Getting Chiropractic Referrals from MD's with Research

“I am currently averaging 30 referrals a month from local providers. Thank you for your help in making this happen!” - Dr. C. Boyle

How to Market Your Chiropractic Practice to Generate Sustainable MD Referrals

Getting referrals from medical doctors with research is one of the most significant untapped chiropractic marketing strategies and opportunities.

What would your practice look like if you added on another 10, 20, or 30 new referred patients each month (without spending a dime on Facebook or Google Advertising)?

In this article I’ll show you the exact strategy to build referral relationships- and I’ll walk you through the proven process- step-by-step.

Let’s get started!

Building Your MD Referral Target List

The first step in getting referrals from other healthcare providers is to build your Target List. Your Target List will contain all of the doctors you are actively reaching out to and will help keep you organized.

If you're a chiropractor focused on pediatrics, you may want to focus your target list on OB-GYN's, midwives, doula's, and pediatricians. If you are more interested in taking care of the Crossfit community, you may choose to target gym owners, personal trainers, and sports medicine physicians.

Once you have created your Target List, then you begin your marketing and outreach.

The Three Steps of Getting MD Referrals

1. Sending Case Notes

2. Monthly Research Briefs

3. MD Meetings

With years of experience and thousands of referrals, we have discovered that a three-legged approach is the most effective when building referral relationships.

Get a FREE Case Notes Template

The first leg is to begin sending Case Notes to showcase the co-management and results you get with your patients. The second one is sending Research Brief's monthly which we're going to focus on here. The third is setting up and executing MD Meetings, where you have the opportunity to learn more about their practice and how you can help them and their clients achieve better health and wellness.

So Why Is Marketing Your Practice with Research So Important?

Research is your marketing. It's the only controllable aspect of your marketing, and it provides the consistency needed to get results.

By sending monthly Research Brief, you can guarantee top of mind awareness and positive branding, by positioning your practice. Consistency is the primary factor that drives the success of any marketing program. Monthly Research Briefs give you the chance to have consistency with your message.

Become a doc that is consistent and stays top of mind by sharing the latest research is a unique way to position your self in your local healthcare community. It doesn't require you to resort to cheesy tactics but instead allows you to market your practice in a way that you can be proud of.

Also, by "dripping" research each month, you can create far more impact than you could in a single meeting. As an example, if you meet with a doc, I would not recommend trying to tell them everything they never wanted to know about chiropractic. It's overwhelming and counterproductive.

Your monthly Research Updates drip the information to them every month. These monthly Research Briefs are the perfect tool to disperse an avalanche of pro-chiropractic information over a period of time. That process is way more impactful and effective at building referral relationships.

Research isn't the only way to do it, which is why we have Case Notes showcasing co-management and the great results you get in your practice as well meetings which build trust and rapport.

But remember, 95% of the "sale" in the follow-up. If you rely on only Case Notes and Meetings, you will be missing out on the consistency of your message. With Case Notes, you can't control who walks through your front door; so they ebb and flow with volume and are uncontrollable. Meetings are great, but clearly, you can't personally visit each doctor office on your target list each week.

Your Monthly Research Briefs Provide a Monthly Marketing Touchpoint, and a Controllable Marketing Asset.

Click to Get a FREE Research Brief

Researchers have produced an abundance of papers supporting chiropractic care as one of the most safe and effective treatment options available, yet we hover at less than 15% utilization because very few of us build a sustainable practice with consistent referrals coming in from other healthcare providers.

It's our job (you and me) to get this information out to the public on our social channels and to the other healthcare providers in our community.

If you'd like more information about how you can systematize and automate that process to get results faster, then become a member of The Evidence Based Chiropractor today.

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Ready to grow your referral base? Listen in to The EBC Podcast for weekly research updates and marketing strategies. If you’re ready to grow FASTER- become a member of The Evidence Based Chiropractor today.

10 Chiropractic Marketing Ideas to Increase Business and Sales

You studied hard, got your license, and gained invaluable experience. You believe in yourself and your chiropractic practice. So, why aren't new patients knocking down your door to find relief? 

Your chiropractic marketing may be to blame. And, needing a little help in this area is normal. 

You aren't a marketing expert. You're a chiropractor. You're also a business owner which comes with an abundance of responsibilities. 

But, you know that your business can't thrive unless you make a profit. And, the only way to do that is to bring in new customers and make them lifelong fans of your practice. 

Sinbad keeping it real.

You also are competing with other chiropractic offices. They may be targeting a similar audience or provide related services. How can you get the edge? 

Successful chiropractic marketing is the solution to these dilemmas. Chiropractic marketing can be a DIY pursuit, or you can outsource your marketing efforts to a digital marketing agency. What's best for your practice will depend on your availability, skills, and staff. 

So, if you're looking to implement new marketing ideas, then look no further. Read on to discover 10 marketing ideas to grow your business while increasing your revenue and new patients. 

Chiropractic Marketing: 10 Marketing Tips to Improve Your Business

Marketing is a vast field. It contains many different layers and elements that you can adjust and improve. Explore the following marketing ideas to learn how to bring in new patients and grow your sales. 

1. Utilize Social Media

As humans, we naturally love familiarity. Being on social media is more about brand awareness and recognition than producing sales. The more familiar patients are with your brand, the more trustworthy your practice will become. 

Create social media profiles based on which ones your target audience uses most. For example, if you're targeting professionals, use LinkedIn.

You can also purchase ads on social media platforms. Select which demographic data to target to reach your audience on these platforms accurately. 

Click to Get a FREE Pack of Social Media Graphics

2. Offer Supplemental Products and Services

While you're at it, use your social media profiles to show off the products and services your offer. It may be supplements, fitness equipment, or group coaching. Focus on the benefits your patients can expect by using the product or service.

This strategy successfully generates leads and can increase your sales.

Your practice website can (and should) have a shop or store to generate additional revenue channels.

3. Create Useful Content

People are smartening up to traditional sales tactics and pitches. They don't want to be pitched to or sold anything. Instead, they want to connect and learn. 

Adhere to your customers' needs by educating them through blog posts. You can also guest blog for another company to gain brand awareness and leads. 

Content will also help to improve your website traffic. And, as your traffic increases, your search engine ranking can also go up. You can reach a wide range of people who can then help you to improve your local rankings as well. 

Using video is one of the best ways to spread your unique healthcare vision.

4. Get Referrals

Develop a referral program for your customers and other medical professionals. For customers, offer a discount or reward for referring a friend or family member. Advertise the referral program on social media, via email marketing, and your website. 

For medical referrals, you'll need to build up a professional partnership. Explain the benefits of your services, automate your referral process, and educate yourself on how to market to other doctors.

5. Build Community Relationships

People love supporting companies that support a higher purpose. Getting involved in the community is a perfect way to show patients that you care. 

Create and build community partnerships.

Support other local businesses by highlighting your favorite healthy restaurants on social media.

Offer lunch and learns to community agencies and companies. Provide free advice and expert wellness tips. 

6. Email Marketing

Email marketing is cost-effective and promotes brand awareness and conversions. It also reminds patients that your practice is still thriving. 

Use email marketing to provide your patients with educational materials, promotions, and company updates. A monthly newsletter is also a beneficial way to engage with your patients.

Grow your email list by offering discounts on your physical products in exchange for their email address. 

Click to get a FREE Email Newsletter Template

7. Press Releases

Traditional marketing tools shouldn't be ignored. Word of mouth marketing, traditional ad space, and press releases can still help you to grow your chiropractic firm. Press releases will help you to reach your target audience and promote brand awareness.

Create press releases when something exciting or out-of-the-norm occurs at your practice. For example, if you win an award, complete a community project, or write a book. 

8. Develop a User-Friendly Website

Website design can influence your search engine ranking, your website traffic, and your conversion rates. Develop a user-friendly website by using a simple, fast-loading design. Your website's menu should also be easy to navigate and include only the necessary information.

Your website can also include videos, meaningful images, and testimonials. Having a "schedule an appointment" feature will also help to streamline the conversion process. The easier it is for customers to contact and schedule an appointment, the better it will be for business.

9. Set Yourself Apart

Your competition can be stiff (no pun intended). 

To truly succeed in your market, you'll need to set yourself apart. What makes your practice different? 

Is it your experience? Maybe you have a piece of equipment, testing tool, or service other chiropractors don't offer. Or, do you holistically approach chiropractic?

When creating your unique value proposition, always keep your target audience in mind.

10. Ask for Reviews

Patients and customers trust each other more than they believe in marketing tactics. Ask for reviews from all your patients. Encourage them to review your practice on social media, Google, and websites like Yelp. 

Asking for reviews is also essential for your reputation management. Many disgruntled customers express their frustrations by leaving negative reviews. Asking for positive reviews balances out these negative reviews.

Stay up to date about your online reviews. If you do receive a negative review, work to amend the patient's concern. Often, the patient will respond positively and be willing to find a resolution. 

Chiropractic Marketing a Pain in the Neck?: Gaining Support

These chiropractic marketing tips will help to put your practice on the map. They can also improve your reputation and increase your profit. 

But, your marketing efforts can be even more successful by hiring a digital marketing agency. Helpful guides and resources can also help to improve your marketing efforts. 

Want to become the chiropractor other doctors refer to? Sign-up for a monthly or yearly membership for a step-by-step guide to learn how to increase your medical referrals.

How to Reduce Crossfit Injuries

If you’re into Crossfit, you know how addictive it can become. That mix of high-intensity interval training and competition can help drive your motivation and commitment and lead you to achieve amazing changes to your body. That consistency becomes the key to your success - to getting the results you're after, but what do you do when you're injured?

Preventing Crossfit Injuries 

Injuries often occur when your body doesn’t have the correct balance of strength and flexibility. Muscles tears, sprain and strains, and even painful arthritic changes can flare up for a number of reasons, such as attempting to lift too much weight at once or not having enough flexibility to support that weight through a full range of motion. How can you reduce your likelihood of injury? Researchers have discovered that a combination of proper warm up/cool down, a full range of motion and progressive intensity training can help reduce injuries when strength training.  

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• Take a few minutes to stretch before and after your workout.

• Increase the weight you lift slowly and focus on quality reps vs. max weight.

• Use good posture and ergonomics during your workouts - don’t “cheat” and increase your risk of injury.

 

One of the most effective ways to improve your spinal mobility and flexibility is through Chiropractic care. Adjustments to your spine and extremities have been shown to increase their range of motion and may help you find that perfect balance of strength and flexibility.

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Short-term effect of spinal manipulation on pain perception, spinal mobility, and full height recovery in male subjects with degenerative disk disease: a randomized controlled trial. Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation 2014. Progressive resistance strength training and the related injuries in older adults: the susceptibility of the shoulder. Aging Clinical and Experimental Research 2014.

Create a Chiropractic Blog to Drive Massive Free Traffic with SEO

SEO or search engine optimization is how people find your website when they search Google for a chiropractor. Being at the top of the list is crucial. So how can you get there for free? Consistent, high-quality blogging!

Blogging is essential if you want to drive massive traffic to your website and more new patients into your practice. When you have a blog that you actually update, it is going to get more people onto your site, it's going to get more people into your practice, and it is going to help spread your message- your unique health care message- in a way that gets maximum impact.

Your Chiropractic Blog Can Drive MASSIVE Free Traffic to Your Website via SEO

So when I say blog, you might be thinking, "those things have been around forever. I don't know if it's right for me, it seems kind of passe". I want you to get that out of your mind. Blogging gives Google, Bing, Yahoo, and all the other search engines an opportunity to find your practice.

If you have a website and it's just a single page, like a click funnel, but you've made it awesome and loaded it with keywords, you are still fighting an uphill battle! That page is only a single opportunity to showcase to the search engines what you and your practice are about. I want you to have hundreds, if not thousands of opportunities to showcase your practice! That is why blogging is so important.

So I want you to think of a blog like multiple opportunities to show different facets of you and your practice to the public, to the community, to your audience, because that's really what a blog is all about. It gives you the ability to have your own territory and not rely only on Facebook or Instagram or all these other channels and platforms that can change their algorithm any day of the week. Controllable assets, like a website and blog, are a great thing to have a business and market effectively over a long period of time.

Every time you publish content to your blog it gives you the opportunity to control your message. And these messages can grow over time. Keep in mind that every chiropractic blog that you produce gives Google an opportunity to "see" your keywords. So if you have ten blogs posts, fifty blog posts, or one-hundred and fifty blog posts you have the chance to exponentially increase the number of keywords that you're hitting relative to your practice. And it also gives all of the search engines a great deal of context for what you're practice focus. Maybe it's natural healthcare, alternative healthcare, chiropractic fitness, stem cell, multidisciplinary care. Either way, by consistently publishing blog content you will be providing more information to hype your SEO. And the more data that you provide to Google, the more information that you put out there, the better job it can do to find the right people to get to your website.

Search engines are in the business of serving up the best and most specific answer to a query on their platform. That is why a blog is by far and away the best way to improve your search engine optimization. The other thing that is fantastic about a blog is that over time it can evolve. It doesn't need to be your" grandfather's blog" where it's just text on a page.

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via GIPHY

• You can make it engaging with pictures.

• You can add in video content.

• You can even add infographics and gifs.

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As the search engines have increased their abilities throughout the last five to ten years, their ability to understand images and video embedded into your blog has dramatically increased. So what do I mean by that? Previously it was only the keywords was all about the words on the page. But now the pictures themselves give context clues to the search engines. When you give Google more data, it will find highly relevant people to give your page more exposure. These people are more likely to come in and be patients.

Adding video and images also gives you the opportunity to have that page becomes more dynamic. If a patient or person goes to your blog and it's just a million words on a page, and it looks like the next great American novel, it's difficult for somebody to get through. Mostly, it's poor user experience. But if you see a paragraph, and then there's a beautiful picture, another paragraph, and perhaps a little video- now your blog starts to become a really compelling piece of your website that can keep people engaged for a long time.

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Get our FREE Guide to Improving Your Chiropractic SEO!

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And guess what happens?

The longer people stay on your page, the higher the page will rank in Google. They love people hanging out on the page because in Google's mind that means you are delivering the goods. Your page gave the exact information that the individual person was looking for. And when somebody hangs out on your page for a while and clicks around, in Google's mind that tells them, they did a good job matching you up. Guess what happens as that starts to occur across multiple pages?

Your overall ranking will go up, and you will start to drive massive traffic to your website with organic search engine optimization.

You can almost think of it like lottery tickets. If you have just a home page or only one blog you have one ticket to win. You don't have a high probability of getting the jackpot. But if you create high-quality content across hundreds of blogs, your essentially buying hundreds of lottery tickets. You just dramatically increased your chance to win!

Tactical Tips to Improve Your Blog and SEO

One tactical tip when you put out a blog is really try to stay above 350 or 400 words. Now you don't need to go up to 8,000 or 10,000 words necessarily, but if you can get between 300-1200 words, you're in a great spot. If you only have 50 words on a page and maybe one image, the search engines may believe you have a "landing page" or squeeze page and Google will begin to steer traffic away from that page. If you have at least 300-ish words in the blog, then you are telling Google that you have done your homework that you have put some time into providing context for your information. Getting over 300 words will also keep people on your page longer and allow you to hit more keywords.

Finally, remember to keep your blog dynamic. If you have a video relevant to that topic of the blog, put it in the middle of it. It's a great way to get engagement, grab additional keywords, and to keep people excited about your content. If you have a beautiful picture, throw that on there and share it to Instagram.

The bottom line is that if you put out high-quality content consistently over a long period then you will be rewarded with a massive influx of organic, free traffic to your website. So if you have been on the fence about starting a blog, you can clearly see I would encourage you to do so. Blogging allows you to climb the rankings on Google, drive more traffic to your website, established subject matter expertise and more. It has been one of the biggest reasons The Evidence Based Chiropractor has been successful for many many years. You can do the same for the people in your community, and build your practice in the process!

If you have any questions about blogging or any questions on platforms, leave them down below. I'll be happy to answer any question that you might have, and that is why you need to start a blog today.

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Looking for awesome blog content, social media posts, videos, video scripts, patient handouts, and more all done for you? Check out The Smart Chiropractor!

Social Media Tips for Chiropractors: How to Easily Create Compelling Content

You know that publishing and producing top quality content online on platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and your website is imperative to driving interest and patients into your practice. But for a lot of docs, it can be exceptionally challenging to keep up with content production. Sound familiar?

I know a lot of people who have a Facebook page's for their practice that goes dormant for weeks at a time. So I wanted to break down how you can take one piece of content and split it into a variety of different parts that you can utilize throughout weeks or months in your practice.

Let's start at the top and walk through how each piece works and how you can utilize them to get more influence, and ultimately more eyeballs on your social media content.

Creating Compelling Chiropractic Content for Social Media

It all starts with a piece of smart material. What is "smart" content? It's a topic that you would feel comfortable talking about for five to ten minutes if I put you on the spot right now and started filming. Maybe it is disc herniation, ergonomics, spinal curves, etc. We each have our own topics that we just know inside and out.

This topic will be your pillar piece of content from which everything else is created. Here's the catch (isn't there always a catch?). The best way to make this process work is to take your pillar topic, or smart content, and create a 5-10 minute of you discussing it. I know, a lot of docs have challenges shooting video. So if you have any questions comment down below. But here's what you can do, and why you should start with a video.

Once you shoot a video, all of your other content can actually be distilled down from that initial video. While shoot your video be sure to paint a clear picture and talk about the topic confidently. Once you do, you can have that video transcribed into text. That creates an excellent blog post. Then guess what? You can post a picture of the video on Instagram, a link to the blog on Facebook and much more.

Depending on the topic you also may have just created a brand new patient education piece for your practice. The options and opportunities are endless.

For instance, take a still image from you speaking during the video. Now you have a beautiful picture. Well, when you combine some of the text of the blog and the images self what do you have? You have an excellent social media post that you can publish on Facebook and LinkedIn.

And don't forget about that audio. If you rip the sound, you have a podcast episode already in the bag!.

And finally off of that video 5 to 10 minutes. You can break down a 60-second piece of it and then have that as a story on your Facebook or on your Instagram page.

If this sounds interesting to you but your concerned about not having enough time I encourage you to check out The Smart Chiropractor. We automate this entire process and provide a done for you social media solution for your practice!