Facebook ads for a regenerative medicine clinic

Fourteen marketing companies in the years after Covid, and a practice close to closing. Seven months later it had tripled.

Dr. Picard, Regenerative medicine. Recorded March 2024.

Dr. Picard has been in practice for 34 years, running an integrative medicine office outside Detroit — regenerative medicine, neuropathy, chronic pain in the knee, hip, back and shoulder. Before Covid the practice was busy enough that patients travelled in from across North America.

Covid ended that, and what followed is the part worth reading carefully. He went through no fewer than fourteen different marketing companies looking for someone who could deliver the leads and the live seminars the practice runs on. The pattern was always the same: three or four months of something working, then decline.

By the time we spoke he had raised the possibility of closing the business. That is the actual stakes of a marketing channel that will not work — not a disappointing quarter, but a 34-year practice and the people it employs.

Seven months on, the practice had tripled what it started with. Staff who were at risk are still employed.

Healthcare is one of the hardest categories on these platforms. Meta restricts what can be claimed about medical outcomes and how patients can be targeted, so the work sits in creative and offer rather than in aggressive targeting. That is exactly why generalist agencies churn through it — the usual playbook is not available.

His closing line is the one I would keep. In 34 years he has been through roughly a hundred companies and does not give testimonials. He gave this one.

In Dr. Picard’s words