Chiropractic Marketing | Chiropractic Advertising | Chiropractic Ads

Can you tell me what is the most important point to make in any and all marketing you do?

(Whether it’s your newspaper ad, website, or patient education, you must have this or it will fail every time.)

Before I tell you the answer, let’s see if you can find it in this article about “Burger King decapitating its King”.

After spending millions of dollars to promote cool and hip commercials with the King Mascot, BK is pulling the plug on this marketing failure.

Why would they do this investing so much to “brand” it into the consumers mind?

Simple. It. Doesn’t. Work.

BK’s biggest rival, McDonalds, is gaining market share while Burger King is losing it.

Why? Here’s the key:

This discrepancy in performance is not the result of McDonald’s having more “creative” advertising or a hipper mascot (Ronald Mc Donald is many things – hip he’s not). But while Burger King was trying to sell consumers an edgy brand image, McDonald’s focused on something much more mundane: selling burgers, fries and coffee. The rest is marketing history.

Do you see it?

The most important concept in any marketing you do is providing a solution to the prospect’s problem. The fast food eater’s problem is that he is hungry, and he wants his food fast.

Now who’s going to connect with the conversation going on in the prospects head: the goofy, big-headed King Mascot jumping around or images of juicy, greasy burgers and fries being cooked up.

Yet, even though BK has spent millions running these silly commercials on TV, they realized it wasn’t working. It’s time to pull the plug and start over, focusing on actually selling the product.

In chiropractic, this means you have to focus on connecting the patient’s problem with your solution. Your solution — that’s the product you’re selling. And make no mistake, while you may not be “hard selling”, you are selling something. Everyone in a for-profit business is selling.

So don’t keep running ineffective ads that may look pretty and impress your receptionist, but do not connect to the patients.

I’ve not eaten at either of these restaurants since I started Chiropractic College. But even though I’m not their target audience, I always thought the King commercials were a waste of money. Maybe it’s just my marketing training.

What do you think?

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

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

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

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

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

Why did the tree fall?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

A couple of years out of chiropractic college, I had hit rock bottom. No money for rent. Barely enough for food. And certainly no money for Christmas presents for our little daughter at the time. (If you want an exercise in empathy, try telling your two year old that there’s not enough money for even a single gift!)

Not being able to provide for one’s family is a heart-wrenching affair, which can send any “tough guy” into a deep depression. And that’s when I had a huge business awakening. Here’s what I learned:

“It’s not just about your patients!”

I know, you’re probably thinking this isn’t any huge breakthrough at all. But here me out a bit. I had been told over and over in school, by consultants and many industry leaders that “If you take care of enough people, they’ll take care of you” or “Don’t worry about the money, just take care of the patients.” Now both of these have an element of truth. You certainly can’t focus your life on the ‘love of money’. You also can’t be worried about ‘numero uno’ all the time. But the problem with these coined phrases is that they don’t tell the whole story.

You see, I had plenty of patients at the time. But I was giving away so much free care and discounted care that I was barely able to feed my family. People would pull up in Porsches and Jaguars to my office, while I was parting my old jalopy at the other end of the parking lot. I realize now that I was ‘doing stupid’ by the shovel full, but at the time I was under the impression that I just needed to see more patients. More visits from more new patients would solve my problems.

Except that it didn’t solve anything because I was marketing to the wrong patients! And on top of that offering them severely discounted care plans!

That’s why it was a huge breakthrough for me. Because for the first time in practice I realized that patients didn’t give a darn whether I drove a jalopy or a Mercedes. They just wanted their care. And I had a lot of nice caring patients, but in the end it didn’t matter to them how successful I was.

So why on earth am I so worried about what they thought of my recommendations. An extra $10 a visit was nothing to them, but a huge blessing to me and my family at the time.

This is one of the reasons I went from an average of $17 a visit to over $80 a visit — in just a matter of 4 months.

Now it wasn’t just charging more that turned my practice around. Thankfully, I was blessed with a wake-up call on how to use effective marketing too. My marketing plan before had simply been this: whoever calls or comes by asking me to market, that’s what I’ll use to get more patients in the door.

A few thousand dollars later and very few new patients I realized the famous “marketing doesn’t work” saying must be true. Little did I know that this saying was both right and wrong. You can guarantee that crappy marketing does not work. But effective marketing does indeed work. The key is being able to determine between the two!

Lessons to learn from this true story:

#1. If you’re not struggling now, make sure you never have to by doing right things right now. Don’t wait to market when you need new patients. Put a chiropractic ad in the newspaper every month. Make sure your internet marketing plan is up to speed. Send your patients “stick letters”.  And more.

#2. If you are struggling, stop wasting money on ineffective marketing and get some good marketing. Passing out business cards and brochures isn’t going to cut it in most cities. Get an ad set up to run before Christmas. (My Ultimate Chiropractic Ads have a 90 day guarantee. What do you have to loose?)

#3. Be thankful for what you’ve been given. I learned my lesson the hard way. But not a Christmas or Thanksgiving holiday rolls by without me thinking back on those hard times, and being thankful for the blessing I now have: a great wife, four beautiful children and I get to help chiropractors grow their business every day!

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)

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.

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?

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.