Chiropractic Marketing | Chiropractic Advertising | Chiropractic Ads

Every time you pay money for your marketing, you should include a special offer. (If you’re worried about how offers make our profession look, see my previous article here.) What’s the best offer price for your advertising?

When I wrote my Ultimate Chiropractic Ads, I placed an example offer inside all of the ads. In most cases I set the offer price in the range between $30 and $50.

But now I’m giving different advice.

Let me explain…

What I taught before was that you should raise or lower the price slightly, adjusting for the number of new patients that you would want and the quality of the patient.

In most cases, the higher the cost the better the quality of the patient is going to be. By quality I mean more open to your recommendations, easier to convert to care, and overall a better patient. For example, it’s generally thought that to have a $49 offer for an evaluation, you’re going to find a better quality patient than you would if you ran an ad for $15.

If you lower the price to $15, you would get more patients, but you’re going to also notice a lot of just freebie seekers. A general rule is $20 or less, your quality is going to drastically drop.

If it’s a specialized ad — fibromyalgia, decompression, cold laser, neuropathy — you’re going to want to do a higher price. This is because the patient is really wanting some help and they have not been able to find it anywhere else.
But even though they are more desperate for help, they’re also more cautious of offers that sound “too good to be true”. Because they’ve had such a hard time finding help, and they’ve gone to higher priced specialists, they assume a doctor who can really help is not going to be cheap.

So that’s what I used to tell the doctors using my ads. But recent data and feedback has convinced me to adjust this recommendation.

Because doctors didn’t want to get a lot of people wasting their time, and (maybe) because they already had issues with giving a discount, many chose to go with the higher price.

Now I’m not sure if it’s the recession still hanging around, or possibly just the new economy we’re in…but higher priced offers are not working well in most areas.

Lower priced offers are working extremely well though!

So what I advise now is just to take the range down to match this new economy. Use an offer between $15 and $30 now. You’re only giving up $10- $15 from the range I mentioned above, but you’ll get lots more new patients. Which would give a huge ROI after factoring in all the patients who will start care.

So the question is this:

Would you rather have a higher priced offer with little to no new patients (low ROI!)…or a slightly lower priced offer with tons of new patients (awesome ROI)?

Hopefully you’ll choose the latter.

If you’re using my ads, make this adjustment and you’ll see even better results. If you’re not using my ads, you can try the advice I give above with whatever ads you’re using. But I can’t guarantee it will help if the rest of the ad is written poorly. The offer is important, but won’t matter one bit if no one ever gets to it in the ad.

Chiropractic newspaper ads are still working great, regardless of what the naysayers are telling you. Here’s an email I recently received from a doctor…

Hi Dr. Beck,

I ran an ad as 21,500 inserts in a free paper; printing cost $515.41. Distribution for inserts cost me $376.25 = total of  $891.25 combined 15 day only offer of $35 expired 9-6-11;

Grand total= $17,490.00 collected with residual collections for multiple payment program option uncollected yet. Table now filled for next 6.5 weeks!

27 new SD patients were scheduled!” – Dr. Rich McKay

I frequently get this type of email message…

“Hi Doc. I just ran one of your ads. We got 20 calls and 11 came in for the exam. How can we get better results from the ads?”

Unfortunately this is a huge problem in chiropractic offices (or any health practitioner for that matter!)

The problem here isn’t the ad. After all, it brought in 20 new patients calls! But to have only 55% of those calling in show up for the first visit is ridiculous.

But you want to know the scary part? This is happening in almost every office around the world.

Most doctors never realize this is happening in their clinic. I know I didn’t when it happened to me.

It may not be as bad as the example quoted above, but as you know, every lost new patient is worth thousands of dollars to your clinic.

How many new patients are you missing out on just from bad calls.

Here are a few current numbers on this issue reported in our industry:

• 98% of all new patients call on the phone first to schedule.
• 50% of all lost patients are caused by poor patient handling at the front desk.
• 79% of all advertising is wasted on leads that don’t convert to new patients

Think about it.

You may have spent thousands on marketing in your office which should bring in tons of new patients and revenue, but one person stands between the patient and the doctor; how well are they doing at their job?
For years I’ve urged the doctors using my ads to track their results. Not just from the calls coming in, but the return on investment for each ad campaign run.

Yet, we all get busy and tracking often falls by the wayside.

But finally I’ve found a solution…

Recently I came across a call tracking and call recording application designed specifically for doctors.

It’s called MyDoctorCalls and it is simply the best solution to tracking ads, staff phone training. In fact, the benefits this application will provide with amazing improvements in your marketing.

While this program is relatively new, I’m hearing reports of a 10% to 50% increase in new patient appointments showing up.

Here are the big 3 benefits you will see with MyDoctorCalls:

1. Increases new patient appointments so you can get more out of what you’re already doing.
2. Tracks the results (especially ROI) of every ad or marketing campaign you run.
3. Brings in more existing patients to stay on their recommended care plan.

Let’s do the math…

If you are currently booking 15 new patients per month without call tracking and call recording, you can expect to see an increase of 2 to 8 new patients per month after implementing the technology.

The same metrics apply to current patient appointments as well.

Here’s what a few big names in the profession are saying about this program…

Daniel Murphy, DC, DABCO – “MyDoctorCalls is the most innovative tool I have seen in years!

Gerard Clum, DC – “Recording your calls with MyDoctorCalls is the single-most important thing you can do for your practice.

John Brimhall, BA, BS, DC – “Doctors can double or triple the amount of new patients they receive with MyDoctorCalls!

I recommend you check out this service immediately. They have three very affordable, customized packages for you to choose from and no contracts.

Go to this website to sign up and use the code BECK100 to get $100 off:
www.MyDoctorCalls.com/sign-up

You can even get a live demonstration of the whole program at the convenience of your own computer. I did a live tour via screen sharing software and it was quick and easy.

I got to see all the benefits this program can provide and I flat out told them they are charging way too little for everything it does.

Go to this website to sign up and use the code “BECK100″ to get $100 off.

Have you ever been pitched a product or service, but you’re not sure what you’re buying?

I’m not talking about minor details either. I’m talking about when you have absolutely no idea what is going to be included in this product, but you sure do know that it’s the…

“awesomest, coolest, bestest ever product that you must buy now before your whole world comes to an end!”

You see this type of marketing everywhere nowadays. It’s usually personality driven, meaning the marketer tries to sell something based on their charming personality, huge riches or hyped up talk… instead of just telling you what the product or service can actually do for you.

This is a well honed science in the “make money online” niche. I see it all the time. At least one guy who called himself the “Rich Jerk” was honest about it, although so crude he’s now gone with the wind. (And that’s not a parody site either.)

A well known internet marketing guru will start a video of himself surfing on the beach, jump into his Ferrari and speed away to his office where he’ll draw on a white board. He’ll show you what you’re doing wrong and then promise to fix your problems if you only buy his $5,000 course.

Try to find out what’s actually in the course, and all you get is more videos and pictures of big houses, more girls and fast cars. Here’s a parody I made on this topic:

This type of selling is contrasted with a clear list of features and benefits of a marketing package. (For example, check out the multiple videos and bullet lists describing exactly what you get in the Ultimate Chiropractic Ads.)

In case you think this is blog post is just a rant, I do have a point.

Chiropractors do this too.

Now most of you know better than to flash fancy cars and big houses to Mr. and Mrs. Average Joe. This will only make then run away from your practice.

But many chiropractors will take extreme measures to make the patient really like the doctor — then completely fail at showing the patients the benefits of their care.

In your office, you should be giving the patient a list of features and benefits of their care. Usually this would take place in a report of findings, “Mrs. Jones, I recommend 25 treatments over the next 3 months [feature] so that we can help your spine and posture return to normal, allowing you to be active in your life again [benefit].”

So give up the fast cars and big houses type of selling, and just talk to your patients about how your care will benefit them.

I got fed up with marketing, “pushing” patients to refer, hard-sell tactics – honestly I was ready to quit the profession entirely.

It wasn’t that I hated chiropractic. It was that no one could show me an effective way to market and grow my practice. I had spent thousands on marketing systems and coaches, but to what point?

My pregnant wife was struggling up three flights of stairs each day in our new “apartment home” – sometimes having to lug over 50lbs of grocery with two toddlers in tow.

I began to think my uncle was right years ago when he said…

“Why Don’t You Go To Medical School,
Then You’ll Be A Real Doctor.”

This lack of effective marketing tools forced me to look outside the profession for answers. My practice depended on it. I had no time to “hope” something worked. I needed a solution fast!

At the “eleventh hour” of my practice (and just barely in time to save it) I discovered effective marketing strategies and put them into place for my practice. And I began to see results almost immediately. This all lead up to my writing of the Ultimate Chiropractic Ads.

Right now, decide that you will not give up. Work smart, then work hard until you reach your goal. Then set a higher goal and do it again.

Check out this video of a girl who did not know how to give up.