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Issue 11 - September 2003 Schroeder’s Low-Force Chiropractic gets high-impact results Schroeder’s Low-Force Chiropractic generated a half-million dollars in gross billings in 2002. His five-month numbers this year project nearly three-quarters of a million dollars in billings. He sees his practice hitting the $1 million mark within 10 years. However, if recent growth says anything, that may happen a bit sooner. Schroeder did $352,000 in billings in 2001; just two years later he stands to more than double that. How does a practice just barely out of its infancy grow so exponentially? Simple: marketing, and lots of it. While not exactly a movie mogul, Schroeder is a multi-media marketer nonetheless. His $40,000 marketing budget for 2003 is spread out across five media. And he gets use of a sixth cost-free. “You can have the best technique in the world, but if you’re not getting your name out in front of someone so they realize what you’re going to do, what’s the use?” Schroeder says of the theory behind his widespread marketing. “As individual entrepreneurs, we need to get the word out to the market that what we do works and works well.” Schroeder gets his name — and face, and voice and image — all over the place. He advertises in the newspaper ($15,600), has an infomercial ($14,400), runs a Yellow Pages ad ($7,000), produces a TV show on local-access cable ($1,500) and publishes plenty of internal brochures, earmarking $1,500 for in-house marketing. On top of all of that, he hosts a call-in radio show one day a month. The key to going multi-media, as with anything else, is to start out slowly. He didn’t simply decide one day to jump headfirst into every form of advertising. Schroeder also preaches the importance of tracking what he does, getting a concrete look at his return-on-investment (ROI). Having built his marketing strategy to include so many different tacks, he says, is what makes his practice what it is. “The multi-media is making the biggest success in our practice,” he says. “It started Day 1. We started planting the seed doing the health fairs. As we started into multimedia, it grew gradually. I started one at a time. A lot of the things I did originally were kind of grassroots. I didn’t have the budget. I borrowed money from my parents to get started. I learned by going out and doing things — speeches, marketing, internal one-on-one things. Like anything else, it takes time. It’s opened up the door to where we’re at a level, right now, that you hope for but you’re never sure you’re going to get.” He also says every approach he uses is not right for everybody and that things cannot simply be done without planning and thought. Affiliate yourself with people who know what they’re doing and go in with an idea, he suggests.“The idea of the marketing is the plan,” he says. “Start with one medium and when you feel comfortable with one, go to two. But you have to have the right people to guide you.” Measured success “You get to know if the idea you’re getting across is working,” he says. “It’s getting the right message to the right people, and you have to track it.”
Schroeder has a formula for tracking ROI. Figuring that a typical patient brings in $800 per year, he multiplies the number of new patients by $800, and then divides that number by the amount of advertising dollars spent. For example, if he gets 10 new patients and spends $4,000 advertising in newspapers, the ROI for newspaper advertising would be $2 for every $1 spent. “It helps having an MBA in marketing,” he says with a laugh. He also makes sure to find out how each patient found him and watches that closely. His greatest expense, newspaper advertising, produces the largest return in new patients. In house, Schroeder has brochures produced and does patient letters informing them of things the practice has done, changes that have been made or announcements. “Anything that can get your name back into their mind,” he says. “That’s the idea of marketing — to make selling superfluous.” A technological appeal “When you see a picture of your pain in color, that’s the most incredible internal marketing you have,” Schroeder says of the two machines. “You can take that home with you. You tell them, especially with the technologies we do that are different, why they are different and why we get the results we do.” Interestingly enough, in spite of all his expenditures and marketing know-how, as with seemingly everything out there, word-of-mouth is still king. Nearly half of Schroeder’s new patients can be attributed to patient referrals.“That’s the whole idea about PR,” Schroeder said. “It’s kind of like with testimonials. The preacher who brags about himself has a congregation of one. There’s so much to getting other people to tell the stories for you. I’m always sure to tell people about the results.” Advertising isn’t easy without a product. In addition to his equipment advances, Schroeder sells his specialty: musculoskeletal problems. He focuses mainly in that area, so people with those types of concerns know to come to him. He knows and understands that other DCs offer a variety of services and he sees the logic in doing so. “More power to them,” Schroeder says. “I like doing things maybe the old style of chiropractic. I’m not saying [multi-function DCs] are wrong. That’s the way I have been brought up. To me, when you try to do all things to all people, you get lost in the shuffle. You stick to things you do well and the conditions you can take care of. That’s the world of medicine anymore. Everything is specialized. That’s what I do well.” Beyond all forms of advertising, and even beyond referrals, there are still ways to get one’s name out, and Schroeder has made sure that’s happened with his practice. He has been featured several times in the local paper, as well as on television newscasts. Getting media coverage isn’t guaranteed, but Schroeder says you won’t get it if you don’t ask for it. “Persistence, persistence, persistence,” he says. “The worst these people could say is no. If you have an idea, they’re looking for ideas that are new and fresh. If you have something that is different and fresh, it’s a different angle for them. It’s worth a phone call.” Hitting the right targets Marketing a practice doesn’t mean simply marketing to prospective patients. Bill Schroeder has found that getting his name and face out among people important to the field can be every bit as important and lucrative. Because of his efforts in the early years of his practice, including safety speeches, health fairs and marketing to doctors, attorneys and local businesses, Schroeder has been able to have his practice on the workers’ compensation panels of more than 100 local area businesses. “We developed a working relationship with several area doctors and attorneys and added hundreds of new patients from the health fairs,” Schroeder says of the efforts, which he estimates provided $130,000 in workers’ comp collections in the first two years. Schroeder says such feats can be easily accomplished. In many cases it was merely a matter of reaching out and touching someone. “I would call the personnel or safety manager and would tell them a little bit about myself and send them a package [of information] and find out the insurances they were on,” he says. “It was a general marketing of myself to not only the insurances, but to the workers’ comp people, the safety managers or those who handled the worker’s comp at that company. I’d come and do free speeches for them in ways that they would familiarize themselves with me.” Schroeder says one cause for concern in this area nowadays is that the medical world is handling more and more workers’ compensation cases. With that in mind, Schroeder plans to go after more regular insurance cases. For instance, Blue Cross of Pennsylvania has said that in July of 2004 it will no longer require referrals for HMO patients. It’s a niche Schroeder anticipates attacking with fervor. He also plans on dropping out of certain PPOs because they are proving less lucrative. “We’re not getting the business from their workers’ comp,” he says. “As a provider, they’ll take 20 percent away, if you’re not getting new patients … why should you give 10 percent to 20 percent away? If you could get $100 per visit, if you don’t need to be a member to see that patient, why are you giving away $20?” Schroeder’s plan along these lines for the rest of this year and next includes marketing more aggressively to the public and less to medical doctors. He estimates that dropping out of wasted PPO and POS plans could net $30,000 to $40,000 in collections annually. Infomercials focus on techno diagnostics It may not be reality TV, but the results are very real. While the infomercial has only run for 10 weeks, Schroder already attributes 5 percent of his new patients to it, and a recent spate of business indicates that the 15-minute production is money well-spent. During a two-week span in May, 525 patients made their way through Schroeder’s doors, accounting for $34,000 in billings. Of those, 46 were new patients and of the 46, 14 were directly attributable to his infomercial. Produced by a local video production company, Schroeder’s infomercial runs about 17 times a month. This includes three 1 a.m. showings per week, an 8 a.m. Sunday broadcast and one Saturday afternoon each month. “I’ve been tracking and it’s been pretty equal,” Schroeder says about the success of the different time slots. “The 1 a.m. [infomercials] have a lot of people up with pain watching it. I’ll tell you what — the response has been something. It’s pretty much doing what I thought it would do. It’s just been absolutely phenomenal.” He says the goal of the infomercial is to “differentiate our practice with our low-force techniques,” as well as to illustrate how the thermal image processor helps in the diagnosis and treatments of different symptoms. Schroeder’s 15-minute program runs twice in each half-hour time slot. He recommends this approach, saying most viewers aren’t likely to stick around for the entire 30 minutes and that he can say all he needs in the 15-minute timeframe. He also emphasizes the importance of getting this type of show produced professionally. He says his show costs about $1,500 to produce and he has budgeted about $14,400, or 36 percent of his overall marketing budget, for airings. Putting a face — and voice — with a name If Howard Stern is the King of all Media, Bill Schroeder is certainly the chiropractic prince — minus the shock value, of course. Preaching a multi-media approach to marketing chiropractic practices, Schroeder has done a bit of everything when it comes to promoting his own. He began simply, giving local talks, doing health fairs — the usual marketing fare. Eventually he branched into other media and now attacks his audience from every conceivable angle. Included in his $40,000 marketing budget for 2003 are newspaper ads, an infomercial, Yellow Pages ads, internal marketing and television and radio shows. The latter are done on Altoona-area stations: the TV show is on local-access cable, while the radio show is on an easy-listening station. “I was doing a speech at a company on workers’ compensation and lifting,” Schroeder recalls. “A gentleman who heard my speech knew a person from the TV station and recommended me. We’ve been doing a monthly show ever since then.” Schroeder says the TV show, which costs about $150 to produce each month (and runs twice weekly), features a different topic each time. Such subjects as fibromyalgia, disc degeneration and other chiropractic topics are among the show’s subject matter. A variety of guests also appear. The radio program, which Schroeder estimates receives two or three calls each airing (he is live one Thursday a month), is conducted on an easy-listening station for a reason. “It has a little bit of an older demographic audience,” he says. “A lot of the advertising we do, we try to hit different demographics. We’re going after a little bit more of the older audience there.” Todd Stumpf is a freelance writer from Akron, Ohio. He has written professionally for 14 years. He has been with Chiropractic Economics as a contributing editor for three years. He can be reached at TStumpf22@yahoo.com. Schroeder Low-Force Chiropractic TEAM PLAYERS Tonya Miller Betty Sue Laird (full time, six months) Richard Shade (part-time, three years) OFFICE HOURS *Estimate from first 5 months actual billing/collections Patient Visits/Week (2002-2003): 175 New Patients /Month: 42 Patient Visit Average/Year: 17.5 |
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