EPISODE 405: 8 Economical Marketing Ideas

Hey, chiropractors. We're ready for another Modern Chiropractic Marketing Show with Dr. Kevin Christie, where we discuss the latest in marketing strategies, contact marketing, direct response marketing, and business development with some of the leading experts in the industry. 

Dr, Kevin Christie: [00:00:00] All right. There's a lot of different things you can do to market your practice, but what are some of the economical marketing ideas that you can do to grow your practice? And luckily, there's a lot of them, and we're going to cover those today. And let's start right out of the gates with email marketing.

I think it's one of the best things you can do. And many chiropractors aren't doing it. I recommend weekly. Content emails like educational based emails to your to your patients. You're, you're educating them on what, you know, and you become a resource in their inbox on health related information. And that helps you stay top of mind with your patients.

And you'll get a lot more reactivations and even referrals. If you're emailing your patients weekly, if you. Think weekly is too much. It's not. But if you want to go every other week, that's fine. But the practices that do like a quarterly email or an email when they have to close their practice because of the snowstorm or something like that is not going to suffice.

And so things like [00:01:00] MailChimp is a great service you can utilize very, very affordable. And it's actually free up to a certain amount of audience members on your email list. But it's a really good way of doing it. You know, design a nice banner image, have the scheduling information at the bottom of the email.

Um, you know, just design a nice template email where you just plug in new information and it does not have to be too hard. You can do an occasional promotion and practice updates. There's nothing wrong with that. But when that's all of your emails, only promotions and practice updates, it's not going to be effective.

And then you'll think email marketing doesn't work. And if they don't want to be emailed, they just unsubscribe. It's not. Not hard. No one gets offended because of that. Um, it's a really great reactivation strategy. I mentioned, and you can also onboard new patients with email. And then lastly, keep them in the email.

If you put a blog in the email, just have them read it. The whole blog within the body of the email, don't send them out, uh, to the website to read it. Just keep them into the email. And we've got [00:02:00] lessons in the academy about more depth of email marketing. Uh, but this is a phenomenal and very economical way.

To grow your practice, uh, video marketing, um, they have, you know, video marketing is really good and whether you use those videos, put them on YouTube, put them on your website, educate patients and send it to them based on certain things they need, put it on your Instagram, Facebook, uh, you can get a lot of economical value out of video marketing.

It's going to create that parasocial effect. And that just means it's like they feel like they know you and you may not know them. It's like if Brad Pitt walked in, you'd feel like you knew him because of the video, the relationship you've had with him watching on video for the last 30 years, that's called the parasocial effect where you feel like you know them, they don't know you.

But the video does a great job of your community and your patient base, uh, feeling like they know you as the doctor and what, you know, think about certain video projects, right? Like, um, condition pages, uh, you can do, [00:03:00] you know, if you treat 25 different conditions, you can have different pages on your website for each condition.

And you can do a video on those conditions, how you evaluate and treat that. And so certain things that you do for that particular condition is going to help with your SEO. So think about projects can be services. It could be topics like, uh, you know, pickleball. It could be, you know, it's, um, golf season.

You could do video projects on around golf injuries. Video equipment is super easy. Now, if you have a smartphone, you're good. Um, you can get a lapel mic and that works out, uh, but the video equipment is super easy now. And then just think about the video strategy that you want to do is your video strategy.

You want to be short Instagram reels that are like 90 seconds or less. Are you going to do, try to focus on YouTube length? Are you just going to do video to educate your patient base? Um, think about the different strategies, strategies. And again, in the Academy, we have video marketing lessons. So check those out are kind of our, um, point of our call today is just to teach you a [00:04:00] build, like build an economical marketing plan, and then you can access some of the resources that are already in the Academy.

If you need to do a deep dive into email marketing or, or video marketing or Instagram reels, right? So this is a really good way of gaining traction. We put. Um, to Instagram real trainings in the academy for you to look at and, uh, Instagram is, um, they are really, really trying to, um, focus on Instagram reels are kind of competing with Tick Tock.

And so the reels again is going to be 90 seconds or less. on the video and then you post it as a reel, not a post on Instagram, not a story. So you got post stories, reels, this is reels, watch the, uh, tutorials in there. We're seeing a lot of chiropractors growing their practice through Instagram reels.

Okay. And they're also getting their patients to follow their Instagram. So when they do post on there, they are staying top of with [00:05:00] their patients through IG reels. Okay. So a big one.

Text message campaigns. There's a lot of softwares out there now. This isn't you texting from your phone to them. This is a bulk text messaging campaigns.

And again, we have a whole, um, breakdown of that in the academy with even scripting in there and what you can do. And there's certain platforms now, obviously review a, which is now a low hop. I don't have any vested interest in that. Um, There's also tracks that does it. There's trust driven care that does it.

You might have some other services that do it, but it, but essentially it's doing monthly and quarterly text message campaigns to your patients or promotional text through certain services. You've added and it's a great way to get into your patients. And again, now it's 2024 going into 2025. People are used to getting texts from the businesses that they service now.

And if they don't, again, those services allow them to easily unsubscribe. They're not going to get [00:06:00] mad at you. And you're going to get a lot more ROI from this than you are patients being mad at you. It's just, uh, we do it and we've been doing it for two years now and don't have complaints. We just have some people that, uh, unsubscribe from it, just like they would an email, very economical way of, uh, reaching your patients.

Next is your allied health network. And this is a phenomenal way of of marketing and getting out of the community for health providers and performance related folks like because a health provider would be your orthopedic surgeon or your acupuncturist and it runs the gamut from there all your specialties and then the performance would be something like the personal trainer the golf teaching professional the tennis coach the pitching coach the running coach you know there's a lot of people in the performance world that you'd want to connect with and um I'm just going to give you an overview of it because again Like I mentioned, all these have lessons specifically [00:07:00] for this in the academy, but you want to a have a world class referral system for your patients, right?

That's part of being a doctor is the patient comes in. I need a good massage therapist. You have a good referral for them. I need a, um. primary care doctor. You got a good referral from them. I need a functional medicine doctor. You got a referral for them. Uh, do you have a tennis coach? Yes, I do. Right. So part of your job, in my opinion, is to have a world class referral network.

And then the second you can actually leverage this idea is to connect with other people. Let's say you, you look at you, you go on your dashboard that we provide for you. And it's got all the different things you could have as far as specialties or performance people. And you say, you know what? I don't have a foot and ankle specialist.

I need one, but I do have a knee shoulder orthopedist that I'm friendly with. I'm going to contact that doctor. That's the knee shoulder ortho say who's the best foot and ankle doctor in the area. He or she's going to give you that information. You're going to call that office aid, you know, orthopedist, Dr.

John Smith, um, is recommending [00:08:00] that, um, I connect with your, uh, foot ankle specialist here, Dr. Sally and said, you're the best. I'm trying to build a world class referral network for my practice. I don't have a good foot and ankle specialist. Is there a time I could stop by and introduce myself and get some information from your practice?

And that's just one example of how you can then leverage contacts to build out your allied health network and. Not only refer to them, but build relationships with them to hopefully they refer to you. Next is just patient appreciation days. These are always really good, um, to throw those in a couple times a year.

And, um, you can dive into the nuts and bolts of that, but I, I definitely recommend patient appreciation days. And there's many ways you can slice those.

Community outreach, right? You got to get in the community. And there's a lot of ways you can do it that are very economical. Um, events, workshops, public speaking, MD marketing, meetings, you name it.

You want to be [00:09:00] doing some credibility enhancing community outreach. And we have a whole community outreach planner in the dashboard. We have a community outreach lesson in the academy. So check out those. Okay.

And then lastly is website and search connection. You want to make sure your website has condition pages on there.

Like we discussed services pages on there that's going to help your SEO blogs on your website are going to help your search engine SEO or search engine optimization or Google search essentially videos on your website is going to help with that. Make sure your website has really good messaging so they find your website.

They're compelled to come into your practice. It's your website shouldn't just be an online business card. It should compel them. You want to have good Google reviews and many of them. That's going to be economical marketing. Great pictures on your Google business profile. So when people search that and they find it and you see your Google business profile, they see all the great images of you, your team, your office, your, you [00:10:00] know, all the things you got.

Um, I want you to think of your Google business profile as a second website, um, and then you should be posting on your Google business profile as well. That's going to really help you with your overall search engine. So if you do a great job of organic search, which is this right here, um, you're going to get, um, good marketing without having to spend ad dollars on, uh, Google ads.

And so let me stop sharing that. I'm not against spending money on marketing. I think. Practices need to do more of that, you know, whether it's Google ads, Facebook ads, direct mail, um, MD lunches and things of that nature. But depending on the scenario you're in, maybe you're limited in that. These are the economical ways you can do it.

Or, frankly, if you're spending money on all the other things, too, you should be doing the economical ones also. And that comprehensive approach is going to allow you to get great marketing results without spending too much money.