Build the Engine Before You Buy the Traffic

How Balance Health Is Strengthening Patient Growth Through Smarter Strategy, Better Access & More Measurable Marketing

FEATURING: Colin Jeffries, Marketing Leader, Balance Health

HOSTED BY: Alison Costello, President, Decibel Media

ABOUT THE CONVERSATION

For Balance Health, growth isn’t just about driving more traffic. It’s about making sure the entire patient journey is ready to convert it.

In this episode of the Decibel Impact Series, Colin Jeffries joins Decibel Media President Alison Costello to discuss how he is approaching growth across a national network of podiatry practices, from patient re-engagement and local search to short-form video, online scheduling and paid media.

The conversation explores why healthcare marketers need to rethink attribution in a zero-click environment, which channels still offer clearer performance signals, and why fixing access and conversion infrastructure should come before significantly increasing media spend.

READ THE CONVERSATION

Prefer to read? See the video transcript below.

01:57   Finding Growth in Preventative Care

Colin Jeffries: One of the things I’ve been looking at is demographic shifts and trends.

A lot of specialty medicine is reactive. Someone gets injured and then seeks care. We’re looking at opportunities to be more proactive through things like fall-risk assessments, custom orthotics and preventative services.

If we can bring people in before they think they need healthcare, that’s good for the business and good for the patient.

04:09   Why Short-Form Video Matters

Colin Jeffries: I’m a big believer that everything is shifting toward short-form video.

We need to be in the channels where people are consuming content. There is a real opportunity to educate the children of aging parents, parents of young athletes and other audiences through video because so much of healthcare education has a show-and-tell component.

Based on the consumption trends we’re seeing, video is where I expect a lot of that engagement and conversion to come from.

06:19   The Attribution Challenge

Alison Costello: Where are you seeing friction between awareness activity and actual patient conversion?

Colin Jeffries: Attribution has become incredibly challenging.

For years, digital marketing trained us to focus on metrics like click-through rates and direct attribution. But with Google moving toward zero-click experiences and platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity changing how people find information, we’re losing many of those clicks.

That means we need to look at the bigger picture: are phones ringing, are patients scheduling and are clinics staying busy?

08:55   Measuring Marketing at a Macro Level

Colin Jeffries: We need to have open conversations with leadership and finance about how marketing value is changing.

You can still look at SEO performance, local search, Google Business Profiles and competitive visibility. But there isn’t one single marketing metric that tells the entire story anymore.

We need to look at performance across the system.

12:24   What Is Still Measurable

Colin Jeffries: Marketplace platforms like ZocDoc are useful because the patient journey can be measured end to end.

Google Ads is also still one of the clearer channels for bottom-of-funnel healthcare marketing because we can see the search, the click and, to a degree, the scheduling activity.

But even those channels benefit from brand awareness, SEO, strong Google Business Profiles and other marketing activity that isn’t as easy to attribute directly.

14:41   Start With the Business Objective

Alison Costello: If you were starting from scratch, what would you focus on in the first 30 days?

Colin Jeffries: The first thing is understanding the business objectives.

In healthcare, sometimes the goal is new patient volume. Sometimes it’s total patient volume. Sometimes it’s service mix or capacity utilization.

Before doing anything else, you have to understand what the business actually needs marketing to accomplish.

15:44   Don’t Ignore Existing Patients

Colin Jeffries: In podiatry, about 70% of an established provider’s patient volume can come from existing patients.

So I wanted to focus first on patient recall, patient journeys, re-engagement and reactivation.

I didn’t want to drive a large amount of new patient volume before we had figured out how to effectively re-engage the patients we already had.

18:10   Build the Conversion Engine First

Alison Costello: You really focused on access, scheduling and removing friction before throwing more money at paid marketing.

Colin Jeffries: Exactly.

If the website navigation isn’t intuitive or the landing pages aren’t optimized, I know my conversion rate is going to be lower.

If I make those foundational improvements first, I’m going to get more ROI from what we’re already spending on Google Ads, Meta and other channels.

19:19   Know When Not to Spend More

Colin Jeffries: Sometimes the right decision is not to immediately spend more money.

If I know traffic is going to convert at a lower rate because the website or booking experience isn’t ready, I’d rather pause and invest in other areas.

Once the infrastructure is stronger, then we can drive more traffic and generate new patient volume more efficiently.