Chiropractic Marketing | Chiropractic Advertising | Chiropractic Ads

A struggling practice is typically characterized by low income, low number of new patients and small weekly volume.

This may either be a long term practice that has declined, or a brand new practice that fails to really take off.

To a doctor who’s spent years in training and thousands of dollars to obtain a degree, this can be very depressing.

And to top it off, the doctor who ends up struggling is in the worst spot for making good marketing decisions.

There are 4 areas in marketing that a struggling practice must learn to overcome if they are going to outgrow this slump.

1. Because of mistakes in the past, he’s hesitant to even use advertising. Past failures are not necessarily an indication of future failures.

The point of making mistakes is to learn from them. If you eat bad food that makes you sick, you don’t stop eating food. If you’ve used bad advertising in the past, you shouldn’t stop all future advertising either.Marketing your struggling practice is not an option, but a necessity! The key is using effective marketing.

2. He’s so desperate for a solution that he’ll risk large amounts of money to save himself from going out of business.

This means spending money with any ad rep that comes by the office. Don’t loose our good judgment when you’re face-to-face with an ad rep. Get all the information you need. Ask for a good deal. And don’t make quick decisions.

3. Thinking that advertising costs too much, so he’ll just save his money and focus on “internal marketing” and referrals.

Unfortunately, this is a downward spiral, as a struggling practice is struggling because of the lack of NEW patients.Regardless of what some consultants teach, not every patient in your office is going to refer.

That’s just being realistic. So ONLY relying on referrals from a dwindling patient base is just going to frustrate you. Get referrals plus do outside marketing.

4. Not measuring his return on investment and continuing to make stupid marketing decisions based on feelings (or bad coaching advice) instead of looking at the numbers.

This one is not just a trait of the struggling practice. Many well-off practices still make this mistake, preventing even further success.

A good marketing strategy isn’t “successful” because of how it looks, how it makes your wife fee or even how many new patients it brings in. It’s successful when it brings in a good return on investment (ROI). An ad that “just brings in 5 new patients” isn’t necessarily a bad thing, if you only paid $500 for the ad and each patients ends up paying you $1500 each!

If you’re in this situation, don’t worry, you’re not alone. I was even there at one point in my practice.

But you have to get over these mistakes and advertise your services in an effective way. You should pay special attention to #2 and #3 above. These are deadly.

You can’t afford to waste money on bad advertising. So if you’re currently doing any marketing that’s not been producing in the last 3 months, then stop.

Put your money where it counts, like with running chiropractic ads in the newspaper.

If I had only $500 to spend each month on marketing, and had to pick just one form of advertising…I would pick newspapers…and work the newspaper rep until I got a good ad
placement for one of these ads!

This was one of the big strategies that saved my practice from bankruptcy!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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?

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.

Math has never been my favorite subject. It wasn’t in elementary, middle school, high school, or college. Especially those nasty algebra and calculus type classes.

But as a business owner, I quickly learned that it didn’t matter how much I liked math and numbers, they are a fact of life.

You’ve got to be able to figure your stats. Determine your prices. Set up a care plan with x number of visits per week, month, etc. You need to keep good business statistics and know what those stats tell you.

For example, early on in practice, I thought my care plans were great. Patients were prepaying for care and my volume was high. What could be better?

The problem was that no money was coming in. So, I sat down and figured my average collection per visit. It came to about $17. No wonder the business was broke. But, without knowing the simple formula of collections divided by visits, I would not have been able to out this huge blunder in my practice.

You might be thinking this is simple stuff, anyone can figure it out. Yet, you would be surprised at the chiropractors I speak with who either don’t know how to figure simple stats or if they know how, simply don’t keep any numbers for their practice.

Here’s the biggest “chiropractic math” problem I see…

Chiropractors don’t figure ROI (Return on Investment)!

Let’s do a basic math problem. Say I get 12 new patients in the door from a newspaper ad which cost me $1000. And let’s assume I’m new in practice, and my conversions are low, so I only convert 4 of those patients to a care plan. If my care plans are worth $1500 (which is a very conservative case value) what was my ROI?

It’s ok to use a calculator on this test. (I had to )

The answer is 6:1, or a 600% ROI. So for every dollar invested, I made $6 back.

Do you run the ad again or not? How low is the ROI going to be before you say this ad doesn’t work?

You bet I’m going to run that ad again! For me it’s got to bring in at least 2:1 ROI over time. Meaning, after all the money comes in from the patients care plans, the minimum ROI it can bring is 2:1. Occasionally a newspaper ad will be a 1:1 or negative ROI, and I’ll tweak something or run it in a better paper and it immediately becomes a huge winner!

But, some chiropractors think an ad is a failure if it doesn’t bring in a 20:1 ROI or higher. In other words, they are upset if their ROI is only 5:1. What other business owner would be upset that the $1 they spent brought back $5?   No one.

Unfortunately, it happens daily in chiropractic. Look, the days of spending $0 on marketing and bringing in $30…$40…$50k a month are over. The days of running a killer ad and getting 676 new patients is over. It’s not 1991 anymore.

It’s time to face the fact you’ve got to pay for some marketing. And you’ve got to be happy with a positive return on investment.  Now the only question which remains is which marketing gives the best return?

What billion dollar business gets better than a 5:1 ROI on their external marketing dollars? What small business get’s better than this?

Are all your eggs in one basket?

Man how I wish they had a class on ROI in chiropractic school. As simple as it sounds, a doctor in an emotional situation or someone who says “I’m just not good at the business side of chiropractic” does not run these numbers.

I was there. I came out of school and thought 1 magic marketing pill, one magic ad would solve all my problems. I’d run one ad, get 100 new patients, and within a short time I’d have a 100% referral practice.

Then I woke up one day and realized if there was a 1 magic ad that brought in 100 new patients, everyone would soon be using it, and it wouldn’t bring in 100 new patients anymore.

I realized I would have to use multiple marketing strategies to grow my practice. But which ones? And how should I proportion my marketing budget out?

Then it came to me. Measure the ROI, return on investment, of each strategy. Put more money into the ones with the highest ROI. If it shows a 6 or 12 month decline, readjust the money into other high ROI marketing. Simple really.

The best thing about this strategy, was that I wasn’t relying on just 1 thing to grow. If the newspaper ad didn’t bring in a 100:1 ROI for me, no sweat. I’ll take a 5:1 ROI because I’ve got 7 other streams of new patient generation methods.

In other words, I didn’t put all the success on my practice on one thing. Even if that one thing works, I’ll need other streams of new patients so I can pay the bills, right?

Are you measuring your ROI? Are you putting the full load of your practice success on 1 ad or marketing strategy, or are you spreading your marketing out evenly over many different ads and other strategies?

The more fishing poles you have in the water, the more fish you’ll catch, right?

I’m not a big fan of this analogy, and here’s why.

First, let’s look at what’s true about it.

It is certainly true that you want to have more than one marketing method being used in your office. And seeing as most chiropractors don’t have any solid marketing strategies in use, I can see why so many marketers are teaching this analogy.

In fact, many chiropractors expect there to be one magic pill that fixes their marketing woes. Relying on only one marketing strategy in your practice, even if it works great, is a recipe for failure. Hey, my Ultimate Chiropractic Ads work great in getting hundreds of new patients and thousands of dollars into your practice over time, but I have never claimed they’re the only marketing method you’ll ever need in practice.

With that said, let’s look at the fishing poles analogy a little closer.

More fishing poles is always better, right?

Are more new patients always a good thing, or does quality factor into the equation?

I don’t know about you, but I’d take 10 referral new patients over 50 telemarketing new patients any day of the week. You see, quality of patients is a big factor as well. Therefore, all marketing methods are not created equal.

I realize when we start talking about patients (people) having a measurement of quality associated with them, it’s going to make some doctors uncomfortable. I hope you realize I’m not talking about the way they dress, talk, or even act. Truth is, there is only so much time in the day. I would rather spend that time working with people who really want help and are willing to pay full price for it.

Back to our fishing poles analogy. After hearing it, you might think, “if having more marketing strategies is always better, why not 50 of them? Why not 100? Why not 500?” and so on.

I grew up fishing. My grandparents fished the rivers of Central Texas. My parents still fish the lakes every summer. By the time I was 18, I had eaten more catfish then most people do in a lifetime (and catfish is not the healthiest fish either!) I still like to go with my kids, when I can actually get away.

And there’s one thing I know about fishing…there’s a limit to how many poles you can handle at one time. At most you can hold one in each hand, then maybe have 4-6 in holders on the boat if you are really good. What do you think is going to happen if you try and add a couple more?

It’s very likely you’ll spend all your time just trying to keep your lines baited. If you get more than one fish on a line at a time, you’ll be in a bind, and maybe even loose one fish or both.

Now you could hire a “fishing pole” manager, akin to a marketing manager. And now that person can handle 8-10 poles while you can still handle your 8-10 poles. But the manager has to check with you every few minutes to see if she’s doing it right. Plus, you still got to tell them what kind of bait to put on the line, how long to leave the line out there, how far to cast, etc.

And what happens if you get a line tangled up? Now you’ve got to go mess with that and clean it up. Are you seeing the similarities to your practice yet?

Here’s the point…

You can only handle so many fishing poles at one time. That’s not being pessimistic, it’s just being real. It’s much better to have 8-10 really strong ones, shaving off the bad ones and adding news ones as you go along.

Perhaps over 5,10, or 20 years you can build up marketing strategies that can be left alone to work. By using the internet you can plug in many marketing methods which will run on autopilot, taking up a very small amount of time. But getting 100 strategies set up? Not likely.

That’s why you’ve got to make sure your 8-10 are working well. I recommend doing niche specific marketing like PI marketing, decompression marketing, neuropathy marketing,  and fibromyalgia marketing. You should do market in the newspaper, on the internet, through referrals, in office marketing, snail mail, email…even the radio and TV is your budget allows.

In my last post, we looked at the “5 Biggest Questions About Chiropractic Ads“. But due to length, we only got through 4 questions and answers. So today’s post is the 5th and final question we get asked most from buyers of my ads kit. And it’s probably the most important question to get the answer for.

The question comes in various forms, but it goes something like this, “I ran your ad and want to know why we didn’t get more new patients?”

Now, as you might realize, this is a hard question for me to answer. Mainly because I don’t know how many new patients he did actually get. And how many did he expect to get from the ad?

What’s a good number, 10, 15, 20? I know expectations have been elevated to unrealistic numbers in chiropractic. What else can we expect after years of hyped up marketing strategies that said they would give us 100 new patients every time we ran them, or make us $1 million a month the first month!

Don’t get me wrong, my ads work well to bring in new patients and I don’t think they’re overhyped. We even give a guarantee for those who aren’t happy. But I can say right now it’s unlikely you’ll get 80 new patients every time you run them. Maybe if you’re in a small town with no other chiros, but as for the rest of us we’ll gladly take 10-30 new patients each run.

But what’s strange is when we get an email of a doctor who’s actually doing very well, ‘making a killin’ actually, but he didn’t get “as many as he expected”.

For example, once I was told by a doctor they had received 5 decompression patients from one of my ads. This doctor knows that other doctors are getting 15-25 decompression patients per ad, so his question would have been a good one if he was asking “how do I get as many as those other guys do”. But alas, we rarely get that question asked of us. Instead, this doc was saying that 5 new patients just wasn’t enough. After all, he had paid $1000 to run the ad.

But hold on a second. We’re looking at this scenario completely backwards! Let me explain…

I asked him if all of the 5 started care. He said yes. I asked how much his care plans were priced at. He said $3000. Quick math lead me to determine he got $15,000 back on his investment. What was his investment? Cost of $1000 to run the ad.

That’s a 15-to-1 return on investment! Who wouldn’t like a 15:1 ROI?

There are very few businesses anywhere that get that kind of return. But this doctor was bummed that he only got 5 new patients in for $1000 spent. Do you see where the premises are wrong with this kind of thinking?

You cannot measure an ads success solely by the number of new patients it brought in. And you certainly can’t measure it’s success by how much money you spent. It’s your return on investment that matters. The money spent (ad cost) is only used to figure out the ROI.

Think about it this way…

What if a new patient come into your office with an 11 out of 10 (!) on the pain scale. They got their first treatment, looked at you angrily and said “I’m not happy doctor. I paid you all that money and only got a 60% reduction in my pain today!” After picking your jaw up off the floor, you’d kindly remind the patient of how they are were doing when that crawled into your office on their hands and knees. Therefore, you’re telling them to compare the “before” to the “after”, which is essentially their return on investment. How much they spent doesn’t directly have anything to do with how much better they got.

Are you measuring your ROI?

It’s simple to do really. Take all the new patients who come in from the ad and record their name in a spreadsheet. Then keep track of how much money each one spends in your office. Your patient accounting software should make this number easily accessible.

So your spreadsheet might look something like the one to the left here.

If I hadn’t kept this spreadsheet and tracked every patient, I might try and rely on my memory of how the ad performed. And think, “man, that ad really sucked because Antonio never started care, and Maria she didn’t even come back after the exam. Bah, advertising doesn’t work!”

But the truth is I got a 2061% ROI, or a 20-to-1 return! You can bet I’m running this ad again after seeing how well it really did. (And this ad is actually in the Ultimate Chiropractic Ads.)

So start tracking your ads. Not using “memory” tracking, where you just try and remember how well it did. But actually record the numbers and see what the real story is.