Chiropractic Marketing | Chiropractic Advertising | Chiropractic Ads

Every time you pay money for your marketing, you should include a special offer. (If you’re worried about how offers make our profession look, see my previous article here.) What’s the best offer price for your advertising?

When I wrote my Ultimate Chiropractic Ads, I placed an example offer inside all of the ads. In most cases I set the offer price in the range between $30 and $50.

But now I’m giving different advice.

Let me explain…

What I taught before was that you should raise or lower the price slightly, adjusting for the number of new patients that you would want and the quality of the patient.

In most cases, the higher the cost the better the quality of the patient is going to be. By quality I mean more open to your recommendations, easier to convert to care, and overall a better patient. For example, it’s generally thought that to have a $49 offer for an evaluation, you’re going to find a better quality patient than you would if you ran an ad for $15.

If you lower the price to $15, you would get more patients, but you’re going to also notice a lot of just freebie seekers. A general rule is $20 or less, your quality is going to drastically drop.

If it’s a specialized ad — fibromyalgia, decompression, cold laser, neuropathy — you’re going to want to do a higher price. This is because the patient is really wanting some help and they have not been able to find it anywhere else.
But even though they are more desperate for help, they’re also more cautious of offers that sound “too good to be true”. Because they’ve had such a hard time finding help, and they’ve gone to higher priced specialists, they assume a doctor who can really help is not going to be cheap.

So that’s what I used to tell the doctors using my ads. But recent data and feedback has convinced me to adjust this recommendation.

Because doctors didn’t want to get a lot of people wasting their time, and (maybe) because they already had issues with giving a discount, many chose to go with the higher price.

Now I’m not sure if it’s the recession still hanging around, or possibly just the new economy we’re in…but higher priced offers are not working well in most areas.

Lower priced offers are working extremely well though!

So what I advise now is just to take the range down to match this new economy. Use an offer between $15 and $30 now. You’re only giving up $10- $15 from the range I mentioned above, but you’ll get lots more new patients. Which would give a huge ROI after factoring in all the patients who will start care.

So the question is this:

Would you rather have a higher priced offer with little to no new patients (low ROI!)…or a slightly lower priced offer with tons of new patients (awesome ROI)?

Hopefully you’ll choose the latter.

If you’re using my ads, make this adjustment and you’ll see even better results. If you’re not using my ads, you can try the advice I give above with whatever ads you’re using. But I can’t guarantee it will help if the rest of the ad is written poorly. The offer is important, but won’t matter one bit if no one ever gets to it in the ad.

Chiropractic newspaper ads are still working great, regardless of what the naysayers are telling you. Here’s an email I recently received from a doctor…

Hi Dr. Beck,

I ran an ad as 21,500 inserts in a free paper; printing cost $515.41. Distribution for inserts cost me $376.25 = total of  $891.25 combined 15 day only offer of $35 expired 9-6-11;

Grand total= $17,490.00 collected with residual collections for multiple payment program option uncollected yet. Table now filled for next 6.5 weeks!

27 new SD patients were scheduled!” – Dr. Rich McKay

Last week, I put the finishing touches on a full page chiropractic “fibromyalgia” ad I’ve been writing. While conducting my research for the ad, it really hit me how many women are out there suffering from this condition. They’re not happy with the answers the doctors are giving them. They are tired of being drug company guinea pigs. They just want someone to listen.

Many women with fibromyalgia have nowhere to turn, and would gladly try anything (chiropractic!) if only they could ‘find’ someone who could help. This is where your marketing comes in.

Marketing to fibromyalgia patients is a huge win-win for both parties. The patient is looking to get help, and is tired of being told she’s crazy. We as chiropractors are looking to help those with health problems (particularly spinal issues). The key is reaching these patients in a way that connects to what they’re thinking and feeling.

It’s estimated at least 6 million women suffer from fibromyalgia. Are you focusing on helping these women live happier, healthier and more pain free lives?

What are other patient “niches” that you should be focusing on?

- sciatica and disc problems

-pregnant women having problems or babies/kids having health issues

- weight loss/detox

-sinus problems

-sports injuries

and so much more.

You’ll find that when you focus on 3-4 niches, your marketing is going to work much better and have a great return on investment. This is because people in those niches feel like you are talking directly to them and are somewhat of an expert on their problem. If you just run a generic “chiropractic can help everyone” ad, then many of these patients will simply say “oh, they can’t help me”.

I’ll let you know how the “fibro ad” works, as it’s being tested in two different offices over the next week. What are some other niches you currently or would like to focus on in your practice? (Comment below)