MSD Insider 0:00
Welcome to med shark insider with Bill Fukui, your expert host on all things medical, marketing, and SEO.

Bill Fukui 0:08
Hello, everyone, I want to welcome you to another episode of met sharks Insider. Today, I’ve got a really insightful individual that’s going to bring some light on to some new technology. And I think where technology is kind of come to today is that our practices need to be adapting, they really need to be adapting. And today, I actually have Josh Combe, who is with podium. And I know a lot of practices may be familiar with podium from the review marketing side and getting more positive reviews, which is absolutely really important. But I think Josh has got some insights on some additional things and kind of where podium and he is seeing this entire communication phenomenon that’s happening online, and how practices need to adapt to that. So today, Josh, I want to welcome you.

Josh Combe 1:12
Yeah, thanks, Bill for having me on. And I’ve been at podium now for just over four years. And we started out as a, you could say review tool, but has since expanded quite a bit. And so I’m excited to talk to you about some of the additional things we do other than just reviews for businesses.

Bill Fukui 1:33
And you know, that just between you and I, that’s how I I got to get familiar with with you guys was initially was just through reviews. And I think that’s such a short sighted thing. And it wasn’t until recently that we kind of reengaged and I got some information from you that if the light kind of turned on the light turned on that there was way more to communication and just trying to get reviews. It’s such a small part of, you know, marketing, and quite frankly, sales. Selling is, you know, it’s that four, four letter word that we don’t like to talk in medical, but this is a sale, let’s face it, this is a sale when I’m getting somebody to move forward with having a surgery or a treatment. And they have the option to spend that money not all on a debit, not a competitor. But even on a different product. It could be the big screen TV, it could be now that travels kind of opening up and maybe a trip. So it’s how are we selling our services, and communicating with our audience. So one of the first things that I, you had forwarded over to me a study in terms of a lot of the communication research that you guys did. And one of the things that kind of came out that I found really interesting was that it says 85% of marketers say that their customers prefer to you know, communicate through telephone through email. And yet, all the studies show that that’s not necessarily what it is. And I get the feeling that people just gravitate towards our practices gravitate towards that simply because it’s what they want. What what consumers want. So give me some perspective on some of this research that you guys did, I found that to be fascinating.

Josh Combe 3:40
Yeah. And Bill, I think too, it’s a lot of times, it’s not necessarily what the practices want. It’s, it’s more so what they’re used to. So it’s they’re comfortable, they’ve been doing it this way for forever, you know, for a really long time. And so adapting or changing is hard, a lot of times for businesses. But a lot of the studies we’ve done here is to just better understand what does the current patient journey look like? How has it changed, because we know it has changed. The way that patients are wanting to reach out to your business is significantly different than 10 years ago, right? And so, I like to use the phrase of like, your front door is no longer your front door. And what I mean by that is it’s your website, it’s your Google My Business page, it’s your Facebook page, it’s it’s the way that your your patients are finding you initially. It’s a referral, right? It’s a friend or family member it’s someone that’s that’s mentioned you but typically what they’re doing is they’re not picking up the phone. When I refer someone to a business. I don’t give them a phone number that business and say hey, here’s the number of call doctor so and so it’s Hey, I went and saw this doctor, he’s great. look him up online. Check him out online. Right and, and that’s what we’re doing is we’re seeing that more and more people are using those methods to find businesses initially. And so we can talk through some of those data points. But yeah, one of the ones that’s interesting is just the practices are, you could almost call it like stuck in their ways, right? They’re so used to just using phone, the phone, talking over the phone, instead of wanting to adapt text messaging, or wanting or looking for additional ways to, to open it up for their patients to communicate with them.

Bill Fukui 5:33
Yeah, you know, and you kind of, I have to admit, I’m, uh, I’m definitely an earlier generation than you are. And I’ve been in the, you know, the medical, plastic surgery, dentistry, marketing, you know, business for the better part of 25 years. And we back then we didn’t even have the internet, it was all about TV, radio, print, advertising, yellow page advertising, that type of stuff. And when practices, you know, that don’t have Nike dollars to spend on marketing, like brand, and that kind of stuff. When they spend money, it needs to turn into a lead. And that lead because they they really don’t have a lot of money to be spending on marketing compared to like corporate big name brands. They need to convert them. So for the longest time, I was always about you got to, you know, when you put together campaigns, when you put together your website, everything is about I need phone calls, I need telephone leads, because number one, your staff is trained to handle phone calls, they’re, you know, they’re better at dealing with, you know, phone call leads, and the consumers that are picking up the phone are usually a little further down the buying cycle to kind of expose themselves to a telephone conversation. They’re more committed. Okay, so it was always about, I need phone calls, I need phone calls, I need phone calls. And I still think that that’s true. But a question that I had, I’ve got a millennial daughter, okay, she’s 2829. And she’s now she that millennial generation has become the new buying power in our economy. She’s, you know, they’re making good money now. They’re very lifestyle driven. They are going to be driving the cosmetic, and, you know, elective medical industry for many years. And I think they grew up with this technology, like, you know, with text messaging, and, you know, I’m down, I’m upstairs, and I’m getting a text message from my daughter or something that says, hey, it’s time to eat, I feel like God, you just come up and tell me it’s time to eat or whatever. It’s like, you’re just over there. How does how does practices in terms of communicating to this new millennial audience? What are you seeing in terms of what are practices doing? What are the better ways the practices that are really adapting? What are they doing?

Josh Combe 8:18
Yeah, great, great question. And I, I agree with you, as far as you know, your daughter texting you that dinner’s ready. And like, it’s, it’s just the way. So it’s funny, my wife brought this up last weekend. But when millennials or you know, the younger generation, I’m in my mid 30s, right? I, I’m like right there in that border line. But Millennials lot of times, if you ask them, Hey, show me what you do. And you take a picture for me, I go like this, right? They’ll actually act like they’re holding a cell phone to take a picture or with phone calls. You ask him to do the symbol of making a call. I do this millennials do this. They’re so used to having their cell phones with them all the time, right? And it’s just it just goes to show the difference of the mindset that millennials have. And they always have their phone with them. It’s constant. It’s how they take pictures. That’s how they, they tell you, dinner’s ready. It’s how they do everything. And so, as a practice, we just need to adapt to that. And there’s some easy ways to do it. The The one thing I will say, because you mentioned phone calls. I agree, I don’t think phone calls are going away anytime soon, like phone calls will continue to be a critical piece to your business. But messaging and texting is important. I’ll talk about texting, but messaging just in general, whether it’s Facebook Messenger or Instagram or texting in general or a web chat from your website. Just being able to message with people that is going to give you that extra edge on the practices that are only available via your phone via phone call. And so, yeah, I can jump into some ideas around that the you talked about leads and about lead generation. And and I think that’s honestly, it’s one thing I find a lot of times I go to these doctors websites, they’ve spent 1000s of dollars to have a really, really nice, pretty looking site. Yeah, but it’s not a lead generation tool. Yeah, you go to it. And what’s your call to action? What are people doing when they get to your site? Are they? Are they clicking on your phone number to call you? Or are they do you have a messaging button there for them to reach out to you? So that’s just something to think about, right? Is we’re spending as practices a lot of times 1000s of dollars a month on marketing. But then what happens when we get them to the website to the spot we want them on? Right? And that’s where messaging becomes critical to is, do you have a streamlined, easy way to get them to communicate now with you with the business and to capture that lead, and to have a chance to go after that? So that’s 111 way to really help is if you’re spending money on marketing? Great, right? Continue to get paid? Yeah, like you’ve got a market nowadays, right? Like, you need to continue doing those things. But if you can increase the conversion rates on that marketing spend, if you can increase the ROI you’re getting from that marketing dollars, why not? And that’s where the web chat widget or having some sort of way to message and convert those leads more often from your website has been big for a lot of our businesses we work with, okay,

Bill Fukui 11:43
you know, the you bring up a really good point, years ago, we tried using, you know, like live chat, text messaging, putting those calls to action on the website. But very early on, we didn’t get a lot of response. We didn’t see it. And I think it was those, you know, the ones that we did get were the early adopters. Now I put those things on, in fact, I have a consultant who would argue with me says, I hate those things. I don’t like that things. And she said, and she had a client that said, Never put that, you know, I don’t care what Bill says, Don’t put that stuff on your website, you know, and I don’t know what happened where we got him to do it. And then all of a sudden, this client was generating probably 40% more leads with the same traffic with the same traffic. It’s not like his traffic went up, his traffic was still the same. And yet his his revenue and his contacts, leads, went up almost 50%, almost immediately. But again, that was kind of earlier, kind of early adopter kind of thing. We saw that. And then she became a huge believer, and now everybody has to have those types of things. But I think the practices, it’s amazing how many practices still only have one of those contact forms. Yeah. As the, you know, as the only really way of communing with communicating with the practice, other than, you know, a call to schedule a consultation. You know, that’s, I mean, it’s a different topic for another call, but diversifying how people, I think one of the study points that was in your research was that people want control of how they communicate with businesses. Consumers want that control, especially. I think it’s Mike, my daughter, it’s the millennials, they want control out of how they communicate with businesses. What are you finding with, with when you’re talking to practices that don’t have something like this? Or haven’t really thought about it? How are you kind of educating them and getting them to to take the leap and do this type of stuff?

Josh Combe 14:10
Well, I think, Bill, like you had mentioned, too, with that practice that saw that 40% increase, if they had to kind of almost put like a little faith in you that it would work. Right. And then they were sold, they’re like, I would never go without it. And honestly, that happens a lot of times it podium, right? It’s these businesses are so used to doing things a certain way that they just, it’s hard for them to understand like so by adding a web chat widget or by adding this to my site, is it really going to help me or increase my my lead flow? And so we try to do a really good job of showing case studies showing examples because there are a lot of them out there. There’s there’s studies, there’s examples of businesses that have done this and they’ve seen success, just like the one you just mentioned. Right? And so I I guess what I can say is, it works. And we’ve seen it across hundreds of similar businesses that have added that feature. And what I will say is not every web chat is created equal, just like every website is not created equal, every, every contact us form is not created equal. Right. And so I would question you the question I would have you asked yourself as a practice, if you’re listening to this is, Do I have a web chat? What’s it look like? Is it simple? How many steps is it? Because I can tell you, there’s some chats out there that they take almost longer than a contact us form to fill out. Yeah. And, and by the time that’s done, you’ve already lost that potential patient, right. So patients want want it to be easy, they want it to be quick. And that’s why texting is so appealing to them is it’s such a quick, easy thing to do. And you’ve got to make your web chat just like that. So make it fill really, really simple to do. Now, as a practice, if you can get that would say you can get a name and a phone number. And that’s your entire goal from that website yet. Yeah, would we like them to schedule an appointment? Great. Of course, we’d like him to do that. But if you have that now, that’s a lead that you can call you can text you can reach out to and you have that at bat that chance to try and convert them into a patient. And that’s what I found is a lot of times when when you overcomplicated on the website, they’ll drop off before you even have a chance. Yeah.

Bill Fukui 16:35
You know, on the lead gen side, I don’t think there’s any question if practices don’t have that. I mean, that’s one of the first things when somebody calls me up and says, you know, our, you know, our leads, I need to generate more cosmetic or, you know, fee for service patients and stuff. The very first thing I do, oh, let me check out your website. And invariably, the first thing I look for, do you have digital communication options for them. The other thing, study numbers that I saw was a, I think it was 85 86% of, of customers want to be able to communicate with those businesses during non business hours, during non business hours. So a lot of my practices, especially if I’m trying to drive telephone calls, like if we’re doing paid ads, like Facebook, or, or Google ads, you know, and we can control when people see those ads. I would always say if you want phone calls, just run them during, you know, daytime weekday, maybe the lunch hour or be heavy on the lunch hour because they’re free. But I am finding when I look at Google Analytics, when I go through a client’s analytics data, there’s invariably spikes, I would say, the majority of traffic comes during those weekday business hours. But there’s always a lump of traffic that comes usually not in the early morning. But it’s after the dinner hour. It’s right around seven o’clock or eight o’clock, somewhere in there. There’s another spike. So during the day, it’s high, it kind of goes down right around drive time, like people drive home from work or whatever. And then after the dinner out, there’s another spike. And I think they just miss so much opportunity when those things happen. And they don’t have those things available.

Josh Combe 18:38
Yeah, I agree with you. And I think it’s why you see, there are practices, I talked to practices all the time that are opening up hours later, and Saturdays or they’re doing they’re doing things to get traffic in. And they typically don’t during those traditional hours. Yeah. But I know that’s not an option for every business. And I don’t know if it needs to be I don’t know, if you need to necessarily be open during those hours, but have a way to not lose those leads. You got to be able to connect with them. Correct. And so that’s where what we’ve done at podium is we when we when we add our web chats to sites, we give them the ability to message during non business hours. And there’s automated responses that can go out to let them know hey, it’s it’s past our business hours. We’ll get back to you as soon as we can. But now you’ve still captured that lead. So that’s where it’s key right is like you mentioned there’s all this traffic there’s this data showing that people want to communicate with businesses after hours. But you have an auction for that. What is your auction? And it’s you’ve got to have one honestly like or else you can just you’re just gonna miss out on yeah leads.

Bill Fukui 19:51
I think. I think I think you hit on a couple of things. Number one, you’re gonna miss out on it because they’re gonna visit multiple websites. Yeah. Make no mistake, they’re gonna visit multiple websites, and the ones that cater to their, what they want are the ones that they that earn the lead at the end of the day. So I do think that, you know, don’t assume that number one, that email forms are enough. Because I think the expectations are very different of a consumer that fills out and presses the submit button on an email forum, or somebody that engages with a chat or a text messaging call to action. It’s kind of like my, my wife, when she sends me a text message. Man, if I don’t respond right away, her expectation is, at least tell me you’re busy or something, you know, the expectation is very different. Whereas when she sent affords me an email or something, if I don’t get back to it in the next day, or when I get, you know, until I see her at dinner, whatever, it’s gonna be, right. Yeah, no big deal. So the expectations are very, very different in terms of that, and I want the expectation to be unready to do some communicate with me, you know, the irons hot strike now kind of thing. If they’re wanting to communicate and address questions and do things right now, man, you don’t want to create barrier for that. Because that status changes, you know, when for sure, when you get that email, and you respond to that email, or even pick up the phone, because they put their phone number in the form. Great, but that was the next day, or maybe the next afternoon. And I’ve completely forgot that I even sent that to you. Or I’ve sent out, you know, four or five correspondences to different practices, and they’ve all gotten back to me, because they had more immediate communication, digital options. I’ve already moved on, you know, I’ve already moved on. So I think those are, you know, where technology, we’ve got to be leveraging them, you know, more effectively in our practices.

Josh Combe 21:59
Now, 100%, and I think there’s, there’s two sides to it, too, it’s, you’ve got to make it easy for the patient, or the potential patient to reach out to you. But on the other on the flip side, it’s got to be easy for yourself, for your staff, to also handle manage, because if not, it’s gonna get dropped somewhere, right. And so that’s where we’ve put a lot of thought into that too. And I know not every practice is going to want to respond to stuff after hours. So my suggestion is have a good automated response back almost like if someone calls you after hours, you’ve got your your line set up already with a you know what, a predetermined message, have a similar type of message free text that goes down that said, No, at least they know, okay, they’re responding to me. It is it can be automated, but it does make a big difference. The other thing too is give your staff or yourself an option to respond. Podium doesn’t have we have an app on our on your cell phone, you can download, and you can respond right from your phone. So we talked about how everyone has their phones on them all the time, you can take a minute at night and respond back to a quick message. If you had a lead come in at night. And now we’re here at least not letting that slip through the cracks. Because it’s I can tell you, there’s gonna be other businesses out there that are responding at night that are doing these things. And so if you want to stay ahead of the curve or on, you know, at the same playing field as those, you need to have an option to take care of those messages.

Bill Fukui 23:32
Gotcha. Hey, kind of after the SES, we get the lead. And yeah, we’re going to, you know, invest in lead conversion technology for digital, we’re going to put that stuff on there. That’s stage one, I get the lead. Okay, I get somebody to start engaging with me, digitally, either through messaging or through, you know, chat or whatever. How were you guys set? If I was a practice that I didn’t have this setup? The question is, how is my staff? Are they supposed to be responding on their cell phone? How do they respond? How do they get these text messages? And how do they respond to them?

Josh Combe 24:18
Yeah, so it’s going to be different, whether it’s during hours or after hours, we have a desktop app as well. So if you’re in the office, it’s going to be very simple. You can have that open half podium open, you’ll see messages coming in and out. You can respond back and forth, right through podium. And then after hours, that’s where having the app on your phone, not going to be lugging around your computer everywhere, right. So that’s where having that app is really handy as well. So we’ve made it simple in that sense. We’ve got notifications that you can really customize. So if you want to get notified get notified on your desktop or email or on your phone that we can we can make those custom to to you. So each person in the office, if you’ve got a younger staff, they might want notifications on their phone or on their app, because they’re, they’re always on it right now. But if you’ve got someone that just prefers the desktop, and that’s how they work, or they, they prefer to use it, we can also tailor it to them.

Bill Fukui 25:17
So the, the platform, and I’m just seeing more and more just communication with businesses, and stuff there. It’s all coming through through text messaging, my dentist, my appointments, everything is coming through text messaging. I think for practices that are not leveraging text messaging as a strategy, how would you how would you coach people on how to best leverage, you know, messaging, in a practice, because I’m starting to see more and more, I think one of the, again, and one of the studies that you showed was that I was actually surprised that it was that many languages almost 3638, almost 40% are, you know, effectively leveraging text messaging, as a form of communication in the practice with their patients, which is, I found surprisingly high. Considering how many I go to their website, they don’t even have it. How does how does the text messaging in that study? What kind of text messaging serve? Is it just appointment reminders? What? What kind of communication would you say, is being leveraged through messaging?

Josh Combe 26:37
I feel like most practices are leveraging? Well, most that I talked to, I feel like majority of practices now are leveraging appointment reminders via text like that has been a very important one. And I would say look like that’s, that’s just a guess, I guess, that’s my feeling talking with these offices that the majority are using that. And they they’re using it, because they’ve seen really good response, they’ve had more patients showing up, they’ve had patients confirming before the appointment, you know, less no shows those sorts of things. And so that’s just one example of what text messaging has been really powerful is for your existing or your scheduled patients, right. So recall, is also another good one, people are using it to maybe try and reach out to some patients that haven’t been in for a while, and you haven’t been able to get them on the phone, you’ve tried many times, why not try to text, try a text message, and a lot of times they’ll respond better to that. So that’s another way that people are using text, text messaging for payments. So with COVID, I know I got in this habit, where if a business didn’t have an easy way for me to pay, like I would prefer not to pull up my card and have to use my card to pay an Apple Pay was big county still is just because I you know, it’s touch list. It’s easy. And so those are things that patients are looking for now, do you have an option where you can send them a text and they can pay, or they can, you know, do all that via text. So that’s another great tool to leverage if you don’t have something like that in place. That’s one way you can utilize text messaging more often. We mentioned web chat, web chats, great. And there are different types of web chats. Some of them are like you can call them, you know, chats that someone else is managing for you. Yeah, third party chat kind of thing, service, chat types things for some businesses, that’s what they need. And that’s the only thing they can they can do. Because the they’re short staffed, or they just don’t have the staff to manage it themselves. Right? That’s great. I would just say jump into it, like get something. So if you don’t have the staff, if you’re so overwhelmed that you can’t respond, maybe some sort of a managed chats the way to go. My recommendation would be if you have the ability to have your staff manage it. Do that, because they know your business better than anyone else. Right. They can feel those questions, they can really help to convert those leads better than a third party.

Bill Fukui 29:14
Question. I think that’s one of the questions I get because I’m a big proponent of live chat. I am a big proponent, and I you know, I have partnerships with some, but I think the you know, I think that at the end of the day, there’s nobody that’s that. And that’s the concern of a lot of doctors, I even say, what is who’s managing those and what do they say? And, you know, they there’s a concern about what messaging is being said, during, you know, in those engagements, when it’s not my people, when it’s not my team, you know, cuz I know what they’re going to say, or at least they think though, I know what they’re going to say to those types of things, or at least we’ve prepared them to to answer it in that way. So I think that’s another barrier, that’s always been another barrier for these practices to, to adopt those types of things is fear of the unknown. They don’t know. And rather than risk of, you know, an occasional, you know, mistake or something, now they throw the baby out with the bathwater, and just don’t do it at all. Yep. You know,

Josh Combe 30:26
I think that happens more often than not, right? Doctors are they, they’re successful already, or they’ve been successful doing the same thing for years. So why change in whites, he could really spear why. But there are, I will say to like, there are better ways to do things. And then other, there are some shafts that are just better than other chats. And so do tailor it to your needs. If you need someone to help manage it with you, for you, there’s companies out there that can help with that. But if you do have the extra staff, or I’ve even had businesses that have turned the podium on, and they hire an extra staff member, to quickly manage the chats just because of the lead flow that’s coming in, and the importance that they realize there is on that messaging component. Right. So that might be something you end up doing as an increase in lead, lead flow.

Bill Fukui 31:19
How about and maybe I don’t know, because I haven’t looked into it as much. What about outreach? So we talked about, you know, email marketing, and you know, things like that? Do you guys, you know, promote? Or do you guys encourage a lot of promotional, you know, a lot of practices would use stuff like MailChimp to send out emails and you know, Constant Contact and stuff to do email marketing. What about text messaging, as it relates to, you know, managing patients primarily from a because they want to promote stuff? If I have a lot of different procedures, treatments, new technology, seasonal offers, things like that. How do you guys how would you say no, to leverage those types of things? In practices with with text messaging?

Josh Combe 32:12
Yeah, I think text is a great medium to use for those because it’s, again, it goes back to text message, the average text message is opened within three minutes, right? People check it, they see it, especially if it’s coming from a regular number, if it’s coming from like a weird five digit number, not going to be as effective. But that’s something that we always push people to do is to connect your business number as your texting number if you can, because then it’s coming directly from from you. Right. So that’d be like just a tip for this takeaway be if you have a taxi tour, if you’re looking into one, try to get one that can link your phone number for your business to to your texting tool, because that’ll help a lot right there.

Bill Fukui 32:56
You know, that’s a great point. That’s a great point.

Josh Combe 33:00
Yeah, it just looks more real, it looks real, right? No one likes to get those text messages from those six digit numbers. And you’re wondering if it’s a real text or not. So just one tip would be that the what I will say is supporting has recently launched with it’s called campaigns within our platform. And what we found it took us a little while to launch this, but what we’ve done is we’ve created a tool within podium that will collect opt ins from your patients, as they leave you reviews as they, as you communicate back and forth via text messages, we’re actually gaining opt ins from your patients. And that allows you now to mark it to them. So I know a lot of a lot of doctors that I’ve talked to you they’re hesitant to really do mass texting or text marketing because of TCPA rules, and the fines that can be associated with that. I mean, it can be pretty hefty, right? It’s not cheap.

Bill Fukui 33:57
I mean, that’s the concern. That’s that’s definitely the concern.

Josh Combe 34:00
Yep, it’s not cheap. And no one wants to get hit with a $10,000 fine, because they were marketing to patients in a way that they shouldn’t be. And that’s where the opt ins piece is critical. So for, for the reminders, the recall for you know, asking for review, things like that, you’re fine. But when you cross that, when you cross that bridge to where you’re now actively campaigning or marking people, you do need to have opt ins, and you need to have those saved somewhere as proof. So if you ever do get hit up or question, you have the proof that those people have opted in to your service, right. So that’s something that’s new that podium has recently launched is that often tool and the great thing is is by doing your other types of texting, or gathering these opt ins, so then maybe you have a month where you want to run a quick promotion. You can go in and you can grab 50 of those For that have opted in and shoot them a quick message. Yeah, and see what the response is like.

Bill Fukui 35:05
Yeah, no, I think, you know, as I started to, again, I heard about you guys early on. You guys reconnected with me, you know, when I moved over to MedStar. And we found it med shark digital. And I’ve revisited kind of what you guys done. And also, I forgot to congratulate why you guys got some really good VC funding to develop resources. I think even Google Ventures even invested in you guys. I mean, congratulations. That’s great. That’s that’s huge. Great credibility, great credibility. And now you’ve got the resources to develop technology, beyond you know, just digging it out of your own pocket. So congratulations.

Josh Combe 35:50
Yeah, thanks. No, it’s it’s really helped. I’ve been here for years at podium, it’s been the fastest company I’ve ever worked for as far as growth goes. And a lot of that has to do with the product. Right? The the vision, but also, we’ve had some really good opportunities as far as funding and partners that way, that’s helped. But yeah, one of the one of the benefits with podium is we have, we’re in every single vertical. So we’re in every sort of industry, you’ll run into, you know, if you’re going into a retail store, you might see podiums widget somewhere, or you might get a text message that says, powered by podium, and it’s asking for a review, invite, we get calls all the time from doctors that are like, I went to do this, or I bought a car and I got your invite, how do I get this for my business? Right? That’s the nice thing about that is we have a ton of resources behind the product to make it as to make it what it is today, and to get it to where it’s at. And so our engineering team, they’re constantly making improvements and changes to how, how we message people like campaigns, for example, that’s a new product as of this month, recently launched it. But it’s been a game changer for a lot of businesses, because it now gives them that tool they’ve wanted for a really long time. But they haven’t known how to go about it in a in a legal way. Right,

Bill Fukui 37:14
gotcha. So you know, I’m going to end this with a request, I’m going to end this with a request. Your data that you sent over, it was called the state of business, texting report, great, great information. How can practices is it possible for practices to get a copy of that? It is, and

Josh Combe 37:39
if you want to go to our blog, on podium.com, we have that report on our website, you can get access to it, we have a lot of other really good content on there, too. So if you’re looking to, if you’re just looking for ideas on how to get better as a business, get better as a practice, increase your local presence, our blog is for that content, right? So I would go there, you can refer to that document. One other thing I’ll throw out there, because I think a lot of times, people are hesitant to jump onto something like podium or to to a texting platform or a web chat platform because they’re unsure of how it’s going to work. Right. And what we’ve done this year is we’ve launched what we call podium starter. So any business can hop on to our website, there’s a link you can sign up for. It’s free, it doesn’t cost yet. So if you want to jump on there, and you want to give it a shot and say hey, I’m going to add this widget to my website, I’m gonna try sending out some text messages and see how it works. You can you can give it a shot, and now works for your business. And so we’ve done that, we’ve done that because we know when someone gets on the platform, they’re gonna see the results, they’re gonna see the success and they’re gonna want you know, they’re gonna come back asking for what else can you guys do?

Bill Fukui 38:57
I’m a believer, man. I’ve been a believer in this for a while now. But I think you’re kind of getting a especially with COVID I think with all this remote and heck, we’re even doing everything digitally. Now we’re having this we probably wouldn’t be having this, you know, webcast had it not been for a lot of, you know, remote learning and information distribution through digital. So that’s great. Is there is there anything else you want to close with or any other takeaways that that you feel like we I may not have asked or you feel would be a value?

Josh Combe 39:42
You know, I think we’ve had a really good conversation, I guess to finish a wrap it up is if you if you’re not texting yet, if you haven’t taken that leap. Go do it. I can promise you, it’s going to be better for your business. It’s going to help you’re going to get more leads more flow coming in. And if You need a way to do it, that’s not going to cost you anything initially, or it’s not going to really be much of a risk for you jump on podium. It’s a free tool there, right. And so that’s we’ve given that to people, we actually started it during COVID. That’s when we launched it was to help businesses that were getting still, you know, affected by out having, they had to adapt or change the way they were doing business with consumers, with their customers. And so that’s when we came out with it. But it’s a great tool, great tool to try. And so that’s great. I guess my number one thing, if you’re not doing it start,

Bill Fukui 40:38
alright. Well, hey, Josh, thank you again, for your time today, your insight, I would maybe like to revisit another episode with you, because there’s a lot of other features and we talked about text messaging today. But there’s a lot of other things that I think you might be able to shed some light on some perspective. Certainly for me too.

Josh Combe 41:04
Yeah, what’s doing i Okay, I’m always down for another episode. So Okay, thanks,

Bill Fukui 41:09
Josh. You have a good day take care about

MSD Insider 41:12
thanks for joining us for the med shark insider with Bill Fukui join us next week for another dive into all things medical marketing. All episodes can be streamed at WWW dot med Shark digital.com/med Shark Dash insider

Transcribed by https://otter.ai