There aren’t too many books published specifically for chiropractic marketing, so I was very interested in seeing what Dr. Reizer has to say in his new book CHIROPRACTIC MARKETING TOOLS THAT WILL ABSOLUTELY GROW YOUR PRACTICE. According to his site, Dr. Reizer “is a former associate professor of Sherman College and has taught numerous graduate level courses in chiropractic technique, x-ray analysis, diagnostic interpretation, chiropractic philosophical applications, and chiropractic communications.”

Dr. Reizer has published numerous other books on chiropractic (which I have listed at the end of this post), as well as three science fiction novels.

The subject matter of Chiropractic Marketing Tools ranges from simple business cards and newspapers to more advanced strategies like writing your own newspaper ads, developing a weight loss campaign, and marketing to health clubs. The book is only 133 pages, but packed full of ideas. I counted at least 24 different marketing tools mentioned. Dr. Reizer spends about 3-6 pages on each of the marketing tools mentioned. In most of the chapters he briefly explains the tool and how to use it, and sometimes gives an sample piece that you can easily use in your office.

One Amazon reviewer said,”Every morning our staff reads a few pages to get everyone thinking about how to promote the office.” This is actually a pretty good idea, as these are mostly marketing tools that your staff could do for you (or setup for you.) So to have them thinking about marketing each day is vital to your practice. Also, many of these strategies your staff has never heard of before, so you can provide a quick and easy manual of marketing ideas for them to use.

I do have two critiques of the book.

The biggest critique is that while the tools mentioned are useful and will “absolutely grow your practice” if done correctly, one of the most effective marketing tools available to chiropractors is only mentioned in passing: direct response marketing. These exact words are not found in the book, but Dr. Reizer does spend a few pages talking about lead generation marketing, which is a form of direct response marketing. He then provides a sample free report, which well written. But no mention of long copy newspaper ads or direct mail pieces. Seeing as one of my Decompression Marketing Elite clients just notified me that they got over 300 new patients this year from my ads, I think newspaper ads are pretty important!

The other critique is related to the first. Overall the book is a great summary of marketing ideas for every chiropractor to use. But the book is going to be used most by those who are new to practice or operating on a low marketing budget. For example, all of the strategies in the book could be done each month for less than $500 (there is no mention of radio or TV marketing). While this is a great place to start, and even marketing veterans should be doing some of the things Dr. Reizer mentions, there is much more that can be done in the way of effective marketing strategies.

Overall I think it’s a book every chiropractor should have in their arsenal. For those in practice less than 2 years, or for doctors struggling, it is a must read ASAP. For others, this book will be very useful for your staff and as a reference guide for ideas.

Dr. Reizer’s other chiropractic books include:

• 15 Secrets to Becoming a Successful Chiropractor
• Up and Running – Opening A Chiropractic Office
• Teaching Your Patients Chiropractic
• Depression – Proofing Your Chiropractic Career

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

One of the best ways to “wow” new patients and get patient compliance in your treatment plans is to be recognized as an expert in your field. Getting more letters in the form of degrees after your name can help some. But there is a better way.

Do you know the fastest way to become an expert?

The answer is to become a published author of a book. As soon as you write a book on any health problem and how to solve it, you will be seen as an expert.

Imagine every new patient who comes into your office receiving, as a free gift, a nice copy of your newest book. By the time you get to your report of findings, this patient is going to feel very comfortable trusting you with their health.

Also, realize that people will quickly loose or throw a business card away. But how many will throw away your professionally published book?

Having your own book will set you apart from all the other chiropractors in your town.

Can you guess the two most important numbers to track for a chiropractic practice?

“How many ya seeing doc?” If you you’ve been to some of the hyped up chiropractic seminars, you might think it’s the number of weekly patient visits. After all, you’ve probably been asked this question more times than you’d like to hear.

What does the number of visits per week really tell you about anyone’s practice? It doesn’t tell you how many of those visits are free or discounted. It doesn’t tell you the doctors overhead. For all we know, he could be seeing 300 per week and barely paying the bills. Some gurus even teach that the question “how many you seeing?” actually should be answered with how many patient visits you “see in your head”. Which means make up any answer you want.

“How many new patients you seeing?” New patients are a very important number to track, but the number you see per month doesn’t always tell the whole story. If someone does a spinal screening and gets 30 new patients in for a free exam, is this equal to 30 referred new patients who paid full price? No. Therefore, the importance of new patient totals can vary depending on the quality.

“What are you collecting?” Indeed, the monthly amount collected is a critical number to know for your practice. One that many chiropractors would do good to focus on more. But still, what does this tell you about the “health” of someone’s practice. If someone collects $100,000 a month, you may think he’s a very wealthy doctor. But what you don’t know is that he spent $110,000 to make that $100k. What collections don’t take into account is the overhead a practice has: the rent, payroll, marketing costs, leases, taxes, etc.

“Okay, so what are the two most important numbers? Just tell me already!”

The #1 most important number to know for your practice is the net profit for your practice. Also referred to as the “profit margin”. Simply take the total amount collected and subtract your expenses (doctor’s salary is not counted as expense for this exercise.) Now what % of your gross collections each month is your net profit?

It doesn’t matter if you had 100 new patients last month…or see 1000′s of visits per week…or collected $236,000 last month…if you’re net profit sucks. How many slow months can you make it through with only a 10% or 20% profit margin?

Now granted, you may not want to tell everyone this magic number. But if someone was to ask you, you better know it to the penny for last month…even if you don’t say it out loud. I’ve consulted with too many chiropractors who tell me “we’ll, I think it’s about 50%”. I reply “you think?” Then they give me some excuse about their bookkeeper or account not doing the books yet. Look, we’re not talking about taxes or anything to do with the IRS. We are talking about the actual amount of money that goes into your pocket each month. If you don’t know this number, you’re truly flying blind.

The second most important number is your return on investment for your marketing or ROI for short.Your marketing ROI is just a measure of the profit margin on your marketing dollars. So if you spend $1 on marketing and get back $5, this is good. If you get back $10 or $15 this is excellent.If you aren’t tracking your ROI, you can’t say for certain how well an advertisement performed. Simply measuring the number of new patients that came in from an advertisement is not adequate in comparing ads either.

Let’s look at some actual case studies. Here’s part of an email I received a couple of weeks ago…

Dr.Beck, we put the ‘sciatic don’t live it’ insert on Monday to 2 zipcodes that went to 6,000 readers, we got 3 patients ,all over 80 years old, who all paid. we took in $4,500, which was a 18:1 return. I want to crawl, walk, then run , as I tested the waters, with your ad’s. So far we are pleased, and will put out same ad to more zip codes to a different area next week. Pleased to say each of our 80+ year old NP’s ,noticed improvement with chiropractic and are happier citizens and telling friends. Thanks for the blessings.

Based on the above case study, did this doctor do well or not? You could be  thinking “only 3 new patients, that sucks big time!” Or you could say “gosh Dr. Beck, $4500 isn’t that great. I mean that barely pays for my salary!”

But we are missing an important peice of this case study. How much did he actually spend to get that $4500 in his bank account? Here’s the part I left out…

…for a cost of only $250 for the ad…

Wow! For a cost of only $250, he made back $4500. That’s an 18 to 1 return…for every $1 spent he made back $18. Realize he said “will put out same ad to more zip codes to a different area next week.” He can now roll this out to other zipcodes and bring in quite a bit more than his salary. But if he was only tracking the number of new patients that came in — which was only 3 — he may throw in the towel and decide to never run another ad.

Always measure your marketing ROI. Measure it for each ad you run and the monthly total of all your marketing.

Have you ever picked up a chiropractic journal or magazine, and looked at what the consultants/coaches in our profession are selling and teaching?

I recently received a journal and noticed the following terms being used…
-pressing
-high energy
-training
-high volume
-philosophy
-technique
-case fees
-rythmic flow
-consciousness
-”attacking” medicine

You may remember that famous commercial on TV years ago.  The one where the old lady would get the hamburger, look at it kind of funny, and say “Where’s the beef?”

That’s what I wonder about many of these coaching programs. Where’s the beef? Where are the tools and solutions that answer the major problems of growing your practice?

The #1 problem in the chiropractic profession is getting quality new patients. This isn’t a theory, but a fact — lack of marketing tools and strategies keeps more practices from growing than any other factor.

Yet, you’ll be hard pressed to find a single article in a journal or magazine even mentioning this topic. (I’m not opposed to coaching by the way, with the right kind of coach it can be very effective in growing your practice. But I get sick and tired of the half-truths and hyperbole that is preached by most chiropractic coaches!)

Why do consultants have to go to great lengths to teach on the small things in your practice, yet fail to give you considerable strategies and tools to bring in new patients?

I fell victim to this many times in my first 2 years of practice. Hours and hours spent training on a script, report of findings, or specific procedure — only to wonder when the new patients were going to magically appear.

Granted, I should have known something was up when these coaches kept introducing unique terms they had come up with. Even though I was an adult and had been in chiropractic awhile, I never quite understood what or how these terms related to growing a chiropractic practice.

That is why I created this blog. To give chiropractors free information on marketing and advertising their practices. And since the popularity of this site has grown over the past few months, I’ve had more than one chiropractic consultant express their “dissatisfaction” with me giving away this valuable teaching.

This is also why I created The Ultimate Chiropractic Ads. Chiropractors need tools that work in their office…tools they can implement and see results from right away — not next month or next year!

Will you join with me in 2009 and help our profession flourish? Will you focus with me on those things that really matter?

Let’s throw out those fancy terms that aren’t really important in growing a practice. Let’s get right down to the truth of the matter.

Here’s where you’ll find 90% of my blog focus this year…

#1. New patienet marketing. I’m going to give you more tools and strategies, free downloads and forms, more information than any consultant will give away.

#2. New patient conversion. Once the new patient is in the office, now we need to convert them to care so they can pay, stay and refer.

#3. Retention. There are many non-forceful strategies that you can use to keep, reactivate, and build relationships with your current patients. (Some consultants teach that you must “force” or “scare” a patient to stay under care. I believe this is unethical.)

If you want to learn how to improve the above three things in your practice, then this is the place to be.

On the other hand, if you’d rather read about unbelievable hype like “How to build a huge, humongous, oversized high volume practice that collects case fees the size of Warren Buffet’s Retirement Fund!!!” , then you know where to find that type of teaching.