Chiropractic Marketing | Chiropractic Advertising | Chiropractic Ads

Every chiropractor agrees that referrals are the best quality new patients you can get. But what many chiropractors don’t agree on is the most effective method for getting more referrals.

Some chiropractic consultants and coaches tell you to continually “ask your patients”. In my experience, “ask your patients” really meant to forcefully push and beg them for referrals. Others will tell you Patient Appreciation Days will bring in 100+ referrals every time you do them. While P.A.D.’s are good to do once or twice a year, they can be a lot of work. (Not to mention getting 100+ new patients is just a hyped up sales pitch.)

I’ve discovered a much easier method of getting new patient referrals…chiropractic dinner workshops. If you’re not familiar with a dinner workshop, it’s basically a short talk or “lay lecture” held outside your office for your patients and their guest

Find out more by clicking here…

Patients are invited and bring a family member or friend. You give a short 20-30 minute talk about chiropractic and how you can help people with their health problems, then you make an offer to the guests in attendance to come in for an exam.

You really are just getting high quality referrals, but doing it in a different way because the person referring is sitting right next to them.

When I first heard about dinner workshops, my first thought was that #1.) it was going to be too much work and #2.) you would have to drag your patients to come. But after getting Chris Burfield’s “The Dinner Workshop” DVD course, both of these concerns were put to rest because he included the steps and tools to make it easy.

Here’s the basic layout of how to set up a dinner workshop…

-Find a local restaurant that can seat 15-30 people in a separate room and make sure they can make a special menu for your workshop.

-Schedule the room for 1.5-2 hours on a Tuesday night.

-Invite your patients by asking them, putting up flyers, and running ads.

-Have your staff show up early and help set up.

-Give your educational talk, closing with an emotional story and a special one-time offer.

I recommend doing these at least once a month (twice if your practice is larger.) Many doctors are getting 10-20 new patients each month just from these dinner workshops alone.

For a step-by-step instruction on how to do this — plus the flyers, forms, scripts, and a DVD showing you how to promote it — pick up Chris Burfield’s “The Dinner Workshop” DVD kit.

Check out the Chiropractic Dinner Workshop by clicking here…

For a package containing 3 DVD’s (including one you can ‘plug and play’ in your waiting room with slides promoting the workshop) and a CD with all the advertising material, I think you’ll agree this is a great bargain.

What’s your strategy for growing your practice during this current recession? Are you trying to keep doing things as usual, “wait it out” and hope to make it through…or do you have a specific action plan you’re working on this week, this month, and this year?

I hope it’s the latter, because the “wait it out” plan is only a plan for failure.You’d better not be asking yourself “How can I survive the recession?”

To sit around hoping next month will be better, yet not taking action steps to make it so is how businesses end up in debt up to their ears and going bankrupt.

Sure, the government is spending billions to try and stimulate the economy…but you have better odds of winning the lottery than getting any “stimulus money” in your pocket. No one is going to save your practice from being affected by the recession except you.

You should be asking yourself “how can I thrive during the recession?” While all my competition is cutting back on their advertising and marketing efforts, what can I do to make mine better?

There were many companies (billion dollar companies today) that got their start during the recessions and depressions. A great article by marketing author Dave Chase states the following in his research…

Because so many companies cut spending during the Great Depression era, advertising budgets were largely eliminated in many industries. Not only did spending decline, but some companies actually dropped out of public sight because of short-sighted decisions made about spending money to keep a high profile. Advertising cutbacks caused many customers to feel abandoned. They associated the brands that cut back on advertising with a lack of staying power. This not only drove customers to more aggressive competitors, but it also caused financial mistrust when it came to making additional investments in the no-longer-visible companies.

Both anecdotal and empirical evidence support the case that advertising was the main factor in the growth or downfall of companies during the Great Depression. To put it bluntly, the companies that demonstrated the most growth and that rang up the most sales were those that advertised heavily.

Are you beginning to see what the key is for your practice to thrive during the recession?

It’s using laser targeted, measurable marketing to bring in more new patients. People are still suffering out there, and they still need our services. In fact, many experts are finding the typical chronic conditions we help with are on the rise. Is it the stress? The loss of retirement assets? Who knows, but the point is patients need us now more than ever.

It’s important to realize that I’m not talking about “pretty” marketing that impresses other doctors but doesn’t do crap to bring in new patients. I’m strongly urging you to use direct response marketing where you can measure a return on investment. Later in the above mentioned article, the Mr. Chase mentions the following…

In general, it appears that direct marketing and interactive marketing will benefit the most — or, at least, will suffer the least — in today’s tough economic climate. Investment bank Cowen and Co. looked at the last six recessions and found that spending on direct marketing actually grew during all six recessions. Understandably, when the budget axe falls, those channels with the least ability to measure ROI will lose revenue to measurable marketing channels.

If you find yourself saying your marketing doesn’t work, I’ll bet 1 of 2 things is occurring. Either you’re not measuring your ROI (return on investment) and you really don’t know which marketing pieces are working and which aren’t, or you have sucky marketing materials.

Direct marketing can come in many forms. Email, telemarketing, chiropractic newspaper ads, internet marketing, yellow page ads, etc. The key is making a call to action in the ads and measuring that response.

Take 30 minutes today and write down your plan for thriving during the recession. What focused, measurable marketing are you going to do next month and the rest of this year? When you’re done with your list, tape it to your desk or wall where you’ll see it everyday and be reminded of what you need to do.

After consulting and speaking with hundreds of chiropractors about marketing, by far the biggest “lost” marketing opportunities are on the internet. In fact, I strongly encourage new coaching clients to work hard on making their marketing on the internet more successful.

There are three very big reasons you should be using the internet to market your practice…

Reason #1. Everyone is using it. Why wouldn’t you want to spend time and money for chiropractic advertising at the place everyone is going?

Reason #2. It’s relatively inexpensive compared to offline marketing. (With today’s economy, who doesn’t want this?)

Reason #3. It can be 95% automated. Which means you do the work once (or pay someone else to) and with only slight tweaks it runs itself.

But there’s one big misconception chiropractors have about marketing their practice on the internet. Many believe that chiropractic internet marketing equals having a pretty, static website. (No worries, I thought this same thing just a few years ago.) You know the pitch all those website companies make..”Hey Doc, we can do a website for you and it will bring you tons of new patients.”

Putting up a static website and expecting new patients just doesn’t work anymore. Let’s look at a similar comparison offline. Would you put up a sign on the front of your office, not do any other marketing, and expect a continual rush of new patients for the next 10 years?

So how do you really use the internet to bring in more quality new patients. Here are my top 3 proven ways to do it…

#1. Improve your organic search ranking. Getting a higher ranking of your website in Google and Yahoo is critical to bringing in more new patients from the internet. When someone types in “Chiropractor” + your town’s name, you want to be at or near the top of the listings. The nice part about organic search results is that they are free, which means you don’t have to pay every time someone clicks on the listing and goes to your site. The bad part about organic search rankings is that they are difficult to improve with a “Traditional” type website.

But there is a new type of website that search engines love (especially Google). This is called a “wordpress site” and can be downloaded for free at http://www.wordpress.org. It’s a software that once installed, makes your site nice and orderly for Google to index all the pages in their system. (Many people use this software to create a blog, but it also allows you to create a more traditional looking website.) I’ve seen clients put these sites up and rank #1 in their competitive areas within 2 weeks. Consider most of these doctors have had an old website up for years and never reached the top 10 on Google with it.

#2. Pay per click marketing. If you go to google.com or yahoo.com and search for a term, you’ll notice ads at the top and right side. These are called pay-per-click ads (PPC for short). You write an ad, bid on it’s location, and if someone clicks on it you pay a small fee. If no one clicks on it and goes to your webpage, you don’t pay. (Wouldn’t it be nice if newspapers and yellow pages were like this — you only pay if new patients show up at your door

Google’s PPC is called Adwords, and it’s vastly superior to yahoo or MSN.com’s PPC systems. A very nice component of Adwords is the wide range of testing and tracking you can do with your ads. For example, I’ve run tests in the spinal decompression market where one single character in the headline of the ad can have 4 times the results than if that character wasn’t there.

#3. Email marketing. Almost no one is using email in chiropractic today. This makes you really ‘stand out from the crowd’ if you can put email messages to work for your practice. The first place to use email messages is to your new patient prospects that have found you on the internet. In exchange for a free gift (an ebook, enewsletter, report, etc) the prospect leaves their name and email. You can then send out a series of messages building rapport and giving them an offer to come in as a new patient. (How much does it cost to send out all these emails? Nothing really. Maybe $20 per month if you use a service like http://www.easyemailsystem.com)

The second place you should use email marketing in your practice is with your current patients. Send out an email reminders when you’re having your patient appreciation day. Send out emails when your doing a special promotion. You can even send out a newsletter by email to your patients educating them on different health topics each month.

Are you using these 3 internet marketing strategies in practice? If not, what are you waiting on. The internet is the new yellow pages, encyclopedia, and library rolled into one. Don’t be the last chiropractor in your town to be using these strategies to get more new patients.

Whether you like him or hate him, you have to admire our current president’s use of cutting edge marketing strategies to get elected.

Obama and his network were able to use free “social networking” websites to utterly dominate the competition in ways that changed the political game.

Here are some eye-opening statistics that compare Obama and McCain in the social media landscape prior to the 2009 election:

1) Obama had 4 times the amount of YouTube viewers than did McCain.

2) Obama had 5 times the amount of Facebook friends than did McCain

3) Obama had 2 times the amount of website traffic and visitors than did McCain.

Wikipedia.org defines social networking as “A social network service focuses on building online communities of people who share interests and/or activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others.”

In plain english, you can use free social networking sites as “word of mouth” advertising on the internet.

(I’ve long been a fan of social networking and use Facebook and Twitter on a regular basis. You can follow me on twitter at http://twitter.com/drmbeck)

A friend of mine, Dr. Matthew Loop, has created a chiropractic marketing course that shows you how to harness the EXACT SAME viral methods Obama used for the past year…. Now, YOU can quickly generate mass-exposure online for your office in little time…

Furthermore, this can all be accomplished without spending any money on advertising! His web 2.0 Social Media Elite marketing system is SPECIFICALLY for Chiropractors who want to take their marketing to the next level.

Social Media like YouTube, MySpace, FaceBook, and other sites can generate new patients day-in and day-out!

Here’s what I want you to do next….

Check out the link below to see “next generation” chiropractic internet marketing and add it to your arsenal.

http://www.1shoppingcart.com/app/?af=950261

As a bonus for my subscribers, Dr. Matthew has agreed to give you a FREE personal 20 minute consultation ($150 value) to put you on the “fast track” to marketing success!

In Dr. Loop’s course, you’ll learn…

- How to score 1st page organic search rankings on Google and Yahoo with videos. This is all accomplished WITHOUT ever having to spend a dime on advertising, either!

- How to easily meet and interact with 50 targeted local members of your community daily while branding yourself as the go-to chiropractor in your town or city. (This is a great way to leverage your time and can be done in minutes.)

- The key to using Myspace and Facebook for bringing in more new patients. The average person on these websites are females around age 35-40 — the perfect chiropractic patient!

- Reveals how to save thousands on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services which typically only provide mediocre results.

- Includes how to record New Patient magnet videos in minutes without a camera, using exclusive screen-capture software.

- And many, many more previously unreleased Web 2.0 internet marketing “golden nuggets.”

Click here for chiropractic Web 2.0 strategies that bring in more new patients…

As a doctor, should you let your patients in on your personal life?

My answer to this question is “Absolutely yes!” There are two big reasons you’ll want to reveal personal aspects of your life to your patients…

#1. It connect your patients to you, building a much stronger bond. The reason social media sites like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, cell phones and blogs are so popular today is because people want to feel connected. We live in a very connected world where patients want to know about your good times and even be there for you during your hard times. Also, patients feel really put off by many doctors out they have seen in the past. They feel rushed, neglected and completely fed up with “the system.” If they can just see that you’re a real human with a life, then they are going to appreciate you and your office that much more. (I don’t recommend you let patients know about all your personal “problems”, but if they can “be there for you” or “pray for you” during hard times,  this would be acceptable.)

#2. Events in your life make for great marketing opportunities. One of the greatest marketers of all time, John E. Kennedy, wrote a book in the early 1900′s entitled “Reason-Why Advertising”. He stated that when you write and run an ad, you must give a believable reason why you are making an incredible offer. By sending a letter or email to your patients on special dates in your life or practice, you’ll be giving a great “reason why” you’re offering a discount, sale on certain products, or free food and refreshments.

Here’s a few examples of certain dates you could use…

-Practice anniversary
-Your marriage anniversary
-Birth of your child
-One of your children’s birthday
-Your birthday
-Getting a new pet
-Your pet’s birthday
-Your family’s summer vacation
-Your spring break plans

There’s really no end to the list of events you could come up with and use in your marketing. For example, after my daughter was born 2 years ago, I wrote and sent out a reactivation letter to my patients written in her voice. After it went out, patients started coming in to get adjusted that we hadn’t seen in years. And based on what some of them said, I think they wanted to hear more about my daughter than to get adjusted. But either way, they did re-activate and a few stayed on for good this time. If you would like to download this letter for free, click here. (Feel free to change the offer so that it fits your practice.)

This is just one of many marketing letters included as a bonus in my Ultimate Chiropractic Ads.

Speaking of special announcements, I have one to make of my own…

After a long and stressful Sunday night, my 4th child was born into the world. What started out as a home birth — which should have been easy and uncomplicated because our previous 3 were born at home with midwives assistance — became a hospital vacuum extraction. And while the kid is going to need some chiropractic care and cranial work, he’s doing extremely well considering. His name is Sterling Marshall Beck and he was born Monday at 8:41am at 8lbs 9oz and 22 inches long.

Here’s a few pictures of him with brother and sisters.

Just half a day old and ready to learn about marketing!

with new big sister.

The whole gang

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Where is your practice going in 2009?

In this month’s issues of The Chiropractic Marketing Newsletter, I’m covering the 7 most important numbers you must track in your office…and what you should be doing to improve them. This newsletter is an 11 page ‘seminar-in-a-box’ mailed right to your doorstep every month. It’s only $29.97 per month, can you cancel at any time (but I don’t think you’ll want to when you see the valuable information that’s revealed.)

This issue mails out on March 9th at 10AM CST. If you want to receive your issue in the mail, make sure you subscribe by then.

Click Here to Subscribe

Here is an excerpt that covers #5 out of 7. The newsletter goes into much more detail about how to improve each of these 7 numbers to bring more growth and profits to your practice.

#5. Case average.

Case average is a number that represents how much money a new patient will generate over time in your practice. You will sometimes hear it referred to as “lifetime value of a patient.”

You figure it by taking your collections for the month (or quarterly, yearly) and dividing by the number of new patients during the month. And make sure to use the new patients defined as in #1 above, not just the number of patients who started care.

Some chiropractors don’t like to figure this number, because they say you’re putting a dollar value on the patient’s head. But let’s face it, you’re running a business here. There are two parts to running your own practice… a clinical aspect and a business aspect. This newsletter is about the business aspect. (I trust you’ve got the clinical side figured out.)

The biggest reason to determine case average in your practice is to make good marketing decisions. Combine it with your conversion rate and you can really drill down on your marketing

Let’s run through an example…

An ad costs you $1500 to run. The last two times you ran it you got 13 new patients. You’re thinking about running it again, but your not sure if its really worth it.

But because you read this newsletter, you’ve been keeping track of your numbers for awhile. You know that every new patient that walks in the door will equal an average case of $1500. And you know that if a new patients comes in, you have a history of converting about 60% of them to care.

So if the ad produces 13 new patients, you’re going to convert 8 of them (13 x .60 = 7.8 rounded up).

8 new patients times $1500 case average is $12,000.

So now back to the question. Should you spend $1,300 on an ad to get $12,000 in return?

If you said “NO”, you need to go back and reread the above paragraph until you get a yes.

As a side-note….

This is the problem with judging your marketing solely on the number of new patients. Some chiropractors think…”13 new patients, well gosh Dr.. Beck, that’s not very many. Dr. Joe Blow said he got 187 new patients from an ad!”

That’s great for Dr. Joe. But I wonder what his conversion percentage is? And what’s his case average? Because if he really did get 187 new patients and converted most of them, he’s got a million dollar a year practice.

This bring us to our next number you must be tracking…

Subscribe Now to get the full issue…

I’ve noticed more and more people talking about the recession and the economy lately. It’s on the news 24/7, my pastor talks about it at church, and friends bring it up in almost every conversation.

I consider myself a realist and acknowledge people are going through tough times, but I tell my coaching clients to ask themselves…

“What am I going to do about it? What can I do to make sure my business
grows during these troubled times?”

There are practices growing during this recession. I spoke with 4 doctors last week that said February was their best month in years. Real quick, here’s the 2 most important steps they took…

1. More qualified new patients. In this case they were using my Ultimate Chiropractic Ads, but regardless of how you do it, get more quality new ones in the door. And stop wasting money on marketing that hasn’t worked for years. The days of look-pretty ads that aren’t condition specific are over. People need to be persuaded on why they should come see you and let go of their hard earned money. An ad that just has your picture, address and phone # isn’t going to do that.

2. Convert more new patients to care. You must have a simple, yet effective care plan to present to the patient. I’m not talking about using hard sell scripts or getting prepays for 60 years of care up front — these things will only hurt your conversions. Just figure up how much active care it will take for the patient to get to a level of stabilization. Total up the cost and present everything to the patient with at least 3 terms of financial payments — weekly, monthly,  or paid up front with a (small) bookkeeping discount.

How much effort are you putting into these two vital practice builders?

You’re a great chiropractor and you just want to help people get better. And the only way that’s going to happen is if you put some work into getting more and converting more new patients.

This isn’t like real estate or investing in the stock market, where you can hold on to your money and wait it out. It’s your business. Your livelihood. Your dream.

You must plow ahead regardless of the external circumstances. Chiropractic school wasn’t easy. Preparing and taking the National Board Exams was hell. (Double for me — my wife was set to go into labor at any moment while I was taking Part 1). Practicing after 9/11 not a cakewalk either.

Yet, when you look back, you made it through. What else are you going to do? Fold up and go home?

Here’s one of my favorite Youtube videos that shows how one father never gives up. Watch and ask yourself “If he can get up every day and push himself, why can’t I do the same?”

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