To Keep Your Practice Top of Mind, Keep Your Patients Informed

Highlights

• Keeping patients informed through educational blog posts does more than keep your practice top of mind (though it does that, too).
• A quality blog builds trust in your practice, and drives increased traffic to your site.
• Posting regularly and promoting the blog through email and social media can retain existing customers and gain new ones.
• Covering interesting and timely topics will draw interest.
• Putting some personality into your blog will endear you to your audience.

Is your practice considering starting a blog (or jump-starting one that’s not performing well)? If you’re not, you’re missing out on a valuable branding and patient retention tool that can have a dramatic effect on your practice’s bottom line as well as your patients’ health and well-being. A win-win, right?

But like everything in life, there’s a right way and many wrong ways to do it. This article will help you get it right.

Why Your Chiropractic Practice Needs a Blog

Blogging is one of the most effective marketing tools available to any business. In 2020, 34% of buyers said they have made unplanned purchases after reading high-quality content, according to SEMRush.

The survey also found that among high-earning bloggers, more than one-third felt that the demand for high-quality content is stronger than ever.

Still not convinced? SEMRush also reports that businesses that blog for marketing realize ROIs that are 13 times higher than businesses that don’t!It’s pretty clear that if you’re not blogging these days, your practice is likely losing patients (and revenue) to those that do.

The Keys to Successful Blogging

Educate and Inform

Practice promotion isn’t the only (or even the best) reason to write a blog post. In fact, a practice’s purpose for blogging should never be to directly sell services or products to your patients. The best way to grow a readership (and your practice) is to provide information and education that’s useful to your readers.

This strategy keeps your patients informed, and it keeps your practice in the top of their minds. Blogging high-quality content also establishes your practice as a trustworthy source of information, and it shows your readers that you care about them and their health, not just about your bottom line.

Build Your Brand

Well-written informational posts can also be a powerful brand-building tool; they’re an effective way to earn blog followers and social media shares. With just one tool — your practice blog — you can build your patient list, your social media following, your brand, and your website traffic, all at the same time.

Increase Traffic

A quality blog containing articles that answer questions your target audience may have about your practice or chiropractic in general can result in a big SEO boost on Google. SEMRush found that the #1 traffic source for high-income bloggers is organic traffic.

Organic traffic is driven mainly by Google searches, and blogging is one of the best ways to gain a share of that traffic. Organic traffic can have a significant local impact that will drive more patients to your practice.

A Quality Blog Is Good for Your Patients and Your Practice

In a nutshell, informing and educating patients through blogging works for chiropractic practices. Better-informed patients will be more disposed to get the care they need. And because of the trust you take time to build with your audience, your practice will be the place they come to get that care.

As a bonus, a growing readership will help you bring in new patients and retain the ones you already have.

Blogging Basics

Whether you’re new to blogging or are looking for ways to make an existing blog more productive, you may find the following tips helpful.

Starting a Blog

Most website builders have blog templates, or you can create a free blog with WordPress and link to it on your site. If you’re interested in tracking your blog’s visitors (and you should be!), there are many plug-ins and programs that can do this. WordPress has its own, and Google can do it for you as well. Both are free.

Posting Frequency

But how often should you publish? It’s best to post regularly if you want to build a readership. Once or twice a week is probably the best frequency in the beginning and should be manageable to maintain. Many bloggers block out some time to create several posts at once and then post them at the same time(s) each week.

As your blog grows, you may want to consider increasing the frequency of your posts.  SEMRush’s marketing survey found that those who publish daily get 57% better results than those who post several times per week.

Whatever the frequency you decide on, you should have a few posts in reserve for the times when you can’t get one written before it is “due.”

Promoting Your Blog

You will also need to decide how you want to promote your blog. The most effective ways to promote blog posts are through email and on your social media pages. Sending an email to all patients who have opted in to your mailing list is a given.

You can also put signups on your website and social media pages to build your email list beyond your patients.

Social media is also an easy way to promote your blog, and the more ways you promote it, the wider your readership will be. You don’t necessarily have to create and promote your content all on your own. You can work with a professional writer to get original content in your brand voice. A content marketer can promote your blog on your behalf.

Possible Blogging Topics

A chiropractic practice can pull blogging ideas from a wealth of topics. A few general categories might include nutrition, exercise, general physiology, various injuries and how to treat them, chiropractic methods, acupressure and acupuncture (should your practice offer them), trending health topics, and how chiropractic care impacts mental health.

Nutrition

You can educate your patients that the healthier they eat, the less damaging inflammation they will have, and the easier it will be for them to maintain a healthy weight that takes excess pressure off their bones and joints. Your blog can cover broad nutritional topics and explain to patients how they can improve their overall health with proper nutrition.

Exercise

Share with your patients the importance of exercise and how to do it safely so that they can avoid injury. This topic, too, could keep you busy for a while, covering types of exercises and how to do them correctly.

General Physiology

A few visual posts that show the bones, joints, and ligaments and describe their relevance can help patients understand the terminology you might use in the office to describe their injuries or the parts of their body on which you are working.

Injuries and Treatment

When a patient is injured, they need to understand how it happened and how they can treat it. Your blog can describe the most common (or uncommon) injuries and what to do about them, both in the office and at home.

Mental Health

Mental health is impacted by physical health, and your blog can explore how chiropractic care can be beneficial for mental health and stress levels.

Chiropractic Benefits

Many people aren’t aware of the many benefits of chiropractic. For example you could blog about how chiropractic treatment can help with headache pain, chronic neck pain, or osteoarthritis symptoms. Or how chiropractic can improve posture and even help reduce opioid use.

Trending Health Topics

If a health topic related to chiropractic care is in the news, your patients will probably be curious about it. Covering these topics in your blog will gain you attention and allow you to address the topic in a way that is compatible with your beliefs and values.

Make It Personal

To make real connections with your readers, it’s a good idea to put some of your own personal experiences and beliefs into your blog posts. Your patients will enjoy learning something about who you are inside and outside the office.

Do you have a unique perspective on patient care? Do you play jazz piano? Own five Rottweilers? Love boating or archery? Write about it! People like to see some personality in the bloggers they follow. It will endear patients to you if you can put some of yourself into your blog posts.

Consider Adding Podcasts

Many chiropractors these days are using podcasts to reach their patients. Why? Because podcasting has gone mainstream, and in a big way. In 2021, people spent 15 billion hours listening to podcasts, according to SEMRush.

SEMRush also found that more than half of Americans have listened to at least one podcast, and that number is growing fast. In addition, 32% of respondents say they listen to learn new things, which makes podcasts a natural fit for a blog designed to inform patients.

How ChiroTouch Can Help

Patient outreach is all-important to a chiropractic practice, and blogging is only one way to do it. If you’re looking to develop stronger relationships with your patients, ChiroTouch has patient communication tools available that make it simple. CT Engage lets chiropractic practices use email or texting to reach out to groups and subgroups of patients.

Our current users use automated messaging to send missed-appointment inquiries, to send personalized greetings such as birthday wishes, to request social media reviews following appointments, and much more.

Make the Switch to Cloud-Based ChiroTouch to Better Serve Your Patients

The cloud version of ChiroTouch, the standard in chiropractic EHR, offers better productivity, efficiency, and continuous innovation for your practice. Cloud-based ChiroTouch enables you to boost productivity for integrated patient management.

When switching from classic ChiroTouch to our cloud version, you gain multiple benefits. Cloud-based ChiroTouch supports efficiency with an intuitive design and modern features like customizable macros and a user-friendly interface. Features like online scheduling help your practice improve its workflow and provide better care to patients who come in your doors.

Additional innovative and automated features of ChiroTouch cloud include:

• Ability to work from one log-in, from anywhere, on any device
• Complete practice-wide data integration for a seamless workflow
• Automatic syncing for real-time information access and updates
• HIPAA-compliant cloud storage
• Automatic backups and updates

With the cloud version of ChiroTouch, you can support your patients from start to finish and keep them informed every step of the way. Your staff can find patient information quickly with our software’s all-in-one views and reduce redundancy with automated features and integrated billing and insurance processing.

ChiroTouch’s instant sync capabilities and messaging system can increase productivity by 25% and allow effective communication between you, your staff, and your patients. For example, if you enter information during a patient encounter, it automatically updates across the practice, allowing your front-desk staff and chiropractic billers to see patient data to schedule and bill appropriately.

Moving to cloud-based ChiroTouch over the classic version streamlines workflow for the entire practice and saves you time and money. These benefits allow you to focus on better patient care and growing your chiropractic practice.