How I Started Marketing My Practice
I had started practicing in my own clinic in August of 2003, and right away I was seeing the difference between the chiropractic school world, and the real world.
In the real world, people don’t care as much as you think about what you do, or how you do it, they just want their problem to go away, and they don’t care how you go about making it go away.
So I was getting a ton of people who would come in to start as new patients, and they would tell me how they like to be adjusted, and what they were used to.
I would tell them: “We don’t do that here.”
“You mean you’re not a chiropractor?”
“Yes, I’m a chiropractor, but I don’t ‘crack’ backs and necks. We focus on precise adjustments of the upper cervical spine which affects all the nerves in your body.”
“I’m not interested in that, I thought I was coming to see a chiropractor.”
Exchanges like that actually happened in my clinic on a recurring basis, and that was from people who had been referred in by existing patients.
I knew I needed a way to market myself to people that set me apart from the rest of the crowd because my time was being wasted, and the prospective patients time was being wasted if they were coming in expecting one thing, only to find out that I don’t do the one thing they come in to have done.
I did not have time to sit down and educate and “win-over” these people to my way of thinking. I needed a way to educate before they ever came though the door.
I needed to pre-qualify people before they decided to have a consult with me.
The problem was, I didn’t know how to do this.
It was about this same time, that I was looking for a bodyweight exercise program that was more than just the running, sit-ups and push-ups that I had been doing in the Army.
I found a program developed by Matt Furey called Combat Conditioning. It was exactly what I had been looking for, and so I bought the product.
Excellent workout program, by the way.
I started checking out Furey’s other products, and noticed that he had a very distinct way of selling, and marketing that created a strong attraction to those who were a good fit for his products, and at the same time repelled those who were not a good fit.
I knew that this was the kind of marketing I was looking for.
I found that he had learned most of what he knew from a
marketing genius named Dan Kennedy. So I looked up Dan Kennedy, and found that, at the time, he charged nearly $800 per hour for a phone consultation, and about $3,500 per hour plus expenses for one-on-one consultation.
That was more money than I could spend, so I decided to read
everything he had ever written, and I got every book the library had, and bought others at the bookstore, and just studied everything there was available authored by Dan Kennedy that I could get my hands on.
Then I received a letter from a chiropractic marketer named Ben Altadonna. I recognized the style of writing as very Dan Kennedy-like, and so I sent off for his program.
The more I read, the more I studied, the more I became immersed in direct marketing principles, and how they could be applied to any and all businesses. The one suggestion I kept running across fro
m all of the marketing experts I studied was the importance of
keeping in contact with all of your customers/patients by sending them a monthly newsletter.
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