Referrals are a compliment to you and your practice.  You might feel humbled or elated (or both) when you get one.  Word-of-mouth is the best kind of marketing, but you don’t have control over that . . . or do you?  You can indeed have a strategy for generating referrals. 

Why Do You Want Referrals?
The reasons you want referrals to your practice might be obvious, but we’ll review them anyhow:

Referrals have a superior return on investment (ROI):  By the very nature of referrals, it costs much less to attract a new patient.  The same marketing dollar that attracted the referrer in the first place has done double duty!

Referrals generate better patients:  If you have ideal patients already, they generally refer others just like them.  These patients value what you do and pay you what you’re worth.  If you have less-than-ideal patients (you know who they are), you’ll likely get more of those. 

Referrals don’t require you to sell:  If selling is outside your comfort zone, referral-generating strategies should be at the top of your marketing plan.  Many business owners are shy or deathly afraid of selling anything, so referral building is more palatable to them. 

Referrals will happen without any effort on your part (besides providing awesome service) but it’s worth putting effort into helping the process along.  You must actively cultivate referrals if you want to attract more ideal patients.

Sources of Referrals: Your Existing Patients
Your existing patients are likely your greatest source of referrals.  If you help them solve their problems, they are likely to refer family members, friends, co-workers and other people they know.  So, the question to ask is:  How do I make it even easier to generate referrals from this group?  Here are some ideas:

Double-Duty Marketing:  Promote all the products and services you offer in your office.  Your current patients may only be aware of the services they are enjoying, but don’t necessarily know about all that you offer.  Their friends and families may have different issues you can help them with, but if they don’t know you offer solutions, they can’t refer you!  This does not have to be a hard sell—only awareness is necessary for patients who already love and trust you! 

Make sure you promote all your products and services on your website.  Sales sheets or brochures in your waiting room can also help with awareness.  Using your monthly newsletter to feature what you offer and writing an article about each can be educational and profitable. 

If you are a ChiroTV Network subscriber, make sure to take advantage of your ability to create custom content and queue that up in your mix!  (Yes, this is our shameless plug.  And might we also add that ChiroTV Network is one of the most cost-effective ways of generating awareness for all your product and service offerings?  Just sayin’!)

Your Patients’ Networks:  How many of your patients own businesses themselves?  If they care about the morale and health of their employees, they might like to partner with your practice.  Find out who might like to provide special health perks to their employees.  Maybe your office could provide chair massage, health screenings, or informational talks on particular subjects of interest.  Their employees might be so delighted by their experience at work that they post on social media about it!  This is good for your reputation and your patient’s business. 

Events could even be cross-promoted by you and your patient.  If you both have email lists, you can open up information events to the public, generating additional awareness of both your businesses.  This is a great way to introduce a new product or service, once you have launched.

Sources of Referrals: Networking Groups
You can attend networking groups to acquaint yourself with other local business owners and generate referrals.  To make best use of your time, it’s best to find an exclusive group, one that allows only one member per profession.  BNI is an example of a national networking group franchise that is structured in this way.  Groups such as this require a commitment of money (there are membership fees) and time (attendance requirements if you wish to hold your category).  The structure of these groups is built specifically around giving referrals and you must be prepared to “teach” the members about your practice and ideal patients.

It’s not absolutely necessary to join an exclusive group, but mind how you spend your time.  Non-exclusive groups may be more informal and there might be competing chiropractors in attendance.  Informal groups can sometimes be little more than people exchanging business cards with each other.  Just keep an eye on how much time and money you spend and make sure you’re getting new patients as a result of participating.  If you’re good at succinctly stating what makes your practice unique and the type of patient you’re looking for, you can still generate referrals.

Sources of Referrals:  Strategic Partners
Both current patients and networking groups can also help you establish strategic partners with whom you can cross-promote.  Handpick other non-competing business owners who share your ideal patient, values and business style.  You must have no reservations about referring your best patients to these partners. 

As a chiropractor, your strategic partners can be other holistic health modalities such as massage therapists, neurofeedback technicians, acupuncturists, occupational therapists and others.  You can partner with health-conscious restaurants or “green” retailers such as organic mattresses.  Use some creativity!

Again, educate each of your strategic partners about your ideal clients.  Devise ways to work together in order to increase business for everyone.  Here are some ways to utilize your strategic partner network:

• Educational workshops: Each partner should have an educational talk ready to present and you can also work on each addressing a different angle of the same theme.  For example, you can talk about better posture to avoid pain while your strategic partner (a health coach) talks about an anti-inflammatory diet.  Invite each other’s customer lists to the workshop and share the costs.
• Joint marketing:  Distribute each other’s marketing materials at your places of business.  Automatically present special offers from one business to another.  For example, a massage therapist can offer a free posture analysis with your business, especially for clients who have recurring injuries.  The massage therapist can offer your patients a special introductory rate for their first massage.
• Guest blogging:  Partners sharing content not only allows you to establish yourselves as experts with a whole new audience, it gives each partner a break from thinking up new content.  Start with writing blogs about the products and services you most want to be known for in your area.  It can be as easy as an FAQ or transcribed interview with your partner!

As you can see, there is no end to the ways you can generate referrals to your practice.  With a little creative thought and follow-through, you can have new referrals knocking on your door in no time!

Of course, we applaud this kind of action.  If all health professionals were so diligent about educating themselves and taking business risks, we’d have a much more educated public and a lot less sick people out there! So, before you launch your new program or product, we recommend you take a little time to plan so that your enthusiasm pays off.

Talk to Your Team
The first step to launching any new program or product is to introduce it to your team. Your launch will gain traction faster if your team is involved from the very beginning. Your team can help you educate patients about new products and services, but only if they are updated! Communicate why you are excited about the new venture and what you hope it will accomplish for patients. Share some of your training. One of our clients created a slideshow intended to teach prospective patients about his new program, but “tested” it on his staff first.  He used his team’s feedback to clarify a few points, making the presentation even more effective during an in-office event.

Ask for your team’s feedback on launching the new program or product in the practice. The people who run your office are much more likely to identify potential snags or bottlenecks. Find out how the new addition will affect their jobs.  Go over things such as: new paperwork patients must fill out, new timeslots needed to see you or other schedule changes, new fee categories to define for billing and new patient flow patterns through the office.

Assign responsibilities to specific team members, along with a description of their new roles (which they help you to create). This teamwork will also ensure that everyone understands the others’ roles and can step in for each other if needed.  

Make a Marketing Plan
Ask yourself a few questions so that you can set your intent, marketing message, goals and ultimately your action plan.  If you prefer to do this as a team as well, go for it! (Especially if your office staff also directs your social media and website or creates your marketing materials.)

• Define the new program or product. List its benefits and the problems it solves for patients.

Who are your ideal patients for this new program or product? Which patients would benefit the most from it? Do you already have these prime candidates coming to your practice or must you attract a new audience?

Identify the “pain points” of this new target market. What are these patients struggling with that your new program or product can help them solve? What keeps them up at night about their condition? What are they missing out on in life because of this condition? For example, if you are introducing a new supplement that quells inflammation, your ideal clients may be people who are literally kept up at night with pain. They aren’t as effective at their jobs or have relationships that suffer because the pain, lack of sleep and prescription drug side-effects alter their concentration and mood.

Develop your message from the ideal patient’s pain points. You don’t have to be a Madison Avenue advertising executive. The clearer you are, the better. The results your patients will enjoy when their problem is solved or alleviated will sell the product better than any clever slogan. Focus on communicating these results. Continuing from the previous example, you can communicate how the new supplement helps relieve pain without side-effects, which allows normal focus and emotional stability!

• Determine the best way to deliver your message. Start with the marketing you already engage in every month, including:
• Social media
• Your email or printed newsletter
• Your website
• Local advertising
• Your ChiroTV Network, if you happen to be a subscriber (Yes, this is our shameless plug and reminder to our subscribers of the services available to them!  If you need a custom module for your new program or product launch, call Steve and he will help you design one for free!)

Determine, based on the scope of your new product or program, if you need a brochure or other information to hand out.  Sometimes, you can get co-branded marketing materials from vendors whose marketing departments have already done the heavy lifting!

Give your team members a cheat sheet of quick tips, scripts and answers to frequently asked questions so that they may confidently help patients decide if the new program or product is right for them.

Define the purpose of your new program or product. What do you want to accomplish as a result of introducing it? Set some easy-to-measure sales goals so that you can track your progress later.

Implement and Measure
Once you define these aspects of your launch, you’re ready to take decisive action. This will be easier to do now that you have done the hard work of determining the direction of the project.

Pull together your creative team: Use your messaging to come up with emails and other marketing materials, based on your plans. Create tools for your team to use, like a sales sheet or brochure. Operationally, you may need new forms for patients to fill out. If you use a graphic artist and/or web developer, now is the time to share the details of your ideal patient and marketing plan.  They will love this information, as it guides their creative process. If you rely on your staff to produce your marketing, they will be fully informed about the program or product.

Get help from vendors:  Sometimes vendors will have co-op dollars to spend, will agree to send a representative to one of your in-office events with information or samples, or they may be able to list your practice on their websites as a supplier of their program or product.

Evaluate your launch with your team and make tweaks along the way: Nothing will launch perfectly. Some assumptions you make may not be correct, but with an informed team, you will be able to reorganize and make everything run smoothly.  Have a weekly meeting or add the topic to your regularly scheduled team meeting to discuss the feedback your staff is getting from patients. Add frequently asked questions to your team’s “cheat sheet” that you hadn’t anticipated at the beginning. Take a look at the goals you set and see if you’re hitting your numbers, or if you must revise your expectations.

Don’t rely on your enthusiasm alone to propel your new program or product launch. With just a little bit of planning and teamwork, you can turn your zeal for helping patients into a revenue-producing feature of your practice! Now isn’t that an enthusiastic thought?

ChiroTV Network is a family-run business built exclusively by chiropractors, for chiropractors. Our product helps chiropractors seamlessly market and sell more of their services and products to patients while they wait. For a demo and a free 30-day trial, call Steve Madnick at 888-480-1350 or go to www.ChiroTVNetwork.com