Each time you teach, you’ve now earned the opportunity to ‘invite’ them to take the next step. In marketing and communications segmenting, this is your ‘call to action.’
If you’re doing your own marketing and communication in addition to seeing patients, you may feel overwhelmed at times. But marketing and communications segmenting of these efforts and knowing what they’re doing to help your business are important skills to have.
Jeff Langmaid, DC, co-founder of The Smart Chiropractor as well as the founder of The Evidence-Based Chiropractor, shared what chiropractors need to know about segmenting their marking and communications efforts.
What follows is our interview, edited for length and clarity.
What kinds of categories chiropractors should divide their patients into?
Many chiropractors struggle to market their practice effectively. We are highly trained at helping people get well, which is a wildly different skill set than the nuance of marketing. To market a practice efficiently and effectively, it’s a smart idea to “segment” your patients.
Segmenting is simply separating your patients into different categories. For most practices, there are three basic categories, or segments, of patients. They are Leads, Active Patients, and Inactive Patients:
- Leads are people who have submitted their information to you, but have not yet become patients.
- Active Patients are your patients who are currently under care and have been seen at least once in the past 45 days.
- Inactive patients include all of our patients who have not been seen in the last 45 days.
Once they have a better understanding of their consumers through these categories, what is the next step?
Once your patients are segmented to leads, active, or inactive, you’ll know where each person is in the patient’s journey. You should think of your patient experience and journey as a continuum. Someone may enter your sphere of influence as a “lead.”
A lead has not yet made a buying decision, so your goal is to stay top of mind using a “Teach & Invite Consistently” framework. Each day you should be reaching out to your health tribe (across your social channels and weekly through email) to teach them.
Teaching is the foundation of content marketing. Each time you teach, you’ve now earned the opportunity to “invite” them to take the next step. In marketing and communications segmenting, this is your “call to action.” If you Teach & Invite Consistently, then over time, a growing portion of your leads will become new patients.
Your new patients will still receive your content via social media. Still, you can craft a personalized new patient email onboarding sequence to guide their journey and ensure they have a top-notch experience in your practice as part of your marketing and communications segmenting. As your new patients become inactive, you’ll want to keep communicating via social media and a weekly email newsletter to increase your engagement and long-term retention.
After they get this data, how do they go about marketing and communications segmenting?
There are two places where you’ll want to segment your audiences. Segmentation should occur in your email subscribers lists and your ad sets. Segmenting your email subscribers lists is critical to ensure that your new patients receive the email onboarding sequence.
For example, you wouldn’t want your leads or inactive list to get a new patient sequence, so segmentation of your email lists is critical to facilitate an excellent patient experience. Next, you’ll want to segment your ads. Again, the ads you use to generate leads and email subscribers will be different than what your new patients or inactive patients will receive.
How important is email marketing?
Marketing is now digital. With billions of people each day online, you need to have a consistent presence to stay top of mind and generate new business. Email marketing needs to be a pillar of your marketing and communications.
Over 4.5 billion people have email addresses, and 50% check their email at least 10 times per day. Sending a monthly newsletter isn’t enough to drive real results. Email marketing should include a weekly newsletter with strong CTAs (calls to action), specialty campaigns depending on the time of year, and a new-patient onboarding sequence at a minimum.
You’ll want to focus on using your social channels to Teach & Invite Consistently. With over 2 billion monthly active users, Facebook is a pillar channel and should be updated at least one time day to stay top of mind in today’s fast-moving feeds.
