Today’s article is on a little something that may seem intuitive and obvious at first glance, but I want to share some thoughts for you to kick around in your head as you set up or modify your own office’s marketing plan. That concept is how important it is to automate as much of the marketing and promotional process as possible.
Seems obvious, right? I mean, of course you want everything done automatically. Why WOULDN’T you set things up that way?
Well, it does take time to set it all up. That’s one thing that holds a lot of us back from setting all of this up. Let’s be honest, running a practice involves wearing a lot of hats, putting out a lot of fires, and what feels like running around in very tight circles. So it can be tempting to skip over anything that’s going to take a chunk of time to sit and set up methodically, and just plain wing it as it comes up.
But that sort of “winging it”, no matter how tempting, leads to the first problem that automation fixes: consistency. Most of the marketing that I see in chiropractic offices (in most small businesses, really) is very, very inconsistent.
Not just inconsistent in a scheduling sense, either. There’s also inconsistency in quality. Let’s talk about quality first.
HOW GOOD IS YOUR GAME TODAY?
Most people, when they have to deliver a marketing message on the fly, vary wildly in how well they deliver that message. If someone comes in to your office and asks you about, say, spinal decompression, how on-point is your delivery?
100%? Every time? Are you sure? You never get tired, you never get sick, you never get distracted?
Of course that’s not true. You’re not a cyborg. You’re a human being. You have good days and bad days. Sometimes you’re on your game, sometimes not.
Unless your marketing staff looks like this, sooner or later they’re going to mess up.
The same goes for your staff. And yes, you can mitigate some of that with drilling scripts and that sort of thing, but you will always be dealing with the performance issue. Human beings will never deliver a message 100% consistently. That’s just not possible.
With an automated promotional message system, however, the message is always the same. It’s always delivered exactly the same way, every time… which not only allows for better overall performance, it also allows for accurate adjustment of that message.
Here’s what that means. If you notice that your stats on spinal decompression (to keep our example consistent) are starting to drop, is the problem with the message itself, or with the ability of your staff or yourself in delivering that message? How could you measure that? You can’t, because as we said, the delivery isn’t going to be consistent. So maybe the promotional content itself is great, it’s just the delivery that’s off. Or maybe it’s the other way around, and the content isn’t effective.
If you can automate your content delivery, now you’ve controlled for that performance variable, and if your stats aren’t where you want them to be, you can tweak the message and monitor the results with confidence that you’re affecting the variable that matters.
DID YOU FORGET TO PROMOTE TODAY?
How about consistency of how OFTEN you’re delivering your message?
I’m sure you’ve never, EVER forgotten to send out some promotional content or conduct some specific marketing campaign, right?
Right. Never once. You never forgot to put out that newsletter, never forgot to place that ad, never ever ever!
Of course you did, or your staff did, because again, you’re not cyborgs, you’re human beings, and human beings forget stuff or put stuff off or try to pass it off on to somebody else. It’s inevitable.
The more of your marketing and promotions you can automate, the more of those promotions are guaranteed to be delivered, on time, every time, because there’s no human being to forget to do it. Think of how many more patients would be rolling through your doors if every single tiny little promotion was always, ALWAYS done, every time?
KEEP YOUR ENERGY HIGH FOR WHEN YOU NEED IT
Keeping track of all those tons of promotional messages is exhausting, frankly. I don’t know about you, but I find it keeps me scattered and feeling like I’m trying to run in fifteen different directions at once. And that saps your energy levels for those times when you CAN’T automate something… like an exam, or adjustment, or the all-important report of findings.
You need to be at full speed when you’re interacting personally with patients. We all know this. We’ve all experienced those times when we were just so spend or so distracted that we KNOW we’re phoning it in. We don’t like it, we don’t want to do it, but we’re just used up.
And our patients know it. They can tell when we’re distracted or not fully present with them. And so maybe the most vital advantage to automating a large part of your marketing is freeing up your mental energy so that when you are interacting with people personally, you can give them your all, rather than be stuck phoning in a half-hearted effort right when your patient needs you most.
For more on the subject, click here to watch this video from my “Basic Training” program, which is all about setting up automated marketing in your practice. In fact, I’ve made the entire first module available for free. Check it out- I think you might find some interesting ideas in there.
