When you think about marketing your business are you overwhelmed with numbers and details and all the confusion that comes along with sales and promotion?
When you consider creating a marketing plan for your services are you at a total loss of where to even begin?
If you're like many chiropractors today, you answered with a resounding "YES" to the above questions
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Spending time learning how to market yourself wasn't a priority in chiropractic college, right? You are involved in your profession because you like helping people, not because you ever wanted to be a professional salesperson. You are trained as a medical healer, not an advertiser.
Because our goal as medical professionals is to serve, the idea of marketing is often like playing a game of hide-n-seek. You know marketing opportunities exist out there for you, but you don't know where to go looking for them. To help you find those marketing opportunities once and for all, let's take a look at where they're hiding and what you can do to make the most of them once you've found them.
Where Are Your Marketing Opportunities Hiding?
For some reason, many chiropractors try to make marketing into something much more complicated then it really is. At its most basic, marketing is simply the art of communicating who you are and what you do to people who might benefit from your services.
To those ends, a conversation about your clinic in the grocery store line is a form of person-to-person marketing. And, just like the in-store conversation example, the opportunities to market yourself and your business in these basic ways are all around you at all times.
Take a look at a few of the many places and ways you can begin marketing your business:
Your Business Card
The key to any successful marketing campaign is being memorable. Advertisers spend millions of dollars figuring out exactly what needs to be done to create advertisements that are memorable. When it comes to thinking about marketing, there's no better place to begin than with your business card. Make and distribute a unique card to set yourself apart from the rest in today's highly competitive marketplace.
Educational Brochures, Flyers, and Reports
Many promotional flyers are tossed in the trash can as soon the patient leaves the clinic. But, if you educate your patients with informative marketing materials that serve double duty as teaching as well as promotional tools, you'll discover something different happens. When you provide useful content to your patients (and potential patients), you are increasing the likelihood that those marketing materials are going to "stick around" for a while and not be immediately thrown out.
Anything "Free"
Free! As you probably know, people love free "stuff." Often it doesn't really matter what the free "stuff" is, but the fact that it's free attracts people by the droves. You can use this quirk of the human character to your benefit. In fact, in marketing there are numerous places where FREE is your absolute in-road to the hearts and minds of prospective and existing patients. Give away key chains, mugs, notepads-make sure each has your name and contact information on it.
Yellow Page, Magazine, and Newspaper Ads
Traditional ads are easier than ever to post in print media. Contact your local newspaper to find out how simple it is-and, often inexpensive-to create a high quality ad to promote your business and services to the local community.
Letters, Postcards, and E-mail
One of the most basic, but often overlooked forms of marketing is the letter. That's right; an everyday letter can go a long way toward promoting your business, establishing credibility, and creating a personal relationship with your current (or potential) patients. Write a letter, a postcard, or an e-mail and send it to your patients and give them an update on what is happening in the clinic, offer them special promotions, or inform them about current trends in the field. Whatever you do, do it regularly and keep your patients in the loop-because remember, out of sight is out of mind.
Your Website
As today's equivalent to the business card, full-page ad, telemarketer, and in-person consultation all combined into one, a website is your full-service solution to marketing your business in the 21st century. If you want to attract (and keep) patients in today's digital world, you'll not only want a website, you'll absolutely need one!
As you can quickly see, there don't have to be all kinds of high tech and highly specialized techniques to market your business. In fact, marketing opportunities often work best when they're kept low tech and personal. When you look around, you'll probably surprise yourself with the number of opportunities that are just waiting for you to take advantage of them. You can begin promoting your business today…quickly, easily, and inexpensively.
