Big Chiropractic Marketing Mistake? Huge!

There is a very common mistake chiropractors make every month in their practice.

This mistake can hurt your practice in two ways; it allows you continue wasting money on bad advertising and could keep you from running good advertising.

It's the mistake of not measuring your ROI.

Here's an example. Maybe you've heard a general rule like, "Never, ever spend more than $100 per new patient when advertising". On first hearing this, it may sound like sage advice. But what's it based on?

Let me give you a scenario...

Scenario #1. Spend $99 for each new patient and get a total of 10 new patients.

Scenario #2. Spend $120 for each new patient and get a total of 10 new patients

Which scenario is better?

According to the above rule, we better go with scenario #1 because each new patient is less than $100.

The truth is, we have no idea which one is better. This "$100 rule" assumes everything else is equal. Sure, if everything else is completely equal, same ad, same offer, same newspaper, same page, same day of the week, etc, then maybe we can use this rule.

But since everything else is never equal, we need a formula that takes into account everything. Not only can we then compare one ad to another or one newspaper to another, but we can compare one marketing method to another.

How do you really measure return on investment (ROI)?

To accurately measure ROI, you need 2 numbers... #1. The amount of money you spent to run the ad. #2.T he lifetime value from the new patients who came in from the ad. A lifetime value simply means on average, what the amount of money a new patient is going to spend in your practice over their lifetime? To get a rough estimate, you simply take your collections over the period of time you've been in practice and divide that by the number of new patients that you had for the same period.

Keep an Excel spreadsheet on your computer and track your ROI as long as you practice. Every time you run a new chiropractic marketing campaign, measure the return.

Say I get 12 new patients in the door from a newspaper ad which cost me $1000. And let’s assume I’m new in practice, and my conversions are low, so I only convert 4 of those patients to a care plan. If my care plans are worth $1500 (which is a very conservative case value) what was my ROI?

The answer is 6:1, or a 600% ROI. So for every dollar invested, I made $6 back. Do you run the ad again or not? How low is the ROI going to be before you say this ad doesn’t work?

You bet I’m going to run that ad again! For me it’s got to bring in at least 2:1 ROI over time. Meaning, after all the money comes in from the patients care plans, the minimum ROI it can bring is 2:1. Occasionally a newspaper ad will be a 1:1 or negative ROI, and I’ll tweak something or run it in a better paper and it immediately becomes a huge winner!

But, some chiropractors think their chiropractic ad is a failure if it doesn’t bring in a 20:1 ROI or higher. In other words, they are upset if their ROI is only 5:1. What other business owner would be upset that the $1 they spent brought back $5? No one!

Unfortunately, it happens daily in chiropractic. Look, the days of spending $0 on marketing and bringing in $30…$40…$50k a month are over. The days of running a killer ad and getting 676 new patients is over. It’s not 1991 anymore.

It’s time to face the fact you’ve got to pay for some marketing. And you’ve got to be happy with a positive return on investment, especially considering large companies would love to get a 5-to-1 ROI any day