Full Access: 5 Deadly Online Marketing Mistakes

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Webinar Transcription

Daniel: Good afternoon everybody and welcome to the Tuesday webinar series. Chiropractic Economics webinar for doctors of chiropractic. I am Daniel Sosnoski, Editor-In-Chief of Chiropractic Economics. Today’s webinar, Five Deadly Online Marketing Mistakes is sponsored by ChiroMetrics. And as always, our program is being recorded and will be archived at Chiropractic Economic’s website at chiroeco.com/webinar for one year. Our expert is on board here today to speak with you. And when his presentation is complete, we’ll follow with a question and answer period. You can submit questions throughout the presentation by clicking on the appropriate icon on the right side if your screen. We’ll do our very best to get to all of your questions. But if we run out of time, we’ll forward the remaining questions to our expert and then notify you via email when the answers are posted on our website, chiroeco.com/webinar.

Our presenter today is Mike Garcia, a marketing expert with ChiroMetrics who’s here to help you understand what to do and not do in your online marketing efforts. Mike, thank you for taking the time to participate in our webinar and for sharing your expertise…online marketing in helping our audience understand how they can use the internet to effectively gain more patients. Before we get started, Mike, please give us a brief background on yourself and your work with marketing strategies.

Mike: Hi. Thanks, Daniel. Good morning everyone, my name is Mike Garcia. Again, I am the Marketing Manager here at ChiroMetrics. And I’ve been in the business for about 10 years, 10 or 12 years doing various things like SEO, SEM, sales, draft designs, those kind of things. Web design. And it’s been a pleasure working here at ChiroMetrics, working with chiropractors like yourselves.We have about 11,000 clients here at ChiroMetrics and about 7,000 of those are chiropractors. And my real passion kind of came through when I was an account manager personally working with chiropractors on their SEO and SEM efforts. So I am definitely been great especially now that we are a premier Google partner, gives us a great way to work with chiropractors and help with their marketing effort.

Daniel: Well, very good. Now Mike, would you like to go ahead and begin our presentation?

Mike: Yeah, definitely, thank you. So again, today’s webinar is on the dos and don’ts of the marketing mistakes, possibly, hopefully, you’re not doing any of them. But again, some of the most common mistakes are ones that we tend to look over and we don’t really think of at the time. So we’re gonna ahead and identify the five common mistakes that you’re probably not really sure you are making, maybe you are and maybe you aren’t. Hopefully, you’re not but that these are things that can really do some harm and possibly hurt your online presence as well your business.

So number one were gonna talk a little bit about how your website is giving new clients the wrong first impression. We’re also gonna talk about what conversion elements you have and which ones you need to have for sure and then as well as the inconsistency and how it’s killing your ranking. A lot of people don’t understand that you need to make sure everything from the naming of your business to your phone number, to even the address is all consistent across the board. Why focusing on social media or even blog followers is really the wrong metric for success. A lot of people tend to think even though social media is very important for your business and your online presence, they tend to focus on the amount of followers that they have as a determining factor in how well they are doing or how well their business is doing. Which is kind of misleading in a way. So we’ll go over that a little bit as well.

And then of course how long it really takes to see results. That’s actually a big one because a lot of people don’t necessarily know the different between SEO, SEM, how long it takes to get some rankings on your website on Google and Yahoo and Bing and the difference between SEO and SEM efforts in PPC and in organic rankings as well. So we’ll be going over that today also.

So first, we’re gonna go ahead and discuss giving clients the wrong first impression. This is something that is definitely hurting online presence throughout Google, throughout Bing, throughout Yahoo, yelp.com, things like that. And bad reviews are really something that you need to pay attention to. They are something that you want to just kind of brush under the rug. Definitely, if I was the consumer willing to look on a business on Yelp or even on Google and I saw a bunch of bad reviews that’s obviously a red flag. If I saw bad reviews on there that weren’t responded to by the business, that’s even more of a red flag. So what you wanna do is you wanna make sure that you understand what to do with those bad reviews. Or even if you don’t have any reviews, what you need to do to populate those reviews on your directory site or on Google, Yelp, etc. Businesses are…I should say consumers really like customers that show that they care about their clients, they care about their customers, whether it’s a good review, bad review or not. It’s really something where they wanna feel like they are being heard and they wanna also feel like other consumers are being heard as well.

That kind of gives consumers the idea that the business actually does care about them. Which you should. You’re taking care of their overall health. A lot of people tend to feel a little apprehensive when they tend to go to anyone regarding their health, regarding how they feel and regarding any kind of symptoms or conditions that they might have that they need to treat. And this kind of helps to bridge that gap. This kind of makes them feel a little more welcome when they know that the staff and the ownership and overall the business really cares for the client, whether it’s a good review or a bad review.

Another thing is maybe having an ugly outdated site. A lot of people tend to think that their website is just a website, it’s just a hub for information, their name, maybe the phone number, that kind of thing. But a website is a really, really powerful tool. You need to understand that is something that is basically a window into your business. This is something where people are gonna take a look at the website first, possibly, then maybe take a look at your business. So you wanna really make sure your website is brand new, up to date, mobile responsive, has all the bells and whistles that you need and obviously not the bells and whistles that you possibly don’t need. And when I say it by that is don’t make it too cluttered. Make it nice and clean and keep it professional looking just the same you would keep your office looking. You wanna make sure that everything from staff pictures are to date, from anything that you have regarding equipment, social media links, all that stuff that is relevant on there. And you wanna make sure that it’s all to date and it looks nice and it looks clean.

It’s really not that hard to really maintain a website once you have it at that point. Once you do start a brand new website, you wanna make sure that you have all these pictures and everything either archived or you have them available. If not, it’s very simple. Take a quick camera phone shot of some areas of your office, a little virtual office tour, maybe some pictures of staff members that you guys can have up against the wall, take some amusing pictures that way. Anything in general that you can do to really kind of welcome a new prospective client into your business. They’re gonna check at your website before they set foot in your office. You wanna make sure it looks just as nice and clean as what your office would.

And of course, one thing that really stands out a lot of people don’t understand is what we call the wrong you. So often businesses really use their site to say why they are the best. There’s a lot of competitors, especially on the chiropractic market. There can be competitors down across the street, across the way, maybe possible colleagues of yours that are competitors as well. These are the things that you wanna do where you want to explain what you can do for that client. Not necessarily always focused on you. That’s really kind of one thing that people tend to get mislead with thinking you know, the only I can really kind of stand out between my competitors is if I talk about me and how I’m different than they are. What you really need to do is just refocus that, reshift that into explaining why you are different and how you can help that client differently than the competitor.

So just a little tweak. It’s a little different than actually talking about yourself. It’s really still focusing on the client, on the patient. And it’s something that you are still kind of showing them that you are different but in a way that is focused towards them. So you just wanna really kind of put it in that direction. And bluntly put, not that no one cares but a lot of people probably don’t care so much about the logo. Really in your logo, in your overall branding, you wanna make sure that it’s not standing out way too much. Here at ChiroMetrics, we have to balance between that left and right a lot of the times. We have different ads, publication that we don’t necessarily our personal ChiroMetrics logo to be overtaking the entire ad. The same thing happens with anything that you have, whether it’s a business card, a brochure that has your services on there. Any flyer, anything in general, they understand and they know who you are and your business is. But you just don’t want it to where it’s all about you. You wanna really make it focused on the client because that’s really who they personally care about.

Next is, of course, conversion elements that you really have to have. These are things that are really important. And it really ties into the website itself. A lot of people tend to think, you know, let me just put my phone number on there. They can reach me anytime. Let me maybe put a form on there, a button that they can click on to request an appointment. It goes a little bit further than that. And if you really wanna take it to the very next level, you really wanna make sure that you have something called a CTA, a very strong CTA. And that’s a call to action. Great calls to action are really clearly labeled and relevant to your site, the content, the specific contend itself. So you wanna make sure the homepage itself has a great call to action. And my call to action, that’s anything from requesting an appointment if you have a new patient special, anything, in general, to really grab their attention.

You wanna make sure that its really kind of prevalent right there on the homepage above the fold, possibly in a sidebar, maybe somewhere on the homepage right above directly above the fold. You also wanna make sure if you have specific pages, let’s say you talk about car accident injury. You have a special offer about car accident injury, you wanna probably put it on that page as well. Maybe you have a different special that’s a monthly special that’s running different every single month. You can also have them on the homepage but then you can also have that in different various areas as well. You wanna make sure that wherever any kind of special offer is, whatever kind of call to action you have if that’s something that you’re running for the month, you need to understand where the client is going through the website, how they’re clicking through. If you have it one page but that page doesn’t get a lot of traffic, not a lot of people are gonna know about your offer.

So anytime you have any special offer, any strong call of the action, make sure it’s somewhere that everyone is gonna be able to see. If they go to a different page, make sure maybe it’s either in the banner image or somewhere on the sidebar where it can always be seen. And that’s very, very important. So that’s something you wanna definitely keep in mind when you’re putting any kind of call of the action on the website, let alone a landing page for PPC or anything really that you’re doing in general. Same thing here at ChiroMetrics. If we have an ad running, we wanna make sure that call to action is nice, clear, right in the front, easily accessible that way no one is confused.

Another thing you wanna look into is possibly the colors that you use. I do see a lot of different industries, you know whether it’s chiropractic or other industries as well, they post different newsletters to their client, different types of emails, eCards, those kinds of things. The colors are really just kind of everywhere. They don’t really have any real direct kind of focus on a specific pallet, they don’t really have any kind of real direction on why they are using those colors. They are just maybe on the top of their head they like those colors. You really wanna kind of start focusing on your brand. And your brand is not only just gonna be your logo and the name of the company or things like that, it’s really focused on the color as well. Something just to kind of give you a little personal touch is we have a color blue that we use here at ChiroMetrics that we actually have in our office all across the walls. We’ve actually dubbed it as ChiroMetrics blue. Even though I am sure that color is not ChiroMetrics blue but it’s just something that we are all familiar with that kind of our color scheme.

Same thing should happen with your office as well. If you have maybe a color like a purple and a gray or whatnot, those are your colors, that’s your brand. Maybe possibly have any emails, business cards, anything that you have, possibly kind of run in that same color context. Same thing goes with images as well, if you have different images and you have any particular images of the office, you maybe wanna use those images towards different pages specifically as well. You wanna make sure that everything you do is really consistent. And I’m gonna keep hitting that note throughout this presentation. Consistency is definitely key. There are so many chiropractors now in the industry that might even possibly have a name that is close to your business name as well that you really wanna kind of focus on different other elements that are gonna really make you stand out between those chiropractors, let alone your services in general or maybe your pricing. But overall your theme, your brand, all that needs to be very catered and unique to yourself. So make sure that you kind of keep an eye on all that throughout your website and throughout the business.

Kind of touching back a little bit for the colors as well as the images, if you do have a specific color theme in your office and you don’t really quite have a color theme for your brand, maybe kind of look towards that direction of your office color and see if maybe that’s something that you wanna go towards as your overall brand color. Same thing with your images. If you have certain images that aren’t necessarily what we call stock images of real people or things like that. If they are maybe cartoony images, whatever the image maybe, maybe try to stick with a specific theme or make sure that at least relevant to that particular content. If you have a page on whiplash, make sure that you stick to that image of whiplash and not put just a random image of anything. Really kind of make it so that it’s clear and concise for the potential client that you possibly would have that’s searching for your website.

And of course next will be the Organized Content. Use text that really conveys your message clearly. You wanna make sure and keep it to the point. Don’t really over clutter the page just to fill up the space. I do see that a lot on certain pages. They create a page about a certain topic. They don’t really know what to say about that topic so they just keep it really short. They have maybe two sentences on there and that’s it. It doesn’t really kind of really kind of work that way and unfortunately even though you might not know exactly what to say, you kind of really do. And that’s the thing that a lot of people tend to not understand. No one’s a writer here, I am not a writer. But if I had a certain topic, I can definitely talk about it. And there is a different between those two.

Now one thing that’s difficult is how is it that I can easily talk about it maybe to a patient, to a client about a certain service, a condition, anything in general but I just have a difficult time writing it down? I know it sound a little tedious but try recording yourself. Maybe if you try explaining something and you record yourself, you can play it back and then you can write down the content that way. There is a lot different ways that you can actually express yourself or explain specific topics by doing that. But you wanna make sure at least you have enough content on there to look like a decent full page. It can be anywhere, you know, 300 words to 500 words or whatnot. Just make sure it’s not over cluttered and make sure that it’s not too long because if it gets too long, people aren’t gonna wanna read it.

Again, I’m gonna focus on the car accident injury just because it’s a great segment that we see a lot of these things happen with, where you can have maybe one page that talks about car accident injury, different back issues, whiplash, things like that. It can go down the line of all the different types of symptoms, treatments, what do you do with insurance, all these different things that you can do and talk about just in regards to that one topic? Well, the best way to do that is probably breaking it up into different subtopics. Then maybe you can have different subpages within. One talking about overall car accident injury, the next one maybe focusing really on just whiplash, maybe another one focusing on another segment of that.

There is different ways that you can segment and organize them so that way the person that’s on your website, the potential client, can actually have a great way of understanding what they’re looking for and it’s not a needle on a haystack. There’s a lot of times, even though everyone knows content is king and content is a great way to get your SEO up, you just don’t wanna have it to where it’s over-cluttered. There’s a lot of different factors that Google looks at. One thing is obviously page…sight time on your page. If you actually go on your web page and you are on that page for a long time, Google actually looks at that as, okay, that page is actually relevant. If someone goes to certain web pages and they leave those web pages, those are bouncing off the web pages and that increases your overall bounce rate which is obviously not a great thing. When Google looks at something and they see that’s someone goes to a web page and they leave the web page very quickly, they consider that a bounce. And then on top of that, they figure that they’re relevant and that it should not be considered in a ranking factor for that particular topic.

So these are all little tiny different things that you need to kind of look at. And if that’s something that you are kind of running into an issue with, maybe look at your overall content right now on your website and see if maybe you need to dice and slice it up a little bit into edible bites, is what I like to call it or if you maybe don’t have enough and you need to add a little bit more meat to the bone of those pages. So overall your organized content really, really a powerful tool but you just wanna make sure that you have it clean and positioned in the way that’s gonna work best for you.

Inconsistency. Big, big, big one. This is one that’s actually probably the most important step which is right in the middle. But I wanna kind of go over this a little bit and just kind of explain what it is I mean by inconsistency. So, expert status. Consistent posting really sets you up as the expert. Now, this is something where if I was to go to a website and I notice that it hasn’t been updated in a very long time, I’m gonna kind of wonder what’s going on. Back in the day, I don’t really wanna say back in the day because we still have a lot of blogs but back in the day when we just had a lot of bloggers, a lot of blog sites, it was really kind of a thing to do. Just nothing but blog sites. If you go to a blog site and you see that somebody hasn’t posted something in the last six months, you kind of wonder if that blog site is even up anymore. Is it even relevant? What’s going on here? Same thing when someone sends you an article when it’s from 2012. You kind of wonder, is it really right? It is really the right info? It’s one of the things where something that is the most up to date, the most current and it’s something that you are having consistently pushed out, people tend to look at you as the expert.

So whether it’s your blogs, whether it’s social media, anything in general that you have, you wanna make sure that you’re doing it on a consistent a basis. So going through that, maybe kind of to double check your blog posts, maybe double check your social media post schedule and just kind of see what you are doing. Now there is different various times that you can actually, little intervals that you can actually have these things posted. I would recommend that as far as the blog goes if you wanna do a blog once a week, that’s fine. I wouldn’t recommend doing anything more than that because kind of saturate people’s inboxes or saturate people in general. I would say don’t go longer than a month. A month should be the longest you go without actually posting something new.

Now when it comes to social media, that’s a little bit different. You wanna post a little more consistently because people are a lot more active on social media like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, those kind of things. So I would recommend posting minimum once a week. Now maximum, I mean obviously you don’t wanna post multiple, multiple times a day. You might wanna post once a day, maybe a couple of times a day but the more and more you post possibly the less and less someone’s gonna wanna follow you because they just see nothing but your posts all the time. So keep in mind on social media that’s a different topic but people do follow a lot of different businesses, a lot of different people, friends, family, that kind of thing. So you wanna make sure also with the time that you post these things, it’s relevant to when you think people are actually gonna see them. Same thing happens with your blog posts and overall content on your website too.

New and improved. Now with the new and improved, you wanna make sure that you give conscious signals that your site has been new and improved, refreshed, those kind of things. That comes along with updated blogs. Maybe you have new equipment that you wanna update. Maybe you have different staff members that you wanna update as well on there. Different events. Maybe you have an event page that keeps you people informed of different things that you have going on throughout the month or maybe throughout the year. These are things that, again, mention that hey, this website’s still current, this business is still current. And we are not in cobwebs like an abandoned warehouse building. It’s something that’s definitely kind of up in people’s eyes when they look at things. And of course, if they have an older layout, it’s a great time to maybe get a new theme or a new skin on your website to kind that give it that new look. It’s like a new fresh paint, coat of paint on your car or on your house. It just gives it that new feel.

So you wanna kind of look at these different things and just really maybe see when was the last time I did this? When was the last time I did that? When was the last time maybe we changed our overall skin on the website? These are all things that maybe you wanna take a look at and then see. Maybe hey, it’s time to do this and update our website a little bit. So that’s something that gives that new, fresh, out of the box feel. And of course, content is key. We did mention that. Content is something that you definitely want to make sure is up to date. Now, of course, I touched a little bit on the blog section. Now blogs are probably the best way to have updated content consistently on your website. You can have different topics, you always post different blogs, whether they are 300-500 words, however long the length of it is. But it’s something that consistently pushed out and with blogs now, you can also push them to your social media profiles like Facebook and Twitter and Google+. So it also reaches out that audience as well.

This is something that you wanna make sure that with that content that you are creating, whether it’s a blog post or even if it’s an actual page of content, you wanna still go back to the other tip that I mentioned which is making sure it’s organized, making sure that it’s segmented properly and that it’s not too much. I always consider it just think edible chunks. These are…you wanna give people on that whether they feel satisfied but it’s not overdoing it. And when it’s overdoing it, people are quick, they want it simple. Again, if they have a video, they’d rather watch the video because they’re on the go. That’s just how people are nowadays. Especially when it comes to chiropractic, a lot of times unless something is really hurting me, I might be thinking of chiropractor right then and there or if I have time to think about it. I might be able to sit down at home and kind of think about it. But a lot of times people tend to be on the go during their lunch break, maybe they’re at work thinking about it, they wanna schedule an appointment. So maybe they might not have 100% of the time to be able to really sit down and thoroughly read through everything.

So you wanna make sure that you have both sides of the spectrum covered. You wanna have enough information to where when they do have time to be able to sit down and read it they can. But if they need enough info to understand what buying decision is for them, then give them enough info to where they can make that decision right then and there. Maybe they are in the car, maybe they are on a walk, maybe they are at work on their lunch break. You wanna make sure and appeal to all the audiences out there and make it so that they have an easy way of actually finding relevant content on your website and then, again, going into your office or making an appointment going into your office from there. So that is the big, big key thing. So keep that in mind overall.

And of course last year is the NAP consistency. Now, some of you might not understand what NAP stands for. NAP stands for, Name Address Phone number. It is probably one of the biggest factors in SEO overall. It’s kind of a black sheep. It’s one of those things where it’s very important but it’s very much so forgotten. And not a lot of people understand the importance of it. They don’t really think the fact that it could be possibly important as well, but it’s extremely important.

So me for instance, Mike Garcia, I have a very common name, especially for California or whatnot. Anytime I go and get any kind of either a background check, credit check, anything like that, my name pops up a lot. And it’s very consistent. Now, that’s common. In the world of chiropractors, the same thing actually happens. Now we have kind of this pseudo name of Anderson Chiropractic that we use on some of our demo sites, things like that. It’s just kind of like a John Doe, Jane Smith kind of thing. We just…typical Anderson Chiropractic. Funny thing is, we actually have a handful of Anderson Chiropractics throughout the United States that are our clients. So that goes to show that no matter what you might think, your name is probably taken in some other state or is very similar in some other state.

So what you wanna do is you wanna make sure that not only on your website, your name-address-phone number are all correct and consistent but all the way across the board, from your social media profiles to all of your directory links, especially your directory links from Google to Bing to Yahoo to Yelp, Angie’s List, anything and everything that you think that your name and your phone number and address are out there on the web, you wanna make sure that they are correct. This goes all the way down to the nitty-gritty. Now it can go anywhere from if I was a chiropractor, I might have a listening that says, “Mike Garcia, DC.” I may have another one that says, “Mike Garcia Chiropractic.” Maybe another one says, “Michael Garcia, DC.”

These all may be possibly sound very similar, especially the first and the third one, but they are not. Even if I have a typo in one of them that has an extra E at the end of my name, but it’s very similar, it’s not. It’s gonna be completely separate. It’s gonna be considered a duplicate. And the problem with that is the fact that, that actually causes a lot of issues with your ranking in general. Google does look at the consistency of your NAP across the board. And what you can do is you can find out where all these different sites are and you can correct them individually by those sites. It is a little tasking but again it’s something that’s gonna definitely save you a ton of headaches down the line. And it’s gonna increase your ranking, it’s gonna help you overall, it’s gonna cause people to not be confused on which one is actually yours, which profile is yours, especially if they wanna leave a review. You wanna make sure that they have the correct profile to leave a review on so that way, it benefits you as well. So NAP is important, important, important. You wanna make sure that you are definitely have that consistency all the way across the board.

And of course, next is the number of followers. Now this is something that I get a lot of inquiries about. It’s really…it’s not a bad question at all because I can see why it’s misleading. Not only with chiropractors, with all other different types of industries that we service, the same question comes up. So it’s definitely a good one. And that is you know, how am I gauging social media? Do I gauge by the number of fans or followers that I have? My business should be ranking a lot higher. Look at how many Facebook followers that I have, what’s going on? Well, just to kind of give everyone a little information,Facebook doesn’t really attribute to your rankings. I mean, having that NAP there, Facebook, social posts in general, things like that overall, social media, in general, is a factor of SEO. It is something that does help. But again, SEO overall is a huge branch, a huge tree branch with different ways and reasons and why your ranking can be affected up or down.

Social media is on there but the number of social media followers absolutely is not. It does not attribute anything to your ranking, anything to your business really besides the fact that people can see that you do have a decent amount of followers. Now there is a happy medium in between that. If I go to a business, like a chiropractor for instance and I see that you have maybe a thousand, maybe a couple of thousand, maybe a few hundred followers, okay. That makes sense. It’s a chiropractic building, it’s an office in general, that makes definite sense. If for some reason you had 50,000 followers or whatnot, okay. But I’m some small town or whatnot which doesn’t even have 50,000 people there, it won’t really make any sense. And a lot of times that happens to the businesses that maybe buy followers, they purchase followers, thinks like that.

So definitely having a good amount of followers helps for the vision of your branding and everything else in general when someone’s finding you, when someone’s looking you, they wanna see if people are actually following you if you actually have some kind of following in general which makes sense. But that definitely shouldn’t be something that you should gauge on your overall performance, your online presence performance I should say, of your business. It’s something that you wanna make sure you look at other things in general, not just the social followers but maybe how many times people share your articles. Maybe how much engagement you have, how many people comment, leave reviews on your social media profile, those kinds of things. How many people like your posts, those kinds of things.

So these are all great ways to gauge certain things but it’s definitely the wrong metric to look at regarding the number of followers. So if you ever do see a business that maybe a colleague of yours, maybe they don’t have a lot followers, maybe they have thousands, and thousands and thousands of followers, you might kind of look at that twice and just kind of keep in mind that a lot of times with small businesses, they tend to not have tens and tens and thousands of followers and even a million followers and whatnot, unless nationally they’re kind of a big national business kind of thing. A lot of those businesses tend to be ones that just focus really on the social signals but it really doesn’t have that much of a difference.

Social links, of course, is tied into that as well. You wanna make sure again with this overall SEO strategy that you have your social links all linked up and that they are linked up correctly. You wanna have all your Facebook, Google+, Twitter links all on your website. You wanna make sure that they are visible, that they are able to be clicked on and that they are going to the right profile. If you have multiple locations and you have multiple social profiles, make sure that they are linked to the correct ones. Keep in mind social media profiles also are a great way for people to leave reviews, leave comments, questions, those kind of things and to interact with you overall. So you wanna make sure that these are all on the correct profiles. The worst thing you could do, again, not just in social media but even with NAP and the different directory links is get a bunch of reviews and get a bunch of testimonials that could benefit your business but they’re going to the wrong profile. There is nothing harder than trying to get Google or maybe even Facebook for that matter to try to transfer those reviews over to your actual real profile. A lot of the times it’s not possible.

We’ve had that issue here at ChiroMetics a couple of times in the past where we might have had some random profile pop up because we changed buildings and someone left a review. We tried to move it over, we couldn’t. We are a Google partner and we still couldn’t. So it’s one of those things where keep I mind, you wanna make sure that not only your social media is linking up correctly but also on your NAP, everything is linked up properly as well. And on your directory links, you can have a link to your website and a link to social media. So you wanna make sure those are correct on that platform as well.

Another thing is basically the content creation and the distribution itself. So a lot of these social media platforms are really offering more vessels for content creation, distribution things like that, really more that they’ve really ever have before. And some platforms kind of like Periscope, Vine, are really designed solely to function in concert with social media. So things like your blog posts, for instance. When I mentioned that you can actually post a blog on your website and then also have it posted and pushed directly to your social media profile, it’s a great way to reach multiple audiences out there. Social media’s an awesome, awesome marketing tool. It’s free, doesn’t cost you anything to sign up. But obviously, it takes you a lot of time which is money. But you wanna make sure that you are pushing all of your information out there, kind of like a press release. You wanna make sure that you have all of your blog content, any other content that you have pushed out there.

Now, a little tip just to let you guys know from an SEO standpoint, something that I used to do that we still do here from time to time, especially with Google+, is whenever you have a new page of content, let’s say you have a new service and you have a new page of content, custom content about that service, maybe you have a special running or whatnot that you wanna promote, anything in general that you have on your website that you really wanna put some focus on you can take that link, post it on your social media profile, whether it’s on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, anything like that and it will actually get ranked I should say or indexed a lot faster than just having it pushed through on the back end and to have Google index it the way we normally do. You should still do it that same way through webmaster tools which, again, if you have an account manager, they can help you out with that. If not, definitely let us know. We can help you as well. But it’s one of those things where if you don’t, push it onto your social media profile, especially with Google+. Google does actually index those pages that you put on Google+ as a social media post. So if you’re ever wondering what you need to post, I don’t have anything really to post, what do I post on there? Hey, if you are running a weekly special, maybe post that on Facebook say hey everyone, we’ve got this special happening this week only. And kind of do it almost like a promotional post. Same thing on Twitter, on Google+, Facebook, all of that.

Now in regards to a page of content, let’s say, again I am just gonna focus on whiplash again. Let’s say you have a page that you just created about whiplash or any other thing that you might have, spinal decompression rate. You wanna take that page link, you can post it on social media, maybe put a little teeny blurb on there about something new that you guys have running, a new service, something that you guys can help out. Come on stop on in if you guys are having issues or problems. If you’ve been in a car accident maybe, come on into our office. You can post that page right there. They can take a quick look, they’ll click on it. It takes them directly to your website to that specific page which then helps to get more page time which then helps to get that page to possibly index and be ranked on Google’s search engine.

So it sounds a little difficult, possibly there’s a lot different ifs, ands, and buts. But always remember that not only your whole website but each individual page can actually be individually ranked on Google and maybe a search engine results page of maybe ten or so let’s just say, you can have, three, four, five of those spots. Based on the keyword or based on whatever they are looking for and searching for through Google.

So these are different ways that you can actually have your overall website really be interweaved within the search rankings and not just your homepage. So keep that in mind, social channels as search engines. A lot of people do search for things on Facebook especially with Facebook graph search. They can search for things, let’s say on YouTube for instance. I actually use YouTube a lot. So whenever I search for something, I actually…a lot of times I don’t even search on Google, I’ll search for it on YouTube to see if there’s a video first. But the same thing happens on Facebook. They have a lot of news trending, different things, other things that are trending. If it’s something specific about chiropractic, it’ll pull up everything related to that. You can search based off of anyone that’s in your friends or businesses that you follow specifically. Or overall you can just search through Facebook itself. But it’s a great tool as well that you can use and you wanna keep that in mind whenever you are posting stuff on your social media if you wanna have it be found through social media.

So big question is how long does it really take to get results? That’s something that a lot of people don’t really understand. You know, hey, I paid for this service, I really wanna have it to start working as soon as possible. You know, hey, I got a new website. I really wanna have it working as soon as possible. What’s going on? PPC, I don’t really know much about it. When can I see results from it? That’s an impossible. Well, SEO just to start off with SEO and SEM, SEM is search engine marketing. SEO is search engine optimization. Really SEO is more based on the organic results, is what we call it where you don’t pay for anything it’s really kind of free organic, I guess you can say. Whereas SEM is more PPC or pay per click paid advertising where it’s kind of like an auction and you’re really kind of paying for spots on Google’s page.

So I’m gonna start with SEO. SEO, in general, takes a lot longer. You wanna think about your credit, okay, your credit score. Let’s say you are in collections for a couple of things and it’s really affecting your credit. Let’s say you pay that collections off. You’re not gonna see your credit score jump up the very next day. It’s something where the same thing with SEO, you wanna make sure that you are, if you’re not really ranking that well and you make a bunch of changes that you’re giving time to really kind of marinate within Google, or Google has to have a chance to really kind of restructure everything, re-index your site, all your pages, pin it up against all the other rankings, all the other pages and websites that are out there for that relevant content, that relevant topic, based upon your metadata, your description, your page title, all these different things go into factor. And it takes a little bit of time. Not only that, it does consider other factors, what I consider or what they consider a refresh factor which is how often do you put in new content on there, how often is the site refreshed, type of thing. Is it stale, how quickly can pages load? There’s all these different things that technically you really kind of need more data to really kind of calculate. These aren’t things that you can get overnight because you just simply don’t have that many visitors to populate that data. So Google needs to give it a little bit of time to really see how long it’s gonna take to have that stuff happen. Now, we usually see…

We usually say six months is pretty good. But we usually say six months is pretty good for noticeable results. But it’s one of the things where you wanna make sure you give a little bit more time if possible. If not, you wanna maybe give it about three months or so definitely see where it’s going. And then if you start to see it not really go up, you wanna possibly start putting some more efforts in there so that it can go down. So one of those things that you wanna see for impactful changes though is 12 months. 12 month period is something that is gonna see very impactful changes. It’s gonna definitely give you a benchmark to look at for the three years here. I think I can hear somebody there, unfortunately. But it’s one of the things where you want to look at the 12 months mark because of the fact you can look at last year’s results if you still have them kind of benchmarked. It’s one of the things where you want to definitely kind of look at the 6 month, the 12-month mark. But if it’s something that you are really not too sure on that you can wait that long on, definitely the 6-month mark is a good place to start with. And it’s something that you want to kind of consider in what direction you wanna go with on your marketing in general.

SEM, in general though is a lot faster. PPC, pay per click, it is something that, again, I’m not gonna say it’s overnight but it is something more where you can definitely see some kind of results fairly quickly. It’s something that you don’t have to have kind of marinate within the system, marinate within all the analytics and whatnot. It’s not necessarily using the same factors for ranking as SEO or organic ranking is. Google looks at all these different other factors. Again I mentioned it’s kind of like eBay. It’s more of like an auction where you’re bidding against other chiropractors for those specific terms or phrases and you wanna make sure that when you populate all that stuff in, again, PPC is a completely different beast. It’s probably another webinar altogether. You wanna make sure that when you are looking at these things you’re giving it at least a few months.

Now for PPC, I would say three months gives you at least a decent amount time to see what’s going on. When you actually start your Adwords campaign, your PPC campaign, it takes at least a month and a half if I’d say to really kind of start getting things populating and seeing some stuff happen. But I would really give it at least a few months to really kind of see what’s going on. It’s not just a matter of you seeing yourself on Google’s page. That’s a big misnomer. A lot of people think that’s something that’s gonna gauge their success. It’s not.

What happens once you are on that web page is really where it matters. You can get as many people calling in as you want, you can get as many people going to your website as you want, tons of visitors left and right but if you’re not closing any business off of it then what kind of money are you really making off of it? You wanna make sure that you are capitalizing on those leads that are coming in. So that’s why you wanna give it just a little bit more time to really kind of gauge how impactful all this stuff really is. Because if not, then nothing is really working for you in that sense and you wanna maybe try something else and shift it in a different direction.

And so that kind of concludes where we are so far. We do have a lot of different questions I am sure. And keep in mind, you know, I will definitely answer as many as I can. But again, I wanna make sure that you guys understand all of this stuff is really kind of pretty common sense. It’s one of those things where you might think about it and just kind of not really act on it. A lot of times even some of the biggest companies forget some of the small stuff. So these are definitely kind of the bread and butter things that you need to realize. You wanna definitely take note and understand that the biggest portion of this webinar that I can really, really focus on for you guys is NAP and consistency. You wanna make sure that that is something that is across the board consistent as well as with your content and that your content is definitely customized in a sense and that it’s not copied from maybe a website. You know, WebMD, anything like that. You wanna make sure that you are overall the expert in your field and they can go to you for any kind of chiropractic needs. Okay? So that concludes our webinar so far. Thanks, Daniel. If you wanna…

Daniel: Pretty good. Well, thank you, Mike. This has been extremely informative. And we’ve been collecting some questions for the audience and I’ve got a couple of them for you now. So let’s go to our first question here. All right, a doctor asks what is the minimum cost of practice should anticipate investing each month to properly market chiropractic?

Mike: Hmm, good question. That’s actually a really good question. Might be a little broad but I can kind of narrow it down a little bit. Now it really depends on the type of marketing you wanna do. Online obviously versus digital, digital being our site, that’s the same thing. Online versus print, digital versus print. Print is definitely gonna be a lot more expensive. And of course digital is, in my opinion, best way to go. Again, a lot of times digital tends to be free. So as far as actually paying anything, the only pay stuff that you’d really pay for would probably be the paid advertising portion of it. Now that really depends on which area you’re in. Now if you are a chiropractor, let’s say, in the West Coast, it might vary differently from a chiropractor on the East Cost. You might have a lot higher cost per click for specific things. And the reason I kept mentioning car accident injuries is because especially in the East Coast, especially in New York, New Jersey, those kind of areas there tends to be a lot of vehicles and tight spaces, especially in New York and people tend to get car accident injury.

Well along with chiropractors, you also have, unless you have a massage therapist in your office, you have a massage therapist, physical therapists and the big one which is car accident injury attorneys. They actually are also competitors in the PPC realm for those specific terms. So that tends to jack the price of that term up. So really that part of it is the only part that you gonna be spending when it comes to your marketing and the rest of it is really just your time itself. Now if you’re really looking towards to overall packages, you know, hey, if I wanna have someone do this for me, there’s a lot of companies out there that charge a few thousand dollars for that stuff. I would say if you spend at least 15 or even 2,000 a month on your overall marketing, that includes everything from social media, I mean that include everything from content to designing to everything in general that you can think of for your online presence itself that’s actually a very, very reasonable price. I’ve seen a lot of other companies and competitors do a lot more…I’ve seen some custom companies do $10,000 a month.

So it really just depends on where you are and your location and how much you think you are willing to do that. If you are in a area maybe that doesn’t really kind of revolve around online, social media maybe it’s something where you think print might be a little bit more useful, that’s where it’s gonna start getting a little more pricey. And it really just depends on your local area. I’d probably get some price quotes from that but I mean you can spend close to $1,000 on a month just on print easily. So you wanna kind of factor that in as far as if you really just wanna keep it online, I’d say at least between 1000, 15, to 2000, that range itself is very, very reasonable. The more you can do on your own end, because of the time constraint, that’s actually a lot more beneficial. If you can’t, that’s where that comes in.

Daniel: That’s I think, that’s a strong answer. I know from the perspective of chiropractic economics, I would say that it would depend also on where in the lifecycle your practice is. Obviously, a new startup is gonna have very limited funds and will probably have to rely more on social and low-cost activities. And a mature large multidisciplinary practice could up into the thousands. In our last salary and fee survey, salary and expense survey, sorry, the average cost reported was 8000 a year annually or about 650 a month if you were just to average that across all practices. So that’s where we got that. That’s another question.

Mike: I definitely actually agree with…so I wrote one quick on that. You made a excellent point. If you are a starting practice and maybe your budget is kind of low, definitely, definitely the big hitter is your social media. That’s gonna be your main branding and really what gets your name out there, especially with Facebook allowing you to reach prospective clients that aren’t fans of your profile quite yet. It will reach out to so many more people and getting your branding out is definitely a great start. So I agree.

Daniel: Gotcha. Another doctor has a question for you and wants to know where can I get a list of sites where I can go to check and or correct my name, address, phone, to make sure that it is consistent?

Mike: Perfect. There is a couple sites you can go to. One, in general, there is one called yext.com. There’s another one called getlisted.org. I would highly recommend getlisted.org just because a lot of the other sites that are out there, they will show you essentially all the different listings that you have and what’s correct and what’s not correct. But they are very tricky in the sense that they will kind of lead you in the direction of you know if you want to correct these, click thus button below thinking oh, yeah. I wanna correct all of them. Let me click on it. But then it end up taking you to a pricing page and then they charge you that kind of thing. Or you can do it manually yourself for free. So getlisted.org is great because it’ll give you a list that you have that’s correct and incorrect. and all it really takes is really time to go through each one and it’ll have a link to each of those sites and you can click on the link. And you can basically claim your business on each of those directory sites and that way you can correct them that way.

So getlisted.org is probably the best one and you wanna make sure when you put your business info, you wanna put the correct business info in there so that way it can pull it up. It’s gonna ask you for your name, address, and phone number. So you wanna make sure you actually have that correct info first before you start doing the research.

Daniel: Gotcha. And that first website you mentioned was called yext? Was that Y-E-X-T?

Mike: Exactly, yext.com. There’s various different ones out there but those are the two most common ones with Getlisted being pretty much at the top.

Daniel: Gotta. Hey, I’ve got one more question for you that you might you wanna tackle. What are some good examples of a strong call to action statement?

Mike: Good question. So it really depends on the type of CTA that you’re gonna be using, whether it’s for a new patient special, anything like that. I actually recommend if you’re going to throw something on there, maybe pop some kind of urgency on there. I do see a lot of chiropractors that maybe have a special that just runs all year long. So there is no real urgency to it. I would recommend throwing some type of urgency on there where it only lasts until the end of the month. Maybe limited time only kind of thing. Think of black Friday, think of cyber Monday. Those type of sales, those types of buzz words are ingrained in us to understand that it’s a very short amount of time. New Year’s Sale, anything like that, those are good strong call to actions. Now when it comes to year round, maybe you don’t have new year’s around the corner, or maybe you don’t have memorial day right around the corner to kind of toss into there. I would definitely say depending on what you are really kind of using, I would put some type of urgency to where it allows them to you know, okay, this is what I’m gonna get. Let’s say it’s a free consultation. A lot of people tend to use free consultation. But maybe put in some type of value on there so that they understand that it’s not just really, really free, that there is actually a $200 value towards it.

Anytime someone throws any kind of, let’s say, ebook or free book or free download, they usually put some kind of value in there. Putting that value adds value to the piece that you are giving away for free. So that way it makes them feel like they’re actually getting something for free and not just getting a freebie that’s not really worth anything. You know what I mean? So that really kind of depends on what you’re looking towards getting. If anything you’re doing, whether it’s a service or anything in general, maybe pass the value and maybe even the discount that you are gonna be putting right there on there. But again, keep it short, don’t make it too large. You wanna have it to where it’s just enough info to get them interested and then they wanna click on it to get the full info.

Daniel: Those are some great points. I think those would apply to a lot of people. Try to show what that value of the product is and make it time sensitive. And here is one more for you. If a Chiropractor is working in a market where there is significant competition, how do you present a unique selling proposition given all the other chiropractors that you are competing with?

Mike: Perfect. You know, it’s funny. That kind of goes into one of the slides we were mentioning as far as being consistent but also you wanna make sure that you do stand out to a point. Don’t talk about you as the doctor or you as the business but more so how you can help the client. There’s a lot of times where I kind of reference when I do presentations, kind of like a gas station. I mean not at all to say that chiropractors are all like gas stations but a gas station is kind of like where a chiropractor office might be down the road, there’s another one across the street. You have a lot of competition around you and gas stations, you know, the only real competition they have is maybe the price. Maybe someone likes the type of gas Chevron with Techron or whatever may be. But there is certain little things that overall, at the end of the day, it’s all gas. So how do you really stand out between the competition?

Well, first and foremost, I would probably do a little research if I was you and just kind of see what the competition is doing. What is the competition doing that’s different from what you’re doing? Maybe they are offering a service that is really kind of standing out that you don’t offer and that’s what pulling all the patients towards them and not you. So first and foremost, you really wanna research and scope the land out and really see what is that each of these chiropractors offer. Maybe go to their websites, take a look at their websites thoroughly, see what they have. Maybe they even have office tours or whatnot, of course, that doesn’t stop them from doing the same to you. But again, you wanna be able to be the one that can offer something that those other chiropractors don’t offer. A lot of people tend of say well, my service is better. That’s kind of an intangible thing. It’s hard to tell someone before they pay you to have that service done. So you wanna first gauge and see what your competition is doing and then kind of take a step back and look at what you are doing. And if you can point out different things that you have that are different, really highlight those pieces and make sure that that stands out.

You wanna make it so that they can see okay, you are a chiropractor. But hey, you offer acupuncture, you offer massage therapy. Oh, hey, you offer this and this and that. These are things that you wanna make sure that whatever you differ from those chiropractors stand out.

Daniel: Very good. And that’s something that we often suggest at chiropractic economics too. Consider spinal decompression, laser therapy, like you said, acupuncture, LMT. Could be nutritional guidance and counseling, depending on whether you are willing to work with other professionals or obtain additional skills or equipment. There are definitely ways that you can present unique value proposition. Okay, well, very good. I believe that’s the end of our question and answer period. And Mike, I understand that there is a special offer for those attending today’s webinar.

Mike: Yeah, we do have a free website evaluation that’s happening. If you actually want to have someone take a look at your website in general, we’re gonna go ahead and take a look at everything that we talked about today. From your social media, we’re also gonna take a look at everything, make sure that things are linked up properly. Is your website mobile responsive? I know I didn’t touch on that too often in today’s presentation. But keep in mind recently with what Google considers their mobile get in, if your website is not mobile responsive then you could be dinged negatively on your Google ranking. So that’s something that you wanna take a look at, we’ll take a look at that for you as well. A lot of things that we have here are able to help with that. If you already currently have that, we’ll take a look at all the other elements as well and give you a full thorough audit on your website for free. So definitely come check it out, let us know, go to chiroMetrics.com or give us a call. We’ll definitely take a look at that. And that’s exclusive of just for everyone that’s attending today.

Daniel: Very good. And at this time, we would like to thank our sponsor ChiroMetrics and you, Mike Garcia, for today’s webinar. And to our audience, thank you all for attending. Remember, this webinar including our speaker’s PowerPoint presentation has been recorded. If we did not get your question during the webinar, the questions will be posed to our expert and the questions will be posted shortly. chiroeco.com/webinar. We will alert you when the webinar is available. Thank you again for attending and we look forward to seeing you next time. Have a great day.