Here is your chance to see an updated version of my friend Paul Wright’s free webinar entitled “The Practice Acceleration Program – 12 Steps to a Great Health Business in ONLY 42 Days”.

There are 3 different days you can register, go here to find out more:

http://www.netofficetoolbox.com/app/?Clk=4287445

This presentation outlines the 12 Essential Steps that you DID NOT learn in your university or technical education, but MUST know to be a successful health professional in these trying financial times.

Here’s just a sample of what Paul will cover…

• The 12 essential steps to a great health business – are you using them?

• Why failing to use these steps will leave you chained to your business forever.

• How these steps allowed Paul to run his clinics remotely – in fact he has only visited his six clinics four times in one 10 week period.

• How your admin team can kill your profits and what to do about it.

• Actions steps you can implement NOW to make you thousands in lost profits.

• The importance of cancellation reduction and how to make every treatment session “too important to miss”.

• How to get your hands on Paul’s exact procedures, scripts, steps and protocols that have taken him 20 years to develop and refine.

Click on the link below to check webinar times and register for this FREE event.

http://www.netofficetoolbox.com/app/?Clk=4287445

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.

Are you using pay per click (PPC) internet marketing to bring in more new patients?

Most search engines have PPC as part of their services. Google has it’s Adwords program, Yahoo has Search Marketing, and MSN has AdCenter. Adwords is the biggest PPC marketing platform because Google controls so much of the online traffic right now.

Some chiropractors are starting to realize that they can get new patients at a low cost using PPC marketing. But the key is knowing what your doing so you don’t end up overspending (or worse — getting a bad “track record” attached to your Google account, increasing your PPC cost forever.) In the video below from ChiroMarketing Academy, you’ll see the first section of the “Google Adwords Training Video”.

]]> http://dcpracticetools.com/google-adwords-and-chiropractic-marketing-2/feed/ 1 http://dcpracticetools.com/chiropractic-consulting-strategies/ http://dcpracticetools.com/chiropractic-consulting-strategies/#comments Thu, 05 Mar 2009 15:38:45 +0000 drbeck http://dcpracticetools.com/?p=372

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…

What good is it to have a website if no one is visiting it? Getting traffic to your website is vital for your chiropractic internet marketing plan. Here are 7 methods to drive tons of traffic to your website.

#1. Pay Per Click.

This refers to the ads you see when searching for keywords on the major search engines. The best pay per click ads are Google Adwords because they get the most views. These who up on the right side of the page when someone searches for keywords. When someone clicks on it, you pay a fee and the person lands on your website. Yahoo and MSN also have pay per click ads that are less costly, but Google will send a lot more traffic. Make sure you set it to geographical limits, so you aren’t getting clicks from people 10 states away. When setting up and using Adwords, be very careful because it can be costly if done wrong.

#2. Blogs.

A blog is what you are reading now. It’s basically a website that makes it easy for regular updates to be posted. Search engines love blogs, and will rank them higher than static pages on the same topic because blogs are new content. And Google especially likes fresh content. While blogs take some work to set up, they are very easy to use. If you can send an email, you can post to a blog.

#3. Articles.

Submitting articles to free article directories are a great way to generate traffic to your site. When writing articles, you want to keep them within 500-800 words. Make sure you include your town’s name and keywords you want to get like “chiropractic” or “decompression” in your article. Also you will need a resource box with a short bio of you and your website’s link. A great directory to submit to is http://www.ezinearticles.com

#4. Videos.

Vidoes are rather easy to make today. And since most people have high speed internet, they are great to use. You can do a short 2-5 minute video educating prospective patients on your services. Uploading it to the major websites like Youtube and Google Video will get you a lot of traffic. Make sure to submit it with your website link embedded in the video. Also mention your town in the description when posting the video.

#5. Press Releases.

Press releases can be submitted online (for free) to many of the press release sites. This will get picked up and listed on the major search engines news, like Google News and Yahoo News. Make sure you write it in a “newsworthy” tone and with a good news headline. There are many free press distributors online, like www.pr.com. Also, you can pay a site like prweb.com to submit it to the news directories.

#6. Trade links with other businesses.

If you know other local businesses in your area, you can trade links to your sites. This not only allows for more traffic, but will help drastically in your search engine rankings. Make sure to make your link keywords like “Yourtown Chiropractor” instead of just your website address.

#7. Mail postcards and run newspaper ads.

This is the most costly of all the above list. However, it also could have the highest return on time and money. Get a list of homeowners and send out small or large postcards, with a headline, some copy and testimonials. Make an offer for a free report on some problem and tell them to visit your website. Expect to spend about .40 cents an address.

Of course once you get visitors to your website, you need a proven strategy to convert the visitors to new patients. In my next blog post, I’ll recommend tips for doing just that because getting a return on your marketing is essential.