Chiropractic Marketing Campaigns: How to Be Successful

Chiropractic marketing campaigns should be designed to be memorable.

Nike’s “Just Do It’ is an excellent example of a marketing campaign that has lasted decades and sticks with you long after the first time you see it or the first time you buy a pair of their shoes.

Campaigns are focused on guiding people towards the desired action.

In Nike’s case, it’s about promoting their athletic apparel.

In your case, it’s about promoting the products and services you offer in your chiropractic practice.

A great campaign can give your practice a unique identity, personality, and evoke emotion.

These are a few of the critical ingredients of influencing people to take action.

This article is designed to show you exactly how you can create and implement chiropractic marketing campaigns in your practice.

There are two parts of that explanation that are critical to understanding.

First is the “connected series.”

A campaign is not a bunch of random stuff thrown together (yes, we’re looking at your current marketing!).

Campaigns are designed to be a journey – a connected series of communications that inspire action.

The action is a particular result.

You may have heard the word campaign used in both marketing and advertising.

Let’s break down the difference.

Advertising is a small part of marketing.

Most chiropractors confuse the two and think that they are marketing their practice because they are running Facebook ads (ads = advertising).

Why?

Because advertising tends to be expensive, and without having the support of great marketing behind it, advertising can lead you down a path of spending more and more for diminishing returns.

Advertising campaigns may be part of bigger marketing campaigns.

For example, retargeting ads to your most engaged people so they can see your best content related to your monthly marketing campaign is a great way to expand your reach and drive more engagement.

Despite the simple definition, marketing campaigns can be complex and require a lot of work.

How to Create Successful Chiropractic Marketing Campaigns

Creating an epic chiropractic marketing campaign isn’t easy, but the process is pretty straightforward.

Planning your campaign, and getting the strategy right, is one of the most important keys to success or failure.

By properly planning your campaign, you can prevent poor performance.

The next section is set up like a template, be sure to answer each question thoroughly.

Don’t skip ahead! Each question (and answer) will guide your ideas.

Planning Your Marketing Campaign

This step is crucial to the effectiveness of your marketing campaign.

The planning stage will determine how you measure success and guide your team.

What’s the Purpose and Goal of Your Campaign?

Let’s start.

Why are you creating this marketing campaign?

What would you like to accomplish for your practice?

Here are a few ideas or goals that drive chiropractic marketing campaigns:

There are many other reasons you may choose to plan a campaign, but you probably notice a few on this list that align with your goals.

Here’s the good news – you don’t need only to select one goal.

A great content campaign may touch 2, 3, 4, or more of the goals above.

Throughout this guide, we’ll use the example of stimulating more patient reactivations.

You’ll now want to turn that objective into a SMART goal.

A SMART goal is specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely.

SMART goals help you stay accountable and provide you with a specific (no pun intended) way to make meaningful progress.

A SMART patient reactivation goal would look like “The goal of my marketing campaign is to generate ten patient reactivations this month by turning on an automated email campaign.

The goal is specific (patient reactivations), measurable (10 reactivations), attainable (using an email campaign), relevant (it helps drive practice growth), and timely (by the end of the month).

How Will You Measure Your Results?

The answer to this question will depend upon the type of campaign you are running.

Here are a few examples based on our list above.

Who Are You Targeting?

The targeting of your campaign can make or break its success.

By targeting the wrong group of people, you can expect to hear crickets when you launch the campaign.

Or perhaps even worse, incorrect targeting may bring in many “leads” that never become patients.

All successful marketing comes down to targeting the right audience.

And the best targeting is re-targeting.

What’s re-targeting?

Remember the last time you visited a website to check out a new pair of shoes.

Then those same shoes followed you around the internet for 30 days until you finally made the purchase?

That is re-targeting in action.

In your chiropractic practice, there are three primary audiences you should be re-targeting with your campaigns.

Your complete patient list is pretty self-explanatory.

Most platforms allow you to upload a list of first name/last name or email.

By exporting your patient list from your EHR (and combining it with your email list), you’ll have a complete data set of your patients.

Re-targeting website visitors is also essential.

Most people don’t spend their days cruising around chiropractic websites for fun.

If they have made it to your website, they have “high intent.”

High intent means that these people are very interested in chiropractic services.

It’s pretty clear why this group of people is important to retarget.

Finally, we get to your engaged audience on Facebook.

Engagement (likes, comments, shares) on your Facebook page shows interest in who you are and what you do.

It’s a strong indicator that you’ve to build a “know, trust, and like” factor, if someone engages with your posts.

Re-targeting these engaged social followers is a great strategy to improve the results of your marketing.

What is the Concept of Your Campaign, and How Will You Create the Marketing Resources?

Let’s talk about the campaign itself.

Marketing campaigns require a compelling message, a clear explanation of benefits, attention-grabbing headlines, beautiful design, and consistent delivery across your marketing channels.

Yes, that’s a lot of “stuff” to make sure gets done.

Click here to download our 2022 Smart Campaign Calendar to get started.

At The Smart Chiropractor, this is what we do for chiropractors who want results without all the work.

We craft monthly content marketing campaigns that alternate between body symptoms and lifestyle choices.

For example…

Once you have your monthly campaigns penciled in, it’s time to start creating your marketing assets.

Marketing assets are things like emails, social posts, gifs, newsletters, etc.

You’ll need to decide on whether you want to use programs like Stencil and Canva to create this content “in-house” or whether you outsource the design to a company like Design Pickle.

Both of these are options but have significant problems.

While Stencil and Canva are affordable, you’ll be spending a lot of time researching, writing and creating the posts and graphics yourself.

Since you’re a chiropractor and not a graphic designer, they are also not likely to look very professional (just being honest!).

Design Pickle is excellent at creating beautiful graphics, but you’ll need to spend the time to manage and direct them each and every step of the way.

This approach takes more time, talent, energy and expense than if you just have The Smart Chiropractor team handle all of your design AND automation for you!

Distributing Your Marketing Campaign

This stage is all about getting your campaign shipped and seen! First, you need to consider how (or what platforms) you want to use to reach your target audience.

This is one of the most expensive and least effective ways to market your practice.

Instead, consider the earned, shared, and owned channels you have, such as your practice’s Facebook page, Instagram feed, email list, and website.

Need a few ideas? Take a look at the PESO model, which breaks up distribution channels into Paid, Earned, Shared, and Owned.

How and When Will You Publish Your Campaign?

Establishing a timeline for your campaign is very important.

It’s part of your SMART goal setting (T is for timely).

Creating a promotional calendar for your campaign is a great way to stay aligned, accountable and on track with your team.

Sending one email or putting out a single post isn’t likely to get you the desired results you want over time.

The point of creating a content campaign is that it allows you to engage your health tribe multiple times on their favorite platforms over and over and over again.

By using the strategic, synergistic coordination of your email list, social media following, and your in-office screens, you can make an impact far more significant than a single paid advertisement that interrupts strangers with an embarrassing low, deep discount special offer (at best).

Scheduling tools like Buffer or Hubspot can alleviate the pressure of having to remember to be posting daily.

With these tools, you can schedule your posts.

This is one reason so many docs love using The Smart Chiropractor- we take care of the campaign creation from concept to design, content production, AND automated posting schedule.

How Will Your Marketing Drive Action?

Even if your campaign drives a lot of traffic, you still want for that traffic to be inspired to take action.

Your call to action (we call it the “invitation” in the Teach & Invite framework) is the direct ask of your audience.

It’s the image, button, or text that prompts them to take action- and it’s one of the most important parts of your campaign if you want it to be successful.

If your call to action is difficult to understand, then you won’t “convert.”

In our example earlier, we defined our SMART goals as driving ten patient reactivations before the end of the month.

A great call to action for this campaign would be “Schedule Now.”

It’s simple, direct, and clear.

There is no ambiguity.

Once you’ve taught your audience something that’s valuable to them, you’ve created an opportunity to further help them by inviting them to take the next step.

That’s your call to action.

Lead forms are pop-up boxes on your website that help turn your website into an even more powerful new patient machine.

By inviting visitors to fill out the information (typically their email address) in exchange for more valuable information that they want to receive, your anonymous website visitors can quickly turn into enthusiastic new patients.

Think about how many visitors your website gets each month.

Maybe 100, perhaps even 500?

Now think about how many new patients you saw last month.

So….what happened to those hundreds of other people who visited your website?!?!

Lead forms give you a chance to convert more of those people from anonymous visitors into excited new patients.

And make no mistake, people don’t cruise chiropractic websites for fun.

They are most likely on your page because they are looking for your services!

Lead forms help more of these visitors who don’t pick up the phone and make an appointment immediately to become part of your health tribe so you can continue to teach and invite them consistently over time.

What Metrics Should You Monitor?

Metrics and data can help you understand the effectiveness of your campaigns.

It’s tempting to focus on vanity metrics (such as Likes).

A bump in Likes is a good thing, but there are more important metrics to measure.

Here are the metrics worth watching.

How Will You Know if Your Campaign Worked?

The best way to know if a campaign worked or not is to refer back to your SMART goal!

If you beat your goal, great.

If not, your campaign may still be considered successful.

For example, if your goal was to reactivate ten patients in 30 days, but you “only” managed to reactivate 9- I would say your campaign was still successful even though you didn’t reach 10.

Marketing campaigns require a lot of hard work, but the consistent results over time make it worth it.

Well executed monthly marketing campaigns can be the engine that drives your practice forward.

The good news is that you are in direct control of the success of your practice.

In order for your community to understand the benefits of your care clearly, they need to be told again and again.

The bad news is it’s a lot of time, talent, energy and expense in order to do it well, consistently over time.

The great news is…

If you’d like this entire process automated for you, you can join hundreds of other chiropractors from all around the world who trust The Smart Chiropractor to content market their practice for them automatically.