Top Digital PR and Marketing Tips for Your Chiropractic Practice

The Top Marketing and PR Tips for Your Chiropractic Practice

Managing a successful chiropractic practice requires a great deal of time and attention. For busy physicians, this means that marketing and PR can quickly fall by the wayside. But, it’s possible to increase market share and patient engagement in the competitive healthcare industry by implementing a few key strategies.

Update or Register your Chiropractic Website with Google

One such option is running a branded search for your business – that is typing your business name and city into the Google search bar – to make sure that the results are current and correct. Ideally, you’ll want this search to return a map listing with your practice’s name, address, and telephone number.

Dominating the first page of the search engine results can be a major boon to your ability to gain patients.

Not only will this map listing show up when someone Googles the name of your practice, but if a user searches for a chiropractor and they are near your location, Google may also provide your listing as a recommended option.

If you do not see a map listing when you search for your business, you can create one by going to Google My Business (1) and registering your practice. When you arrive, you should see a screen like this:

Once you’ve filled out your information, you will be asked to verify your profile. To verify a new listing, the only option is by mail.

In this case, Google will send you a postcard with a code that will allow you to verify your business. The reason Google does this is to ensure that your business has a physical address that is maintained and checked. It typically takes 1-2 weeks to receive a postcard, which is only good for 30 days so be prepared to use is as soon as it arrives.

If there already is a Google map listing with your business information, you can then claim that listing for better results. This also requires Google to verify that you are, in fact, the business owner; they may try to contact you by phone, postcard or email.

Google My Business provides a valuable service to you and your clients, so make sure you take advantage of its lead generation capabilities. It’s also a good idea to claim and update your listings on listing data aggregator sites.

These organizations (like Neustar Localeze, Infogroup, Factual, and Acxiom) keep extensive databases of business contact information that are distributed to many other listing services.

Chiropractic and Social Media

Another option is managing your presence on social media to make the most out of your exposure to your loyal patients and fans.

It’s easy to create profiles across many different social media channels, but it isn’t as easy to manage, track, and record the progress of each one – nor is it necessary. To get started, choose one site to focus on and take a bit of time to track your efforts over a period of several months. 

Facebook is one popular option for businesses, as it offers a combination of organic and paid advertising. An organic post is a status or photo you publish with no advertising dollars behind it.

Such a post might only be seen by three percent of your followers. If that’s under 100 people, you’ll want to consider spending a little more to get more of a reach. Facebook’s paid posts are inexpensive and can show tremendous results.

When it comes to tracking results, Facebook tracks impressions, clicks, and traffic to your posts. And, Facebook also makes it possible to target your campaigns to the specific demographics of your audience. To create a targeted campaign, you’ll want to start by building a following. As your follower count increases, you can start creating targeted ads specifically to your dedicated followers. For instance, if your chiropractic office specializes in sports medicine, you can specify that you’re most interested in appealing to younger individuals who have expressed an interest in basketball, running, or soccer. This can help ensure that your campaigns get in front of the right eyes.

Twitter is another option.

Although, every second an average of 6,000 tweets are produced (2).

To help your business stand out from so many conversations, it’s helpful to have several people contributing to your campaign.

With two or more minds working to use trending hashtags, interacting with other accounts, and generating new followers, the job is much simpler. For instance, ask a receptionist or intern to snap a few pictures around the office and post them throughout the week.

Try to stay consistent with a posting schedule and use trending hashtags on each post. One option? Share a picture of your office before a remodel for a Throwback Thursday (#TBT) post.

As far as LinkedIn goes, this platform is primarily used as a “social resume” where you can share updates that other doctors, partners, or patients might find interesting about your business. As an experienced speaker for Laser Spine Institute, I’ve gained a lot of exposure from my presentations. Sharing professional video clips on LinkedIn gives my practice more authority and brand value.

Most LinkedIn users are active in the morning, before lunch time, so try to post early enough during peak browsing hours.
 

Manage a Monthly Newsletter

Lastly, don’t write off email marketing, as it is an inexpensive and effective way to interact with patients. Since most patients go weeks – or even months – without stepping foot in your office, periodic emails are a great way to keep your name at the forefront of their minds.

To assemble your contact list, include an option in your new patient paperwork to have patients indicate whether they would like to receive your newsletter. You can also place a clipboard with a sign-up sheet at your front desk or in your lobby. And, have a box on your website to enter an email address if they wish to provide it.

The most important aspect of an email marketing campaign is to make sure that it adds value to your patients’ lives – otherwise, the messages can get buried in a cluttered inbox. Try generating content that can fall under one of several categories, such as health tips, FAQs, and industry news. Behind-the-scenes tidbits from your office can also help give your practice a human touch. And, ask for reader feedback to make sure you’re on task, and then consider what patients would enjoy reading or hearing about from your practice.

As far as measuring your successes, most email marketing tools track your open rates and click rates so that you can analyze which information is useful or not. If you have a good open rate, but no clicks to links in your email, it may mean the information you’re providing isn’t useful to your audience. Try sending a test email to your employees and a few patients first to get their honest opinion. You’ll be surprised with what you think you know and what others have to say.

Here’s an example from an email sent using MailChimp, where the campaign is set to the “Medical, Dental, and Healthcare” industry. According to Mailchimp’s industry averages (3), this example has a high Open Rate but a low Click Rate.

Have you taken advantage of social media marketing, email marketing, and/or branded search in your attempts to market your chiropractic practice? If so, share your own favorite tips and techniques in the comments below.

Sources

1. https://www.google.com/business/

2. https://blog.twitter.com/2013/new-tweets-per-second-record-and-how

3. https://mailchimp.com/resources/research/email-marketing-benchmarks/

Delivering Value for Chiropractic Success- Episode 44

Tip: Deliver VALUE through your Chiropractic marketing.

One of the most important episodes we have ever released.

Learn why delivering value creates a successful chiropractic practice. Discover a variety of resources you can use to being making a greater impact in your community. Delivering value should be a core tenant of your chiropractic marketing.

As a chiropractor, you are an entrepreneur. You should explore all the tools available to decide how you can deliver the most value to your audience.

It could be social media, a lot of hustle, and a little grind. The most important step is to get started!

Best Chiropractic iPAD Apps

If you have an iPad or iPhone you probably know how frustrating it can be to find good healthcare apps. It may feel easier to run a 4 minute mile than find a top quality chiropractic app for your iPad.

Well, let me be more specific.

You have probably found out how hard it is to find any apps which are relevant to chiropractic. There are hundreds of blood pressure apps, steps per day apps, temperature apps, exercise apps, nutrition apps, etc. etc.

But, there are very few which are actually applicable to use in your daily chiropractic practice.

I want to highlight some of the best app’s which I have experienced so far.

3 Best Chiropractic iPad Apps

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Spine Decide

An absolute essential app is SPINE DECIDE.  I literally use this application with over 90% of my patients during their report of findings.  The graphics are astounding with a crisp and clear presentation that puts charts and handouts to shame. 

Additionally, the conditions which are “pre-loaded” are perfectly aligned with our practice as chiropractors.  This is truly a must have app for your practice. There are even some screens which create the ability to use this as a posture screen app.

Quite simply, it's the best patient engagement, and patient education app available in the world. They have actually shown increased patient retention by using their app.

Which makes sense. The patient is better educated about their condition, they have beautiful examples, and consistent communication through the app in their email inbox. 

Now, full disclosure, I have been consulting with Orca Health (the creators of Spine Decide) for a few years. Basically, I have been analyzing their animations and making sure they are awesome, clear, and ready to use in practice. I want their animations to look more real than the dragons on Game of Thrones.

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Omnio

Another fantastic app is Omnio.  I believe this was developed with Health 2.0 guru Jay Parkinson. 

(as a side note, if you are not familiar with Jay you should check out his incredbily popular blog HERE.)

Omnio acts a digital medical bag and houses a vast array of content (which would physically fill many large bookshelves) on your iPAD.  While I don’t use this application everyday, it is a great tool to have at your disposal.  You can custom build your homepage to have a variety of texts and tools at your fingertips. 

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Dr Chrono

While I use a rather robust EMR due to my practice within a large orthopedic group; I would like to touch on Dr. Chrono.  Dr. Chrono is a free EMR application which is extremely flexible and can be built (rather easily) to work seamlessly for chiropractic. 

To me, Dr. Chrono is simply the best low cost EMR system.

It combines tremendous flexibility, advanced functionally, and a relatively simple interface and low learning curve. All of these features make Dr Chrono a great choice not only as an app, but also as a EMR system. I have even built some templates which you can download and use for free!

You can click here to get my personal daily SOAP note.

What are some of your favorite iPAD applications?

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  -The Evidence Based Chiropractor is the fastest growing chiropractic marketing group in the profession.  The service, founded and run by Dr. Jeff Langmaid, is dedicated to increasing chiropractic utilization by showcasing research.  Marketing to medical doctors through research is proven, cost effective, and can dramatically improve your incoming referrals.  Join us.  Lets grow chiropractic together.

Addressing the 3 Big Hindrances to Chiropractic Referrals

Marketing your chiropractic practice can be difficult.

One way to you can immediately improve your marketing is by actively addressing the 3 big hindrances to chiropractic referrals. When you speak with an MD you should have a plan.
As a matter of fact, you should make it EASY from them to refer to your office. Learn an essential chiropractic marketing tip in this weeks episode.

Addressing the 3 big hindrances to chiropractic care will make your marketing more efficient, more precise, and more refined.

Re-Targeting Marketing for More Chiropractic New Patients

How to Get More New Chiropractic Patients Using Online Website Re-targeting.

Reach more new Chiropractic patients than ever using online re-targeting. People who have visited your chiropractic website and VERY interested in your service. Deliver a carefully crafted message directly to them through re-targeting. Learn how to get started today!

Step up your chiropractic marketing today using the re-targeting tip video below.

Re-targeting your ad's through Facebook is one of the most effective ways to reach your prospective new patients. 

Here's how it works: Have you ever been looking for a new pair of shoes on Amazon, but then decided you would wait to purchase.

Next thing you know, you can't click anywhere on the internet without seeing those shoes in the sidebar, just ready for you to click and buy.

That is re-targeting. Watch the video below to see how you can use re-targeting for marketing your chiropractic office.

Hubspot also put together a very comprehensive article on re-targeting which I highly recommend.

(yes I have an epically intense face in the thumbnail. this information is THAT important!)