Know and use the seven P’s of marketing to get your practice out of a marketing rut

During this past year, much of my correspondence with chiropractic students and field practitioners has been about the techniques for successful practice marketing. When our discussions narrow down to how the doctors market their practices, the main problem is that they are trying to hit too many targets.

Having many good ideas isterrific especially when coupled with an energetic approach. However, when the marketing directions are scattered, the endeavor is designed to fail.

Shotgun marketing is like trying to hit the center of a target with a load of bird shot. You might hit the center or you might not. In either case, you are wasting your time. Most marketing practices seem to follow this line of thinking, “I’ll throw my practice marketing budget toward anything that moves. If it sticks, I’ll benefit.” This type of marketing will only work if you an have an unlimited supply of money.

Marketing Is a Seven-Step Word
To determine the effectiveness of your marketing endeavor, take it through the steps and questions of the seven Ps of marketing: 1) product; 2) price; 3) promotion; 4) place; 5) packaging; 6) position; and 7) people.

Product. This is already in place. Our main product (what generates an income) is chiropractic service. As we work juggling the hats of manager and doctor, we sometimes lose sight of the fact that the only person producing a product is you. All the other work in your office is nonproductive in that its sole function is to support the results of your services.

One of your goals will be to keep the quality of your product at a high level. Therefore, you should consistently evaluate your services in terms of suitability, ethics, and profitability.

For example, I have decided to offer rehabilitation services to my patients. To be suitable to deliver a quality product, I must have the appropriate training and effective equipment to include rehab as part of my services.

For many years, my guide to ethical practices has been the rotary four-way test:

• Is it the truth?
• Is it fair for all concerned?
• Will it build goodwill and better friendships?
• Will it be beneficial to all concerned?

If whatever service you are evaluating has a positive answer to the above four questions, it is most likely ethical.

Price. Our fees are influenced mainly by insurance reimbursements, the current marketplace fee structure, and your income needs. Therefore, most fees will be set within relatively tight upper and lower parameters. This should not preclude periodically evaluating your fee situation.

If you are on an insurance panel, consider your reimbursement versus the cost of treating that patient. You may be seeing a lot of people and just breaking even or perhaps losing money. Many DCs are working to get into a stronger cash practice to get away from the restraints of insurance reimbursements. The key here is you must be making a profit otherwise you are wasting your talents.

Unfortunately, there are a few cash-poor practitioners who mistakenly think they can improve their situation by just increasing the volume of their profit-losing services. They neglect to determine their fixed and variable costs. Then, they tell themselves that all they have to do is increase their patient volume and they will make a higher profit. This is fallacious thinking.

First, see if more is really any better. No matter how many patients you flow through your office, calculate the overhead costs that are assigned to each patient. Also, keep in mind that as your volume increases, so do your variable costs, such as personnel, supplies, and equipment maintenance.

Promotion. This should consistently occupy a prominent place in your thoughts. When an opportunity arises, be ready to recognize it. You should be aware that your marketing program eventually becomes less effective or might even stop working. Obsolescence should not prompt you to scrap your entire marketing program. Usually, all you have to do is tweak some small detail, which results in an updated and stronger promotional system.

Assume you want to offer a no-cost consultation to introduce your practice to potential patients and decide to hang a small banner that reads COMPLIMENTARY CONSULTATION on the front of your building or on your business card. How strong is that statement? What catches your attention better, complimentary consultation or free consultation?

Studies have shown that there are certain key catchwords that when used in advertising promotions are consistently effective. The word free is one of them. When you change complimentary to free, that is a tweak.

Also, with the knowledge that your current promotional activities will eventually become stale, start working on plans for a new promotion.

If you are involved with service clubs, think about volunteering to do a program about chiropractic. Remember that the effectiveness of your presentation is that it must be interesting and not a sales pitch.

In my case, one of my marketing niches was the automobile-racing community. I sponsored several cars in various venues (road racing, stock cars, and drag racing) and felt that the exposure was getting stale.

My service club put on a yearly chili cook-off and was looking for ways to make it a bigger event. I suggested a car show that would attract new attendees for the cook-off and volunteered to be chairman. I arranged for the local cable company (with which I advertised) for a series of public service announcements to promote the chili cook-off and car show. Importantly they interviewed me as the car-show chairman and local chiropractor.

All of the cars that I sponsored were at that car show, and the drivers brought their racing buddies. The cook-off show had a higher attendance with the side benefit of my practice benefiting from its name exposure on the cars.

In this instance, I did not change the niches that I currently promoted—I just changed the exposure. You can do the same by evaluating your marketing and promotional approaches, and then give them a little creative tweak. You will be surprised and pleased by the positive results.

Place. This is where you actually sell your services. Take a hard look and evaluate your place to see if it reflects your professionalism and competence. You will probably think of place as your office, but it goes further than that, such as a booth at a trade fair or other community event

Have you evaluated your place from the perspective of a patient? Next time you are returning to your office from lunch, drive to your office pretending to be a first-time patient. Ask yourself, Was the office easy to find? How hard was it to find a parking spot? Is the parking lot clean? Is your building presentable? Is the entrance to your office well marked? If you were in a lot of pain and had difficulty walking, was it easy to get to your front door? These will trigger many more critical questions.

The idea is to periodically evaluate the way you present your services. Then, you will want to enhance what you like and change the unacceptable.

Packaging. There is some overlap between this and place. Packaging refers to the impressions that you, staff, and office make to your patients. The core value of packaging is to examine your operations and see if they present a strong, professional impression to your current and potential patients. Again, look at your practice through the eyes of a patient.

A chiropractic office should exude clean, friendly, efficient professionalism. This does not mean fancy or expensive. I am convinced that the amount of chrome on an adjusting table adds absolutely nothing to a good or bad patient impression.

Also, a bad attitude, dirty office, and sloppy practice management can limit or destroy your practice.

The same type of questions you asked yourself about your place can be extended to your operations image. For example: What is the first thing a new patient sees when walking into your office? Can a new patient identify the doctor and staff from the other patients? Does the doctor wear shorts in hot weather? What kind of music is playing in the office? Does anyone greet the person walking in the front door?

Again, you will come up with many more questions. The premise of packaging is to present the image you want to convey to a patient without putting up a false front.

Positioning. This is how you want your community to think of you and your services. Position is the hard and sometimes cruel fact of how the community actually thinks of you and your services.

Therefore, if you want to develop a favorable position in your community, work on positioning yourself in their hearts and minds as the chiropractor for whatever niche you want to occupy. An example would be a chiropractor interested in working with athletes. She would have to work at showing her community that she is capable of owning that position.

All the obvious routes to accomplish this apply—working with local teams, learning and displaying your specialized training or experience in understanding and treating athletic injuries,

Another example would be if you decide to target city workers, such as the police department. You would want to be familiar with the equipment they wear, the condition of the seats in their cars, and the types of injuries they might incur with an uncooperative detainee.

People. The great thing about our profession is that we are trained and become acutely aware of looking at our patients as people. Therefore, when you are building your staff, evaluate more than their technical competence. You should determine how your prospective employee will be able to help you in your community.

If all the qualifications are equal, I have a tendency to hire local talent as opposed to someone who had to drive into our community from another. First and foremost, when a local employee is not at work, he will usually get out and about in his own community.

Educate and encourage your employees to talk about the office or great experiences. Create personal business cards for your staff members. They will be motivated to hand business cards out if their name is printed on the card.

If you are not already doing this, it is a good idea to devote a portion of your weekly staff meetings on how you and your staff are going to get your message out to the community. Also, what incentives or motivations are you giving staff that will excite them to spread your message?

In a nutshell, hire staff to not only do their jobs well, but train and educate them to have the means and knowledge to promote your services. When your staff understands that your successful practice is also in their best interests, you will have a team capable of helping you achieve your dreams and beyond. CP

Ivan Delman, DC, is the author of The Business of Chiropractic: How to Prosper After Startup and has degrees in both business and chiropractic. After working 20 years in each field, he has retired to write and travel. Delman’s free Chiro-Biz newsletter and other articles can be found at: www.businessofchiropractic.com. He can be reached via email: ivan@businessofchiropractic.com.

The information in this article is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute any legal advice whatsoever. Consult a certified human resources expert in your state for more specific information.