Maximize New Patient Leads with These Top Spinal Decompression Marketing Strategies
The healthcare market forecasts expect an upswing in patients interested in chiropractic service including decompression in the coming years. Chiropractic medicine is a particularly popular market for the millennial customer base so reaching this audience with good spinal decompression marketing strategies will be highly beneficial to your business going forward.
Make your marketing budget produce by devising a diverse approach to spinal decompression marketing that casts a net large enough to stretch across platforms. Don’t leverage all of your efforts on one outlet. To reach your target audience you need to speak to them where they are by creating a marketing strategy that covers a combination of messages across digital and print platforms.
Spinal decompression is a safe and effective treatment that has high success rates for relieving pain and correcting spinal issues, but many patients lack proper education about the service and its benefits. Partnering with a chiropractic digital marketing agency can help you deliver consistent, effective messages with a decompression marketing strategy that will get patients inside your office and encourage brand loyalty.
Facebook:
Facebook is a preferred digital marketing tool of chiropractors because of the ability to narrow your targeted audience with specific demographic and location information to make the best of your marketing energy. You can’t help people with decompression services that they don’t know about so using the networking potential of Facebook to contact and link with other local businesses in your area could help grow your reach and visibility to help patients find you.
Facebook marketing is multi-layered, so you have both paid and organic options to add to your marketing strategy. Paid marketing is great and has returned positive results for many chiropractors but encouraging engagement by providing your audience with more than just an offer for service is key to generating organic traffic. One of the best ways to achieve organic traffic is by providing valuable content to your audience in the form of blog posts, status updates, videos, and images. A combination of paid and organic Facebook traffic expands reach while building brand awareness and reputation.
Decompression marketing Facebook strategies should also be multi-layered to compliment the multi-layered platform. Create a customer funnel journey that covers every stage of a patient’s process to decompression treatment. Educate them, address their fears and concerns, provide valuable informational content about specific conditions, create opportunities to learn more in your office and retain them as patients by continuing content about the importance of decompression treatment. Chiropractors are finding creative ways to utilize Facebook in their decompression marketing strategies with lucrative results and for maximum results, they are outsourcing Facebook decompression marketing to chiropractic digital marketing agencies for professionally designed strategies.
Instagram:
Instagram is a powerful marketing tool with a high volume of daily traffic that could open your practice to a wealth of untapped opportunities for decompression marketing. Chiropractors are expected to treat more than 35 million patients this year and many of those potential patients are new to chiropractic services and decompression. Instagram shines when introducing new patients to your practice and services because it’s a great tool to use to help new patients get familiar and comfortable with you and your staff. Instagram showcases the personality of your office through dynamic images, video and live streams that encourage engagement.
Decompression can be intimidating to new patients so using an Instagram marketing strategy to demystify the process can be valuable to increasing your business and trust between you and your audience. About one-third of Instagram users have made a purchase based on content on the platform so the tool is rich with potential business and the key to unlocking it is engaging and valuable content. Your Instagram marketing strategy should combine consistent content, responsive communication, videos and pictures that communicate the personality and culture of your practice and many calls to action on content to give interested new patients’ opportunities to give you feedback and engage with your staff in real-world communication opportunities.
Instagram marketing strategies are also essential to patient retention. Keeping up communication and engagement with existing patients using your Instagram profile creates stronger brand loyalty and word-of-mouth marketing opportunities within your followers’ social networks.
Google AdWords:
While social media marketing strategies based on platforms like Facebook and Instagram are great for branding, marketing and educating about decompression services, structuring your decompression marketing strategy solely around social media could make you miss out on other valuable marketing opportunities. Google AdWords marketing strategies for decompression services create valuable traffic of motivated potential patients to your website and landing pages.
Google AdWords campaigns use pay-per-click marketing tools to position your links as labeled ads on search engine results pages related to keywords for decompression services. There are two key benefits to Google AdWords campaigns that produce strong, high-quality leads. The first is transparency. When potential patients navigate to your website using a Google AdWords link, they know they are clicking an ad to learn more about a paid service or product. That implies a high level of intent to either take advantage of the service or a strong desire to learn more about it. Patients who find your practice through Google AdWords links are most likely a few stages into the customer journey funnel, they have some idea about the specifics of their condition and decompression and they are close to taking action to find a solution to their problem.
The second benefit is the targeting capability of the tool. Google AdWords allows users to define their target audience using parameters to narrow it by demographics and location. Adding a Google AdWords budget to your decompression marketing strategy could get you the visibility you need when potential patients are in your area and motivated to find decompression services. Many chiropractors rely on the high-quality traffic produced by Google AdWords campaigns to maximize their local reach and get patients to cross the bridge from their device to an in-person visit to the office.
Google AdWords campaigns are best coupled with a sound local SEO decompression marketing strategy to ensure that your practice is simultaneously ranking high in local keyword searches while running ads. Combining the two can create a bullet-proof stream of fresh traffic to grow your business.
The chiropractic market is expanding and standing out among local competition, it can be challenging for practices looking to increase business, brand awareness and community engagement. Well planned marketing strategies and campaigns are essential to succeeding but many chiropractors struggle with knowing the right way to approach brand building and courting new patients with their marketing efforts.
The most efficient way to handle the marketing portion of your practice is to leave it to the professionals and partner with a chiropractic digital marketing agency that has the expertise and bandwidth to position your practice for success on both digital and print platforms. Discovering the freedom that chiropractic digital marketing agencies provide has been essential for chiropractors looking to grow their business without taking focus away from what they do best, treating patients with high-quality care.
Digital marketing creates many opportunities to get creative with your marketing efforts to reach potential patients, so the ideas are endless when trying to devise a marketing strategy. Here are a few ways you can ramp up your chiropractic marketing campaigns.
Google AdWords (aka Paid Search):
Every independent chiropractic practice can benefit from a Google AdWords campaign in their marketing strategy. Google AdWords is a pay-per-click marketing tool that allows chiropractors to capitalize on local and keyword searches. Google AdWords displays labeled ads at the top of the search engine results pages for specific keyword searches. Google AdWords campaigns are flexible and budget-friendly and can be paused or ended at any time for adjustment and availability. Google AdWords campaigns are essential to establishing a solid footprint in local markets and gives chiropractic offices the visibility they need to attract high-quality leads. Google AdWords ads are clearly labeled so the potential patients that navigate to your site using these links are aware they are accessing a paid advertisement. They are more likely to be motivated patients who already have some level of knowledge about chiropractic services and their condition. Patients searching for chiropractic services in their area who see your Google AdWords ads are already willing to seek treatment or close to making the decision. Google AdWords campaigns deliver leads with high intent that increase the potential for conversion and maximizes your financial commitment.
In-Person Opportunities:
When compiling a content marketing plan for chiropractic services consider creating opportunities for potential patients to have a soft introduction to your office and staff. Digital marketing efforts that invite patients to complimentary seminars and consultations have proven to be highly effective lead generation tools with high conversion rates. Digital marketing platforms continue to make these in-person opportunities more and more convenient for busy chiropractors looking to attract new patients so this marketing idea can be accessible in many different scenarios. If you are unable to schedule in-person events at your practice or nearby locations, consider holding live stream Q&A sessions on your social media platforms, create evergreen webinars that potential patients can access at their leisure to avoid scheduling conflicts and shoot videos that cover basic information about the services you offer and conditions you treat. All of these ideas will give new patients the personal touch of face-to-face meetings without too much sacrifice required from both your busy schedules.
Instagram:
Continuing with the power of personal interaction to attract new patients, Instagram is the perfect tool to expand on the concept of in-person opportunities. Instagram is fast becoming the go-to tool for chiropractic offices looking to showcase the personality and culture of their brand. Instagram brings your target audience in closer and encourages engagement with images, video and live streams that make your practice more accessible. Instagram is a great platform to stage digital meet and greets with you and your staff with scheduled live streams. You have the opportunity to not only reach potential patients but also to foster stronger connections with your existing patient base and encourage brand loyalty. Many social media users have begun to seek customer service on these platforms and businesses are capitalizing on the positive visibility of connecting with existing customers in this way. Communicating and engaging with existing patients on Instagram opens up opportunities to tap into their networking circles and expand your reach. Instagram has both paid and organic opportunities for marketing strategy layering to cover all your bases.
Facebook:
Facebook ads for chiropractic marketing have been proven as successful tools for reaching potential patients and generating leads so the platform remains an essential addition to any chiropractic marketing strategy both for general services and condition-specific campaigns. The Facebook marketing platform allows users to fine-tune their target audience using demographics, location, and interests to help chiropractors find the potential patients that can benefit the most from their services. Paid Facebook ads are only one part of the wealth of marketing opportunities the multi-layered platform creates so make sure to incorporate both paid and organic traffic strategies to your plan. One of the best ways to attract brand attention on Facebook is by providing relevant content patients value. By following a customer journey funnel chiropractors can establish trust with potential patients while educating them with researched content, directly addressing their issues and concerns and validating their struggles with their conditions. All of this can be done with quality blog posts, Facebook groups, videos, images and live streams on this one platform. As patients learn to trust you for information, they will eventually trust you to provide their wellness care and the more they become familiar with your brand, the more likely they are to contact you when they are ready to move forward with care. Social media brings audiences and content creators closer so, don’t be afraid to communicate directly with your audience on Facebook. Ask questions that encourage answers, provide content that sparks discussion and let your brand culture and personality shine through your content. Facebook is a flexible and budget-friendly marketing tool for both large and small practices but building your brand on the platform will take time and constant adjustment to remain on trend and valuable to your audience base.
There is a lot of confusion about how to put together incredible patient recruitment campaigns on social media. Some people underestimate its complexity – thinking that it only requires a few button clicks to put something together. Others think it’s one step short of alchemy. The truth is somewhere in the middle.
A strong patient recruitment campaign on a social media platform is made up of four components. Built the right way, you’ve got magic. If not, your results will suffer.
The four components of any social media campaign are:
Audience
The basis of every campaign. This is literally who will be seeing your advertisement. Typically, it’s comprised of geographic, demographic, and interest-related information. Most audiences will be based on criteria like age, location, and how potential audience members spend their time online. With tools available today, it’s easy to build an audience of 45 – 60 year olds within 20 miles of your office who are interested in yoga and expensive cars – you just need to be sure that’s the kind of person who wants to use your services! It’s also possible to create audiences that look like your current patients, which can be extremely valuable to a growing practice. If a marketing campaign doesn’t go well, the first place to look is the audience. It drives everything else.
Creative
A good social media campaign must catch a prospective patient’s attention. This is typically accomplished by having an eye-catching image or video (what we would call the creative).The whole purpose of the creative is to engage the viewers attention long enough to read the copy (more on that next). To give you a sense of the power of good creative, during a recent campaign we added a new creative element mid-campaign and saw a 10x increase in prospective patients asking for more information.
Copy
If the creative catches their attention, the copy tells the prospect why s/he should engage with the ad to learn more. Good campaigns will test different descriptions of the service being offered to see which description connects most with prospective patients. Typically, we’ll start off with 3 – 5 sets of copy at the start of a campaign and eliminate underperformers as quickly as we can see which descriptions resonate best.
Landing Page
This is the final component of a patient recruiting campaign. It’s the website you direct prospective patients toward to learn more about you or your offering. Your landing page should have one, clear “Call To Action” – an action you would like your prospective patient to take. It’ll be something like filling out a form, calling a phone number, watching a video, or scheduling an appointment. We typically see the best results by building a specific page to educate the prospective patient on the product or service being offered, but there valid reasons to have a different type of landing page. Landing pages are the easiest part of a marketing campaign to triage, since you can look at the number of people who landed on the page against the people who took the desired action.
Putting together patient recruiting campaigns is one-part science and one-part art. When it comes together just right, it can be transformative to a practice – filling the schedule with high-quality patients seeking care. It’s what motivates the team every day to constantly improve on the successes of yesterday.
On the first part of this series, we reviewed the first step in fixing your sales stats, which is focus first on your purpose. Getting back to your “Why”.
The next step in this process is communication. It’s HOW you communicate the purpose and sell care to a patient.
This is a vital part of the process. To teach you why this is so important and not something that you can just “Wing it” with, I want to give you some perspective on some of the highest paid people of our time.
Actors and Actresses
First off, have you ever wondered why Actors and Actresses get paid so much?
It’s because there is a tremendous amount of work and effort that goes into being a great performer/communicator.
Years of work go into perfecting their skills. In addition, they got go hundreds of auditions, thousands of hours of classes and rehearsals, all of the opportunity to perform at the highest level.
Yes, luck may have something to do with why one actor becomes successful, but just like in business, rarely is this the case.
Whether you call it a craft or a skill, they have to work hard at it and practice. No matter how long they’ve working at it.
But actors aren’t the only ones that get paid to be great at communicating.
Some of the highest paid people in our society are incredible communicators. That’s why speakers, actors, trainers, CEO’s and coaches all get paid more because they have to be effective communicators.
Your business is no different.
The 2nd part of fixing a broken sales process is constant effort and training on your communication.
If you want to improve your sales, you HAVE TO TRAIN. You must role play, you must use scripting, you must constant work to improve and stay focuses on your sales experience.
It cannot be something that you do 1X a year, or even 1X a month. It has to be done weekly.
We all get rusty if we don’t train!
Ego’s are a funny thing.
They tell us we’re good enough. That we’ve been working at something a long time, so we should have it down by now. That we’ve done it all, seen it all, and that we’ve “got this”.
If you don’t train constantly, your mind will automatically try to find the easier way to sell care. (I know because I’ve experienced this first hand). You cut corners on one aspect, then 2 parts of the scripting and before you know it, the entire experience has changed.
This is almost found in every sales experience where the doctor or team is struggling with their sales.
Some aspect was cut out, shortened, or made easier for the team member.
If you really want to be good at sales…
If you really want to increase your case acceptance rates on cash cases…
There is no shortcut I can teach you that will replace what comes with constant, weekly training for your sales team.
You have to work at it and constantly train to improve your communication. But if you do put the time in, you’ll see a huge payoff in the end.
What I want to do on this email is give you an action plan, to improve your sales, conversions or case acceptance rates. (To do that, I’ll need 2 articles)
But first tell me if this sounds familiar…
Dr. Smith has a pretty successful office. He’s been in practice several years and everything seems to be running like clockwork, so he starts to focus on things outside of practice. Before he knows it, one of his staff members starts to lose their motivation, and his practice numbers begin to drop Now, because his focus is off the practice, this goes on a for few months before it’s caught.
When he finally catches it, the team member leaves, gives notice, or gets fired. With one less team member, the rest of the team is now working hard to get caught up, and the focus goes off of marketing and sales.
The sales numbers begin to drop.
The doctor’s first reaction is what?
Yep, you probably called it, his low sales numbers.
He ramps up the marketing, which he thinks will increase sales, but with an overloaded team, what do you think happens?
Sales slump even lower!
His focus is on his numbers, which go into a nosedive.
Focusing on your numbers, when your sales process is broken, is like looking at your speedometer while your car is heading directly into a tree. It’s only going to make it worse.
You have to get back to why the problem occurred in the first place.
PURPOSE (Intention)
Your first reaction when sales are down, should not be focusing on your numbers. It’s getting back to WHY you sell care in the first place. It’s getting back on purpose.
Inverse Rule of Serving
I came up with this myself, so don’t steal it, but the Inverse Rule of Serving works this way.
“When I focus on what I need, and what I want, I always get less of what I want. When I focus on others and serving them, God delivers in abundance.”
God, the universe, whatever you want to call it, is not going to send patients into an office where the doctor, case manager, front office person is focused on themselves, their numbers and what they don’t have. (fear)
It’s a funny thing I see in business and marketing.
I see a lot of businesses make money with marketing, and I see even more lose it for a lack of purpose.
You want to increase your sales, increase your long-term success in business. go back to purpose, Go back to your why.
Start there first…. Then work on the next step to fixing your sales process…COMMUNICATION. (Part 2: Communication = Success)
Well guess who’s back and making a solid go at it.
It’s our old friend Google Adwords!!!
You remember that platform, right?
With everyone over on Facebook and Instagram; it’s easy to forget one of the solid staples of digital marketing: Google Search & Google Adwords.
I wanted to share with you some of the results that one of our Stem Cell / Regenerative Medicine practices had with Google Adwords last month.
Here goes.
First off, if you’re not familiar with what Google Adwords is, it’s the paid (PPC) advertising platform for Google.
[History Lesson]
Gather around the fire kids and I’ll tell you a story about how the interwebs got started. Years ago; in the olden days, circa 2012, Adwords was the ONLY form of paid advertising one could do on the internet. With all the focus on social media platforms, a lot of advertisers have forgotten about Adwords, but it’s still a great platform for the right services.***
Now remember, a new patient lead is a little more expensive using Google Adwords, but if they are handled correctly (meaning solid follow-up, 3 day scheduling) the conversion/sales process can give you a solid ROI.
Here are the numbers:
Average Cost Per Lead/Sign-up = $50
Spent $1200 to get 20 sign-ups/calls –
6 New Patients in the office ($200 per new patient show-up)
Those numbers may not look good to you, but wait for this. From the 6 new patients that showed up to the office for consultations; 3 purchased care for a total of…. (drumroll please)
$13,500 in purchased care!
We spent $1200 and generated $13,500
That’s over a 1000 percent ROI!
***IMPORTANT NOTE***
There are certain services that work extremely well for Adwords and some that do not. We’ve tested everything from Dental Implants to Stem Cell Therapy and we know the exact services that work well on this platform.
