Marketing Chiropractic on Social Media | Keynote Live from Palmer Florida

All right, how's everybody doing? Cool. Anybody listen to the podcast? One, two. All right, couple. All right, so today we're gonna go through marketing chiropractic with social media. So this is a little bit about me. I run a company called the Evidence Based Chiropractor, Smart chiropractor Body Signals, a consulting group. And I am a pretty busy guy. But the most interesting things up there, in my opinion are probably the middle of the package. So I've been pretty unique and I've had the opportunity to practice at a few different orthopedic groups. So one is the largest outpatient spine surgery company in the world and the other was a local regional hospital based ortho group. Right. So that's given me some interesting insight into people that are spending millions upon millions of dollars per month marketing against us and against their competition. You might not have $5 million a month to spend on advertising, but a lot of the overall strategies and tactics remain the same. We'll talk a little bit about tactics and strategies for how you can really build your brand starting today. I don't think this is about when you're a doc. I think the sooner you start, the better it is. And these are a few of the major platforms that we'll kind of touch on today. So nothing surprising there, right? LinkedIn, I think podcasting is super important. We'll talk a little bit about that Instagram, big time tool that probably everybody in this room utilizes. Facebook, of course, and YouTube as well. How many people are on these platforms? I asked myself this question, so I put together this graph and I like this because I've never seen it really framed this way. And this is important to know, right? You need to know when you're reaching out. You want to be where people are. Of course, that's the whole point of marketing, right? So Facebook, 2 billion people, that should be number one platform. Even if you don't have a Facebook page, because that's your gig, get one, because you need to have one. YouTube. Billion and a half active users on YouTube. That's a lot. Google, it's actually bigger than Google. Google has about a billion active users. Because if you take away everybody outside the United States, a lot of people use different search engines, but United States, Google is obviously dominant. Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and then podcasts, you can see go down. But almost all of these, I mean, that 500, that's 500 million people. And almost everything is above that line. That's very, very powerful. Especially when we think of it in terms of it probably will cost you $2,000 to place a black and white advertisement in something that circulates to 20,000 people in this town for one month. That is an absolutely horrific return on investment. You can reach Those people times 10 with just a couple smart ways to go about it through these channels, which are all free to use. So what do you think the best way to communicate in 2018 is? What do you see going around the room right now? Video cameras. So video is absolutely the way to go. But I know what everybody's thinking, so I want to bring in the five commandments of doing video. Everyone thinks they look weird. Everyone thinks they sound weird. Everyone thinks they don't have the right gear. Everyone doesn't know what they should talk about. And everyone wants more than a single view from their best friend or mother or father. So, okay, does everybody agree that this is true? Okay, the quicker you do it and just get over it, the better you're going to be. But every single platform currently favors video. It'll change probably. But every platform favors video. And if you can do video, it enables you to do everything else. And let me frame that a little bit as we'll talk through some of the tactics later on. You do a video, I do a video. Hey, here's three things about. Did you know that arm pain could come from your neck? Right. Pretty simple. I talk through it for two minutes. That's a video that can be used and chopped and used on Instagram. It can be used on Facebook and YouTube. I can link to it on LinkedIn. Then I put it through Trent or Rev. I get the transcript back from it, use it as a blog piece on my website with the video embedded into it. Then what do I do? I take that same piece of content. I put it into a little handout that I give to all of my patients that week and tell them to share it with a friend if they have arm pain. 12 minute video. And you could get way more slick than that. But video enables you to transmit through all the other platforms much, much easier. So just keep that in mind. So let's dive through. So I'm going to do three tips on pretty much the major platforms. We'll talk through them pretty quickly. So Google, also known as search engine optimization. Right. Somebody types in Port Orange Chiropractor. If you had a practice here, you, it'd be ideal to come up. Number one, if you're on the fourth page, you do not exist. Hate to break it to you. So what are some Google tips? Well, create a Compelling headline and cta, what does that mean? Okay, so I've ranted about this before. I'll rant about it again. Wellness awaits you is not a compelling headline. I just want to get that out there. All right, let's just get it out there. Nobody in town right now is saying, I am desperately looking for wellness and if it awaits me in this clinic, I am motivated to absolutely spend cash and sign up at the first visit possible. Nobody even knows what that means. Chiropractors fight about what that means, never mind the public. So create a compelling headline. I don't know what that is. Everybody's different, right? If you want to do acute care and auto accident cases, well, speak to that. If you want to do, you know, CrossFit gym, also known as new patient fulfillment centers, CrossFit gyms, then speak to that. But make sure that you are creating a compelling headline and a compelling call to action at the top of your website. That's absolutely crucial. Image sizing. If your images are big, it takes a long time to load your page. A long time means about 2 seconds. Google will push you down. You will if you have everything else right in your image size in two seconds. I'm not talking like dial up style where it's like, oh gosh, forget about that. Your page needs to load in like less than one second. And image sizes are the number one reason why pages load slow. Number three thing in this case is making sure you have fresh content. Right? Nobody wants to go to a website and be like, oh man, I'm so excited. I'm making, oh, I'm so excited. I'm so desperate to find relief that I want to do something about it. So now I go onto a website and it looks like they're literally having like dust off the top of the website because somebody decided to post 25 things in three weeks and then hasn't touched it in two years. That's not compelling. Right? And there's plenty of tools to help you schedule those things out. So don't go feast and famine. Make sure that you are continuing to put out content even if it's once a month. That's just nice. The search engines like to see that. And from a patient perspective, you don't want to seem like, oh, I went to a seminar, so I posted four things and now I didn't touch it for two years. Right? So just keep those things in mind and all three of those things will dramatically help you in terms of search engine optimization as you get going. Facebook tips, post Daily consistency is absolutely crucial on Facebook until proven otherwise. They constantly change, of course, but keep your posts up again. Don't go dormant forever. The other thing with Facebook, of course, is that back in my day you used to get 100% reach, right? If I had 1,000 people follow the evidence based chiropractor, almost 10,000 now I put out a post, everybody saw it. Those are what we refer to as the good old days. Because now 8% at maximum see a post. So if you have an audience of 100 people, you put out something and you don't put money behind it, eight people will see it. Therefore, you do not want to go two weeks between posts because at the end of the month your reach might look like 20 people. That's not going to be good enough, I will tell you that. So keep the consistency up there. That's going to get you the reps necessary. Mix in original with curated content. So that's another item, right? It's like, damn, that's a lot of stuff to put out. How am I going to do all that? You don't have to put everything out, share stuff that's cool, that's interesting, that's controversial. Whatever you want to do, don't hesitate to share other items as well. It doesn't need to be all you. As a matter of fact, their algorithm, EdgeRank technically favors curated a mix of content. So don't hesitate to share things. And if you want, you'll put your little take on it. Hey, here's what I thought about this. Look at this. Isn't this surprising? Whatever, you can put a little spin on it and then link that content below. So that's important. And obviously use video anytime you can utilize video. Their algorithm also favors the reach goes greater for video, specifically live, than uploaded above pictures and text. And that's influenced by how people interact with it, right? If people start interacting, it helps push it up and get more reach. But video at a baseline absolutely performs better than text and picture alone. But as with everything moderation, right? Mix it up a little bit. That's what the algorithm likes to see as you get out there in your community. Instagram is a huge place to connect with influencers, right? People who have big followings. Maybe they're just young and good looking, maybe they're a semi or true professional athlete. Instagram is one of the easiest ways to connect with those individuals and start a dialogue or start a conversation. So don't hesitate to direct message influencers in your community. It might be because you want to meet Them it might be because you want to go learn about what they're doing. I mean, there's a lot of tactics and strategies you could utilize. But don't hesitate to hit people up. Tag other businesses. This is something I talk about a lot. And some of these things, they'll go cross platform, Right? Tagging other businesses isn't just Instagram. You could do that on Facebook, and you should. But make sure you highlight other businesses. I always say, as you're going through school, if you like to work out or at least eat healthy one time every couple days, showcase the business, right? Hey, here's what I learned and here's why I'm eating this and tag another business. Because what happens over time is the other business is going to look at it and be like, cool, I'll share that. Guess what? You just grab their audience and you want to do that as much as possible and show the journey. I think this goes hand in hand with what I just said. But you might not know everything yet. And you're still learning. I'm still learning, right. So I think there's a lot to be said. Some of the most popular medical doctors online were actually not medical doctors yet. There were people in residency working through programs people love to see behind the scenes. Here's what I learned today. Here's what challenged me today. The sooner you start telling that story, the sooner people resonate with that. People like to hear. Think about movies, right? There's always the arc. People go through the struggle. They're learning. You don't just see the end. There has to be context to the story. And you can start building that context right now. In my opinion. YouTube tips, longer is better. YouTube favors longer videos because of view time. They want to keep people there. So as opposed to Facebook, where shorter does a little bit better. And these are not absolutes. They're constantly in flux. YouTube videos that are a little bit longer perform well. Compelling thumbnails. So as you scroll through that list, if you're on YouTube, there's a little thumbnail. You want to make sure that it's compelling. You've probably clicked on videos because you're like, what the hell is that? Right. And link to your other content in the description for your YouTube videos, link to your other page, link to your Facebook page, link to the other channels. Because as people watch those. That's right. If somebody checks out a YouTube video and they're like, oh, he's talking about how you can find. How I can become a better golfer with less back pain. Oh, this is interesting. Okay, people subscribe to YouTube channels, but not as much as Facebook pages right now, right? So link to your Facebook page. They're gonna click through and be like, oh crap, he's got all this other stuff. It's so low bar for them to click like on your page. And now you have them in your ecosystem. So don't hesitate to link to your other channels within YouTube as well. LinkedIn. LinkedIn's a little bit more professional, right? In my opinion. So don't hesitate to connect with other docs. The sooner you bridge and get out to other docs, right now would be a great idea. Then you build your network, right? Then it's then when you're looking to move back home or move somewhere, you might already have a loose connection there that's better than completely cold. So connecting with other docs now would be a great idea. Utilize groups. LinkedIn Groups is a chiropractic professionals group that has 20,000 plus people in it. They're probably not all chiropractors, but there's various groups on LinkedIn that get really good exposure. But in LinkedIn is probably the single place that I think you can get technical very quickly and people will follow again because as you build it, you're going to be interacting with other professional level people, with whether it's other chiropractors, medical doctors, whoever it may be. So it's a place where you could expose that technical component if you so choose Twitter. I'm not the biggest Twitter guy in the world, but from a usage standpoint, and some of it is probably gonna be obvious cause I'm so focused on the other channels. But engage, engage and engage. The more that you can be on Twitter, the better. I mean, I've seen stats that to get the best reach, engagement and growth 14 to 15 times per day, which is just, you gotta be pretty, you gotta be aggressive to get on there that much, right? So the more that you engage and contribute to conversations, that kind of goes to the third one, contribute to conversations. Twitter is a great place if you're good at short, concise kind of things, right? Character limit. If you're good at that and you're a fast typer, it's an awesome place to be because what you can do is just search out these kind of all three go together. You can just search out local people or hashtags and just contribute to that. If you start doing that six, 10 times a day, you're gonna grow. You're going to grow on the platform, a podcast, whether it's 10 minutes or whether it's an hour. Don't hesitate to go as deep as you can in that time. Anybody that listens to a podcast, podcasts are the worst, right? It's like you have to know how to use the platform, know where to find it. They're kind of difficult to subscribe to. They are like the worst tool. But here's the great thing. Once somebody bites, they're in. So don't hesitate to go deep or get technical on a podcast if that's your format. If somebody's listening, it's because they want to hear you. It's not passive, right? Nobody's like, well, I just like, kind of casually, people that listen to podcasts listen to podcasts, which is why it's a great tool and do collabs so similar to that. I've been doing more interviews lately. But don't hesitate. If it's local again, grab somebody who just opened a healthy restaurant. Have them talk about what they're offering. Grab a local sports person, have them talk about their exercise routine or what they utilize to stay well during the season. There's a million different ways you can go, same story, right? You do that, then you don't have to twist their arm for them to get it out to their people. But chances are they are. And then more people are going to trickle into what you're doing, and it raises your credibility and celebrity in your area for sure. And podcasting, for me, has been one of the biggest things. I get about 10,500 to 11,000 downloads a week, and that's 99.9% chiropractors. So it's probably 15, 18% of the entire profession listens to the podcast by the end of the week, every week. So now, it took a while, right? I'm 135 episodes in. It's a couple years in, but that's a nice platform to have, I'll tell you that. Sam.