Your advertising strategic planning could lead them to a coupon that can be used to discount their first treatment session, or to put eyeballs directly on your product
Just as it’s important to keep a finger on the pulse of health care trends, enabling you to better meet your patient’s current wants and needs and reach customers, the same is true when it comes to advertising strategic planning and marketing your service.
You need to know how to best reach potential customers in a way that physically draws them to your chiropractic practice or product. This requires staying on top of the marketing avenues and strategies that are garnering the best results, and these are three to consider:
Print marketing (with a twist)
With the advent of digital marketing, it has caused some to question whether there is still power in print. According to the experts, the answer is a resounding yes — with a bit of a twist.
BRAND United reported that, during a recent webinar with Lily Harder, former senior director of marketing strategy at Comperemedia, Harder stressed that print marketing continues to serve a valuable purpose. The key to staying with the trends is to create print-based options that utilize the latest technology, an example of which is QR codes, which have seen a resurgence via restaurants during pandemic times.
QR codes are the black and white coded squares that, when a smartphone camera is pointed at them, effortlessly transport the user to a specific website page or provide certain information such as contact information or a special offering. As a chiropractic provider, your QR code on a flyer or in a newspaper or magazine ad could take potential patients to a web page that talks about the benefits of this health care approach. Or in your advertising strategic planning it could lead them to a coupon that can be used to discount their first treatment session, or to put eyeballs directly on your product.
In a June 2021 survey of 1,100 respondents, 45% indicated that they have used marketing-related QR codes to interact with a business. The age group with the most use was individuals between 18-29 years of age (54%). This was followed by 30-44 year-olds (48%) and 45-64 year-olds (44%). Those aged 65 and up had the lowest use of QR codes at 31%.
If you handle your own marketing and advertising, several do-it-yourself QR code generators can be found online.
Customer experience versus making a sale
Marketing Insider Group (MIG) adds that marketing, in general, is transitioning away from selling your business’s products or services and becoming more focused on providing a stellar customer experience. MIG cites customer impatience as an issue that is driving this trend, making it critical to offer a more seamless experience from the first interaction to long after a sale has been completed.
What does this mean for your chiropractic practice, product or service? One way to boost your customer’s experience is to personalize your marketing messages in a way that helps them solve the problems they face. Is your target demographic plagued by back pain due to working several years on the farm or does your primary audience consist of athletes who play a certain sport and are, therefore, subject to that sport’s most common injuries? Or if it’s a chiropractic product, how do you reach that audience? Create a marketing plan or use advertising strategic planning that envelopes your target audience’s most prominent concerns.
MIG also stresses that a top-notch customer experience is one that offers “efficiency, convenience, knowledgeable and friendly service, and easy payment options.” Hitting on each of these aspects makes your practice one that will not only draw potential patients in but also make them want to retain you as their chiropractic provider, or for your product offering.
Organic growth via inbound marketing
The value behind inbound marketing is that it helps you grow your practice organically as opposed to shelling out hundreds (or thousands) of dollars on social media ads and other costly advertising campaigns. Hubspot shares that this approach has “come to the forefront of effective tactics,” partially because we now live in a world where people are spending more time at home.
Inbound marketing involves coming up with ways to help potential patients find your practice. It involves them coming to you instead of you going to them. This increases your visibility to your target market.
Inbound marketing might involve posting articles on your blog that link back to your website or creating content with the right keywords, thus utilizing the power of SEO (search engine optimization, or helping search engines recognize who you are and what you do so that it can lead the right users to your website).
If you don’t currently have an inbound marketing plan, Marketo suggests that you can create one by following these five steps:
- Identify your target patient. Who are they? What do they do? What types of issues can you help them solve?
- Create content for every stage of the buying journey. Some of your content should speak directly to people that have never heard of your practice whereas other pieces should talk to those who have been in your office a time or two.
- Decide which platforms you will use. Which social media sites will you create business pages on? Will you have a blog? If so, will it be on your website or hosted on another site, such as a WordPress blog? Newspaper or magazine advertising, or writing for the websites of these entities?
- Develop a content calendar. Plan out your content for the entire year. This provides a framework of what you will post and when. Having a calendar laid out in advance also encourages you to keep posting new content regularly, reducing the likelihood that you will let it slide.
- Continuously monitor your results. Keep track of whether your marketing plan is providing the results you want. Is it increasing your patient load or providing quality leads? If it is, great! If not, make changes to improve these effects.
Your marketing and advertising strategic planning
Focusing on customer experience and inbound marketing is a long-term investment for your practice or product, while taking advantage of the ongoing popularity of print advertising (magazine and newspaper) to increase sales and attract customers and prospects.
Finances Online reports this year that campaigns that combine print and digital:
- are 400% more effective
- that 82% of consumers trust print ads the most when making a purchasing decision
- 77% of consumers say print drives higher levels of recall
- and that “Print readers usually spend 20 minutes or more with their publication in hand, while a typical visitor to a digital news site sticks around for less than five minutes (Heitman, n.d.).”
When planning your advertising strategic planning and marketing mix, identify your audience and go where they are, both in print and online.