Here’s the thing. We became doctors. If we wanted to be marketers or salesmen then we surely would have chosen a different profession. No chiropractor “likes” to market themselves or their business – we’d rather be saving lives!
We may learn to “like” the challenge of marketing or the challenge of out-marketing our competition, but again, we became chiropractors to help others, not to go out and figure out creative, fancy and sometimes pushy ways to get our name and services known in our local community.
Nonetheless, knowing we HAVE TO market ourselves, most of us take it upon ourselves to conquer this challenge. And for most of us that means we really do have a tough road ahead.
I was fortunate; I first came from the entrepreneurial world of owning my own businesses before I went to chiropractic school. So, even though I still didn’t want to have to market I adapted to the challenge pretty well. But, I still made many of the mistakes that I see most chiropractors making. See if any of these have ever applied to you:
1) Don’t aggressively promote my services but expect my professionalism and excellent skills as a doctor to create my practice for me.
2) Spend a lot of money jumping into and from every next great idea (PI practice, WC practice, MD/DC/PT, decompression, cash practice, internet and so on).
3) Try to hire others to do all the marketing for me.
4) Stop doing what was working previously to get patients in the door. Why? Because it was working of course!
5) Get frustrated when your marketing strategies don’t do well and insist (for the time being) that marketing doesn’t work.
So, what have I learned?
Well, after all the years and all the clinics I have found the one chiropractic marketing home run. It never fails! It will work every time, 100% of the time.
Do you want to know what it is? Well, its NOT public speaking. It’s NOT marketing on the internet. It’s NOT figuring out how to get your present patients to refer. It’s NOT figuring out how to get other professionals to refer to you?
It is none of those things because it is ALL OF THOSE THINGS, AND MORE!
That’s right, the marketing home run is the multiple efforts all the time theory. Sounds simple; so why do some chiropractors never get it?
Well, many just don’t know, others don’t know where to start; while still others just refuse to accept it as reality. But consider this reality…
Doctors that never get it and never embrace it rarely grow and often fail.
My business partner describes this “home run” with a fishing pole analogy. Essentially, put one pole in the water and it is relatively hard to catch a fish. Put a dozen or more poles in the water and a few poles will catch a lot of fish one day, and maybe the rest will not. Different day, different outcome. The overall effect of multiple marketing methods may not provide us the ‘direct response’ that we are always looking for, but the cumulative effort, over time, will.
Ok, so maybe overall this theory is not revolutionary, maybe it’s just a nice reminder that we need to get off our butts and continually do “something” to get patients in the door. But, how many of us get motivated for awhile, get a thing or two going, get some response and then start slacking on the marketing as we get busy with patients? I would venture to say almost all of us do this.
This is what I want you to take from this post: Growing your practice, just like it is for virtually all other small businesses, is a numbers game. If you do not have multiple marketing methods in place that run consecutively and simultaneously then you will never achieve your full business success potential.
Try this simple chiropractic marketing formula to get you started. First consider your broadest categories of marketing, those are Internal and External. From there you need to break down your options even further. A good example would be to have subcategories such as these (realize that certain strategies may fit in multiple subcategories below):
Promotions
Events
Referral
Image
Internet
Under promotions you would write down every option you can think of you do monthly, seasonally or on special occasions. Examples might be a Thanksgiving Food Drive, a Reactivation Campaign or New Patient Special.
In the events column would be activities such as a Patient Appreciation Day, Health Talks or Chair Massage Events.
Referral marketing might include things such as MD or Attorney Referral Campaign or perhaps a Corporate Wellness plan.
Image marketing includes how your clinic markets itself including your marketing paraphernalia like poster and handouts that stimulate referrals, signs that increase patient retention and even the look of your staff.
Internet would include anything from doing your blog and Facebook posts to submitting videos and articles to sharing sites and even the continued updating and optimization of your website.
Pretty much everything can fit in one of these categories and while I just gave you a few examples in each to get you started, simply continue to add more and more to each category as you either come up with new ideas or as you read about others having success with good systems and techniques.
From there you or a staff member will just take action on any marketing strategies that you decide to implement in an upcoming month.
One last word of wisdom here: Try not to get lost in the next great internet marketing idea or attorney marketing campaign or, worse, rely only on your big sign that has excellent street visibility. By limiting your marketing you are missing too many awesome opportunities to get new patients.
And while maybe only 20% of your chiropractic marketing efforts may be a success when you are first starting to try new strategies, the profits you will get will more than make up for the 80% that don’t go as well as planned. By the way, that percentage will get better with experience – I promise!
That’s why diversity is essential. Multiple poles man, multiple poles!
-Troy Counselman
BTW…if you like this post or have comments please leave them below. Thanks!
