Why Every New Chiropractic Patient is Different: How to Optimize | Podcast Ep. 280

Foreign. Hello and welcome to the Evidence Based Chiropractor. I AM your host, Dr. Jeff Langmaid. On today's episode, we are going to talk about why all chiropractic new patients are not created equal. I want to break down and dispel some of the myths around new patients, around marketing and advertising, give you some actionable tips and also preview some of where we're going with the smart chiropractor, which I think you are going to love. That is what we're gonna break down on today's episode. So if you're interested in building and growing a practice, you're gonna wanna tune in to the end of this one. But as I said at the top on today's episode, we're breaking down something about new patients. And what is that something? It's really about segmenting or classifying the new patients that are coming into your practice. And this is an important piece of the puzzle. If you are a doc out there that is doing anything, advertising, doing anything relative to marketing, you really have to have this foundational information, in my opinion, to make good decisions. Otherwise it's going to be super challenging. So this is a philosophy that runs deep within the core of the evidence based chiropractor and the smart chiropractor. But let's start right with who is your best new patient and who's maybe the least best new patient and how can you start to segment, think about these things? And of course, we'll preview where we're going with the smart chiropractor as well. So our philosophy is that your next best new patient is actually keeping your current patient, meaning curating a long term relationship, staying top of mind in being able to reactivate the people that you've already taken care of. And here's the story, right? If I start with a story, I think we've all seen this before and this might be you, but I will say it's not you. You go into a doc's office and you're like, great. This practice is fantastic. This doc's been in practice for 20 years. They have 10,000 patient charts or records of people that they've seen. And they're seeing 50, 60 people a week and that they'd like to see more, right? And so the question is, how have you seen that many people? And we know chiropractic, 90% of people that see chiropractors really love the care that they receive. What the heck's going on? What's the dichotomy there? And the dichotomy There is that too many chiropractors do not curate long term relationships. We're gonna talk about how you do that as well. But this is a major, major issue. Your next best new patient is actually keeping your current patients. You should have a, an 80 plus percent retention long term. And I say retention, I don't mean three times a week for the next 40 years. What I mean is if somebody comes in and sees you for care today, there's no question that when they need you in six months, one year, five years, that they should be coming back to you. But how do you do that? You do that by staying in consistent communication. If not, they're gonna forget about you. They're gonna go to Google, look at who's advertising to them, and maybe go in that way. And that's not. You just can't have that. If you want to build and grow a sustainable, durable practice. Your next best new patient is keeping your current patients. That is where a majority of your marketing focus should be. Now your second best new patient is connected to your current patients. Those are referrals, right? A lot of chiropractors do a good job. I'm going to say not a great job, but a good job building referral systems, et cetera. But that's really your second best new patient. Your third best new patient is somebody in your health tribe, somebody that's following you online. Hopefully at this point it's super clear that you need to develop an online following. Whether you choose Facebook, whether you choose Instagram, whether you want to focus on Google, my business, whatever it might be, you need to have people following you checking in online. So your third best new patient is somebody following you online. Your fourth best new patient is somebody you advertise to. So that's all the way down the line. Now the irony is there's so many chiropractors out there that confuse advertising with marketing and they think, oh, I'm marketing, meaning I spend some money on Facebook ads. Advertising is only a small component of marketing. It is not marketing. You should really focus most of your efforts on marketing. Well, if advertising is only a small component of that, well, what's the rest of it? Well, the rest of it is posting on social channels, having email automations, and follow up, getting those first three types of patients right, keeping your current patients, finding those referrals from people that are connected to your current patients, and curating a great health tribe of individuals who follow you online. Who are your next new patients? Literally the lowest quality, worst patient that you can have coming into your practice is somebody advertised to. They don't know you, they're not connected to you, you haven't built a relationship. They are fleeting at best and expensive to get in your front door, AKA advertising. Trade in dollars out there throwing money on the table that is literally should be the smallest subset of who you are and what you do. If you want to build a sustainable growth, more minded practice and even if you just want to, you're currently at a place where you're comfortable. I'm going to suggest even more that curating and keeping your current patients is so, so critical to it. And I just don't think too many docs have really thought through this in a way that makes it actionable for them. Now how do we do that? At the smart chiropractor, I want to break down some of it because we have just a lot of experience with it. So if the smart chiropractor resonates with you, head over to smartchiropractor.com but we do this day in and day out and I think a lot of docs out there, maybe you listening, aren't really sure exactly who we are and what we do. So I want to break down some stats like how, where am I coming up with this stuff, right? I want to break down some of the research and the stats behind the scenes of what we do so you can understand how we've come to these conclusions. Right now, each and every month through the smart chiropractor, we're generating somewhere in the vicinity of 1600 patient appointments for our docs. We're sending about a half a million emails per month, which is like 6 million per year. We're, we're reaching 4 million people plus on social media, which is insane. That's like over 1% of the population in the United States. And we're streaming over 25,000 hours of video into doctor's reception areas each and every month. So what does this mean? I don't say those stats to brag. I say those stats so that you understand we have the data. I don't think anybody else there has this much data that can help empower and inform data decisions on marketing. Now we think through it, of course, through that teach and invite mentality that you probably heard me talk about. When you get out there and you teach something, you become educational, engaging and entertaining each and every day. Well that gives you the opportunity to invite. That's the call to action. If we think about marketing lingo, right? So teach, showcase something cool, benefit driven, right? Then invite that gives you the opportunity to invite Gary Vaynerchuk would call this jab, jab, jab, Right hook of course to then it gives you opportunity to invite invite somebody to take a next step. Comment below Share Call our office. There's a variety of calls to action that you could utilize. And then the last part's the tough one. Consistently, right? You need to do that consistently. Now the way that we go about that, I'll tell you exactly how we do it. We post two times a day to our doc's Facebook and Instagram pages. Why? Because feeds move super fast and if you're posting one time a week or something like that, zero traction. You need to get out there, get as many at bats as possible, right? So you get those wins. So we post two times a day to Facebook, two times a day to Instagram. We post weekly to YouTube for our docs. YouTube's the second biggest search engine in the world, which is absolutely insane. What's the biggest Google? You guessed it correct. We have recently. We're adding in right now. This is huge. Google My business posting for our docs. So once a week our docs are going to have updates to their Google My business page. Now why is this so critically important? This is critically important because Google My, the average small business, get this, the average small business has 1,000 views to their Google My business listing each and every month. 1000 views to their Google My business listing each and every month. So let's break down those stats, right? We say, okay, thousand. Well, I'd ask you, how many new patients did you see last month? It's probably not a thousand, right? It might be 10, it might be 20. Maybe you're an office that's doing 40. What is happening to all of those other people that are checking out your Google My business listing? Those are all opportunities. So how do you showcase your Google My business listing in a way that increases that conversion? Well, you have accurate listing, number one. You have a listing, I guess you have a listing number one, you have an accurate listing number two and you post to it consistently. Number three, Google rewards timeliness. They do this on websites and on listings. So getting posting up there and showcasing who you are and what you do so, so, so important. And if we drive one layer deeper than that, let's say you're getting those clicks, right? Let's say your website. I'm asking this question, how many visits does your website get per month? Many docs don't know it. That's okay. But I've looked in average Chiropractic website generates between 500 and unique views per month, roughly. It could just be some exceptions there, but 500 to 1,000 unique views. So I'd ask you the same question there, meaning how many of those people visiting your website? You probably spend money on your website, right? You might have a company that charges you 100 bucks a month, maybe 1,000 bucks a month. Question is, how many people are converting? How many new patients are you getting? And again, if the answer is I don't know, 10, 20, 30, I'd like to have a few more. And you're getting 500 visitors. I got news for you. Most people don't cruise chiropractic websites for fun, maybe, except for me. So people are visiting your website because they have a need and desire. And the question is, are you meeting that need and desire? And if your conversion is five people out of 500, that's questionable at best. So the question becomes logically, well, how do I improve that conversion? This is an area where we're spending a ton of time with the smart chiropractor. Right now. We have built out and you can do this within Cairo emails, our automated done for you email system. You can build out exit intent popups onto your website that automatically, seamlessly integrate with Cairo emails. This is huge and this is something that I think is revolutionary. And this is something that can literally has a potential to change your practice over time. So let's break down some stats and some numbers around that so you have super, super clarity on how this literally works. If you have an exit intent pop up, which means when somebody visits your website, when they're going to leave the website, a little pop up comes up and asks them to enter their email information for a lead magnet, let's say a low back guide or to get your weekly newsletter, whatever it might be. But a pop up comes up, we've all seen it on websites. If that pop up converts Even at just 5% of your traffic, that's five people hop onto your email list for every hundred. So if you have 500 people visiting your website, that could be 25 people onto your email list very conservatively, each and every month, that builds and curates a lead list for you. But here is the beauty of it with how we've built this out with chiro emails within the smart chiropractor, that person who enters their email address can go into an automated which means you don't do anything. It's all 24, 7, 365 all done for you behind the scenes. They can get a follow up email sequence that can generate and stimulate interest in your practice. You can continue to deliver value, you can continue to teach and invite consistently. You can follow up. Now if your follow up converts just at a mere 50%, which I think is very reasonable. Again, these people are highly targeted people that visit your website. There's not necessarily that you advertise to them, right? They might visit because they have a pain point. They found your practice, they check out your website, they're not ready to make a buying decision. Right there, 5% of them, let's say, enter onto your email list. Half of those people become new patients. In our example of 25 people onto your email list per month, that is 12.5 50% conversion, 12 people to 13 people, additional new patients just by optimizing a lot of what you already have, which is a website with traffic going to it. You have to step up your game and convert more of that more of your website traffic by using a teach and invite philosophy. And I'm going to say there's literally no better tools out there than what we have at the smart chiropractor because we've spent so much time, effort and energy and research and design. We've also have the data live 247 to see what's working, what's not, adjust campaigns and make sure things are cooking with gas. So how much would an additional two to three people from Google my business because there's auto posting there for you be worth to you? How much would the ability to have lead generation automatically happen on your website and actually use the website you're paying for and optimize it and convert more of that traffic on top of the benefits of getting out there on social with our twice daily Instagram posting or twice daily Facebook posting. That now includes personalization as well, where some of our posts can have your practice name, your website, your, your phone number, all of that built in. Those personalization points just help improve and increase the engagement on the post and ultimately the conversion on the post. So we have spent a ton of time, I think it's time to market better and it's time to market better by optimizing your lead generation, by optimizing your social posting, by optimizing your email marketing and your patient education. You do not have to run discount ads to get people in your front door, but you do need to do something and doing nothing. As we say, hope is not a good marketing strategy. Hope is not actions. You know, you have to take action to get results. We always say Results follow action. So what actions are you taking? Get your house in order. With the higher emails you have unlimited sending, you have dozens of templates. If you want to pre make and make your own emails you can. It's fully featured. We have all automations and campaigns built out for you. You can pick and choose, you can use a la carte. But the bottom line is what I broke down today I hope gives you a better understanding of exactly who we are and what we're doing at the Smart Chiropractor. It's not just that we're throwing up a Facebook post a day for you. These are personalized posts across multiple channels. Monthly campaigns, weekly topics, daily posts. Call it research that matters because it's the research that matters to the people in your community. And we are leaning in heavy on optimizing your website. We're leaning in heavy on Google my business. I hope you check it out. You can head over to smart chiropractor.com if you have any specific questions hit me up jeffevidencebasedchiropractor.com or you can email me jeff smartchiropractor.com but hop on a demo. Check it out. If you go to smartchiropractor.com in the upper right hand corner you'll see a big demo button. Check it out. See what we can do with you. Talk with somebody on our team. You can ask me a question as well. We are here to help and guide docs who are trying to make a positive difference in their community. If that sounds like you, we would absolutely love to have a conversation. But the bottom line with all of this is not all new patients are the same patients that you advertise to are going to be the lowest quality, the most difficult to get in your practice and have them stick around because they're there for the deal. Discount shoppers are exactly what they are. So how do you do it? Not that way. You do it by number one, keeping your current clients, which is absolutely critical long term and then getting referrals and then building your health tribe. The least amount of your focus possible should be on advertising. Get out there with content marketing, get out there with automations. Delegate things to people who know what they're doing, who have the scale, the ability and the team to make it happen. Check out a demo at the smart chiropractor.com hit me up with any questions that you might have. And if you are looking for an associate doctor or a coverage doctor for your practice or you're the talent, if you're an associate doc 2B and you're looking for a current career position, Check out Cairo matchmakers.com Cairo matchmakers acquired my coverage business, Cairo Office Coverage last year. So we have Locum Services coverage services available, we have CA placements available, we have DC associate placements available, and much, much more. There's a whole science behind it. There's an episode coming up on that web, but check it out if you're interested in that. 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 the evidencebasedchiropractor.com and join our MD Marketing membership today.