How to Grow Revenue and Help More People in Your Community
In a recent episode of the Grow Your Practice Podcast, chiropractic marketer Dr. Jeff Langmaid shares his top marketing tips for chiropractors.
Known as the “Evidence Based Chiropractor,” Jeff is devoted to increasing chiropractic utilization. His great-grandfather was a chiropractor who studied under BJ Palmer nearly 100 years ago. His goal is to continue that legacy as a chiropractor himself and by highlighting the power of chiropractic adjustment through research and marketing. He believes it’s time for conservative care practitioners of all types to step up and create a healthier world by scaling their unique healthcare professions.
Chad and Jeff discussed the top marketing tips for chiropractors. Some of Jeff’s key principles are to start with your patient database, lead with educational content, and create monthly recurring revenue. By implementing these practices, owners of chiropractic clinics and integrated wellness centers can improve profitability and generate consistent visits.
Why should practice owners care about marketing?
Dr. Jeff shared an unfortunate approach that he sees many clinicians make. He labels it the “journey of professional indifference.”
Every day in your community, there are people undergoing unnecessary surgeries, taking unnecessary medications, and receiving unnecessary injections that affect them and their families for the rest of their lives. Opioid addictions are by far the worst they have ever been, largely due to doctors overprescribing opioid painkillers after surgery.
The “journey of professional indifference” describes the approach where a practice owner passively waits for patients to come to them. These patients may have already undergone surgery or another intervention. They could have been referred by their physician or found you as a last hope.
Whether you’re a PT, OT, or DC you are an integral part of a patient’s journey. You have the ability to get in earlier in a patient’s journey and help them take their health into their own hands. So they can avoid the fate that so many people in your community fall into.
“If you care about the health of the people in your community, you need to get out there and tell your story,” Langmaid said. “You have to be proactively answering the questions people have about their health. The more you can build trust and rapport, the more you can help people in your community avoid the fate that so many have fallen into.”
So you want to help more patients. Where to start?
Dr. Jeff and Chad both recommend that you always start with your warmest audience. These are the people you have already seen. People who likely already know, like, and trust you. Reach out to your existing or past patient database. Email them consistently to let them know you’re around.
Share educational content in your emails and invite them to something to learn more. A webinar, a workshop, or an appointment. Avoid using jargon or overly medical terms. For instance, if you’re writing an email to educate about radiculopathy, use terms like ‘how to tell if your arm pain is coming from your neck’ instead of the actual term ‘radiculopathy.’ Use patient-centric language and offer something of value. Then invite them to come in if they’re still not seeing relief.
The key is to engage with your patient database consistently. Being consistent is what most practices struggle with most. Patient Demand software can help you automate this process, enabling you to choose from hundreds of pre-written and customizable campaigns.
Top 3 Marketing Tips for Chiropractors
When it comes to getting started with marketing, the lowest-hanging fruit is marketing to your past and existing patients. But that’s not where your marketing should end. To reach a broader audience and help more people in your community, you eventually need to create demand beyond your existing list.
Here are the top 3 marketing tips for practice owners:
1. Lead with Patient Education: Teach and Invite
Jeff’s core philosophy is to teach and invite consistently. If you show up and teach, engage, entertain, and then invite – and you do that consistently – then you’re going to see success. Lead with educational content, then invite them to something: Say give us a call, hop on the schedule, join the webinar, or come to a workshop.
This methodology applies to all audiences: past patients, existing patients, and cold traffic (people who haven’t interacted with you before). As practice owners, we often have this resistance to sales and marketing. We think we’re going to provide high quality-of-care and evidence-based practice, then just grow by word-of-mouth referral. But we need to be getting out there and educating, building marketing systems, teaching, and inviting. The reality is that marketing is just educating people in your community and showing them how you can help solve their health problems.
Most people equate marketing with paid marketing and discount advertising. That’s just a small piece. The majority of your marketing should lead with education.
2. Avoid Discount Advertising
Tens of thousands of providers are offering deep discount advertising on a regular basis. This is not a cost-effective marketing strategy. Why? Most often, patients that come in because they saw an ad for a discounted service are not the people that are going to stay, pay, and refer. They are deal shoppers. And what do deal shoppers do? They shop for deals! So when they take advantage of that offer, you’re going to notice that there’s a small percentage of them that actually stick around. You’re going to get dramatically fewer visits from someone who comes in from discount advertising compared to someone who comes in through educational content. In most cases, Jeff recommends sticking to the teach-and-invite methodology over discount advertising.
When IS it okay to offer discount advertising? If you’re doing it to keep your doors open in the short term, that may be appropriate for you. Or, if you’re already doing everything else right, and you want to sprinkle on some discount advertising, that’s fine. But Jeff recommends first leveraging free or lower-cost options. This includes marketing to past and existing patients, teaching and inviting, and leveraging retargeted online advertising.
3. Create Monthly Recurring Revenue
There are ways to create monthly recurring revenue and this is a great way to diversify your income stream. You can make your practice more durable and less vulnerable. The goal is here to create monthly recurring revenue that meets your minimum viable monthly expenses each month. If you can have recurring revenue that meets your expenses, working in your practice becomes a lot more fun and way less stressful.
This does not mean changing your business model or giving up patient care. This is about diversifying income streams, reducing stress and increasing revenue in a patient-centric way. Dr. Jeff and his business partner Jason identified three primary ways that most clinicians can implement this in a way that makes sense:
Provide ongoing services
This can look like a monthly movement assessment, a monthly check-in, or any type of maintenance care that makes sense for you. After your patients complete their plan of care, have them check in with you once a month. A majority of the time this is warranted and is not overtreating. Your patients come in because they have a problem and they come back for accountability. It’s better for the patient and better for you. Many of us have movement-based facilities that can be leveraged for a monthly check-in, but most of us don’t do it. A monthly check-in is a great way to increase patient visits and create monthly recurring revenue.
Open an e-commerce store
Sell items that supplement your services. Supplements are a great example of what you can sell in an online store. We know that between 50 to 70% of people going to conservative care providers take supplements each and every day, whether it’s a multivitamin, Vitamin D, Omegas, etc. Other options could include exercise props, therapeutic heating/cooling devices, and ergonomic products for sleep or work as examples. The key here is to create auto-recurring revenue to have an online store that drop-ships direct to your patient. This way, you don’t need to have the inventory and utilize space in your clinic. Better for the patient, better for you.
Offer online coaching
This could look like anything from telehealth all the way up to lifestyle coaching. For many providers, this may feel like very new territory, but there’s an avenue there to create monthly revenue by providing value on an ongoing basis. This can be leveraged at scale online. You can create courses that can be sold online without actually requiring significant amounts of your time on an ongoing basis.
Summarized Marketing Tips for Chiropractors
Practice owners wanting to grow revenue and help more people in their community can start by:
- Consistently engaging your past and existing patient database. Lead with patient education. Teach and invite.
- Avoid overusing discounts in your online advertising.
- Come up with a strategy to create monthly recurring revenue.
Would you like to be able to automatically create educational campaigns for your patients and community, without much effort? Patient Demand software can help.
See How It Works.
