Episode Highlights:

Georgiana Clary: “All of us in the healthcare marketing world ,and marketing in general, know that it’s ever-changing. You need to do your research and make sure that you know where your target audience goes to find a [service] like yours.”
Episode Overview
Healthcare marketing is evolving fast, and Summit Physical Therapy is proving that local, independent clinics can thrive—even when competing against national players with massive budgets. In this episode of Ignite, Alex Membrillo sits down with Georgiana Clary, Vice President of Administration and Marketing at Summit Physical Therapy, to uncover the strategies that are helping Summit expand, engage, and dominate in their space.
What You’ll Learn:
- The digital-first approach to patient acquisition—why Google reviews and targeted ads matter more than ever
- How local partnerships can fuel a thriving referral pipeline
- Why education-driven marketing, like blogs and social media content, is key to changing patient behavior
Georgiana shares the real tactics that are moving the needle—from leveraging ManyChat for patient engagement to creating an in-house competition among PTs to drive referrals. Plus, Alex challenges the long-standing belief that PT is a referral-only business.
Listen now and learn how to win in healthcare marketing—one patient at a time.
Announcer: Welcome to the Ignite Podcast, the only healthcare marketing podcast that digs into the digital strategies and tactics that help you accelerate growth. Each week, Cardinal’s experts explore innovative ways to build your digital presence and attract more patients. Buckle up for another episode of Ignite.
Alex Membrillo: What’s going on, everybody? This is going to be fun. I always tell you guys it’s going to be fun, but this one’s going to be fun and we’re going to learn a lot per use. This is going to be good because we’ve got a guest here who’s fighting against national players and fighting against a typically referral-driven business, and we’re going to talk about all kinds of ways they can go D2C and how you beat the national players when you are David Nakalai at Georgiana. Welcome to Ignite.
Georgiana Clary: Hey, thank you for having me.
Alex: Where do you hail from? What do you do? Where do you do it?
Georgina: I’m currently in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I’ve been here a long time. I work for Summit Physical Therapy. Been here a little over nine years. We are a locally-owned and operated physical therapy group. Our owners are from the area. Went to graduate school here at the University of Tennessee of Chattanooga. Started in the home health world back in 2007 and grew the business into outpatients. The majority of our clinics are in Chattanooga but we, in the last couple of years, have extended up to Knoxville, Tennessee. Right now, we have 11 operating clinics from Chattanooga all the way up to Knoxville.
Alex: I love it. 11 clinics and you’re purview is what all things. Marketing? Do you have the referral site? It’s on the way.?What are you doing?
Georgiana: My entire background here with Summit is in the marketing world. Currently where I stand is I oversee all of sales and marketing as well as quite a bit of the administration side. That includes your insurance, HR, so other areas, basically anything aside from operations.
Alex: What’s the title running ops?
Georgiana: Vice President of Operations, and I’m the Vice President of Administration and Marketing.
Alex: Are y’all all BFFs?
Georgiana: We are, yes. I had to take them out and run in the gap.
Alex: We call it MOps, Marketing and Ops Alignment. It seems to be pretty important to make sure marketing is spending where it matters.
Georgiana: It’s very important and it’s a challenging relationship, but if you can get two right people together, you can make it work fairly seamlessly.
Alex: Yes, super important indeed to see in the new healthcare-type marketing. All right. You got to be the seaside on you as well. Smaller business, so every hack comes to you. You got to wear all of them, 11 locations, not PE backed, I assume, correct?
Georgiana: Say that again.
Alex: Not private equity backed. It’s still run by the guys that Mortem raised.
Georgiana: Correct.
Alex: Okay, good. I love it. When you look at this year, where’s your focus going? How are you going to keep breaking in against the national players? What tactics are you using? How do you do your analysis? Where do you start? Where do you start with? 11 locations and you’re competing against a few of our clients, which are the big guys with the big names. Where do you start?
Georgiana: Yes. Where do you start in our world of marketing B2B sales and our sales rep being out in front of faces within doctor’s offices and other healthcare provider-type arenas is still very important. Our time as well as where we’re at in 2025, but also looking at what our competitors are doing and where our audience is going to look for services to help them with whatever their ailments are. It’s all digital as we know. Digital platform effectiveness is what I would say. You’ve got to know what works and what doesn’t.
All of us in the healthcare marketing world and marketing in general, we know that that’s ever-changing. You need to do your research and make sure that you know where your target audience goes to find a product like yours. Google is obviously the big one there. You’re going to get online and say “back pain help near me.” Google is important, right? With Internet platforms, what does the consumer behavior look like Facebook versus Instagram? They may not look quite the same.
Another important thing is to partner with like-minded businesses. Know your community. That’s really important to us being still having that small field to what we do. We really enjoy seeking after businesses around us in our community that are like-minded where we have the same goal and the same vision, which is to help people get better.
A lot of times I’ll look at gyms and you’ve got clients on there. They want to put their health first and their strength training and cardio training. What happens when they’re injured? We can help them with that. How does that benefit the gym? That gives their clients better and right back in there working out versus not getting better and maybe canceling a membership.
What we can do to help them to make it a mutually beneficial relationship, which is what a partnership is, is our patients graduate and, hey, we believe in what you do and who you are. We’re happy to send our patients to you and encourage a gym membership so they continue to meet their goals and their shoulder injury doesn’t come back because where it’s sent from was weakness in the shoulder. We helped you get stronger. Now let’s go maintain that strength over at this wonderful gym.
Alex: I love it. If you had a blank slate, Georgiana, would you start with a B2B? Would you put more emphasis there or would you have started with a D2C patient acquisition type stuff?
Georgiana: A blank slate? I think in today’s time, digital is, it’s very important. I think you would start there. You’d want to get yourself on Google. You’d want to get as many reviews as quickly as possible, even if it’s from your friends and family being your first customers. Right at that same time or shortly after that, you do need to be in front of people and make good relationships and meet people and show them where you’re located and have that face-to-face relationship. I do think it’s important, but you can easily start with digital fast. digital is fast.
Alex: Dude, I walked you into the answer, but I’m glad you gave that answer because I got that question from a client the other day, “How much focus should we put on B2B?” In my mind, I’m biased, but I was like, start with the D2C, like the digital stuff, because like even B2B, when they were at the gym and that physical trainer was like, “Hey, we have a partnership with Summit, go check them out for your industry,” they’re still going to go google you and see what the reviews and the provider and the whole thing.
If you don’t start with the hubs, folks will look like, “All right. Makes sense. Thank you so much.” You are battling against, and you mentioned back pain– Shoulder pain is what you said. I thought that was interesting because you’re also battling against, I guess it’s a misconception that PT is orthopedic. I tear an ACL, I go there after it gets surgically repaired to get myself back on my feet. I guess that’s a misconception.
How do you battle against that and where do you sit? It sounds like you’re choosing to rank and show up for shoulder pain, back pain. Tell us all of the thinking there and how do you compete against the back pain type people, all of the injectors, and stuff like that.
Georgiana: Back pain. Yes, like you said, orthopedic is what people think of when they hear physical therapy. Me myself, before coming here, even with an extensive background in healthcare, wasn’t super familiar with PT aside from post-op and orthopedic. We are able to help with so much more than that.
Being over the sales and marketing department, yes, relationship and building trust is important, but you got to remind people what you do and what you offer, whether it’s the B2B, like I said, our sales rep in the field or what we’re demonstrating and showing people online, it’s a top priority for us to always include all of these other treatments and programs that we have, whether it be the blogs that we put on our website and we’re sharing with our email list or posting a link on our Instagram.
If you’ve got headaches and you’re not sure where they’re coming from, check out this blog to learn more about what causes headaches. Maybe based on what you read, you’ll discover physical therapy can help with that. Whether it’s print material out in the field, a pop-up event that we participate in, our highlight of the month is going to be TMJ jaw pain and people suffering with jaw pain that they’re only going to their dentist for. You just have to constantly have your product out there and awareness.
The general population is very undereducated on, like I said, what we do. It goes so far beyond orthopedic. Just having everything readily available, yes, our website, yes, our social media platforms, and where we go, who’s going to be there and what might they be dealing with, when, we’re having a conversation with them.
Alex: It just sounds like it’s nonstop education. You’re fighting the good fight for everybody, every PT out there around the country. My elbow hurts right now. Every time I lift, it hurts. I honestly would have thought go to an orthopedic and tell them, but it sounds first up should be the PT and see if I’m lifting incorrectly, see if there’s ways to like get it working better at home.
Including myself, we don’t know the right ways to go at PT. It takes blogs and education. I’m sure your liaisons are educating people in the community all the time. Hey, personal trainer, by the way, if you hear this, bring them over. Yes, very interesting. You mentioned Facebook and Insta earlier. Do you use that for research? Are you running paid social ads? Is it organic posts per location? How do you use those social platforms?
Georgiana: We just quite a bit of organic, but we have a strategy and structure that’s worked for us since the COVID time. We actually discovered the most effective way that we– Yes, I won’t say the most effective way entirely. There may be other better ways to do it, or someone else may have a better success story with that platform specifically, but Facebook, we’ve had a pretty good system going since around the summer of 2020, so right when COVID was at its peak spot. We’re just letting that roll. The ad effectiveness is good. Yes, paid ads, that’s a big part of what we do digitally.
Alex: I think you’re trying to not tell me the secret sauce, which I will allow. You’re running meta ads. Is it conversion-focused? Is it education-focused? Can you give me any tip for all of our free listeners?
Georgiana: This goes back to what we talked about earlier. You got to measure what you’re doing. You have to look. You don’t just do a little bit of research, create a strategy and execute it and say, “Okay, this is obviously what’s going to work because this is what we’ve discovered,” and let it roll. You need to pay attention to the analytics on the backend, whether for you that looks like monthly, weekly. For us, it’s roughly monthly and we’re looking at those conversions. How’s the ad performing?
The term on Facebook, the meta ads conversion means one thing, but from a business standpoint, we can look at those leads and we can look at what comes in and are those converting actually to a sale. Are they becoming a patient? Yes, the ad may appear to be performing well, but is it converting to a patient? Then from there, if it’s not, we can discover maybe why. Is it our followup? Are we quick enough? Do we have a good conversation with them once they end up in our messenger? Where’s the missing link?
Georgiana: You got to pay attention to what you’re doing, but conversions important-
Alex: [crosstalk] at the end of the day.
Georgiana: -on your ads, [crosstalk] on that.
Alex: Georgiana, it’s kind of a manual batch. You take the leads and you say, Cindy Gym, et cetera, came in as leads. did they convert? It’s not a CRM and an automatic type thing, probably.
Georgiana: Right.
Alex: Okay, cool.
Georgiana: Then we have to get them on a schedule. You got to go pay attention and work those leads to get them where they need to be within your clinics.
Alex: It’s okay for it to be manual, listeners. That’s what I was trying to get to. You don’t have to have the most fancy CRM and CDP and lead tracking software. You do need to know the names that came in and then someone internally. You can’t do it at 100 locations, but 11 locations, you should be looking at that saying, what’s going on here? Are we not converting? Are they not educated? Are they what? You said Messenger. Are you guys chatting with the leads?
Georgiana: Yes. I was going to say, if you’re going to use some sort of automation, some sort of bot, that can be effective, but you got to go have somebody. You got to go have a real person paying attention to that.
Alex: [unintelligible 00:10:44].
Georgiana: You got to go make sure that the conversation is flowing how it should be. You also got to go know when you need to chime in and take over based on what that person’s saying. Don’t let the lead go based on where they stop in that Messenger, if you’re using a bot, like I said.
Alex: Do you have a specific bot or thing you’re using?
Georgiana: Sure. One of the options for a bot within Messenger is called ManyChat.
Alex: Okay. All right, good.
Georgiana: It’s been around for quite a few years.
Alex: Everybody wants to know those types of things. Do you have online scheduling?
Georgiana: We do not do online scheduling.
Alex: It’s all forms and calls coming in. What do you use for call and form tracking?
Alex: Actually, it’s self.
Alex: All right, it’s manual. Okay, so the calls are not any kind of listen to or track back to the ad campaign yet. Plans to do that?
Georgiana: Yes. Part of the reason that we still keep them in a sort of old-school way is we still want a personal touch in there. Somebody who is coming to us through online avenues, we can certainly take some of the availability that we have online. Like I said, you’re using ads to help get traffic in and you’re using a bot to nurture that lead, but we want to take over and we want to make that call as soon as possible to them and get them on the phone and have a personal conversation. What’s going on? How can we help you? Now let’s look at the best time and day for you. What’s going to be the best location for you? Let’s get you in as quickly as possible.
That goes back to our original foundation, like that hometown feel. We want that to be one of the ways we do stand out against the big guys. You’re still going to get that personal touch with us.
Alex: Let’s talk more about that. That’s a good segue. You should be doing the interviewing. When you’re competing against the HCIs and PT Solutions, et cetera, how do you stand out? You got to be more crafty, do better hood rat stuff. What are you guys doing? It’s the personal touch, I get it, but hard to quantify that online. What are we doing?
Georgiana: Our product speaks for itself. We do capitalize on our Google reviews. We’ll get as many as we can when someone is midway through their plan of care and they just hit a really big goal, like I haven’t slept in months, but now my pain went from a 10 to a 2, which means I’m finally sleeping [crosstalk]–
Alex: Put on a video.
Georgiana: Let’s go ahead and get a review. Let’s go ahead and get some sort of testimonial. At the end of the plan of care when you are hopefully graduating and your pain is closer to a zero, or at a zero, and you’re pretty much fully back to life, work, or sport, those Google reviews go a long way. They can help with organic traffic to your website and getting people to see what you’re doing. You can take them and publish them in all sorts of ways.
We believe our product speaks for ourselves. You’ve got friends and family. Once they leave, they’re going and telling people about you and who you are. Really, the way that we stand out is, yes, we’ve got effective marketing tools to get people in our door that may not look like the thing that’s going on over here, but really, truly our product– and who we are and what you’ll see when you’re in our facility. From there, it’s shared.
Like I said, whether it’s us taking those success stories and sharing it with the public or that patient graduating and saying, you have back pain, you’ve got to go see Summit, let me tell you about my story. Then, this person in the store, their mom, whoever it is, we get a lot of family, friend referrals.
Alex: Yes, I imagine so. The product speaks for itself, but you do promote it at the right time. Are you talking to your PTs and training and when you hear like somebody’s happy and it really worked, guys ask him to go tell the world? Yes, so you’re training them. You’ve spoken with the PTs. It is part of your marketing movement.
Georgiana: [unintelligible 00:14:05] test against each other and see who can get the most referrals from your existing patients. Most people are motivated by money. Incentivize them. Hey guys, we’re going to challenge you in Q2 of this year. I want these two clinics against each other and these two over here against each other. Who can get the most referrals? Whoever gets the most referrals gets, fill in the blank.
Alex: Bam, I can already tell you that’s going to be the headline for the video on LinkedIn. That’s exactly right. The product can be great, but if nobody tells the story and Positive Pollys generally don’t go to Google because they’re happy and so they just walk out and they feel good. Then you just leave it to the Nancys that are like, “Ah, I couldn’t stand that PT. My knee still hurts.” I love it.
Okay, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. There’s two more things I want to run by you. PT historically has been very referral-driven. Does someone have a different viewpoint that it is not entirely a referral-driven business by other providers, orthos, PCPs, whatever it may be and we should go acquire? I’ve seen it a lot with other PT groups that the mentality and leadership is this is a referral driven business. We don’t need to advertise on Google. Did you not have to battle that or that’s not the case with y’all?
Georgiana: Referrals from providers are extremely important. I think that a lot of PTs would tell you they’d love for a high percentage of their business to come from direct access. The reality is that so much of it is it’s going to come from provider. Patients go to see their primary care. Like I said, their dentist, we used an example earlier of TMJ. They’re going to go to that MD or DO first, most of the time for whatever it is that they’re dealing with. Then if that provider is educated on a physical therapy group like ours and all the ways we can help, they’re going to facilitate that referral and get them in our door.
While direct access and our effort to let people know that direct access is a thing, which again, it’s when you can come see us without a referral, and we could talk a little bit more about that in a minute, that’s important because then you’re not dependent on a provider. What happens if–
Alex: They move.
Georgiana: What happens if one PT and one patient have a bad experience with one another, regardless of what that means and what it looks like, how much of it’s true, whatever the case is, but it gets back to the doctor and you’ve got a doctor that’s not interested in having a conversation with you about it. I’m using a very extreme example here, but you don’t want to be entirely dependent on a referral provider because you don’t have to.
Like I said, direct access in the State of Tennessee, and we’re not the only state that has this rule, you do have access to our services without seeing a medical doctor first. There are some stipulations to that. Most of it has to do with insurance. There are a couple of insurances where you’ve got to have your doctor involved at some point, whether it’s after that first visit or before you come see us entirely.
Generally speaking, for the most part, most of the population out there can pick up the phone and call us and say, “I’ve got a shoulder pain. Can I come see you right away?” The answer will be yes. The access is there. We’re able to do it. Why not save some money?
Sometimes you can avoid, maybe it’s an injection or MRI, not to say that that’s not necessary at times, so don’t misunderstand me, but sometimes you can avoid unnecessary services by coming to us first. Our doctors of physical therapy are trained to recognize when maybe it is outside of our scope of practice and say, “Okay, I think I can help you, but I need you to first go see your physician.”
The access is there. We’ve got to let people know. You don’t want all of your business to be dependent on–
Alex: I love it.
Georgiana: What we can control, let’s capitalize on that.
Alex: Build your own machine. It’s more repeatable, reliable, and you need it all as well. I love that. I’ve got one more question for you. This year, this early part of ’25, I don’t know when my team’s going to launch, so it could be mad at me, but it’s going to be February, I would assume. What are you looking to invest in more? When you sat down in December looking at this year, you said, hey, listen, this really worked for acquiring patients. We’re going to invest more into that. What was it?
Georgiana: We are currently working on our plan for the year, our grand plan, owners, executives. Part of the reason we wait a little while is we want to have full data from 2024. We want to wait until December is completely finished.
What I can tell you that the focus is, time and time again, is, we talked about this already, but education, constantly trying to stay top of mind of our product and PT, but then our company specifically and what helps us stand out. We just want to be available and accessible to the community in as many ways as we can.
I think you have to have the team with the energy to fulfill that, so whether it’s your outside sales reps or your people working behind the scenes digitally. Nurturing your past customers, your past patients. Retargeting them in different ways, whether it’s email campaigns or your monthly newsletter.
Time and time again, year over year that is what is extremely important to us is this education to the community, whether it’s someone new or a reminder to someone who’s been here before that we are still here. PT for life, right? You got a dentist twice a year and as long as you’re satisfied, that’s your dentist for life, as long as you’re in the same town and they’re doing what you need.
It’s the same concept. You can come get a tune-up with us. You can come get a free screening. “Hey, I was in a clinic here with you guys six months ago, but now my knee’s hurting.” “Come by, we’ll just check it out.” We can be available for life if you need us to be.
Alex: PT for life.
Georgiana: PT for life.
Alex: I love it. Sometimes, guys, the most fancy and newfangled thing ain’t all you need in 2025. It’s going back to reeducation and reactivation. Sometimes that’s enough. I love that Georgiana said energy. You want everyone to have energy and be charged up. I think that’s something in the smaller practices. I love that everybody’s got know to build it. Then it gets big and then you lose some energy towards building and it becomes a mega lift. It’s really cool to hear how you guys looked into 2025.
This was fun. We got to talk about how to compete against the national players. We got to talk about Google and Meta ads and what’s effective and secret there. We got to talk about manual tracking and that could be effective in that the places starts technically, typically digital, at least when you’re smaller, and then you evolve and you make sure the B2B is working really well. Georgiana, thank you for joining us on Ignite.
Georgiana: Thank you so much for having me, this was fun.
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