Facebook can be a very powerful way to let your community know about your chiropractic practice, but you might not know where to start. We’ve put together a video that makes it easy to learn how to use Facebook for your practice.

If you have any questions about how to integrate social media into your existing chiropractic site, or how to use social media in general, give us a call at (800) 295-3346 or email rod@chirohosting.com. We’ll be happy to get you started!

1  Dominate the Internet

A well designed and content rich website is your most powerful marketing tool. Make sure you focus on educational, well-written content instead of catch phrases and sales pitch. Make sure you’ve got a website that integrates social media and blogging tools like Facebook and WordPress.

The best way to rank 1st in Google is to upload high quality content frequently. Information on sciatica, neck injury, back pain, and chiropractic techniques will define you as the leading expert in your field.

2 Collect Testimonials

Pick your best 10 patients and offer them a discount in exchange for a referral. Get them to write 2-3 paragraphs about your practice. Do this three or four times and year and you’ll have a great collection of testimonials.

If you’re feeling especially motivated, snap a quick photo of your patient and upload it with their testimonial. This adds credibility and a nice personal touch.

3   Become Grassroots

Start a referral program and your patients will be your evangelists. Offering them a free treatment, 2 movie tickets, a raffle prize, or a gift certificate can make lead to an explosion of new patients. Just make sure you’re offering them something they want.

Take a minute to check your state regulations- every state is different but most of them are pretty relaxed about simple referral programs.

4  Give Back to Those Who Give

Volunteer time to provide free treatments for your local fire department and other community heroes. These guys and gals are hard working, dedicated people who put their bodies through hell to serve normal folks like us. Spend a few hours per month helping them out. It’ll build good will around your practice and it’s the right thing to do.

Not sure how get started? Call your local fire department and ask. They’ll be more than happy to hear from you. Think of this as a long-term investment in your business and your community.

5  Join the Community

If you’re not already a member of local service organizations, you should be. There’s no better way to connect to your community and build a successful business like contributing to a service organization. Pick one that you’ll enjoy being a part of and suits your skills and interests.

You’ve got loads of options: Rotary, Lions Club, USO, Kiwanis, Optimists, Odd Fellows, Toastmasters, and dozens of others. Members of these organizations of often well-established and successful business people with deep connections to their community.

6 Be Seen Online

These days, most inexpensive digital cameras include high-definition video- making it easier than ever to make videos for the internet. Make use of this technology by uploading video introductions, tours of your office, and examples of technique. You can put together a simple 5 minute video in about an hour.

Video gives patients an opportunity to get to know you before stopping by your office. It also demonstrates your expertise and educates them on the benefits of chiropractic. It’ll be the best hour you’ve ever invested and it can be a blast.

7 Follow and be Followed

Everyone is joining Facebook. In fact, it’s starting to look like a miniature country. There are literally millions of groups, hundreds of millions of users, and billions of interactions every day. Fortunately, it can also be an intimate and personal place where you can develop new relationships and expand your practice.

If you haven’t already joined, you should. Facebook is amazingly simple to use but can have a huge impact on business. Just register an account and start talking with people. If you want advice for getting started, check out our Facebook Chiropractic videos.

8  Invite the Family

Chiropractic wellness can benefit the entire family but can become expensive for younger families. Why not offer family discounts? That way everyone can benefit from wellness care! Offering family chiropractic services can open up a whole new world of effective marketing and advertising opportunities.

Be sure to include a page on your website about family chiropractic care that includes information on childhood chiropractic. You can add child-friendly chiropractic games.

9  Join the Club

Contact your local golf clubs and/or country clubs and offer to do a seminar on the benefits of chiropractic care. Be sure to include basic information like a biography of yourself, your qualifications, and some samples of your presentation. When you make the presentation, be sure to use visual aids. Slide shows, diagrams, and photos help keep your audience engaged.

After the presentation, hand out a gift packet that includes your business card, additional educational material and coupons for discounted services. You can apply this same technique to many social clubs and sports groups!

10  They Listen to Lists

These days, people rarely read more than a few paragraphs and it’s more important than ever for you to create lists and easily readable bullet-points. Try creating a list of “10 ways chiropractic helps you stay well” or “5 treatments for sciatica” or “12 common causes of neck injury.” These lists help people engage with complex information.

The lists will also help your website’s search engine optimization (your raking on Google), which will dramatically increase traffic to your site- and your office.

“Don’t Gossip!”

Here’s a great USSR poster warning against the dangers of gossip and blabbing – “It’s only a small step from blabbing to treason” (rough translation).  We’ll ignore the bit about the walls listening and the thinly veiled KGB threats in order to glean a bit of wisdom from this old Soviet poster. Here’s the important bit: protect your online reputation at all costs. Increasingly, folks are turning to the internet for reviews and advice on anything from deodorant to heart surgeons. Assume your patients are smart enough to look you up online, check your credentials, and seek out reviews of your services. You should also get ready for them to find you on Facebook and scrutinize your personal character before walking into your office.

Terrified? Don’t be. My advice is to differentiate your personal and professional web personas, just like in real life. If you have a personal Facebook profile and don’t want patients to see it- you need to access your privacy settings and restrict information to only those you approve. But make this basic assumption: when you post anything on the internet, it has become public record and will, someday, catch up with you (for better or worse). The best solution to this dilemma is simply to publish only nice, informative, and professional information the the web.

Eventually, someone will attack you over the internet. They’ll slander your name, question your expertise, or outright insult you. The best response to this kind of activity is none at all or a strictly factual, diplomatic, and non-emotional correction of any false information. When you see something nasty about you online, take two or three days to separate yourself and ask whether it’s even worth responding to- overwhelmingly, it isn’t. Ultimately, taking the higher ground will always pay off.

So what if someone slanders you online and it’s your only review? Obviously, you don’t want to lose patients but you don’t want to respond brashly either. The solution: offer your best patients a 50% discount on one of their adjustments if they write a review of your practice online. It won’t take long before you’re overflowing with positive reviews…and don’t be surprised if you see a surge in new patients too!

Rod Campbell
Marketing Director
Chirohosting.com

Avoid endorsing or selling products. Quick money is awfully tempting- just ask the 20,679 doctors who endorsed cigarettes in the 30′s. It seemed like a good idea at the time. The product was controversial but it hadn’t yet been proven dangerous or unhealthy. Not to mention, they were well paid and the cigarette representatives seemed like awfully nice guys. Bad mistake.

This is a controversial topic to blog on but it’s important. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of companies on the internet trying to get you to sell their product. They guarantee fast cash, big paychecks, and overnight fortunes. If this were the case we’d all be millionaires. Unfortunately, you can lose more than money by buying into these get rich schemes- you also risk losing your professional reputation, or even being subject to lawsuits.

Chiropractic Marketing Idea #2: avoid selling or endorsing products. If you spend half that time promoting your website, improving your search engine optimization, and writing valuable articles you’ll make significantly more money in the long-term and improve your reputation along the way. Don’t get side-tracked, focus on what you spent 6-8 years in school learning- it’s what you’re best at!

Rod Campbell
Marketing Director
Chirohosting.com

In the 1940′s there was a great advertisement for the Volkswagen Beetle. It was refreshingly honest, down to earth, and funny – unlike their competition, who were stuffy, corporate, and cheesy. The advertising technique was a wild success and kept Volkswagen alive and well in the United States. The reason for their success: they were honest and didn’t take themselves too seriously.

Chiropractic Marketing Idea #1: review your website(s) and find ways to make them more personable, honest, and charming. Visit other chiropractic websites and figure out what catch phrases they use. When you’ve got a list of 20 phrases, go back to your own website and change anything that sounds like your competition. Here’s an experiment… take the content from your website and change the name to another practice, if it still makes sense- you’re doing something wrong. Great content should distinguish you from the competition. If your content sounds different from the rest of the mob, you’ve succeeded.

One of the most common questions I run across is “how do I market my practice online?” My answer is usually the same – “build a community, be a valuable resource, and invest time.”  There are no magical solutions, guaranteed gurus, or overnight millionaires.  Can someone become a qualified chiropractor in a week? Not likely. Likewise, successful online marketing takes time and investment – but the results are worth it!

Marketing your chiropractic practice will require a bit of legwork. First, you’ll need a professional website. Skip the bells and whistles, spinning graphics, and busy designs. Your website is your digital office- would you paint the walls of your practice purple? Don’t do it to your website either. The design should be professional, easy to navigate, minimalistic, and informative.  Second, you’ll need social media profiles. Social media websites like Facebook and Twitter are invaluable marketing tools because they connect you to people in your community. Think of social media websites like big cocktail parties; follow simple rules of etiquette: be polite, engage in conversation, and don’t constantly sell. Here’s the worst mistake new users make: they join a social website, create a profile for their business, start adding random people, and then begin barraging folks with meaningless advertisements. Don’t make the mistake of treating social media like a giant classifieds ad or phonebook. If you treat people with respect and make yourself a valuable member of their community, it’ll pay off better. Third, invest in some advertising. There are two primary routes for placing ads: Google Adwords and Facebook Ads. They’re both fantastic but if you could only choose one, I’d recommend Adwords. For detailed advice on online advertising campaigns, refer to our free chiropractic marketing ebook. The ebook, written by Mike Melton, is an concise and informative educational resource. I hope you enjoy it!

Rod Campbell
Marketing Director
Chirohosting.com

The best chiropractic websites all have something in common: good, original content. It’s the best way to boost your search engine results, bring people to your website, and keep them there. Make it your goal to write 2 short (250-500 word) articles per week. It can be on any subject you’re interested in, just get into the habit of writing!

Short on topics? Write about why you became a chiropractor, your best and worst experiences in school, the trials of running a practice, or even the view out your window. You’re not supposed to be writing published literature or academic essays- stick to informal, fun material that you enjoy talking about.

Typos? Imperfect punctuation? Nobody’s perfect. It’s better to produce content with a good heart and a few misplaced commas than to write nothing at all.

What are you waiting for?

Rod Campbell
Marketing Director
Chirohosting.com

You really can’t go anywhere without hearing about Facebook, Twitter, and blogging. And there’s a good reason: social networking is revolutionizing how we communicate with others.

Social networking and chiropractic marketing

Email marketing is an inexpensive and effective way to keep in touch with your existing patients and educate new patients about the benefits of chiropractic.

There are some great resources available to people interested in taking advantage of the power of this new marketing method. For instance, Constant Contact is a popular email marketing service, and the company provides free seminars throughout the country on how to get the most out of email marketing. You can see availability for these seminars here.

There are also some good books on email marketing, available here.

Here are some tips to get the most out of your email campaigns:

• Use a catchy subject line. DON’T do this: “August Newsletter.” That’s not very exciting and is less likely to get opened. Instead, use something like, “Study finds chiropractic beneficial for chiropractic.” With that subject line, you’re going to get the attention of patients with sciatica AND mention the benefits of chiropractic.
• Don’t make your email messages too long. Marketing guru Guy Kawasaki wrote that the optimal email length is five sentences. That’s perhaps a bit extreme for a patient newsletter, but it’s good to keep in mind.
• Don’t send attachments. There are a few reasons for this. First, you don’t want to irritate your recipients, and attachments can be a pain. Secondly, a large attachment is going to get you in trouble with your email service because of bandwidth issues.
• Link to your site! Instead of attaching newsletters, link back to articles and videos on your website. The goal is have your patients interact with your site, and so tease them with something interesting and then link to your site for more information.

And, of course, include good content! Give your patients something interesting to learn about or think about, or something they’ll forward to a friend. With our chiropractic email marketing system, we provide a library of ready-to-send emails that you can use.

Email marketing can be a powerful tool, if done right. For more information about using email in your chiropractic marketing, email me at mike (at) chirohosting.com or give me a call at (800) 295-3346.

Mike Melton

Here’s an interesting strategy for getting more exposure for your chiropractic practice: multiple websites.

Not multiple domains pointing to the same website. (As I wrote a few days ago, multiple domains all pointing to the same site will hurt your search engine ranking.)

I’m talking about creating two or three unique websites with original content and unique domain names — all optimized for search.

Say, for instance, that you’re in Decatur, GA. You could pick three domains:

www.decatur-chiropractor.com

www.chiropractor-decatur.com

www.decaturchiropractic.com

With proper optimization, you could have all three of these sites on the first page of Google. You could put these sites together with WordPress relatively easily, or even use two or three of our $30 Chiropractic Websites. For just $90 a month, you could have THREE links on the first page of Google!