Overview of Podiatry Marketing Interview

READ TIME – 2 MINUTES

Hey, Don here.

I recently had the chance to be the “practicing podiatrist” guest on Tyson Franklin and Jim McDonald’s Podiatry Marketing podcast for their 200th episode, and it reminded me why I love the marketing side of what we do.

Quick backstory: I’ve been into business and marketing since before Podiatry school—E-Myth, Dale Carnegie, Tony Robbins, all of it. During residency I was the oddball who preferred Podiatry Management magazine over anatomy textbooks and spent time in attendings’ offices collecting forms and learning how they ran their practices.

Fast forward to now: I’m in a group practice where not everyone is as excited about marketing as I am—and that’s OK. I’ve learned you don’t need your partners to share your obsession. You just need to build a system that works and stay in your lane.

Here are a few things that are working really well for us right now:

• Google review domination. We use a service called Swell to automatically text/email every patient at 6 pm asking for a review of the practice. Three days later they get a second request to review the specific doctor they saw. Other clinics around us have ~100 reviews. We’re sitting at about 10x that across our locations and provider pages, and it drives a ton of new patients.
• “Podiatry Urgent Care” positioning. Instead of competing on price, we compete on speed. We run a small Facebook ad offering an appointment within 24–48 hours for foot/ankle “urgent care” problems and book them in a dedicated schedule block. These are usually straightforward cases, and patients love the fast access compared to ER/UC wait times.
• Leaning into high-value, enjoyable care. If I could do one thing all day, it would be Shockwave (radial and focused) for MSK issues. It helps patients, it’s profitable, and I enjoy it. I use simple treatment sheets and price anchoring to explain options clearly and ethically, and patients say yes when they understand the value.

And the big mindset piece: invest in yourself. The people who grow are the ones who buy books, go to conferences, join coaching, and shadow positive podiatrists who are already where they want to be. Free is nice, but it rarely changes your life.

If you want to hear me break this stuff down day by day—what worked, what didn’t, and how I’m pushing my own production toward the $1M mark—check out the Podiatry Practice Mastery podcast.

Key Takeaways

• You don’t need your partners to love marketing; you just need a simple, consistent system.
• Automating review requests (practice + doctor pages) can dominate your local Google results.
• Positioning yourself as “Podiatry Urgent Care” and competing on speed is a powerful differentiator.
• Focus your time on the treatments that help patients and energize you (for me, that’s Shockwave).
• The fastest way to grow is to invest in yourself and learn from podiatrists who are already doing what you want to do.