Chiropractic Marketing Plans

The reason you need to create a chiropractic marketing plan is that you can forecast:

• Where you want to spend your marketing and advertising dollars for your practice
• What type of patient (new and recurring) inflow that you can expect over the life of your plan.

Your initial thoughts on marketing might be that you can just spend some money to be in a local newspaper or circular and by making that investment, you will get enough new clients to keep your practice busy and to pay down that investment.  Unfortunately, that sort of wishful thinking is the downfall of many businesses.  Just because you advertise (and you could do it very well), it doesn’t mean that you will get enough new patients to pay off that investment and to keep your practice full.

For example, let’s say that you advertise in a weekly newspaper and it’s a pretty good ad and brings patients through the door.

• You spent $5,000 to reach 10,000 people over 5 different weeks. 
• From that advertisement, you get a 0.1% response rate, or 10 new clients. 
• If each client is worth $1,000 over their lifetime, that’s a $5,000 return on a $5,000 investment - a good 100% ROI

The problem is that this money doesn’t come to you right away.  The $1,000 per patient is over the lifetime so you don’t see that return for probably a year.  So you ran your one marketing campaign, got pretty good results, but you can’t even pay off the campaign within the first month. 

If you had a marketing plan in place, you would know this ahead of time.  By putting together a plan that has the dates for each campaign, the costs, and the expected results, you have a better picture of the impact that your marketing campaigns are going to have on your practice. 

What’s in a Chiropractic Marketing Plan

Here are the elements that you need in your chiropractic marketing plan.  I like to put this information into an Excel spreadsheet so that I can get a bigger picture if need (for example, how much am I going to spend in marketing over the next 12 months)

1. Date to start Campaign
2. Campaign Name
3. Campaign Type (direct mail, newspaper, radio, sponsorship, online search)
4. Number of contacts (how many people you’re going to reach)
5. Expected Cost - Probably should be in the above list since you might need to use that number to determine your cash flow
6. Expected Response Rate - Usually based off of previous campaigns
7. Expected Responses - Based off the projected response rate and the number of contacts that we’re sending out.
8. Expected Sales - We use our sales conversion rate to figure this out
9. Expected Net Revenue - Based on how many sales we project and the average revenue per customer
10. Projected ROI - Based on our expected net revenue and how much we are planning on spending

The big daddy in that list is projected ROI.  Once campaigns are done, that’s the main number that you should care most about.  If you can get a positive ROI, you know that the campaign was a success and you should look to expand it as much as possible to get a higher ROI for more and more profits. 

• If it was a newspaper ad, continue advertising and see if you can advertise more frequently
• If it was a mail campaign, send out mail to more people

Maintaining Your Marketing Plan

Some people like to put marketing plans in calendars so they know exactly when different campaigns are going to kick-off.  This is a good way to ensure that your name is always out there and on people’s short term memory.  It also ensures that you don’t have "gaps" in your flow of new patients.  You might be busy today and don’t think you need to advertise at all.  Just remember, there is a delay in these efforts so your investments today won’t pay off until further down the road.

In the end, it’s all about testing and tracking.  You need to test and see what works and your chiropractic marketing plan is the most effective way to do that.   You can plan and work off of actual results and not just hunches on what seems to work most effectively.