Learn the four steps of the marketing process to help your practice evolve and grow

You spent all those years in college learning to become a great chiropractor, now you need to the learn the basics of another discipline, marketing. Fortunately, gaining knowledge of marketing will take less time and you won’t have to pass any boards.

How do chiropractors get their practices up and running? Whether you have a staff of one CA or 20, chiropractors need to know the basics of marketing.

When you talk to a chiropractor on how their practice is doing, you will find those who are successful are knowingly or unknowingly using marketing. Along with top quality care for your patients, marketing is what increases patient visits, income, and profits.

Marketing embraces all impressions given to patients through advertising, promotion, sales, Web sites, signage, logos, and public relations. In fact, it permeates every aspect of a modern practice from your list of services offered through to all aspects of promotion right on through to patients recommending your services to their friends and family members.

Marketing needs to be taken into account when naming your practice, designing your letterhead, how your receptionist answers the phone, and even the color of your furniture. Live and breathe marketing every single day and have your staff to do the same. The most successful businesses in the world do exactly that. Of course, all of this should enhance the quality of your practice, not detract from it. You can concentrate on the care of your patients rather than worrying about your practice overhead.

Some of these marketing actions can be outsourced, but you will need to know what they are and how they basically work before you will be able to outsource them. Even independent contractors, such as designers and Web programmers, have to be supervised. Also, you have to be able to articulate what you want.

Go Four It
The marketing process has four stages:

1) Market research. Know before you go through market research and surveys. This is a vital, important step that is often skipped or poorly done. Imagine building a house without a set of plans—no one would even think of doing it.

Surveying your friends or family is a bad idea as they are not likely to give you unbiased advice and many not even be the target audience for your services. First, figure out who is your target audience: Are you in a low- or high-income area?

Survey at least 100 people. It is better to talk to people on the street or at a business mixer. Ask, Would you be interested in a new treatment that will eliminate chronic back pain (or whatever your niche or speciality)? If there is an interest, then you know you are on the right track.

Do not survey a group. This will give you the wrong answers because people do not make buying decisions as a group. After you have surveyed your potential patients, then do some homework on the competition. What services do they offer? What are their fees? Where are they located? What do they do successfully?

For example, if you find through your research that there was a huge physical therapy practice down the street specializing in workers’ compensation rehabilitation, this needs to be taken into account before you invest money in equipment and a facility to compete with them. You, of course, want to deliver the services which you are trained for, but you cannot ignore the competition, which includes other chiropractors in the area. Part of your research before you sign that 5-year lease is to talk to the practitioners in your surrounding area because they can give you valuable information.

The best way to avoid practice failure or limping along is by doing your marketing homework and becoming knowledgeable about the business of chiropractic.

2) Strategy and planning. This is the creation of the campaign (a series of promotional actions done in coordination). Once the research has been done, you will need bright ideas based on your surveys on how to market your product or service. This would include a few or a lot of tools of marketing. Often a new product or service is launched with public relations (publicity articles in local newspapers or magazines, local radio or television appearances, speaking engagements at service clubs), then followed with advertising.

A campaign is often used in a military sense: “A series of actions embarked on to achieve an objective during a war.” In a marketing context, a campaign is a series of actions or targets to achieve an objective in alignment with the purpose of the business. Successful marketing campaigns are seldom a single action—it is typically many actions done in the correct sequence and fully coordinated. As part of your planning, prepare a marketing calendar and make a weekly list of goals that you and your staff need to accomplish.

3) Execution. This is implementing your plan in the correct sequence. Creating a new practice or jump-starting a failing one without research and surveys is the wrong sequence. Many practice failures are due to jumping right in with expensive promotion of a product or service that no one wants or thinks they want.

4) Review and evaluation. Just as you have your patients come in for regular visits to review their progress, you need to do the same with your marketing campaign. Are you getting the results you expected? If not, determine which promotional actions worked and adjust the campaign as needed. You will need to do this periodically to keep your practice expanding.

If you want to have a successful chiropractic practice, learn the basics of marketing. Your survival depends it.

Doug Hay is the cofounder and CEO of Expansion Plus Inc, Burbank, Calif, a full-service advertising and public relations consulting firm, which offers long-term strategic planning, marketing research, branding, advertising, design, public relations, media planning, Web development, and Internet marketing. He has over 35 years experience in marketing, sales, and management, and has an avid interest in alternative health. Hay can be reached at: (818) 285-6786; dough@expansionplus.com;   www.expansionplus.com.