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Have you set up your 2012 chiropractic marketing calendar yet?

I know it’s already 2 weeks into the year, but if your holiday season is anything like mine, it takes the first week or two in 2012 to actually relax and catch up from the end of the previous year.

One of the things you must do is write down all your plans and goals on a yearly calendar.You can not just wait until you need new patients, and then figure out what to do. This is reactive marketing and you want to be proactive this year.

For years, I used a monthly calendar on the wall that my staff and I could write marketing events down and see what was coming up.

But the furthest you can see on these types of calendars is only 30 days at a time. What we need is a “year at a glance” type of calendar.

Well thankfully this year I found the NeuYear Calendar, which is a complete year at a glance. This will hang great on the wall or back of my door.

I recommend you grab one too, and start planning your monthly marketing events, promotions, ads, etc.

Here’s some benefits listed on their site, which led me to buy one immediately:

• It’s big, coming in at 27″ x 39″ this means you can see the whole year at once. “You no longer have to page through a traditional calendar (or on your small computer screen), to see the whole year. You can layout your goals for the year, set future deadlines, and clearly see the passing of time. Also, it has bigger squares so you can write more.”
• No space between months. “The week is the currency we think in, so this calendar focuses on presenting 52 weeks, rather than 12 months.”
• Brilliant aesthetics. In Making Ideas Happen, author Scott Belsky says “the design of your productivity tools will affect how eager you are to use them; attraction often breeds commitment.”
• 2 calendars in 1! It has a horizontal orientation that fits perfectly above your desk, or you can flip it over for a vertical orientation that fits perfectly on your door.

Now that I shown you which calendar I think is best, what do you do with it?

Call a staff meeting one day during lunch. Start by explaining your mission for your practice and the goals you have for this year.

Then begin brainstorming with your staff about the different types of marketing ideas they have. Make sure to give them room and freedom to talk. Even if they have a bunch of bad ideas, just write them down. You never know when they’ll say something you’ve never thought of.

My staff would often come up with many successful in-office marketing procedures from the past that I had totally forgotten about.

Once you have written down, everything you can think of, start prioritizing your list. Put a “1″ by the most effective, “2″ be second most effective, and so on.

Side note: Do not base effectiveness on what feels like it did the best last year. Feelings do not turn into dollars. Measure effectiveness based on your return on investment numbers you recorded for all marketing last year. And if you didn’t keep good records, go back and see if you can figure it up now. Remember, ROI equals the amount you brought in from a given marketing campaign divided by the money spent on it.

You might want to throw in something new for 2012 that you haven’t tried before. A few suggestions would be:

• Neuropathy or decompression newspaper ads
• Google Adwords
• spinal screenings (but with a caveat, see here)

Then begin writing on your calendar all the 1′s, 2′s, etc. spread out somewhat evenly throughout the year. So you don’t want all your ads to come out in March and have the rest of the year empty.

If you wanted to do it according to budget, you should write the amount to spend beside each campaign to. For example, on February 20th you might write “Run Neuropathy Ad for $1000 or less”. (To see how to save money on running your monthly newspaper ads, watch this free webinar.)

If a month get’s too busy, slide things forward into the next month. You should be marketing every month of the year, no exceptions.

Now you have a marketing calendar set up. Try to stick to it as much as possible. You may need to edit and change things throughout the year. That’s fine, but make sure you take a look at the big picture before making rash decisions.

Do you have any other good ideas on planning your marketing calendar? Let us know in the comments below.

1. Monthly print newsletters will be more valuable.

I know, you’re probably thinking print newsletters have gone the way of the dinosaur, and that email, Facebook, etc. are “da bomb!” But the fact is people are starting to demand a more personal relationship with their businesses. All you have to do is look at the Occupy Wall Street movement to sense how people now see a big gap between the products they buy and the companies who provide them. (Also, for more on this, watch the second video here on Dr. Loop’s blog.)

What about email newsletters you ask? You should be sending those too, at least 2 per month. But does it mean more to you to receive a birthday card by snail mail or an e-card? Sending a print newsletter with a real postage stamp is still a very effective way to communicate with current patients and get more referrals.

2. Videos will be more effective on your website.

Video has been around for a number of years on the internet, but it really hasn’t become the norm yet. However I think in 2012 that will start to shift. A few reasons for this are: almost everyone has some type of broadband internet access now, Youtube is more popular than ever, and sites like Facebook are using more video. At the least you should test a video of yourself on the landing page of our website to see if it increases conversions. Using tools like Google website Optimizer will let you easily figure out if videos are more or less effective for your site.

3. Neuropathy, Decompression and other niche specific newspaper ads will continue to get high returns.

Like the print newsletters mentioned above, you may have bought into the lie that newspapers are now extinct. However, in most markets, this is not the case. Many of my clients got their best returns ever on newspaper ads in 2011, especially when using neuropathy and decompression ads. I know there are plenty of other people out there telling you how a jillion internet things will bring in hundreds of patients. And some of it will bring in patients. But don’t neglect the trusted source of patients like the newspaper. The key is using very good copywriting to reach specific niches that are really responsive.

4. Facebook, Google + and other Social Marketing sites will become more important in your chiropractic marketing plan.

Many chiropractors have heard of Facebook. Less have heard of Google+. Unfortunately, doctors treat these sites like everyone else, a place to post all your personal happenings. The problem is most patients aren’t interested in the fact you just “checked in” at the local burger barn. Sure, some personal interaction is necessary to maintain a following. But, you also need good copywriting and intentional posts to cause new patients to act and pick up the phone to call. Another important and often overlooked aspect of these sites is that they help with your search engine rankings. Having Facebook likes and Google+’s on your website will help it come up higher in Google Search, which will translate into more new patients. Just remember, Facebook and Google+ are effective tools, but they are not the only game in town. So, don’t spend 100% of your time and money fiddling with them.

5. Developing a mobile site will become a necessity.

As my friend Terry Dean recently pointed to, more and more people are using iphones to access websites like Facebook. Look at the stats from the link below, which state that “more than 350 million active users currently access Facebook through their mobile devices “:

https://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics

Also, realize that one of the most common uses for a smart phone is to check email. That means every time you send an email with a link back to your website that person is going to your website on their phone. Even though I prefer to use the internet on my PC, I have an iPhone and iPad that I use often and realize it is just more convenient to click a link now rather than wait until later when I can access the website on my home desktop.

I’ll be working hard to implement these changes in 2012. I recommend you do the same. Also, I’ll keep you updated on any new tools and strategies I’m working on next year. Happy New Year’s.

Do you ever think about why you became a chiropractor? And not just a chiropractor, but the owner of a chiropractic business?

Some docs, if they will admit it, will say it was for the money. And there’s nothing wrong with that as long as you still provide good patient care. Many say they did it to help other people, and that’s a noble reason. But you can help people working as an associate.Why take the risk of running and owning your own practice?

When I first went to chiropractic school, I wanted to help people and make a ton of money. But 2 years into practice, I was doing it for a bigger reason.

You see, two years out of school I went through a really hard time in practice. I was only averaging 3 new patients a month and collecting about $3000 – with an overhead of $15,000!

Describing how bad things were would not even do it justice. I was working late almost every night, doing 2-4 spinal screenings per week and holding talks for audiences of one – both with awful results.

At times like these in your life, you really begin to see clearly. Your priorities are stripped bare, and you can’t kid yourself anymore.

That’s when it hit me…

It wasn’t the patients who were suffering. They were still getting quality care and couldn’t tell the practice was suffering (we clusterbooked then, so they thought we were busy!) Even if my practice folded, they could just go on to another chiropractor, so it didn’t really affect them.

It was my family. My pregnant wife who was struggling up three flights of stairs each day in our new “apartment home” – sometimes having to lug over 50lbs of grocery with two toddlers in tow. It was our baby girl, who at her 3rd Christmas, could never know how much our hearts broke because we couldn’t buy her gifts. Or when my son was born, extended family brought food for a gift, since our fridge and pantry were completely empty.

You see, my family were the ones suffering the most. While my patients were great (and I loved helping each one of them), they didn’t really care wether I made $25,000 income that year or $200,000. No one cared about the success about my practice more than me and my family. We depended on it. It’s what put food on the table.

It became totally clear to me then. I owned and ran a chiropractic business so I could do something I loved — helping others get well –  AND make a good living for my family’s future, hopes and dreams. I obviously loved chiropractic, but I certainly wasn’t fulfilling the second part…giving my wife and kids what they deserved. A better home with a yard, food, vacations and peace of mind.

That was the turning point. I knew I had better learn to run a business successfully and grow my practice. Because it wouldn’t matter how much I loved chiropractic, or how good an adjuster I was, if I couldn’t keep the doors open. And most important of all, my family depended on it.

I realized the biggest problem I had was that my practice was missing good marketing strategies. Marketing that brought in a high return on investment, quality new patients, and consistent growth month after month.

Have you every seen a struggling practice that had too many quality new patients? I haven’t.

You know how to adjust. You know how to be a good chiropractor. That’s not the problem. Learning a new technique or a new billing procedure will only get you so far. Marketing is the key. Without it any practice will struggle.

Below are the reasons I run my own business. What are your reasons?

After consulting and speaking with hundreds of chiropractors about marketing, by far the biggest “lost” marketing opportunities are on the internet. In fact, I strongly encourage new coaching clients to work hard on making their marketing on the internet more successful.

There are three very big reasons you should be using the internet to market your practice…

Reason #1. Everyone is using it. Why wouldn’t you want to spend time and money for chiropractic advertising at the place everyone is going?

Reason #2. It’s relatively inexpensive compared to offline marketing. (With today’s economy, who doesn’t want this?)

Reason #3. It can be 95% automated. Which means you do the work once (or pay someone else to) and with only slight tweaks it runs itself.

But there’s one big misconception chiropractors have about marketing their practice on the internet. Many believe that chiropractic internet marketing equals having a pretty, static website. (No worries, I thought this same thing just a few years ago.) You know the pitch all those website companies make..”Hey Doc, we can do a website for you and it will bring you tons of new patients.”

Putting up a static website and expecting new patients just doesn’t work anymore. Let’s look at a similar comparison offline. Would you put up a sign on the front of your office, not do any other marketing, and expect a continual rush of new patients for the next 10 years?

So how do you really use the internet to bring in more quality new patients. Here are my top 3 proven ways to do it…

#1. Improve your organic search ranking. Getting a higher ranking of your website in Google and Yahoo is critical to bringing in more new patients from the internet. When someone types in “Chiropractor” + your town’s name, you want to be at or near the top of the listings. The nice part about organic search results is that they are free, which means you don’t have to pay every time someone clicks on the listing and goes to your site. The bad part about organic search rankings is that they are difficult to improve with a “Traditional” type website.

But there is a new type of website that search engines love (especially Google). This is called a “wordpress site” and can be downloaded for free at http://www.wordpress.org. It’s a software that once installed, makes your site nice and orderly for Google to index all the pages in their system. (Many people use this software to create a blog, but it also allows you to create a more traditional looking website.) I’ve seen clients put these sites up and rank #1 in their competitive areas within 2 weeks. Consider most of these doctors have had an old website up for years and never reached the top 10 on Google with it.

#2. Pay per click marketing. If you go to google.com or yahoo.com and search for a term, you’ll notice ads at the top and right side. These are called pay-per-click ads (PPC for short). You write an ad, bid on it’s location, and if someone clicks on it you pay a small fee. If no one clicks on it and goes to your webpage, you don’t pay. (Wouldn’t it be nice if newspapers and yellow pages were like this — you only pay if new patients show up at your door

Google’s PPC is called Adwords, and it’s vastly superior to yahoo or MSN.com’s PPC systems. A very nice component of Adwords is the wide range of testing and tracking you can do with your ads. For example, I’ve run tests in the spinal decompression market where one single character in the headline of the ad can have 4 times the results than if that character wasn’t there.

#3. Email marketing. Almost no one is using email in chiropractic today. This makes you really ‘stand out from the crowd’ if you can put email messages to work for your practice. The first place to use email messages is to your new patient prospects that have found you on the internet. In exchange for a free gift (an ebook, enewsletter, report, etc) the prospect leaves their name and email. You can then send out a series of messages building rapport and giving them an offer to come in as a new patient. (How much does it cost to send out all these emails? Nothing really. Maybe $20 per month if you use a service like http://www.easyemailsystem.com)

The second place you should use email marketing in your practice is with your current patients. Send out an email reminders when you’re having your patient appreciation day. Send out emails when your doing a special promotion. You can even send out a newsletter by email to your patients educating them on different health topics each month.

Are you using these 3 internet marketing strategies in practice? If not, what are you waiting on. The internet is the new yellow pages, encyclopedia, and library rolled into one. Don’t be the last chiropractor in your town to be using these strategies to get more new patients.

Where is your practice going in 2009?

In this month’s issues of The Chiropractic Marketing Newsletter, I’m covering the 7 most important numbers you must track in your office…and what you should be doing to improve them. This newsletter is an 11 page ‘seminar-in-a-box’ mailed right to your doorstep every month. It’s only $29.97 per month, can you cancel at any time (but I don’t think you’ll want to when you see the valuable information that’s revealed.)

This issue mails out on March 9th at 10AM CST. If you want to receive your issue in the mail, make sure you subscribe by then.

Click Here to Subscribe

Here is an excerpt that covers #5 out of 7. The newsletter goes into much more detail about how to improve each of these 7 numbers to bring more growth and profits to your practice.

#5. Case average.

Case average is a number that represents how much money a new patient will generate over time in your practice. You will sometimes hear it referred to as “lifetime value of a patient.”

You figure it by taking your collections for the month (or quarterly, yearly) and dividing by the number of new patients during the month. And make sure to use the new patients defined as in #1 above, not just the number of patients who started care.

Some chiropractors don’t like to figure this number, because they say you’re putting a dollar value on the patient’s head. But let’s face it, you’re running a business here. There are two parts to running your own practice… a clinical aspect and a business aspect. This newsletter is about the business aspect. (I trust you’ve got the clinical side figured out.)

The biggest reason to determine case average in your practice is to make good marketing decisions. Combine it with your conversion rate and you can really drill down on your marketing

Let’s run through an example…

An ad costs you $1500 to run. The last two times you ran it you got 13 new patients. You’re thinking about running it again, but your not sure if its really worth it.

But because you read this newsletter, you’ve been keeping track of your numbers for awhile. You know that every new patient that walks in the door will equal an average case of $1500. And you know that if a new patients comes in, you have a history of converting about 60% of them to care.

So if the ad produces 13 new patients, you’re going to convert 8 of them (13 x .60 = 7.8 rounded up).

8 new patients times $1500 case average is $12,000.

So now back to the question. Should you spend $1,300 on an ad to get $12,000 in return?

If you said “NO”, you need to go back and reread the above paragraph until you get a yes.

As a side-note….

This is the problem with judging your marketing solely on the number of new patients. Some chiropractors think…”13 new patients, well gosh Dr.. Beck, that’s not very many. Dr. Joe Blow said he got 187 new patients from an ad!”

That’s great for Dr. Joe. But I wonder what his conversion percentage is? And what’s his case average? Because if he really did get 187 new patients and converted most of them, he’s got a million dollar a year practice.

This bring us to our next number you must be tracking…

Subscribe Now to get the full issue…

In my last post, we discussed how you could start preparing for economic change. Today I’ll continue with the last 3 steps you can take to win during the recession.

5. Get out of debt.
If you’ve ever had a slow month of collections, you realize how tough carrying debt can be. You’re debtors don’t care if you are having a slow month, or the economy is in turmoil, they just want to be paid. Proverbs 22:7 says “The rich rules over the poor, and the borrower is slave to the lender.” Lest you think this is some kind of outdated, old-fashioned wisdom, try going a few months not paying your debtors and see what happens.

I know it’s not politically correct to say “get out of debt” these days, in a country gone wild with borrowing up to their eyeballs. But truth is truth, and carrying debt during a slower economic time is a recipe for disaster. So focus today on paying it off.

6. Add other streams of income to your practice.
It’s said that one is the loneliest number. In business and marketing this is certainly true. It’s not wise to rely on one stream of income. Many businesses have been wiped out overnight because they only had one method of making money. What can you add to your practice that builds on what you have, but is different than chiropractic services. Can you add nutrition, weight loss, detox, or decompression programs to your practice? Can you better diversify your marketing, so you aren’t getting new patients from just a few sources?

7. Stay focused on your business.
Who’s going to win the elections? Will the stock market go up? Will real estate go back up? Who cares, none of these things are going to make a difference in your practice in the coming year. You’re a chiropractor. Stop watching the news and get busy on your practice! Did George Bush help build your practice? How about Bill Clinton? No, your practice grew as a result of you, not Congress or the President. It’s what you do over the next year that matters.

Some chiropractors will go out of business in the next 12 months. Some will just do ok. Others will explode past their limitations and build the lifestyle of their dreams. Which will you be?

You can either spend money to market your practice, do all your marketing for free (not recommended) or do a combination of both (highly recommended). Here are 7 marketing strategies that that work well and cost little to no money:

1. Send a “stick” letter

In the marketing world, campaigns that help people stay with you and reduce ‘buyers remorse’ are called “stick campaigns”. You can use this strategy in your practice by simply mailing a series of customized letters that reinforce the patient’s decision to start care and continue to educate them on why they are coming in. This is also a great time to offer referral cards or gift certificates. Simply state in the P.S. of the letter that they can give these certificates to any friends and family for the next 14 days for a free (or $25, 35, etc) spinal exam and x-rays.

2. Condition of the Week board

Get a small to medium sized dry erase board with a small easel. Each week have your staff write a different condition of the week on the board. Also write “Ask for details” or even “Ask Dr. Smith for details”. When patients see this, many of them will say “I didn’t know chiropractic helped with migraines?” What are they really saying? They know someone with migraines and just realized you may be able to help them. This is when you (or your front desk) asks them if they know someone with migraines, then promptly hands a gift certificate to this person for their friend/family member to use.

3. Use Testimonials

You should be collecting and using testimonials in your marketing. Include a copy of your best testimonials in your stick letter. Put them in your newspaper ads. Some doctors frame them and have a wall of testimonials in the adjusting room. You can also have them in a binder in your new patient area. Do testimonials really work? Are they worth the trouble? Ask anyone that uses them and they’ll certainly assure you that 1 key testimonial is what made the person call their office. Even if you can’t use testimonials in your state (rare), you can use them inside your office!

4. Send a monthly printed newsletter.

I’m all for saving time and money. In fact, my internet marketing course for chiropractors teaches doctors how to use technology to communicate with and attract new patients. But nothing beats a printed newsletter sent by snail mail. A newsletter keeps you in touch with your patients on a regularly basis, educates them further on chiropractic, and reduces the likelihood of competitors ‘stealing’ them. Marketing research has shown that if you haven’t communicated with your customer in at least 6 months, they have likely forgotten totally about you. Newsletters also help with generating referrals because you can make a special offer for friends and family to receive an exam and x-rays.

5. Patient Appreciation Days

You’ve probably heard this one mentioned before in the chiropractic guru circles. Maybe you’ve even tried a few and never had great results (like those guys who claim to see 100 new patients). Well, don’t beat yourself up. P.A.D.’s are a great way to generate referrals. Simply get a few sponsors in your town to donate door prizes. Then get a few finger foods and handout/mail out announcement flyers. Make it about appreciating your patients. If they get adjusted that day/week, then they can enter for a prize. If your patients refer someone they get more tickets or you can even put them in a special grand prize drawing. Depending on the size of your current patient base, you should be able to get 5-20 new patients from a properly done P.A.D. For a few hours of work you had a great return on your time, even if you didn’t get the 100 mythical new patients all those others guys get.