231 Poor Retention the Silent Killer

Welcome to the KC CHIROpulse Podcast.  

This week’s topic:  The key to practice wealth is not through new patients

The KC CHIROpulse Podcast is designed for Chiropractic professionals ready to elevate their practice to new heights.  This week, the show is hosted by Kats Consultants’ coaches Dr Michael Perusich and Dr Troy Fox, seasoned experts in Chiropractic business management.  This podcast provides invaluable insights and actionable strategies to help you create a flourishing and sustainable Chiropractic business.

In this episode, we discuss:

• Why new patients will never create practice wealth
• How the dentists keep their practices full and profitable
• Why Chiropractors need to change our mindset about profitability
• How a new direction in practice is a game changer for building wealth
• …and so much more…

In each episode of KC CHIROpulse, we delve into crucial aspects of building a successful Chiropractic practice, covering topics such as establishing a strong foundation, adopting a patient-centric approach, mastering marketing techniques, achieving financial fitness, fostering effective team building and leadership, integrating technology and innovation, and navigating common challenges in the field.

Whether you're a seasoned chiropractor or just starting your practice, the KC CHIROpulse Podcast offers a wealth of knowledge and personalized practical advice to help you navigate the intricate world of Chiropractic business. Join us on this journey as we explore proven strategies, share success stories, and connect with industry experts to empower you in your pursuit of building a thriving Chiropractic practice.

Don't miss out on the latest insights and expert guidance. Subscribe now and unlock the secrets to taking your Chiropractic practice to the next level. Your success is our priority at Kats Chiropractic Business Advisors.

DISCLAIMER:  The information presented in this broadcast is for educational purposes only and is not intended to offer legal, investment, accounting, or medical advice, and represents the opinions of the speakers.  Seek the consultation of a professional for advice in those areas. And remember…your results using this information may be different than described.

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Transcript

230 Manage Your Marketing

[00:00:00] 

Dr. Michael Perusich: Doctors, are you doing your marketing the right way? Hi everybody. Welcome to the KC Chiro Podcast, brought to you by Kats Consultants and Chiro Health USA. I'm Dr. Michael Perusich, your host, and I'm joined by my, my. Protein eating co-host. Troy was eating sausage before the podcast started. That's right. Uh, Dr.

Troy Fox. Troy, how are you? 

Dr. Troy Fox : I'm good. Just had my breakfast. I got my, I got my coffee mug here. We're gonna talk about marketing today. We're gonna talk about mistakes that people make. I got my oils today. Yeah, you got your roll. But yeah, we're gonna talk about all kinds of fun stuff because the truth of the matter is I see a lot of docs out there that copy and paste off of other people's Facebook pages, and that's their marketing plan.

Don't do that. That's their whole marketing plan. One, that's terrible. One if there's, if there's a link that goes through that photo. Yeah. Which sometimes there are, or sometimes there's a website that goes with that photo. Sometimes you're embedding that into your Facebook page. Yeah. How many or your [00:01:00] website or whatever.

Many, 

Dr. Michael Perusich: how many doctors have we seen do that? And what they're doing is marketing somebody else's clinic a competitor of theirs. Yeah. Yeah. 'cause you, you haven't paid any attention. Right. And you know, so you've really gotta stay on top of your marketing. If you are using a marketing company, you have to stay on top of it.

If you have an employee doing it for you, you have to stay on top of it. If you're outsourcing it to somebody local, you need to stay on top of it. Yeah. You need to be, I think you said 

Dr. Troy Fox : you have to stay on top of it every time, which is exactly true. Now the other thing did, I mentioned 

Dr. Michael Perusich: you, the doctor has to stay on top of it.

Dr. Troy Fox : Yes. I think that's very important. And I just realized I'm Bridget Fox today too. You are Bridget Fox. Today's, yep. Yep. I wasn't gonna comment. Yeah, I do that a lot. But so the other thing is too, when we, when we go about this is a, a lot of you don't pay any attention to it. You just think, well.

I'm gonna do what everybody else is doing, and that's gonna be my marketing plan. So if somebody [00:02:00] else is doing a picture, I'm gonna steal that picture. If somebody else is doing a drive us all to the bottom of the well, $9 99 cents special. And we've talked about this before. I won't go in depth, but I'm gonna do that.

So we're mimicking what each other do, which is really, you see anybody else do that? Does Coca-Cola mimic what Pepsi does? No. 

Dr. Michael Perusich: No. 

Dr. Troy Fox : Now they got their own marketing campaign, and their marketing campaign consists of more than just a Facebook ad, so, yep. Should you consist of more than a Facebook ad? I'm gonna conjecture, and Dr.

Perus, you can add into this, but I'm gonna conjecture. Yes. Facebook ads, we still market to that age group. There's a whole lot of people in that 40 to 60 or 70 year age range that utilize Facebook. People younger than 40 or not utilizing Facebook. So if you're marketing young moms and children, you're gonna have to find a different way, whether that be through print ad.

Maybe that works, maybe it doesn't. Maybe you're [00:03:00] involved in local organizations, so there's there, there's several ways that you can, you can market people one. Mm-hmm. You can pay for marketing, you pay a group to market, but they're only gonna market like social media stuff. Right. You can still advertise in your local newspaper if anybody still reads it or gets it.

So if the circulation's good, make a qualitative decision. I have one paper in the area that is, and the other one that isn't. And they're both about the same price. So which 1:00 AM I gonna advertise in the one that gives me circulation? And people say they actually read, pull your patients if you don't live.

Like I don't live in the town that I practice in. So for me. I have to pull the patients and go, Hey, which one of these newspapers do you guys actually listen to? And they tell me. So I advertise in that one. Another way is when you get asked to do something like our local hospital asked me to speak next month at a health fair, and I'm the keynote speaker.

Perfect. You know? Cool. Right. It's a big deal. I, I'm, it's a big deal and I'm thrilled. So I was honored to be chosen to [00:04:00] do that, and I'm gonna go in ready to give information, but I'm not gonna give a chiropractic sales pitch because obviously that would be the worst way to do it. What I'm gonna do is talk about some of the technologies that we have and how they assist, and how the chiropractic adjustment works well in concert with that.

And that's how we're gonna market that. The other thing is, I mean, you can look at like TikTok and Snappy Chat, as my wife calls it, instead of Snapchat Snappy Chat. Is that still around? My kids use it. So my 22 and 23-year-old, all their friends are on Snapchat. And I think you can advertise on there too, but we haven't marketed that age group.

But those are some of the things you can do. What are, what are other things that you think of right off the top of your head? Because you have to have a multifaceted approach, and I know that I missed one, which is gonna be direct to our patients. So 

Dr. Michael Perusich: yeah, you, yeah. No, you're good. I'm gonna force a break here 'cause we need hear word from our sponsors.

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Dr. Michael Perusich: Everybody. Welcome back to the KC Chiro Pulse podcast. We are talking [00:06:00] about staying on top of your marketing because it's so danged important. And Troy, you brought up something that's real. You have to have a multifaceted marketing plan. Mm-hmm. You can't just. Throw something on Facebook and think it's gonna do anything.

Yep. You've gotta be on Facebook and Instagram and Google and tiktoks becoming kind of a big thing now. And, um, you mentioned the snappy chat. I don't know anything about that one, but I didn't even know it was still around. Yeah. But, uh, that may be a medium, but we have to make sure that we're targeting not just.

Trying to get anybody with a spine because your practice isn't called anybody with a spine chiropractic. We all have some kind of niche or target. And the profession just in general when it comes to marketing, has a very specific. And a lot of people don't realize this has a very specific age group that we should be marketing to.

And it's the 35 to 55 year olds. Yeah. Now there's a stretch market, which is about 30 to 60, [00:07:00] but you notice we're not going, we're not going to 65 and 70, and we're not going to the 20 and 25 year olds. They're the tire kickers. They're the ones looking for the new deal, the new patient deal. They're the ones looking for the quick pop and go and so I told you guys, I did this while you were talking, Troy, I just did a quick cursory search on Facebook.

Here's what I found. $60 new patient deal, a 48 new dollars new patient deal, a $30. A 19 a nine, an 11 and a 12, and here's my favorite, $20 and 25 cents to celebrate. 2025. That's not gimmicky 

Dr. Troy Fox : at all. But and folks, there's a time when you could run a new patient special, but when you're running it all the time, because that's the only way you get new patients in the door, I think it, it cheapens the profession and I think the less we can run it, the better just because I, I do believe overall it just makes us look cheaper.

There are [00:08:00] certain times, maybe even in practice for five years and you wanna do something for your patients and you go, Hey, for those of you that are patients. Fantastic. If we haven't seen you in a year, here's an offer for you. If we haven't seen you ever, here's another offer. Get to know our clinic.

It's a great way to bring other people in because sometimes people haven't seen your clinic and they were on the fence about whether they were gonna come in. Right. But if you're consistently running that month in a month out, you're gonna get the type of patient that you don't want in your practice, which is the one that's looking for the free stuff and doesn't have any intention of following through.

So you go to all this work to educate a patient, and then they end up in my practice later. And I, I appreciate it if you educate 'em. But what I see in most cases is because you're doing the new patient special, uh, what I see is chiropractors that don't educate their patients, they have no idea why they're getting chiropractic care.

So part of the marketing aspect is that we do have to, we do have to work with those patients. One, [00:09:00] once they come in. They have to understand why they're getting chiropractic care. So that's the follow up to the marketing step. 

Mm-hmm. 

Dr. Troy Fox : Some people don't realize that. It's like, well, I don't understand.

They're going out as fast as they come in, and that's a whole nother podcast, but that's another step to the marketing arm. Is that if you're gonna get patients in your practice, let's please educate 'em as to what chiropractic really is, and that it's not a pain relief only technique. That one drives me insane.

When your patients come to me and tell me, my last chiropractor just told me, call me. Call me when you hurt, or call me when you need me. Which means, oh my gosh, 

Dr. Michael Perusich: please 

Dr. Troy Fox : don't do that. Call me when you hurt. That's not what chiropractic's all about. That's, that's like not maintenance in your vehicle.

Driving at 200,000 miles and expecting it to hold together. I'll just call you when a light goes off on the dash and some of you drive like that and yeah, 

Dr. Michael Perusich: some do. It 

Dr. Troy Fox : shows. And it shows and I'm behind you sometimes on the road. 

Dr. Michael Perusich: So I wanna unpack something just a little bit because the, this could [00:10:00] be a bad piece of meat and get bigger the more we chew on it.

But our marketing needs to create retention and that may sound like too. Totally opposing thoughts. 

But we create retention through a couple of things. Marketing in a professional manner that shows our professionalism and approach to healthcare, but it's also about marketing to the right people.

And when you market. A $9 new patient special. For example, you're marketing to the person who is already planning on never coming back to you until there's another $9 deal. 

And so we have to realize that the price that we put out there indicates that the value we think. Our clinic is worth.

Mm-hmm. And 

Dr. Michael Perusich: so, is your clinic worth $9? Is your clinic worth bringing in a whole bunch of patients who are never going to [00:11:00] become profitable for you? Now, if you're a 5 0 1 C3, and that's your whole goal, and your whole mantra is to just introduce as many people as possible to a one chiropractic visit plan.

Okay. I, I, I think that's crazy, but, but in reality, that's what a lot of you out there are doing. And so we've gotta make sure that we're marketing to the right person, the person that finds value in what we do, number one. Number two, if we have a niche in our practice. We need to make sure we're marketing to that niche.

And I'll give you a great example, and this is real. A couple of weeks ago I was talking to a doctor who was complaining about their marketing not hitting. Mm-hmm. And this was not a client of ours. And I said, well, okay, well, well, tell me about your practice. Well, we're, you know, we're a pediatric practice.

We treat mostly children and pregnant moms. Okay, so where are you marketing? I'm marketing [00:12:00] on Facebook and Google. Okay, so I'm gonna pull up your clinic on Facebook and I said, so your marketing that you have on Facebook doesn't say a word about kids and pregnancy. And he said, I'm just curious, are you getting a lot of older clientele?

'cause he was in kind of more of a retirement community. Where there's a growing young people population, but there's also retirement population. And he said, yeah, we're getting practically all of our new patients are Medicare patients. Mm-hmm. Okay. That's because you're marketing to the Medicare segment.

You're not marketing to the pediatric base. That's right. You gotta really think about. What is my practice all about? Who is my perfect patient and how do I market to that perfect patient. And I'm gonna go back to something you said a couple minutes ago, Troy. You talked about the, uh, copy and paste marketing.

Mm-hmm. Copying from other people's social media. It's gonna do the same thing. It's gonna get you [00:13:00] the kind of patients that want to go to their practice. Mm-hmm. Not yours necessarily. Yeah. 

Dr. Troy Fox : Yeah. Well, if you, if that's your same type of practice and you're looking at somebody that's a thousand miles away that's doing the same, that's doing some marketing, and you go, Hey, that's catchy.

Now can you mimic that and do your own thing? I would say make a live or a video or something like that where people actually look at it and Yes. I mean, if it matches your philosophy, but here's the thing, philosophy is not set by what you named your clinic. At the, at the 11 o'clock hour right before you opened, when you decided to call it first, or, or, or call it pediatric Family Wellness Center.

You know, we're gonna, so we'll throw all the words out there that chiropractic use. Love it. Pediatric Family Wellness Center. And then you open the doors and like you said you mark like you, you put out stuff on Facebook like. Is chiropractic effective for low back pain? Is chiropractic [00:14:00] effective for neck pain and headaches, which are, those are all great articles, right?

But who are you marketing your 30 to 50-year-old patients? You're not marketing a child, you're not talking about infantile colic, you're not talking about, uh, bowel movements with young children. Right? You know, you're not talking about any of that stuff. And so as a result, your pediatric family wellness center.

Happens to be a Medicare practice. Yeah. And so we see that often to where you, you may signal that you're one type of practice, but the truth of the matter is if we walk into your practice, you're a totally different type of practice. So you need to know what your identity is and if the type of patients that are coming through your door are not what you want.

Look at your marketing because you are marketing a specific type of patient. And you know what? Sometimes your branding is wrong and sometimes who's in your practice should, is who should be there because that's what you're good at treating and you tend to draw that type of patient sometimes in your [00:15:00] practice.

So it's not always marketing. Sometimes you're just darn good at treating Medicare age patients or 30 to 50 year olds, which is fine with with headaches and maybe you weren't. Maybe you aren't meant to treat children or athletes or whatever, what, whatever you've got on the outside of your door. 

Dr. Michael Perusich: And you know, I think too, when we talk about staying on top of our marketing one more card in that deck is a lot of doctors out there are using marketing companies. Mm-hmm. And mm-hmm. We need to take another quick break, but I want to come back and I want to talk about staying on top of your marketing even when you have.

Have it outsourced to a marketing company, so Right. Talking about staying on top of your marketing. We'll be right back.

Pat's Chiropractic consultants, your partner in chiropractic success. We are dedicated with one-on-one guidance to bring you all your practice management needs. Let's supercharge your practice. Give us a call [00:16:00] today.

Dr. Michael Perusich: Okay. Welcome back to the KC Pulse podcast. Troy, we're talking about staying on top of your marketing, and before we went on break we brought up the idea that you have to stay on top of marketing even when you hire a, a third party to do your marketing for you. And here's the biggest problem I see.

With that and I don't wanna get a bunch of calls from the marketing companies thinking we're poo-pooing you guys. Nope, we're not. But not at all. I'm pointing, I'm pointing out to the practice owners why you have to stay on top of what they're doing. They don't know your practice. They don't know your practice, right?

They have an idea of what chiropractic is all about in a general manner. 

And so if they're just posting general stuff on your website, and there's a caveat to that too, if they're just posting general stuff on your website, on your social media, um. It's not targeted to your practice and the kind of patients that [00:17:00] you are trying to bring in the door.

The other side of that is if they're static posts, if they're just. Pictures and print copy and that kind of thing, not, not video, and they're posting it on other people's pages and social media. The social media web crawlers. Take note of that, and they'll close your algorithms down because they see it as a copy.

It's not unique. The whole idea behind social media is that you are unique and when you go copying other people. And that same ad is on six other social media sites or, or more, I don't know what the number is that, that they pick up on, but they can be, they could be shutting down your algorithms, so now you're paying a whole bunch of money.

To have some marketing done, and it may be nice looking marketing and those kind of things, but it is, is it opening up your algorithm or is it shutting it down? So you need to stay on top of your marketing companies and have a regular cadence of phone [00:18:00] calls with them and make sure that you're helping them understand how to drive your marketing because they don't get it until you tell them.

Dr. Troy Fox : That's exactly the point I was gonna make. Part of this is trust, but verify. Make sure that your marketing company's doing what you want. But the other part of the equation is, is don't just hire somebody. And I see this often where somebody will hire a marketing company and then the marketing company starts asking the hard questions like what?

You know, where are you trying to head with your marketing? And the doctor's going, well, that's not my area. I'm just gonna let them handle that. No, no, no. What they're asking is, who are you? That's such an important question. Who are you as a practice? Where do you want to go with your marketing? They'll come up with some slick stuff for you and that that's what they do.

They're good at marketing, but they have to have a direction. You can't just say, I'm a chiropractic practice. Do something. You're gonna get those generic, static posts in a lot of cases, or. A generic, maybe you're gonna get an AI [00:19:00] video, but you're not gonna get anything that's really truly unique because you didn't give 'em a direction to go.

So I'm gonna put part of the blame back on you. And that's that regular cadence of conversations, not only with your marketing company, but with your staff. So yesterday I met with my staff. Guess what we went over? We went over FA because the areas that we're in is Facebook advertising. We talked about that.

Where are we at? What are we doing? And how much ad spend are we using right now? Number two, newspaper, print. Some people don't use print. We still do. We're in a small town. 

Dr. Michael Perusich: They're a small town. It's great union. We're small 

Dr. Troy Fox : towns, so we're still using print. And so as a result, I want to know what's our ad spend on print?

How often are we in the paper right now? How many ads do we still have in the shoot? In other words, what do we have available and ready to go that we prepared? 'cause we always try to prepare in advance. Number three, what do we do in-house? Patients, do we have kind of promotion[00:20:00] 

or do we have an

Dr. Michael Perusich: throw your component with our throw? Your video is pausing just a little bit, so I'm gonna. Here for a second. We both lost. So I, I, I wanna piggyback on that just a little bit. Yeah. Um, you know, you, you've gotta make sure, it kind of goes back to that multifaceted idea. You gotta make sure that you have the reach and frequency that is effective.

Mm-hmm. 

Dr. Michael Perusich: Everywhere that's different. If you're in a small town reach is pretty easy because it doesn't take long for everybody to know who you are. If you're in a big community, reach and frequency is a really big deal. 'cause it's harder to reach people in a bigger community. So you have to take those kind of things into consideration when you're doing your marketing.

But I mean, I wanna give a couple of tips here too. I know a lot of doctors [00:21:00] shy away from doing videos and things. Don't. Those are the best. Marketing pieces you can ever do because it shows your personality, it shows who you are and it's your uniqueness. And it doesn't have to be anything fancy. A 30 to 52nd video about a condition of the week about being open extra hours today, whatever it might be.

Make sure that you're doing things like that. Because those kind of things are incredibly important. So we've been talking a lot today about staying on top of your marketing. So make sure that you guys are staying on top. Make sure that you understand what works, what doesn't, and who your target market is and really focus in on it.

So at Kats Consultants, we help doctors with their marketing. We don't do your marketing for you, but we help you. Understand it. We help you know how to utilize it. We help you know how to refine it and we give you ideas. So go be sure and [00:22:00] go check us out at katsconsultants.com. See all the great things that we're doing to help doctors create more profitable practices.

So from all of us here at Kats Consultants, Troy, thanks for being on today. I know we both kind of froze up there a little bit for a second, but Oh yeah. Uh, hey, that's okay. We probably overloaded the internet with too much information. Alright, from all of us here at Kats Consultants and thanks to Chiro Health USA, we'll see you guys next time.

See ya.