What's the best way to promote your practice? How can you market your practice and get your name in front of potential new patients when money is tight or you're just starting up? How can you get the word out about your practice in the most affordable way? Promoting their practice is an ongoing challenge for many chiropractors.
1. Talk to your patients.
It's amazing how much money chiropractors spend to attract new patients when they have a wealth of opportunity and information in their existing patient base. One of the best ways to build your practice is to talk to existing patients. Ideally, this should be done by someone other than the doctor so patients are willing to be honest and open.
When you assess perceptions, you don't need to talk to hundreds of individuals; simply choose five to ten patients and contact them to ask if they'd participate in a phone interview. Here's how it works:
- Send a letter asking permission to have someone contact them about your practice.
- Have the interviewer call and ask value-based questions such as:
- What health and wellness challenges were you facing when you considered the services of ABC Chiropractic Center?
- How important were ABC Chiropractic Center's services in addressing your challenges?
- What did you value most about your experience with the chiropractic center?
- What other products or services do you wish they offered that could help you with other health and wellness challenges?
- After all the interviews have been conducted, compile the information to discover trends and themes.
- Send a thank-you letter to every patient who participated. Include key lessons from the interviews and explain the specific changes you plan to make to your practice based on this information.
The important part here is to use what you learn. If you don't make changes to your practice, then you've wasted everyone's time. One practice that recently did this tripled their revenue in one year — they learned what people wanted, how their solution made a difference, how to present it, how to price it, and then proceeded to make changes that improved those areas.
Keys to success: The conversation with your patients is just that, a conversation. Don't fire questions at them; instead, have the interviewer engage in a conversation and gather as much valuable data as you can. Remember, it's not about how satisfied they are — it's about how much they valued your product or service.
2. Creatively package your marketing campaigns.
A postcard is one way to market your practice. But how about putting a small box together with a fork, knife, spoon and a custom printed napkin that invites a prospective referral source such as a medical doctor, attorney or local business owner to "have lunch on us?" Think outside the box and your marketing campaigns will have more impact. Think about the little details that will get attention. When it comes to your gravy, lumps are bad. When it comes to getting your marketing message past the gate keepers and into your prospect's hands, lumps are just the ticket. Lumpy mail is a direct mail piece or package with some dimension to it. A lumpy mail package screams, "Notice me; open me." A lumpy mail campaign can give your marketing message center stage attention.
Take steps to make new patients feel special. Patients respond to being recognized, especially in these rush-rush, get-the-lowest-price times. One marketing-savvy practice encloses a small, lavender-scented sachet along with a handwritten note welcoming each new patient to the practice. The sachet and note cost pennies but add something memorable to the exchange. Another successful practice created business cards that their patients keep. Most business cards are tossed within hours of a meeting. Instead of having your card tossed, they created one that recipients actually use. They mail new patients a good-looking notepad with their contact info and tagline on every page. The business card notepad is referred to almost daily, kept for 30 days or so and carries a high remembrance factor.
Keys to success: Set a clear objective for your marketing campaign, and identify how you'll measure its success. Then follow up to measure the results and adjust the program if necessary.
3. Get the word out with publicity.
Think you can't do PR or publicity without employing the services of a high-priced firm? You can! Although a good firm brings tremendous contacts and experience, most practices can do enough PR on their own to spark the public's interest. Court your local media. Editorial features convey more credibility with prospective patients than paid advertising does. To get coverage from the local media, whether from the town newspaper, from TV or radio stations, or from trade journals, you need a fresh, timely story. Look for something unusual about what your practice does and publicize it. Send out press releases to local newspapers, radio stations, cable TV stations, and magazines whose audiences are likely to be interested in your services. Be sure to post the press releases on one or more online press release services, too, being sure to include links to your website. To increase your chance of having the material published, send along a photo (but not to radio stations) with your press release. Editors of printed publications are often in need of "art" (drawings or photos) to fill space and break up the gray look of a page of text.