Chiropractic Marketing | Chiropractic Advertising | Chiropractic Ads

A few minutes every day, I take time to see what interesting concepts I can learn from other bloggers. I use Google Reader to manage all my feeds, that way I don’t have to visit every website individually. Here are some articles and videos related to chiropractic marketing that I’ve been meaning to post for you.

The Power of Passionate Stories – Terry Dean says, “What story are you telling in your business? How to motivate people to change and live a better life? Charts, facts, and figures make good proof, but they don’t motivate people. You can show them charts until their eyes glaze over, but they won’t take action on them.”

Don’t Let Your Small Practice Make You Small Minded! – Chris says, “Most chiropractors fresh out of school fail within the first two years of opening their practice…those first two years in business can be scary, risky, draining, and frustrating…”

Google Deleting Legitimate Places Reviews? – If you have a Google Places page, you should read this account. It appears many business (maybe even yours) have had their reviews deleted by Google.)

Google+: A Chiropractor’s Perspective – Google+ is being called the new Facebook of the internet. I’m not sure I would make that claim, but I’m definitely watching it and plan to use it as part of my marketing plan. In this article, Dr. Mac tells you why it’s going to be very important to us in the future. Also, here’s a funny video Dr.Mac links to in his article:

It is very likely that everything you’ve been taught about what motivates people is wrong. In this video you’ll see why giving a bonus to your staff based on money alone is not motivating them. In addition I recommend you ask how these concepts can be used to motivate yourself to achieve your goals this year.

I can attest that the 2 motivations Pink gives at the end of the video have worked tremendously well for my productivity.

To learn more, check out Danial Pink’s book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

It was a hot, sunny July 4th weekend in the Texas hill country. Thankfully there was a slight breeze, but not much help when the thermometer is near 100.

After returning home from church, I was reading on the couch when I heard a loud cracking sound outside. At first, I thought it was my air conditioning unit falling apart. Great! It’s gonna be a hot afternoon now! But then the sound was gone so fast, I thought maybe it was only the wind,

Then about an hour later my daughter took the dog for a walk and nearly fell over this tree in the front yard. She ran saying “Daddy, this huge tree just fell in our yard!” I thought she must have been exaggerating, as some of the females in our house are prone to do.

But sure enough, a huge post oak, over 40 feet tall and with a trunk bigger than my waist, had cracked and fallen in the front yard.

The very tree that my little children had been playing under just the previous day. Next to this tree, another one exactly like it shades our picnic table and holds up a swing for the kids.

Why did the tree fall?

It was perfectly healthy. No disease. No bugs inside. Sure we’re in the worst drought in Texas history right now, but this tree had green leaves and was thriving.And it’s not like we’ve had any hurricane winds lately.

There was absolutely no outward sign this tree would fall over.

Yet once it fell, you could see what the cause of death really was. I’ll get to that in a moment.

Why am I telling you about a majestic oak falling down in my yard?

Because it applies to how you run your practice. Let me explain…

When my practice was struggling, it looked great on the outside. The patients really had no idea it was in trouble. The carpet was clean, the paint looked good, I dressed well and my staff was professional. And while it’s true there weren’t ever more than a couple of people in the office at the time, most patients just thought we had scheduled them during a special time.

However, on the inside the whole business was starting to crack. Marketing was pretty much useless, because every time I let the newspaper design an ad for me it failed miserably. New patients began to dwindle, visits decreased and cash flow quickly dried up.

My family noticed though. They noticed every time we climbed into the 1998 4 door Ford Escort in the August heat (with a broken AC to boot!) Anyone who came by the house noticed, as there was sparse furniture and even less food. Business associates and friends noticed as well, but I pretty much ignored their sage advice.

After all, I was told not to associate with such “negative thinking people”.

Things did turn around at the 11th hour of my practice, thanks to finally mastering marketing and patient care plans. (You can read the whole story at my Ultimate Chiropractic Ads site.) And we were blessed to be given a second chance right on the verge of bankruptcy.

But the point is there were signs–very big signs—that my practice was headed south. But I just ignored them and chose not to deal with the problems.

The same thing is true with the tree collapse. There were signs. I had been warned when we moved in to this house. And as soon as I saw what had happened, his words came back to me, “Ya, post oaks are pretty. But they grow up to just fall over in your yard!”

But I thought, “No way, won’t happen to my trees.” Just because the tree trunk weighs a thousand pounds and is growing at 45 degree angle doesn’t mean anything. Just because the neighboring lot has 5 or 10 trees that have fallen over doesn’t mean anything. I just need to ignore those negative trees

Of course, once it fell you could see the inside of the trunk had split. The crack was completely undetectable on the outside. But inside, the crack had completely taken the support out of the base, going 2-3 feet into the ground even. Once that trunk base split inside, it was just a matter of time before the tree collapsed. Thank God my children weren’t playing under it at that moment.

Here’s the point. Wherever your practice is right now…whether it’s super successful or fallen on hard times…you better take a look at it’s health. What’s your marketing look like? Are you focusing on condition-specific marketing yet? Is your monthly new patient volume trending up or down?

There are a lot of factors to look at in addition to marketing. I’ve listed just a few. But often the loss of new patients (which means no or poor marketing strategies) is where serious problems start.

Don’t wait until the whole thing collapses. Fix the cracks before they get worse. Next week we’ll look at specifically how to do just that.

Is it really possible to get new patients from Facebook?

Some people act like Facebook is the greatest marketing tool ever invented. Others think it is a complete waste of time. So who’s right?

I get quite a bit of feedback from doctors using my chiropractic ads, decompression marketing clients, and friends in the industry. Some of this feedback is used to write better ads and put together tools you can use to get more chiropractic patients.

Also, I will often post feedback here on this blog, so you can use it to grow get new patients right away. So as a blog reader, I want to paste a copy of an email I received Friday.

I thought you might want to know this. For a while now I take a few minutes every week or so and look at my schedule for a few weeks and add those patients to my Facebook. When I think of a patient I haven’t seen in a long time, I try to find them on Facebook and “friend” them. Obviously not all of them are on FB but most are and as far as I know they have all accepted my friend request. Now for the really good part, we are getting patients reactivated with no offers or specials, through this reconnection.

For example, I did a friend request for a husband and wife who hadn’t been in the office for over 4 years. They accepted the friend request and I didn’t hear anything from them. (Most people actually look around my profile and make comments on family pictures or at least send a message to say hi. Some I never hear from.) Anyway, the husband, wife, and 14-year old daughter were rear ended by a semi last Fri. and contacted me through FB. Needless to say, that reconnection, financially alone, is worth $10-15K!

Even better, it’s great to see people I really enjoyed having in the office and they were thrilled to be back. I thought you might want to share this with your clients, if you haven’t already.

Gotta run, have a Blessed weekend!

P.S. It has also increased our referrals! We had 38 new patients last month, not all from FB of course

Okay, I really gotta go this time… Tell all the family hi!

Do you use Facebook as part of your marketing plan? If so, leave a comment below and tell us how.

Find  DC Practice Tools on Facebook be sure to click the “like” button while you’re there.

Are you really talking with your prospective patient? Or are you talking at them?

The reason that most marketing doesn’t work is because it is outdated. A dinosaur from years gone by. Back when this profession was rather new and people were still discovering what it was. When there was only one chiropractor in town and all you had to do was put out your sign.

But today patients are much more sophisticated. They know about their own health. They have a billion more choices for a health care provider. And they simply ignore most marketing that does not speak directly to the conversation going on in their head.

And each condition is different. A neuropathy patient and a back pain patient can be having two totally different conversations going on with themselves about their problem.

So do how you find out what they’re thinking?

Real life research and discovery. I’ll let  you in on a little secret that I use when I write ads.

I’ve spent a lot of time researching what patients are thinking. Hours with real live patients in my practice. I’ve spoken to thousands of doctors about their patients. Spent time on condition-specific forums and read hundreds of testimonials. And the same words and phrases come up time and time again.

So even if I’ve never had migraine headaches, I can totally empathize with those who do. Because I’ve heard so many people (mostly women in the case of migraines), spell out exactly how they feel.

The point is…

Don’t be like the advertiser who thinks you can just throw money at a some fancy ad campaign like Microsoft or Walmart might use. Learn to speak directly to your prospect. Within seconds of reading your ad, you want them to think “Finally, someone who understand exactly what I’m going through!”

How long does it take to dramatically change your practice?

A lot faster than you think…

In fact, I find that most successful doctors I work with have a point in their practice where things really took off for them.

And from that day on, everything changes.

I know it was like this for me. Early on in my practice, I struggled for years trying to bring in enough new patients to grow and make a profit.

I tried all the normal stuff. Seminars, marketing gurus, chiropractic management groups, yellow pages, Val-paks, money mailers, ad displays, health fair and convention center booths, newspaper ads, spinal screenings – I even went knocking on doors after being in practice for almost two years.

After throwing countless hours and dollars at the “new patient problem”, I got a few new ones trickling in. But many of them were not very interested in care, and their conversion rate was terrible.

The problem is, that almost none of these approaches worked. Most of the marketing techniques were overpriced, outdated or too sleazy.

The problem is chiropractic marketing can be a “brutal – and very time consuming – challenge” to building and sustaining a growing practice.

For my first two years in practice, my frustration with getting quality new patients was agonizing, often making me depressed and bringing me close to tears on more than one occasion.

It’s not our fault really.

None of us learned about marketing in Chiropractic College. After spending four years and over $100,000 on my chiropractic education, I didn’t have one class on how to use effective advertising to grow my practice.

All of this led up to a fight for survival for me. Two years into practice, I was only averaging 3 new patients a month and collecting about $3000 – with an overhead of $15,000!

Describing how bad things were would not even do it justice. I was doing 2-4 spinal screenings per week and holding talks for audiences of one – both with awful results.

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 groceries with two toddlers in tow.

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.

Finally, real marketing that works for chiropractic. (Unlike all that other crap out there being pushed on us from advertising sales people and over-hyped chiropractic marketing gurus.)

Within 6 months from this point, my practice volume and income had increased by a multiple of 10! I was making $30,000 and could finally afford to take one day off a week to spend with my family. Later my practice continued to increase as I tweaked my marketing and conversion procedures.

Now $30k may or may not sound like a lot to you per month, depending on where you’re at now. But that’s not the point. The point is the change from $3,000 to $30,000 in such a short time span.

What this meant for me was that my kids could have a less stressful father, who spent more quality time with them. My wife could worry less about buying groceries or clothes. And we could go on that family vacation we always talked about.

What would your life be like if your income increased by a multiple of 10? What would change if it just doubled? And what would that really mean to you?

If you’re not using effective marketing, don’t wait. It can make a huge difference to more than just your practice.

Click Here to Grab Proven Chiropractic Ads

The question of fees will often come up with my conversations with Decompression Marketing Elite clients. How much should I charge? How do I keep fees competitive in my area?

These questions do not just pertain to practices with decompression tables. All of us, no matter what services we have in our offices, should be asking this question on a yearly basis.

How you answer this question can either ‘make you or break you’ in terms of business success. You may be the best doctor, the best adjuster, the most well-liked person in a 30 mile radius, but if you fail to set your prices correctly you’ll be out of business with a matter of time.

Most practices set their fees either based on insurance schedules or local competition. Neither of these is a smart way to do business. Let me explain…

Insurance companies are notorious for cutting what they will pay down to the lowest possible fee schedule. They are a “for profit” business, and expect to pay out a lower amount than what is regularly charged in your area. Using extensive research to justify they’re fees, they have calculated the lowest amount payable to you. So if you are setting your fees to match an insurance companies schedule, they are much too low. And if your fees are below the insurance fee schedule, you’ve been too low for a very long time. Not because you could have gotten more from the insurance company, but because you have been selling yourself short for a long time now.

Remember, not all patients are insurance patients. Many of you see a combination of PI, Work Comp, cash and other types of cases. To set your fee schedule based on one or two insurance companies reduced rates is hurting you all across the board.

The other common way to set your fee schedule by finding out what your competitors charge and trying to beat them with lower prices. Unless you’re running a non-profit clinic, this is the wrong way to set your fees. What if all your competitors are much lower than they should be? What if they still have the original prices they opened with 20 years ago? Maybe they do a ton of therapy, making their adjustment fees artificially low?

It is important to know what your local market is charging, but not so you can undercut their fees. You want to know the range of your competitor’s prices so you can set yours near the high end. That’s right, you don’t want to be the lowest in your area, but the highest. What other professional service is praised for their low fees? Do you go to the lowest priced dentist in town? How about sending your mother to the cheapest surgeon? Would you use cheapest attorney to represent you in a court case?

Here’s a case scenario. The highest price for a chiropractic adjustment in your area is $55, the lowest is $35 and the average is $45. What are your fees going to be for an adjustment? At least $55. But there’s not enough information here to effectively price your services.

Additional questions must be answered like…

• what other services will you be doing on an average visit
• how much will you be charging for these other visits
• how much time will be spent doing all the services a typical patient needs
• how many people do you have on staff and how much do you pay them
• what is your overhead
• and most importantly, how good is your marketing

If you’re marketing is good, you can charge a higher fee because you have plenty of new patients coming in. One person leaving because they are “shopping for a deal” won’t affect your business at all if you’ve got 30 more new patients waiting to get in this week. And this is fair, as prices are somewhat based on supply and demand.

The only exception to this rule of being at the top of your market’s price range is when you make a special offer. When running an ad in the paper with a special offer, for example, don’t try to have the most expensive exam and x-rays in town. This will only deter people from responding to the ad. Without seeing your office, meeting you and your staff, having their problem explained to them, etc., prices will speak loudly. So be sure to give them a good special offer to come, but make sure they understand it is a special price and this isn’t what all your fees will be like in the future.

This week I’m in L.A. at a conference, but I wanted you to see one of the most popular blog posts I’ve ever written. It was also the most controversial. Tell me if you agree or not. Read it and leave your comments below.
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Have you ever been told you needed to see a large number of visits per week to be successful in practice? While it’s not going to make some of the coaches who read my blog happy (yes I do look at my subscriber list), I’m going to let you in on a little secret…

You Don’t Need High Volume To Be Profitable In Practice

I’m not certain where this got started.

It was likely back in the early days of chiropractic, where chiropractors only did adjustments and everyone charged the same price. Under those conditions, it makes sense that the more visits you see the more you’ll collect each week.

But to believe that today is simply false.

Every doctor has different prices, different therapies, different equipment.

You see, most chiropractic coaches lead you to believe that high volume (or at least more visits) is the way to go. Some even make you feel bad about your practice if you’re not seeing what the top doctors in their coaching group are doing.

Here are some of the ways the high volume lie is used by coaches to make doctors feel guilty…

-when you do an event like a P.A.D. or dinner workshop and you don’t get 60 new patients from it

-when you’re not seeing 1000 visits per week many will say you aren’t “sacrificing enough” or “you don’t have a big enough mission yet”

- if you’re not getting “x” number of referrals per week like the big guns are, you’re not “on purpose”

Number of visits per week is only part of the practice success formula I teach. Dollars of income per patient visit is a much more telling number.

Here’s how you cut through the fluff and find out how these high volume doctors are really doing. Ask them for their average collected amount per visit. Not there “estimated care plan” numbers, but the real deal. I’m about to reveal to you the secret formula no high volume coach wants you to know….

$collected each month divided by your monthly patient visits= average $ per visit

Wow, eye-opening isn’t it. (But believe it or not, this stat is does not show up on any of the coaching group’s statistics forms I’ve been a part of in the past.) Turns out most high volume doctors are making less than $30 per visit, some even lower than that.

Funny story about coaching groups and high volume real quick…

One group I was a part of did put your monthly collections number on your name badge at the seminars. They did it as a mental boosting type of thing, where you were excited to show up and get your new badge when you hit a certain goal.

The thing I really like about it was this…

No one could come up and B.S. you about their practice. A guy could come up and talk all day about seeing 300 a week, but if his “badge number” was lower than mine, his advice went in one ear and out the other. Turns out high volume guys weren’t the mentors everyone looked up to in this group, it was the “high income” guys instead.

I’ve seen moderately high volume and I’ve seen what most would consider low volume. Guess which practice was more profitable, had lower stress, and allowed me to take time off?

When I was “higher volume”, I was was flat broke making $17 per visit because I was giving away care for free. At the lower volume, I was getting $90 per visit. Maybe I wasn’t making as huge an impact on the planet as the guys seeing 1000 a week, but you know what…I was making a huge impact on the patients I did see each week.

And I was making the biggest impact of all…being there as a father for my children!

What’s really going on here is that these coaches are imposing their values, their goals in life, they beliefs on you. If you really want to see 1000 visits per week, that’s great, go for it. But don’t believe the lie that you can’t be happy without seeing high volume, or that high volume equals high income.

It urns out the low volume practice fit my lifestyle better. I wanted to help people get well, make a good living, and spend time with my family. None of those things require high volume.

What about you? What do you want out of your practice? If you want a high volume practice, tell us why? Let us know in the comments below.

We all want to grow. We want our practice volume to grow, our income to grow, and our positive influence in the community to grow. Often times in our quest to grow we jump at every strategy that comes our way, thinking we’ve finally found “the secret” to growth.

But the truth is there is not a huge secret to growth. There are 5 simple strategies to grow. If you improve in these 5 areas, your practice could not keep itself from growing. If your struggling to grow take a look at this list and find the one (or more) strategy that you need to work on.

1. Acquire More New Patients

As I’ve said, there is not secret and this point proves it. Everyone realizes you’ve got to get more new patients to grow. While there are plenty of business coaches telling you to plug the “leaky bucket” and not worry about new ones, common sense tells you that new patients are the life blood of your practice.

So if everyone knows about this strategy, why aren’t more people successful at it?

Well, knowing about it and being good at it are two different things indeed. Most chiropractors (any health practitioner for that matter) have been told various lies about marketing, like: it’s degrading, it’s not for doctors, and my personal favorite “marketing is unethical”. Of course there are snakes out there doing these things. Yet one bad apple doesn’t mean all the rest are bad too. If you’ve got a website, that’s marketing. A business card, that’s marketing as well.

You get the point. Marketing is extremely ethical, especially if you’re in a profession that can help people. It would be unethical to be able to help people and then keep them from finding you for your services. So the question you really need to ask is “how do I find and use effective marketing?”

The general answer is to find and use marketing that proves itself. If you have proven yellow pages work in your area within the last year, by measuring the ROI, then keep using them. If your town has a newspaper, then you should know if a good ad will work there. The specific answer is to look at the links above in the menu bar and the Other Tools where I recommend other people’s products.

2. Get Stronger Conversions

What good goes it do to get 30 new patients a month if you only convert one of them to care? I struggled with low conversions when first starting in practice. Some of my problem was confidence issues, but the bigger part was poor presentation. No, you don’t have to be a sweet-talking care salesman, but you’ve got to present your case with truth and certainty. Imagine going for brain surgery and the surgeon is nervous, uncertain and not very trustworthy. Would you “start care” with him?

The easiest way to get better conversions is to bring in better qualified patients. Patients referred in by others are usually very qualified for care and have already gotten a recommendation from someone else. Also, by using effective marketing like I mentioned above, you can market to certain conditions which are more likely to follow through with your care recommendations.

For more tips on conversions, see my article entitled “14 Ways to Increase Your Conversions“.

3. Collect More Per Visit

How much do you collect per visit on average? Not a guess, but the actual number?

If you’re like I was the first 2 years in business, I had no clue. I thought that since my charge for adjustment was $45, that was my average. Imagine my surprise when I actually did the calculation and found it to be $17. No wonder some coaches tell people “not to worry about the numbers” — wow! How many visits do you have to see at $17 to make a living these days?

So the point is figure up your number and know it. Take all the gross collections you made last month, or last year, and divide by the number of visits in that time period. You may be surprised at what you find.

So how do you increase this amount?

You need to add more services that the patient wants or needs. Easy ideas are massage, nutritional supplements, rehab, weight loss programs, etc. I’m not saying you’ve got to be a Walmart and offer everything under one roof. But adding a couple of extra services you and your patients are interested in will only benefit everyone. Another thing you can do to collect more per visit is raise your fees a little. The costs of running a practice do go up over time, so don’t be shy about raising your fees to make up for it. If you’ve been holding off for years from doing this, now is the time.

4. Increase Your Patient Visit Average (PVA)

Of the 5 things listed here, this is one of the most difficult. I know, you’ve heard stories about people having a PVA of 100+. And they may be using the easier way to increase PVA, which is to discount everything down to nothing (like the $17 a visit mentioned above!)

But for the rest of us, we realize that human nature is what it is, and we live in a world that does not like to commit. It’s nothing for people to have an excuse for missing appointments. Other may not like the perfume your front desk wears and they’ll go down the street to see someone else.

The best way to increase PVA is simply to tell patients at the beginning how many visits you recommend. Not scaring them into it or anything like that. But simply saying here’s how many I think it will take. Other strategies that help are patient education, front desk follow-up, in-office marketing, and having a good rapport with patients.

5. Lower Your Overhead

The one everyone body loves to hate — overhead expenses! But the easiest way to increase your income is to keep more of what you make.

Many doctors think there is nothing that can be done about their monthly business expenses. But this is not true. Everything is negotiable, from lower rent and CAM charges on a lease to a lower monthly cell phone bill. Simply contact all your vendors/suppliers and ask them for lower rates.You’ll be surprised how many will budge.

Also, paying interest on debt every month can kill a practice. What if you kept all your debt payments every month and pocketed them. How much would that add up to? Develop a plan to repay your debt as soon as possible. I followed and recommend the Total Money Makeover.

Some doctors cut out their marketing budget to reduce expenses. But this is very, very dangerous and can send you into a deadly spiral (which I wrote more on here.)

Which of these 5 strategies do you struggle with? Leave a comment below.