Improve Profitability With SMART Marketing Plans

Building your chiropractic dream practice will greatly depend on how well you market your services. The hard part will be figuring out just which marketing activities will produce the desired results of attracting new patients and retaining existing ones without breaking the bank or taking up too much of your time.

Regardless of your chiropractic marketing expertise, the best laid out plans will fail if you can’t find the time and discipline to follow through on them. It’s also important to set realistic goals that are ambitious enough to motivate you without overwhelming you into paralysis. Ideally, you should be able to use your marketing activities as patient relationship building tool to improve the profitability of your chiropractic clinic through increased patient flow.

Measuring your success and ROI, however, will require a SMART marketing plan that complements your general business plan. And just like your chiropractic business plan, it should consist of specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time based goals that you will need to iterate each month until you achieve them.

For example, if you want to improve your chiropractic billing performance to increase your monthly income by $900 you would also need to improve your Patient Visit Average (PVA). As such you could tie your chiropractic marketing goal to this specific business goal and quantify it with 30 new patients gained from all combined marketing activities, or 30 rescheduled no-shows resulting from a successful email campaign to drive up your PVA.

Needless to say, you will need to have the necessary framework in place to measure the results, such as asking new patients how they heard about your chiropractic clinic on their intake form, and tracking monthly no-shows as well as billing performance with your Genesis chiropractic software.

If you end up falling short of your goals of increasing revenue and/or of attracting 30 new patients through your combined chiropractic marketing efforts at the end of the month, you will need to evaluate which of your activities worked and which did not produce any results, then create a new chiropractic SMART plan for the following month.

Here are 5 SMART chiropractic marketing goals you should focus on:

• • S: Attain a specific number of new fans on facebook, twitter, and/or any other social media account

• • M: Achieve a measurable increase in monthly traffic to your chiropractic website (e.g. from 1,000 unique visitors to $1,500)

• • A: Expect attainable results from chiropractic social media efforts (e.g. 30 new patients/month)

• • R: Post relevant blog articles on chiropractic treatments and appropriate healthy lifestyle tips for your chiropractic patient personas

• • T: Track time based numbers (e.g. number of monthly no-shows & monthly chiropractic billing performance with Genesis chiropractic software) and plan marketing activities for each month based on goals on previous months’ results

Last but not least, you should also assess any monthly chiropractic marketing expenses for website maintenance, advertising as well as other marketing efforts to determine your actual ROI. Since marketing is a testing game you will need to adjust your monthly goals in accordance with the results you are producing.

Your software should be an investment, not an expense.

What is the ROI of your current software?