If you're a chiropractor who is looking for ways to market and build your private practice, it's important to realize how profoundly consumer trends have changed in the past 2 years. It used to be that you could rely on big yellow page ads, direct mailings, health fairs, or other display advertisements as effective lead generation methods.
While these methods can certainly still work, they are expensive and there is no guarantee that they will produce a good return on investment. Many chiropractors experience a great deal of frustration and disappointment after spending thousands of dollars on these forms of marketing with little or no impact on their practice growth.
So, what does work? Well, as a chiropractor, you are going to have to get more creative in your marketing endeavors. The average consumer is more empowered than ever to make informed decisions before they buy. They want you to provide them with helpful information that they can absorb on their own time without any risk on their part--financial or otherwise.
This is why ads don't work that great in this day and age: there is too much of a leap for the average person from seeing your ad to becoming a patient. There needs to be some kind of intermediary stage where they can learn more about how you can help them in a risk free way.
Enter the web 2.0 world. Simply put, if you don't have a powerful online presence to market your practice, you are missing out in a big way. Web 2.0 is largely about interactivity between you and your prospects using interfaces such as blogging, social media sites, and YouTube. These are incredibly powerful tools to softly sell your services by providing information to targeted groups of people in your community who are specifically interested in your methods and philosophy.
As of 2008, we are now just seeing the initial wave of potential that these mediums offer. Give it another year or two and I predict that social media sites like Facebook and MySpace will be one of the most powerful and widely used forms of marketing for chiropractors all around the world. By then, too many chiropractors may be using this to make it as powerful as it is right now. NOW is the time to learn about social media, to get on facebook, twitter, myspace, stumbleupon, and the other major sites, and to make this a major part of your marketing system.
These mediums are all free. They do require your time and energy to maintain, but you can automate a lot of the daily maintenance or delegate it out to your receptionist or a virtual assistant. You also want to install a blog on your practice website and post to it 2-3 times a week minimally.
I hope this gets you started thinking out of the box and experimenting with this powerful new trend in chiropractic marketing.
I invite you to get a FREE copy of my Conscious Practitioner Starter Kit with a practice building audio and a bi-monthly practice building ezine. Go to http://www.ConsciousChiropracticBusiness.com to get this valuable information today.
Kevin Doherty is a licensed business development consultant and practice building coach to holistic health practitioners around the world. He has personally built two very successful holistic health practices. He helps chiropractors experience both purpose and prosperity through creative, low cost marketing and effective patient education.
