Your chiropractic clinic can benefit tremendously from solid marketing strategies and effective, proactive outreach.
Many chiropractors find themselves wondering how to market effectively and how they can begin using strong inbound and outbound marketing to grow their businesses. In this article, we’ll talk about some of the differences between inbound and outbound marketing and how you can take advantage of these marketing methods for your organization.
Inbound and outbound marketing both offer strong advantages to your clinic and should be part of your overall marketing strategy. If you don’t already have one, it is worthwhile to take the time to create a strategy and plan for your upcoming marketing efforts.
Your plan should outline what results you plan to achieve from your marketing, how you will get there and how you will measure your marketing success over time.
To start, let’s review the basics of inbound and outbound marketing so you can start marketing more effectively for your practice.
What’s outbound marketing?
Outbound marketing is your own outwardly-focused effort to generate interest in your clinic. It’s whenever you host a scoliosis screening clinic at a local fair, distribute flyers to promote a health and wellness talk at your practice, place ads with local radio stations or do some other type of traditional marketing effort.
Outbound marketing can be very expensive and time-consuming, depending on the type of outreach, or it can be relatively inexpensive. Generally, though, with outbound marketing you are physically doing something to generate interest in your practice.
If you choose to use outbound marketing, though, you’ll need to be careful about how you do it. Measure the feedback and results you are getting so you don’t overinvest in a marketing method that isn’t working for you. Make sure your clinic is getting decent results from your marketing efforts at all times.
Avoid using outbound marketing to promote a free offer. Be wary of offering discounts, too, as part of your marketing. Many chiropractors offer a free first visit, but this only devalues the healthcare you provide and encourages patients to think of chiropractic care differently.
If you want to offer a freebie, consider teaming up with another business and offering a discount or free item for your patients.
What’s inbound marketing?
With inbound marketing, you’re drawing in new patients to your practice through branding, blogging, social media, SEO, online traffic and other strategies. This traffic is organic, from people who are actually interested in your brand instead of just people who saw and responded to an ad-that’s the goal of inbound marketing.
Instead of marketing a message through a traditional medium to anyone and everyone, you are creating content that attracts readers and followers. These folks love your work and the types of content you publish, so they seek out your practice, share your work with others and visit your clinic as new patients.
Inbound marketing can be significantly cheaper than outbound marketing because all you need are some online platforms, consistent investment in providing interesting and relevant content to the right audience and some effort improving your online presence over time.
Keep in mind, though, that it can sometimes take a while to develop strong traction with inbound marketing. If you blog, for example, you may need to post consistently for several months before you start to see a strong payoff.
Ignite your marketing
If you’re ready to take your marketing further, start to look for marketing efforts that make sense for your practice and for the patients you want to attract to your practice. For instance, a sports chiropractic clinic should be targeting athletes and active people.
To do so, you’ll need to find marketing messages and strategies that resonate the most with athletic patients. If you have a general or family practice, your marketing might be more local or region-specific and must be measured accordingly.
Try to choose two or three new marketing methods to implement and identify objective criteria to measure how effective they are over time. If one method stands out as a particularly effective investment, then that may help you decide on where to invest more of your money and time in the future.
References
- Rouse, M and Ehrens, T. “Outbound Marketing.” TechTarget. http://searchcrm.techtarget.com/definition/outbound-marketing. Published: December 2014. Accessed: February 2018.
- Rouse, M and Ehrens, T. “Inbound Marketing.” TechTarget. http://searchcrm.techtarget.com/definition/inbound-marketing. Published: December 2014. Accessed: February 2018.
