Chiropractic Marketing | Chiropractic Advertising | Chiropractic Ads

There’s a little-known formula that you should use in all the marketing you do. This formula should be used when speaking, running newspaper ads, sending direct mail, on your website, and more.

It was officially put into writing in 1898, and has been used in almost every industry since. (It’s really been around since the beginning of creation, because the way humans think has not changed!)

This formula has proven successful for many, many decades, especially in direct response marketing. It’s called the AIDA formula. Let me show you how it works…

A = Attention. Your advertising should grab the reader’s attention. The best way to get someone’s attention is with your headline, if an ad, or your opening sentence (if you’re speaking.) John Caples once said that the headline is 80% of the ads effectiveness.

I = Interest. After you’ve grabbed their attention, you want to continue to making it interesting. What we’re doing here is not just putting up big, bold words in the headline just to get their attention.

You may have experienced advertising in the past that did something crazy and shocking to grab your attention, but as soon as that was over and they started talking about their product. You were no longer interested.

There’s advertising that uses words just to get your attention, but then the ad has nothing to do with that word. It almost feels like a bait and switch, where they’ve baited you, you go to look at the ad and it has nothing to do with the headline.

D = Desire. After the reader is interested in your ad, then you want to arouse their desire. The desire of your prospects are simple: they want to be rid of this annoying health problem. They want the benefits you can offer them.

For those who have my chiropractic ads, you’ll notice many of them describe what the reader will experience once they’ve improved their health…like more energy, more golf, etc. (You should continue this type of”conversation” with them during your report of findings.)

A = Action. Action is where you make the offer and then tell them how to place the appointment. In our case, how to schedule the appointment. The prospective patient must be given a reason to come and see you over all the other offices in town.

This formula that has been effectively working for over 100 years. Unfortunately, many chiropractors are not following this simple strategy with their marketing.

Carl has sciatica. He knows this because his wife used that medical thingy online where you put in your symptoms and it tells you what you have.

Carl hates this constant, annoying pain in his right buttocks and leg. Carl has had back pain in the past, but that went away 2 years ago.

Now it’s a “completely different” problem that just won’t go away! And worst of all, he can’t play golf, go dancing with his wife, or even sit for 20 minutes in the car.

Carl knows deep down that if this problem doesn’t get better soon, he’s going to have to see a medical doctor and he’s going to give him a bunch of prescriptions he isn’t crazy about.

He grabs a newspaper on the way to work, and sees an ad for the local chiropractor. Carl knows nothing about chiropractic except that his uncle used to go to one for back pain. This ad is classy, sharp, and has a professional picture of the doctor. The name of the office is in large letters with the phone number underneath the photo.

He briefly makes a mental note that if he ever has low back pain again, he should call this chiropractor’s office.

Carl turns a few pages, reading an article on government overspending and debt accumulation. As he glances down at the bottom half of the page, his mind begins racing. To Carl’s astonishment, there in large bold letters, is a headline that reads “Eliminate Sciatica Without Surgery, Drugs, or Painful Exercises”.

Carl can’t read the “article” fast enough. It describes exactly what he is suffering from. And there’s a solution described and backed up with testimonials.

Carl reads that if he comes in for help during the next 10 days, he will get an exam and x-rays for less than $40. Wow!

Who is article from? Oh, a D.C. Hmmm, not sure what kind of doctor that is. But I’m open to anything that can help with sciatica.

Carl quickly picks up the phone, calls the office, and quickly begs the receptionist to get him in this week, “before this special ends.”

——–
This isn’t a fairy tale. It happens every day around the world. The point of the story is that when you advertise your services, you must enter the conversation already going in the prospect’s mind.

Just talking about the history of chiropractic is not something that a new patient, who doesn’t know anything about chiropractic, is going to respond to.

Your marketing cannot be geared towards what chiropractors love, but not what patients are thinking about.

Once they come in, then you can educate them all about chiropractic and what it can help.
It’s a common phrase in marketing, “what’s in it for me?” At that point in their life, it doesn’t really matter who D.D. Palmer is.

Look, chiropractors can help a lot of different people with a lot of different issues. But, to speak to that new patient on their level, you need to talk to them in their language.

What is the most profitable condition to be marketing to right now? Which of the Ultimate Chiropractic Ads bring in the highest return on investment? What is marketing and advertising anyway?

Check out this short video where I explain the answer to these questions and more.

I just received the DVD set from the NeuropathyDr conference I spoke at last summer. Here’s the first 10 minutes of the talk, where I showed the audience why some chiropractic ads bringing in little-to-no results. I’ll be posting more videos from this DVD in the future, but if you like this one, please click through to Youtube and choose “Like” or thumbs up.

I often get asked about running my Ultimate Chiropractic Ads as inserts in the newspaper, as opposed to a space ad inside the paper. Many chiropractors have never tried inserts and are quite surprised at the return on investment they can get.

If you’re using my ads, I strongly recommend testing inserts for your zipcode at least once. (Of course you can try inserts even if you don’t have my ads, but I can’t promise you’ll get good results.) If your ad cost to run in the main section of the paper is going to be above $1,500 or $2,000, you should try inserts as your first three runs.

If you’re running in a major metro city paper, inserts would be better to start with because you can just run in the zip codes for your area.

For example, if you were out on the edge of a big city, like in a small suburb, you’re not going to have that many subscribers in some areas for the major paper. In this case you should run inserts for your zip code instead of paying full price to run in Section A, the news section. Running inserts in a large city paper is a very good thing when looking at your overall marketing plan. It can give you a lot of options and multiple places to run your ad.

You could run a half-page ad in the small, local paper, and then inserts in the big city paper for your area. This allows you to run basically two different ads in the same exact area in two different papers.

With my ad kit you have plenty of ads to rotate and run, and although it’s possible, don’t just build your practice on one ad.

Typically inserts will be a little bit more expensive than running a half-page, a full-page, or a quarter-page ad, but many times inserts will produce better results.
There are different reasons for this, not that it really matters, because the fact that you get a better result is good enough.
But in case you’re curious, let’s look at what advantages inserts offer:

- people can hang on to it longer, putting it on the refrigerator for example,
- the insert’s easier to handle and read
- inserts fall out of the paper, so prospects are more likely to notice it
- it looks a different color than the “gray” newspaper
- inserts are a different size
- inserts stand out from the rest of the paper

All of these factors have an effect on the insert’s higher response over a “display” or space ad. One of the major benefits of an insert is that it’s not right next to any other ad. You don’t have to worry about losing the person’s attention. It’s not mixed in with other articles either, so they can’t really skip over it.

Many newspapers will allow you to bring already printed inserts to their facilities, and they will charge you what’s called an insert fee. There are two fees sometimes quoted regarding inserts: a printing fee and an insertion fee. The insertion fees is where someone actually is putting an insert into each of the papers before they go out in the morning.

In my experience, the insert fee usually the bigger expense. For most papers it’s more cost effective to have the newspaper print the inserts, as opposed to taking them to your own printer. You will have to shop around with your local printers and compare prices to determine which route is best for you.

I know for one of the major big city papers that I ran in, the insert fee was about 70% to 80% of the total cost that they quoted me. Which meant it wasn’t likely I would save much by printing the inserts myself.

But I would shop around and at least find out.

I compared it to the option of paying a local printer, then driving the inserts over to the newspaper’s facility, and paying the insert fee.
It was going to cost me double the price to do it this way! So I decided to just let the newspaper handle everything.

Sometimes newspapers will even have specials on inserts. That’s something you’ll want to ask your ad rep about. If they’re trying to get more inserts into the paper or they’re trying to get new business, the ad rep will give you a special discount.

Are you sub-niching your marketing prospects?

Watch this segment of a decompression webinar I gave. Whether you do decompression or not, you need to understand what sub-niching is. (If you do have a decompression table, watch the complete webinar here.)

Do you know what demographics you want to be marketing too?

The term demographic is defined as “a single vital or social statistic of a human population.” What this means to you is that you can use demographic information to make sure you’re spending you’re money where it will have the best effect. Here are just a few demographic measurements you should be looking at:

• Number of people in a household (which tells you if you’re dealing with families or singles, homes or apartment complexes)
• Median income per household
• Racial and ethnic information (helpful in marketing to a foreign language, etc.)
• Education level
• Median home value

These statistics can be used an various ways to help you get a better return on your investment. One example has to do with direct mail. If you’re going to spend $500, $1000, or more on a direct mail campaign, you want to focus on the right area of your town or city. Are you going to mail to a business district where your mail will likely be trashed, or to a neighborhood with high median home values?

Another way to use this information is when you have multiple newspapers in your area targeting different areas of the city, you can compare the demographics to the paper distribution. This can also help when you are running inserts in the paper by zip code.

I once had 10 different newspapers to choose from, ranging from a very small neighborhood newspaper to the large Dallas Morning News. With the right demographic information, I could target and test very specific areas of my town, plus surrounding towns, to find out which performed the best. Some of the 10 newspapers I could quickly dismiss as useless because their distribution went too far or hit areas I was not interested in marketing to. To have this information meant a huge amount of time and money could be saved. (One thing I learned is don’t always trust the newspaper’s own demographics, as they can be slanted to make that newspaper look good!)

An awesome new tool I recently discovered can be very helpful in determining the demographics of your area (if you practice in the U.S.) It’s called the NY Times Mapping America Project. If you go there and put in your city or zip code, you will be able to select many different demographic maps. Here’s one I created for the North Dallas area.

When you mouse over the live version, you can see each census tract’s median household income and it even shows you what percentage that has changed since the 2000 census! If you understand the true value of demographics, you will know this tool is going to be very useful to you.

I would highly recommend you visit the website, check out your area, and bookmark it for future use. Consult this site whenever you are making decisions about where to run different marketing campaigns. Also, make sure you check out the different maps and how they relate to your area by using the blue button at the top right that says “View more maps.”

Speaking of demographics, here is a neat video on the world demographics since 1810.

Which marketing strategies are currently working the best? How much should you spend on each of them? Find out in these two snippets joined together for you from my recent Decompression Marketing Elite program.

In the video I mention the following categories. More resources can be found to help you when you click on these links:
Chiropractic Newspaper Ads
Google Adwords
Websites/Blogs
Internal Referrals
Social Media/Facebook
Workshops/Lectures

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?

With the internet being all the rage, many chiropractors have been told that newspaper advertising is completely useless. Is there any truth to this claim?

No. Chiropractic newspaper advertising is still going strong. It is certainly true that some newspaper publishers are struggling to keep up with the recent recession and all the new media in the past few years. But this is an advantage to you, since you can get better prices in most markets than you could 5 years ago. You’ll still get a good return from newspaper ads and a much quicker one than from a website.

Don’t misunderstand. I’m not saying you should do newspaper advertising in the place of internet marketing. I’m saying you should do both. Why must it be one or the other? One is a quick influx of new patients when you run the newspaper ad. The other is a constant trickle of a new patients from your website and other online marketing methods. I for one like money that comes in big and fast, and money that flows in consistently over time. How about you?

If newspaper ads aren’t working anymore, no one has notified my ad customers who are getting tons of new patients. Like Dr. Merritt, who had 50 new ones after running his first neuropathy ad or the doc who called us and mentioned that his phone has not stopped ringing after running his first ad. Or Dr. David Rusick who just today emailed me this:

My first ad worked great! We have seen 22 new patients in one week from this ad alone and they are still calling, and 18 have agreed to prescribed care plans. Not a bad ROI, when my average case is $1,400.00 and my first 1/2 page ad cost was $1,500.00 . It sounds too good to be true, but it works. It has been amazing to see the reponse from the patients.They feel like the ad was written specifically for them. They are all ready for care when to they come to my office. Thanks Doc.

Here’s a short clip from a webinar where I cover the actual numbers released in a study from the Newspaper Association of America.

(If you have a decompression table and would like to watch the full decompression marketing webinar, visit http://www.decompressionmarketingelite.com)