based approach, what is the average profitability of a customer and therefore how much might you be able to spend to acquire the next customer?
Speaker 1:So what's the most common mistake you see companies make in their marketing?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it aligns with those two things, to be honest with you, and that's why I was looking for a text that had them. One is that a lot of groups either go heavy on the brand stuff and then they don't understand why it's not working from a performance standpoint, or they go heavy on the performance stuff and they don't understand why they're not building the brand equity in time or over time.
Speaker 1:What's the value of brand marketing?
Speaker 2:Brand marketing is trust. You woke up this morning. You brushed your teeth with branded toothpaste. You put on a branded watch. You got in a branded car. You make those decisions based upon trust. You know that is going to work. You're not always in the market for those items, Yet when you go to make a decision, you are familiar with those brands because of that brand-based marketing. And that's the importance of branding.
Speaker 1:Over time, so Activator would be a brand.
Speaker 2:Exactly A very strong one.
Speaker 1:And someone said one time you know you need some competition because otherwise you're going to be like Kleenex.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I know, you know this lost a lawsuit around Kleenex and the term Kleenex, which was their brand term. You're exactly right. Same thing with Band-Aid, et cetera.
Speaker 1:Everything was a Band-Aid, correct?
Speaker 2:And that was their actual Too strong of a brand, if you will.
Speaker 1:So what's the value of performance marketing?
Speaker 2:Performance marketing. On the other side of the coin, Performance marketing is to optimize for the inbound inquiry, so those that are in the market for that product or service at a specific amount of time. To put it bluntly, it's fishing where the fish are, and if you can do both of them together you can build that trust over time which builds share of mind. You know the cognitive ability, the Daniel Kahneman type stuff, and then you can also optimize for those who are looking for a solution right now.
Speaker 1:Why is it important for companies to utilize brand and performance marketing?
Speaker 2:Exactly that. It's the ability to fish where the fish are. It's the ability to optimize for those who are looking for a solution right now. It's also the ability, from a brand perspective, to build the trust which allows for those individuals to know your brand and therefore come to you when they are looking to make a decision.
Speaker 1:Talk to me about the lifetime value framework.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this is probably the most complicated part of the book Heavy math piece here but the basic concept is using the profitability or average profitability of a customer to inform what you can pay to acquire the next customer. So, as opposed to taking a static approach to monthly marketing budgets or marketing budgets in general, where you have X dollars amount to spend in channel and to spend in a time period, et cetera, you'd actually inform that spend based upon profitability. You'd actually inform that spend based upon profitability. So you know you can spend X amount to acquire a customer based on how that average on average, how profitable that customer is to the business. You use that as the guardrail for the spend and you ramp spend up accordingly.
Speaker 1:What if a company does not have a good analytics or reporting? Can it still utilize the framework?
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and it's also a good excuse to get that in place. If you don't have that type of reporting or understanding of your customer base, it's something that you probably should have, knowing how profitable you are on a customer by customer basis. So it would be a good call to action in order to get that done.
Speaker 1:So what do you have to do to?
Speaker 2:do that In order to get that understanding in place. Yeah, yeah, it starts from the bottom up. If you think about the marketing funnel and most people are familiar with the marketing funnel, which is impression-based at the top and then post-conversion at the bottom Understanding the post-conversion metrics, what is the average customer value? What is the average margin for that customer and therefore the average profitability? You move backwards up the funnel. So what does the average order value look like for an individual customer? What are our conversion rates from a lead to customer perspective? Then what are our conversion rates from an impression to lead perspective, and then what are our CPMs at the top of the funnel. It takes a a lot of work, but it's totally worth it well, let let me, though.
Speaker 1:I want to make this. Uh, what, how do you, how do you get this to the chiropractic level of a practice?
Speaker 2:I mean, yeah, sure, it's a great example. So for a chiropractic practice, I would look at what is the average profitability of a patient. So once I get a patient in and I either get them on a regular schedule or I get them on a treatment plan, what does that profitability look like over time? And once you understand the average profitability of a patient, theoretically, based upon the framework, you should be able to take that number and go to market to use it to inform, capturing new patients. So let's use like a local-based approach and there's lots of local marketing opportunities. Of course, doctors of chiropractic are way more familiar with this than I am. You can attend events, you can become part of the better business bureau, you can use pay-per-click, you can use social media. All of those cost something. So once the doctor of chiropractic understands how much the average patient is profiting them, they can base, base their budgets and channel decisions on those metrics.
Speaker 1:This seems like it's a little complicated for the average chiropractor. Now, in business I would think they would have marketing teams that would do that kind of thing. So can we do that as an average practitioner though?
Speaker 2:You should be able to. I mean, I would think that if you were to sit across the table from a doctor of chiropractic such as yourself, you could tell me how often does the average patient come to you? Eight times, 10 times. What is the average visit cost? $100, $200. What is the time period over which that occurs? One year, two years or something like that? That's going to give you the average revenue per customer. What do you make on that patient?
Speaker 1:In other words, what's a new patient worth Correct? That's exactly it. Yes, we all think we know our customers. What do companies get wrong in this respect?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So this is another Daniel Kahneman reference personal bias. People do not make rational decisions as much as we think we would. So we're here in Vegas. I can give you an example. You go down to play roulette. They have all the numbers up on the roulette wheel that have shown for the last 10 tries, or whatever it happens to be. That's a cognitive bias exercise. The odds of the wheel do not change, but if you look at that readout and you see 10 blacks, you're absolutely positive it's going to be a red next time, even though the odds are exactly the same. So what people don't understand or don't take into account most of the time is their own personal bias. When they're designing the ads, when they're using the channels, they think about how they digest media, what images resonate with them, what messages they would act on, as opposed to what their customer will be acting on would act on, as opposed to what their customer will be acting on.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of quotes in the book. Obviously you felt these were important. Can you shed a little light on why you included these?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. I'm a big proponent of the concept that we stand on the shoulders of giants. These are not theories, these are proven practices. This is what Procter and Gamble uses. This is what Nike uses. These are what these big Capital One uses, these big proven brands are using. The quotes are there to show that this has been refined over time and that it does work. If you have the discipline and you will execute. The key word is discipline, discipline.
Speaker 1:So how has the book been received?
Speaker 2:Honestly, it's gone fantastic. What beyond my wildest dreams? Bestseller in multiple categories on Amazon, which is very cool, including small business, research, advertising, small business in general. It's awesome that it's adding value. That was the whole intent.
Speaker 1:Well, I I'm still coming as an average practitioner out there that's wanting to build a practice. Is there an easy, simple way for them to start this process?
Speaker 2:There is. I think it would be twofold. One, if you have an established practice, understanding what that average profitability looks like from a customer standpoint and therefore understanding what a new patient is worth to you from a customer standpoint and therefore understanding what a new patient is worth to you, and if a new patient is worth $1,000 to you and you know you're going to make a net perspective $500, I'm using round numbers here you should be able to spend $500 to break even on acquiring that new patient. So, with that in mind, where can you go and deploy that capital in the most effective manner? Is it social media marketing? Is it local events, you know? Is it pay-per-click marketing, et cetera.
Speaker 1:Do you have some successful practices that you're advising today that use certain sorts of media that really have been successful?
Speaker 2:It's a great question we don't work with on the individual practice level. You know we have worked with businesses that obviously are working with the chiropractic profession in general, but we have seen this be successful on the local level. In fact, it's easier to execute on the local level, and the reason being is you have a finite pond. You know, if you're attempting to advertise to the entire United States, that's 360 million people. If you're attempting to only advertise to the Dallas-Fort Worth area, that's a lot easier of a task.
Speaker 1:I like the concept. I just want to kind of break it down, you know. So I'm a practitioner sitting out there and I want to do this, and I've had many practice management people that were friends. Now, some of them and this is very interesting they would only take certain people because they said only 20% of the people are going to be successful anyway, and so they quickly jettisoned the 80%. I don't know if you found that to be true.
Speaker 2:Two comments on that. One is a little bit of context. The book starts with a, with a introduction, and the introduction states that this is a. This is a 301 level text, to use the college grading system, if you will. It is not meant as an introduction to marketing. It's not meant as a here's where you start type text. It's very advanced stuff, quite honestly. So unless you are a practice that is stable financially and has set growth targets, or unless you're perhaps a practice network, it probably is too complex.
Speaker 1:Well, I really appreciate it because it looks like you stepped into an area here that nobody has stepped very far into or done much with, and so I think there's a lot of opportunity.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, thank you, it's been received that way, which is just wonderful.
Speaker 1:Yeah, was it among chiropractors or among everybody that was so well-received?
Speaker 2:Among everyone. Yeah, quite honestly, the chiropractic profession was a small subset. The book is not aimed at chiropractic, it's aimed at SMB in general.
Speaker 1:Okay, well, I want to thank you because this brings a whole new look at marketing, and so I recommend you read Outmarket the Competition, and I think it probably was a hard job to get this down to this level. I wouldn't recommend it, right? Well, nick Doyle, thank you for your work and thank you for being on the podcast.
Speaker 2:Wonderful. Thank you, doctor.
Speaker 1:Thank you.
