Driving new patients for chiropractic in 2022 can be tough. Especially with all of the options available these days.

Classic lunch-and-learns, dinners-with-the-doc, spinal screenings, and “boots on the ground” chiropractic marketing has gotten tougher with covid-19 and navigating the space of direct paper mail and online marketing for chiropractic patients can leave you old and gray.

In this guide, we’ll be covering exactly how to get new chiropractic patients banging down your door and filling your waiting room in 2022.

And if you’re looking to apply this to any niche marketing like spinal decompression, functional medicine, peripheral neuropathy, knee pain, shoulder pain, etc, you’ll end this guide with exactly how to do it.

Setting Your Foundations (Don’t Skip This)

Now, before we dive in, it’s important to set the proper foundations. If you go at marketing without a clear goal in mind, you’ll be about as lost as trying to find your dorm in that first year of college. Unless, you went to a small school for undergrad… It would be the complete opposite. For me, I was lost.

When setting your proper foundations, it’s important to keep your end in mind and to look at your marketing as a pertinent part of your business.

If you approach marketing by just hiring on any old guru without a clear plan and way to measure success, you could end up worse off then when you started.

Your chiropractic marketing plan should start with the end in mind. Are you trying to get new patients yesterday or are you looking to build a long-term asset for your business?

They all work. Do you want to fill your office quickly or are you desiring a slower growth plan?

Do you want to run events and screenings in your community or do you want to build online systems that work without you having to be running them?

Whatever the case is, make sure that you’re clear on how you want to develop your practice before diving into marketing.

Should You Focus On Brand Awareness Or New Patients?

This depends largely on your focus. They both certainly have their perks. Branding can be a long-term game whereas direct-response marketing is focused on actual results like clicks, leads, appointments, and new patients.

I like to focus personally on what I call, “brand-response marketing.” This is a combination of the two.

As a hungry business owner, you don’t have time to wait months and years for branding to settle in, but you can build your brand and reputation while getting new patients. In fact, that’s really the core of how you’ll do it.

Focus on marketing that gets you quick new patients and do it in a way that represents a stellar brand image for your office.

This is what we recommend and if you do it right, you can market to patients suffering from the specific conditions that you can treat best. If you’re looking to grow a chiropractic practice, we’ve identified that the most successful offices have an established niche.

The saying goes, “the one who tries to get them all, gets none.” Rather than going after all patients, focus on the patients that you want the most and become the best in the world at treating them and attracting them. We recommend doing this through condition marketing.

Here you can focus on the patients that need your help the most and thus retain in your office the longest. That allows you to spend more on marketing because each patient that you attract will pay your office more money for treatment.

Data Analytics Are Your Friends (Yes, I Said It)

So that we’re clear, the number one common denominator between the successful chiropractic offices in the arena and those who fall flat on their face is knowing their numbers.

I know this wasn’t taught much in chiropractic school and can seem counterintuitive to what you desire to do (i.e. treating patients), but it is vital if you want to be successful. Get comfortable reviewing numbers to measure progress in your chiropractic marketing campaigns and to justify whether you should continue with the projects you’re working on or not.

When building a chiropractic business, knowing your numbers is an important prerequisite as a successful business owner.

The Old Way: Direct Mail & Paper Advertising For New Patients

Direct mail advertising, newspaper advertising, and magazine advertising can be every effective if done correctly to generate more new patients.

The key, as I’ll cover throughout this plan, is that it must be done effectively. There are a lot of practices who have been very successful posting newspaper ads for specific condition marketing and seminars. 

You can even buy lists of the highest income zip codes in your area to mail out tickets to your upcoming seminar or pamphlets about your office.

The problem here is, from business owner to business owner, you have little data analytics on this. And as I mentioned, that’s largely the first and most important rule for your chiropractic marketing plan.

I’d advise using this type of advertising particularly with more established offices or if the cost is low so that you can test it out. If you’re looking at spending $7,000 on a newspaper ad be prepared to lose it, because you might and you won’t be able to adjust the campaign soon enough (typically) to test what will work.

Usually, it’s best to hire a designer and a copywriter who can create an effective ad if you’re going to spend money on this type of campaign.

The New Way: Online Advertising For Chiropractic Patients

The beautiful thing about the internet is that we now have a lot more data to see what is working and to quickly adjust things to get them working without wasting money.

With online advertising you can now also focus more on getting in front of patients that are searching for the keywords you want, like “sciatica back pain doctor near me” and “best chiropractor in Miami.”

Then you can test the ads and make sure they’re working without wasting a lot of money. Plus, you can get your ads directly in front of the people you want to help the most.

I prefer online advertising over other channels because of this. You can laser target on Facebook & Instagram with the interests, age, and areas that you would like to market and build your authority with great content to get new patients.

Plus, let’s just be real for a moment. When was the last time you went to a restaurant without checking the Google reviews, or their website.

Building an online presence in 2022 is a vital piece of your marketing plan to get more chiropractic patients. It will help you to showcase your office as established and an expert in the field quickly.

Educate Your Community & Build Your Authority With Floods Of New Patients

Whatever type of conditions you want to attract can typically be attracted through Facebook and Instagram at a very low cost. Many offices are very successful with Facebook and Instagram advertising to attract new patients because if done right, it can drive very low cost new patients.

These platforms have over 2 billion users on them and growing and people spend so much time scrolling through their phones.

With this type of advertising, you can publish content that will show up on your patient’s news feed in the middle of all of their friends and families posts.

We call this interruption marketing because you’re essentially interrupting their news feed. This allows you to publish captivating and unique content and Facebook & Instagram’s algorithm along with your targeting preferences will help you to get your ads shown in front of more of the people that will sign up and likely become patients.

We have a whole training and article on creating Facebook Ads for Chiropractors (That Get Patients) so, I’ll keep this brief. If you’d like a more in-depth getting started guide, go ahead and check that out here.

Now, being successful with Facebook & Instagram Ads in your marketing plan will happen in two ways.

Firstly, you can market here for the specific conditions. I recommend running a certain type of promotion. It doesn’t have to be a huge discount, but you want to offer something that is attractive for getting new patients.

Now, if done correctly the message that you share about the conditions you treat will provide an incredible offer in and of itself. A lot of people in the community don’t know what options exist for care and how important it is that they take care of certain conditions.

With this type of marketing, focus on educating your patients on their specific conditions and then offering them a way that they can come in and see you for a special offer. This can be a free consultation or discounted exam and first treatment.

It is recommended that you use a Facebook & Instagram lead form for these or a landing page so that you can capture their information. If you send these patients to visit your website, they might get lost scrolling through your content and never actually sign up to come in for this special.

If you need help with this, reference that article to learn how to get this set up, or book a call with me and I’ll show you how we can get this setup for you.

If you have a website and as you run these ads, you can also use this remarket to people who have shown interest in you. You can set up campaigns to place more ads in front of people who viewed your Instagram and Facebook pages, who visited your website, and even those who signed up to take advantage of your offers.

This can be very effective for showcasing testimonials of your patients to build their trust more and to position yourself as an authority so that when they come into your office, they already know that you can help because they’ve seen how you’ve already helped many others.

Show Up For All Of The Exact Keywords You Want: Google Advertising For Chiropractic Patients

Google Advertising for new chiropractic patients is also a great part of the chiropractic marketing plan in 2022.

I love Google because you can get placed instantly at the top of all of the relevant high-intent keywords that you want to be seen for without spending years building up your ranking organically with Search Engine Optimization. Plus, with this, you’ll actually show up above all other websites that aren’t running ads on Google.

You can place ads on Google maps so it showcases your reviews and makes it appear that you’re the nearest chiropractor and can drive a lot of patients and phone calls this way.

I recommend adding a Google campaign to your marketing plan in 2022 with the high-intent keywords that you’re after.

These include some of the ones that I mentioned before like, “chiropractor near me,” “sciatica pain relief in New York,” “knee pain relief doctors,” etc.

Now, this has to be sent to a landing page or the “click-to-call” feature for the best results. Many offices don’t take the time and invest the money to build out custom landing pages, but they will make a world of a difference.

If you send the Google ads directly to your website you will lose a lot of potential patients because they will view it and then click off your website because there will be so many places that they can go.

Landing pages are designed with one goal in mind, to gather their information for an appointment or to get them to call your office.

Google Ad campaigns can be set up to only show during certain hours and like Facebook and Instagram can be displayed with a budget as high or as low as you’d like to spend each day.

Get Visitors Without Paying: Search Engine Optimization For Chiropractic Patients

Search engine optimization is another great tool for those with a little more budget to spend. This is a long term strategy which is why I typically recommend not starting with it.

You won’t get patients immediately from it however it can be very fruitful in the long run when you invest into it regularly.

Search engine optimization is the act of putting out content regularly and optimizing your website for what Google and other search engines like. I say it like this because it can get very technical. Essentially, what you’re doing though is building your website to show up for keywords organically (without paying for ad spend).

Overtime, you can get a lot of traffic to your website to generate a lot of leads and phone calls. It’s important with this to build a high-converting website so that the visitors on your website are signing up and calling your office.

Now, your website won’t convert as well as a landing page still, but if done correctly, this can still be worth it and very effective.

Serious Profit Levers: Reactivation Marketing For Chiropractic Patients

This is free and one of the most highly effective ways to get new patients.

It starts by recognizing that not all new patients have to be “new.” Now, of course this won’t work for new offices, but if you’ve been around the block for some time or two, this can be highly effective.

We love to reactivate old patient leads and old patients regularly via email, text, and phone calls. Now, there are some legalities here for text and phone calls to take a look at, so make sure to do your homework for your area, but it can be highly effective.

I encourage continuing to follow up with old leads who never came into your office to keep on checking in with how they’re doing and to let them know of all of the new offers that you have. The key here is to keep on creating new offers too. This can be simple with new discounts, new treatments, events, content, or even the same thing with a new name, etc. Don’t over complicate it.

You can also do the same with old patients with these same offers or by just calling to check in with how their health is and to tell them that they’re long overdue for a crack. Give it a shot.

If you’re looking for a platform to help with this for text and email blasts, reach out too. We have excellent software in-house available to chiropractors.

The Most Important Part Of Every Chiropractic Marketing Plan

Now, the most important part of every chiropractic marketing plan is to take action on it. I know that a lot of the information I provided can be overwhelming. Just understand, Rome wasn’t built in a day.

As a chiropractic business owner it is your responsibility to help more patients and you can’t do that if you don’t have sources to attract them into your office.

Please share any feedback and experiences that you have generating new patients and if you need help with any of this feel free to reach out.

Want To Get A Headstart On All Of This?

If you want some help implementing your chiropractic marketing plan, just like over 100 other offices, reach out by phone or by scheduling a demo call with us.

We’ve worked with over 100 chiropractic clinics to get new patients with these exact strategies so we know the ins and outs and can get you up and running with new patients in your doors quickly.

We’d love to chat with you and see if these strategies are a good fit for your office too. Call us today or schedule a time to speak with one of our Head Marketing Strategies here.

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