Episode 68 - March Marketing Madness: SEO, Google Ads, Web Design, & Social Media With Marketing4E

There are still many things you need to know to grow your business. Dr. Harbir Sian is back to help you complete your journey in mastering the marketing arena. He welcomes our guests, Payton Karch, Brynn Low, Diana Prakash, and Tyler Kemp, to share their expertise in digital marketing. They are the leaders of different areas of knowledge at Marketing4ECPs. Listen in on this "Final Four" episode as they discuss the four key facets of digital marketing: Web design, SEO, Google Ads, and Social Media.

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March Marketing Madness: SEO, Google Ads, Web Design, And Social Media With Marketing4ECPs

This is the final part of our March Marketing Madness. I took it to another level. I have four amazing guests and since this is the final episode, I thought I call this the Final Four of our March Madness. All four of our wonderful guests are part of Marketing4ECPs. If you're an eye care professional, I can't imagine you haven't heard of Marketing4ECPs, but there are people in the audience who are from other industries. Marketing4ECPs is a marketing agency that caters specifically to eyecare professionals, hence the 4ECPs.

If you happen to be tuning in from other industries, I have friends and colleagues from other places that are tuning in for the marketing advice. There are going to be tons and tons of value that's applicable across industries and transcends the boundaries of certain professions. Just because the name is for ECP, it doesn't mean it's not for you.

We are going to dive into four different topics and do our best to bring the most important facts and features of each of these to you. We're going to talk about SEO, web design, social media and Google Ads. These are all things you expressed on social media that you wanted to know about. Make sure you absorb all of this information because you're going to be able to put it into action right away. Without further ado, let me introduce our amazing guests. First, we have Payton Karch. Please introduce yourself.

I work on the Google Ads aspect for Marketing4ECPs. I've been doing it for a few years. I have a background in engineering but always lean towards statistical analysis and data analytics. That's how I ended up at Marketing4ECPs. I've been loving it so far.

All of that you said, especially the data and statistical analysis, specifically, multiple people have messaged me wanting to learn more about. There are a lot of nerdy, geeky people out there, including me. Please feel free to dive deep into that when you get a chance. Next, we have Brynn Low.

I'm the Manager of SEO at Markerting4ECPs. If you don't know what SEO is, that's Search Engine Optimization. I make stuff show up better in Google.

Next is Diana Prakash.

It’s Diana Maleshri now. I am the Manager of Graphic Design and Art Direction with Marketing4ECPs. I've been a designer, but I've been showing off my expertise in Marketing4ECPs for years.

If anybody's seen the designs that you come up with, I can vouch for that in my experience. I should've mentioned this off the top, a little disclaimer. We use Marketing4ECPs for our practices. We're in the process of getting our websites built and polished up, but I'm very happy with the process and product so far. Finally, in our Final Four, we have Tyler Kemp.

Social media is the chance to tell your story and enhance your voice.

I am the Manager of Brand Engagement. Our Brand Engagement Department encapsulates our social media, email marketing projects and objectives. We realized about a few years ago that the Email and the Social Media Department were having a lot of the same meetings with the same clients and we realized it could be a much more cohesive experience and an overall better branding experience.

While we all think of social media a lot as optometrists and business owners, I don't think we think about email marketing enough. To start with one specific point here, my understanding of this all is the one common denominator to all of these things, SEO, Google Ads, social media, all of this is you need to have a good website. That's ground zero. Diana, if you wouldn't mind starting us off, what makes a good website? What should a business owner look to have?

A good design will help you with creating the first impression. Without that first impression or brand consistency, you're going to lose trust. When the user comes into your site and they see a bad design or outdated information, they're going to be like, "They don't care about their business. They don't invest in themselves enough. Why should I go invest my money in their business?" We don't want people to think that way and that's when the branding comes into play.

Branding will help you get recognition. It will give you a competitive edge because your competitors are already doing this. When you work on your brand, it shows and builds trust. It makes you look like you know what you're doing with your business. You take care of your business, customers and patients. All of that impression is so important when it comes to design. That's why a good website is so vital.

It is that first impression of, "What is this business and person about?" It's like when you're dressed up to go to an event, if you show up disheveled, people will be like, "This guy doesn't care to show up for everybody else." Are there any other specific technical features, whether it's the look of the website or the user experience that we should be looking to make sure we have?

The first thing that comes to my mind is good navigation. When someone comes into your site, they shouldn't be clicking around too much to find the information they're looking for. It should be so easy. “If I want to know about this practice, I need to go click on the About Us button and then all the information related to that practice should drop down in that navigation.”

If they're finding information about the location, maybe the person already knows enough about this practice and they're looking for the information to make a phone call and book an appointment. That information should be front and center and easy to find wherever they are on the website. Having solid navigation is one of the most important features to have on your website.

The second thing I can think of is responsiveness. We live in a day and age where we have so many different types of devices. One website can be accessed from a mobile, tablet and desktop, that's just the device. We have to think about the different screen sizes of all these devices. The information should not be shorted anywhere. It should be consistent and the images or videos that we use should be responsive on all the screens.

The next thing is the style guide, the consistency of the brand. When they come to your site, they look at your logo and where the information is placed and how it's placed. The voice and colors of the brand, the consistency of the fonts, how it's laid out, all of that convert them to trust. The style guide and the style of your whole brand are so important. Those are the top three things I can think of.

Those were all good pieces of information. This is a first-world problem, but two pet peeves when I go on any website are, one, it takes too long to load. If I click on it, I'm like sitting there waiting for it. This is a 2022 problem. The other one is when I'm going to a website on my phone and I'm trying to zoom in on stuff, but then it moves and it's not reactive to the device. I'm like, "I have to go to my desktop to use this website properly." That part is a first-world problem, but that's why we're here in this conversation.

TTTP 68 | Marketing Madness — Marketing Madness: Branding will help you get recognition and give you a competitive edge. It shows that you care about your customers, and that kind of impression is so important when it comes to design.

You'd be surprised, it's not a first-world problem. The page speed impacts how long a user stays on the website. When we're talking about the competitive edge, it's if your site is too slow, but your competitors' site doesn't look that great, but it performs better by loading faster, you're going to lose your conversion. That's why equally optimizing your website design, not making it look pretty but optimizing it to convert your leads is so important by making the page speed better.

Once we have a good functional website, responsive, usable on different platforms and devices, what's the next step? We got to make sure we're optimized for Google. Would SEO be the next big topic that we'd want to touch on?

A lot of that ties into SEO well. I'm glad Diana brought up having a responsive website on mobile because Google does something called mobile-first indexing. All that means is when Google is deciding where to put your website in the search results, they look at how your website appears on a cell phone versus on a desktop. It doesn't matter how good your website looks on a desktop because Google is not looking at that. It's looking at how it looks on a phone. That's important, as well as the page speed and things like that are crucial for SEO.

When we do SEO, we do a couple of different tactics. We can do things like blog posts, which helps your website show up for more search queries. The website is the foundation. If you don't have a good website like even for our clients, we won't be doing things like blog posts or anything like that because the website is the most important piece.

It's nice to know what Google is looking for. I was thinking of having a website that's functional in mobile for the user experience, but it's going to help us rank higher in SEO as well. What other things can a business owner do to make sure they're ranking higher organically?

There are a lot of tactics we use. I'm using Google to encompass all search engines because that's what 98% of people use. When Google is trying to rank different websites, all Google's algorithm is trying to understand how people use the internet and interact with websites. If you always keep in mind the user experience and how patients or customers are interacting with your website, then you should be doing well from a search engine optimization perspective. A lot of people think SEO is complicated and you have to do weird stuff that doesn't make any sense. It can get a little complicated, but if you remember the user, that SEO is pretty simple.

I tend to reference Jeff Bezos a lot and I know Google is not Bezos, but one of the things that I remembered hearing from him was that he always has the customer in mind. When he has a meeting, he has an empty seat and that's the customer seat, the person we're trying to think about. It makes sense for us as business owners to always have that in mind too. It's like, "Who is using this website? What is going to make this website most functional for that person?" You mentioned blogs. How important are blogs? Should everybody be writing blogs? How often should we be doing that?

For blog posts, we use them as a tactic to get the website rank for more of our keywords. By keywords, I mean search terms. Let's say you're an optometry practice and you have a page about eye exams. That page will probably show up if someone searches like, "Eye exam Toronto," if you're in Toronto. That page won't show up if someone is searching, "How often do I need an eye exam?" If we had a blog post that was about how often you need an eye exam, then your website is showing up for both those search terms. That's the idea of blog posts. It helps your website show up for more things.

I've heard conflicting advice on this. It's like blogs are dead. It's not important, but from an SEO perspective, it's still valuable for us to have. The more words we have on a page, the better. Are more words that we have on our website as a whole, the better?

Having multiple platforms provides you with a better opportunity to drive home your message.

Not necessarily. One thing to keep in mind with SEO is that Google doesn't rank a website as a whole. It ranks individual pages. One of the important things for SEO is to have your pages targeted to certain search terms. Using the eye exam example, all your different services, whether it's eye exams, a contact lens fitting or frame gallery, should all have their unique pages because Google will rank them separately. The same thing goes for blog posts. When we do blogs for our clients, they target very specific searches, which helps the individual pages show up better.

Overall, there are a lot of misconceptions about SEO. It's an intimidating topic overall as Google AdWords, which seems like a big black box for a lot of people. With SEO, maybe the key takeaway, at least here in the early stages of the conversation, is to keep it simple, think about your customer, the person who's going to be on the website and have the information for them.

A user-friendly website helps you rank better versus a less user-friendly website. That's important. The next natural topic is Google AdWords. Since we're talking about Google Ads, Payton, if you wouldn't mind jumping in here, what are maybe some simple high-level things that people should know about Google Ads?

We say that Google Ads are going to shine a spotlight on your website. If you have a website that's not good and you're sending traffic there, then people aren't going to take action and convert on your website, but if you have a website that's beautiful and well done, then those ads will shine a lot spotlight on that. You're going to get more traffic there. It all comes back to the website and making sure that is designed to be a good experience for the user.

My first recommendation is to make sure you're tracking what's valuable on your website and know what actions you want to deem valuable in terms of Google Ads. For us, it's typically phone calls, form submissions and button clicks to third-party appointment schedulers. With that, it's not as much of a black box. If we weren't tracking anything, we could say, "We're running Google Ads. This is how much we spent. This is how many clicks we got," but after that, we don't know what's happening once they get to the website.

We always want to make sure that we're tracking on the website and then we can look at what actions people are taking on the website. With Google Ads, you can get pretty granular with the actual levers that you can pull and target different locations, age ranges and genders. That's all data that are all available if you're tracking conversions. Otherwise, you're looking at clicks and then it's that black box and you don't know what's going on. I would always start by defining what is valuable for you on your website, what actions are valuable and then making sure that you have a way to track that.

On that note, as far as tracking and seeing conversions, one of the common conversations that I was having with some colleagues online and in-person is the action. If you have a brick-and-mortar business, you want people walking in the door or calling to book an appointment, however you might end that trail. How would someone track that conversion? I want as a business owner to track like that person clicked at and ended up walking through the door.

It's more difficult to track physical visits. We track a phone call and use programs that can record calls, do the call listening and are very powerful to know where people are coming from. Whether they're coming from a Google Ad or social post, we're able to track all of that. The other things we'd like to track are form submissions. We can track where they came from when someone submits a form.

Those are the two main things that we consider valuable and best for transparency of knowing exactly what ads someone clicked on, knowing how they got to our website and then filling out those forms, converting or making a phone call. Those are the two most important actions that we take on a website. It's more difficult to track stuff like a location page visit. It's a little vaguer if someone's looking at your location and they may or may not come to your practice. It's like the black box there.

I'll speak for myself, but there are other people out there. I would love to know that someone found me on Google and then walked in the door and somehow measure how many of those people ended up coming through the door, but that part is a hard thing to do.

Especially with more privacy laws, it's more difficult as well to do stuff like that.

Some of the features you're talking about or features that Marketing4ECPs offers are pretty cool and very powerful tools to be able to get down in the nitty-gritty and figure out how many people are interacting with us and coming through. How about somebody who's not yet working with Marketing4ECPs? Are there numbers that I should look at or data that would give me some ideas of how much of those people are converting?

If you know what actions you want people to be taken on your website and what you can deem as a conversion, then you can import those conversions back into Google Ads and then it boils down to a conversion rate or a cost per conversion. Those are the metrics that we're going to optimize for in Google Ads. We would start with a bunch of different what we call ad groups. We're targeting eye care, eye exam, an eye doctor and keywords like that. As time goes by, we make some optimizations and see which one of those keywords are delivering the conversions and which ones are delivering the actions that we deem valuable.

If we are spending money on a keyword, for example, an eye doctor and we've seen that it hasn't delivered any conversions, then we're going to pause that. We're going to allocate that budget somewhere else in Google Ads. Google Ads is also good. Based on those keywords, it shows you a market share of how many clicks or impressions you are showing up for. You can say, "This one ad group is performing well, but we're only at 20% market share. Let's reallocate budget there." There are a lot of metrics that can show you where you can spend money and what you're spending money on that's producing valuable results.

Your niche is data analytics and you have to analyze that data a little bit and reapply what you've learned from that. Maybe a bit of a basic question here. For an optometry clinic that's in a major city or a fairly large city, what do you think is a reasonable monthly ad spend for Google?

I would always start between $500 and $1,000. Google will show you all those metrics, those cost per conversion and market share metrics. Let's say you start with $1,000. You can say, "We're only showing up 20% of the time, but on the back end, we're seeing this is delivering us this many customers or patients," then you can go in after and be like, "This has been valuable to us and there's more room to increase our budget." Realistically saying that it's a similar cost per conversion because you can expand your location and get more people, but as you expand out from a practice, you're not going to get the same return from someone who's 20 miles away as someone who's 2 miles away.

Another question with that cost per conversion, is there a dollar value there that's a good number, a way to track how much it costs you to get that person to call you or something like that? Is there a way to track that type of thing?

Focus on the things that are important to you.

Work back from an estimated average patient revenue. If you say, "Our average new patients going to bring us $300," then you want to say, "What percentage are we looking to spend on marketing? What conversion rates are we getting if someone makes a phone call?" You work backward from that to get to get a cost of how much you're willing to pay for a new customer. For us, between that's $20 and $30 mark is what we're looking at as a good cost per conversion.

It’s as if that patient was worth $300. That's on that one visit, not their lifetime value. Is that how we're assessing this?

Yes, it's on the one visit.

It'll depend. Every clinic is going to be different. Some are maybe little higher-end clinics and their value may be $500 or $600. Would you say that it's safer to look at the absolute dollar value $20, $30 or should it be 10% of that customer's value to your office? What's the better way of looking at that?

The metric there is how much marketing budget you want to spend if you're looking to grow, might want to spend a little more and acquire more patients, but if you're looking to maintain, then you might want that number to be a little lower.

Tyler, the different types of marketing and advertising, wouldn't mind coming in on this one. Social media and email marketing, if you were to rank them 1 and 2, which one would be the more important one to you?

Both have slightly different goals but moving to social media is the first one that I would step to. As the brand engagement department, we're what's known as an enhanced service within Marketing4ECPs. It's a cool opportunity to utilize all the great stuff that has already been talked about. Utilizing the information already created on the blogs and the great design present on the website, we can pull all that back into creating a nice social media grid and a social media presence that talks about the same thing.

You have different goals for social media and emails. Social media is the chance to tell your story, work on a long-term branding play and enhance the voice that you've already worked hard with the design and content team to get right on your website and pull that onto social media where your patients are. It's like another search engine that way. Whereas email is that way to remind the people that you've worked so hard to get through all of these other methods to come back to you. You've got your patient list and it's, "Remember this? Is it time to come back to us again?"

In the same sense, we can be utilizing some of that great social media and content to either remind people or drive them back to your website. Promoting some of the blogs that we've written in emails is a great way to deliver some interesting content in your email and, at the same time, drive people back to your website and enhance the quality of the SEO program that you have.

The common theme here is bringing people back to the website. That's the key. With email marketing, is it better to do a weekly or monthly newsletter or reach out when something is going on? What's the better approach for an office or a business?

Having something consistent is always better across any of the enhanced services, such as social media and email. I hear a lot of questions of, "I don't always have something new in the practice happening this week. Do I have to talk about something?" That's the opportunity to talk more about your history. That's the chance to talk about the services that you offer. There are multiple things that you can do to enhance the trust that your patients have in you and that's telling your story. That's the peek behind the curtain of how things operate and introducing your team.

If you keep that consistent on both social media and email, then you have that chance to talk to your patients on multiple different platforms. It's the same theory that if you're driving home and you see a billboard for a company and then you see their bus bench ad and then you hear them on the radio, you're probably going to remember them when you get home, whether it's conscious or unconscious. It's the same thing that if you hit them on multiple platforms, you have a way better opportunity to drive home your message.

On that note again, with the email marketing, the newsletters or whatever this might be that we're sending out, somebody who may not be working with Marketing4ECPs yet, would you suggest that they're using something like a MailChimp, Constant Contact or something like that to arrange all of that?

Any of those are great. For people starting and doing it on their own MailChimp, it can be an easy one to work with. It comes down to your ability to look at the metrics the same way that Payton does, geeking out on that, looking at the data and analytics, that influence the next email you put out. You have to plan ahead of time, want to test out a few different topics with your patients and see what they respond to best. That will indicate what you should send out next time to try and receive a better open rate or click-through rate.

On social media, that's going to result in more engagements and people following your account. Any of those that are free or low-cost options to get on those are great. It comes down to, "Are you looking at the analytics that they're providing? Are you listening and responding to that?" The best thing about social media and email is that your patients tell you what they like.

You need to have a decent sample size before you can analyze that data and say, "This is working. That's working." Sending out one email and then sending out another six months later and then trying to analyze that data may not be as useful. On Facebook Ads, you can do this A/B testing. You can send out slightly different ads. Would you suggest doing that with an email blast as well? Maybe send 50% of your patients this one and 50% slightly different wording or something like that and see how that goes or is it better each time to send the same thing to people?

There are plenty of different methods. If you're doing it on your own, then maybe sending out the one, seeing how it performs and then trying a different topic the next time is always positive, but you can play around with it. The benefit of working with an agency, too, is that we have a team that we look at and say, "What's something that we haven't tried? Based on the analytics, is that something that we think would work for them?" I'm not going to say trial and error, but I'm going to say trial and see what works better because it's a long-term branding play on both social and email.

On social media, people use a certain filter or border around their picture, so everything looks very uniform. Is that something you recommend for businesses? Does it matter?

Be consistent in bringing out your message on a regular basis.

It matters in terms of the visual, but as we've done numerous times, it all goes back to the website. If what you're doing on the website is using those kinds of borders, lots of cool colors and maybe some different assets that have been designed for your specific branding, make sure to use those in the same way on social media. You want to make sure that it's consistent because if someone goes to your website and starts to learn a little bit about your services and business, a lot of customer behavior is then going to say, "Cool, but what are they doing lately?" I don't know when the website was made and they often go to social media for something like that.

If they arrive on your social media and it doesn't look the same as your website, they might question, "Is this the right business?" That might have them going and looking for one of your competitors instead because they're not confident in your overall branding. The visual is huge. We take a very focused approach to this to make sure that we don't focus on too many topics and just focus on the key ones that are important to you. The topics are the most important thing, but having that visual component and utilizing what's already been created for your website is going to be essential for that overall branding component.

It goes back to brand recognition because without consistency, there will be no brand recognition and it confuses them, leading to not trusting your overall business.

I feel like the one word that's been consistent through this whole conversation is consistency. One is being consistent with bringing out your message regularly, whether it's through emails or things like that. The other thing is consistency across platforms, making sure you look and sound the same in all of these different channels, so that's key.

It sounds like a lot of work for one person or a couple of business partners to say, "I got to make sure I build a good website and it got the right SEO. I'm doing the ads." This is a lot of stuff. Even for me, who's super active on a lot of these things, I can probably keep two of these things up above water for a while, but the other two are lagging. The short answer to this question would be, "Hire Marketing4ECPs." Anybody who wants to jump in on this one, do you have any suggestions or words of advice for somebody who's trying to start up their business and tackle all of these things by themselves?

If you can only do some of it, especially in your example, if you're a brand-new business, tactics like SEO and Google Ads will probably do a little bit better. For things like email, you don't have that patient base yet to be emailed. Things like Google Ads and SEO can help you get patients who aren't searching for a specific eye care practice or a specific business. You then can move into more branding strategies like email and social media.

When you have a solid design, you don't have to consistently go back and check if your design is working. You've created and established a voice and the way you were recognized. Going into Google Ads and SEO will help. You don't have to keep going back like, "I need to change my brand because this or that piece isn't working." It's not the case with branding. It's a matter of maintaining. If you're able to only balance two things at a time, then it would be Google Ads and SEO. Social media and branding will help move the boat along.

One of the biggest misconceptions when it comes to social media management is that you have to be on it every day to have an effective social media presence. It's always going to improve your chances of engaging with your audience if you're on there, responding to things and talking to people, but there are some great programs that you can schedule posts out well in advance.

With our program, we schedule out content for a quarter and that allows us to put a strategy in place where we can focus on a few topics that we want to nail home for our client. We can plan out over the next quarter when we're going to deliver those. Once it's set, it's monitoring and making sure that everything is going out properly, that things are being responded to and all of those types of things.

It doesn't necessarily have to be that you have to be on Instagram and Facebook every Tuesday and Thursday morning, coming up with a new topic. It takes a little bit of pre-planning, but it can be effective for business owners who don't necessarily have the time to be going back in weekly. Planning that ahead of time is almost more beneficial because then you can make sure your strategy is in place and it stays consistent with what you set out initially.

That's something I'm bad at. I'm one of those who's like, "I have an idea. I'm going to post it now." If I don't have another idea for days, I won't post anything. It's cool if you do it ahead of time so you can plan what messages and multiple messages in the same theme. That's good. In eye care, there are various niches and specialties. Other businesses have these different things, too, whether you're an accountant or a lawyer who specializes in something.

Let's take a dry eye, for example. That's something we do a lot of in our office. Let's say an office specializes in something like this. From each of your perspectives, if you wouldn't mind sharing a few words, what should I be doing as a practice that wants to lean into the dry eye from a website perspective? Diana, if we can start with you, what should I make sure I have?

The right information and visuals help with the topic you are talking about because dry eye is an umbrella term to talk about multiple things. Focusing on all at once and making it content-heavy wouldn't work. Giving people a lot of different visuals to understand, whether it's an animation, a video or an image, all those technical terms to be converted into layman terms to make it easy to understand will make the engagement in the website a lot better.

From a social media perspective, I'm going to go back to something you said in thinking about your audience and that Jeff Bezos's idea of keeping that seat open for who your client or who your patient or customer is. It's considering what's most interesting to them or perhaps when you're delivering that content about dry eye. What age, gender and income demographic are you speaking to? What content are you choosing specifically that's going to pique their interest?

If you're looking to speak to moms in their 30s and 40s, you're probably going to get some great impact if you talk about children and people who are their age and present something that's going to draw their interest in. When you get specific like that, it's keeping your audience in mind and who you're speaking to. Not just putting out something that makes sense to you as a doctor but something that would pull on the heartstrings and break it down simply to understand for who you're speaking to.

We're talking about dry eyes and there's a specific demographic I want to reach. With women in their 40s, should we be running ads to meet those people where they are? Is it Google or Facebook? What ads should we be running here?

Yes, running ads and specifying which target you're looking at. With topics like dry eye, you have to be a little leery of people doing research, which isn't always the worst thing, but you don't want to necessarily drive traffic through your Google Ads to someone who isn't going to bring you a return. You always have to be leery of that and what keywords are showing up for.

The biggest thing for anyone on social media is not about reaching the most people. It's about reaching the right people.

Someone searching for an eye exam or eye doctor is looking for an exam so that it's easy to know that you might get some potential revenue there, but with dry eye, you don't know if they're doing research or what phase they are in. You have to be a little more careful with what keywords you're using. With what ages and genders you're targeting, if you're targeting those specific people who are more likely to have dry eyes, then you're better off targeting those people than targeting everyone. You're going to get people who might be doing research or might not be as interested in it.

The way we word those ads, should they be a little bit more direct and even potentially to use like, "Do your eyes burn and feel like they're going to fall out of your head?" Should we be more gentle and subtle about it? What's a better way to approach that?

The biggest thing is making sure the people who can see those ads know that you service that and that is the main purpose of your website. If they're doing research, we don't want an ad that says, "Learn more about dry eye." It's like, "I'll click this ad. I'm going to learn more about dry eye," but no intention of ever calling you or filling out a form. That messaging is important there like, "Book your dry eye appointment." You want call-to-actions like that where you're calling people to contact you or fill out a form, make a phone call and not giving them a wishy-washy, "Learn about dry eye, " or see some dry eye images thing.

I'd love to open it up for you. Are there any last things that you'd like to share on your specific areas of expertise that you feel business owners should know? How can people reach you after that?

The biggest thing for anyone on social media is that it's not about reaching the most people. It's about reaching the right people. That comes down to posting with a purpose. When you're creating content, you have to think about who you want it to reach and that you're using hashtags that are going to group your content into the right places. Gaining 100 followers from somewhere in a different country is going to be so much less valuable to you than gaining one follower of someone who might live in your community.

It's about the right people, not the most people. If you can put a real focus behind that with your content, targeting and overall plan, you're going to be so much more effective and see it drive a lot more engagement than you would to try and get as many followers as possible or as many likes as possible. The vanity metrics aren't the important thing there. It's about speaking to the people who are going to become your patients.

Since you're talking about that, I thought of another question. What's your stance on influencers for an office? Our office is in Surrey, BC. Should we be looking to use an influencer? What's the right approach for that?

It can be impactful at the right point in your social media strategy. If you are a practice with 100 followers or less, paying an influencer or a micro-influencer to be promoting your business, you might not see the same impact as you would. If you get a solid foundation to your profile behind there first and when people come to your profile, based on the recommendations or the push from these influencers, they have a breadth of content to read and find value in it.

It depends on the stage and also on the influencer. If it makes sense, absolutely. If you are an optometrist and you're using a food influencer in your area, their audience might not be your audience. It all comes back down to who you're trying to reach again and that influencer's audience is going to be relevant to yours because if they aren't, those are going to be a lot more of the most followers versus the right followers again.

Thank you. Any other last words that you guys would like to share?

When people talk about branding, people take it so personally that they see it as a representation of who they are and that is what should be represented in their website and their social media platform and everything but most of the time, it doesn't work that way. When we put it from a user experience standpoint and empathy in place, the brand is for the people who are going to interact with it. It will be the final end-user, which is your patients or people who come into your website. A dad looking to book an appointment for their kids or if the kids trying to book appointments for their parents.

We have to think about the end-user in mind when we are building the brand. It's not just about the representation of who the client is. That is always missed and sometimes it's an oversight. It's not a matter of not having empathy. When we explain it to people this way, they start to understand, "I'm not the one who goes to my website every day to book an appointment or find the location of my practice. It's my patient. It should cater to their needs as opposed to only for me."

For some reason, something clicked on there doing this from the patient's perspective, but with branding, I'm thinking about, "How do I make myself and my brand look good?" We should be looking at how does this brand connects with the end-user or customer. That is fantastic advice. Thank you very much for that. I appreciate it. This was packed. There was a lot of information in here. To everybody who's reading, I hope you're writing some of this down and taking notes. I'm going to start putting some of this in my office right away.

Thank you all for coming on Payton, Brynn, Diana and Tyler. I appreciate all your advice. Thank you to everybody who's reading this. Make sure you check them out, Marketing4ECPs. Also, make sure you tell them that Harbir sent you. Stay tuned for another episode coming soon. That's all for the March Marketing Madness. This was The Final Four. I hope you loved it and found lots of value in it. If you did, make sure you share it, take a screenshot, post it up on Instagram and tell me what you thought. I'll see you soon.