Marketing your practice with a limited budget

Hello, and thank you for tuning in to Catch Up with ChiroTouch. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Tami Howard. And this is our weekly podcast series, where we talk about the chiropractic community, current events, and the state of our profession.

Today, I have Michael Sharma with us to talk about how to get started with digital marketing for your practice on a limited advertising budget. Michael is our Senior Marketing Manager and has 13 years of experience in digital marketing, working with ChiroTouch, Illumina, TD Ameritrade, and Google. He also consults and freelances for friends and families, small businesses.

Hey, Michael, thanks for being here.

Thanks, yeah, happy to be here.

We're so glad that you can come and join us and give all of our listeners more information on this really important topic. Everybody is looking to obviously expand their reach when it comes to patience, getting more patience into the office, getting word of mouth about their office out there. One of the easy ways, obviously, for practices to do that is through online marketing.

It's an important topic for our listeners and I know that there's a wide range of knowledge when it comes to online digital marketing. Before we get into maybe different price points that may be offered, I think it would be really helpful for our listeners just to understand marketing 101. What are some of the options that are available to small business owners and where do they start?

Sure. Yeah. I mean, yeah, we can speak about this for hours, right?

Yeah. Like you said, there's a lot of different options and each option can be either very simple or very complex. This is sort of like ranging the gamut.

I want to start with maybe mentioning Google My Business. So Google My Business is a tool that allows you to be visible on basically Google Maps. So Google has enhanced their functionality via Google My Business quite a bit.

It used to just be your phone number, your operating hours and your website and that's basically it. But now it offers all these other cool functionality like marketing your business as well. Creating posts, review management, all that stuff.

So that's a very interesting option that I think everyone needs to start off with. Then more advanced options are social media, either organic or paid. So organic social basically just means your own, let's say Facebook or Instagram page.

You're going to create posts on that, you're going to try to engage with your members, you're going to try to grow your followers, and then paid would be to do advertising or marketing on those channels, to try to get people to, let's say, schedule an appointment. Then we also have your website, which is related to SEO. SEO is search engine optimization.

Really what it boils down to is that you want a website and you want that website to show up when people are searching for a chiropractic office near them. And there are certain things that the website needs to do to be able to show up on the Google page. Other things are PPC.

So PPC is sort of like slang for pay-per-click advertising. Really it boils down to certain kinds of ads that you would primarily do on Google. The most effective for this kind of business would probably be paid search ads.

That's a little bit more advanced. Obviously requires some money to be put behind as well. And then email, of course, right?

So email can be a very effective tool to market to your both prospects or trying to get a new client to convert into a regular patient and your current patients as well. A great form of communication. And then one that I won't go into that much depth today are events.

But it is a viable channel for you to look at local community events and going there, maybe doing some adjustments or set up a massage table or something like that. That can be an effective tool for lead generation, which means trying to get new business.

Right. Yeah, with all these options, I think that sometimes it feels pretty overwhelming for offices to know where to start, especially when it may be like a newer office and they've got a limited budget and figuring out what the best use of their dollars may be. So I know when you and I were talking about this at one point in the past, you mentioned some options that are a little bit better in terms of like no budget options or low budget options.

If somebody's starting off with basically no budget at all, and they just want to start to get their name out there, what are some of the best online marketing channels that you think for the no budget options would be?

So I would start with the Google My Business listing. So just Google, Google My Business. Hopefully you already have a verified account on there.

If not, you'd want to verify yourself that takes a couple of days. And there you can adjust what your business looks like on the local Google Maps. So you want to make sure that all of your information is correct.

The services that you provide are on there. Your website, if you have one, should be on there. The operating hours should always be up to date.

If you have reduced hours because of COVID, you want to make sure you put that on there. But they also offer this new functionality that I sort of teased up earlier, that allows you to market your businesses. So you can create posts on your Google Maps page, and that then increases your visibility amongst other competitors.

So if I'm typing in chiropractor near me and I see 10 chiropractors in my area, if one has a certain post, that will be highlighted, and I may be more inclined to go to that particular one. And I make it pretty easy to create these posts, especially if you have some good reviews that you want to highlight, you can easily create a post around your reviews. So one person said that you did a great job in XYZ, so you grab that review, you create a post around it, and that then becomes a marketing piece.

So that's one thing that you can do. And this also is related to review management, right? So reviews are very important for all small businesses.

I don't know about you, but I base most of my decisions on where to go based on reviews if I haven't already been there, right? So a restaurant that has a three-star rating versus a restaurant that has a 4.8, I don't know about you, but I'll go with the 4.8. Yeah, definitely.

Who wants to eat at the three-star?

Exactly. Maybe it's good, maybe it's not, but there's so many options out there that people will give the better one a chance. So yeah, there's a couple of things you can do around review management.

Online, you always hear around that the best practices is that you respond to each review. There's two schools of thought. Majority feels that you respond to everything.

I personally fall into a different camp that says you respond only when you can address something or you can add value. So a copy paste of always responding with, thank you for your great review. Hope to see you again.

Like five times in a row doesn't add all that much value, right? But if you can, if it's a negative review or not that great review, definitely want to respond to that. You want to be professional.

You want to be courteous. You want to kill them with kindness, right? And then the reviews that are good or great, some of them you want to highlight, some of them just leave them alone there.

Right. Maybe adding that personal touch, like you said, so it's not just a cookie-cutter approach each time. Maybe adding something very specific to that particular review gives it a little bit more of that personal touch where people realize it's actually a human that's speaking back to these and not maybe a paid service or something like that.

If we go a little bit further up in the budget and we have a little bit more money to spend, what are some of the things that add some value as we have a little bit of a budget to spend?

I think the second thing I would do is if I had no money to spend, I would do all the things that I sort of talked about. You do your organic social on Facebook, you optimize your Google, my business listing, you dive into review management. Then if you have a little bit of money, I think the next logical step is building your website.

Building a website can be very complex and very costly, but it doesn't have to be. It can also be very simple and very cookie cutter for a very small amount. There are these services that have these templates, and all you need to provide is some basic copy around who it is you are, and what it is that you do, opening hours, etc.

There are services like GoDaddy or Wix or Squarespace. There's a bunch of them. They're usually about 15, 20, 25 bucks a month or something like that, and they'll provide you that template and they'll do the hosting for you.

All you need to do is basically set that up. Once you have that set up, you link it to your marketing places. You link it to your Google listing, you link it to your Facebook page, etc.

There's also some things that you could consider for marketing to patients. If you are a ChiroTouch user, we've got some no-cost features inside of ChiroTouch that allow you to just market directly to your clientele or your patient base. We've got a bulk email template that would allow you to email patients that you have in your database already.

That's a no-cost feature that's in ChiroTouch. If we go up one step and we start looking at spending a little bit of money, there are some additional services that you can subscribe to for ChiroTouch that allow you to engage patients either from a marketing perspective at CT InTouch. That's the expanded communication platform that we have, that you can communicate directly with patients and a set of lists and things like that of patients that you can target different marketing messages too.

But one thing that is interesting that I thought you and I had talked about a little bit is well in regards to having a website set up. You mentioned that if they had on their website the ability to schedule appointments there, maybe they're using CT appointments through ChiroTouch to allow online scheduling. They'd be able to also track back the amount of patients that had actually hit that particular website via some type of marketing efforts.

Can you speak a little bit about that?

Yeah, sure. One point that you made is the email communication, right? So I think that's a great way to basically reach out to your current clients.

I was at an event a few months ago and I spoke with a couple of DCs about how they market their practice. One of the DCs expressed some concern around not wanting to seem too pushy into their own client base, and it's a valid concern. But what you also have to remember is that if you provide a valuable service and if you've done right by that person or in general your patients, you earn the right to ask for more business.

So you've done the appropriate patient care. You've earned that right to reach out to that person and tell them about a new service that you're offering, ask them to come back in for recurring care, stuff like that. So really if you're providing a valuable service, to me, you have earned the right to ask for more.

I like that a lot. I think it's something that business owners sometimes struggle with, especially chiropractors in general. I would take that one step further and that you've also earned the right to ask for referrals, right?

So a lot of times I think that chiropractors forget to ask their patients for referrals and their patients are their biggest advocates. So being able just to say like, hey, you've done such a great job under your care here. You're seeing such amazing results.

Don't you want to share this with everybody you know? So it just reminded me of that, needing to remember to ask for those as well.

Right. So if you're going even one step further and you have a good amount of money that you can spend on marketing, perhaps you're really in this growth phase or you're a larger office, perhaps multiple DCs or multiple types of services and you want to put a little bit more money behind, then you go into paid advertising. There's a couple of options here that you can do.

Before I go into paid advertising though, I want to go back to your earlier comment, Tami, that I think is really key and that is the integration of CT appointments into your website.

Right.

This is going to become clear in a minute here why this is so important. So the main point of paid advertising is to get people to do something, right? So if you're doing a very basic paid ad, what you would do is you create a certain ad or someone else creates that ad for you.

You get people to click on that ad and then you go to the website. That's pretty easy to do, but what's the point? Anyone can get a lot of clicks on your website.

That's not that hard. The hard part is getting the right audience and to get them to do something. That doing something should be to schedule an actual booking or a visit, right?

Because that is of actual value to you. If you have that integration, you know that either your ads are working or they're not working, and then you can stop spending money on something that doesn't drive a lot of value. It's very important that you know whether or not it's driving value.

This, I think, is the main way. Either you're getting an increase in appointments directly related to that ad or you're not. That's how you make your decisions, whether or not this particular channel or not is worth it.

Right. Tracking that return on investment. I think that's obviously an important thing to make sure that you're putting that money out there, that you're getting something back for it so that you can gauge if it is worthwhile to continue doing.

So that makes a lot of sense.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we could do an entire topic just on paid advertising, right? And I love paid advertising.

It can be very complex. It can be very basic as well. But just a high level overview of your options.

So you can do paid advertising through the social platforms. There are some pretty basic ways that you can dive into that. So some Facebook ads and Instagram ads can drive some traffic to your appointments page.

Something that's a little bit more complicated is the PPC realm. So pay-per-click advertising, particularly around Google ads. So Google paid search ads is a little bit more work to set up.

And I have some thoughts around some models that I think could potentially work for you. So if you are very familiar with these channels, then by all means, build these channels out yourself. But if you're not that comfortable with it, there are a couple of options.

The most traditional way is to go with an agency. The issue there is usually cost. It doesn't always make sense to go with a full service agency because there are minimums that they need to charge.

And that can range anywhere from $2,000, $3,000, all the way up to $10,000 or more per month. And that might not be worth it if you're a small to medium size business. And if that is your situation, then I would go with a freelancer.

So freelancers can kind of run the gamut as well from very basic just starting out to very advanced folks. So you need to do a little bit of interviewing and research to figure out if a certain freelancer is right for you. But there are a lot of freelancers on the market right now because of COVID-19 and because of layoffs in marketing departments.

So there's a lot of people that are out there looking for a gig to hold them over and they might be pretty affordable. What I would do is I would probably go in that direction, have them build out some of the things you want them to build out and have them teach you. So you can take over in two, three, four months or something like that and just maintain it.

Maybe you pay them every three months or something like that, have them go into your campaigns and give it a quick refresh.

So this would be mostly just on like the paid-per-click side, because I think I've heard of advertisement or like agencies that will also manage like your Facebook or Instagram accounts. Are you talking about on that front as well or are you looking more at the paid-per-click side?

I was really just talking about the paid-per-click side, but agencies love to do it all, because the more they can do, the more they can bill you. So they're going to say that we can do all of it for you. We can build you the website, we can do the organic social posting, we can do the paid social posting, we can do the pay-per-click, we can do the Google My Listing, we can do it all, and it only costs you $10,000 a month.

Only.

When I was like, well, maybe that's not worth it for me. So people tend to become quickly overwhelmed by these very large offers. So I think what's key is deciding, okay, what is important to me?

How much am I willing to spend? And who's out there that can do this for me? And once you find that person or that agency, then you got to decide, okay, how long do I really need them?

They're going to try to get most of their money in upfront and then put you on a maintenance plan. And I'm not always convinced that that maintenance plan is worth it. If you have a little bit of time, a couple hours a week, you can do the maintenance, probably yourself, or you can have it set up so that it auto-optimizes your campaigns.

Right.

Well, gosh, this is a lot of great information. Thanks for sharing all of this knowledge with us. And thank you all for tuning in to Catch Up with ChiroTouch.

We do have the inbox set up for any questions, feedback, or comments. So feel free to email us your thoughts at podcast at chirotouch.com. Tune in next week for our episode with Dr. Mark Student and our client success manager, Lawrence Pepler.

Dr. Student will be sharing how he ramped up his practice for opening in New York. I'm your host, Dr. Tami Howard, and thank you for catching up with ChiroTouch.

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