Zora Chase is Dr. Deb's marketing expert. Branding, customer acquisition, ROI, and the Lifetime Value of the client are topics covered in today's episode.
Do not miss these highlights:
05:16 What is Digital Marketing
06:37 Branding Strategy - How to brand your business
10:27 How to evaluate your Cost of Acquisition
14:14 Digital Marketing is very analytical
16:52 Why is it risky for your business if you rely on one channel like relying on Facebook alone
20:53 Why we have to get past that stigma of “ If you market to sick people, you're taking advantage of them”
21:35 You are serving your current customers by reminding them that you're there for them, you’re there to help them
About our Guest:
Founder/CEO Chasing Nectar Marketing Zora Chase leverages more than 20 years combined in broadcast and digital media, guiding dozens of businesses with marketing needs that span from branding, product launches, experiential, and lead generation. Prior to Chasing Nectar, Zora held marketing positions at iHeart, CBS and Emmis where she conceived and implemented marketing programs for Fortune 500 brands such as Anheuser-Busch, Apple Music, Chrysler-Jeep-Fiat, Disney, Warner Brothers, to name a few. Her mission is always the same - to unify a team of trusted professionals who are.
https://chasingnectar.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/chasingnectarmm
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/zorachase/
Transcript of Episode #22:
Debra Muth 0:01
You're listening to the Functional Medicine Business Podcast featuring Dr. Deb, one of the most creative functional medicine business practitioners in her industry. She shares the wisdom and knowledge that she has gained over 25 years of functional medicine, a pioneer in functional medicine, scheduling, leadership and Practice Management. Dr. Devin has a wealth of knowledge and he's eager to share to help functional medicine become more productive, and for the practitioners and patients to live better lives. Our podcast shares the good and the bad of our industry, because Dr. Deb knows the pain you live every day building a functional medicine practice with practical tools on how to manage money, taxes and patient care. She will discuss it all with you.
Hello, and welcome back to Functional Medicine Business Podcast (FMB). I'm your host, Dr. Deb. And I have a guest with me today who is a dear friend of mine, and you guys are just going to love her. Her name is Zora Chase, and she is part of Chasing Nectar. And we're going to talk all about marketing today, and why it's important for functional medicine practitioners and integrative medicine practitioners to actually start a marketing plan and what's available for us today that is going to be worth us putting money towards to get clients and I also want her to share with us how she actually tracks what she's doing. And deciding whether or not it's profitable, and letting us know, how do we how do we track the cost of acquisition, the return on investment? Because I think in medicine, we don't think in the same terms and language as we do in business.
Big Box businesses talk about this all the time, but as small practices or small businesses it's rare that you hear us talk about what's the cost of acquisition for a client? What's the return on investment? What's our lifetime value of our client? And Zoras going to talk to us today about this and how we evaluate it. And how do we choose which marketing is best for our practice. So let me bring her on right after this message from our sponsor. We will be back in two seconds and we will talk with Zora.
At FMBI we understand how it feels. Created by medical professionals for medical professionals. Are you racing from one patient to the next, skipping lunch and not sure how you're going to show up to your kids events? Not quite sure what that p&l sheet really means to your practice? And are you struggling to find the right partners in your business? Our program is based on the values of efficiency, organization and prioritization. The FMB ai 15k a day program will help you discover how to run an efficient operation and introduce healthy generating therapies for more income. Our business roadmap will help you scale your functional medicine practice using proven business approaches. We would like to invite you today to book a free discovery call with our founder Dr. Deb. Simply go to our website at https://functionalmbi.com/book-free-call/ and schedule your time today.
Welcome back. You're listening to the FMBI podcast. I have my dear friend Zora Chase with me here today, Zora, welcome to the show.
Zora Chase 3:49
Thank you so much. Great to be here.
Debra Muth 3:51
Thank you. So tell us a little bit about yourself.
Zora Chase 3:54
Sure. I come from I have a company called Chasing Nectar Marketing. And I spent 20 years in the traditional media side of things. I worked for large organization broadcast companies like CBS and I heart media, which everybody's heard of doing traditional media campaigns are running across radio, TV, digital, experiential, everything with big brands like the Coca Cola, the world's actually Coca Cola, Anheuser Busch, Fiat, Jeep, Chrysler, Dodge, those are my clients. And then I realized that digital is really the future and I was working at a radio property and seeing year by year it getting chipped away by digital. And digital was such a resource for clients to spend less money but have more impact on their business. And it intrigued me so I opened up my own company chasing nectar digital solutions. And now I kind of run an entire marketing strategy for my clients and we decide what channels they should be on. We manage the campaigns, and we work against their business goals to help them achieve the goals through marketing.
Debra Muth 5:07
That's awesome. When you talk about digital marketing, do you mean like Facebook ads and LinkedIn? Or do you mean something different in the digital world?
Zora Chase 5:16
Digital Marketing can be many things. It depends on what the goals are for the clients. So yes, they can be Facebook, they can be Google ads, Pay Per Click ads, they can be connected TV, which is really huge and emerging right now or audio, podcast, influencer, anything that that shows up on a screen that can be delivered digitally is, you know, a digital ad. So. So a lot of times, it's it's, it depends. And some of them are branding tactics. And some of them are consideration evaluation, and then others are kind of at the bottom of the buying decision. And it's the acquisition and conversion type channels, like the paperclip, where there's already an intent to buy, but people buy from brands they know and trust. So if you didn't do your work on the branding, and the consideration and evaluation side, even if you're running a bunch of Pay Per Click ads, and you're showing up on a Google search, people are going to click the most, you know, reliable and known business to work with. So all of those elements are really important. So that's kind of what we do is we guide clients through that entire process to make sure they're hitting, they're spending their money wisely and hitting on all levels of the buyers journey, basically.
Debra Muth 6:35
That's awesome. So when we're talking into functional medicine, or integrative medicine practitioners, how can someone brand their business to to be a household name kind of like Coca Cola?
Zora Chase 6:51
I know, right? Well, with a lot of money. You know, time is money, actually. Because if the resources are huge, your time line is going to be shorter, right? Like if your resources are huge, you can run an ad in the Superbowl and reach millions and millions of people with $6 million. I had. But But, but the other ways that we can go about it when the budgets are like that, and that's reality for most of us is to, to run campaigns that like in the branding side. You know, Facebook is a branding strategy, actually, because people are getting used to seeing advertisers on Facebook. But podcasting is a great branding tool. Email marketing is more of a consideration. It's a little bit a little more down the journey, then then, then branding, but like things like podcasting and running ads on, on digital across the web, there's a lot of different tactics, I mean, conducted TV, video, YouTube, YouTube is branding. So those are the kinds of ways that you get your, your brand your image out there. And it might not be, you know, you might not see the immediate results, but you are going to see a long term result and be known as an entity through those channels.
Debra Muth 8:18
Well, and it's relatively inexpensive to use those channels. It's just your time and creating the video or the podcast. But it does take time, I will say that, like we've had our podcast for it'll be four years this May. And we're really just starting to get traction where people know us in the last three or four months. So it is a long game. It's not, it's definitely not something that's going to pop up right away. But the wonderful thing about this is that it stays in perpetuity, right. So if I made a podcast four years ago, I still have people finding that very first podcast I did today and being introduced to it. So it's always there working for you.
Zora Chase 8:59
Yeah, that's so true. Isn't it crazy when you get your podcast results on a monthly basis. And you see people going deep into the different episodes. It wasn't just what what you put out this past week, but they're going in and looking at all of your materials. And you're right, it's YouTube isn't a great example of that. You know, I ran a campaign a few years back on YouTube with influencers and it's still getting hits. I mean, there's hundreds of 1000s of hits on this thing. And it's like, it was a few years ago and it's fine.
Debra Muth 9:32
That's crazy, isn't it? Yeah, it's a good thing.
Zora Chase 9:35
It's entertaining people like entertainment.
Debra Muth 9:37
They do. And you know, I think a lot of people today they'd rather listen to something than read something because they can listen to it and do something else at the same time we become multitaskers. So if I'm cleaning the house, I want to listen to something while I'm cleaning the house because I can do two things at one time. And so it's easier to do it that way than it is to read I'm not going to read something while I'm cleaning the house. That's not gonna work for me.
Zora Chase 10:02
Me too. Yeah, I'm the same way. Like, I'll take a walk during lunch, and it's in the middle of the day. And I feel like well, I can edge I can use this hour to, like, educate myself and listen to a podcast that, you know, that brings me more, you know, you know, more enlightenment on my on my work, even though it's in the middle of the day anyway, you know, yeah,
Debra Muth 10:23
I do the same education. Yeah, I do the same thing. So, I want to talk a little bit, because I don't think healthcare practitioners think in this way as other businesses. But how do we look at what the cost of acquisition is? So when we talk about cost of acquisition, mostly, you're thinking about big companies? What does it cost to get you a customer? And how long do you keep them? In the medical world? We don't necessarily think in those same terms, but it's a business term. And we need to think about that, can you explain a little bit about what that means and how people evaluate that? Sure.
Zora Chase 10:57
So when you what you would have to do is you have to look at the history, it is important. I mean, you want you know, you need to mark it, you know, you need to put resources on that. But every resource that comes out of your business, you want to have a dotted line or a straight line to revenue, right? Like you don't want to put something in and not get something out. So the best way to do it really is to first look at a historical analysis, look at how many what it's been costing you over time to acquire a new client look or new cause look to see what that value is the lifetime value of that client. So now you have something to test against. And when you now you say, Okay, well, you know, I acquired 10 customers, for, you know, $10,000, that's, that's a lot. But I want 20, then you have an idea of what you're going to have to spend to get the extra bump in your business the next year. So it's really looking at historical seeing what that was the identifying what your expectation is. And then we work backwards and see what established what kind of budget it's going to take to get to that number.
Debra Muth 12:12
And that's important when we're thinking about selling our businesses, correct, like other people are going to want to know, what does it cost me to get a client in the door? That's part of your business branding as part of your business strategy, but it's also part of the value of your business.
Zora Chase 12:29
Right. And I bet you have some clients that are with you for multiple years, and other clients are one and done. But like those kinds of things need to be all factored in, right? So you need to continue to widen the net and bring new customers in. And you decide what that like, what that rate of attrition, thank you. That's what that attrition rate of attrition is, too. And kind of consider that and make sure you are bolstered in that area to where you're bringing in new clients to fortify the future of your company.
Debra Muth 13:04
Yeah. And that's where we look at the lifetime value of the client, right? How much does it cost to acquire a client? And how much is that one client worth to you in the lifetime that they're there?
Zora Chase 13:14
Exactly, exactly. And then then you're justifying your marketing spend. And it makes, it makes a lot of sense. And if you get that all down as a formula, I can imagine if you ever wanted to sell your business, it makes it so much easier to explain where your Predictable Revenue is going to come from. Because these are the marketing tactics I use. This is what it cost me to acquire a client. And this is what we can expect in the next six months, 12 months and so on.
Debra Muth 13:48
Yeah, and that's important when you're looking at selling your business. But it's also important when you're looking at looking for revenue, like if I want to go to a bank and I want to get a loan for something, this is part of the information you would take to the bank and say here's how I know what I'm going to be bringing in because you've got all of this down you you know it to a tee and it helps you identify the value of your business.
Zora Chase 14:15
Yeah, and the thing about digital and we why we do a lot of digital why I'm in the business it is very analytical where we can like take a look at your Google Analytics and see are my are my ads bringing people to my website? Are people hitting my Contact Us button are people you know, calling us and you have to Yeah, so that's why why it's so nice to have, you know, a set marketing strategy and know where you're going to get your next customer.
Debra Muth 14:51
And I think it's so important for us to understand this and know these dollars before I started working with you I had several other marketing people and we never talked about this part. And so it would get to an emotional point, like I'm spending all this money and I'm not seeing my numbers change, I'm not seeing the clients change, I'm not seeing the value come up. And so then you get this emotional hit like I shouldn't spend this, forget it, and then you jock, you drop off the marketing ad part, when you might have just been getting close enough to make a breakthrough. But you jump off because of the emotional this way, if you have objective numbers, you can see you can evaluate, you can tweak. And numbers don't lie.
Zora Chase 15:31
Right. And you know, in marketing, and digital, especially it is a lot of trial and error. It really is. But if you know where you want to end up, you start at the end, and you work your way backwards, we might have to tweak what what's in the middle and what we're doing because something's working really well and something else isn't. So we might move our dollars around. But we know where we're going. And we know what we're going with the metric is that we're going to be judged on with this particular campaign. So we work at around that. I've had clients and I've changed my dynamic, my dynamic in my business, because I've had clients that just say, I just want to run Facebook leads, I just want a bunch of leads, I want a cost per lead, but I want 1.5 leads a day or whatever it was. And that was really not not working for them or for me because it's haphazard. And again, that's probably where the emotion came in. Because everything is tied to just this one number. And it's people buy from brands they know. So what else did we do besides run Facebook leads, nobody knows you're, and we saw from the analytics that people are going to your website, and they're checking you out. But you need to establish yourself as a business before they buy from you and not from your competitor, whom they've they've heard of, and they've been who's been around longer, whatever the case is.
Debra Muth 16:52
Well, and I think it's it's so reckless for us to put all of our eggs in one basket. I mean, we saw how vulnerable Facebook was a couple of months ago, when they shut down for just a couple of hours, right? It was only like six or eight hours that they went down. And how much money was lost to businesses because Facebook wasn't functioning. And the question for me is, do you really want everything to be tied to one entity that holds that much control over your business? Or do you want full control over your business? And, you know, I had been not happy with the idea of Facebook for a long time. For that reason. I didn't want it all tight. But you know, you have to have a foot in that door. But boy, it sure opened a lot of people's eyes that they were depending way too much on Facebook.
Zora Chase 17:41
Yeah, and Facebook has undergone so many changes with the iOS update. People on their Apple phones have the ability to say no, I don't want to be tracked by apps like Facebook, and about 90% or so people have opted to not be tracked. So what that did was all of those people who relied on catching people on Facebook multiple times weren't able to do that. And Facebook lost $10 billion last year. Wow, this 10 billion with a B I mean, they make 9 billion a month. But you know, but so, yeah, because of the year that is really a lot of that's a big loss for their company. So what I did a report a couple of weeks ago and saw that what they did to make up for that is they took their rates up, their rates went up like 40% In the fourth, second and third, second, third and fourth quarter of last year when when all of this started happening. So it costs more to acquire a client. People were getting like less results. And so there's been a lot of tweaks and things that have been done on the Facebook to rely on one channel Facebook alone is risky business.
Debra Muth 19:00
It is very risky. It is very risky. I'd much rather rely on something that I own and use those other things as ancillary things.
Zora Chase 19:10
Yes, that's a good point. Yes. So yeah, so I appreciate that you do embrace that full or funnel approach. You know, where you've got your podcasts, you do your you do your YouTube channels, you do your email marketing. And then we run some ads across the web for branding and people who are interested in functional medicine and things that you offer like chronic illness and Lyme disease. And then we run Facebook ads to you know, bring people more people in and then we run Pay Per Click ads. Yes, because when they're ready to buy, they are going to use you. Yeah,
Debra Muth 19:51
you want to write a letter. Yeah, you want them and you want to be in the forefront of their mind. And one thing that that caught me kind of I suppose In our marketing campaign that we're doing with you is, I didn't. And I don't know why I thought this way, but I didn't think about it, I didn't expect my own patients to see our ads that we delivered to them. And when one of my patients came in a couple weeks ago and said, Oh, I saw your Lyme disease ad, and I knew it was you, because I recognize your voice, even though your picture wasn't in the video. She's like, that was so amazing. Thank you for doing that. And, you know, I think so many times from marketing, we think our clients are not going to approve or they're not going to appreciate what we're doing. But in so many aspects, they do appreciate what you're doing. And it's us that are afraid of putting ourselves out there for fear of what our clients are going to think about us.
Zora Chase 20:44
Oh, isn't that interesting? Really? Is that a thing for your particular vertical functional medicine? Or is that just-
Debra Muth 20:53
it is in medicine in general, you know, medicine has never been a place where you market to, you know, because we're taking care of sick people. And I think there's this thought amongst the medical society that if you market to sick people, you're taking advantage of them. However, the big pharmaceutical companies have no problem marketing to people, right? They paid billions of dollars for ads on the Superbowl. Right. But I think as healthcare practitioners, there's that sense for us that we feel guilty about doing those kinds of things. But if we don't do those things, people don't know we're here to help them. And if they don't know, we're here to help them, we can't help them get better. And we have to get past that, that whole stigma.
Zora Chase 21:34
That's right, that's right. And actually, you are serving your current customers by reminding them that you're here for them. And that's really important, the customer is king, right? So right, they need to know that they can rely on you. And they don't have to go find they have to they're not, they don't have to be lost about who's going to help them in the current condition that they're in, or in the questions that they have around their health and well, being that you're there for them. You are, you're built you are you've gotten through this, you know, pandemic, it's as strong as ever, and you're there for them. That's a huge, you know, benefit for you to, you know, shout out to the world. That is. Yeah. And I like that you're doing the email marketing for to your current customers. Because of that, too. They need to know you are there, you need to remind them that you're there. Otherwise, you know, someone else might come along, too, by the way?
Debra Muth 22:33
Absolutely.
Zora Chase 22:35
You know someone will!
Debra Muth 22:36
Exactly. We learned that a few years ago, like we assumed that we had been communicating everything to our clients, and that they knew who we are and what we did and why we did what we did and all the services that we had. And it became very apparent when Dr. X came to the scene. And he was a big Facebook marketing gurus probably one of the biggest ones in functional medicine, that really landed at home and branded himself really well. And there's been a lot of people trying to do that after him. But we lost a lot of clients to him. And it was because they didn't realize that we took care of gut health and that we did IV therapy. And we did this. And that's when it really became apparent to us like we're not in the forefront of our clients minds when they have a problem, because they're looking for someone else because they think we're only this over here. And once we started marketing to them a little bit more and started telling them more about who we were and what we were in what we could offer. We started retaining more and more of those clients instead of losing them to the doc down the block that was better at marketing their service than we were.
Zora Chase 23:44
Yeah, isn't that interesting. I mean, I come across people that are just better at marketing something, but they're not a better product, and they're not a better service. And you know, and it's you know, our job is to make sure that that doesn't happen to you.
Debra Muth 24:03
And you do a very good job at that.
Zora Chase 24:06
It's my joy.
Debra Muth 24:09
Well, Zora, this has been such a great conversation. How can people find you and reach out and have a conversation with you about marketing their business?
Zora Chase 24:18
Sure, they can check out check me out online at chasingnectar.com that's chasing my last name is Chase. So it's chasing n-e-c-t-a-r.com. And or you can find me on LinkedIn: Zora Chase. And you can message me there. And I'd be happy to take any phone calls or emails that your your listeners have.
Debra Muth 24:41
Well, Zora, thanks so much for being with us. It's been a pleasure. I love working with you. You've made such a difference in my business. And I so appreciate you.
Zora Chase 24:49
You've been wonderful for me too. I really appreciate the innovation that you you show on a daily and open mindedness and and the desire to grow your business, that's what it's all about.
Debra Muth 25:02
That's what it's all about. Well, thank you so much.
Zora Chase 25:05
Thank you have a wonderful day.
Debra Muth 25:06
You too.
So let me tell you, that was an amazing conversation. And I love talking to Zara because she is all about true business, it's not about the marketing per se for her. Like I've been with some marketers, where it's all about marketing, it's all about the dollars, it's all about how much you can spend. And if you can't put 10,000 in, you're not gonna get anything in return. And Zora is not like that at all, she is just the opposite. She's very conscious of your dollar spend, where it goes, how you spend it, and making sure that we're actually getting a return on our investment. She has been just such a blessing to have in my business in the last year and a half. And I love her, I really think that anybody who's looking at some marketing changes should check her out, give her a call to have a discussion with her. And if you love your marketing person, but they're not speaking this language, go back and have this conversation. Ask them what is the cost of acquisition for my client? What is the return on investment for me, and if they can't, or are not willing to go down that road with you and discover that as much as you like them? I think you need to look at a different marketing person, or at least somebody that can help you answer those questions. It is not about whether or not you're selling your practice today, you're going to sell your practice someday in the future, whether it's three years, five years, 20 years down the road. And you want to have all of this in place so that when you're ready to sell, you have that longevity, you have that history there and it makes sense to them. So check this stuff out. It's amazing. Marketing is one of the most expensive things we do in our business next to the people that work for us, our team, and so your dollars need to really be spent wisely, especially in today's market. I appreciate you listening to our podcast today and I hope you have a fabulous day.
Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode and you'd like to help support the podcast, please share it with others. post about it on social media, or leave a rating and review. To catch all the latest for me. You can follow me on Facebook at FMBI, join our free group where we support one another and share our struggles. Thanks again and I'll see you next time.