Initiate strikes a balance between getting real results for specialty practice growth at a reduced cost. Practices that are ready to maximize their growth and understand that the more you do the faster and more dramatic the results would be better served with the Advocate package. In the Initiate program we keep the cost low by leveraging your staff to implement it. Practices that do not have available staff time to commit to this program should consider our done-for-you program.

We have worked with many specialty doctors that said the same thing, and after their first 10 or 20 videos, with the right coaching, had a totally different perspective. Many times the hesitancy is due to having a misconception about the goal of your video. You speak to your patients every day, you answer their questions and explain to them about the services you provide. We guide you in creating videos that follow this style. These videos are not about you giving a comprehensive scientific lecture or being a captivating youtuber, it is about answering questions that people have, building trust that you care about your patients and can help them. Part of our video training is focused on helping you become comfortable doing videos, from creating a lot of videos that will never get posted to having conversations with staff or answering a list of questions without focusing on being videotaped. And even if you end up deciding that video is not for you, there is still incredible value in the program without videos. Alternatively you can have your therapist or technicians create videos.

The Initiate program has flexibility built in, and is designed to minimize the effort to implement. The program was built by a team that has run multiple specialty practices, and understands that staff time is not always in high supply. That being said, we know that practices can benefit greatly by allocating time to this, and we encourage you to consider prioritizing this and fully utilizing the program.
As a rule of thumb, the doctor should expect no more than 15 minutes a week. We recommend that you allocate at least 2 hours of staff time per week for Initiate. As a general rule practices will see faster and more radical results the more time they commit to Initiate .

This program was created to help specialty optometry practices ramp up growth for; vision therapy, neuro, low vision, dry eye, specialty contacts, and myopia management. However these same strategies work for other specialties including ophthalmology. We recommend speaking with us about your practice to better determine if this program is right for you.

Great question! While our team has helped hundreds of specialty practices with their websites and generated millions of visitors to specialty content, we chose to specialize our marketing to focus on the most important specialty marketing initiatives. While having a nice website with information is definitely important, we don’t believe that websites drive major specialty patient growth. Our focus is on the unique growth strategies that no one else can provide and that have a much more significant impact on new patients and referral acquisition. Every practice should have a good website, and we recommend that you keep your website (with your current provider or speak with us to get advice tailored to your specific practice).
And the same applies for Google PPC (pay per click advertising), while great for getting routine patients, it doesn’t even make it on our top ten list for specialty patient marketing strategies.

While some may think that our service and a company doing websites or PPC is the same thing, we disagree. Websites and PPC are about capturing demand, and since so few people know about specialties, they have limited potential for specialty growth. On the other hand, we focus on creating demand by building awareness, education, and trust with potential patients and referral sources. So while you may have been told that marketing for optometry is all about a website and PPC ads, that is true for routine care, but any mention of marketing for specialty care that doesn't focus on referrals, is clearly not an expert in specialty marketing.

Finally, we believe that for a specialty practice to have a great website they need to show up for informational searches, such as “why do my eyes hurt after reading” or “double vision after a stroke”, however a practices website is mostly able to generate traffic from searches with localized intent such as “vision therapy doctor near me” or “glasses for macular in New York”. Since most searches for specialty care are not localized, a specialty practice is best served by listing on directory websites that invests heavily in creating both volume and quality that competes for non-localized searches.

A pro account for Canva is included in Initiate, and this subscription enables one staff person to edit videos, schedule posts on most social media channels, and so much more. You do not need to pay for any additional services.

We started by creating the very best specialty growth program we could, and created it in a way that would require as little practice effort and time as possible. To transform the practice into an Advocate for specialty care in their community and driving incredible growth to the practice.

We then aimed to maintain as much value as we could at a reduced cost by scaling back the intensity and having the practice staff do the implementation. We also removed the ad budget and ad management component.
But at their core they are the same strategy, Advocate delivers much faster and dramatic growth while requiring less staff involvement.