Add a little spice to your marketing recipe
By Harvey Schwartz, DC

Cookbooks can provide great recipes. But the most successful cooks use those recipes only as guides. They improvise — adding a bit of this and a dash of that — to make the final product their own.

Marketing your practice can be done much the same way. You can find recipes for marketing success. But to make them yours, you need to improvise. Here are some “seasonings” you might want to consider in your marketing program.

1. Learn from your mistakes — and move on. Successful people make mistakes. What separates them from those who are not successful is that they learn from their mistakes and move on.

This tenet is basic to marketing. As you develop a marketing program to promote your practice, keep track of your successes — and failures. Keep the winners and discard the losers.

2. Be willing to try new things. Although you attempt to avoid making the same mistake again, repeating a successful marketing program may not get the same results you had the first time you did it.

The reason? Successful marketing is influenced by there important variables — who you are professionally (which changes over time), how the world views chiropractic, and the local market condition in your area (which also changes).

Assess these variables and try new approaches.

3. Make your marketing resonate ‘you.’ You can buy canned advertising that works — for someone else. But if you or your staff don’t feel good about the entire promotion, it will fail to get the results you expect. Customize your marketing materials so that they are instantly identifiable as yours.

4. Structure your practice to accommodate more patients. Here is what may happen when you advertise: The promotion recruits a rash of new patients. The increase overwhelms and exhausts you and your staff. Your “old” patients sense your fatigue or get tired of long waits and start dropping out. But you and your staff are so busy processing new patients that you don’t notice the drop.

A month or two later, when the storm has passed, your numbers indicate that the practice is no busier than it was a month before the promotion. That is when you discover that some of your regular patients have stopped coming in for treatment.

Avoid this by preparing in advance for the possible increase to make the promotion a positive experience for everyone — you, your staff, and all your patients.

5. Tell a good chiropractic story. What good is an influx of new patients if they don’t remain active? One key to retaining patients is to provide an excellent report-of-findings on the second visit. Give them a written report that includes chiropractic information, an outline of the patient’s individual problems, exercises, and lifestyle suggestions.

6. Don’t be afraid to fail! Try new things to promote your practice, even things no one else does. It’s OK to be different. Why should you do what everyone else is doing?

7. Weigh the benefits of different types of marketing. There are two types of marketing — internal and external. Internal marketing costs less and yields more referral patients who tend to be good chiropractic patients.

External marketing costs more, but requires less emotional energy to attract new patients.

Whatever you do, have fun in your work! Life will not give you more of a burden. It will provide abundance if you care and want to help as many people as your abilities allow.

Harvey Schwartz, DC, has practiced for 25 years. His first practice averaged nearly 400 patient visits per week. His second practice became a model of efficiency and profitability. He currently offers phone consultations to help teach others what he has learned. He can be contacted at 360-733-7002 or through his Web site, www.fc-solutions.net.