We all need more new patients. It’s the curse of being a chiropractor. You will always have a need for more and more new patients. It’s just life.
Oh, you can reduce that need with great retention, great reactivation, and great compliance, but people are going to move, or pass away, or simply drift off for one reason or another, and you’re going to need new patients to replace them.
Okay. I’ve said all of that to say this. Because we all need new patients, chiropractors often fall prey to the classic mistake of marketing: trying to market to everyone, at all times.
It’s an easy mistake to make. Heck, it’s even logical… why would I want to ignore some potential sector of the market on purpose? Why would I want to limit how many new patients I could find? I want to cast a wide net, and get ‘em all, man!
And in theory, that’s great. But reality works quite differently.
To understand WHY this catch-all approach doesn’t work, we need to take a step back and look at the situation from the prospective patient’s perspective (say that ten times fast). Those of you who have been through my Basic Training course on automated marketing know that I’m a big, big fan of taking the time to understand the psychology of the patient.
This is how many people are shouting for your prospective patient’s attention.
In this case, we’re going to focus on the idea of overwhelm… a HUGE topic to appreciate when one is studying the psychology of the patient. People are overwhelmed in their daily lives with stresses and bills and whatnot, but in this context, we’re going to talk about how people are overwhelmed by sales messages.
Take a second and think about your own life. How much junk mail do you get, in your email inbox as well as your physical mailbox? How much of what you see, hear, or otherwise take in during the day has an advertisement of some sort attached? Newspapers, radio, internet, TV… it’s all over the place. We’re constantly, constantly pummeled with ads.
Does that mean that we should never advertise? Of course not. We’ve got to promote ourselves, or the population at large will never know we exist. But we have to make sure that our promotions are such that they are going to cut through the massive amount of ad noise that people are already drowning in, so that those people will take a few seconds and pay attention to us.
The best way to do that, is to speak directly to them.
Imagine if, just as you were thinking, “Gosh, I could REALLY use a meatball sandwich”, just at that instant, you spotted an ad for a meatball sandwich special right around the corner? You’d think it was practically Divine Intervention! Exactly what you wanted, exactly when you wanted it? That ad would cut right through all the swirling noise of other promotional messages and capture your complete attention.
And ideally, that’s what we accomplish when we go to promote ourselves.
Picture this. Someone with neck pain is exposed to two different ads. One says, “Nagging Neck Pain? We fix it EVERY DAY.” The other says, “XYZ Chiropractic Back Pain, Neck Pain, Headaches, Wrist Pain, Ankle pain, Disc injuries, Auto injuries, golf injuries, tennis injuries badminton injuries ANY ANY ANY ANYHING PLEASE BE MY PATIENT!!!!”
Okay, maybe I exaggerated a little bit with that second one. But I think you can see how that particular person’s problem… THEIR concern… which was neck pain, got lost in a sea of noise of other complaints that THEY DON’T CARE ABOUT. But with the ad targeted to only neck pain, THAT one will jump out to this particular person. They’ll say “EXACTLY. That is EXACTLY what I need. Thank God!” They’ll ignore everything else, because you are speaking right to their problem.
Now, I know what some of you are thinking. “Yes, but what if that person had lower back pain?” And the answer is, you won’t be speaking to them. And yes, that means that you won’t catch their attention. That’s the trade off. But guess what? You wouldn’t have gotten their attention with the catch-all ad either. With the targeted ad, at least you will cut through the noise with SOME people. No, not everyone in the universe, all at once.
Write this down. If you try to get the attention of EVERYONE, you end up getting the attention of NO ONE… especially in a noisy environment.
Targeted marketing does mean that you’re only going to reach a small part of your entire market base… BUT your ads will actually work. So what do you do about the other segments of the market… back pain, or headaches, or other complaints? Simple. Separate ads, targeted individually to those concerns as well.
It may SEEM inefficient on the surface, but once you understand the situation from the prospective patient’s view, targeted marketing becomes clearly MORE efficient. Generalized ads fade into the background noise of zillions of other ads. Stand out by speaking directly to specific concerns.
