Jerry (0:01)

All right, guys, welcome to another episode of the Rocket Chiro podcast, the business and marketing podcast for chiropractors. I'm going to answer a question for you guys today. And actually this is something I would like to start doing more on the podcast is to have a listener driven Q and A type podcast episodes. I don't know how often I'm going to do them. It sort of depends on how many questions that I get. But I decided to kind of start off this concept or start off this idea of with a question I get asked a lot and that is what type of marketing should I do? Now, if you want to submit a question for the podcast that I could potentially talk about, whether you're just, whether you're a client of mine, whether you're just a listener to the podcast, or even if you're a student that wants to ask a question, you want me to talk about it on the podcast? You can go to RocketKiro.com AskJerry, A, S, K, J, E, R, R, Y, all one word. Or you can reach out to me through Instagram, through the rocketchiro Instagram Instagram handle and you could ask me a question there. And then I would take those questions, the things that I think would be good to answer on the podcast. We could answer those on future episodes. So that's what we're going to do today. Before I get into that, I do want to say if you want a better chiropractic website, one that's going to help you attract more new patients and help you, your practice grow, go to Rocket Chiro and check out our websites. If you'd like help with your Google Ads or SEO, you can go to Rocket Chiro and reach out to me there. I'd be love to help you out. If you would like me to look at your website and SEO and give you some recommendations, give you some tips, just let you know where you're at right now in terms of how well your practice is doing and maybe give you some tips on how you can improve your website, then you can request a free practice assessment. There's no pressure, no obligation, it's just a free assessment. I'll do a custom video, I'll send it over to you and let you know what I think about your website and your search engine optimization. All right, so the question is what type of marketing should I do? And I'll tell you what's bad about this question. What's bad about this question is that there isn't a particular answer. Because the idea that if I can do it, you can do it. Like that's not a true statement. That what's true is if I can do it, somebody else can do it. And this is true. If you meet somebody at a seminar or somebody in your town, they say, well, if I can do it, you can do it. That's not exactly a one to one true statement. What's true is when one person can do it, somebody else can do it. If one person can run a four minute mile, somebody else can run a four minute mile. Now does not mean if somebody can run a four minute mile, that Jerry can run a four minute mile, because I can't do that. So saying that I can do something, therefore everyone can do it really removes the individuality of your situation. Your talents, your giftings, your area timing, all of that stuff. It just sort of gets removed from the equation. I don't think that's fair. So when it comes to marketing, there isn't a way of saying, like every chiropractor should do X, Y, Z, and that's how you're going to be successful. So what we're going to talk about when answering this question, what type of marketing should I do? Is I'm going to give you some things to think about to help you evaluate your own situation, to answer this question for you, because nobody on a podcast can actually answer this question for you. And even my clients that get a hold of me that we're doing, we're talking on the phone, I have to walk them through this same idea and they can answer the question for them. Now they may, they would have the luxury if they're talking to me where I can sort of help them make those decisions. Oh, okay, this sounds like this makes sense. Because of what you're telling me. We obviously can't do that on the podcast. So I'm just going to give you some things that you need to think about to help you make the best decision for your practice and for your marketing. So first thing I'm going to talk about is there's three categories that I want you to consider. And I think you should do marketing in all three of these categories. That's going to be internal marketing, external marketing, and retention, or reactivation. And retention and reactivation is just sort of a way of staying connected and maintaining that doctor patient relationship with your patients over a long period of time. If your patients come in once or twice, you never see them ever again. They never, anytime they use a chiropractor in the future, they just go find somebody else who's closer or there's a coupon or whatever. That's a. That's a bad relationship. That's a bad business. You have a leaky bucket. You don't want that. You want to have a practice where you're out externally marketing, like reaching out to people who don't know about you, that are new to your practice. You want to have marketing that is internally marketing, meaning you are generating patients from the relationships you already have. And then you want to make sure that you have systems in place and marketing tactics in place that are staying connected to your current patients and your past patients. So. So that you have a recurring business where people that when they use a chiropractor in the future, they come back to you. You're their chiropractor. They're not going to somebody else. They're not shopping around. You've established that a relationship, you've stayed connected, you provide value, and then now they're reconnecting with you. I think you should do marketing in all three of those categories. What you focus on more will sort of depend on where you're at. And this is something we're going to talk about a little bit later when we talk about timing. But if you're brand new in practice, you can't focus all your energy on retention and internal marketing because you don't have any patience. That doesn't make any sense. Now, if you've been in practice for a really, really long time, you may be able to focus most of your energy on internal marketing and retention and reactivation because you have so many people that have been in your practice before. So timing really does matter. Which is also why, once again, we're back to there isn't a specific answer for everyone, but all chiropractors have these three categories. External marketing, internal marketing, and then retention or reactivation, that sort of marketing. Now, within that, we could also say there's ways of doing that. And we could incorporate Internet marketing or online marketing or offline marketing. So within those, you could do external marketing, you could do online and offline. Internal marketing, you could do online offline retention and reactivation. You could do online and offline. There are online ways of reaching out to new people. There are offline ways of doing it. And I'll tell you, they don't replace each other. I just had a conversation with this one of my, one of my close friends. We had this conversation and I feel like what I was saying and what he was saying and what I was trying to get him to understand, like it Wasn't we just. I feel like we were sort of missing each other because we got talking about the topic of a newsletter, like sending someone a print newsletter in the mail versus doing an email newsletter. And he was kind of saying, like, well, why would you send it in the mail when you could do email? And it's cheaper, it's faster, it makes sense, whatever. And I was just telling him that the one doesn't replace the other. It just doesn't. There's some overlap, but they hit people differently. The people that are attracted to the one aren't necessarily going to be attracted to the other. The fact that if you decided to do a print newsletter and there's ways of doing it, I have a whole section about that in my Next Step program for those that are interested. I even create a print newsletter for chiropractors that want to send something out. There's a whole way of doing it. There's a right way and wrong way of doing it. And if you do it right, it can still be a very beneficial thing to physically send something into mail to your patients. It could be done as it's internal marketing and it's retention marketing. It sort of hits two of those three things that we're talking about here that can be done through a print newsletter. Email newsletter could be all three. It could be retention, it could be internal marketing, it could be external marketing. If somebody has signed up for your newsletter or maybe you got names when you did a screening or something like that, where these people aren't even patients and you're sending them emails, it could be all three of those things. The point is, is that the one doesn't necessarily replace the other. You could be doing some things in house to for retention or internal marketing. And for instance, if you're reaching out to your patients, like face to face, you're reaching out to them and just saying, hey, would you leave us a review that doesn't take the place of sending someone a text with a link that allows them to leave a review easily, like, that's technology. That's sort of like an online way of doing it. But the offline way of doing it is looking them in the eyes and shaking them hand, shaking their hand and saying, hey, I would love for you to share that on Google. So there's offline and offline, online and offline ways of doing all of this stuff. So when you're deciding what should I do from a marketing standpoint as a chiropractor, I would just encourage you to step back and look at all these things and say, am I doing external marketing? Am I doing internal marketing? And do I have marketing in place for retention and reactivation? Is. Is there places or systems in there for those things? Am I doing all three of those areas? And if that's the case, that's good. That's a good baseline for where you're at. You probably have a nice balanced marketing plan. Now, three things to consider. This is something I've said a lot. I've said it on a recent podcast. So there. When you're deciding what to do specifically, then I would look at what are your talents, what are your opportunities, and what are your interests? And so external marketing, you may look at it and say, wow, I'm really interested in social media. There seems to be a really good opportunity for it. And I'm really good on camera. I'm really good with social media. Great. Like, that could be an incredible opportunity. Now, you could also say, like, for me personally, like, I don't know that I would ever be a chiropractor that posted a lot on social media if I was still in practice. It doesn't. I'm not a big social media person. Like, I like posting memes, I like doing the podcast, but that's not really social media. Like, social media is a. It's a thing, you know, it's a, it's a. There's a certain way of doing it. There's a certain, there's a certain skill to it. There's. You have to be. You have to be willing to be a certain way. And it doesn't necessarily jive with me all that well. So I would look at it and say, my interest of doing social media in that way is not very high, which is why I don't have a huge following on social media, is because my interest isn't very high. Uh, am I talented at social media? I don't, I don't even know that I'm talented at social media. So I would look at that and say, maybe that's not the best opportunity for me. I probably have opportunities doing something else. So when you're evaluating these online, offline, internal marketing, external marketing, retention, you have to ask the question, where's my talent? Where's my opportunity? Where there's potential. Here you're just getting started in practice and you're saying, I'm gonna focus all my energy on retention. That's not smart. You could be the most talented retention marketing chiropractor in the world. You could have a very high interest in it. But if you have six patients total the opportunity, it just isn't there. You don't have an amazing opportunity to have a retention based practice when you only have six patients. You gotta focus on external marketing. And that's something we'll talk about here in just a second as far as timing goes. So once you have your categories, you have internal marketing, external marketing and your retention marketing. Now you have to ask the question, where's my talent? Where's my opportunity? Where's my interest in each of those categories? When you find the overlap of all those things, that's really when you have a really tremendous opportunity. Now the other thing I'll say, which is not even in my notes, is you don't have to be great at all of this stuff. You may be leaning a lot more heavily into external marketing initially and then internal marketing as time goes on. You may not do a lot of any internal marketing or external marketing if you have big enough practice and you may be focusing exclusively on retention and reactivation and just sort of writing the momentum that you have in your practice because you have so many patients you've had in the past. So you don't have to have an even distribution of energy and input or influx of people coming from all three of these categories. I just think it's wise to have a nice balanced marketing approach. Last thing we'll talk about is this. There are some factors to consider. Timing is one of them. I sort of alluded to this already. If you're just getting started in practice, you're going to focus more heavily on external marketing. If you are have been in practice for a while, you might focus more on internal marketing and retention. If you have more money than you have time, you're going to probably focus on leveraging. And those are the other two things that we're going to talk about here. The two, the factors you want to consider is timing, money and then how much time is it going to cost you to do this? The time cost. So timing is where you at in practice. If you're just getting started, you're probably going to do more external than internal. If, if you have a lot of time in the beginning because you don't have a lot of money, you don't have a lot of patience, then you have to do marketing that's going to be focused more on put your boots, pull your, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, you know, door knocking, kissing baby, shaking hands, like that's the sort of thing you have to do. You have to do low cost marketing. You have to ease your way into spending more money on marketing. I don't think it's wise to spend high dollars on marketing when you don't have a good budget for marketing. And I do know that there's some times where you have to maybe spend a little bit more than what you're comfortable with, because you just, you just have to, you kind of have to take that, that risk. But just make sure that you're not doing something foolish in the name of, like, oh, well, I'm going to spend $5,000 on whatever, and it's going to. If it generates 10 new patients, I'll be fine. Like, I, I don't, I don't think it's wise to gamble with your last dollars. So when I say, what is the timing that has to do with where are you at in practice? How. When do you need new patients? Do you. Someone who comes to me and says, I want to do search engine optimization, I want to do managed SEO, I'd be like, yeah, we could talk about that. But you can't be in a situation where you have to have a result from that this month. That's not likely to happen with SEO. If someone were to come to me and say, I'm going to start doing networking and I want to have a bunch of new patients this month, be like, well, networking is a relationship thing. It takes time to build those relationships. Networking is generally something you're really happy you did a year from now, two years from now, three years from now. You know, when you've really established yourself in a community and it's like five, ten years into practice, that is an incredible benefit to your practice. That first couple months, it's probably going to be a lot of energy out and not a lot in. Well, if you need new patients this month, saying that you're going to focus heavily on networking and that's your big plan. You're disregarding timing. And so keep. Make sure you understand as you're deciding what do I do and what I not do is what's the. When do I need new patients? How quickly do I need them? Because that's going to determine which direction you go, where you spend your time, your energy and your money. And then last, like I said, is you're going to take into consideration money and time. If you have more money than you have time, then I would look at leveraging that. Like, get a hold of someone, have them do your Google Ads for you. Have someone do your Facebook ads, your Instagram ads, like, like, start spending money on Some of these things, it's way easier to attract patients into your practice when you have money. And most chiropractors, when you get started, you don't have money. So you have to do things that cost you time. And you have to be really, really smart with money. But if you get to the point where you have some money to spend, spend it, definitely spend it. Because it's, it's, like I said, it's just easier to, to. It's easier to attract new patients when you have money than it is when you don't. But then you have to consider time. When you got more time than you have money, you got to do things that cost you time. You might have to work on your own website, you might have to work on some of your own SEO. You might have to go network. You might have to go get out of your office and fight that introvert nature to stay in your office and just be online. And you might have to go on offline and shake some hands and kiss some babies. You might have to do that. Now, maybe long term, you don't have to do that. But once again, we have to consider, how much does it cost? How much time do I have? Consider the timing of your life as a chiropractor. So those are the things to consider when you're deciding, like what type of marketing should I do? And there isn't an exact answer. What works really well if you're in New York City, may not work really well if you're in Kansas. If you're out in the middle of nowhere in Iowa, your plan could be completely different than if you're in Miami. So don't look at what somebody else does and say, I'm going to do that exactly. And I'm going to get the exact same results. What I would encourage you to do is look at what other people are doing and, and use it as a jumping off point. Even when you do coaching and consulting. When I have Next Step members and things, my whole Next Step program is designed that way. It's designed to give you a jumping off point. It's not designed to give you a paint by numbers approach to marketing and running a practice. I don't believe in that. And I think that if you don't believe in that, you're probably better off because you're going to look at what other people are doing and say, okay, how can I apply that to me? And what ends up happening as a result of that is you become a much more competent small business owner. You start exercising that decision Making skill that you know, the ability to look through what's going on and problem solve and figure out what's going on and make the best decision for your practice. The better you get at that, the easier your practice is going to be, the easier your life is going to be as a chiropractor. Because one of the things that stresses chiropractors out the most is they find themselves in a small business kind of leadership role. And. And they've never flexed that muscle, They've never developed those muscles. So the more you force yourself to make decisions and you force yourself to troubleshoot what's going on, you force yourself to analyze the situation and make adjustments and make changes, the better you're going to get at those things. And the good news is it gets easier with time. You'll be able to see the patients you want to see. You'll be able to make the kind of money that you want to make. But you got to get to that point. And if you're constantly avoiding that aspect of being a chiropractor, you're. You're going to just constantly be stressed out because you're constantly going to be in a situation where you're in over your head. You're being a small business owner, you're being a decision maker and a leader. You're in that role, but you're not qualified to do it because you've never flexed those muscles. So hopefully this can sort of help you troubleshoot your marketing, especially going into the new year here. We got the new year coming up here in just a couple of weeks, and you want to look at your marketing plan. You want to decide, like, what is best for me to do. This is the thought process is you have to decide. You make sure that you're covering all three areas of marketing, internal, external, and retention. And then you have to decide what online, offline, where's my opportunities? Where are my talents? Where are my interests? And then you have to look at money and time and timing and all of that stuff. And you have to figure out what's best for you. And the answer is going to be different for you than it is for other people. And that's okay. That's part of what's great about being a chiropractor, part of what sucks about being a chiropractor. So hopefully this helps you. Thank you for listening to the podcast. Thank you for subscribing. Thank you for sharing the podcast with other chiropractors. If you haven't left a review yet on Apple podcasts, I'd love for you to do that. If you would like, help with your website, with growing your practice, etc. Etc. Go to Rocket Cairo. Reach out to me. I'd be happy to help you however I can. I'll talk to you guys on the next episode.