370- The Top Chiropractic Growth Strategies for 2023

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 today's episode, we're talking growth strategies for 2023. We just got into the year and if you're looking at your schedule and you'd like to have it a little bit more full over the next 15 minutes or so, we're going to go through some action packed, super pragmatic ways that you can build, grow and develop your practice in 2023. These are some of the personal strategies that I'm going to be utilizing and I hope that you can take at least one of them and implement in your practice. I'll pretty much guarantee that you will see a positive result because it's built on tenants that work, not fads or hacks or anything like that. We'll talk through that in specificity on today's episode. Before we get started, I want to say a few words about Patient Pilot by the smart chiropractor 3x ROI guarantee. If you have not booked a demo with our team to see how we can help your practice this year, please head over and do so. The smartchiropractor.com, click book a demo. If we don't think you're a good fit, we'll give you an honest answer and let you know that if we do think you're a good fit, we'll give you a 3x return on investment guarantee. You're not going to find that anywhere else. If we can help you, we'd love to help you. And for so many docs out there listening right now, that click can make all the difference in the world in terms of what happens in your practice this year. Book a demo, have a conversation with our team, the smart chiropractor.com but as I said at the top on today's episode, we're talking specific growth strategies and I live in the marketing world. I love engagement, geek out, on entrepreneurship, on business, on marketing, and I learned a few things along the way and through running my own businesses as well. There's certainly things that work wonderfully. There are things that don't work as wonderfully and I want to highlight a few of the things that I'm going to encourage you to think about as we head into this year that I think will work really, really well, for your practice, really, regardless of your philosophical approach, regardless of your technique, these are just tenets. And sometimes we just need to be reminded of the tenets of the basics of the foundation so that we can get the results that we desire. So I'm going to start with a great thing to do this year is to literally take a few moments, meet with your team, or do it yourself. Write down everything you're doing from a marketing perspective. Now, I want to be super clear when I say marketing, don't be so myopic. I'm not talking about just paid advertising. I'm talking about marketing. Do you have a website? Are you putting money into SEO? Are you using email marketing? Are you using text marketing? Are you putting out content, though, across YouTube, across Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, you name it. Those are all marketing endeavors. I want you to write all of those down. Maybe it's events, of course, online or in person. Those are all great things. And look, looking at that is going to give you a clear understanding of what are you actually doing. Like, what are those actions that you're taking? And what I'm going to say now sounds ridiculous, ridiculously simplistic, but I have to remind myself of this all the time in my own businesses. Do more of what's working. You know, literally take a list of everything that you're doing from a marketing perspective, then look at it and say, how is this working for me? And do more of that. We have such a shiny object syndrome as entrepreneurs. I use a slide of this when we talk about patient pilot. Standing on a pile of gold. That's your email list. And looking out into the distance, you're standing on the pile of gold, looking out in the distance. Should I be on TikTok and Snapchat? How about use the email list of people that like, you know, you know, that you already have, that you can utilize and connect with each week to generate reactivations, to build better retention, to generate referrals. Often as entrepreneurs, as business people, as chiropractors, even taking care of care of people in our communities. We get shiny object syndrome. We see new platforms, we run around new ad campaigns, but we don't double and quadruple down on what's already working. So I'm going to encourage you. Again, take a moment, write down some of the marketing activities that you did last year. Events, webinars, SEO, paid ads could be a component of that text email marketing. And, and look at where your holes are. What do you know you should be doing? But aren't currently doing and what are you doing that is working and do more of that Often I'll talk to docs and they might be, let's say running. I don't mean to pick on paid ads, but they may be running paid ads. The paid ads continue to work less and less, cost more and more, and the doc just spends more into that. I would say that the channel that needs either a strategy change or, or it's something that maybe you should be looking in a different place to get those results. There are so many ways that you can get out in your community. There are so many ways you can market your practice that you shouldn't feel beholden to paid advertising being 90% of your marketing. As a matter of fact, I think it should be 10%, 15%. Your marketing should be wide and deep and then your paid advertising should be the icing on that cake. In other words, the marketing is the cake, the paid advertising, the icing. And so many chiropractors have that flipped around their cake is, is the paid advertising and maybe there's a little bit of ice spotty icing. That's the actual marketing that they're doing. There are so many ways to get out there in your community. So list these down, knock out what's not working here, what is and what do I want to do more of? If you're starting to see traction on Instagram, do more of that. If you're finding that events online or offline webinars or in person dinner with a docs are working, what can you do to do more of that? And don't get shiny object syndrome where you're looking out into the distance feeling like oh my gosh, you know, I need to be on TikTok. When you haven't touched Facebook, you haven't touched Instagram in any meaningful way, you're not doing email marketing, you're running a few paid ads and you're curious about whether you should be creating on TikTok or not. That's an example of just you're jumping way ahead. Take one step at a time, double and quadruple down on what's working and identify those holes. See what you're not doing. That's the low hanging fruit. Gosh. We're not marketing via email in a significant way. We don't have a welcome or onboarding campaign. We don't have a lead magnet or a new patient pop up on our website. We're not sending weekly email newsletters to generate reactivations. Do those first before you worry about the latest and greatest new platform that could change tomorrow before you start dumping money into more paid ads, which are difficult to convert. So do more of what's working. I'll say that to myself just as much as anybody else. A second thing to keep in mind is generating more emails. The money is in your list, and so many of us underestimate the value of collecting emails. And I touched on it briefly when I said about your website, But I want to dive a little bit deeper because this is an area. I spoke about this this past weekend in Orlando, and I asked docs in the room, and I'll ask you to think about this yourself as you're listening. How many people visit your website each and every month? And a lot of. A lot of docs don't know their website traffic. That's okay, but. But many. I know some listening right now. You do know, or you could look it up pretty darn easily. The doc that raised their hand said, I think I have about 1,000 visitors per month. We say by all the research I've done, the average chiropractor, for example, has about 750 website visitors per month. This doc said, I know. I know the answer. I have a thousand visitors per month. We said, wonderful. How many of those visitors become new patients in your practice? So how many new patients do you get from your website each month? And he was like, I don't know, zero to five. Like, I have 20 new patients that come in each month. I probably have 0 to 5 that come in off my website. Now, the stark thing here, obviously, is how do you have a thousand people visiting your website and zero to five of them choosing you as their chirofractor? You probably heard me say it on this podcast before, Nobody cruises chiropractic websites for fun except for me. So if they made it to your website, a chiropractor in a town, they are probably live local and are probably looking for a chiropractor. They just didn't convert right then. They just didn't pick up the phone right then. But if you don't have anything on your website to collect their email address, you have what's going on right now, what this doc had going on, and probably what you have, where you have 10,000, 12,000, 20,000, 8,000 people visiting your website, one all potential patients every year, and nothing's coming from it. And you're probably spending money on your website, you're driving traffic to your website, and this is just a huge missed opportunity in pretty much every single chiropractic. Practice. So how do you, how do you change that? How can you maximize it? You have to have what we call a new patient pop up. But you could also say a lead magnet. You have to have an email opt in box pop up on your website. Even if you're converting 1 to 2% of that traffic, you can start doing the math on that. You're letting all of it go right now. Literally, if you have two patients come in extra per month, that's awesome. And that's not much if you have hundreds if not a thousand plus people visiting your website. But you have to give them a reason to do so. That's where a new patient pop up or a lead magnet comes in. A new patient pop up or a lead magnet. A great way to think about it, just to get super practical on it, is we utilize seven days to seven days to headache relief, seven days to low back pain relief, seven days to better sports performance. And here's the reason why. You can insert seven days to blank, right? So blank would be. What is the primary challenge your ideal person, patient, website visitor is dealing with? You want this to speak to them? Super, super. Specifically, the more specific you are, the better. So what's the number one thing that's going to get the attention of the person visiting your website? Ideally, your ideal patient. The second component is seven days to seven days to do it is great because that's stimulating curiosity. Somebody visiting the website says, man, this guy's gonna give me the information. This gal's gonna give me the information to learn how to take care of this issue on my own in the next week. Awesome. This is where we say 2%. I mean, 2%'s a low ball number, but, but 1 to 2% of the hundred people visiting every a hundred people visiting your website. If it's a good lead magnet, they're definitely gonna opt in because they're like, cool. And if you don't have it, you're missing all of this. Well, guess what happens once they enter their email address, you have it connected to. In patient pilot, we do this automatically for every member. We have it connected to a campaign on the back end. So the patient immediately receives that information. The website visitor immediately receives the information. Hey, thanks for picking up this information. Here's why this is important. Here's where you click to download it. And it's a nice PDF. Well, guess what? The next day they receive an email follow up. Again, this is all automated. You're not individual emails, all Campaigns and automated works 24, 7, 365 lays on top of your website. It's awesome. They receive an email the next day, hey, hope you were able to download it yesterday. If not, here's a link. And by the way, here's my two favorite items in that guide. So now you're guiding them, right? Well, you can probably already see where this is going. You're going to email them and have that campaign set up where, where by the end of the week, I'm paraphrasing, but basically the email saying, hey, if you haven't got over the hump or got 100% of the result you hoped for, we can help. We do this all day, every day in our practice for hundreds, if not thousands of people in our community. And we'd love to help you here. Here's click to call or click to hop on our online scheduler and schedule your appointment. You can see how powerful that is because instead of it now just being cold traffic, you've built a relationship over that week. You've given awesome information that's beneficial to them. Key component that lead magne beneficial to them, which is why you want seven days to what's their problem? How do they overcome it? And then from there you're able to guide them throughout that week, build a relationship and trust and rapport. And I can tell you a majority of the people who opt in for that lead magnet are going to call and for lack of a better way to say it, convert to care. Because you've provided information, you've built trust and it's just a great thing to do. If they never call, great, you're still going to be wonderful in their eyes and they're probably gonna refer people, hey, you gotta check this doc out. They're giving out information. They helped me get over the hump here, maybe I'll share. This is a way to really get out there. This is true marketing. This is a way to get out there to provide value and then to receive the benefit on the backend. We always say teach and invite consistently. So having a lead magnet on your website is a really, really powerful growth strategy for 2023. And it's not new. Lead magnets and pop ups have been around for years, but I can tell you less than 1% of chiropractors utilize this strategy. Even though they're paying for their website, maybe paying for SEO, they're driving traffic there and they're letting it all just fall out. The bottom thousand people per month in 0 to 5 are converting. Yikes that you can do better than that. And a Lead magnet and exit intent pop up allows you to do so. The final strategy I want to talk about before we wrap up today's episode is this is not gonna be rocket science here. Staying in communication. We talked about standing on that pile of gold earlier. Your email list in your ehr, it might be on your phone right now. If you're listening on a computer, maybe it's in your ehr is an unbelievable amount of value. These are. There's. How many people have you seen in your career? Hundreds, Thousands? All of them should be in communication. You should be in communication with them each and every week through a weekly email newsletter. Staying in touch with your list consistently is by far, I'm going to say, the number one growth strategy you need to enable in 2023 in your practice. It just makes sense. And guess what? It provides a better patient experience when you stay in consistent communication with your list. The money is in your list. You're going to see reactivations. How does this pan out in practical format? We tell you straight up. The average doc that we work with, the patient pilot that we send automated email campaigns, including a weekly email newsletter, has a list of 1,000. 1,100 is about our average. With that list size, we see an average of 26 reactivations each month. That's what we see in the data. That's over 300 practices, over a million emails a month. So we're really, really tight on that data. We have a really good idea of predictive analytics. We know what will happen. So if you have an email list, if you have past patients that you don't stay in consistent communication with, you're just missing out. Now, one of the things you might be thinking of, weekly email. Yikes, that sounds like a lot. I wouldn't want to get a weekly email. Here's the thing about quantity. One email a year is way too much. If the email totally stinks. And clearly you can't send advertisements of these deep discounts each and every week. That will get annoying, like, super quick. This is why the weekly email is built on teach and invite. It's built on benefits. What are you teaching them each week? Something engaging, entertaining, informative. That's the teaching component. How do you invite them to take a next step? If you're struggling with this, click to call. If you want to experience the benefit that Sally did that we just touched on, click to hop on our online scheduler. That's the call to action or invitation. And then you do that consistently. A weekly email newsletter is a must in service based businesses in chiropractic practices in your practice because it's going to generate consistent reactivations once you get going. And also it extends the relationship you have with your patients. The final example I'll use, we've all had this happen before. Patient comes in, I'll use a generic example, but it happened to me. Patient comes in with low back pain, you take great care of the patient. You don't all of a sudden you don't see the patient for a while. It's been two years. Patient comes back, they have low back pain, they're like, oh man, you took care of me so great. A couple years ago I had to come back. You know, you start talking with them and they say, you know, about a year ago I had a neck issue but I didn't want to come to you. I went to another chiropractor because I know you're a low back doc and you sit there shaking your head. But the question is, what have you done to prove that otherwise? Well, a weekly email newsletter that keeps them engaged with your practice, that helps them understand who you are, what you do, how you take care of people, the full scope and gamut of your modalities, and in a way that speaks to them. That is a powerful asset in your marketing arsenal. That is a fantastic growth strategy for 2023. So that's a lot of information. If you have any questions, I know there's a lot of details around this stuff. If you have any questions, hit me up. Jeffeedencebasedchiropractor.com, i'll be happy to help. If you haven't left us a rating or review yet, I'd love to see that. Scroll on down, tap that number of stars, leave a line or two of feedback. Helps more docs find out about this podcast and I really, really appreciate you tuning in. Before we sign off today, if you have not picked up your free Power Step insoles do so. I love these. My dad uses them. They're developed by a podiatrist over 30 years ago. Pro.powerstep.com sample pro.powerstep.com sample use the code EBC evidence based chiropractor. They'll hook you up with a free pair, see what's up. I think they're a great service. They're a great opportunity for chiropractors and people ask about this kind of stuff all the time. You need to have a go to resource. Power Step is the one that I would recommend. And finally, World Spinecare just does awesome work. If you are looking to make a tax deductible charitable donation, I'm gonna encourage you to make it to WorldSpineCare. WorldSpineCare.org EBCPodcast WorldSpineCare.orgEBCPodcast they have over 50 chiropractors volunteering in international clinics. Quite frankly, in places that barely have even electricity. I mean, we think about access to chiropractic care around the globe. It is woeful in so many places. World Spine Care is doing a great job to Change that. So worldsofpinecare.org EBCPodcast Otherwise, I hope you have a fantastic week in practice 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.