Let's TalkLet's TalkTwo businesses in one practice - insured diabetic and wound care arriving by referral, and cash-pay orthotics and nail work arriving by search - and one campaign cannot serve both.
Most podiatry practices run one campaign across two unrelated businesses. Send us twelve months of visits by service and source and we will show you what comes from referrals versus search, what each is worth, and which cash-pay service has local demand you are not addressing.
Four failures we see repeatedly in this vertical, and what each one actually costs.
Diabetic foot care and wound management arrive by physician referral, are insurance-billed, and are relatively insensitive to marketing. Orthotics, fungal nail treatment and heel pain arrive by search, are often cash-pay, and are entirely marketing-driven. One campaign across both optimises toward whichever converts cheaper and tells you nothing about either.
Patients search for heel pain, ingrown nails, fungal nail treatment and custom orthotics by name, in volume, with local intent. These are also the highest-margin services in most practices. Yet the typical podiatry site leads with the clinical breadth a referring physician cares about and buries what a patient is actually looking for.
Fungal nail laser has been marketed with results claims that outran the evidence, and patients now arrive sceptical and price-comparing. A practice repeating those claims competes on the same ground and inherits the scepticism. Honest framing of expected outcomes converts better here than in almost any other cash-pay service.
A practice whose insured volume depends on a handful of primary care or endocrinology referrers is exposed to a single acquisition or a retirement. The mitigation is a self-referred channel that does not depend on anyone else's practice, which is exactly the channel most podiatry practices have not built.
Business outcomes rather than dashboard metrics. None of these is a guaranteed number - where we do guarantee something, it is written into the offer above.
The real deliverables, not a list written to make a proposal look thicker.
Not the general agency pitch. The reasons that only apply to this kind of business.
An infected ingrown toenail or sudden heel pain sends someone searching for whoever can see them today. Practices that hold urgent slots and say so clearly win these patients; practices that bury availability behind a contact form lose them. We treat urgent capacity as a marketing asset and put it where the search happens.
Custom orthotics wear out and need replacing, and feet change. That makes replacement a predictable, recurring need - yet most practices never prompt it, and patients either keep wearing worn devices or buy off the shelf. A simple recall timed to the device's life brings back patients who already trust the practice.
Runners with overuse injuries and parents worried about a child's feet search specifically, and each wants to see someone who understands their situation. Where the practice genuinely offers sports or paediatric care, dedicated pages and campaigns reach those audiences - who are often loyal once they find the right practitioner.
Revenue and volume by service and source. Until this exists the practice cannot tell whether marketing is working, because the two halves respond to completely different things.
Pages for the conditions patients type, not the specialties a referrer recognises. This is usually the largest untapped demand in a podiatry practice.
Expected outcomes stated honestly, because the category's overclaiming has made patients sceptical and honest framing now outperforms it.
A self-referred channel built deliberately, so the insured volume is not hostage to one referrer's retirement or acquisition.
Budget follows the services where margin and marketing responsiveness actually sit, rather than being spread across a practice-level average.
The parts of this that come from having run it in this industry before rather than from running it well in general.
Nail concerns rise as sandal weather approaches, and overuse injuries follow the running and sports calendar. Timing campaigns and content to those predictable shifts - rather than spending evenly across the year - puts the practice in front of patients as the concern becomes pressing.
Diabetes educators, endocrinology practices, wound clinics and community health programmes all influence where diabetic patients go for foot care. Building those relationships strengthens the insured side of the practice in a way that does not depend on any single referring physician.
Adult children frequently research foot care for an ageing parent - mobility, nail care, diabetic checks. Content that speaks to that family member, with practical information about access, appointments and what to expect, reaches the person making the enquiry as well as the patient.
Orthotics and nail treatments are paid out of pocket, and uncertainty about cost stops many enquiries before they start. Stating typical prices and what they include filters for serious patients and builds trust, particularly in a category where patients have learned to be wary of vague claims.
Not a podiatry practice, stated plainly. The clinic group below is the mechanism this vertical needs most: demand split by service line rather than run as one campaign, and the conversion moved onto the appointment that happened. Cost per lead fell 57% in two weeks and funded expansion from three states to twelve. For a podiatry practice the split is referred insured work against self-referred cash-pay - two businesses that currently share one report.
Read the full case studyWe had one campaign for diabetic care and orthotics. They have nothing in common except the foot.
Nobody searches for podiatry. They search for heel pain. Our site did not have a page for it.
Being honest about what the nail laser does and does not do sold more of it, which was not what I expected.
Because they are unrelated businesses. Diabetic foot and wound care arrive by physician referral, are insurance-billed and barely respond to consumer marketing. Orthotics, nail treatment and heel pain arrive by search, are often cash-pay and are entirely marketing-driven. A shared campaign optimises toward whichever converts cheaper and produces a blended number that describes neither, which is why most podiatry reporting is uninformative.
What patients type, which is conditions rather than specialties. People search for heel pain, ingrown toenails, fungal nails and custom orthotics - not for podiatry. Most podiatry sites lead with the clinical breadth a referring physician would recognise and bury the condition pages entirely. Building those pages properly is usually the largest untapped demand in the practice.
Yes, and honest framing is what makes it work. The category has been marketed with results claims that outran the evidence, so patients arrive sceptical and price-comparing. A practice repeating those claims competes on that ground and inherits the doubt. Stating expected outcomes, treatment course and what the evidence supports converts better here than in most cash-pay services, precisely because everyone else is overclaiming.
More than most practices have calculated. If a handful of primary care or endocrinology referrers produce most of your insured volume, a single retirement or hospital acquisition removes it, and you discover that when the volume stops. The mitigation is a self-referred channel that does not depend on anyone else's practice - which is the channel most podiatry practices have never built.
They share the referral-dependence problem and differ in the cash-pay opportunity. Physical therapy's unclaimed channel is direct access - patients who can self-refer and do not know it. Podiatry's is condition-level search demand for specific cash-pay services. Both are about building a patient-facing channel alongside the referral one, and the two pages link because a practice with both problems should read both.
Written for owners weighing this up, whether or not they work with us.
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