Top 3 Marketing Trends for Chiropractors in 2019

Since marketing is so important to chiropractors who want to grow their practice, we like to keep our eye on the latest trends.  We recently came across an article from Entrepreneur called “10 Marketing Trends to Watch in 2019.”  (Keep reading, we’ll put a link to it at the end of this article, so you can read the whole thing!)

We thought three points made in the article were especially relevant to chiropractors.  When your days are busy, you must prioritize.  We thought these three trends were good places to start!

The Marketing Funnel Model is Shifting

If you’re not familiar with the term, a marketing funnel describes the journey of a consumer from when she becomes aware of your practice through to converting to a patient.  The prospect is guided, or “funneled,” through a process to take actions that further qualify her as an ideal patient until she actually becomes one. 

Here’s an example: A woman hears about your practice through a chair massage day set up by her office.  Your resident massage therapist gives her a discount card with your website on it.  The woman visits your website and subscribes to your newsletter.  In the newsletter, she reads an article that resonates with her and decides to make an appointment.  The free chair massage, discount card, website, newsletter and article are all parts of the marketing funnel in this example.  You can see on every level of the marketing funnel, there is an action to take that pulls a prospect through.

The point of the Entrepreneur article, however, was that your marketing should be tailored to specific niches of interest.  Prospects should not just be seen as people with wallets.  According to the article, consumers “seek legitimate trust and genuine relationships.” 

Luckily, we’re talking to you, a chiropractor.  Chiropractors are especially suited to personalizing their marketing because they often offer a variety of healing products and services.  And even if you offer straight chiropractic, you’re bound to have a segment of the market that you especially like to attract to your practice.  Use your marketing to promote the specific products and services you offer to the audience that will most benefit from them and appreciate them. 

For example, based on the survey we sent in our last newsletter, many of you sell supplements.  If you do, you should talk about the pain and health issues that require them.  Blog about them, create flyers for them and devise in-house workshops for how to use them for healing.

Influencers Don’t Have to be Famous

The concept of influencer marketing has traditionally been the territory of celebrities.  Consumers were willing to try a product endorsed by someone famous, but this trend is fading.  Consumers want advice from regular people—people just like them with whom they identify.  The article calls these people “micro-influencers.” 

Who are your micro-influencers?  Do you have a fantastic stress-relieving package for young women who work 9 to 5 and are active on weekends?  Then find a patient that others like her can identify with and ask her for a testimonial and a picture!  Better yet, ask her for the testimonial on video.  Video is very powerful.  You can put it on your website and link to it from your newsletter.  Incidentally, our ChiroTV Network customers can also load either video or a custom testimonial slide into their system and set them to appear in their programmed material.

Content is More Important Than Ever

There’s an old saying in marketing: “Content is king.”  Content is anything you communicate to the market through articles, social media posts, videos, email newsletters, brochures—the list goes on.  You use content to attract prospects to your practice, educate your patients and provide something that can be easily shared between people.  The content you develop is a way to interact with the market and let it know what you’re about.

These days, authenticity is important.  Just as people are leaning towards “real” people versus celebrity endorsements, they want to open a dialog with your business to discover whether you can really help them.  Properly developed content matches your ideal patient with your practice which makes everyone happy!

How do you develop great content? 

• Know WHO you are speaking to. Define an ideal patient profile and make sure your content “speaks” to your ideal patient.
• Prioritize the products/services you want to promote.  Focusing on a few important products/services helps you write your content and also create a more relevant marketing funnel, as we described above.  If it’s hard to choose, ask yourself what your ideal patient would find most useful.
• Lean on your ChiroTV Network system.  Yes, this is a shameless plug.  Your ChiroTV Network system is FULL of content ideas that you can build upon.  And in reverse, when you develop your own content, you can easily create custom announcements and advertisements to include in your message rotation.

Developing content take a bit of work, but once you do it, you can use it in multiple ways.  This increases the ROI on your content creation efforts.  Read our article “Top 4 Ways to Educate Your Patients with Repurposed Marketing Content” here. 

We hope these top three tips help you narrow down your marketing efforts and we wish you a prosperous 2019!  As promised, here is a link to the Entrepreneur article.  https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/324043