In my first article on marketing in this six-part series, I revealed how to calculate the number of scheduled new patients on your reservation books needed give you the income you require – first to survive and second to carry you to an affluence of New Patients In (NPI). I also presented the first steps in formulating your marketing plan. Now let's discuss how to tap into a huge market of local prospective patients and where to find them by building a marketing hierarchy for your practice.
The Event Formula for Growth
The growth formula that has served true in my experience is this: If you want to expand to reach and/or maintain an office at 200-225 patient visits per week, your office needs to participate in an average of two events per week. For an office to reach and/or maintain an office at 400-425 patient visits, you need to average three weekly events.
An event is a high-caliber venue that either (1) has a high concentration of very qualified prospective patients, such as a corporate health fair; or (2) has a high-volume of local prospective patients, such as a local 5k running race or community festival.
If your office is short an event-level venue in a given week, then to make up for the production of new patients, you would need to undertake three separate bouts of grassroots or guerrilla activities to equal the production of that single event. For each of those bouts of activity, an office would expend approximately 3-4 hours.
So, you can be part of a single three-hour event, or you can go out and be extremely busy for 9-12 hours. Each strategy would yield about the same result, but one takes significantly more time, energy and resources.
Marketing Hierarchy
Here's where you scale out or prioritize your marketing efforts from the actions that give the most bang for the buck down to the grassroots that produce results, but take more energy/effort/time – not comparable to the top categories we will cover here. As in any battle plan (and competing for new patients is indeed a battle), the best overall strategy and individual tactics win. It's comes down to being smart about it and learning the rules of the game.
What you focus your attention on gets your energy, and that energy should not be wasted on trivial pursuits when that same energy can make a bigger and better result. By reproducing something that works, you can be assured it can work. Avoid things totally new and untried until you are in a very stable volume, so you don't put your practice growth in jeopardy.
Building Your Chiropractic Marketing Hierarchy
Most chiropractors can be found beating the same drum over and over again with regard to their marketing outflow, events and advertisements. The goal of the marketing hierarchy is not to abandon that (at least not the things that are producing!), but to reinforce those successful actions and make way for other top-producing sources to rise.
The first step in making your hierarchy is to pull out a blank piece of paper and jot down every source, every avenue that has produced new patients for you for the past year or two. This is a mind-dump. Just put it all down; no ordering / sorting required at this point. If you have a marketing calendar, reference it. You can also use your past new-patient reservation books as a tickler.
Sorting Out Your Marketing Hierarchy
Top: At the top of a separate sheet of paper, start listing the venues and sources that provide "the most bang for the buck." These often include:
- Already established health fairs
- Corporate benefits fairs such as an open enrollment
- Any form of referral program or referral campaign/contest
- Local seasonal events where there are a lot of local qualified prospects (e.g., one where you can have a booth)
- Monthly dinner talks
- Teacher appreciation days
These are just a few examples. You know what events produce the most qualified new patients with the least cost, energy, effort (blood, sweat, tears) and staff time.
Middle: These are slightly lower-yielding venues compared to the ones above, yet they are reliable and predictable. Some examples here are corporate lunch & learn events, gym / rec center screenings, leads groups, having a booth at the farmer's market / home show / boat show, etc.
Lower third – grassroots and guerrilla marketing. These venues and activities produce the least, take the most energy and time, but nevertheless always have a minimum production. I call this "boots on the ground."
There are hundreds of marketing options at this level. Some examples could include: distributing your introductory package out in public in the form of a gift certificate, such as to small businesses or business foot traffic / food courts; having a screening at your local health food store; hosting a benefit drive for a local cause, etc.
Base: This is where your passive producers go: direct mail campaigns, Facebook / Google ads, all social media campaigns, email drip system, door hangers, newsletters mailed out, killer ads, etc.
The venues and actions you put here are ones that can be amazing producers – or little, yet consistent producers of leads. These usually take time and/or money up front to establish; however, then they are literally "push-button" campaigns to launch when needed.
Start Each Day Right
With all of these ideas for building your practice, the main thing to remember is to leverage your (and/or your team's) effort and time. Starting each day with a top-down focus on your marketing hierarchy – asking questions such as "What companies do I need to follow up with to find out when their next health fair is?"— will help you pursue the events and activities that are the most fruitful for quickly building your practice. Don't get lost in the need to be simply "busy" doing marketing.
The goal in creating this hierarchy is to reinforce your marketing to work smarter for you, not harder on you. When you operate this way, and then later train your marketer to operate like this, you will likely have a "too many" new patients problem – now that's a cool "problem" to have!
