The American Chiropractic Association estimates chiropractors treat more than 35 million Americans every year. While there’s a clear need for chiropractic care, acquiring new chiropractic clients can be a challenge. Health consumers are among the most difficult to market to because services have to do with alleviating suffering, and while the majority of treatments are successful, not all are foolproof.
The value-based reimbursement structure into healthcare, well-informed patients, and changing industry landscape make it challenging for a chiropractic office to differentiate from the competition. In addition, HIPAA compliance further restricts chiropractic marketing strategies, and if we’re entirely honest, chiropractors don’t always have the know-how or time to focus on marketing because they need to treat their patients.
More than relying on old-fashioned referrals, potential patients look to the web to find suitable chiropractic practices. This disruption to reliance on word-of-mouth and steadfast reputation has increased patient expectations and means that chiropractic practices now have to penetrate online communities and dominate them with their presence and unique value proposition.
Because the marketplace is more competitive, it’s vital that chiropractic offices embrace online marketing as part of their business development strategy. Today, it’s possible to reach qualified leads across multiple devices (computers, tablets, smartphones, etc.) wherever they are — all you need is a well-planned online marketing strategy.
Chiropractic Marketing Ideas That Will Improve Your Marketing Strategy
All chiropractic marketing challenges can be remedied with expertise from a digital marketing agency that understands healthcare. In addition, a chiropractic marketing strategy will positively connect, engage and interact with existing and prospective patients in a fulfilling manner that exceeds their expectations, with the end goal of improving a patient’s journey of finding and receiving care. Below are a few ideas that can enhance your marketing strategy.
Narrow Down Your Audience
Healthcare businesses new to marketing often make the mistake of marketing their services to anyone remotely interested in their business, but this goes against online marketing best practices. It may seem counter-intuitive, but every company has an ideal type of customer they strive to appeal to. If you want to get the maximum ROI from your marketing spend, it’s better to pick an audience on which to focus your marketing efforts.
As a chiropractor, your patient base is likely large, and you could help anyone from the elderly to young children. If you tried to market to a broad audience, you might say: “We aim to revitalize your well-being.”, for example. While relevant, this is very generic and obvious. Don’t all health practitioners aim to restore their patients’ wellbeing?
Instead, you may decide to commit your focus to prospective patients who are sportsmen and women. Now your message becomes: “We improve the performance of injured athletes.” This targets a specific audience with a unique value proposition and establishes your chiropractic practice as the go-to for search engines and new patients.
Why does this matter? Digital marketing is hyper-focused and specific to audience segments. Its analytics enables businesses to target specific users with demographic data matching a specific age, vicinity, or interest. Now, if you’re marketing to every single person, you’re going to have to spend an astronomical amount of money. And this isn’t always successful, as you’re spreading your efforts thinly instead of keeping them narrow and focused. After all, the most successful brands are primarily renowned for a single product or service.
The World of PPC Advertisements
Pay-per-click (PPC) is a popular online advertising model in which an advertiser pays a publisher every time their advertisement is “clicked on.” Put simply, it is one of the most cost-effective ways of buying visits to your website. The end goal is to lead the user who clicks on your advert to your chiropractic website, where they can complete a valuable action like booking a consultation.
A brief side note on SEO: Search engine optimization is the cornerstone of digital marketing. Through various marketing tactics (which we’ll get to a bit later), it aims to rank your chiropractic website at the top of Google search engine results pages. The higher a website ranks, the more traffic it receives. Increased traffic boosts lead generation and the acquisition of new patients.
This is usually done with keywords: words or phrases users type into search bars like “chiropractor Chicago” for instance. Now, PPC campaigns allow advertisers to bid for ad placement in a search engine’s sponsored links when a user searches a keyword related to their business offering. So, for instance, if you bid on “sports injury chiropractor,” your ad may appear at the top spot on Google’s search results pages.
Google Ads
Google is the most visited search engine, with over two million websites that attract 90% of consumers. It’s no wonder Google is a verb commonly referenced when trying to learn something from the internet. Conducting PPC campaigns through Google Ads is effective because it is the largest search engine, receives the most amount of traffic, and delivers the most impressions and clicks to your ads.
Google Ads provides great marketing flexibility that will grow your practice. It’s easy to customize campaigns to focus on specific types of online users. For example, you can target people by location, their device, and the Google-owned website they’re accessing, which reiterates the importance of the earlier point of having a niche market. Businesses can also set spending limits, so you can stick to your marketing budget without fear of overspending.
Facebook Ads
The social media giant allows you to create PPC ads within Facebook Ads Manager. These ads can be video, carousel of standard photos, and appear in the sidebar, feed, and audience network once created. They can also be displayed on the Instagram feed of your target audience. Facebook is the world’s third-most visited website, so there’s a good chance your target audience is spending time on the platform. As it is, 86% of marketers use Facebook for advertising.
Like Google Ads, Facebook ads can help businesses receive more visibility for their Facebook content and boost traffic to their website. With unparalleled targeting options, Facebook is a great place to start social media marketing because the platform makes it easy to share almost any type of content. Launching a Facebook Business Page to build brand awareness, interact with local groups, and share blog content will also complement your PPC campaign efforts.
Create Unique Campaigns for Each Platform
Successful PPC campaigns have a clear call to action, improve your advertising quality score, and reduce the cost of pay-per-click over time. For example, according to Wordstream, Google Ads “helps you find new customers, while Facebook helps new customers find you.” Basically, Google Ads targets users who demonstrate intent when they type keywords into a Google search, whereas Facebook matches a user’s interests.
So, a Facebook ad is better for building brand awareness, and Google is suited for direct marketing your chiropractic services. While both platforms are frequently pitted against each other, they are complementary and should be used together as part of a comprehensive chiropractic marketing strategy because they target different stages of the buyer’s journey. But, of course, you can’t use a cut-and-paste approach and will have to tailor your ads to best suit each platform.
Managing Your Keywords Correctly
For chiropractic marketing, you always want your keywords to be relevant to your services. Strong keywords improve click-through rates (CTR) and quality scores — both of which help your website to rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). For instance: you run a chiropractor business, so you wouldn’t want your ad to show people searching for a massage therapist. You can tweak your keywords by doing the following:
- Use long-tail keywords. Replace single-keywords with keywords that use two to three words potential patients might search for. For example, instead of just using “chiropractor,” you could try “sports chiropractor.” This practice will help you specify keywords that are too general.
- Make sure your keywords are relevant to the ads in your ad groups. If your ads in your ad group are about maintaining spine health, you should have keywords that include the word spine health, for example. Google’s keyword insertion can help you dynamically update your ad copy to include the keywords that match your customer’s searches.
- Always group your keywords based on themes that cover your chiropractic services; that way, your ads will be more relevant and appear when prospective patients search online.
Using the correct keywords is one of the most important parts of search engine optimization and chiropractic marketing. Increasing traffic to your website is a priority, and to do so, you need to appeal to the right audience. Choosing effective keywords or tweaking existing ones is an integral step to this process.
Optimize Your Chiropractic Services Website
If you’ve done any research on chiropractic marketing, you’ve probably come across optimization more than several times, and with good reason. The entire process is really just about making it easier for search engines like Google to understand what your website is about and then rank it accordingly, i.e., ensure that it appears when users search for the services your practice provides.
The first thing to consider is content. Does your website communicate everything you have to offer clearly and concisely? When someone visits your homepage, do they immediately understand what you have to offer, and are they inspired to contact you instead of other chiropractic services? This has much to do with the copy and the layout. Any practice with an outdated website or difficult to navigate without relevant business information will immediately lose credibility.
You’ll also want to ensure that your website uses on-page, off-page, and technical SEO to rank higher on search engines. Copy, titles, meta-tags, videos, and images should all be appropriately labeled. You can have the most attractive website, but no one will find it on Google Search without proper SEO practices in place.
Responsive web design is another key consideration. 63% of Google’s US organic search traffic originates from Smartphones. The leading search engine has stated that responsive design is its preferred method of mobile optimization, meaning that a website should look just as good, regardless of the screen size, platform, or orientation.
Work on Your Landing Pages
A landing page is a form of a webpage with a specific marketing purpose, and its traffic comes from paid ads. Any landing page aims to nudge a prospective patient further down the buyer’s funnel, whether to sign up to a mailing list or book an appointment. The biggest mistake a business owner can make is to have too many calls to action on a single landing page. If you want to run multiple offers, then it’s better to create a separate landing page for each one.
A single landing page should only have one offer or solution with a clear call to action (CTA). Most landing pages have a large CTA button that contrasts the background and instills a sense of urgency to motivate potential new patients to act immediately. If your landing page acquires new leads, then it’s fulfilling its marketing function.
If your landing page conversion rate is lower than expected, you can try A/B testing. This marketing experiment lets you test various layouts, copy, and image variations to understand which works best for patient acquisition. Running A/B testing takes the guesswork out of website and landing page optimization. In addition, by measuring the impact of incremental changes, you can tweak your efforts to maximize positive results.
A/B testing should be done regularly to continually improve your conversion rate over time. It’s cost-effective and time-efficient as it leads to continuous improvement, and it’s easy to determine immediately whether a change works or not. More than 50% of marketers use A/B testing because they know it successfully boosts conversion rates.
Take Advantage of Local SEO
Any business with a physical location that services a defined geographic location should use local SEO. Local search engine marketing helps smaller companies acquire new patients who are looking for their services nearby. If you’ve ever done a Google search and seen businesses appear in a box at the top of your search result page along with a map and dropped pin, then you’ve witnessed local SEO in action.
According to Safari Digital, 97% of users search online to final a local business. 54% of these searches occur once a month, and 12% search for a local business every day. Google ranks local SEO according to relevance, distance, and prominence.
- Relevance has to do with how well your business details match with local searches.
- Distance is how far a potential business is from the users’ location. For example, many users often type “near me,” so Google uses their location coordinates to determine whether a company is within the vicinity.
- Prominence is how well-known a business is based on its directory location, website links, article mentions, and online reviews. The more positive online reviews a company has, the higher its search rankings.
To set up local SEO, you need a Google My Business profile. It allows you to register on Google’s ‘business directory’ and include important details like location, address, website address, contact details, customer reviews, and operating hours. A helpful tip: If your business address is not updated, it will not show up when a new patient types a “near me” search. So, be sure to fill in all details as accurately as possible.
Create a Blog for Your Chiropractic Business!
Blogging should definitely be on your chiropractic marketing ideas list. Companies that create content like blogs are 13 times more likely to see a positive return on investment. Having a blog will boost your SEO marketing strategy and improve your results on SERPs. It also aids your social media marketing as you can use these platforms to publish your blog content. Blog articles provide dynamic marketing materials for patient education and enhance business visibility within your local community.
Engaging and well-written blogs will establish your practice authority and build trust with potential and existing patients. When people find a blog useful., they will also link to it from their website, which further boosts your Google ranking. Chiropractic Chicago has a short and sweet blog about related topics to do with wellbeing. It’s a good example of how you can impart helpful information and gain loyal patients.
Companies that create content like blogs are 13 times more likely to see a positive return on investment. Having a blog will boost your SEO marketing strategy and improve your results on SERPs.
Collaborate With Experts for Blogging Content
When you work with an expert to publish a blog, you increase your business exposure because you double up on audience reach. Hopefully, they’ll share the content on their social media account and website, too, providing valuable backlinks that boost off-page SEO. For example, you might interview a famous sportsman or women who recovered from an injury by going to see a chiropractor. This individual then becomes associated with your practice and boosts website traffic and interest in your services.
Collect Reviews, Testimonials, and Referrals
We’ve already mentioned how important reviews are to rank for local SEO, but they’re also critical to convincing new patients of the quality of your chiropractic care. Every marketer knows that a positive review provides social proof of good business or healthcare service, in this case, and drives business. Take a look at Dr. Anay Patel’s profile on Healthgrades. Not only does he have a becoming profile picture, but he also has over 165 reviews!
Reviews are of particular importance in the medical industry. Unlike products, a medical procedure can’t be sent back to a warehouse if the results aren’t what a patient expects. Because chiropractors, like any medical professionals, have specialist knowledge, they need to work harder to gain the trust of new patients, and positive reviews are one of the easiest ways to do so. They can easily help your chiropractic practice gain credibility and trust.
Conclusion
Many strategies and tactics are needed to roll out a decent healthcare marketing campaign, which can be overwhelming for a business to ideate and execute. That’s why Comrade exists. As a reputable web design and marketing agency, we support many local businesses with their digital marketing, no matter what stage they’re at.
With over 300+ successful marketing projects in our portfolio, we have the expertise to help your chiropractic practice increase targeted traffic, generate qualified sales leads, and improve its brand visibility to a local audience. Call us at (312) 265-0580 or click here to learn more about our chiropractic marketing services.
