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Online Chiropractic Marketing: Balancing ROI and Results
Are you tired of running discount ads for new patients?
Yeah – so were our Smart Chiropractor Docs.
But what if you’re not running ads? You may wonder where to start marketing your practice.
What’s working?
What’s going to get results?
And where is the best place to spend your time or money?
The Smart Chiropractor's Guide to Converting More New Patients From Your Website
In this guide, we’ll walk you through the do’s and don’ts of online chiropractic marketing to help you hit the ground running to start effectively and efficiently growing your practice’s business.
Must-Avoid Online Chiropractic Marketing Strategies
Before we dive into the 3 fundamental do’s of online chiropractic marketing, let’s start with 2 equally as important don’ts.
DON’T Use Just One Social Media Platform
When you think about digital marketing, you may think about one platform like Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok.
It can also be daunting to try to use more than one of the social media platforms, not to mention time-consuming.
However, you do not want to narrow it down to just one platform.
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Narrowing your social media efforts down to one platform will significantly reduce your potential reach to a new customer base.
Instead, you should run chiropractic Facebook ads, use Instagram for photos and information, and even consider running a Twitter or TikTok account to expand your reach and bolster your online chiropractic marketing efforts.
"The Smart Chiropractor has helped me stay constantly booked. No bait and switch discounts that make you look worse than a used car salesman."
Dr. Sam Liveriadis, DC
North Road Chiropractic
Being present on multiple platforms enhances your ability to connect with more people.
Some people love Facebook, others are TikTok scrollers, and many may be checking things out on Instagram.
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You don’t need to go crazy and have FOMO every time a new platform is announced, but you want to ensure you have a presence on the most popular platforms.
To be even more effective, think about your ideal patient avatar.
Who are they? How old are they?
Where are they consuming content?
If you can nail this, you have a huge advantage and can lean into the platform your ideal patient spends the most time on.
DON’T Promote the Language of Cures
When it comes to your online chiropractic marketing, you don’t want to overpromise and underdeliver.
Instead, you want to underpromise and over-deliver.
Be wary of outrageous, attention-grabbing claims.
Instead, focus on practical and real ways you can help people live better lives.
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Your chiropractic marketing strategy should never use language that promises a cure or something that you may not be able to deliver.
This is true on all platforms, especially ads that you are promoting.
In addition to having your ads shut down, you could end up in hot water with your state association.
Must-Do Online Chiropractic Marketing Strategies
Now let’s shift gears and dive into the most important do’s of online chiropractic marketing.
DO Optimize Your Chiropractic Website for SEO
Your website is critical – there’s no way around it.
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Even simple optimizations for SEO can drive significant results over time.
But you shouldn’t feel like you need to spend thousands of dollars per month on your website to have it attract new patients.
When you create a website for your chiropractic practice, you want to learn about search engine optimization.
SEO, or search engine optimization, is essentially how (and how high) your website shows up on Google and other search engines.
When you learn how to do this properly, your website will show up higher on search engines like Google so that more people in your area who are searching for a chiropractor will come across your page.
This will eventually lead to more business and more revenue.
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The key to great SEO (and a great overall online chiropractic marketing strategy) is pretty simple…
Put out content that proactively answers the questions people have about their health.
You need to give Google information (through blogs and copy on your website) that helps them match your website as the answer to the searches/questions people are typing into Google.
The clearer you answer the searches, the more likely you will appear.
As you can see, showing up on Google isn’t magic.
It’s also why our Teach & Invite Consistently strategy at The Smart Chiropractor works so well.
We provide our doctors with content and blogs they can post weekly to their websites.
From there – viola! You start showing up in more searches, driving more traffic, and seeing more new patients on your schedule.
DO Build an Email List for Your Chiropractic Practice
“The money is in the list.”
This is an old marketing saying, and it’s 100% true.
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Your email list is the most valuable asset you likely aren’t currently maximizing in your practice as part of your online chiropractic marketing efforts.
Email marketing has a 42X ROI (and at The Smart Chiropractor, we don’t take on members if we can’t guarantee at least a 3X ROI).
The best thing about an email list is that you own the list.
That means that if social media went away tomorrow, you would still be able to market and contact your clients and potential clients through email.
It’s owned media, not rented media like ads.
And great email onboarding can improve your patient retention.
Your email list can provide new patients to your schedule every day, week, month, and year.
And consistent weekly newsletters and monthly campaigns will keep your schedule full with reactivations.
If you’re not using an email system like ChiroEmails by The Smart Chrioprpactor, you’re missing out and wasting money on other marketing channels.
And, remember, it’s important to keep collecting emails as you see new patients, as existing patients return, and also at any local event you participate in.
DO Track Analytics
When it comes to marketing, one of the best pieces of digital marketing advice is to track analytics continuously.
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Tracking analytics is critically important because you want to know what is working and what is not so that you can do more of what’s working and less of what’s not.
This way, you are spending your time wisely and ensuring your business actually benefits from your online chiropractic marketing.
For example, with email marketing, we value each click at $200.
Why? Because some people who click may come in for one visit and others for six or more visits.
We’ve conservatively averaged this at 3 visits per click with an average collection of $65 per visit ($65 x 3 = $195,or about $200).
(We know that our average member gets over a 5x ROI using our email marketing system, which is why we feel comfortable saying we won’t work with practice if we can’t guarantee a 3x ROI.)
Remember: All Marketing is Not Advertising
One fundamental principle we want to take a moment to zero in on is this: advertising is a subset of marketing and not all marketing is advertising.
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Most advertising is designed to do one very specific thing, and that’s to get a breathing body with a spine in the office for the lowest cost possible.
Is that really what you want in your office?
The easiest thing for any marketing company to do to show that their “marketing” is working is to create a discount offer.
That allows them to come to you and say “look at all these leads we got you.”
That lead is not the same as a patient – that lead is theoretical.
They might possibly maybe come in for a visit in the future… based on a discount deal they saw in an ad.
This is different from a person who’s had the chance to learn from you and develop trust in you and who is ready to come in, participate in their care, pay, and stay.
They’ve gotten to know you, they understand what you have to offer, and they’ve truly “opted-in.”
They’ve effectively qualified themselves (if we’re talking about qualified leads).
These patients are more than a transaction for you.
These patients and qualified leads demonstrate exactly why online chiropractic marketing is so important.
And that’s a big part of why we put together this quick guide for you – to give you an overview of how to use some of the most common online marketing power tools you have at your disposal right now.
Know This
We recommend that you focus on an online chiropractic marketing strategy of teaching and inviting and doing so consistently, and we take a deeper dive into this idea in S1E2 of The Smart Chiropractor podcast here.
Remember, marketing is bigger and wider and more than just advertising.
A Word About The Smart Chiropractor Program and ChiroEmails
Are you a chiropractor or chiropractic para professional?
Thanks for reading!
We hope the article above has your “wheels turning” and has you open and perhaps even excited once again to refresh your online chiropractic marketing.
Our team at The Smart Chiropractor is dedicated to making patient communication easier for DCs and their staff through free resources like our blog and our subscription-based patient-education-focused marketing materials and services.
We’ve also created the first and only stand-alone email service designed by and for chiropractors: ChiroEmails.
Don’t be fooled into thinking that MailChimp or Constant Contact is an email marketing service.
They are email providers, which give you the ability to send emails, but don’t contain any of the campaigns, automation, or content you need to be successful.
The magic of ChiroEmails is that you’ll have the ability to send as many emails as you want while also having all of our automated campaigns running for your practice 24/7 on autopilot.
That’s how we achieve such incredible results for our members.
To learn more about how the marketing campaigns we deliver each month can help you connect with more of your patients in the office, on your social channels, and through email, check out our website at TheSmartChiropractor.com.