Marketing is a major driver for the success of any business, even in the eye care industry. Harbir Sian sits down with Caley Dimmock to shed light on the subject. Caley is a marketing and brand consultant, photographer, educator, and Facebook ad coach. In this episode, she shares practical tips on attracting new customers, tracking leads, and increasing your conversion. Caley breaks down the elements of an effective landing page and the importance of establishing social proof for new businesses. The two also dive into how to optimize your Facebook ads using three campaign objectives: lead generation, conversion, and traffic. Tune in and get expert advice to help grow your business and profits!
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March Marketing Madness: Caley Dimmock
Thank you so much for taking the time to join me. As always, I truly appreciate the support. The show has been growing. Thanks to everybody for reading and sharing it with their friends and family. If you do get some value, which I know you will for sure, please do share it. Take a screenshot, post it up on Instagram or leave a comment, leave a review and tell a friend about it because we are going to be talking about marketing moving forward. This is the very first episode in the series of the March Marketing Madness Series that I'm excited to bring to you.
I have spent a fair bit of time speaking with digital marketing experts over the last few years for different reasons, whether it's my own eCommerce brand that I started, my personal branding or our brick and mortar business. I love to share those pearls with people as much as I can, but it's not the same as hearing it directly from the experts.
That's what I want to do with you here in March 2022. For our very first episode in the March Marketing Madness Series, I have my lovely guest and friend, Caley Dimmock, who is a Canadian marketing expert, photographer and the Founder of Dimik Creative Group, a boutique agency that helps businesses scale through digital marketing.
When she's not facilitating done-for-you services, she's busy helping other business owners bust through mindset blocks that prevent them from growing both personally and professionally. I can speak personally that she is amazing at her job because I have worked with her a few years ago both for personal branding and for growing my eCommerce business. It was such an amazing experience. Thank you, Caley, for joining me here on the March Marketing Madness Series.
Thank you so much for having me.
When I came up with the idea, I was like, “It's March Madness. I'm a sports fan.” I thought in my head March Marketing Madness, but I didn't think about how much of a tongue twister it was going to be until I said it out loud. Thanks for joining and for being the first in the series. I'm very excited to have you. It's special for me since we have worked together. I got to know you, your business and how you work. You did help me. Any of my online presence growth over the last couple of years, I can attribute so much of it to you, the lessons that you have taught me and the feedback you have given me. Thank you for that as well.
Why don't we start with personal branding since that's something that I have personally talked about a fair bit? When I started doing it a few years ago, focusing on it, it wasn't exactly a new concept in our industry, but it was a bit newer. Optometrists weren't thinking about branding themselves. They were thinking about, “I’m working in an optometry clinic. How do I run the optometry clinic?”
Now there's a lot more of it. It's great to see our industry or my colleagues have done a great job. Let's talk about that. Let's say you have an eye care professional in front of you who wants to start getting themselves out there a little bit more. Starting from step one, what's personal branding 101? What should I do to get out there?
We all know social media. That's where people are watching. When it comes to an eye care business, I don't think it's as much as being like, “Which platform is going to work best for me?” It's going directly where the masses are because you're working in an industry where everyone needs you. Everybody needs an optometrist at some point in their lives. You are on Instagram. Going there and being up to date on best practices. I hate to say this because a lot of people don't love being on video and rolling their eyes, dancing and mouthing things on reels. Unfortunately, we don't own the platforms. You have to play their game.
The place is to be unfortunately on Instagram and doing reels. All you have to do is do reels, get on stories, get on IG Live, be on video, play their game. They want it to be video forward. A lot of people don't want to go over TikTok, but there are a lot of opportunities there. I also do still believe in LinkedIn and YouTube as well. Twitter is dead.
Facebook pages on the organic side are dead as well. That's where you're going to see the most upside. Writing a blog is great and all this stuff, but where are you going to get the most return? It's going to be focusing on a clear content strategy, becoming comfortable on video and putting the video up on the platforms where you are going to get the exposure.
When you’re able to do lead gen properly, it ends up becoming a system. A system that you can always have, be relatively hands off, and is going to be constantly bringing you in the leads.
What a lot of people don't want to hear, but it's the truth, is that you got to get comfortable on video. I'm one of those people who hated pretty hard on the whole TikTok trend of like, “Look at this,” and mouthing the words, but that's the game they want you to play. I’m not judging anybody, but if you do it right, it gets more views and followers. I did a social media lecture that was accredited for our association. I bashed TikTok so hard back then and now I changed my tone. I'm like, “TikTok can be helpful if you do it like this and this.” I'm with you on that. Video is king.
We did a little promo post on social media before getting together and doing this show to get a feel for what my colleagues and other people on social media would like to know about regarding marketing. A lot of the people that I interact with online are business owners, small business owners, and even new business owners or starting businesses cold and from the ground up. One of the conversations that comes up often is lead generation. How do we bring people in from a cold start? I know this is something that you work on quite a bit. I'd love for you to introduce us to the concept of what is lead generation and then how we should approach it.
This is a topic and a strategy marketing that a lot of business owners see us as one thing. A lot of people are like, “How do I master Google Ads?” They are missing out the whole funnel. There is a whole series of things that have to come together in order to have a successful lead gen strategy. When you are able to do this properly, it ends up becoming a system that you can always have on and can be relatively hands-off. It's going to be constantly bringing you in the leads. For new business owners, it can be intimidating. I want to back up a little bit here because the lead generation strategy for a brand new business is going to involve a few more steps than an established business.
In an established business, ideally, you are going to have a lot of social proof already, Google Reviews, hopefully, you are going to have some testimonials on your website. A brand new business may not have that yet. Before you start trying to draw traffic in and get all these leads, you need to have social proof apps. If you are not actively asking your clients for reviews, make sure you start doing that. Once you have all of that set up, the first step in successful lead gen is coming up with an offer. What is going to entice somebody to come in? I know that there are obviously regulations in your industry and many different industries. It's about coming up with an offer that is going to entice people enough to come through the door.
Sometimes you can lead with just straight benefits, but oftentimes you are going to want to get something free like a discount. It works well or if there's anything you can give away for free. It’s establishing the offer first and foremost. The next step is the one that I see many business owners completely missing out on. People will come up with the offer, run the Google Ads, Facebook Ads, billboards or whatever. They are sending everybody to their main website. That's the number one mistake I see people making. You need to have and should have a purpose-driven landing page.
Landing pages are created very strategically and differently than an entire website. There are key elements there that need to happen. Ideally, this page doesn't have a navigation menu, for example. The page serves one main purpose. It's to get people to put in their name and their email to receive the offer. We don't want people to have all these other options. The more options we have when making a decision, the less likely we are to make the decision and take action. That's one of the key things that needs to happen there.
Another thing is the headline needs to be very benefit-focused. This is a statistic from Neil Patel, the king of digital marketing, about landing pages. 80% of people will read the headline and only 20% of people will read anything beyond that. Your headline has to be very clear and benefit focus. Not like, “Come in for an eye exam.” It's got to be, “What's the benefit? What is going to entice somebody right now to put their information in below?”
Would that be the offer then? Would that be something that you put in the headline as like, “Give us your email and get a free pair of glasses,” just to put that out there? Is that what you want to have in the headline?
The key thing on the landing page is making sure that you have the navigation removed, having that headline honed in, and benefit forward. You also want to have the first lead form that you see where people can put in their email above the fold. Above the fold is what shows on the screen before somebody scrolls. You want to make sure that it's like that for desktop and mobile. One other key thing is the fewer the fields that you can have on there, the better. A lot of people are tempted to try to get a lot of information upfront. They want name, address, phone number, email and they want you to check off extra boxes.
The more fields somebody has to fill out, the less likely they are to fill it out. Generally, the first name and email are going to be your best bet. Beyond that first bit there, that's where you can put in more benefits about your clinic. You can also put in some testimonials there and another call to action. You don't want the only form to be at the top of the page. The landing page is what’s super important because if you send somebody straight to the website, they have so many options. They are going to get overwhelmed pretty quickly. They just want the offer, sign up, and get out. That's about it.
Marketing: When it comes to an eye care business, it’s just going directly to where the masses are because you’re working in an industry where everyone needs you. Everybody needs an optometrist at some point in their lives.
That’s a huge piece that many people are missing and losing out on a potential opportunity because of that. If you wouldn't mind going through the steps starting from social proof.
We still have some more steps to go. The social proof for the new businesses also goes with making sure that you have got social media pages set up too. People are going to want to be checking you out on social media to make sure you are legit. Have your Facebook page set up, even though nobody is going to be going there. Have your Instagram going, make sure your website is alive, make sure that you're getting reviews on Google and anywhere else that you can, then you're going to come up with your offer, create this landing page on your website. The next thing is traffic because we can make all this stuff, if nobody is going then it doesn't matter at all.
This is where organic and paid traffic comes in. If you are just starting out, getting enough traffic is going to be tough. You may want to do some paid ads then. This is where Facebook Ads and Google Ads can come in handy. On the Google Ads side, specifically the search placements, people who are actively searching for, “Optometrists near me. Eye clinic near me,” are going to be your best bets in order to get people back and signing up because the intent is quite high.
After you have got all the traffic and people are signing up, you want to have those people who signed up go into an email sequence, ideally. A sequence of emails are going to be sent out to them to warm them up, let them know more about your clinic, encourage them to come in, create that relationship and continue to strengthen it until they come in.
How many emails do you think are usually required to get somebody on average to act on something or get them to come in the door?
It depends on what your offer is, to be honest. Are you able to offer a free eye exam?
We can’t do free services, but we can do free or discounted products.
It would depend on how juicy that offer is. It depends on how badly somebody wants it. If it's an offer that they can get anywhere because you do see a lot of these offers in your industry if it's something that somebody can get anywhere, it’s hard to say, but if the offer is good enough that somebody is really like, “I don't want to miss out on that,” I've seen your chances are pretty high. When it comes to people putting in their emails, honestly, probably 1/4 of them are going to forget pretty quickly that they even did it.
You are going to have a chunk of people who you are not going to be able to count on converting, but if you are getting 100 emails and if even only 10 of those people end up coming in, that's amazing because you are not just looking at the return on their initial visit. We want to talk about lifetime value. If you've been in business for more than a couple of years, you should be starting to look at what your customer lifetime value is so you know what you can be spending on marketing because if your clients end up coming in to see you every 2, 10 or 20 years, that's worth a lot more than a client who's just going to come in once and never again.
I fall into that trap myself like, “How much did this person spend this time?” The lifetime value is a super important way of looking at it. Is there more to the process of lead gen or was that the last, but the email chain that you send afterward?
That's pretty much the overview. A lot of people in professional industries or healthcare industries are quick to want to call the leads. That very rarely works. People see that as pressure tactics. The more that you push somebody to come in is, the less likely that they are to come in. People want to come in because they have decided that they want to come in. That job on the business owners starts at the very beginning.
The first step in successful lead gen is coming up with an offer.
The language that they are using in the ads on the landing page, the types of emails that are coming through them. That's one thing I want to add because I know that sometimes people want that phone number and call them, but you are probably going to decrease the rate of coming in. One other thing is I would try to make the offer time limited. Switch up your offers often. Don't make it something that people know, “I can get that any time,” because there is no urgency.
I mentioned that we couldn't do free services, but that means the core services. We can't say you can get a free eye exam, but if anybody's offering specialty services, then you can do certain things on that. For example, we do certain dry eye treatments. We brought in certain dry eye and cosmetic-related services that we do. That type of stuff because it's pay out of pocket and whatever separate. We could potentially do that.
There is an opportunity there for people who are offering those types of specialty services. You alluded to it a couple of times and I know this is one of your specialties. Can we talk a little bit about Facebook Ads? I know this could be an episode on its own or maybe a series of episodes because it's like this wormhole you could end up in. Facebook Ads 101. If I want to get out there and start to make use of it, how do we get started?
Facebook Ad is a very deep topic. It's wild. People always want to come to me to learn Facebook Ads in one hour. I'm like, “That's impossible.” I was running a three-month program to introduce it to people. I don't want to say that to make this intimidating for people, but it is not the most user-friendly interface to work with. Facebook does that on purpose because Facebook honestly doesn't care if you're doing it well. Facebook cares about one thing. They want you to spend their money. It benefits them if you're not very good at them, which is interesting to note. To get started, most people know you can boost a post on Instagram.
That's a very quick way to get into Facebook Ads because Instagram Ads are under the same umbrella as Facebook Ads, which they're technically calling Meta Ads now. When you do that, you don't have very many options at all. When you run ads inside what's called Ads Managers, the first place to start is to sign up for a business manager account. You go to Business.Facebook.com to sign up for a business manager account.
Within there, we have all kinds of different areas. We've got our Ads Manager, audiences data and all kinds of different things. You sign up for a business manager account. You would connect your ad account. You would connect your Facebook page, add in a payment method for ads, and then you have the structure that you need. When you go to create a campaign, there are so many different options to choose from in terms of objective. This is the first place that I see a lot of people get lost. Have you attempted to run them yourself? You probably have.
Not successfully.
It can be tough. Most of the people reading are probably going to be most interested in lead gen. I'll speak to this from that perspective instead of an eCommerce perspective. For lead generation, there are a few different options here. I see a lot of people default to choosing the awareness objective, which is not going to get you anywhere.
The awareness objective, the way that Facebook puts that out and their goal with that is to create awareness. It's to show the ad to as many people as possible. It's not to create any action. What you want to be selecting at that first campaign level in terms of objective is going to be either lead generation, which is not all types of lead generation, conversions or traffic. The lead generation campaign objective on Facebook is on Facebook lead generation. For this, you don't need a landing page.
Does that take them to your Facebook page?
It can take people to a couple of places. One is you can build a form on Facebook that pops up. I set some of these new ones up for myself too, and I love them. It looks like a normal ad, but when somebody clicks on it to go to the next step, instead of taking them off of Facebook, a form pops up. There, you can have further information about your offer. They can put in their email, name and hit submit.
Marketing: You should have a purpose-driven landing page.
You can connect Facebook leads to your email service provider, usually through a service called Zapier. I usually have to use a third-party service to that. You can send them directly into that email automation through there. That's a good way to avoid the whole landing page thing. If you're doing this, it's very important to have your Facebook and Instagram page dialed in because people might click through first to make sure that you're legit.
Another thing you can do with this lead gen campaign objective is you can set up these automated messages in Messenger. It'll look like you are chatting with somebody in Messenger and you may not be. It's just a bot, but you can do that right on Messenger and right inside Facebook. That's another way to do it. I did those for a series of gyms. They were launching a new studio. It was a way to talk to people about the new founding membership. It was very successful. Within that too, because that's automated, if you're getting people's email addresses there, you can even follow up personally if you have somebody able to facilitate that as well.
The lead gen campaign objective is cool. There are a lot of possibilities there. The other campaign objectives that can work, conversions, which you would be selecting lead for the conversion event. That gets a little bit more complicated because you need to set up tracking in order to be able to check who's signing up. There are a number of different ways you can do that. One of the easiest ways I find is to have a dedicated form and landing page that's only for paid traffic.
You can set up your pixel. Everybody's heard of the tracking pixel. You can put the pixel on the landing page as well, but an even easier way to do it is to duplicate the landing page and have only Facebook Ads traffic going there because Facebook tracking is not always accurate and especially not since the iOS 14 update. That's one way to definitely get accurate information.
I know some of this because we've talked and I already know that it's this crazy, massive, complicated topic, Facebook Ads. I'm already getting a little bit bogged down with some of this stuff. I want to clarify. After we have set up our account, we got our Facebook page and everything set up, are we doing the Ads Manager?
Yes. Ads Manager lives inside the business manager.
We want to explore the lead gen objective.
When you go to create a new campaign, a window will pop up and it'll make you select a campaign objective. One of the ones listed will be lead generation. This is the objective we are talking about that doesn't require somebody to even leave Facebook.
I know a lot of business is done in Facebook Messenger. I know a lot of companies use that as a way to interact with their clients or potential clients. That was one potential objective. What was the next one that you talked about?
The next one would be conversions. That would be conversions then at the ad set level. After you set up the campaign level, you go to the ad set level. You'd want to select the lead event. In order for this to work properly, you need to have lead tracking set up if you're using the lead event. That all happens in the events manager because UI people get intimidated.
I don't want people to get discouraged or confused. Let's keep it a little bit higher-level if we can to make sure people are able to understand how manager works and get started on it. After the conversion, was there another one that you would say another objective?
The more options we have when making a decision, the less likely we actually are to make the decision and take action.
Traffic is another possibility. When you select the traffic objective at the campaign level, then you're telling Facebook that, “My main priority is just to get traffic to the landing page,” which can work well if you've got an amazing landing page. The only thing about that is that when you select the conversion objective and you've got all of that tracking and stuff in place, if you're able to do that, Facebook is going to send or show the ad more to people who are more likely to sign up.
How does it determine that?
With all of the data that they are tracking on all of us, Facebook can tell who is likely to click through and put their email address in place. They can track all that because what happens is when we do have the lead event tracking set up, in order for Facebook to register that, they're grabbing the data from the other end where the conversion happens on the website. They are hashing that data. They are jumbling it all up. There's nothing that gives away somebody's identity in that information. That information gets set back to Facebook and it matches with people who have seen the ad. That's how you can see on the Facebook side that, “A lead was caused by this ad.”
There's lead generation conversion traffic. Are those the three key ones?
Yes. For people who want an easy way to set all this up, maybe you don't have the time or the resources to do every single stage of this, like the landing page and all that, try the lead gen campaign, seriously. It's easy to set it up. Facebook Ads can be intimidating. However, in the eye care industry, if your main goal is to get people through the door to your clinic for targeting, don't overthink it. You need to target the area around your clinic. Don't define it. Don't put any interest in it. Don't do any of that because the cost to reach a certain amount of people on Facebook is low. I can use that series of gyms as another example. They are based in Halifax and Dartmouth, various areas in Nova Scotia.
I don't need to target people who are interested in fitness because the population in the area that I need to reach, I can reach that for such a low cost. That's what happens at the ad set level. Don't overthink that. Put in your ages. You probably don't want to target a sixteen-year-old because they are probably not making that decision or it's not on their mind. You might want to bump it up to 19 or 20 and 65 plus. It doesn't matter.
Beyond that campaign level, for businesses that rely on geotargeting, things do get pretty simple. People talk about how complicated Facebook ads can usually get when they're talking about industries that have such wide possibilities, like eCommerce for example. When you're targeting specific locations, it becomes a lot easier.
I definitely have been guilty of doing that, overthinking it and trying to narrow it down to the exact picture in my mind of the person that I want to have walked through the door. That does limit the results. That's good advice too. Moving on from Facebook Ads, unless there's something else that you'd like to add on that specifically?
I’ll leave it there because we could talk about Facebook Ads forever. I don't want to overwhelm people because it is very easy to do that. If anybody's reading, just one thing, sign up for business manager, try a lead generation campaign. Target the location around the clinic.
Let's say somebody is trying to get in-depth, when does it make sense for them to talk to someone like yourself, bring pro in to go deep?
There are two sides of that. One is going to be volume. Are you booked out already? If you are, you probably don't need to be doing this. If you're not booked out, do you have a few different optometrists who can take new leads? If it's only one person, hiring somebody for this is probably not going to be cost-effective if I'm being honest because a good Ads Manager is going to cost you money. For example, I don't mind talking about my rates at all. My management fee starts from CA$1,500 a month.
Marketing: We can make all this stuff and if nobody’s going, then it doesn’t matter at all.
I'm on the very low end for somebody who's an expert. When we look at my fee plus ad spend, let's say that we are spending $1,000 or $2,500 a month on this, you need to ensure that you have the capabilities to bring in enough new clients to make that worth it. If you are a bigger practice, then it probably would make sense to have somebody run it for you. If you're a smaller practice, you might want to find somebody who works as a bit more of a consultant who can help lead you through it a little bit.
How about Google Ads? I know there have been a few comments and questions about it. Any advice to how to approach that and ways to make the best of Google ads?
That was another area that people are relying on, throwing their information up on Google Ads and hoping the magic would happen. Google Ads is an area where you need to have that strategic landing page for people to go to. Another insight that I want to let you know about for anybody who is not a digital marketer themselves, Google Ads has this new type of campaign.
It's called the Performance Max campaign. That campaign is quite automated. Normally, this is where Facebook Ads and Google Ads contrast because on Facebook Ads, when you boost a post, you're casting a wide net and you have little control and honestly, your results are likely not going to be great unless you get lucky.
With Google Ads, if you try this Performance Max campaign, it does a lot of the steps for you. You can have some great results with that. Google has so much data and information on people and they know what to do. If you're feeling intimidated by Google Ads because there are a bazillion options when you're setting it up, I would recommend to start out by trying the Performance Max campaign.
It's going to ask you to put in some headlines, descriptions and a few images. If you want placements to show on YouTube, you can put in a video there too, but keep everything focused on your lead gen offers, so whatever that promo is that you come up with, that's got to be at the forefront of the search ads or anywhere else you have it appear.
That landing page is a pretty important piece of all of this. That headline and offers are a big part of it as well. There are a lot of people who are reading or who had shared their questions with us online where new business owners and that type of thing. Do you have any other advice for those types of businesses in general, whether they're online or in physical businesses, for getting started online?
I'm going to come back to the review site. The number one thing that you should be focusing on if you're new is getting social proof. It is why and how people are making their final decision these days. You can present people with a great offer, but once they see other people had a great experience in this place, they are going to come in. I don't know about you, but when I'm looking for a new service provider, I moved back to Nova Scotia a few years ago. I needed a dentist. I had a surfing accident. What did I do? I looked on Google. I looked for the different reviews and read through the reviews as well.
I'm looking for ones that I can tell people have been there and have experienced it. I'm not looking for the ones that don't have a description because those can be friends and family. On that note, a lot of people are very tempted to have their friends and family go in and rank the practice. Please don't do that because chances are, especially if you are operating within a certain location, somebody is going to know, “Isn't that their brother?” That's going to damage people's perception of you.
It comes down to when you get those first few people in the door, chat to them and humanize it, “If you had a great experience, I would appreciate it as a new small business owner if you could head to Google and give us a review. I'm going to send you a follow-up email.” That's another thing. Have automation that goes out to people after their visit, “There's going to be an email that comes to you with a link. We can just click on it and leave something there. It would mean so much to me as a small business owner.”
All you have to do is do that for a little bit. If you get 5 to 10 reviews, it’s super helpful. That's the number one thing, focusing on providing an amazing experience. Everybody is focused on, “How can I get people to know what my clinic and get them in?” Once you get some people in and you provide an incredible experience, they are going to tell people. In the eye care industry, most people actually go to places that people they know recommend.
You’re not just looking at the return on their initial visit. We want to talk about lifetime value.
Word of mouth is huge. I agree with your initial thought, which was we all use that social proof, Google Reviews or whatever it is before I do that all the time. When we ask people where they heard about us, the most common is a referral from a friend or family. Word of mouth had recommended us. That starts from providing the best possible service. On the note of Google Reviews, I have heard mixed things about having a QR code, perhaps right there and then so people can scan it and leave a review while they're standing in the office. Is that good or bad? Do you recommend that versus the email process?
That can go 1 of 2 ways. It adds pressure in asking somebody to do it right then and there, which on the one hand, is probably going to get you the review right away. On another hand, it could tarnish your perception a little bit. I have had that experience before in a professional setting. It made me feel very strange because it made me feel pressured. A lot of people want to make other people happy. They have a hard time saying no, so they're probably going to do it. They're not doing it fully because they want to. They are doing it because they don't know how to say no right then and there.
You are creating a bit of an inauthentic experience. A lot of people who are business and marketing forward are going to say, “Just do it,” but what are you trying to achieve here? Are you trying to achieve as many Google Reviews as possible or authentic human relationships and experiences and showing that you care about that person and their wants? In this industry, it's important to play the human card. It can be a vulnerable thing for some people, anything when we talk about medical healthcare or any of that.
I know we're talking about eye care here, but dentistry is an area that you want to create a good relationship. A lot of people don't love the dentist. For that reason, what I would recommend is following up with the email that has the link to go leave the review. In-person, before they leave, saying, “It was nice to meet you. If you had a good experience, as a small business owner, it would mean so much to me if you would be able to do this. You are going to get an email with a link.” It's saying, “This would mean a lot to me as a small business owner, but it's up to you. You decide if you had a good experience.”
We have gone so far in this one direction of everything being digitized and everybody communicating through digital forms that having that a human component now is more important than it ever has been. We do have a little QR code on the counter there, but we don't pressure people it's there. If they see it and they do it, great, but otherwise, we have been doing what you recommended here. From my perspective to my colleagues out there who are reading, I will ask the patient myself as we are checking out. I hope every patient has a great experience, but I'll feel for how happy that patient was with their experience.
“If you wouldn't mind leaving us a Google review to share your experience, our staff will send you an email to follow up with you.” Everybody is like, “Of course.” Even then, the conversion from those people to leaving a review is a small percentage, but I had to take the time to get comfortable asking for it. It was a bit awkward for me in the beginning, like a lot of things are, but I'm pretty comfortable with it now because, realistically, nobody is going to be like, “No. That sucked. I'm not leaving you a review.” They'll smile and nod. It was a harmless experience.
You are not going to get everybody to leave that review, but would you rather people be like, they go home and they call up their friend, “I had this weird experience at this clinic. They pretty much forced me to leave a review right in front of them.” You don't want that to happen. To your point about humanizing everything, that's amazing that you do that as the owner because a lot of people will leave their admin to do it. Everybody knows that the owner asked the admin to do it. It's great that you are doing it yourself.
It's a bit parallel that somebody can use if they want. When I have a lead come in for my business and it's somebody who I'm like, “I'm going to want to work with them,” instead of replying by email to the initial inquiry, I record a video and say, “It’s cool to get your inquiry. I see that you are interested in this.” I introduced them that way.
Do you know why? Because people want to work with people that they like their energy. That's why in clinics, such as eye care clinics, you are not going to see a massive difference in incompetency necessarily. You are going to see differences, but you're not going to see massive for the most part. What’s going to have people coming back to you time and time again is a good clinic experience overall, but definitely how they feel when they are in that room with you having their examination done.
It's tough, but there's got to be some approach that could work depending on how many patients you see in a day and how technologically savvy your patients are, but there could be something there where you could send a short video saying, “Thanks for coming in. It was great to meet you. Let us know if you have any other questions,” whether it's a DM on Instagram. I don't know what's appropriate. That's the other part. How much time would it really take at the end of the day to record 10 or 20 videos 10 seconds each and have your staff send them out that maybe something we could look at?
There are services that make that a little bit easier. I use a service called Vidyard. It's free up to a certain amount. I've never needed to pay for it, which blows my mind. You can install it as a Chrome extension on your computer. If you're already at a computer writing reports or doing anything, you can click it on, record your screen, adjust your screen or you. There's a place for notes if you want notes for speaking. When you stop recording, it opens up your dashboard for Vidyard and you can grab that link out of there. If you have an admin, they can just go into the Vidyard account and send out those links pretty easily.
It creates a link to the video and you email that link. What happens when the patient or the customer clicks on that link? Where does it take them?
Marketing: Once you get some people in and you provide an incredible experience, they're going to tell people. Most people actually go to places that people they know recommend.
It takes them to a page that's hosted on Vidyard with just the video. The cool thing is you can see who clicked on the link and how much of the video they watched.
Right back to the full circle at the beginning of the show, we're talking about how important video is for social media, but it could be so valuable for these interactions to elevate our patient's experience in no matter what industry. There are mainly optometrists, opticians and that type of people that are reading, but there will be people in other industries.
I know because I interact with them, financial industries, other industries that could take value from everything that you've talked about here, including that last point. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing all of this amazing insight. Where can people find you if they want to learn more about you or connect with you?
I tend to hang out on Instagram the most out of any of the social media platforms. My handle is @CjDimmock. They can also find me at CaleyDimmock.com if they want to learn more about me. Those are the two best places.
There is a lot of great content coming from Caley. I have been following you for years. I can speak truly about that. Any last words of wisdom that you'd like to share with us before we wrap up?
I know that marketing can be very intimidating for somebody who's just opening a clinic, one piece of advice I have is to ask yourself, “How can I make this easy?” You and I were talking about Facebook Ads. I'm starting to get into it. I'm like, “This is a lot. I can see how this is going to seem intimidating quickly.” The easy way is to do the lead gen campaign. Anything that you are trying to do, if you're like, “I don't have time or resources to get a landing page up to do all this,” ask yourself, “How can I make this easy?”
Asking for reviews, “How can I make this easy?” Usually, automation goes out via email or having a trigger or a signal for yourself. After I did this step at the end of the exam, I asked for a review. Having a routine almost for it. Constantly asking yourself, “How can I make this easy?” so then it all seems manageable, you don't get overwhelmed and quit on your efforts.
This could be insanely complicated if we let it be. That's important and automating as much of it as possible. Thank you so much. I look forward to sharing this with everybody. I know there's going to be so much amazing value for everyone. Thank you, everybody, who's reading. Make sure you throw up a screenshot. Let me and Caley know what your thought and what your favorite takeaway was. I will be back with the next episode of March Marketing Madness. See you guys soon.
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About Caley Dimmock
Caley Dimmock is a Canadian marketing expert, photographer, and founder of Dimik Creative Group - a boutique agency that helps businesses scale through digital marketing. When she's not facilitating done-for-you services, she's busy helping other business owner bust through mindset blocks that prevent them from growing, both personally and professionally.