Chiropractic Marketing | Chiropractic Advertising | Chiropractic Ads

A discounted or special offer is when you lower your consult, exam and/or x-ray price for a new patient. Some people think using discounted offers is the bane of chiropractic.

But I’ve yet to hear any good reasons for thinking this. But I’ve heard many myths about discounted offers that would lead people to think they are bad.  Let’s look at each one:

Myth #1: Offers Hurt the Profession

What hurts the profession is when chiropractors are going broke and closing their doors to bankruptcy. And nothing closes the doors faster than not bringing in any new patients. I can understand where this myth is coming from if everyone in the phone book is making the same “free x-ray” offer to the community. But the problem here isn’t that everyone is making a discounted offer. The problem is that they are all doing the same thing, making the same offer. I always recommend my customers and clients make their offers unique, which means different than the competition. This may even mean a higher priced offer! Also, offering something in regards to a specific condition, like neuropathy or fibromyalgia,  is much more effective than a generalized “free chiropractic exam”.

Myth #2: Offers Are Illegal in the U.S.

I’m not an attorney, so check with yours regarding your state laws. In the United States, there had developed a long held view that professionals should not advertise at all. A few lawyers challenged this in the Bates v. State Bar of Arizona Supreme Court case, which said that advertising was a kind of commercial speech protected by the First Amendment. Also, the Goldfarb v. Virginia State Bar established that was a violation of the antitrust laws for anyone to restrict competitive pricing with professionals. Many chiropractors will tell me it is illegal in their state to make special offers, but when they actually research it and ask their state boards they find out that’s not the case. Sure there are some insurance carriers like Medicare and other federal plans may require you not to make special discounted offers to their members. Yet, surely you want to see a mixture of patients in your office. I’ve yet to meet a chiropractor that makes 100% of their monthly gross income from Medicare payments.

Myth #3: Offers Makes You Look Sleazy

A carefully written offer in your advertisement is not “sleazy.” What makes an offer look sleazy is the use of hype in your ad (which can make it illegal in some cases.) To say that you’re giving a limited-time, reduced price on a special “herniated disc” evaluation is not sleazy. And the thousands of patients who come in each month to chiropractor’s offices don’t think so either. This relates back to Myth #1 above and the whole “it’s not professional.”

Myth #4: My Area is Too Wealthy to Respond to Discounted Offers

This myth is interesting. I practiced in a high income area ($90k+ average income) and when I ran ads I’d have people drive up in Jaguars and almost beg to be scheduled for the special we were running that week in the newspaper. A friend of mine practices in an even higher income area, and he once said he had quite a few billionaire’s wives coming in responding to his special offers. There’s two things to keep in mind when dealing with high income areas: (1) in a time where people have more debt than ever, the appearance of wealth and true wealth are not the same, and (2) many wealthy people got that way be saving money where they could. I would almost venture to say people with high income respond slightly better to special offers.

Myth #5: It Will Bring in Lower Quality Patients

This myth can become reality if you don’t word your offer correctly, or you advertise in the wrong locations. Usually a slight price adjustment can correct this. One doctor told me that he was getting tons of decompression patients with an offer of a free exam and x-ray. Others have told me this “freebie” offer brings in too many lookers — people who simply waste time for a free exam and have no intent of wanting any care. In this case, a price increase of $25 or $35 can make a huge difference. By charging a little more for the offer, only those most interested will take you up on it. Of course, there is a place of diminishing returns where you can go to high with your price and kill the effectiveness of the ad.

Myth #6: Your Offer Price Must End in 7

Did you know there was magic in the number 7? Twenty or so years ago, the genius marketer Ted Nicholas ran some direct mail tests. He tested prices ending in 7 verses prices ending in 9. The 7′s outperformed the 9′s. Since then, this strategy has spread through most professions. Sure, it worked for Nicholas back then, but does it work for you? The only way to find out is to test. I know plenty of markets who have tested $7 offers against $10 offers, and the $10 almost always wins. So are we going to say all offers must end in 0′s now? You should try $17 or $27, but since I’m not superstitious I suggest keeping it simple by using multiples of 5 ($15, $25, $30, etc.)

Myth #7: Must Be Able To Pay with a Single Bill

This isn’t as common as the myths above, but in some coaching circles it’s somewhat popular. The thought is that when a person sees your offer, they think it’s not really that much money if they only have to pull one bill out. So they recommend you do offer prices at $5, $10 and most often at $20. I’m not sure what they would say about $100 offer, since after all it’s still just one bill the patient has to pull out of their pocket. In a society that pays with credit cards, checks, debit cards, and more, the “one bill strategy” is pretty much useless. It may have worked 50 years ago when $5 was a lot of money to most folks, but today it’s just not a big deal.

Last week we looked at three big marketing strategies you should be be doing this year to build your practice. (To read that post, click here.) Today, let us look at four more marketing methods you would be very wise to use in 2011 for your biggest year yet.

#4. Have Your Staff Do “Focused” Spinal Screenings

This recommendation may come as a shock to some of my readers, as I have often times said spinal screenings are a waste of time for most doctors. And I still tell my clients and customers that. For the doctor, it is not a good use of your time to go and spend 4 hours standing at the front of a business, chasing people with a clipboard in hand. I’ve done enough of these types of screenings in my lifetime and 95% of them were a complete waste.

But there are three reasons you should do spinal screenings: (1) you’re new in practice, (2) you’re about to go out of business and need new patients ASAP, or (3) you can have someone else do it for you at a big event. It’s this third one that I recommend you focus on in 2011. A big event would be a huge festival that your town holds once per year, or a large business that let’s your staff come in to screen (like Walmart, Costco, etc.). Notice I said “your staff”, and not you as the doctor. If you want to streamline this process for your staff, and find out how chiropractors are still getting into Walmart to do screenings, I recommend you get Dr. Smith’s Spinal Screening Program.

#5. Email Marketing With Current and Inactive Patients

It’s amazing that many chiropractors still don’t ask for their patient’s email address. It’s as simple as including it on the intake form for all new patients. The reason this is so important in your marketing strategy is that we’re all human, which means we forget things. Patient’s forget appointments unless reminded. And this is especially true of patients who’s treatment plan does not require them to come in often (maintenance or wellness patients, etc.) How much revenue is lost in your practice every week simply because people forgot about their appointments?

The simple solution is to set up a system with your staff to email patients about their appointments. Or society is becoming more and more an email/internet society, replacing the telephone. My dentist emails me a remind before each appointment, which makes a huge difference when I’m extremely busy and likely to forget. Now I don’t recommend this for all patients, but you should make a list of the ones who need to be reminded most. Also, something similar can be done for inactive patients. You can compile an email letter that offers inactive patients to return to care. If your list is set up right, with a click of a button your email can go out to thousands of inactive patients at once. This strategy can really have an affect on your practice in the long run.

#6. Get More PI Patients

As health insurance becomes more difficult to work with in 2011, many chiropractors will turn to seeing more car accident cases. Unfortunately, most chiropractors still think PI marketing is all about using outdated attorney-schmoozing techniques to get new PI patients. While it’s true a few chiropractors do this, its by no means necessary to for having a successful PI practice.

There are much better ways to get new patients from attorneys, as well as MDs, ER rooms, body shops, existing patients, Facebook, and more. This does not mean you must become a 100% PI mill practice. But you should take another look at PI, as the return is much higher because you actually get paid a fair value for your care, if it’s done right. See This PI Marketingprogram for all the new marketing strategies you can use.

#7. Use Direct Mail

Direct mail has long been a tested and proven marketing method in businesses worldwide. But when the recent recession hit, so many companies pulled out of direct mail marketing that the USPS took a huge hit. And unfortunately many chiropractors did the same. Of course cutting back on your direct mail campaign doesn’t make sense if all your competition has done the same. Like newspaper ads, now is the best time to use direct mail, since others are cutting back or convinced it doesn’t work.

What type of direct mail? I would not suggest fancy postcards. Long copy letters and postcards work best, but they must be written well and not sound sleazy or cheap. Also, list selection is important when it comes to direct mail. Getting a good list from a list broker can increase your return on investment drastically. We’ll look closer at direct mail in a future blog post.

The super-successful practice will implement all seven of these strategies. Which of these 7 will you implement this year?

Have you set up your marketing plan for this year yet?

If you haven’t, what are you waiting for? Set your goals high and plan now for a breakthrough year. Big numbers are possible with the right tools. Just a few weeks ago a client told me he had received 300 extra new patients from using my newspaper ads in 2010. What would 300 more new patients do for your practice, and more importantly your lifestyle?

Here are my recommendations regarding the marketing strategies you should be focusing on for 2011.

1. Finally Do Online Marketing Right.

Chiropractic internet marketing is the strangest thing. It’s the one strategy everyone knows they should be doing, as its getting bigger and bigger every day. It’s also one of the lowest forms of marketing you can do for your practice.

But here’s the strange part: most chiropractors are dragging their feet on doing anything. I’ve seen people spend hours “marketing” on Facebook and Twitter, while their website can hardly be found on Google. Every day you wait to do it right, someone else comes along in your town and figures it out. Being ranked #1 on Google is like being king of hill, and the longer a competitor stays king of the hill the harder it is to knock them off.

So here’s what you need to do right now. Make sure your website shows up on Google’s top 5 for your area for the major keywords that patients would type in; chiropractor, back pain, headaches, decompression, etc. If you’re not there, that’s the first thing to work on. Once you’re set up at least in the top 10, add some condition specific landing pages to your website and buy some qualified traffic from Adwords to send to your site. (See my explanation in more detail in this webinar.)

You may choose to put in the time to do this or hire someone else to do it for you. If you hire someone else, please make sure they (1) know chiropractic, (2) can write marketing copy and (3) actually understand how Google works. Very few web designers understand chiropractic enough to present it to the public. And most web designers are more gifted in the technical skills of programming than in writing. This produces a beautiful site with moving spines and award-winning graphics, but wouldn’t convince your mom to come in as a patient.

Also they must understand what Google likes (hint: it’s called a WordPress site layout). Any high school kid can build a website for you. But there is very little chance it will ever make the coveted top 10 on Google. And if you, your wife, and the aforementioned high school kid are the only ones to every see your website…it’s pointless.

#2. Ignore the ‘Death of Newspapers’ Mantra

When I wrote my first newspaper ad for my practice, someone told me it was pointless since newspaper didn’t work any more. The ad brought in 17 decompression patients at the cost of $800. In 2009 my Ultimate Chiropractic Ads brought in a conservative estimate of $20 million dollars for chiropractors in the U.S. (I haven’t estimated 2010 yet, but it has to be about 5 times that based on the numbers of doctors who bought them.)

Here’s the point…

Ignore the gloomy predictions and focus on your practice now. Will newspapers disappear? Maybe they will someday. Who knows. But the question you need to ask yourself is this: “Is there a newspaper in my town?” If the answer is yes, you should be advertising there. When there no longer is a newspaper in your area, then you can join with the naysayers and proclaim that newspapers are dead. Until then, use them for all they’re worth.

Here are the best producing ads according to feedback in 2010:

• Spinal decompression
• Neuropathy (crazy numbers are being reported for these ads)
• Back pain/sciatica
• Fibromyalgia
• Migraine headaches

You can see the commonality between the above…they all are condition specific ads. In 2011, you’ll need to get even better at showing prospects how you can help them with their specific problems.

#3. Get Into Local Businesses

This year, setting up events in local businesses will bring you many more new patients. While this method has been around for decades, the same old techniques don’t work today. New tactics have been tested to educate and schedule new patient appointments from these events. One method that is working very well is using the Teacher Appreciation Program to check teachers in local schools. If you have a massage therapist on staff, they will be very useful in making connections with local businesses.

Where should you go?

The list is endless. Schools, malls, gyms, banks, Costco and even Walmart. (Yes,Walmart is possible. Look for more on this unique strategy in a few days.) Many of these places, like Costco, will have some type of community health event already planned each year.

I’ve got 4 more strategies you must use in 2011, but this blog post is getting a bit long already. Look for the final 4 next week, one of which you will be shocked I’m actually endorsing!

Use this list to and check off what you need to do.Get out a calendar and pencil in dates that ads will run, changes to be made, etc. Let’s make 2011 your best year yet.

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)

(Today’s post is by my colleague Dr. Jonathan Walker, co-creator of PI Marketing Mastery.)

Check out this marketing message from a website I stumbled across recently…

“Don’t rely on focus groups and consumers’ ability to express their opinions about your product, let their minds speak for themselves.

At MindSign Neuromarketing(TM), we look at the subject brain response to your ad, game, speech, or film. We look at how well and how often it engages the areas for attention/emotion/memory/and personal meaning (importance). We also look at how well it activates (good) the brain as a whole. From this data we can tell what your audience was thinking while using your software or watching your content, moment by moment, regardless of what that content is. Were they scared or sleepy, happy or sad? Were they even paying attention? We can show you how your product is affecting the consumer brain even before the consumer is able to say anything about it.”

This comes from the website of a company called MindSign Neuromarketing who uses functional MRI technology to literally read the minds of subjects who are exposed to marketing messages. Functional MRI measures blood flow to the brain, so when a particular region is activated it is easy to measure and record.

Am I the only one who finds this a little scary? Although it seems like something straight out of Star Trek, this type of marketing research is being utilized by corporations such as Unilever and Proctor and Gamble to know exactly what consumers are thinking.

While no chiropractor that I’m aware of has figured out how to read the minds of PI attorneys, you can get close. There are very specific questions that every attorney wants answered, and your goal is to answer these before they even have a chance to ask them.

I recently sat down with a local attorney and explained to him how I understood how difficult it was to build a case with no objective evidence. I told him the battle he faced trying to prove his clients were injured when the treating physicians didn’t provide any objective evidence in the form of diagnostic testing.

I then explained to him that I use very specific x ray and MRI protocols that can uncover ligament damage that is common with most whiplash patients. These ground-breaking imaging techniques can be used to show proof of injury in the dreaded “soft tissue” cases that for years have been nearly impossible for attorneys to win at trial.

Knowing the answer to one of the most pressing questions burning in the minds of PI lawyer instantly made me this attorney’s “go to guy”. At the end of our conversation he said, “I like your office and I’m ready to work with you. I’ll probably be able to send 50-60 cases to you over the next year.”

This stuff really works! Answer the questions before they can ask them and you’ll have attorneys keeping your practice full to capacity with high quality PI referrals.

Discover multiple ways of getting PI patients at:
http://newpimarketing.com

Yours for more PI patients,
Jonathan Walker, D.C.

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.

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?

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