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Rocket Chiropractic Podcast for Chiropractors
Simple Chiropractic Marketing Structure That Will Help You Grow Your Chiropractic Practice
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Chiropractors like to tell people that they are “a chiropractor who does something different” or that they “aren’t like most chiropractors.” I’m not sure what percentage of chiropractors say they are different, but it could be the...
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Jerry Kennedy
Hey, guys. Welcome to another episode of the Rocket Chiro Podcast, the business and marketing podcast for chiropractors. My name is Jerry Kennedy. I'm your host, and we're going to talk today about marketing structure and what I would consider a foundational way to think about your marketing as a chiropractor. That's going to help you make decisions and also just make sure that you don't have marketing blind spots when it comes to your practice. I was. This is something I have talked about in the past a lot, and it's probably been a few years since I've really talked about it in detail. And I wanted to bring it up again because I had a client that was asking me about marketing and. And we live in a world where, you know, the marketing options. There's so many different ways that you can market a practice, and there's so many things that are available. That doesn't mean you should be doing all of them. And I think that it's easy to get overwhelmed or it's easy to miss something. And so there's different extremes that you can take from a marketing standpoint, and it ends up resulting in your practice not doing well and not heading in the direction that you want it to go. So we're just going to talk about structure. This is going to be a foundational layout for how you should think about your marketing, and it's going to give you the opportunity, after you've listened to this podcast, to look at your marketing and go, oh, okay, I'm doing well in this area. Maybe I need to do a little bit better in this other area. Before I get into that, I do want to read a recent review that was left. This is from Dr. Jonathan. He's one of my website clients. He said, excellent service. Jerry transformed my website from a mess to a product I'm proud to showcase. He exceeded all my expectations while making the process simple and seamless. Jerry understood my goals and concerns, provided insight, insightful feedback, and gets to work fast. My only regret is that I didn't reach out sooner. Thank you, Jonathan. I appreciate the review. If you want to leave a review, you can go to Rocket Cairo. Click the Review Us button, and if you want to get started with a new website, go to Rocket Cairo. Reach out to me. I'll be happy to talk to you about that. I know some of you. I have a decent number of people that have talked to me about it recently that are sort of sitting on the fence. So don't be like, Jonathan, don't wait too Long, like it's super sooner is better than later. If you are also a podcast listener and you know who you people are. Uh, let's see. All right, so here's. Here's the basic idea, is that one of the things that's interesting about chiropractors is chiropractors often say that I'm a chiropractor, but I do something different, or they say, like, I'm not like most chiropractors. And the reason that that's funny to me is because I hear so many chiropractors say it. And I don't know what percent. I don't know what percentage of chiropractors say it, but it seems like I hear it just as often as anything else. So my thought is that if everybody's different, then no one's different. And I know what chiropractors mean by that. Like, when they say that, they're typically talking about clinical stuff. But I would argue that chiropractors are very different just from the standpoint of your particular talents, your particular opportunities, your particular. Your particular interests. Marketing things. Like, there's just. We are going to be all very unique. Like, some of us are more extroverted, some of us are more introverted. Some of us are really good on. On a podcast, and some of us are really good speaking, and some of us really good on video, and some of us are really good at writing, and some of us are really good face to face and shaking hands and kissing babies and that sort of thing. There are things that you're going to have an area of skill that's going to be better or worse than other chiropractors. So from a marketing standpoint, one of the things that I think is a mistake is for a chiropractor to look at something that somebody else is doing, even if it's a chiropractor that's in your area that's doing well and try to copy and paste what that person's doing. I think that that's a mistake. And my approach, from a coaching standpoint, from a training standpoint, because my experience with coaching as a chiropractor is I would. I would ask for some help or get a coach or get a practice management group or something like that. And none of the groups ever talked to me or discussed issues with me and my practice and my. From the standpoint of me uniquely as an individual, it was always like, here's what. Here's what I said. So you say it and you'll be successful, too. Here's what I did. And if you did it, you'll be successful too. Or you do it, you'll be successful too. They were, like, trying to create little versions of themselves all around the country and all around the world. That's never been my goal from a podcasting standpoint and also from a chiropractic coaching and mentoring standpoint. You know, when I created that Next Step program, and as I've. As I add material to it, I try to be very conscious of how it's laid out and the information that I give, understanding that what I'm attempting to do is give people structure and give people systems and give people thoughts and give people understanding of things so that they can make the best decision that is unique for their practice and unique for their situation. Because we are all different. And if we attempt to force something because, oh, Jerry did this and he was successful, well, you're not me. I mean, one of me is more than enough. It is too much. So trying to be me is silly. I'm not you. And when I first started experiencing this sort of thought process was actually when I started getting help outside of the chiropractic profession. My last. There were two people. One of them was a friend of mine who considered himself a business coach. I guess he didn't have a specific niche. He just kind of. I don't know what he considered himself. He was one of these six. He's one of these success guys, and he wanted to get into coaching and whatever. And I knew him from. He was one of my patients. And I actually knew him from the. From the area, from networking and whatnot. And so he was someone that I started sitting down with, and he started addressing my success and problems and issues in a different way. He wasn't trying to make me into him because he wasn't a chiropractor. He wasn't a person who had. Had. He doesn't have patient scripts and things of that nature. He didn't come at it from that standpoint. He came at it from a different perspect because he wasn't trying to make me into him. I had another woman that was. She considered herself a business coach, was somebody I also. She was somebody I paid. We sat down and had meetings every month. And it was sort of an accountability. And she was a sounding board. And what was really great about that experience was that she also wasn't a chiropractor. She just wasn't someone who. She was willing to talk to me about my business and my goals and my struggles and the Things that I was going through and helped me work through those things. But her philosophy was, you know about your practice more than I do. Like, you know about your niche more than I do. You know about your people more than I do. Because at that point in my career, I was very far along in being a chiropractor. So I didn't need someone to tell me how to be a chiropractor. But it was nice to have. Get some advice and have somebody to talk to, because sometimes being a practice, being in practice by yourself is kind of a lonely place. So that was what I was paying her for. And what I learned through that, and which is I'm sort of kind of talking a lot about this, kind of setting up the whole thing. But what I learned through that is that because everybody is unique and because everybody is. Is different, that understanding how to think and understanding. And I don't mean from the standpoint of thinking positively. I just mean being able to think through stuff, being able to think through things and being able to process, like, what needs to be done now, what doesn't need to be done, what's important, what's not important, what's working, what's not working. I've talked a lot about that. The concept of, do I keep it? Do I tweak it, Do I scrap? Requires a certain level of business maturity and emotional maturity and all that sort of thing to be able to do that process. Well, because I could sit down with my kid, who's a teenager, I can sit down with my kid and say, hey, should you keep doing this? Should you scrap it? Should you tweak it? What's your thought? And because he's not fully developed as a human and he only has a certain amount of life experience, he may go through that exercise, but come to the conclusion that is wrong or different or not ideal because he doesn't have experience in that area. So you do have to learn. You have to learn how to think, you have to learn how to process. You have to be willing to make mistakes. But I. What I learned is that the structure and the ability to think and the. The concepts are going to be more important for individual chiropractors than it is for me to say, this is what Jerry said, so this is what you should say, this is what Jerry did, so this is what you should do. I don't think that that's terribly helpful. So I say all that to say this. This is a marketing structure for your practice. This is a way of thinking about your marketing and allowing you to customize it however you want while staying within the structure. And the structure looks like this. If we take all the marketing options that are available to you as a chiropractor, whether you are overseas or whether you're in the states, or whether you're wherever you are at, you're going to be able to put most of that stuff into one of three categories. There's internal marketing, there's external marketing, and what I call retention marketing. Now some of the things are going to overlap, meaning like a website for instance. I talk to you guys about websites all the time. I think websites are mostly external marketing tools. I think that's how they're best best use. But there are chiropractors who put content on their websites for their existing patients. Whether that's a newsletter, whether that's a blog, whether that's a patient hub of some sort, or maybe even products that they sell through their website. Those are things that have an internal marketing and possibly even like a retention marketing element to them. So there are some overlap with some of these things. But what I want to challenge you to do as chiropractors is if you keep the structure in mind of internal marketing, external marketing, and retention marketing, and you say, I'm going to make sure that I have a bare minimum, and this is bare minimum of one system or one strategy that I'm doing in each of these categories. That should be your starting point for your marketing. Now which one, what should you do in each category? That's up to you. And that is really where you have to evaluate. What are your talents, what are your opportunities, what are your interests? You have to figure out what makes the most sense for you. So let's kind of go through each of these categories real quick. And then your homework and your, your, you know, not that anybody likes homework, but the homework for you and the challenge for you is going to be to take an honest look at your marketing and say, do I at least have one in each category? And if I'm at a place in my career where it makes more sense, where I have to be doing a lot more external marketing, how do I put more in that basket? Or if maybe you've been in practice for a while, you have a more established practice and it makes more sense for you because you, you're wanting to move in the direction of, of referral, having a referral based practice, then you would say to yourself, how do I, how do I bump up my internal marketing? So, so you can take this structure, look at it and you could Start now making better decisions for your situation as a chiropractor. And that's my intention for all of my people, whether you're listening to my podcast, your next step member, or your website client or something like that, that's my hope for you. So first we'll just start with internal marketing. Internal marketing is really straightforward. You're basically using your existing patients to get you more patients. This would be in most cases considered a referral based practice in our modern day. I will throw in reviews with that as well. I think that those are probably the two simplest way to think about internal marketing. Your existing people are either telling someone in person or telling people online that you're doing a great job and they're referring to you. Now, we can get into how to do that. We can get into ways of getting more reviews, systems and things of that nature. But if you're going to sit around and wait for reviews to happen or wait for referrals to happen, and you're not creating an environment where they're normal and creating an environment where people can do these things, they do these things as part of a natural extension of being in your practice, you're really missing out. You're going to get like a fraction of the amount of referrals and reviews that you could possibly get versus if you're being proactive. Now, there are ways to be more obnoxious, obnoxiously proactive. And there's ways of being more passively proactive and less obnoxious. Being an introvert myself and being. I get uncomfortable easily with human interactions. I can talk to a mic all day, but when there's another human, I get uncomfortable quickly and easily. Which means I like to have strategies and I like to have approaches with people. When I'm dealing with people that are very, very low on the obnoxious scale, they're very low on the intrusive scale because otherwise it makes me uncomfortable. And I don't think that ever helps. Now some people are going to be more comfortable with being more straightforward than others. That's sort of why the beauty of this structure is that you say, hey, I need to do internal marketing, I need to get more reviews, I need to get more referrals. How do I create an environment to do that? How do I create system to do that? And you know, how, how can I put these together in a way that makes sense for me personally and for my practice? Don't, don't resist the idea simply because you haven't seen it done in a way that works with you, you could find a way that it works with you. External marketing, really straightforward external marketing is just any way you're reaching out to people that are not existing patients. This is going to be, even networking is considered if those, if that networking partner is not your, is not a patient of yours, that would be considered external marketing, even though those are people that are referring to you. This could be done online, offline, it could be expensive, it could be cheap, it could be long term, short term. These are things obviously you need to take into consideration based on your timing. If you're just getting started in practice, you're most likely going to be doing whatever is cheap and fast. You know, you're going to be probably putting your, you know, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and doing everything that is cheap and, and people that you can, you want to focus on things that are, get you new patients right away if you've been in practice a little bit longer. I have people sometimes it'll reach out to me about things like Google Ads or search engine optimization. And if they need people right away, I'm like, hey, you, you should look at Google Ads. You know, you should. That's, that's the, that's going to be a quicker turnaround versus doing search engine optimization. Now if you're a practice that's more stable and you want to be referral based, you want to get more people from search and you want that to be better two months from now, three months from now, four months from now, Search engine optimization is great. I love search engine optimization. And the difference between being low on the search rankings for important keywords and being high in the search range for important keywords is the difference between a successful practice and a practice that's struggling with that said, if you need patience this month and you only have a few hundred dollars or you have a thousand dollars to spend or something like that, and that's it, and you're going to go take a swing. You want to take a swing with Google Ads if you are needing somebody right away versus doing search engine optimization. But either way, all of those things are outreach, what should be happening. And I have talked about this recently on the podcast, what should be happening is every single month there should be people that are learning about your practice this month who didn't know you last month. And that should be happening through internal means and external means, through community involvement, whatever. There's a bunch of different ways to do that, but you just want to have, you want to be constantly adding people to the Top end of your funnel, which is awareness. So that that needs to be happening. External marketing, there's tons of ways of doing it. Cheap, expensive, long term, short term, online, offline. The difficult thing as a chiropractor is you're going to have to stop and evaluate your situation. You have to be honest about what, what, what your budget is, what your time frame is, what your talents are, what your opportunity is. And then you have to make the best decision because you can't do everything. Last thing we'll talk about is retention marketing. Retention marketing to me is just having systems in place and having a structure to the way you do things so that your patience. There's two things when I think about retention. Number one is short. The short term retention aspect of care is I want this person to complete their care, whatever that care is, if it's a couple weeks, couple months, whatever that happens to be, you want that person to have a start, middle and end to their kind of initial phase of care. If someone is not going through that. And you'll see this. When chiropractors have a bad time with retention, they don't do a very good job of onboarding people. They don't have good follow up. Like they have just a messy. You're sort of leaving people to their own devices. When you leave people to their own devices, they're going to assume that chiropractic is only for short term pain management. And the, the millisecond that they start feeling better, they're going to assume that they are fine, their body is healed, they don't need the chiropractor anymore. And, and if you have them come back beyond that point, you're just trying to take their money. That's how people think when left to their own devices. Now I know that there are chiropractors out there that have unnecessary care plans and unnecessary recommendations. I'm going to assume if you're listening to this podcast, that that's not the direction that you tend to go in terms of your practice style and the way you take care of patients. So those of us who want to do what's best for our patients and want to be honest and want to take someone through care and really want to help, not only help someone be better, but help them stay better, there is a process to that that requires a level of commitment that goes beyond being absolutely miserable in pain. And if we don't do a good job of onboarding people, helping them understand, and I'm not talking about waterboarding them with philosophy, but there are some things people need to understand about how their body works, how your practice works. There needs to be agreement that is that the, the patient has agreed to under like what they're doing and what the plan is and what you're doing going forward. There's a process to onboarding someone where you can get a good amount of follow through initially. And if you're in a situation where people are coming in two, three, four visits and they're not completing that initial care or they're not doing what you would like them to do, and that's a normal thing for your practice, you're, you're messing up some of your retention elements, retention marketing elements. So there's two things that happen because of that. Number one is the person doesn't follow through with care and that hurts your business. So if we're just talking about from a business standpoint, that hurts your business. But the other part of it is the reason you wanted them to complete their care is because that is going to help them get a better result from your care and that's going to help them be more stable. They're going to be more satisfied with their results from your practice. If people are leaving early, they're less likely to get full benefit from your practice. They're less likely to be long term happy with their, their issues with you, and they're more likely to not come back when they need a chiropractor again, because you haven't really done a very good job of establishing the doctor patient relationship that you're just someone that, you know that it's like having someone cut your grass that one time. It's like, oh, I needed my grass cut. I had somebody cut my grass. Well, who is it? I don't know, some guy. You don't want to be some guy in someone's healthcare history. You want to be their chiropractor. That's, that's what you're trying to do with real retention. So the two aspects of real retention is you want them to follow through with whatever the recommendations are when they're coming in with an issue. If they need some sort of structure to that recovery, you want them to follow through with that process. And then secondarily you want to establish the doctor patient relationship so that this person comes back next time they need a chiropractor. Now there are going to be some people that use chiropractic care on a fairly regular basis for the rest of their life. That's going to be people that have acute issues, that are chronic issues. Sorry, said that wrong. Chronic issues that need management or people that are kind of health nut weirdos that are doing it anyway. Now there are some chiropractic circles that make you think that there's everybody stays, pays and refers and nobody ever leaves and everybody becomes a wellness patient. That's ridiculous and silly. The people that generally stick around for a long time and are your regulars, even if they're not in a really, really acute situation, are generally going to be people that are dealing with chronic issues that you're helping them manage or your rare unicorn kind of health nut. Someone who is far more proactive with their health than what the average person is. Those are going to be your two categories. Everybody else is going to fall into the category. If they feel like they need you, they will come ask for help. When someone initially does that, I think it's your responsibility as a chiropractor to come up with some sort of plan for. Here's what we're going to do to get you heading in the direction that you want to go. And after that point, if they want to use chiropractic more kind of sporadically, I always, I always gave my patients the permission to do that. So retention marketing, like your two ideas and philosophies around retention marketing, your two areas you'd want to focus on are going to be onboarding and follow up. Those are going to be your two things. And like I said, I've done podcasts about those things. There's a lot of information about those things in my next step program. That's your basic idea. So if we step back from all of this, what we have is we have three ways of marketing and growing your practice. Number one, in no particular order, is internal marketing. Obviously, if you're just getting started, you're not going to be doing a lot of that because you don't have a lot of patience. Number two, that does. You should still be aware of it, by the way, even if you have only a few patients, be aware of it. Build your practice with the mindset of internal marketing so that as you grow your practice, you continue to grow from within. So don't ignore it, but just don't make it your primary thing. If you're just getting started, next you have external marketing. I would just flip flop what I just said about internal marketing. When you're just getting started, you're going to do primarily external marketing because you don't have any patience. If you have an established practice and you have a lot of people that are regulars, I would start Focusing more on internal marketing than external marketing. Like kind of maybe cut down a little bit on some of the stuff that you're doing outside. If you're doing a lot of external stuff, or maybe not even, maybe not doing it initially. I mean, if you, if you got. Don't cut it off if that's what you're living off of. But if you start ha. If you have a lot of patience and a practice is established and you start focusing on internal marketing, you can have the potential to have a. Get a lot from that because you have a lot of patience. This is like when somebody gets a hold of me asking to help them get more reviews and do reputation management. Well, I'll send out text requests asking your patients to leave reviews. But if you have seven patients, it doesn't make any sense to pay someone two or $300 a month or $400 a month to help you get more reviews. When you have seven people, like reach out to them yourself, that doesn't make any sense. But if you have a practice that's been around for 10 or 15 years and you have hundreds of patients or thousands of patients, it might make sense for you to have someone help you with reputation management because you have the potential to get a lot more from that because you have a lot more patients to pull from. So internal marketing, external marketing, and then retention. Retention falls in. Like retention should be something that everyone's focusing on whether you have a new practice or an old practice, whether you're established or you're just getting started. You don't want a leaky bucket. It's a terrible way to run a practice. And it doesn't matter if you're running a wellness practice or an acute care practice, you still want patients to follow this. The principles are the same. You want patients to follow through with their initial recommendations. You want people to come back whenever they feel that, whenever they're going to use a chiropractor. That's true whether you're doing a wellness patient, wellness practice or acute care practice. So start there with your retention and then figure out how else to apply that information or those philosophy, your philosophy to that and kind of however else you're going to do it. So that's it. The bare minimum is, is three, one of one of each of those things. Most successful practices have more than one in each of those categories, and I would encourage you to do that too. But you got to start with one. So start with one and go from there. If you want help with some of this stuff and coming up with ideas of ways to market and ways to grow your practice. Check out my Next Step program. If you want help with your website, go to Rocket Cairo and reach out to me asking for help with the website. I'm done. I'm out of here. I'll talk to you guys on the next episode.