“Go Ahead!…but I am telling you, we’re not going to get any new patients from the internet!”
– Famous last words from a ‘kicking and screaming’ convert.
This is a marketing confession about how we took a busy clinic, with very well defined new patient acquisition streams, to a clinic that now garners well over ½ of all our new chiropractic patients via the internet.So, if you are one of those who thinks the internet is really not going to be an important part of your practice in the future, because, well because it hasn’t been in the past, and you have no desire to ‘learn’ what all it takes to be part of the internet scene, then please read this!
This article now is even funnier to me because when my business partner approached me about 2 years ago with his plan I had already been retired from active practice for years and was working full-time at creating businesses that relied solely upon the internet.
But, when it came to our practices, I had a different (antiquated) attitude.
Here’s how it happened. I actually know quite a bit about the internet: creating websites, software, generating traffic and making sales. So, when my business partner came to me with his plan to really hit the internet marketing realm hard in an attempt to drive new patients to our clinics I knew what all that would entail.
I knew it would require redoing our chiropractic website, creating a strong social network presence, doing chiropractic search engine optimization (SEO) and garnering lots of social proof in order to rank high on search engine traffic. I knew what all the ‘gurus’ said needed to be done on the internet for you practice, as I was presently doing it for other businesses.
However, if you know anything about how I approach practice owning you would know that I only set up a clinic when I have a “captive audience”, which means that I have a well defined method of getting new patients. The clinic my business partner wanted to promote via the internet was a long-standing, well established clinic that received 95% of it patient visits and new patients from 3 huge employer groups that we basically dominated through our corporate wellness and massage programs.
Our methods of chiropractic marketing to these groups has been so well defined that it was literally on autopilot, and we really had little to no room to expand into anyway. On top of that, this clinic required that patients have really good insurance in order to operate and, since those two employers had that insurance, going for ‘regular old patients’ from an otherwise variety of sources really didn’t suit our business model well. After all, why take up one of limited number of patient slots with a patient visit that is worth $40 when all our other patient visits were worth $120? We actually had to have very high cash prices just for this very same reason.
So, when an ‘average’ potential patient called to come in the odds of them having the insurance needed was so rare, it was essentially not worth our time to pursue new patients outside our normal referral sources. This was my first reason that I thought trying to get new patients from the internet would not work for us.
The next reason was because of what is required to really bring in raging fans – as new patients. I am speaking of patient referrals of course. The common convention has always been that a clinic that receives all its new patients as referrals from existing patients is the best type of clinic to own. Those new patients know all about you before they even set foot in your office. They are “pre-sold” so to speak.
So, in my mind the internet lacked this level of credibility. I figured the internet would work great to educate existing patients, or even potential new patients, but, following that the potential new patient would still end up going either where a friend or family member recommended and/or where it was geographically convenient.
Needless to say, I was wrong.
My business partner set out on a well orchestrated mission to rule our local marketplace with the internet. We completely revamped our site with the sole purpose of getting people to call us to come in. This is vastly different than 99% of most chiropractic website which do the common and ineffective things like give tons of information on what chiropractic is, dazzle the audience with a spinning spine and type out a short blurbs about “who we are.” Simply put, this is not compelling enough to create action.
Secondly, my business partner did some thorough keyword research to uncover just the right terms that our prospects would be using and then we optimized the site for those keywords. Then he went about the task of building back-links by posting unique articles around the internet and through our blog which is attached to our site. We then went after social media, which goes far beyond creating a Facebook and Twitter page but we actually involved our most active patient base and got everyone giving us online reviews. [As a side note: because of this we actually won the “Best Of” award in our area in 2010! Which gave us even more SEO and more ‘selling’ power!]
Now, I could go on and on, because this is an ongoing effort, and it does require ’some’ work. However, I want to clarify my use of the word ’some’ because just like most things, put some effort into something like marketing on the internet early on and before long the whole system is on autopilot. Now, scantly just a year past our initial launch of all these efforts and we are #1 or #2 (sometimes better than #1) every time a prospective patient enters a search term that we are optimized for. And, more importantly than that, when they go from there to our site they are taken on a quick and compelling journey to call our office.
Now, this begs the question of how did we get past the ‘no good insurance means you can’t really get into see us’ issue? Simple really. We get so many new calls from the internet daily that we are able to plainly state what either their co-pay or cash price will be. And because those prospects are already so ‘pre-sold’ by not only our search engine ranking, but also our HUGE array of glowing reviews over multiple review forums, and then our simple yet very effective ‘social proof’ clinic website, they are willing to come to us for their care, often regardless of price.
I must say, surprisingly the strong chiropractic internet referral system that we have set up rivals that of the personal and professional referrals! There, I said it! I was wrong previously but, you know what? With our normal insurance base slowly eroding and the internet patients filling the void, prove me wrong any day as long as being so still puts patients on the books!
And…a really cool part is that we took the same principles and methods we use to drive our own clinic to the top of the search engine rankings and gave you all the steps in the Chiropractic Marketing Dominator (Included as part of your Patients to Profits membership).
If you have any inclination at all to get into chiropractic internet marketing to build your practice, the good news it’s really pretty easy to do on your own. With a little guidance that cuts through the fluff and gives you steps you need, you can do it without paying hundreds of dollars a month to someone to do it for you.
