Saturday, February 6, 2010

Promoting a Chiropractic Clinic

Part of building a successful clinic includes getting patients in the door. To do this any Chiropractic clinic owner needs to have some knowledge of promotion.
There are several ways to promote a chiropractic clinic, I’m going to cover what the main ones are. In later publications we will go into each promotional system more in detail and give you some tips on how you can improve it.


Word of mouth referral:

This is one of the primary ways of gaining new patients. By actual survey 100% of the patients will tell their friends about their chiropractor (whether they liked it or not). So whether or not you are doing anything active about it you already have a word of mouth program going on. Depending how the quality of your services and friendliness is makes this a good or bad word of mouth program.


Clinic Website and Internet Presence:

By recent survey 80% of the American public is now using the internet as their main tool for finding things, this is already a huge number and it’s only going to go up. This makes a website a must for any successful chiropractic clinic.

A correctly created website provides the following things for a clinic:

  1. It provides a place for potential patients already looking for a chiropractor to find you.
  2. It provides a way to bring potential patients currently unaware that they need your services to the realization that you are the solution to their problem.
  3. It allows an easy way for people to contact you or set an appointment.
  4. It gives credibility to your clinic.
  5. It keeps you and your services real to your existing patients.

Most clinics do not realize the full potential of their website because they think of a website as a yellow page ad on the internet, this is probably because most company currently making websites for chiropractic clinics are indeed yellow-pages type companies. For more information on chiropractic clinics visit our website www.myclinicwebsite.com


Direct mailing of phone calls:

There are different types of mailing and calls that a chiropractic clinic can do. It can obviously mail to existing patients to bring them back in. It can do checkup calls, on patients that haven’t been in for a while. It can do satisfaction calls. It can do broad mailings and in some areas it can actually write or call personal injury victims to get them in the clinic.

As with any type of communication the more personal the better the response. Existing patients mailing should get a 5% or higher response whereas mailing to potential patients that don’t know you and haven’t inquired on your services will average in the fraction of a percent.


Generating Outside Direct Referrals:

Sadly for many chiropractic clinics this is a totally untapped potential source of new patients, yet when fully utilized it will keep your clinic influx of new patients stable.

Generating outside referrals is really a simple concept; what you want to do is make contact points, that deal with potential patients, think of you. This can include insurance agents, collision shops but it also expands to any business that deals with people within a certain radius from your clinic.

There are right and wrong ways to do this; simply going out and soliciting business is the wrong way to do it, and in many cases it’s considered annoying; whereas establishing relationship and awareness of you and your services and granting importance will establish your clinic in ways you never expected before.


Public events:

One more way for a clinic to increase its influx of new patients is by conducting or associating itself with public events. This can include charity activities, free physical awareness seminars, church activities and many more.

They key here is only associate, support or conduct public activities that the majority of your potential patients will approve of otherwise this will backfire and might even lose you patients.