It's tough when you're trying to both run a chiropractic clinic and keep track of your marketing. Because of the juggling involved in running a busy practice, it's common for doctors to hire someone to help with their marketing. That's great! In fact, that's the work we do, so we're all on board with hiring people to help with marketing!
A common problem we see in the world of chiropractic marketing, however, is that many people confused advertising with marketing. Advertising can be an effective and profitable part of a marketing campaign, but often advertising is the only thing that is done by many firms, and that's not good.
AdWords
We see many chiropractors using Dex, Yodel, SuperPages or similar services for their "marketing," but all that these companies are doing is creating a generic landing page and pointing AdWords ads to it. This is advertising, not marketing.
This is expensive and ineffective. If you're in this predicament, it's important to look at your conversion rates and ROI to make sure that you're getting the most benefit from your ads.
Running AdWords effectively takes planning and constant monitoring if it's to be profitable, but we don't see that happening much. A lazy approach is costly to you and doesn't make a good impression on your patients. In fact, because many of these companies are using outsourced labor, we see typos and other mistakes in some ads for chiropractors!
A Holistic Marketing Strategy
Just as health is more than the lack of illness, marketing a successful chiropractic clinic must involve more than just ads. Your goal should be to build your site's reputation and credibility for the long-term; it's much more profitable over the years to build a solid website and social media presence than it is to run advertising alone.
The key to a holistic plan is content marketing. Content is what Google needs to properly index your site and it's what your clients need to learn about your practice.
Content is also what you need to share and connect with patients on your social media accounts.
Content is what the internet is all about!
Advertising can be an effective way of connecting your patients to your content, and then getting them to take some kind of action. But advertising without content? Not effective, and usually very expensive.
Becoming a Micro-Media Company
You're a chiropractor, but with the focus on content in our always-connected world, you're really going to also need to be a micro media company. You need to supply your patients with articles, news, videos, and other content that they can read, watch, and share with friends and family
The amount of media you'll need to create will vary tremendously, depending on the size of your city and the number of chiropractors competing with you. If you want to be the top chiropractor in your town of 5,000 people...well, you might not even need a website. You can probably just go have breakfast at the local diner twice a week! But if you want to be the top personal injury doctor in Boston, you're going to need to create a library of content to get your message out to rise about the 20 other chiropractors trying to do exactly the same thing as you are.
We have experience creating and running marketing strategies for practices of all sizes. If you would like a free consultation to see what we can do for your firm, contact us here or call us at (800) 295-3346.
If you would some more free ideas and tips on marketing your clinic, see our Complete Guide to Chiropractic Marketing.
