Chiropractic Marketing Tips: Sports Teams Sponsorships
When you launched your chiropractic practice, you launched a business. Every business needs to “get the word out” about the products and services the business offers. Your chiropractic practice is no different. Marketing is merely the act of getting the message out about the products and services your practice offers the surrounding community! When you start viewing marketing as merely a way of introducing your practice to people, then it begins to take on a whole new meaning.
Chiropractic Marketing Tips: Sports Teams Sponsorships
Picking a target audience to which you wish to educate about your services is essential for marketing your practice. By picking a target marketing audience, you narrow your marketing options considerably. This reduces the “spray and pray” marketing tendencies to which we ALL fall victim.
For example, let’s say you would like to specialize in treating families with children. Because you’ve narrowed your target audience, it’s now easier to pick successful marketing activities.
When you’re trying to reach families with children an exceptional marketing tip is to sponsor a local sports team.
Yes, you read that right. Sponsoring a sports team is a GREAT investment in marketing for your practice if you don’t just write a check and let your relationship with the team end there. Try to view sponsoring the team is the opportunity to build RELATIONSHIPS with the players (and their parents).
When the coach contacts you to pick up the check for the sponsorship, be sure to have brochures prepared for the coach to hand out at the beginning of the season. Ideally, the brochure should cover things young athletes can do to avoid injuries and what to do if injuries occur. Of course, the brochure should also cover which injuries can best be treated with chiropractic care.
As the team sponsor, be sure to watch at least a few of the games. Learn the players names. Cheer. Then, offer to take the team out for ice cream after the season ends to celebrate the season. Make it a fun evening out for your staff and the team. During the party, be sure to take LOTS of pictures of your staff with the team. Frame and display these later in your office and be sure to offer copies to the families just for stopping by the office.
Most importantly, make this a HABIT instead of a one time event. Get into the habit of sponsoring THIS SAME TEAM every year and soon you’ll be known THROUGHOUT the entire league as THE team on which every kid wants to play - not because they win championships but because they have such a GREAT end of season party.
Sponsoring a children’s sports team can be an EFFECTIVE way of marketing your practice, but only if you take it as an opportunity to build relationships with the team members and their families.
I don’t recommend blatantly “marketing” your practice during the party unless it’s passing out balloons filled with helium with your practice name printed on them. Beyond that, make the end of season party all about connecting with the team and their families.
Chiropractic Marketing Strategy
Creating a successful chiropractic marketing strategy is essential in establishing a six figure chiropractic practice.
If you’re a chiropractor who has a love/hate relationship with your marketing and advertising, then you’re in good company. Many chiropractors often find themselves chasing after an array of marketing tactics instead of implementing a cohesive chiropractic marketing strategy.
Unfortunately, marketing tactics which may result in great success for one practice may fail miserably for the next. Yet many chiropractors attend seminars, buy books and subscribe to newsletters that do little more than provide a never ending list of various marketing tactics. They keep gathering these crumbs, hoping to collect enough crumbs and the finding the magical marketing tactic(s) that will turn this collection of crumbs into a slice of toast.
The search for tactics to increase the return on investment dates back to the earliest recorded history. One tactic used by early farmers to improve their farming “return on investment” was to plant discarded fish parts to improve their production of corn. Modern science has shown there are practical scientific principles behind this ancient practice. The decaying fish parts provide the steady supply of nitrogen which corn needs to grow abundantly. It seems the decaying fish parts are a great “lo-tech” method for providing the steady fertilization needs of growing corn plants.
It turns out that in ancient cultures there were two schools of thought about the role of the planting fish with corn. On one hand, there were the cultures that, at some level, seemed to recognize the science behind the practice. Farmers in these cultures believed that the corn was literally feeding upon the decaying fish. So while they used the “tactic” of planting fish parts with corn, they were aware of the overall strategy behind the tactic which was to provide nourishment for the plants so they could produce an abundant crop.
However, there were other cultures that also planted fish parts with their crops but did so without any understanding of the science behind the practice. For these cultures, the fish were thought to have magical properties. They believed that the spirit of the dead fish magically helped the plants to grow. These cultures were using the same tactic; however they were using it without any understanding of the strategy behind the tactic’s success.
From our 21st Century perspective, it’s easy to see that the farmers that viewed the fish as having magical properties were putting themselves at a severe disadvantage. Without being aware of the underlying strategy of feeding the plants, the farmers who subscribed to the fish spirit as magic tactic could not understand how placing too much fish in with each seed could actually lead to undesirable results. (If you are a dog owner and have brown spots in your lawn, then you’ve seen firsthand the results of excessive nitrogen on vegetation.)
Imagine that you were a farmer who subscribed to the fish as magic school of thinking. At some point as you watched your corn fail to grow, you would have to ask yourself: Is there such a thing as too much magic? How can some magic be good but more of the same magic be bad? Only when you adopt the scientific view of using the fish as part of a fertilization strategy can you begin to see where too much of a good tactic can actually lead to undesirable results.
The same is true in modern marketing. For example, offering a limited time discount is a time honored way to improve patient counts initially but when used excessively, consumers become conditioned to wait until the next big discount to buy. Even the biggest players in the market, like GM and Macy’s aren’t immune to the underlying principles at work.
No matter what size your practice, the going gets tough when you learn that there is such a thing as too much marketing magic.
When you understand the underlying principles behind creating a successful marketing strategy and successful marketing message, then you’ll be able to choose the right marketing tactics that will help you to achieve your marketing objectives.
Pick up a copy of the book Beyond the Niche: Essential Tools You Need to Create Marketing Messages that Deliver Results to learn more about developing a marketing strategy for your chiropractic practice.
Can an Attitude Adjustment Make Marketing Fun?
Marketing can be easy…and maybe even fun
with a simple attitude adjustment.
If you ask most chiropractors their most dreaded task, marketing usually makes the top 5. Most chiropractors will attest that marketing ranks second only to public speaking as their most dreaded activity.
Since ignoring the marketing of your practice is perhaps the WORST thing you can do, and you will naturally avoid doing something that you absolutely despise and/or fear… then let’s engage in an attitude adjustment about marketing your practice.
As a chiropractic professional, you have invested a considerable amount of time/energy/ money into your education. You probably did so because you recognized that you have a real talent for healing. If healing is not your passion, then perhaps that is because it is your obsession. (I’ve known several chiropractors whose passion for chiropractic MAY BE the reason they don’t get invited to more social events!)
Just as accountants and bookkeepers solve accounting, tax and financial problems, you are charged with solving a myriad of different health “problems” or issues. However, unlike the accounting professional, your potential clients may not KNOW that you offer the solution to their health issue. Your potential client may have seen dozens of other health care professionals, only to be told there IS no relief for their pain.
While the IRS may provide a wake up call for the accountant’s potential client, who is going to provide YOUR potential clients with the answers they need.
Instead of viewing your marketing as a way to bring new clients into your practice, perhaps you should view your marketing as a way to EDUCATE your potential clients.
With this perspective, marketing and advertising are merely the PROCESS of educating people in your area to the benefits of chiropractic medicine.
Suddenly, your direct mail campaign will take on a different twist. Instead of “selling” you’re “solving”. Instead of pushing someone to call for an appointment, you’re offering solutions to their problems. Instead of trying to “sell” potential patients via your web site, now you’re educating them on what chiropractic can do for them.
When you view your marketing as merely the act of educating people about the solutions you, the chiropractic professional, offers to everyday health problems, suddenly the world is your oyster.
Those grains of sand irritating your potential patients
are your golden opportunity to shine.
Armed with your new rose colored marketing glasses, you may be able see the different avenues available to you to “get the word out”. For some chiropractors, just removing the stigma of “selling” from the equation is enough. For others, recognizing that their marketing efforts are merely educational in nature is all it takes to open the floodgate of ideas.
This simple attitude adjustment helped one chiropractic client of mine revisit the tried and true “educational activities” he had done in the early days of his practice with renewed vigor. He began holding “new patient orientation sessions” again and began promoting himself as a speaker at the local civic clubs. Suddenly, marketing wasn’t about “selling”… it was about educating. He quit reading the “how to sell” books and got back to his passion…. healing through chiropractic.
Remember, marketing is merely the act of spreading the word about the solutions you offer to potential patients with health problems. Keep that in mind as you plan your next “marketing” campaign.
