Every chiropractor wants to get new patients from the internet. As they should. It’s easy, inexpensive (compared to other marketing) and relatively easy when you know what you’re doing.

After getting a website, the first question to ask yourself is “where does my website rank on Google?”

I speak to many chiropractors who have had a website for years, but they still do not know where they rank on Google’s “organic” search results. The term “organic” simply means natural, as opposed to paid ads.

In this picture to the left, the area marked in red is the section for paid advertising. The middle section of the page that is not marked in red is the organic search results. These results are based on Google’s complex algorithm for determining which website is most relevant to the searcher.

If you pay someone to run your website, the first thing you should measure is how many new patients you are getting from it. The second thing you should be tracking is where it ranks in the organic Google search results.

To do this, go to google.com and search for the term “chiropractor”.  As long as you’re in the area you practice in, your practice should come up. You really need to be in the top 3 search results to get new patients from your website. If you’re in the top 5 results you’re doing well. Below #5 and your website is not effective at all (except for a yellow page type listing for existing patients to look up your phone number.)

If your website is not in the top 3 listing, let’s look at the top 5 reasons why?

1.) Your website is new (under 6 months old).

Google is not simply about first come, first serve. But they are a wary of new websites. I’ve worked on sites that rank highly within 2-3 months, but this took a focused effort of giving Google exactly what it wants to see. So it might take a few months for a new website to rank highly. But you should still be doing everything right that in 3-6 months it will rank. It’s easier to set things up right from day 1 than it is to go back later and fix it.

2.) You are in a very large city (1 million+). Not a suburb, which in this case is considered a small town, but your practice is physically in a city like New York, Dallas, etc.

You can still rank in the top 3 in a larger city, but everything has to be done right. The competition is obviously much bigger. Sometimes you can choose a specific neighborhood and rank well for that, like” North End Boston” or “North Dallas”.  If your prospective patients are typing in these terms when they go online, you would be better off setting up your site for that neighborhood. Also, many patients are not going to drive across miles of traffic to see you, so it may be a better use of your time and money to focus on your local neighborhood.

3.) Your site is not optimized for certain keywords.

Keywords are what people type in when searching for help. The most obvious ones are chiropractor, chiropractic, etc. But there is a long list of keywords you want to rank for. Some others would be back pain, sciatica, decompression, and so on. Many chiropractors will pay thousands to Joe Computerguy to “optimize” their websites. Problem is that Joe Computerguy is optimizing the site for 1999 standards, messing with meta-tags and met-keywords. This is website basics. To rank high on Google you’ve got to play in the big leagues and optimize using the newest technology.

4.) You’re still using an old website layout

Moore’s law says that the amount of computer technology out there doubles every 24 months. But you wouldn’t know it looking at some chiropractor’s websites. Many doctors have websites for their office that look exactly like websites we all ad in the late 90′s. Technology has drastically changed with regards to websites, making it not only easier to build a webpage but much more inexpensive. Google loves a dynamic interactive website with regularly updated information. In areas where all the other chiropractors have outdated sites, you can just straight to the top of Google simply by updating yours.

5.) You don’t have enough backlinks

Google keeps a count of the number of websites linking back to yours. The site with the most backlinks, taking into account #4 above, will usually rank first on Google. To see how many websites you have linking to you, use a free checker like Backlink Watch. Run a few of your top competitors through there too. Do they have more backlinks than you do? If so you need to start building some more.

By constantly working on these, you’ll have a website at the top of Google in no time. Then you’ll be ready for some heavy duty chiropractic Adwords campaigns.

Often doctors will ask a spouse or front desk CA to look over their ad before it goes to print. A common response these parties give when looking at a long copy ad, like the ones picture on the left, is “who’s going to read all that?” Sometimes these answers will influence the doctor’s decision to run the ad or not.

A professional marketer might ask the same question, but in a slightly different manner saying “is long or short copy more effective?”

Let’s take a look at what some of the best marketers over the past 100 years have said.

David Ogilvy, famous ad marketer, in his book Ogilvy on Advertising said:

“Long copy sells more than short copy, particularly when you are asking the reader to spend a lot of money. Only amateurs use short copy.”

Victor Schwab, How to Write a Good Advertisement –

Mr. Schwab tells the story of Max Hart (of Hart, Schaffner & Marx) and his advertising manager, George L. Dyer, arguing about long copy. Dyer said, “I’ll bet you $10 I can write a newspaper page of solid type and you’d read every word of it.”

Hart scoffed at the idea. “I don’t have to write a line of it to prove my point,” Dyer replied. “I’ll only tell you the headline: ‘This Page is All About Max Hart’.”

Jay Abraham, marketing expert says:

Should your letter or E-mail be long or short? Make it long enough to tell a complete, informative, and interesting story.

Jay Conrad Levinson, Guerilla Marketing Handbook with Seth Godin writes:

Don’t be afraid to use lengthy copy. It’s been statistically proven time and time again that ads with more copy draw better than those with less.

Claude Hopkins, author of the classic book Scientific Advertising writes:

Some say, “Be very brief. People will read but little.” Would you say that to a salesman? With the prospect standing before him, would you confine him to any certain number of words? That would be an unthinkable handicap.”

As you can see, all of these marketing giants recommend a longer copy ad over a shorter one. Why? Because it works. More specifically, because long copy allows you to have all the effective components in the ad (like the important ones I mentioned in “5 Secrets to Powerful Chiropractic Ads“).

So who’s going to read all that copy?

A patient who’s looking for a doctor that finally understands them, that finally can relate to their problem, someone that has expertise with their condition that they’ve been suffering from. Put these elements in your long copy, niche-specific ad, and I guarantee patients will read it.

Here are a few cases where patients did respond to the ads. (This does not mean you’ll get exactly the same results as they did, as it’s likely yours would be within the range mentioned here.)

So the point is save your short copy ads for the yellow pages, but use long copy in the newspaper, in direct mail and online.

Do you have a weight loss program in your office?

It’s no secret the “weight loss” market is a huge industry. Wikipedia reports that “between $33 billion and $55 billion is spent annually on weight loss products and services.” And this is not just a U.S. trend, but one seen in Western Europe ($1.4 billion in sales for 2009), Canada, and Australia. Weight loss has even gone prime time with the popular TV show “The Biggest Loser” where individuals and families compete for the greatest % body fat loss.

IBISworld, a market research company, made an interesting statement in their 2009 report on the weight loss industry. They said:

IBISWorld estimates that about 70 percent of American's dieting attempts
are of a self-help nature.  Although often short-lived, these diet fads are a
positive trend for this sector as Americans ultimately turn to professionals
to help them meet their weight loss goals.

Notice what they are saying. Most people try a weight loss program or diet on their own at home, but because these are “short-lived” the person seeks professional help. As professionals we must be asking ourselves if we should be in the weight loss industry as well.

Another fact to consider is that obesity (defined as BMI over 30) has become an epidemic in America. Obesity is the #1 cause of Type 2 diabetes and 55% of those who are obese will end up with diabetes according to the CDC. Heart disease and cancer are closely linked to obesity as well.

Done right, it can certainly help patients live a healthier life. In addition, your office can be seen as a holistic health clinic, not to mention bringing in a potential revenue increase. Also, it would not take much in to convince an overweight person they need a weight loss program because the media and their MDs have already done quite a bit of the work.

Taking everything into consideration, adding a weight loss program to your practice by year’s end could be a smart move.

I’ve kept this post short because I want it to be more of a discussion. Let’s here what you think.

If you’re already using a weight loss program in your office, comment below and tell us what you think are the pros and cons? If you’re not using a weight loss program in your office, what concerns are keeping you from doing it?

**UPDATE: We’ve had many comments that are simply advertisements for a weight loss product or service. These will be edited or deleted. No phone numbers, links, etc. will be allowed in the comments. This a discussion for chiropractors, not an opportunity to advertise products.**

Axiom Worldwide, LLC, the maker of the DRX and DRX9000 decompression tables appears to be in liquidation. (See attorney docs here http://www.srbp.com/axiom/axiom.htm).

What does this say about the current decompression market in the United States?

Not much in my opinion. There are too many questions left unanswered to determine what the cause of their bankruptcy was.

Was it caused by the recession, meaning less sales on their part? Was it due to bad management, hubris born of success, or their recent troubles in Canada? Did it have something to do with the FBI raids on their office back in 2007?

We simply do not know.

What I can tell you is that if you own a decompression table, many people will be trying to use this as a marketing ploy to scare you. One company sent out an email to some chiropractors, trying to scare them into “buying” publicity websites so as to drown out the negative publicity for DRX tables on Google. I’m sure others will soon follow, using fear to motivate you to waste money on useless marketing.

So if you own a DRX table (or any kind of decompression table), what are you supposed to do in light of all this negative news?

As far as marketing your practices goes (which is my specialty, not law), I’m recommending my clients focus on growing their practices and getting more new patients. Decompression offices are still overflowing with new patients, as the need for such treatment has not dropped off and likely will not as the population ages.

Here’s one thing I would NOT do if I was your shoes…

I wouldn’t be using old outdated advertising that talks about “NASA claims”, “FDA Approved” or even mentions the name DRX or DRX9000. You see, that’s the problem with promoting the name of a piece of equipment instead of your practice. If the name of the equipment gets a bad rap, you’re up a creek without a paddle. But if you market your practice as designed to help people who are suffering with herniated discs, sciatica, etc., and a company goes bankrupt or gets bad publicity, it doesn’t affect you.

When I first started looking at decompression tables, I was told the DRX table was the only “true spinal decompression table”. That they would be patenting the term “spinal decompression” soon and no one else could use it. One prominent marketer (at the time) even had ads written for his clients. I personally would not be making this claim any more either, as it is likely not going to go over well with the current news about DRX tables.

Keep marketing the results of your table in an ethical and professional way. This is why testimonials are so important. You’ve seen patients get better. You’ve seen them get well, preventing back surgery or a lifetime of dangerous medications. So you know decompression works. The problem is not if it works or not, but how we market it. Do we make hyped up claims or simply use educational advertising with condition-centered copy?

Decompression is about results for the patients…not about any specific table.

Over the past few years I’ve proven educational ads focused on patient results provides the best results. This is why I write non-hyped up ads. NASA and walking on the moon has nothing to do with decompression tables, and it never has, therefore I don’t put those claims in my ads.

In the end, I’m sure all of this will blow over and be a thing of the past. But what about your practice? Will your practice be thriving or barely surviving at that time?

If you are thinking about getting a decompression table, but have not yet, I urge you to read my previous article on this entitled “Decompression Marketing Solutions“.

One of the most frequent questions we get about the Ultimate Chiropractic Ads (and even Decompression Marketing Elite) is…

“Can you send me a sample of one of your ads?”

In most cases, I understand that this is an honest, sincere question to see what type of ads I write. Usually, it’s to compare to past advertisements the doctor has used in his office. So I realize people aren’t out to steal my ads. But there’s a big problem with this request. To me, this question might as well be…

“Can you send me $50,000 in cash as a sample, to just look at?”

Why would I equate the two requests? Because unlike custom made advertisements, where a copywriter sends over samples he’s written in other industries, my ads are ready to go for one specific industry. That means any chiropractor can quickly change their name and number, insert them into the paper and start getting new patients. (Like the customer who called us yesterday from North Carolina and said his phone has not stopped ringing after running the neuropathy ad one time, scheduling over 40 new patients so far!)

You see, the ads I write aren’t “samples”. They are real ads I’ve spent quite a bit of time and money researching and writing. We don’t have any samples. The ads are all ads, ready to go and bring in quality new patients. Even if we did have samples, reading it would tell you very little. Unless you’ve spent thousands of hours studying copywriting and testing ads, you’re not going to be able to see the nuances of how my ads work.

That’s not being harsh, just being honest. I’ve had two chiropractors, who’ve spent years writing their own ads, now use mine and love them. They’ll be the first to tell you that their own ads worked okay, but after using mine they won’t likely ever go back.

An advertisement works because it produces new patients. Not because it looks beautiful or professional (although I think my ads are both!) Even if the words of an ad are the most beautiful prose ever written, if they don’t bring in new patients they are rubbish.

To ask the question a slightly different way is to say…

“How are your ads different than what I’ve used before?”

Now this is the question most people want to know, and 90% of the time the ‘question behind the question’ of “can you send me a sample”. There are really only 2 reasons to want a sample. Either to run it and see how it does or to see how it looks and reads to differentiate it from other advertising the doctor has seen in the past.

As an aside, sometimes we get the “if you’re ads are so good, why don’t you let us try one for free, then we’ll buy the rest” type of request. I guess we could do that, if we were willing to get our attorney to write up a very long, lengthy contract, making this requester promise to pay a percentage of what he makes, with various clauses for defaulting on the agreement, etc, then pay said attorney thousands of dollars to prosecute violations of this contract, which we all know would be numerous. OR I could just give you a 90 day trial period with a money-back guarantee, and save both of us some legal bills!

But seriously, if you’re struggling in practice ( I feel for you, as I was once there myself), as hard as it  is to sometimes admit it to ourselves, if the 3 payments are too steep for your budget right now it’s time to hold off from buying. If $365 is too much, then you aren’t going to have the money to run an ad in the paper once you get them. And I know for a fact my ads will not work if you shrink them down to a tiny little business card-sized ad to save money.

As to the question of “how are your ads different”, let me attempt to give a quick summary. (More detailed information about these differences are given on the websites linked above.)

• They work better at bringing in quality new patients. Why? Various reasons: they employ empathy, photos with captions, effective offers with a deadline, etc.
• You get 40 different ads (Or a new decompression ad every month in the Decompression program.), as opposed to a small handful.
• You get multiple sub-niched ads, including neuropathy, fibromyalgia, numbness, sciatica, back pain, headaches, decompression, laser, scoliosis, etc.
• You get a money-back guarantee for 90 days on the Ultimate Chiropractic Ads and an area exclusive 60 day trial (nonrefundable) with no long term commitment with Decompression Marketing Elite. Do the other ads give this?
• You get the “how-to” reports. How to get the best ROI with these ads. How to save money with your newspaper ad rep. How often to run the ads. What size. Which ones work best.
• You get bonus marketing letters that you can use via mail to get more referrals, re-activations, new homeowners and more.

I could go on and on, but these are just a few that I’ve listed here. We really have tried to come up with the best chiropractic marketing product available for you to bring in quality new patients. If you haven’t tried them out, what are you waiting for?

According to Google Analytics, my blog has had near 100,000 pageviews. Today I looked at the most popular articles since the blog started in 2008. You might be interested in seeing the most popular articles by category. Feel free to comment at the bottom of those articles or below this post below.

General Marketing

The Best Months for Chiropractic Marketing

Most Controversial Post

Chiropractic Coaching Lie #3: The High Volume Lie

Spinal Decompression

Decompression Practice Solutions

Referral Marketing

Internal Marketing Strategies, Part1
Internal Marketing Strategies, Part 2

Practice Growth

The Only 5 Ways to Grow Your Practice

Newspaper Ads

Are Chiropractic Ads in the Newspaper Dead?

Internet Marketing

My Top 3 Internet Marketing Strategies

Obamacare and Chiropractic (2nd Most Controversial Post?)

Congress Has Done It, Now What?

Today I was reviewing the practice stats of a Decompression Marketing Elite client and noticed that this client was doing exceptionally well with internet marketing, getting a whopping 1873% return! The internet is one of the most cost effective ways to market your practice. There is at least a billion people using the internet in the world. And it’s growing more and more every day.

At this point, it’s not a matter of if you should be marketing online, but simply how you should be marketing online. But where do you start? What works for chiropractors?

There are literally thousands of different ways to market your practice online. But not all of them will bring you a return on your time or money spent. Some are frankly a complete waste of your time, no matter what anyone tells you.

Let’s take Google for example…

On the Google search engine there are only 21 slots on the results page (11 paid, 10 organic) for keywords. And we all know you gotta be in the top 5 listings are you are going to be overlooked. How do you go about getting in the top 5 listings?

Some “web site experts” are still claiming you’ve gotta have good meta tags, and they’ll gladly do that for you at the low price of $1000. Most chiropractors don’t have a clue what meta tags are (why should they) so this geeky language makes the “expert” sound like he knows what he’s doing.

The problem is that on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the most important components of your website, meta tags are about a .05. Which means you could leave meta tags out and still be at the #1 spot if you did everything else right. Meta tags were hugely important in 1998, but in today’s world they are simply minor in comparison to other components.

So as you can see, there’s a ton of information to sort through and learn. The problem is you have very little time to do it. And neither do I. This is why I have developed easy to use tools for internet marketing, as well as found great services that can save you time and money.

Here’s a list of some great internet marketing resources you can use. Most are chiropractic specific. A couple are my own and the others are people I’ve dealt with in various ways in the past, meaning they can be trusted.

ChiroPatients Online – My own niche specific done-for-you website, blog and Google Adwords automated system.

Complete Internet Marketing System – A fully automated new patient internet generator that includes email, videos, blogs and more.

Automated Social Networking – A system where all your online social networking is done for you each month.

Customized Twitter Backgrounds – Semmy has the lowest prices on high quality Twitter backgrounds.

Aweber Email System – The best email system on the internet.

ChiroMarketing Academy – My membership site on how to lessons on internet marketing, print marketing, conversion and more.

Leave a comment below and tell us if internet marketing has worked well for your practice.

What business books will you be reading this summer to improve your practice?

Reading is one of the best ways to learn. For your practice growth, you should be consuming a steady stream of new ideas and strategies that can help you excel. I’ve had numerous breakthroughs in my life. Many of those breakthroughs began with a small sentence or thought on the printed page.

Reading is an acquired skill. Few of us are born with the desire to read a book a week. I hardly ever read non-fiction books until my practice began to struggle. Then I started reading every good marketing and business book I could find.

Each month I read 4-6 books on a wide range of topics like: history, biography, theology, marketing, business, philosophy and good classical fiction (read aloud to the kids). Here are the top 4 books in the business/marketing category that I look forward to reading this summer. Grab one or two to read while you’re sitting on the beach or enjoying a break from the summer heat.

What books are you reading this summer? Let us know in the comment section below. (If you’d rather read books digitally, Amazon just recently dropped the price of their Kindle to $189.)

Dr. John Reizer, CHIROPRACTIC MARKETING TOOLS THAT WILL ABSOLUTELY GROW YOUR PRACTICE. This book has been on my to read list for awhile now. But it has finally made it to the top of my stack and should be a fast read at only 130 pages. There aren’t too many books published specifically for chiropractic marketing, so I’m looking forward to seeing what Dr. Reizer has to ad to the discussion. The bio says Dr. Reizer currently teaches as an adjunct professor at Sherman College of Chiropractic. The subject matter of the book ranges from the simply business cards and newspapers to more advanced strategies like writing your own newspaper ads, developing a weight loss campaign, and marketing to health clubs.

William Poundstone, Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It). The name and concept of this book fascinated me, especially when we consider that many chiropractors may soon be flocking to the cash practice model in light of recent health care reforms. In Priceless, Poundstone looks at how prices are set and how we don’t really know how much anything is worth. The inside flap reads:

“People used to download music for free; then Steve Jobs convinced them to pay for it. How? By charging 99 cents. Prada and other luxury stores stock a few obscenely expensive items — just to make the rest of their inventory seem like a bargain. Why do text messages cost money, while e-mails are free? Why do jars of peanut butter keep getting smaller in order to keep the price the ‘same’? The answer is simple: prices are a collective hallucination.”

Arthur C. Brooks, The Battle: How the Fight between Free Enterprise and Big Government Will Shape America’s Future. Being entrepreneurs like we are, and realizing the government already affects our business in many ways (and will do so even more in the future), this book should be on every chiropractors ‘to read list’. I added this book to my Amazon wish list when I read that WORLD magazine ranked it as their book of the year.

“Honoring a book on current political and economic questions is unusual for WORLD. Our books of the year in 2008 and 2009 were The Reason for God and The ESV Study Bible. We generally rate timeless higher than timely—but sometimes we have to pay attention to the immediate. Samuel Johnson said, “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” As the United States careens toward a crucial fall election, The Battle is concentrating minds.”

Robert V. Levine, A Geography of Time: The Temporal Misadventures of a Social Psychologist, or How Every Culture Keeps Time Just a Little Bit Differently. I’ve always heard that other cultures live at a slower pace than western cultures do. But I’ve never given much thought to how that affects business and society. Dr. Levine is a psychologist who’s spent much of his life studying time. The book description says, “Levine raises some fascinating questions. How do we use our time? Are we being ruled by the clock? What is this doing to our cities? To our relationships? To our own bodies and psyches? Are there decisions we have made without conscious choice?”

I first heard of this book, which is about 12 years old, from the following video.

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. (Listen to Dylan’s song here when reading this post )

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.