211- The 5 Most Common Marketing Mistakes of 2019

Welcome to the Evidence Based Chiropractor where each week we deliver the latest chiropractic research and marketing strategies all in the time it takes to get to your office. Now here's your host, Dr. Jeff Langmaid.

Hello and welcome to the Evidence Based Chiropractor. I AM your host, Dr. Jeff Langmaid. On this week's episode, we are going to break down the the five most common marketing mistakes that you might be making right now in your practice. We're also gonna talk about how you can overcome them. What are some strategies, some tips that you can utilize to better market your practice as we roll into 2020. As you know, the Evidence based chiropractor sits at the intersection of research and marketing. So understanding the research is half the battle. But you also have to understand how, how to put that in the proper context and how to get out there in your community to help your practice become successful. And that is what it is all about. So we're gonna break down the five most common marketing mistakes that I have seen and again, action steps that you can take to correct them. Before we get started, I will say a few words about Rocktape. 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Another way to put this, if you have read the story, brand book, it's really focusing on you instead of your customer, client or patient. And this is a huge mistake. And you can really see this on a lot of chiropractic websites. A lot of chiropractic websites, maybe yours. Talk more about the doctor, the technique that the doctor utilizes, the education that the doctor has. The old, you've heard me rally against this before. Wellness awaits you, which means nothing to anyone. As a headline on your website. That is a feature, not a benefit that now how do you start talking about benefits? Well, benefits would be things like how does somebody find pain relief if you're a relief office? How does somebody find performance benefit if you're a sports performance office? How can somebody perhaps, you know, either reduce or get off a medication deal with chronic pain? If your practice revolves around chronic pain, these are benefits to the individual. Another way to think about this would be the average person who comes into your practice when what is the why did they come in and what is their goal when they leave your office? Those are great things to focus on if you're helping them achieve their goals. That's focusing on benefits instead of features. Nobody truly cares about the technique that you utilize. Very few people, very few people care about the special table that you have. Yes, there are off chances, but that's not gonna sustain a practice. What people care about is the benefits that you can offer them. For instance, if you're a golf focused practice, they probably care less about every bit of the technology that you have. But people care a lot about being able to golf each and every week without injury and being able to play better than they have. Right? Staying in the game and improving their game is a benefit to them. The features of your practice are something that I would focus on secondarily or tertiary. Do not lead with that. You want to make sure that you have the benefits that your practice and clinic provide to the patients in your community. Front and center on every communication that you have. Common marketing mistake number two in my opinion, relying on PPC leads. So if you are only relying upon leads that come from Google or Facebook, AKA advertising, I have a feeling that you are leaving yourself exceptionally vulnerable to changes in those platforms. We saw it earlier this year in the regeneration regenerative medicine space where Google shut down all of the ads around stem cell and regenerative medicine and all of those practices that were reliant upon those advertisements have been struggling greatly to recalibrate their bearings because they didn't build a solid brand to begin with. And the same goes for your chiropractic practice. If you're only relying upon getting somebody in with a free pillow or getting somebody in based off of a specific advertisement, you are very, very vulnerable to to changes in those platforms algorithms. What you'd really like to have is a diversified way where yes, you could have some patients coming in via advertising that's healthy, but have a strong referral system in place, have great branding, be putting out content consistently online, be following up via email so that the patients who have already picked up the phone, no trust and like you have the opportunity to stay top of mind and and have the opportunity to refer their friends quickly and easily. So big marketing mistake number two is relying only on PPC leads in your practice extremely vulnerable position to be in common marketing mistake number three as we keep trucking is missing consistency. The Ben marketing is all about consistency and if you are inconsistent in your approach, regardless of your marketing platform, strategy or channel you you are going to suffer as a result of it. So within the evidence based chiropractor we talk about reaching out monthly to the other physicians in your community. You have to stay again top of mind. You have to be consistent with that outreach, not take a meeting every five years and hope for the best. You need to have consistency behind it. The same when we talk about the smart chiropractor, which solves for pretty much every single one of these common marketing mistakes. If you haven't checked out the smart chiropractor, please do so. But consistency is crucial on social media. If you're posting things haphazardly, your result is likely to be haphazard. So what you want to do in an ideal world is to be able to set up a perfectly executable strategy and calendar where you know, oh, Monday is motivational Monday, Tuesday is testimonial Tuesday, Wednesday we're breaking down research Thursday I'm showing tactical tips. For instance, that sort of strategy and that calendar will keep you accountable number one. But number two, it'll keep you consistent. And when you stay consistent, almost every social platform rewards consistency, even non social platforms. Google likes to see consistently updated websites. It helps the crawlers better identify who you are and what you do, which means you get shown to more people via SEO. So don't be inconsistent with your outreach. Make consistency a priority because your results from your marketing will improve as your consistency improves. I can guarantee that. Common marketing mistake number four not focusing enough on other businesses and collaborators. So one beautiful thing about social media is the fact that you can tag, right? You can identify, check in, tag other people and businesses in your posts and it tells them, hey, this person just tagged you in a post. I know we all are used to that, probably with our personal pages, but don't hesitate to do that with your business as well. If you have a restaurant that you love eating at, if you have a gym that you go to, interview the gym owner, tag yourself when you're there, talk about what you like, about the health, you know, the healthy aspects of what the restaurant has, talk about why you love the gym the benefits, you know, wink, wink. The benefits, you know, getting back to marketing mistake number one that you've personally seen since you started going to that gym, showcase other businesses. And if you're not focusing enough on collaborations and with other businesses, you're missing out. And here's exactly why is because anytime that you tag another business, the likelihood that they are going to reshare that with your audience, their audience, excuse me, is exceptionally high. And that gets you access to their audience. So I've spoken with a few people who are debating if they wanted to become members of Smart Chiropractor and they're like, well, our Facebook page doesn't have that many people following it. And you know, it's kind of this catch 22. Well, I don't want to put stuff out and put energy into it if there's nobody there. Well, you have to think about it the other way around. If you start putting stuff there, staying consistent, focusing on the benefits people can receive and doing collaborative interviews, Focus feed, you know, focuses just however you want to do it. You could take a picture, you could write some text, you could do video. If you're really a go getter, any of those types of collaborations where you're tagging other businesses are awesome. And it'll help grow your page at a dramatically accelerated rate and it'll showcase you to people who probably don't know who you are or what you do. So be sure in 2020, focus on other businesses. Do collaborative pieces. It will help you grow your page substantially and it'll help get new people seeing who you are and what you do. And number five ties in with all of this. And that's missing accountability. Meaning if you don't have somebody in your practice who's accountable for executing these strategies that then it's going to be difficult. Or if you're not holding yourself accountable, if you're doing it yourself, you are going to probably start slipping and focusing on features instead of benefits. You're gonna rely more on advertising. You are going to probably be a little inconsistent and you're very likely not gonna be getting out there and doing enough collaborations with other businesses if you don't have that accountability. And here's really where that boils down. Results follow actions. The so everybody is super concerned with if they run an ad. How many leads did this ad get me? That works in the advertising game. But if you are trying to build, and I think you are, if you're listening to this podcast, a sustainable practice that grows organically, that you can be proud of that's not fleeting with the times, but that is a stable, strong practice, a pillar of your community. Results follow actions. You need to be taking the right actions day in and day out to and the results will follow. Now, I know we all want results immediately, but I would encourage you focus on the action steps you can take before you worry about the results. If you're taking actions such as we broke down today Action step I'm gonna make a video or I'm gonna make a post and focus on benefits instead of features. I'm gonna take an action step and stay consistent for 30 days straight with posting across all of my pages. By emailing my patients each and every week, I I am going to stay consistent. My action step is staying consistent. My action step is I'm gonna do two collaborative videos or one collaborative video per week or one post per week highlighting and focusing on another business. When you start to take those action steps, I will again guarantee that the results will follow. The first step is not to identify the result. The first step is to commit to the action and be accountable for it. If you have are looking for an accountability buddy, so to speak, shoot me an email. Jeff the Evidence Based Chiropractor I'm happy to link some people up, but these are the five most common marketing mistakes. Now I could say that these are five most common marketing mistakes of 2019, but honestly I probably saw them in 2018 and 2017 as well. But if you want to make 2020 your best year yet, start focusing on features instead of benefits. Don't be a hundred percent reliant or 80% reliant on PPC leads and advertising. Stay consistent with your marketing focus and take effort to highlight other businesses and do collaborations with other business owners in your community and focus on taking action results. Follow action. If you want help with all of this and to automate really your social marketing, your digital outreach, your email, all of that, check out the smartchiropractor.com that's exactly what we do there. It's really a patient engagement platform at this point. I used to describe the Smart Chiropractor as a social media service, but it's evolved into so much more than that. So if you want help with writing, content, video creation, calendaring, accountability, check out the smart chiropractor.com but I would encourage if you have not written these down, write down the five most common marketing mistakes, make sure that they are not your five common marketing mistakes for 2020 and enjoy a great kickstart into a new year. Make it your best year in practice. Have a great week and I will talk to you soon.

Thank you for joining us on this episode of the Evidence Based Chiropractor. If you want to grow your practice, come back for next week's episode. If you want to grow faster, visit theevidencebasedchiropractor.com and join our MD Marketing membership today.