Chiropractic Marketing | Chiropractic Advertising | Chiropractic Ads

There is an internet marketing secret that most “website guys” would rather you not know. It has to do with something you hear about all over the internet regarding the word “traffic.”

The secret is…

“When it really comes down to it, the amount of website traffic doesn’t really matter.”

This applies to website visitors specifically, but more generally to office visits in your practice as well. Let me explain…

Regarding the internet, there is no end to the amount of techniques you can use to get visitors to your site. You can use Facebook, Twitter, social media, social bookmarking, Google organic search, Google Adwords, YouTube videos, article marketing, Yahoo organic search, Yahoo ads, Bing organic, Bing ads, Ebay ads, and on and on.

If the yellow pages rep. stops by your office and says he can guarantee you 300 clicks a month for X amount of dollars, what do you say to him? I would say, “so what, what’s 300 clicks to me! How about you get me 300 qualified clicks to my special landing page?” Of course he’s likely to say that’s no problem. But from my experience, these ad reps are clueless about how to really market online. They are still thinking in terms of how many people see your ad, like all the newspaper and yellow page reps have done for years.

But it’s not the same online. What you want to buy is qualified traffic. People who are interested in what you do and how you can help them. A patient with severe sciatica is 100 times more likely to respond to a special page on your website discussing sciatica, than is a person with only a stiff back.

But even if you get qualified traffic, that’s still not what you care most about. What you really care about first and foremost is conversions! You want your website to convert visitors to patients. Who cares if your site gets 1000 visits a day (which could be some bored teenager in China or something), if you don’t get any new patients out of it.

How do you track conversions from your website? The same way you do (or should be doing) with any other type of marketing. You ask the new patient where they heard about you. It’s best to have some check boxes on your intake forms with the major types of marketing you do, i.e. website, newspaper, referral, etc. Of course you can leave an “other” check box so they can write in someone other than the selections you’ve given.

So how does this apply to your office?

In a general sense, this is true of all your patients that come in. You want to measure and watch your conversions to care. If you spend $10,000 this month on marketing and that brings in 30 new patients, how many of them stayed around for your recommended care plan? What was your conversions percentage? How much are they paying per visit?

You see, if all you cared about were the total number of visits to your office (or total number of new patients), you’re missing the most important numbers to track. Would you rather see 500 visits per week and make $5000, or see 100 visits and make $10,000? ? In chiropractic its common to hear people talking about how many visits they see per week. Yet you’ll rarely hear anyone say how many conversion they had this month, or what their gross collections were or how much they average per visit in collections.

If the only thing you cared about was visits per week, you could have someone stand out in front of your office on the road with a sign that said, “Free care for everyone!” But unless you’ve got a huge trust fund tucked away, this “free care” strategy will run you out of business.

The point is don’t just measure the total number of visitors to your website. Or the total number of patients you see a week. This numbers might be used to check growth, but they don’t tell you much in and of themselves. More importantly you need to measure conversions on your website and in your office recommendations.

Advanced articles on this subject:

Your Website is Not Enough

6 Chiropractic Internet Marketing Tools

14 Ways to Increase In-Office Conversions

The end of the calendar year, what many Americans call the Holiday Season (Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years), is quickly approaching. For many chiropractors, this is a bustling time of new patients and high profits to finish out the year strong. For others it represents some of the hardest and leanest months on record.

Why the difference?

It comes down to your view of marketing. There is a myth that’s been perpetuated in our profession for many years. The myth that says you shouldn’t market in certain months because of holidays and vacations. Have you ever heard such nonsense?

I actually had a consultant when I first started out in practice that went through all the ‘bad marketing’ months. January is insurance deductible rollover month. Feb. was probably okay. March was spring break, so not good there. April was tax month, so that was out. The summer was out because everyone went on vacation. December was bad because of all that Christmas spending, no one had money to come in. Plus insurance plans were maxed! And on and on. I think he ended up listing at most 2-3 months out of the whole year that I should use paid marketing!

You may remember the Dynamic Chiropractic poll which was taken awhile back on this issue, finding there was no difference between summer, fall and winter when it comes to marketing. The interesting thing was that 22%, a fourth of doctors polled, said it the season didn’t make any difference in their marketing.

Now that’s the attitude you should have. If anything the Holidays are an excuse to ramp up your marketing because your marketing will stand out even better as your competitors will have believed the myth and pulled back on their spending. Many doctors have realize this little secret and done very well.

Sidenote: In case your not familiar with this blog, when I say “marketing” I mean effective, proven marketing strategies, methods and techniques. I’m not speaking of getting more brochures printed up or drop a few business cards off at the local restuarant.

I’ll never forget the year I put an ad in the newspaper the week before Thanksgiving. It was later in the month I would have liked, considering I believed at the time I shouldn’t be marketing at all near the end of the month. And my ads usually have a 2 week deadline to take action on the offer. But things just didn’t work out for me to get it in earlier. “Oh well”, I figured, “at least they’ll have 1 week to come in.” The results surprised me. A few came in that first week, but we actually got swamped the three days before Thanksgiving Day. I think we had 7 or 8 new patients the day right before, meaning when came back the following week I was going to be doing multiple report of findings. What better thought to have on a 4 day holiday?

Let’s look at the reasons why you should market heavily during the next two months.

• Bad weather means more accidents, whether slips, falls or auto accidents. People will need your services.
• Holidays can be a great time of year to hold a special new patient event like a Food Drive, Toys for Tots drive, Angel Tree program, and more.
• Winter sports are in full swing, causing many athletic injuries that need your care.
• Competitors marketing is usually lessened, which makes yours stand out.
• Discounts can be had from many media, especially newspapers and magazines.
• People are home more often, which means it may be time to try some telemarketing programs.
• More people are online shopping, which means they may come across your website.
• Many are looking to use up there Health Savings Accounts by years end (especially considering people are concerned these benefits will disappear under Obamacare.)

Now I’m not saying you should ignore certain aspects of the Holidays when you do your marketing plan. I would not put an ad in the paper on Christmas Day or New Years day for example, or even the day before. Also, you shouldn’t run ads when you’ll be closed unless you have a good answering service.

Here’s where my focus would be on marketing in the next two months.

Newspaper Adveritising: Run a chiropractic ad or decompression ad at least once in November and once in December. Twice each month would be even better, but in December run your second ad before the 20th. I would also have an ad coming out the very first week of the new year. (Look for a special New Years ad I’ll be mentioning in a few weeks.)

Internet Marketing: I would keep it running right along smoothly with article marketing, email marketing, SEO backlinks and Google Adwords. Now there is a trend at the end of the year on Google (see chart below) where people do search less for the term “chiropractic”. But we need to consider a couple of things here. First, since you only get charged when your ad gets clicked, if no one is searching for this term your ad won’t show and you won’t get charged. Secondly, even if someone does click your Adwords ad, they are interested and have just as much chance of coming in as someone who clicked your ad in April, or June, or any other month. Thirdly, you definitely should be marketing to other keywords than just chiropractic. In fact all keywords take a dip in mid December on Google (except for toys, gifts, etc.), but they also spike quite a bit right after Christmas.

For example, take a look at the chart above which is a Google Trends graph for the search term “sciatica”. See that spike right at the end of the year. You want to be running your ads then for sure. And lastly, it’s been confirmed from Google Adwords experts that one of the worse things you can do is to turn off your ads. This messes up your past history of success with Google, jacking with your bid rates, quality scores and more.

Referral Marketing: Continue with an effective internal marketing plan, but adding to it at least one special event near Thanksgiving food drive, Christmas toy drive, or New Years “get back to health.” As Dan Kennedy says, these are great times to create a special marketing event. Don’t waste it. Also, these events allow your patients to give to those in need helping others to enjoy the holidays.

We’ll look at more ideas in the coming weeks. Have you laid all this out on the calendar yet and put things into action? If not, what are you waiting for, Christmas or something?

Dan Clements was kind enough to answer a few questions regarding his new book, The Practitioners Journey.

1. Dan, can you give us a bird’s eye view of what your book is all about? (Or maybe this questions is better phrased “Why did you write the book?”)

After a number of years of working with practitioners, and growing our own business, it was becoming more and more evident to me that the biggest challenge facing practitioners wasn’t information, it was complexity.

Time after time we discovered that practitioners had plenty of information, and no shortage of things on their to-do lists. What they had trouble with was how to look at their practices in a way that made it easier to make decisions and continue to move forward.

2. In the first section of the book, you use the metaphor of traveler getting lost in a cave. I see a lot of chiropractors lost in dark caves like you explain in the book. Do you think we’re seeing more chiropractors lately wandering into the darkest parts of their career?

Between economic shifts, health care changes and the sheer amount of competition in some places, I think the idea of being lost in a dark place is something that resonates with many chiropractors.

What’s important to remember is that being lost is temporary. The cave—how we describe that dark stretch—is really a tunnel. There’s an end, and finding it is something that’s within your control.

CE credits aren’t usually what you need to get out of the cave—the dark parts of your career are almost always related to a lack of NON-clinical development. A new technique or tool might be part of it, but it’s usually about embracing the idea that you’re in business, and continuing to develop that side of yourself.

Invest in your non-clinical education. Learn to manage, to lead. To take risk. To market what you offer. Each lights the way a little more.

3. I’m always telling chiropractors that they need to niche their practices, focusing on certain conditions or types of patients they like to work with. How does this compare to your metaphor of “the crystal” and the story of Maya the chiropractor?

Maya is like many other chiropractors today. She’s in a busy market, with competition right down the street. The appointment book is never as full as she’d like. She’s struggling, and stressed.

The real reason that her competition is a problem, though, is that what she offers isn’t any different from other DC’s.

That sameness means she has to compete. And when she competes, there will always be someone who will be cheaper than Maya. Or closer. Or open later. Or with better parking.

The result? Her existing patients don’t have a compelling reason to stay, and new ones don’t have a compelling reason to choose her. Focusing on one type of problem, or one type of patient is one way to avoid that no-win competition.

4. One line I really found helpful in your book is on page 31: “And there’s the great irony of the CAM industry: no one starts out to be in business, yet everyone has to be in order to succeed.”

I think cash practices are on the rise in chiropractic. It’s going to become the new normal. And that means that you don’t just get to be a chiropractor. It means you run a health care business in which you also happen to be the person providing chiropractic services, too.

It’s not a choice. You have two hats to wear (at least), and you have to find a way to get comfortable in them. Your DC hat only gives you the license to provide services. It’s the business owner hat that lets you find the people to deliver them to.

5. There a great section in the book where you give 6 tips to help alternative health professionals bridge the gap between them and MDs. How important is this?

For me, it’s critical. MD’s are still the gatekeepers to the sick in our culture. If you want to reach and help more people, you need to go where they are. In our society, a huge number of them are still in hospitals and MD offices. And that system is being overwhelmed.

Continuing to fight over the same people who already use chiropractic is a race with no winner. The real opportunity lies in the huge chronic health challenges in our culture, and most of those people who need that help are still inside conventional care.

6. Your second strategy for finding more time in our busy lives is to follow Parkinson’s law. What is Parkinson’s law and how can it help chiropractors?

Parkinson’s Law says that work expands to fit the time available for it. In other words, if you give yourself a “day” to do admin work in your practice, it’ll take all day – regardless of how much of it there is to do. The same goes for patient hours. If you offer thirty patient hours a week, it’s common to only bill for half of those or less.

That makes Parkinson’s Law critical for balance. What most DC’s miss out on is the fact that they can almost always earn more in the same time or less. My suggestion is to put your focus on your percentage booked. Start measuring it in your practice, and if you’re not consistently booked at a rate of 75% or more, start cutting back your available hours.

7. How do you think your book can help chiropractors thrive in this tough economy?

I recently interviewed Dan Clements, author of a very helpful book entitled The Practitioner’s Journey.

People find three things helpful in the book. The first is simplicity – the book gives practitioners a way to rise above the overwhelming minutiae of day-to-day life in practice.

The second is a practical way to look at growing your practice. The framework of the book is the same framework we use to do our strategic planning every year—it’s a way to look at your practice from 50,000 feet and make smart decisions about what needs to change so that you can find success on your own terms. When you take a simple framework, and combine it with small, practical and consistent steps forward, you get something very powerful: progress.

Last, I think it’s a book about hope. About believing that there’s no special advantage required to find your way to success – that if you’ve made it far enough to be in practice, you have what it takes to do it successfully.

Thanks for the interview Dan.

Dan Clements, B.Comm., B.A. is the author of The Practitioner’s Journey, and Escape 101: Sabbaticals Made Simple, which has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Success Magazine and on A-list blogs such as Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek.  Dan and his wife Tara Gignac, ND operate StoneTree Clinic in Collingwood, ON. Together they are Contributing Founders of IntegrativePractitioner.com, the premier online community for integrative health care professionals, joining such health care luminaries as Joseph E. Pizzorno, Jr., N.D., Mark Hyman, MD, Alan Gaby, MD and many others.

Their popular practice management blog, www.practitionersjourney.com, attracts thousands of practitioners in diverse health care professions.

Dan lectures at The Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine on practice management, and speaks regularly on health, business and work-life balance.

Cash practices have been around for a long time in chiropractic. For the first few decades of our profession, all chiropractors ran a cash-only practice as there was little to no health insurance in those days. And even if there was, it sure wasn’t going to pay for chiropractic.

I previously wrote on the pros and cons of a cash practice here. In that article, I mentioned that I’m seeing more chiropractic (and even medical) doctors consider going to a cash practice. Many give the current health care environment as the reason why.

Here are just three pieces of news I’ve come across lately regarding the state of affairs in chiropractic.

#1. In Texas, the Medical Association is fighting (and currently winning)
a battle to keep chiropractors from diagnosing.

#2. On the east coast, insurance giant Kaiser Permanente has declared
they will no longer pay for cervical adjustments.

#3. Obama’s healthcare plan will be fully implemented by 2014. No one
knows for sure what it will do to chiropractors, but chances are it
will not be good.

One of my goals is to provide the information you need and want to
help you thrive in the midst of upcoming challenges.

To do this, I need your help.

I’ve put together a simple 10 question survey that will only take
you a couple of minutes to complete. This is your opportunity to let
me know what you think about this mess.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/7YJ5FMV

Whether you’re for a cash practice or against it, let me know by
answering these short questions. And as a thank you for filling out
the survey, I’m going to give you a free bonus: “The Coming Crisis in
Chiropractic and How to Beat It in 2011: A Blueprint for Success”,
which includes the 3 most effective marketing strategies, the 3
advertising strategies you should stop doing now, and the big secret
that cash-practice gurus never, ever tell their clients.

After completing the survey, leave your email, and as soon as I get
the blueprint done I’ll send it to you.

Click this link to take the survey:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/7YJ5FMV

Yours for greater success,
Michael Beck, D.C.

In the last post (Chiropractic Marketing Is A Changing) I began revealing the answers to a recent blog survey I conducted. I left the answer to the final question to be discussed in full today.

The question I asked my readers was:

5. What is the biggest challenge you see facing you as a chiropractor over the next year?

The answers I received were very surprising. Let me explain…

First, a bit of history. I asked a very similar question in a survey about a year and half ago. The most common answer at the time had to deal with getting new patients. This was no surprise, as that has always been the biggest struggle in running a chiropractic practice.

Chiropractors struggle with the problem of getting new patients for a couple of reasons.

Reason #1: The common misconception of chiropractic by the public.

Reason #2: Most chiropractors complete disregard for using effective marketing and measuring ROI.

Number 1 above we can do little about individually, other than keep making our practices successful so we can reach more people. But the second reason above is totally within your control.

Why do most chiropractors have a complete disregard for using effective marketing? There are various reasons I’ve heard from doctors over the years, ranging from the “marketing is not professional” to the “it just doesn’t work in my area”.

So it wasn’t a big surprise to me that this was the most common answer with my survey last week. 36% of people mentioned new patients or marketing as their biggest problem. It’s definitely still a problem chiropractors face, and will be until we all become better educated on real chiropractic marketing.

What was a surprise was the second place answer, coming in at 35% of respondents mentioning it in their write-in answers. This new category of answers had to deal with health care reform (Obamacare) and the issue of cash practice or cash patients!

Now you may think this has been around for awhile, so it’s not big deal to see that answer. But think about it for a minute. Almost as many people are concerned about how the insurance industry changes will affect their practice as are concerned about actually getting new patients. This is a big change in our profession.

Especially when you consider only 4-5% of people mentioned anything about insurance or cash patients 1.5 yrs ago in my survey.

Also, what I’m noticing is that chiropractors are looking at the cash practice as a better, less stressful business model because of these new health care laws. This is much different from 5-10 years ago, when most chiropractors were switching to cash practices for more philosophical reasons.

I’m curious as to what you think about all this?

Leave a comment below telling us what type of practice you have now (cash or insurance), and if you plan to change it in the future (and if so, why.) If you didn’t participate in the survey last week and you leave a comment below discussing this, I’ll send you the link to the bonus marketing audios I gave away. (I can see your email address when you leave a comment, so you don’t need to put it in the comment itself.)

As Bob Dylan once sang, ‘times they are are a changing’, and this is especially true in the profession of chiropractic.

Most of you can feel it, knowing that there is a wind of change blowing through our industry. Currently it may feel like a small breeze. But soon I fear it will be a strong, gale force wind.

But while some things are changing, still others remain the same. Which is good if it’s a rock solid marketing method, as I’ll soon show you below with the results of my recent survey.

Why are things changing? Two big reasons.

#1. A recent recession and still weak economy. This has caused some chiropractors to withdraw all marketing ( very dumb move if your marketing was previously working). Others had thought their low return-on-investment marketing would get them through the recession, but it didn’t. And still others sought after the magic pill that would save their practice, expecting a new marketing product would undo years of bad business management.

#2. Health care reform. (Also called Obamacare by some.) This is the biggest reason for change occurring in chiropractic. While there are still a lot of questions over this recent congressional bill, many chiropractors get the sense this bill is bad news for their practice. The ACA and ICA both seem to be convinced this is an “historic pro-chiropractic” bill, mostly because it will not allow insurers to discriminate against us. Of course some chiropractors have said to me they’d gladly take a little discrimination as opposed to an across-the-board-medicare-like system that has low payouts and excludes payment for exams, x-rays, therapies, etc.

Other chiropractors have taken a “wait-and-see” approach to this bill. After all, we have 4 years to figure things out, right? Well, if you are anything like me, being reactive is not something I like. Being proactive in growing my businesses has always been extremely successful, whereas being reactive to problems others throw at me ends in mediocrity at best.

Last week, I ran a quick survey to my list of blog readers. I limited the survey to 100 respondents and offered a package of marketing audios to those who answered every question of the survey. (Links to the audios will go out Wednesday to those who completed the survey. Thank you!)

Let’s look at some results of the survey. The first question I asked was:

Question 1. What area of marketing do you want the most help with right now

Now I expected a wide range of answers, which I certainly got. But I did not expect the answers to be strongly skewed toward what’s referred to today as “offline advertising”. Over 67% of the responders chose an answer in the offline group of marketing which contained newspaper advertising, internal referrals, MD referrals, attorney referrals and public lectures. Very few wanted help with their websites, pay per click, blogs, Facebook & Twitter. Is this because D.C.’s don’t fully understand these online methods yet? Or is it that the offline methods are continuing to outperform newer, online marketing strategies? (What do you think? Please leave a comment below.)

Question 2. What area do you currently spend most of your marketing budget on?

Big surprise here! A whopping 38% of respondents chose newspaper advertising compared to the second most popular answer (websites) being only 17%. This result was very telling of our profession for 2 reasons. First, there are many ‘salesmen’ shouting that newspaper ads are dead. If this was the case, why are so many chiropractors in June, 2010 still spending a large amount on them? And secondly, most businesses don’t continue to spend money where there is no return. Therefore, newspaper ads must be bringing in a decent ROI at least, compared to other advertising.

You may think this answer is not surprising, because after all I developed the Ultimate Chiropractic Ads, so of course the answers would be biased. But the interesting thing is, most of the people filling out the survey have never bought my newspaper ads.

So here is an example of one thing that hasn’t changed much, which is good because its working and continues to work well. Marketing that works well doesn’t need to change.

Question 3. Which form of marketing/advertising is currently most effective for you?

Here I gave the same choices as I had given in the previous 2 questions. No surprise here that the answer “internal referrals” won by a large margin. Everyone knows referrals are the easiest to convert to care and cost almost nothing to bring in. Taking 2nd place was public lectures and 3rd was newspaper advertising (which confirms the assumption I made about ROI above.)

Question 4. Which of these products, if any, would most interest you?

The answers to choose from were  weight loss, associate hiring /training, massage therapy and write in your own. This question brought a pretty broad range of answers. Write-in answers varied with 16 different answers typed in. Weight loss won, (but just barely) and all the other answers pretty much tied for 2nd place.

5. What is the biggest challenge you see facing you as a chiropractor over the next year?

This was a completely open ended question, with the ability to type in what you wanted here. This is where I saw the biggest change in our profession. Huge actually! But you’ll have to wait until Friday because I’m going to do a whole blog post just on this topic. I know, it’s annoying to wait, but sometimes it’s well worth the wait, right?

See ya Friday.

Are you happy with your income so far this year?

The June 3, 2010 issue of Chiropractic Economics magazine is entitled “DCs: Are You Back in Black?” The feature article in this issue is a their “13th Annual Salary & Expense Survey”.

This survey was taken from a good number of practicing chiropractors spread evenly throughout the U.S. Here are some major points that I got out of the 3-year comparison chart on pg. 33.

1. Franchises are declining. According to the percent of franchises in our profession from 2008 to 2010, the number is dropping significantly. The chart shows 3.9% of chiropractors surveyed in 2008 had a franchise, 1.4% in 2009, and only 1% in 2010.

Why are franchises declining? I’m uncertain. I have heard a few past franchisees say they didn’t get what they expected out of the deal. Perhaps the marketing didn’t live up to the franchisees expectations.

2. Associates are up, almost double from what they were in 2008 and 2009. 9.4% of those surveyed had an associate. This could be due to the recent recession, as more graduates are looking for a job, since they are unable to get a loan to start their own practice. Yet, this number is also telling of the owners who hire the associates. Are practices growing in 2010 to the point where they can hire more associates so quickly?

3. Salaries and DC compensations are still low. While definitely up from last year’s depressing numbers, the 2010 average salary of $87,538 has not returned to the level observed in 2008. The lower salary could be explained by the increase in associate doctors, but the overall DC total compensation is still low as well at $112,368.

4. The average chiropractor’s advertising expense is embarrassing. A general rule in business, one I heard even in chiropractic school, was that you should spend at least 10% of your monthly gross collections on marketing. I realize this will not always be the case. Some times you spend more, like when you open a new practice for example. Other times you spend a bit less.

According to the study, the average gross collections for chiropractors in 2010 will be $323,421. Yet the average spent on marketing is projected to be only $10,660. This isn’t anywhere close to 10%! The amount spent on marketing by the average chiropractor is only 3% of their collections. This is actually down from last year’s average of 4.6% spent on marketing and 2008′s 3.7% spent on marketing. This means chiropractors on average are cutting back this year on their marketing spend. It doesn’t make any sense to cut back now, as the economy is showing signs of recovery and many business are hitting a growth spurt right now.

What lessons can you learn from this?

If you don’t want to have just an average practice, increase your marketing spend immediately. What better time for your marketing to stand out than now, when everyone else is still cutting back.

Of course, you shouldn’t waste your money on useless marketing that doesn’t work. It’s best to use direct response marketing to bring in new patients every week of the year.

If you’re spend increases on productive marketing, your practice can only grow. And then you’ll be far ahead the “averages” mentioned above.

Here’s a list of tools & products I recommend for helping you get more new patients in over the summer. Some are mine and others are excellent products from friends of mine who’ve proven themselves in the field of chiropractic marketing.

Use these tools now to bring in more new patients. Don’t waste the whole summer, thinking “everyone is on vacation, no one will come in.” Cut the excuses and grow your practice to the level you always wanted it to be!

The Ultimate Chiropractic Ads

Decompression Marketing Elite

Internet Marketing for Chiropractors

Chiropractic Marketing Academy

PI Marketing

Internal Referral Marketing System

Neuropathy Doctor Marketing

There are 5 lies every chiropractor has been tempted to tell himself at one point or another. Some of us have only fallen prey to 1 or 2 of these lies. Others of us have succumbed to all 5 and felt the devastating effects on our practices.

Where do these lies come from?

Many of them come from chiropractic consultants, especially numbers 1 through 4. The 5th lie is one we usually come up with on our own during desperate times.

Which of these chiropractic marketing lies have you believed? Do you agree with these or disagree, post your comments below.

1. I’ll just cut back on my marketing expenses for awhile, since I’ve got so many referrals coming in.

This one gets a lot of chiropractors. Usually the doctor is looking for ways to cut costs or maybe is just tired of having to “market my practice.” It’s not that marketing has been a failure, as much as it takes a bit of work to measure return on investment (ROI) and keep track of what’s working. Plus, there’s the added task of trying something new occasionally. Why not just take a few months off and let the referrals keep coming in?

Of course the problem is that many of these referrals come from the “marketed to” new patients. For example, a new patient comes in from a chiropractic newspaper ad and after starting care refers their husband in to you. The husband refers a coworker. The coworker refers their spouse in. By this time, you may have forgotten where this process started. Don’t cut the referral generator off at the source.

2. Marketing isn’t professional.

Thankfully this lie isn’t believed near as much these days. During the Mercedes 80s, chiropractors could get new patients simply by putting a sign on the door and getting on the best insurance plans. Who needed marketing?

Chiropractic schools sometimes give off the aura that marketing is not professional. How many marketing classes did you get in school?

Times have changed. Insurance doesn’t pay what it used to, nor are you going to get flooded with new patients by joining the local networks. And everyone has to agree that chiropractic school does not prepare you 100% for the business of chiropractic. What profession doesn’t market themselves? Hospitals have billboards, newspaper ads, and more. Dentist advertise in the phone book, newspaper, TV, radio, etc. Attorneys, medical doctors, surgeons, orthodontists — if they are successful and growing, they advertise.

3. I want MD referrals, and MDs won’t refer to me if I advertise because it’s unprofessional.

I first heard this one from a prominent consulting group. They wanted me to pay them $40k to show me how to get more referrals from MDs. And of course I’d need to tone down my other marketing, since it wasn’t professional like MD marketing. Plus this consultant would show me how to get so many MD referrals that I would never need to spend money on marketing. A pipe dream for sure.

Back on planet earth, every business has to market their services. Certainly there are sleazy, hyped up ads, but not all marketing is like this. Marketing and advertising does not have to be unprofessional. Many MD’s and D.O.’s will refer to you because of your marketing. I ran newspaper ads for years, and never met the big medical practice down the street, yet I got referrals from them for years. Why? Only thing I can figure is they read my ads in the paper on the different conditions we help.

4. If a marketing strategy or tool is good, it will bring me 100′s of new patients per month.

We’ve all heard of the proverbial marketing “magic pill.” Problem is that it’s a fairy tale. Everyone knows this. But desperate times call for desperate measures, and doctors expect the next thing they buy will produce 100′s of new patients. What if you only get 10 new patients for $1000 spent?

Two different perspectives can occur here.

#1. One doctor says wow, one marketing tactic got me 10 new patients, that’s awesome!

#2. Another doctor says “man, I needed 20 new ones this month to remain profitable. This only brought in 10. Guess that strategy didn’t work well at all. Time to trash it and try another one.”

Some of you may be thinking #2 is a made-up doctor, no one with this thinking really exists. But trust me, I see it every week. See the blog post “Chiropractic Math and the Struggling Practice” for an in-depth example.

Now we mustn’t over do this and say all marketing is equal because there isn’t a magic pill. There is certainly a dividing line between effective marketing strategies and crappy, waste-of-money marketing strategies. There are tools which will bring you 20 new patients a month, but even then you should not focus 100% of your money and time on that one stratagy. One month you may only get 5 new patients instead of the normal 20, so make sure you have multiple streams of quality new patients coming in.

5. If money gets tight this month, I’ll cut the most expensive advertising out.

What’s wrong with this one?  After all, when things get tight you’ve got to cut something out, right?

That’s true. But it doesn’t follow that you base what your going to cut out simply on how much things cost. If it did, then you should cut out your rent first. And your payroll. Plus your salary.

You should determine what you’re going to cut out based on what’s effective. If an ad has been working in the newspaper, why would you stop running it because it’s the most expensive marketing cost you have? Better to cut out all the little things that don’t work, like maybe yellow page ads or poorly done static websites.

The cost of advertising tells you nothing about how many patients it brings in. For that you need to figure ROI and compare your returns across multiple marketing strategies.

Make sure not to cut the advertising that is actually keeping you alive. Cutting off the hand that feeds you will only result in a downward spiral that makes it very difficult to come out of.

Math has never been my favorite subject. It wasn’t in elementary, middle school, high school, or college. Especially those nasty algebra and calculus type classes.

But as a business owner, I quickly learned that it didn’t matter how much I liked math and numbers, they are a fact of life.

You’ve got to be able to figure your stats. Determine your prices. Set up a care plan with x number of visits per week, month, etc. You need to keep good business statistics and know what those stats tell you.

For example, early on in practice, I thought my care plans were great. Patients were prepaying for care and my volume was high. What could be better?

The problem was that no money was coming in. So, I sat down and figured my average collection per visit. It came to about $17. No wonder the business was broke. But, without knowing the simple formula of collections divided by visits, I would not have been able to out this huge blunder in my practice.

You might be thinking this is simple stuff, anyone can figure it out. Yet, you would be surprised at the chiropractors I speak with who either don’t know how to figure simple stats or if they know how, simply don’t keep any numbers for their practice.

Here’s the biggest “chiropractic math” problem I see…

Chiropractors don’t figure ROI (Return on Investment)!

Let’s do a basic math problem. Say I get 12 new patients in the door from a newspaper ad which cost me $1000. And let’s assume I’m new in practice, and my conversions are low, so I only convert 4 of those patients to a care plan. If my care plans are worth $1500 (which is a very conservative case value) what was my ROI?

It’s ok to use a calculator on this test. (I had to )

The answer is 6:1, or a 600% ROI. So for every dollar invested, I made $6 back.

Do you run the ad again or not? How low is the ROI going to be before you say this ad doesn’t work?

You bet I’m going to run that ad again! For me it’s got to bring in at least 2:1 ROI over time. Meaning, after all the money comes in from the patients care plans, the minimum ROI it can bring is 2:1. Occasionally a newspaper ad will be a 1:1 or negative ROI, and I’ll tweak something or run it in a better paper and it immediately becomes a huge winner!

But, some chiropractors think an ad is a failure if it doesn’t bring in a 20:1 ROI or higher. In other words, they are upset if their ROI is only 5:1. What other business owner would be upset that the $1 they spent brought back $5?   No one.

Unfortunately, it happens daily in chiropractic. Look, the days of spending $0 on marketing and bringing in $30…$40…$50k a month are over. The days of running a killer ad and getting 676 new patients is over. It’s not 1991 anymore.

It’s time to face the fact you’ve got to pay for some marketing. And you’ve got to be happy with a positive return on investment.  Now the only question which remains is which marketing gives the best return?

What billion dollar business gets better than a 5:1 ROI on their external marketing dollars? What small business get’s better than this?

Are all your eggs in one basket?

Man how I wish they had a class on ROI in chiropractic school. As simple as it sounds, a doctor in an emotional situation or someone who says “I’m just not good at the business side of chiropractic” does not run these numbers.

I was there. I came out of school and thought 1 magic marketing pill, one magic ad would solve all my problems. I’d run one ad, get 100 new patients, and within a short time I’d have a 100% referral practice.

Then I woke up one day and realized if there was a 1 magic ad that brought in 100 new patients, everyone would soon be using it, and it wouldn’t bring in 100 new patients anymore.

I realized I would have to use multiple marketing strategies to grow my practice. But which ones? And how should I proportion my marketing budget out?

Then it came to me. Measure the ROI, return on investment, of each strategy. Put more money into the ones with the highest ROI. If it shows a 6 or 12 month decline, readjust the money into other high ROI marketing. Simple really.

The best thing about this strategy, was that I wasn’t relying on just 1 thing to grow. If the newspaper ad didn’t bring in a 100:1 ROI for me, no sweat. I’ll take a 5:1 ROI because I’ve got 7 other streams of new patient generation methods.

In other words, I didn’t put all the success on my practice on one thing. Even if that one thing works, I’ll need other streams of new patients so I can pay the bills, right?

Are you measuring your ROI? Are you putting the full load of your practice success on 1 ad or marketing strategy, or are you spreading your marketing out evenly over many different ads and other strategies?