Finding Patients’ Pain Points in Your Chiropractic Marketing Plan

Cost is a patient pain point that you can easily address in your chiropractic marketing plan — provide clinical information regarding the benefits of chiropractic care and work closely with their insurance

What do you think of when you hear the term pain points? Odds are good that your mind immediately goes to trigger points on the body and how to treat them. While that is a perfectly understandable – and correct – conclusion to reach, the term has another negative meaning. Pain points can also be a problem in your chiropractic marketing plan if they are not properly addressed.

What exactly are pain points within the context of marketing? What are some common pain points within chiropractic marketing? How can you address these problems?

What is a marketing pain point?

In marketing parlance, a pain point is the term used to describe a problem that a company’s customer, vendor, or client has, which it can help them solve. For example, if a small tea retailer wants to expand sales from just one city to the entire state, but does not have the shipping infrastructure to do so, that lack of capacity would be its pain point.

Companies that specialize in regional shipping would then target their marketing to this retailer by showing how they can eliminate this particular pain point. Now let’s look at how marketing pain points work in health care and, more specifically, chiropractic.

Untrustworthy online advice

The number of Americans turning to the internet for health information has been steadily rising. In fact, as many as 80% of Americans reported searching online for health care information at least once during the previous year.

While it may be a good thing that more patients are educating themselves about their health issues, there is also the hidden danger that the information they access online is not helpful, incorrect, or even outright dangerous. This lack of reputable online information is another pain point that your patients may not even realize exists.

Here is a great place where your chiropractic marketing plan can fill a sorely needed gap in patient education. Your digital marketing campaign should include links to reputable, online, health care information at every available opportunity. By positioning yourself as a source expert on the benefits of chiropractic care, you can eliminate your patients’ pain point regarding trustworthy sources of information about chiropractic care.

Your chiropractic marketing plan and patient rising medical expenses

Aside from concerns about the effectiveness and safety of chiropractic care, cost is almost certainly the other big pain point for your patients. There’s no denying the fact that health care costs, including insurance and medication, have been climbing steadily upward, with no sign of either leveling off or dropping down.

In fact, a 2019 article in the American Journal of Public Health noted that 58.5% of all bankruptcies were a direct result of medical bills, while 44.3% were partially the result of income loss for health reasons. This worked out to 530,000 medical-related bankruptcies each year. This should tell you that your patients are not only experiencing pain points about their health, but also about the cost of treatment.

Fortunately, cost is a patient pain point that you can easily address in your chiropractic marketing plan. Take the same approach as when you provide clinical information regarding the benefits of chiropractic care. Look for peer-reviewed articles discussing the cost benefits of chiropractic care compared to standard care, and use them as the cornerstone for talking about chiropractic’s long-term financial benefits.

Ultimately, your goal is to consider not just your patients’ physical pain points, but also the trust and financial pain points that may prevent them from getting the most out of chiropractic care.