Marketing Series (Part 3): Use Kindling for a Quick Burn

This podcast will help you to become more confident with your patients , more successful in your practice or business and a leader in pelvic health , and we're going to have some fun along the way . Join us as we rise together .

We're Jesse and Nicole Cozine , founders of Pelvic Sanity Physical Therapy and the creators of the Pelvic PT Huddle , and this is Pelvic PT Rising .

If you have missed them , I would highly recommend actually going back and listening to our overview of your marketing fire and then from last week what your marketing logs can be . But we're going to have more details on what the kindling side is in part three here as we get into today , real quick announcements beforehand .

First of all , the rectal evaluation and treatment course . The second cohort opens up on Monday If you're listening to this , on the day it drops , so that'll be 10.23 . Make sure you are on the wait list for that for first priority and for all of the information there .

And if you are a business owner and listening to this , make sure you have also checked out our accelerator program . We are going to have another cohort of that starting in January . We're taking 130 plus people through that right now . It's been really fun , really transformational for people's business .

Make sure you are taking a look at that if you are picking up what we're putting down when it comes to marketing .

I had a couple of people when we were at Pelvicon not too long ago now ask me a little bit about the podcast and be like , oh my gosh , it was so crazy to hear Jesse's voice and see him in person and hear him talk when he was mingling and stuff at happy hour and somebody thought that the part that we have recorded was longer than it actually is .

So when Jesse pops on and says , hey guys , do it right now , Do it again .

here . Nicole , as you guys have heard on the last year , I'm going to do a real quick reminder marketing as a fire , where you really need a balance of different elements in order to have a very successful fire . So that includes logs , which we talked about last time . But those are the things in marketing that take a long time to develop .

They're usually relationship based . They are just going to not yield fruit immediately . It's going to take some time , but once they catch , they're going to be kicking off fire for you and heat and light for a long time . What we're talking about today is going to be the kindling .

That's the stuff that burns quick , it burns hot and it is gone once it's gone . So think about all those small twigs that you can use A lot of times . That's really helpful as you start a fire , but if you build your entire fire out of it , you're continually have to throw those on . They disappear almost as quickly as you can throw them on the fire .

And then next week we're going to be talking about lighter fluid , which for us , is usually paid advertising . So we're going to be talking about Google ads , facebook ads , yelp ads , all of that stuff , when you tune in next week as well .

That takes a lot of time for them to catch on with the help of kindling , by the way , but then also , once they do catch , though , they're going to burn well and hot and have those embers , and it's going to be easy then to stoke that fire and continue with your good light and heat source . So now we're going to talk about kindling .

Jesse , what is the pros and cons or things to think about with kindling ?

We don't have time to try to light a log and hope it's going to give us light and heat ie patience or calls or leads six months from now , so we do need to have something that's going to bear immediate results for us . So we oftentimes focus on this as we're starting Now .

The cons are that kindling is gone really quickly , so this type of marketing has to be done again and again , and again in order for it to be effective . Once you've done it , it works . You might get a patient from it .

Great , you have to go back out and do it again next week to do that , and so what we see a lot of times is people who are really stuck in this grind , and I think kindling is a grind .

If you can imagine just trying to build a bonfire out of kindling like these are all the small sticks and leaves and bits and pieces that you collect all over the place . Well , if you're doing that all the time , imagine that you're pouring it on the fire , there's a big burst of flame and then it's gone .

Now you have to run out and get more before your fire burns out . You're constantly running back and forth . Should I do this ? We see that a ton in business of people who have even been doing this five , 10 , 15 years and are still reliant solely on kindling , haven't gotten any of those big logs to catch , and now you're still doing all of this stuff .

So that's really the con , nicole , is that it's constant effort , and when people are burned out or they're feeling they're in the grind , that's usually what's happening is that they're having to go out and put so much effort into their marketing because it's all of this quick hitting stuff , but it's not long lasting .

You're looking at a workshop as a why can't I keep doing it at the same location ? Why can't the person that said I can do a workshop at their place ? Why aren't they sending me patients ? It's like well , that's not the relationship that you sent up . You set up a relationship for a workshop , not a .

You didn't treat that person like practitioner marketing and so you are misappropriating the type of marketing in a different category and then getting frustrated and saying , well , that doesn't work , and really you're just having the wrong expectations for what that type of marketing should do .

But that's basically kind of either doing self hosting a thing where you invite people from the community , usually free or at a nominal charge , or where you're doing this at a gym , at a yoga studio , at a Pilates place , something like that where you're getting people in , you're doing a free or very low cost course class , like just a one-off thing , and this is

actually really effective for a certain type of person . First of all , so Nicole talked about in the very first episode of this series , knowing what you're good at , knowing what you like . Are you a great teacher ? Are you dynamic ? Do people resonate with you ?

Are you the kind of person who goes in and does something like this and two or three people are coming up to you afterwards and saying , hey , I need to work with you , give me your card , where can I schedule ?

Or is that something that feels awful to you and it feels like pulling teeth to put together a teaching thing and you don't really know what to say and you feel awkward when you're there and you show up and all of a sudden there's two people instead of 10 , and now you have this whole canned PowerPoint presentation for two folks who are sitting there looking at

you like you're crazy , right ? All of that stuff kind of goes into workshops . So , nicole , how do people know if workshops are right for them , and what have you seen be effective and what have you seen be a little bit of trouble ?

If you're someone like me who's not a crossfitter and you're gonna try to go and do a workshop at a CrossFit box , you sure as shit better do your research and talk to crossfitters before and understand their lingo and understand that culture , because if you walk into that area and you have no idea and you're talking about how you shouldn't load and you should be

careful about certain things and we really have to dial things back , I mean , those people do not wanna hear that stuff . And you're a crossfitter . I have done research on you . I know that you all do not like to be told like don't do those things . You're willing to modify , but you're not willing to not do it for a while .

That is your source , that is your drive of people , that you are getting motivation from that . You're getting support from like it's so much more than just the gym for you all . So and this is all without me not going to CrossFit , you guys . So I feel like you gotta understand where you fit in in that setting .

So if I go into a Pilates studio , for instance , I cannot say don't pull your belly towards your spine , like that is a cue that these people use a lot of , and so you have to just understand your audience .

That's where a lot of people go wrong is that you're not understanding your audience or you are trying to make people care about the pelvic floor that are not in the right mindset to worry about the four functions of the pelvic floor . Are the people that are staying after an orange theory workout don't care that there's four S's for pelvic floor function .

They wanna know about what they wanna know about , which is , think about what they're doing . They're doing high impact activity , they're doing interval training , they're running on a treadmill , they're rowing . So you've gotta make sure that what you're talking about is married to the type of people that you are talking to .

So Nicole had a standing thing to go back and talk to each one of these new folks . Well , that , if you're gonna do a workshop and that's gonna be a kindling part of your marketing , then make it easier on yourself . Find places where you can go back and you're not having to do this with a brand new person every single time . If it's a gym , great .

Can I set up something quarterly ? If it's a Pilates studio , how often are they getting new people in ?

So , because both of those things are kindling , because they are going to spark an interest in somebody and then it's going to help them to call you kind of immediately . This isn't something that is going to like you do it once and then that person six months down the line is going to call you . That's typically not how these workshops work .

Every once in a while you'll get somebody being like a year ago I saw you at the Pilates thing , but even then that's like a one-off person that heard you speak one time that just happened to remember your name and all that stuff and , quite frankly , they probably ended up googling anyways and then had name recognition and it really was a log when you thought

it was kindling .

If you're trying to do workshops to your current email list , they're going to get kind of tired of that real fast and the whole point of it is to get new patients . So if you're hosting it at your place all the time with your audience , you're really preaching to the choir already . So what you want to be thinking about is using other people's audiences .

But to Nicole's point , you're going to get a different group of people . If you come in and talk about returning to running postpartum , then you are going to . If you get somebody , if you want to do a talk on something some kind of pelvic pain or low back pain right , those are two different people who are going to be interested in that .

So if there's a big gym audience , you do one talk on one . You come back a couple months later you do a different talk on another topic . You're going to be able to get more people who are interested . The other thing to just remind yourself of workshops . If this is going to be something , that is something you're doing .

A lot of these are usually at inconvenient times for you , because they're at convenient times for people when they're not working . So , by definition , a lot of these are evenings . A lot of these are weekends . The last two that we've done , nicole , have been on a Saturday and a Sunday , like that's when this is going to be happening .

And if you're good with that and you're in that grind stage and you're hustling and doing that , then that's great . But if that gets old for a lot of people pretty quickly when it's another seven o'clock on a Wednesday night , Totally .

So if it's a 45 minute workshop or a half an hour workshop with 15 minutes of Q&A , that's actually like three patient slots that that takes up , and you want it so bad to bear fruit for a long time or to give off a lot of heat for a long time , but it just doesn't . So you need to sort of decide is that worth it for you to do right now ?

The answer can totally be yes , but this can't be the only type of marketing that you're doing .

So if somebody does see a post of yours and it inspires them to learn more , to reach out , to check out your website , to come in , that's great . And then that post is gone and no one is seeing that , and now you have to post something else especially if you're heavily doing it on stories , and so it's the last only 24 hours .

Now , if you happen to have a good local following , then it can work , but you need to make sure that if you're going to post something that you also tag some people in your local market that they might be interested in sharing it Make it shareable .

There have been so many times when I have tried to support a local practitioner in my area and I'd go to their Instagram feed and I'm like cool , I'm going to like repost something to my stories and literally nothing is reshareable from my audience . So think about that if you're really trying to do local types of stuff .

You created this reel , you posted it , you put it out into the ether , but one of the things that we would always have you take a step back and challenge is what's the ROI on every reel that you're doing ?

And so you can and very many people do build an incredible business , a thriving business , without ever doing much on social media at all or more than what we would call like proof of life . So it does not have to be . You know , I think there's this misconception that you have to be doing that , and the answer to that is absolutely not .

It is one type of kindling , but it is only one type of kindling and it is only kindling as we think about that .

So another one that kind of falls into the category is email newsletters or email blasts to your people , or , again , something that can be a great thing to do can have a great ROI , but no one's going back and searching for that email you sent three months ago .

That's something you're going to have to be doing consistently in order to see any difference or change , and you have to be committed to the consistency of that .

There's a bunch of different ways to do it , but basically try to turn that person that is looking for a free thing into a long term patient for to sell them .

It can be a really good fit to do a free screening , but you also have to keep doing those free screenings because once someone's had a free screening , they're not going to come in again . They already know they have a diastasis , and now it's , are they going to get help or not ? That is probably the best actually example of kindling there , Right ?

And again to your point , nicole , that's either a new topic or new people .

You either need to put that same screen , that same diastasis screen , out to a different group of people or a new group of people who have had babies in the last six months , or you need to come up with a new topic , a new screen to put out to the same people that might be more attractive to that audience .

So that's a very good definition of basically what kindling is . It's cool that burns bright , it burns quick , but , man , as soon as it's gone , you're back and doing it again .

And so what we want you to assess for those of you guys who are in business for yourselves already what is your kindling and how much of your fire is that right now ? Because there's two ways that we can get this wrong .

We cannot be doing any kindling at all and the phone's not ringing and we're still trying to have practitioner meetings and focusing on all these big logs and we're wondering if our business is going to go out and go under or you're doing too much kindling and that's all that you're doing . It's all that you're focusing on , you're getting people in the door .

It's the short term focus and it's not allowing that kind of long term success to go in . We really want to be thinking about creating this well balanced fire that's going to fuel your business for a long period of time .

So what is your kindling and how much of your marketing is it Is the question that we're going to have you guys ask yourself at the end of this episode . So this has been helpful for you guys . We'd love to reach out to hear from you If you have other thoughts or other types of kindling . We'd love to hear that as well .

As always , we want to keep this conversation going .