A 2016 Gallup study found that 35.5 million Americans saw a chiropractor within the past year, with 1 in 4 U.S. adults seeking care for neck or back pain.
Patients are the backbone of your chiropractic clinic. Without them, there would be no clinic. But you can’t guarantee that you’ll always have a steady influx of patients — yes, even with those 35.5 million Americans seeing chiropractors. Your existing patients may not always need care.
You need a plan to keep your chiropractic clinic running with more new patients, and OppGen Marketing can help you create a marketing plan. Contact us today for more information.
Digital Marketing Channels for Chiropractic Services
Website
In this day and age, websites are pretty much a requirement if you want your chiropractic clinic to survive. You need to be found online, and having a website can more or less guarantee that people looking for chiropractic services can find your clinic.
For optimum performance, your website should look sleek and professional, and reflect your clinic’s brand. Make sure that there’s no disconnect between your virtual presence and your clinic’s physical location. When these things fail to match up, it can negatively impact your business and result in fewer new patients coming through your doors.
Your website should also work smoothly and quickly on mobile browsers.
SEO
Assuming you have a website up and running, you’ll also want to start focusing on search engine optimization, or SEO, efforts. SEO is a strategy that focuses on getting your website to rank high on search engine results pages (SERPs) for relevant keywords. Being on the first page of search results can lead to an increase in traffic to your chiropractic clinic’s website, and ideally, start getting the traffic to convert into patients.
SEO is also the reason you want a mobile-first website. Google has started to shift to mobile-first indexing, and websites that perform incredibly well on mobile devices tend to rank higher. But that’s not the only thing that can help your website rank well.
You also need to create rich and robust content that’s relevant to your target audience. Content can be blog posts, images, videos, and/or podcasts, or a combination of all four. Creating good content that others can share and link back to is something that Google’s bots can see, and will reward you with better SERPs positions.
Keep in mind that SEO is not a fast, on/off strategy. It can take several months before you start seeing the fruits of your efforts.
Paid Search Ads
For faster results that get more leads through your chiropractic clinic’s doors, paid search ads are a great option.
Search engines host paid search ads, which have 2 main formats:
- Search engine ads/pay-per-click (PPC) ads: The first kind of paid search ads look similar to the individual results on SERPs. They can be found at the top or bottom of SERPs and are usually labeled with “ad.” PPC ads are great because they only show up when people search for certain keywords or phrases that you select. You can also narrow down who sees PPC ads by location, so you can ensure you’re only getting local clients — more specifically, prospective clients who are proactively seeking chiropractic care and treatment solutions. And if someone who isn’t a good fit sees that ad, it won’t cost you a penny! As the name implies, PPC ads only incur a charge if they are clicked on.
- Display ads: Display ads can be PPC ads as well; however, they aren’t text-only ads and they don’t appear on the search engine itself. Instead, display ads are visual ads that appear on websites. We’ve found display ads are most successful for retargeting prospects — a process that entails targeting ads to prospects who have already visited your website without doing anything, and displaying these ads as “reminders” to go back and take action (i.e., schedule a consultation).
Paid Social Media Ads
Another great place to market to prospects is Facebook, where you can create different types of ads and target them to even more specific audiences.
Unlike Facebook and most social media sites, Google doesn’t require its users to create accounts. While Google Ads does have some demographic targeting options, these options aren’t as robust as the ones Facebook has to offer.
Facebook users share quite a bit of information when they sign up — their age, location, sex, relationship status, etc. — and then go on to share more with their likes, interests, and behavior.
Facebook’s targeting tools use all of this information to help better target ads to the right audiences. Once you know your target audience, you can utilize Facebook’s lookalike audience targeting tool. it will take the information about your best patients (with HIPAA, though, you’ll have to supply the information yourself and not use the account of a specific patient) and use it to push ads to more people like them. This can help you find more prospects and more patients.
Plus, Facebook Ads offers several different kinds of ads that go beyond text-only. You can combine text and images, either in single-image ads or carousel ads that feature multiple images. You can even create video ads. With all of the options Facebook Ads has to offer, you’ll certainly find the ones that are most effective for marketing your chiropractic services. Feel free to reach out to OppGen Marketing for additional guidance.
Reviews
According to the American Chiropractic Association, chiropractors are the highest-rated healthcare practitioners for low back pain treatment, as patients give them higher ratings than physical therapists, specialists, and primary care physicians.
That said, reviews are very important, especially if you are living in an area with several different chiropractors available for patients.
Reviews can make you stand out from your competitors and even improve your SERPs position, and as a medical professional, you have several options for where you can have your ratings displayed, such as:
- Healthgrades
- WebMD
- Zocdoc
- Yelp
- Yellow Pages
- Facebook Business
- Google My Business
- Bing Places for Business
We recommend creating or claiming a Google My Business listing for your chiropractic clinic, as Google is the most popular online review platform. Running your clinic’s Google My Business listing allows you to manage your reputation better than if you haven’t claimed your listing or created it.
Managing your reputation doesn’t mean you should try to hide or delete negative reviews; on the contrary, you should always respond to negative reviews. Negative reviews can actually be a good thing, as they offer feedback and can help you improve your services and offerings. So when you see a negative review, respond — but don’t use the same copied and pasted answer over and over again.
Read what the patient has to say, apologize, and reach out to them to see if there is anything you can do for them to improve their experience.
This doesn’t mean that they’ll take down the review, but it does show everyone else who sees the review and your response that you care about your patients, and that goes a long way.
Traditional Marketing Channels for Chiropractic Services
Offer Free Health Screenings/Consultations, Massages, and Other Relevant Chiropractic Services
Offering discounted or free services as value propositions can be a great incentive that can get new people through your chiropractic clinic’s doors.
Consider offering free consultations for first-time patients, free massages (if you have a massage therapist on the payroll), and other services you feel could make a good impression for these first-timers and would encourage them to come back for a follow-up appointment. If you’re not sure what services you could offer for free or at a discount, contact OppGen for recommendations.
Partner with Local Businesses
If your chiropractic clinic specializes in certain areas, such as pediatrics, sports medicine, or certain types of injuries, it may be worth your time to look into a partnership with a local business.
For example, if you specialize in treating sports injuries, try reaching out to a local gym and see if you can offer screening services for a limited time, or if you can teach a class or give a seminar about preventing back injuries. This can help both you and the gym bring in more customers and patients, making it a win-win scenario for everyone involved.
Another relationship that may be worth building is one with personal injury law firms. It’s not uncommon for a personal injury attorney to refer one of their clients to go to a medical professional for another opinion. In the event that one of their clients has a back-related injury, they may reach out to a chiropractor they trust.
Create a Business Outreach Program
You may not have local businesses’ trust right off the bat, and that’s okay. This just means you need to think of some ways to reach out to those businesses and establish that trust.
Hiring massage therapists and getting them to call local businesses and set up a massage event, either offering free massages or highly discounted massages.
Another option would be to run a giveaway contest or a drawing with a local businesses, in which they could receive free massages during a scheduled time of day.
Contact OppGen for More Ideas for How to Market Chiropractic Services
For more information on how to market chiropractic services, contact us today.
