Chiropractors are constantly looking for good marketing. Most of them are willing to pay large amounts of money for marketing that promises to get patients in the door (keeping them is another article for another issue.) It may surprise you to know that the best type of marketing with the greatest result costs the least!
Social Media incorporates the four most common types of marketing that chiropractors are currently using. Those four major types of marketing are direct response market saturation, education, and personal interactive.
You must have an understanding of those four types of marketing if you are going to incorporate them into Social Media marketing. Direct response marketing consists of promotions that request consumers to directly respond to the advertiser, by mail, telephone, e-mail, or some other means of communication. Some practitioners also call this direct marketing.
Market saturation is literally flooding our market with our product (or service) for the purpose of name recognition. The goal is to increase the market share of your product (or your practice) in the community. This type of marketing cannot be expected to give any type of direct return on the money spent; however, over time, it can be effective in taking a particular market.
The purpose of education marketing is to educate our patients and communities on the power of what our services offer. Do not make the mistake of thinking that this only covers the education given inside the walls of your practice. There is an art to educating your city and making you the expert (which is best achieved through incorporating social media into your marketing).
Personal interactive marketing is found in numerous styles of marketing and is the hub of social media marketing. It can be defined as marketing that engages the user to “interact” with the marketing in a personal, emotional, or tactile experience. This type of marketing is mostly digital. Some popular examples are iPhone, iPod, or iPad apps. The goal with this strategy is to engage the user, which produces higher rates of retention among the consumer.
The main thing to understand under this new inbound marketing model is that whatever information you distribute needs to be incessantly bent toward meeting the wants, needs, and desires of your prospective patient. In other words, it’s not about you and how great you are as a chiropractor but, rather, more about them in terms of how your services can benefit their lifestyle, occupation, hobbies, general health, et cetera.
And the nice thing about it is that it takes minimal investment dollars. Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter are free to join. But, once they’re linked to your chiropractic website, more specifically a blog, then you’ve got significantly more leverage toward distributing your content. Remember, according to Alexa.com, Facebook is the #2 visited site in the world. By leveraging their size and traffic, you can get your message in front of more eyeballs than have ever been available for the small business owner.
It is important to understand that there must be a certain return of investment for every dollar spent in business. Your business strategy must include the amount of money you are willing to spend in attracting each prospective patient. This one factor is crucial in the successful longevity of one’s marketing plan.
You need to have a working knowledge of the different types of marketing to understand how to use them effectively. The days of trial and error are gone forever. The cost of doing business is too expensive for applied ignorance.
Social media is here to stay and we think it is one of the most powerful types of media of all time. The fact that all areas of marketing can be utilized through social media alone is powerful enough. However, if one adds the fact that social media has an almost nonexistent cost factor for potential business, then anyone should be able to recognize that social media is necessary in today’s chiropractic practice. The other four arenas are still crucial factors that must not be ignored, but social media certainly deserves its place.