How to hire and use a marketing CA


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Boost your bottom line
How to hire and use a marketing CA
By Kathy Mills Chang

Some chiropractors cringe when they hear the word “marketing.” Marketing is foreign territory to them and they wonder, “Do I really have to market my practice?”

The short answer — yes.

Your practice is a business, and new patients are its life blood. Without new patients, your practice is in a state of decline. If this situation is left unattended, you put your business in jeopardy.

In reality if your lights are on and your doors are unlocked, you are actually marketing your practice. But — with more focused attention, you can turn up this minimal marketing and make a significant difference in your bottom line and cash flow.

No time to do active marketing? Hire — and use — a dedicated marketing specialist.

Here’s how:

1. Hire the right person. Personality and organizational skills should be two areas of careful focus when choosing a marketing CA.

Marketers tend to be creative yet analytical, have excellent interpersonal and networking skills, but are not necessarily extroverted. (They get much of their motivation, inspiration, and creativity from within.)

To make sure the person you are considering hiring has the best characteristics for the job, select from a variety of personality tests and interview questions.

Other characteristics to look for include a positive attitude; a sincere desire to do marketing; top-notch organizational skills (to keep track of marketing efforts); and a take-charge attitude, to control the marketing effort and keep it going.

2. Get organized. Marketing cannot be done without organization and planning.

An excellent way for you (and your marketing CA) to get organized is to put together a marketing manual. This manual should include, at a minimum, the following sections:

• The marketing CA’s job description. These duties should include scheduling events, decorating the office for holidays and upcoming events, organizing reactivation and recall campaigns, and coordinating the creation of brochures, sell sheets, etc.

• A list of all marketing events. Each event needs to be detailed with: contact information for the people you deal with, the cost of supplies and fees, and the number of new patients generated over the specified (for example, 90 days).

• A six-month events calendar. This enables you to budget for upcoming events, and to plan your time and delegate as necessary.

The manual acts as the central collection point for all key marketing information. Everyone in the practice should know where it is and be familiar with its contents, so that when the marketing CA is not available, marketing still goes on.

3. Schedule events. With the goal of casting the practice in the best possible light, your marketing CA should aggressively seek a variety of community events, social functions, volunteering opportunities, and speaking opportunities. Ideally, he or she should schedule three or four internal marketing events every month, as well as several external actions.

That is a lot of activity — which is why a person dedicated to marketing is so essential. Think of the role in this way: Your marketing CA is like the plate spinner at the circus, and your marketing events are the plates.

The plate spinner has to keep all of the plates spinning simultaneously and not allow any of them to fall. Your marketing CA has the same job — only with marketing events, instead of plates. These marketing events include such things as contact efforts with personal-injury attorneys and healthcare professionals; recall and reactivation efforts; lectures and corporate talks, and quarterly open houses, patient appreciation days, and charity fundraisers.

What is involved in marketing?

Marketing is different from advertising. Marketing is the combined effort of all the things you do to promote your practice and attract new patients. Advertising is just one facet of marketing.

Marketing actions and activities include such things as:

How you decorate your spaces,
How you conduct your new-patient workshops,
The way you encourage referrals,
The community events you choose to attend, and
The way you and your employees are perceived in public.

A marketing CA can help you think through and plan all of these different activities, and also be the designated representative to the community.

4. Measure return-on-investment (ROI). Calculating ROI is not difficult. You should do so at the end of each event. Here is how:

• Calculate your current collected case average (CCA). CCA equals total collections for a period, divided by the total number of new patients (NPs) for that same period. For example: Assume that your collections for a three-month period are $120,000. If you acquire 60 new patients during that period, your CCA would be $2,000. Another way of stating this is that each NP would be worth $2,000.

• Calculate the cost per new patient for an event. Divide the full cost of an event by the number of new patients (NP) generated. This is the cost per new patient generated by the event. For example: Assume that you conduct a corporate health fair at a local company. The health fair generates 30 NPs.

The costs to put on the health fair include: $200 on printed materials, $200 for a small television raffled at the booth, and $100 on promotional giveaways, for a total of $500.

The cost per new patient is calculated by dividing the total cost of the event ($500) by the number of new patients generated (30), or $16.67 per new patient.

• Calculate the ROI. Divide the CCA ($2,000) by the cost per patient for the event ($16.67). A good ROI is 3:1 to consider doing an event again. In our example, the ROI is 119:1. This event would be worthwhile doing again!

If you believe you cannot afford to pay a staff member dedicated to marketing, think again! A dedicated marketing CA will more than pay for him/herself. Do the numbers: Adding just three to five new patients per month significantly increases revenues in your practice. But a marketing CA’s consistent efforts will increase the number of new patients to many more than three, four, or five. The marketing CA will more than earn back his or her salary and bonus.

The power of passive ROI

Although it shouldn’t happen often, sometimes when you engage in an external marketing event — such as a corporate health fair — you don’t generate any new patients.

But don’t forget that you may be generating “passive ROI.”

Passive return-on-investment occurs when you fail to generate any new patients through an event, or you have fewer than would normally be deemed successful, but you develop a relationship with a key contact.

For example: When you conduct a health fair at a local company, you generate only a few new patients. But, one of those new patients is the human resources director.

After her treatment, this key decision-making employee decides to send all of the company’s workers’ compensation cases to your office for initial screening. She also decides to invite you to conduct flexibility training once a month as part of the company’s safety program.

These decisions afford you the opportunity to acquire new patients over a long period of time — passive ROI.

Practices that have a dedicated marketing representative consistently report higher than average new patient statistics. Hire your marketing CA and watch your practice grow.

Kathy Mills Chang is a senior coach with Breakthrough Coaching and a partner in Harkcon, designer and developer of the Chiropractic Competency Toolbox. She can be reached for questions or comments at info@mybreakthrough.com.

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