Chiropractic Marketing: How To Expand Your Local Audience
Highlights
- Expanding your local audience is a critical component of chiropractic marketing.
- The best chiropractic digital marketing techniques include optimizing your website, focusing on local SEO, and starting a blog.
- CT Engage offers tools to simplify and automate email and text marketing campaigns as well as to manage your online reputatio
Expanding your local audience is one of the best ways to reach potential patients. Using the right chiropractic marketing techniques to expand your reach and get the word out about your practice is essential. Using fully integrated chiropractic EHR software like ChiroTouch supports your chiropractic marketing efforts with capabilities like email marketing campaigns and online reputation management.
Evaluate Your Current Website
Your website is often the first “face” your patients encounter. You want it to be professional, user-friendly, and easily discoverable by people in your local market seeking chiropractic care.
The website design should be easy to navigate on all devices, including desktop, mobile, and tablet, so patients can easily reach you as soon as they think about your practice.
Work with an experienced web designer to create a user-friendly website with features such as:
- Clear website architecture
- Fast page-loading times
- Clean coding
- A clean, modern interface
- Effective navigation, such as HTML or JavaScript menus
Optimize Your Website Content
A solid marketing online campaign includes optimizing the content already on your website. Some strategies to increase organic traffic to your website and interest people in your services include creating engaging content and making sure it’s SEO-optimized.
Use your target keywords in the title tags and meta descriptions. Add your location to your meta description. You can also change the file names of your images to be more descriptive instead of using the default image file names.
Start a Blog
A blog is no longer a “nice-to-have” feature on a practice website; it’s critical if you want to compete in your local market. You should be posting regular content on your blog as well as using it as a marketing tool to generate and convert leads. Consider offering several types of content in addition to blog posts; videos, webinars, and podcasts are more in demand than ever.
Ensure your blog content is informative, engaging, and features long-tail keywords, backlinks to authority websites, and a call to action at the end encouraging readers to engage further with your practice.
Add Value to Blogs
Produce blogs with content that offers your readers something of value without asking them for anything in return. Valuable content includes digital products like eBooks, pamphlets, case studies, promotional offers, and tutorials.
For much more about how to blog successfully, see our blog post on the topic.
Try Guest Blogging
If you’re not ready to invest time in writing your own blog, you can still promote your practice locally by writing guest blog posts for other local businesses. Sharing blog content on high-traffic local sites or social media channels can significantly boost your visibility.
Contact walk-in clinics, dental offices, sports facilities, dance academies, and senior homes for guest posting opportunities. Guest posts can be mutually beneficial marketing strategies and can help you connect with the broader community.
Focus on Local SEO
Local SEO refers to the keywords and search phrases that people in your community search for when looking for chiropractic services. It also refers to elements like a Google Business Profile account that helps you rank in the local search results for chiropractic clinics.
Keyword Phrases and Search Queries
To rank high in local results, incorporate local SEO phrases into your website’s landing pages, services pages, contact pages, and blog posts. Research shows that mobile searches for phrases like “near me” have increased by 200% in the past few years, making it important to work this type of phrasing into your web content. A few additional ideas include:
- “Chiropractic services in city name”
- “Chiropractor in city name”
- “What time does practice name open/close”
- “Best chiropractor in city name”
- “Experienced chiropractor near me”
Use Google Suggestions
A helpful way to discover search queries to include in your content is to use Google autocomplete. Pull up Google and type in a search query that a patient might use, like “best chiropractor in.” Then, take note of the autocomplete suggestions that come up.
Also, take a look at the “Related searches” section at the bottom of the Google search results page.
These are the types of queries that your website content should address in your blog posts.
Additionally, perform a search using local SEO keyword phrases. Observe the top Google results to get an idea of which chiropractic businesses are ranking and what their content looks like. Your goal is to find out how to outrank them for the same search topics.
Use SEO Analysis Tools
Uses a program like AHrefs or SEMrush to gauge search volume data. This can show you how much competition there is for a single keyword and indicate the keyword difficulty. The keywords that get the most hits are those with a high search volume but a low competition score.
You should also opt for a high proportion of long-tail keywords over short keywords. For example, short keywords include one or two words, like “chiropractor Michigan.” A long-tail keyword for the same geotag could be “chiropractor for sciatica pain in Michigan.”
Short-keyword searches typically indicate that the person is not yet ready to commit to a service; they’re still browsing for options. Specific long-tail keywords suggest the person has already given some thought to their search engine query and know exactly what they want. This person is more likely to engage with the results they click on.
Create a Google Business Profile
Google Business Profile is a service provided by Google that is essential to local SEO. Fifty-six percent of companies don’t claim their business on Google, causing them to lose out on potential engagement with their audience.
Claiming your practice on Google is simple and only requires you to follow the prompts to enter basic information about your chiropractic clinic. The payoff is that you rank higher in search results. This leads potential patients who might not find you otherwise to view your practice’s information and visit your website.
Don’t Ignore Social Media
Social media provides real-time engagement with followers, helps to develop your chiropractic brand, and allows you to promote your services to a broad local audience.
Use your social media accounts for daily engagement posts, interactive feedback with followers, blog post publication and promotional announcements, and general chiropractic educational content.
Post Daily
Daily engagement posts keep your social media account active and on your followers’ minds. Daily posts also appeal to new patients, especially when they contain special offers or interesting information about chiropractic care.
Aim to make a short engagement post every day at the same time. Keep your posts short — 180 characters or less — and make sure they include a link to a landing page, blog post, or service page on your website.
Interact With Your Audience
Social media allows you to engage with your audience to gain interactive feedback. Use your social media channels to answer questions, send out mini-surveys, and develop relationships with your followers.
The feedback you receive is a valuable tool that can help you offer services that your local audience is looking for. It will also allow you to identify and address patient concerns you may not have been aware of before.
Developing an interactive relationship with your local audience sets you apart as an authority in your field. When a person in your local audience needs chiropractic services, they will choose a provider with whom they feel comfortable. Giving and receiving feedback through social media helps you become that provider for them.
Offer Patient Education
Social media outlets like YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram are platforms where you can provide general educational content to your audience. Whether in video form, infographics, or short posts, you can provide helpful information about chiropractic care to your local audience. This puts your practice in the minds of potential patients who may not have considered visiting a chiropractor before.
Host a Podcast
Podcasts are becoming more popular every year. In 2020, 87% of Americans age 12 and up were familiar with podcasting, a number that has grown steadily every year since 2006. Fifty seven percent said they had listened to a podcast in the previous month.
Podcasts offer patients a passive way to consume marketing information while they go about their day. Unlike video content, patients can listen to podcasts while they commute or do chores. Make your podcast informative and engaging, and add plenty of actionable content to encourage listeners to contact your practice.
Well-executed podcasts can increase trust in your business, provide valuable information for your patients, and create rapport with listeners. This can help convert listeners into patients.
Set Up Email and Texting Marketing Campaigns
Email and texting campaigns are excellent ways to increase your reach and grow your practice. They can be used to send out limited-time opportunities to new and existing patients, distribute educational material, and re-engage inactive patients.
When crafting a successful marketing campaign for your chiropractic practice, focus on consistent scheduling and identifiable goals.
Choose a Frequency
The most successful email marketing campaigns follow a release schedule that is consistent and predictable. Patients are more likely to engage with your practice if you send regular messages.
However, sending marketing messages too often can cause patients to feel overloaded. It is important to choose an email frequency that works for your goal. Typically, one to two emails per month is sufficient to engage patients, but your ideal frequency might vary.
Identify a Goal
Create your campaign strategies with a goal in mind. Before sending out messages, determine a goal to drive the campaign. Possible goals include:
- Bringing new patients in for their first chiropractic appointment
- Increasing patient retention
- Promoting new chiropractic services
- Introducing new practitioners at your clinic
- Rewarding patients who sign up for packages with discounts
Ideally, your campaign’s goal should have measurable objectives, such as click-through rates and frequency of social media shares, which you can track to determine success.
Build Your Practice Reputation Using Reviews and Testimonials
According to statistics, 77% of people find new healthcare providers through online reviews. Managing your online reputation using online reviews to engage your audience and reach potential patients is vitally important. You can manage your online reputation in several ways.
Encourage Reviews and Testimonials from Patients
The best way to build your online reputation is to encourage current patients to leave reviews. With CT Engage, you can send feedback surveys to repeat patients and message your top patients asking them to leave a review.
Many people follow through on leaving reviews when asked, so taking this step is essential to getting reviews on online platforms.
Patient testimonials are also a powerful marketing tool. Typically, patient testimonials live on the homepage of a practice’s website. Reach out to satisfied patients and ask them to write a brief paragraph on their experience with your practice. Be sure to routinely ask for new ones and refresh them on your site periodically.
CT Engage Simplifies Marketing Campaigns
An easy way to integrate email and text campaigns into your chiropractic marketing plan is with ChiroTouch’s ancillary service CT Engage. CT Engage is a patient engagement tool that allows you to automate patient communication.
With CT Engage, you can send texts or emails to individual patients or groups of patients. You can schedule campaigns and use prebuilt and customizable templates to send appointment reminders; birthday, holiday, and practice anniversary greetings; and recall messages.
You can also use CT Engage to publish a regular newsletter, which can help keep your practice top of mind for your patients and increase repeat appointments.
CT Engage also helps you respond to challenging feedback and manage online reviews. This allows you to correct and address feedback that brings up potentially damaging reviews before they go online.
Expand Your Local Audience with ChiroTouch
ChiroTouch is trusted by over 21,000 providers, 13,000 practices, and 7 chiropractic colleges across the country for its easy-to-access and easy-to-use interface. You can personalize the fully integrated software system with built-in templates and macros to allow you to streamline your practice’s workflow and improve your patient experience.
With ChiroTouch’s ancillary services like CT Engage, you can boost patient engagement and improve your marketing strategies with email campaigns and messaging features.
To discover how ChiroTouch can help you implement successful chiropractic marketing techniques to grow your practice and reach a wider local audience, book a demo today.