How to Stop Always Needing More New Chiropractic Patients | Podcast Ep. 351

Foreign hello and welcome to the Evidence Based Chiropractor. I AM your host, Dr. Jeff Langmaid. On today's episode, we're going to talk about a very important topic. This is how to stop always needing more new patients. That is a big topic. It's something we're going to address in detail, give some pragmatic action steps on how you can really stop that need. And a lot of this comes down to filling holes in your bucket, as we like to say. I'll talk about exactly what that means. We'll give action steps each and every step of the way. And my goal is, I hope that you're able to really take away from this episode some pragmatic pieces of information that you can use to better your practice. Like literally today or tomorrow. That is the goal. So stay tuned for that and much more. Before we get started, I wanna say a few words about the Payday Practice. Payday Practice is my new book. It is out available right now@thepaydaypractice.com a digital cop. Or you can pick up a hard copy, a paperback at Amazon. It's called Payday Practice. It's all about how to build monthly recurring revenue in your practice. So if those three words of monthly recurring revenue sound good to you, please check it out. The feedback has been awesome. I am gifting everybody listens to this podcast a free digital copy@thepaydaypractice.com or you can pick up and do me a super solid. Pick up a physical copy. Every single one counts on Amazon. Search the Payday Practice. But as I said at the top of the show, today we're talking marketing and practice growth. And this is going to be around how you can stop that consistent and undying need for new patients. Let's identify the problem, then we'll talk about the solution. The problem with always needing more new patients is that tactically you're at a disadvantage. What do I mean by that? Well, when you always need more new patients, things like discount advertising become very, very attractive because you need new patients. So you spend money to get those leads that come in. Biggest challenges that I've seen time and time again with paid advertising. Paid advertising, when you're doing it from a retargeting perspective or really tight around a circle of practice or to your existing audience in a retargeting way, super powerful can be a great thing. However, when you're going on demographics, just that alone and you're running discounts, you end up way overspending for difficult to convert low Revenue patients, they're the lowest quality type of new patient. We all see it, we all know it. When somebody comes in from a advertisement, there's a conversion point and you're looking for that conversion metric. And the ad company, we hope you convert this much where somebody comes in from a referral, let's say there's no conversion process. You go about your business, you let them know what you think is best and you move forward from there. We see that especially with physician referrals, which is why the evidence based chiropractor is so powerful. When another healthcare provider in your community refers a patient in, patient shows up ready to go, it's like, tell me what to do and let's get to work. As opposed to somebody coming in off a discount ad. So the challenge with the advertising, when you always need new patients, you tend to do things like paid advertising and spend more and more money month after month after month for diminishing returns month after month. The other component that drives me nuts is you might be spending 500, 1000, $1500 in management per month and then you have to spend for the ads. So you could easily be at a thousand, two thousand, three thousand. I know practices that are well over 5,000 and even 10,000, believe it or not, per month in paid advertising and they're diminishing returns. There's variability. I always think it's like day trading stocks. I don't, it's just, it's, if you do it all day, every day, you can win. Otherwise you're on the outside looking in, as they say. I guess you're either, you know, if, if you're not, if you're not sitting at the table, you might be on the menu kind of thing. So many times docs are just letting the ad companies copy and paste things across the different ad accounts. I don't think that's the best way to go about it. I think if you're gonna run ads, you really wanna focus on retargeting your website visitors, retargeting your past patients and really focusing in on who are your ideal patients, who probably aren't just, well, the person willing to come in at the cheapest price. So that's my two cents there. Now why is that such an issue or why does that become an issue? Quite often it's because you have holes in your practice bucket. Let's talk about what that means in detail. If you are not having as many of your ideal new patients come in, if you're not attracting your ideal new patients, often you Have a hole in your bucket. Because when a patient comes in, they're not your ideal patient. That means you might not be their ideal provider. And it's a short term relationship. Now what does that mean? Well, we all have patients on our schedule. We're like, I love taking care of, whether it be pediatrics, expecting moms, geriatrics, sports people. And when they come in, we're just juiced up. We are pumped about seeing that patient. We do a great job. We feel like we have great knowledge, expertise. That's an awesome thing. And we also have those patient archetypes, not individual people necessarily, but the type of patient where like, gosh, this just isn't my strong suit, it isn't my wheelhouse. And those tend to be more difficult to take care of. They're more draining from an energy perspective. And the results might be slightly under in some cases where you get the best results with the patients you love taken care of. So my point of that is you really start this process by saying to yourself, what are some things I can do to attract more of my ideal patients? Well, how do you do that? You do it through the strategy we talk about, the smart chiropractor called Teach and Invite. Consistently. If you're looking to attract more of your ideal patients, number one, you have to identify who is my ideal patient. Is it somebody 30 years old, 50 years old, 70 years old? Is it somebody that's eight months old into pediatrics? When you start to identify who your ideal patient is now you start to be able to say, what are the challenges they're struggling with? Because the challenge that somebody who's six months old might be dealing with is probably different than somebody who's 40 years old. Right. So who are those ideal patients and what are the challenges they're struggling with? Now, to put a bow on this, that's what you want to talk about. That's where you want to focus your marketing. That is where you want to teach and invite is to educate your ideal patient, which they're your ideal patient because you're passionate about them. You probably know what they're struggling with and you probably have great solutions. The question is, do they even know that? There's probably, depending upon the size of your community, hundreds, thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of your ideal patients within your circle of practice that have no clue that you exist. And the only way they're going to is by you letting them know. How do you let them know? My big statement here would be not with a discount ad, but let them know by consistently teaching about the challenges they're dealing with. That's the teach component. Invite. That's the call to action. Inviting them if they're struggling with that issue to get a solution to it in your practice. That's the invitation. And do that consistently. You can do that across social channels, with videos. You can do it across blog posts, on your website. You choose the medium. I could care less about the medium. The it's more about the message. When you teach and invite consistently based upon the challenges that your ideal patients are struggling with, you are going to start to attract more of your ideal patients, which starts to patch a hole in your practice bucket. And let's maybe be real clear, on the practice bucket, you dump new patients in the top and they're falling out all over the place and you never feel like your schedule is full. That's how you know you have a hole in your bucket. Probably you have more than one hole in your bucket is that you have a constant need for new patients and you consistently build your. You build more and more inactive patients, yet you constantly need new patients. Schedule never seems full. You always seem like you're on that roller coaster. It's unnecessary, but you gotta patch the holes because the water's falling out as fast as you're dumping people in the top. Right now, people are falling out the sides. It starts with the water that you're dumping in the top, meaning you want to attract more of your ideal patients because it's going to lead to much longer relationships than simply the transaction of that deal. So that is a super important step. Number one, hole, number two, which way too many practices have are retention issues. It's estimated, believe it or not, that up to 25% of patients do not complete their active care plan. That is wild and it probably is true. And that is a huge challenge. You've given an active care plan because of what you found during an examination and what their health goals are. You wouldn't have given the care plan, the active care plan. I don't care whether it's 2 visits, 6 visits, 12 visits, 24 visits, 36 visits. Whatever it is, it's based upon your findings and their health goals. And if they're not completing that, that's a problem. That means they're not getting the maximum benefit for the recommendations that you've provided. It also means that they're probably gonna be less likely to refer it is sub optimal when they don't complete their active care plan. The reason that's a care plan is because you thought that that was what was best. Now, could that change throughout time? Of course it could. But if you have patient dropout during active care, it is an issue. How do you overcome that issue? The best way to overcome that issue is with automated email campaigns. So placing an onboarding sequence for your new patients so they receive a series of emails throughout those critical first week to two weeks of care is super, super important. Why? Because the reasons people drop out are quite often the same. And what are those reasons? Well, one is I'm not exactly sure the benefits of the care. Yes, people are of course going to want to feel better, but you can't describe everything just in the interaction you're having in your office. So utilizing email to further emphasize that they've made a good decision because they might be hearing things from friends, colleagues, relatives. Oh, chiropractic, I don't know. It's just the truth. 15% utilization. It's not 85% utilization of chiropractic. So there are a lot of skeptics out there. So you being able to reinforce your message through automated means. Automatic. An email campaign that goes out when somebody comes in. Super powerful. And let's peel it back even one more welcoming them to the practice. So them receiving an email the day that they came in for their first visit, welcoming them to the practice, that just goes a long way to somebody feeling really good about what ultimately is their buying decision. They're going to feel really good about being in your practice. Secondarily, we want to re emphasize the benefits of the care that you're providing because they chiropractic is wide in scope. We have a lot that we can do. And when we deliver a spinal adjustment, a lot of things happen. So being able to describe that not just with the patient knee to knee with you, but having automated email that reinforces that message inevitably improves retention. And then the third part are questions. People fall out when they have like simple questions, what do I do? It sounds silly, but it happens every single day. If they don't know where to call, what the hours are, these types of things can be friction or roadblocks that lead to decreased retention. So here's the beauty. Through an email campaign, you can let them know, hey, here are some of the frequently asked questions our new patients have about our practice. How do you get those frequently asked questions? Well, we have those all built out within the smart chiropractor and chiro emails, our automated system that takes care of that for our docs. Or you just ask your front desk or you can edit the emails in chiro email say, hey, ask your front desk staff, hey, what are the most common questions you get from new patients about our practice? That's your email right there. Take those questions, answer them and then be more proactive with your communication. Inevitably start to fill that hole in the bucket. You reduce the dropout during active care. So that is step number two. Now step number three is really phase three of the patient journey, which is all around reactivations. There are far too many chiropractors that have a huge hole. They have like a, the whole entire bottom of their bucket is open, so the water is just falling out. If you do not have a reactivation system, and a system is a process that's automated, that's consistent and on a timeline, needs to be automated. Consistent and on a timeline. Your reactivation process should be automated, consistent and on a timeline, because that's how you can might sound obvious, consistently generate reactivations into your practice. If you do it ad hoc, if you're doing it well. Whenever we think of it, we make a few phone calls. Whenever we think of it, we send a missed appointment reminder. And let me dig a little bit deeper here. A reactivation campaign automating this process is much more than just a missed appointment reminder. Missed appointment reminders are great. They usually go out through an EHR system. That's a great thing to have. All of us should have it. That is a completely different thing than a reactivation campaign that's taking place at least quarterly in your practice. We do this again within the smart chiropractor and all of our automated services. And it's one of the most powerful tools that we see because we find docs with email lists that might even be 500, 750 that are not 10,000 plus, pretty low numbers of emails can generate 3, 5, 7 reactivations each week based off of just reaching out and staying top of mind. That is powerful. And that's our weekly email newsletter that we send out. But then we institute a quarterly reactivation campaign, actually updating this right now pretty aggressively to make sure that it is absolutely world class. And a reactivation quarterly campaign means every 90 days the people on your list who are not act in active care are receiving insert number two to four messages in a one week period to let them know what's going on and to instigate a conversation to help them understand if they don't have a next appointment scheduled, now is the time to do so. Because patients that are proactive with their health get the best results and that is an important message that should be displayed to every single past patient of yours. So if you have seen Hundreds if not 1000 plus patients in your practice to date and your schedule just can never seem to be full, you have holes in your bucket. Chances are you do not have reactivation processes that are great. Chances are you have retention issues and chances are you have new patient issues. And new patient issue being you have a lack of your ideal patients. So you churn and burn through patients and you spend money on advertising which leads to conversion metrics, quote, unquote. Chances are if you have retention issues, it's because you don't have a new patient onboarding sequence that welcomes into the practice, identifies their frequently asked questions and provides context to the benefits of the care. Super powerful retention tool and and again, reactivations. Most practices, the whole bottom of the bucket is empty. They have nothing there to stop anything because they have no reactivation system and process that's consistent, that's automated and that goes on a cadence. So that's why within the Smart Chiropractor we talk a lot about more of your ideal new patients, better retention and more consistent reactivations. But those are some ways to go about it. So whether it's teaching and inviting consistently for more new patients, whether it's your onboarding sequence for better retention, or whether it is building a quarterly reactivation campaign for consistent reactivations, all three can help fill the holes in your bucket and ultimately stop that month after month after month undying need for new patients. So that is the way that I would go about it. That's the way we do go about it. And lastly, I think we're sending over a million emails per month, each and every month for over 300 practices around the world that are Smart Chiropractor members. So we're super fortunate to do that. We feel privileged to do that and we take that really, really seriously when we're communicating with millions of people on chiropractors behalf. That also enables us to have better data and information than just about anybody in the game. So we can constantly, as we're doing right now, update, revise and make things work better day after day, month after month, year after year. So you can take the information I gave you today and run with it, build your own. Or if you want to make your life way easier and get better results, then I'd encourage you to check out what we have going on at the Smart Chiropractor. If you have any feedback or questions, of course you can hit me. Up. Jeff the evidence basedchiropractor.com and before we get going, I want to say a few words about Power Step Orthotics. Power Step Orthotics are my favorite orthotic. They're what I use my dad uses. They're developed by a podiatrist 30 years ago and as a listener of this podcast, Powerstep is willing to hook you up with a free sample pair. Pro.powerstep.com sample pro.powerstep.com sample use the code EBC evidence based chiropractor. They'll hook you up with a free sample pair. Why not take them up on that opportunity? They support us. We hope you support them. And additionally, if you're looking to hire somebody in your practice this year, whether it's an associate chiropractor or a chiropractic assistant, don't do it alone. Reach out to Chiral Matchmakers, schedule a discovery call and get a better understanding of how you can find somebody for the long term. The that's gonna match your practice culture and be really somebody that can help you build grow because staff turnover absolutely kills practice momentum. So if you're thinking about building your staff this year, please reach out@chiromatchmakers.com Otherwise, I hope you have an awesome 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 wanna grow your practice, come back for next week's episode. If you want to go faster, visit the evidencebasedchiropractor.com and join our MD Marketing membership today.