Top 3 Reasons Your Chiropractic Practice Needs a Marketing Consultant

chiropractic marketing consultant

If you’re one of the 60,000 chiropractors practicing in the United States (Source: American Chiropractic Association) you’ve probably tried your hand in marketing. Maybe you dabbled a little in it, or tried so hard it started distracting you from what really matters – your patients.

It’s Time to Drop the Chiropractic Digital Marketing Agency

Perhaps you’ve tried one of those chiropractic digital marketing agencies that specialize in providing websites and advertising for you and all of your competitors. You learned firsthand that they can cost an arm and leg. On top of that they want to up-sell you a ton of services too. Pretty soon you have a website and marketing package that costs as much as a mortgage payment.

As soon as you stop paying your expensive monthly fees, they pull the plug on your website and your life’s work is lost. Which means you spent a ton of time, energy and money having an agency build you a website which wasn’t even yours to begin with. Not to mention, you practically held their hand through the whole process trying to capture the language and brand of your practice.

All the while you didn’t even think twice about your customer data, analytics, email leads and milestones that you were hitting were being held by a company that also handles websites for your direct competitors. Talk about a major conflict of interest!

Bring on a Marketing Consultant

If you don’t have time to do your marketing yourself and are sick of paying out the yin-yang for an agency that is holding your website hostage, then it’s time you engage a marketing consultant. A marketing consultant is a skilled business professional with a track record of successfully maneuvering marketing on behalf of clients to reach business goals. They can be brought on a project basis or part-time basis as your Marketing Director.

What makes a consultant helpful is they can really dig into your marketing and dedicate themselves to your hurdles more so than any other form of outsourcing available. Marketing consultants can go beyond remedying your digital marketing. They can help you with customer service, branding, public relations, advertising, customer retention and even design a website that is yours to keep.

Not all consultants are created equal, so you will need to do your homework when hiring one. Make sure to always ask these questions when hiring a marketing consultant.

Here are the top 3 reasons why Your Chiropractic Practice Needs a Marketing Consultant:

1. Your Patient Experience is Lacking

When you patients come to you they are seeking relief from neck and back pain stemming from different types of causes. These can include accidents, sports injuries and muscle strains (among many others). The best form of marketing for your practice is providing exceptional care for your patient’s by helping them gain relief through your various treatments you have. Chiropractors that deliver exceptional outcomes are rewarded with positive word of mouth by pain free patients. When 99.9% of your patients are leaving your care happy, word travels lightning fast.

A marketing consultant is a customer advocate. The consultant will be able to draw upon multiple techniques to find out how you really fare with your customers. Once the consultant identifies weak links, they’ll put you on a plan to improve, turning weaknesses into strengths. This will put your practice on track of high performance. So it is that outsider perspective, combined with a marketing research component that makes the marketing consultant especially valuable for your practice.

2. You Need New Patients

When it comes to getting new patients, no chiropractor can ever have enough. The most successful chiropractic practices all have something in common. They have a marketing system in place that provides them with a steady flow of leads. If you are not getting enough leads, this can stem from a number of breakdowns that exist in your current marketing efforts. The guidance of a marketing consultant can help you write a strategic marketing plan. This strategic plan will focus on creating lead generation to spearhead new patients. There is no silver bullet in chiropractic marketing. Each practice has its own unique sets of challenges. That’s the benefit of working with a marketing consultant; they are not going to put you on the same program as everyone else. They’re going to build you a custom program that turns you into a high performing marketing machine.

3. Your Reputation Needs Improvement

Reputation is everything. If your chiropractic practice suffers from a bad reputation, you’ll need to stop the pain by improving your patient experience. You’ll need to do this by providing positive outcomes with everyone that enters your clinic. When you get this right, then you will be ready to market your practice to referral sources and through marketing, advertising, digital channels (website, social media) and public relations.

An experienced marketing consultant will have maneuvering not just one of the above areas, but all of these areas. This will help improve your reputation on multiple fronts.

Hiring a Marketing Consultant for your Chiropractic Practice

Bringing on a consultant with experience directly in the chiropractic field is not a must, though it can help. If you do decide to hire one, make sure to always ask these questions when hiring a marketing consultant.

The very nature of marketing is very competitive. High performing chiropractic practices with a large loyal following of patients guard their marketing plans and strategies from the eyes of nosy competitors. This is something to be aware of when seeking the counseling of a marketing consultant or any outsider. Make sure they are working for you and not sharing your trade secrets and marketing discoveries with your direct competitors. After all you are paying them to create strategies for you so you can capture the market to grow your chiropractic practice.

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Levon Guiragossian is principal marketing consultant and founder of The Holy Grail of Marketing, a consulting firm specializing in helping chiropractors market their chiropractic practices. The Holy Grail of Marketing practices what it preaches by never taking on competitors in the same market.

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