TOP SIX DIGITAL MARKETING TOOLS YOUR PRACTICE NEEDS AND HOW TO USE THEM
chiropractor near me
Tom Daniel
Digital marketing has become integral to running a successful business, but you may be surprised to hear it can also be a vital part of your chiropractic practice. Eighty-five percent of Americans say they use the internet every day, which presents an excellent opportunity to reach new prospects, expand your chiropractic practice, and better serve your existing patients. If you’re wondering where to start, don’t worry! That’s where this guide comes in to help.
We’re detailing the top six digital marketing services that make it easy for you to leverage your online presence and book more patients. With these tools, your chiropractic practice can become a digital marketing powerhouse in no time.
“Your content may very well inspire people who never knew they needed a chiropractor to book an appointment”
Build an engaging website
Step one of a successful digital marketing strategy is to have an informative, user-friendly website. You want to make sure your site is not only aesthetically pleasing but also easy to navigate from both computer and mobile devices.
Your website is your practice’s home base and the main source of infonnation for prospective patients. It should have any details that may be helpful to patients, including your location, contact information, services your practice offers, your chiropractic philosophy, and a convenient way for website visitors to book appointments. Around 60% of Americans prefer to book their appointments online, and nearly 40% of appointments are booked while offices are closed, so making it easy to book an appointment online can give you a huge leg up on your competition.
When implementing online booking services, it is important to include digital security measures that protect visitors’ information. Appointment scheduling data may contain information that qualifies as protected health information (PHI) under HIPAA, so a breach could potentially put your practice at risk. Thankfully, it is possible to secure this information so you can reap the benefits of online booking without compromising PHI. We’ll discuss how to keep your website as secure as possible later in this article.
Mobile accessibility is another key consideration when developing your website. Around 86% of the U.S. population owns and uses smartphones, meaning there’s a good chance that potential patients will find your practice from their phone. Being mobile-friendly means that your content will be formatted in layouts that give visitors the best viewing experience, depending on how they access your website. For example, since phones have smaller screens than computers and are predominantly navigated via thumb, your content (including buttons) should be larger for easier clicks and improved readability.
Don’t know how to design a website? Consider outsourcing your web services to a third-party provider, such as Online Chiro, to get everything you want from your website without the hassle of managing it yourself.
Protect Patient Information
As is true with any healthcare practice, the patient data you receive as a chiropractor is protected by HIPAA. This is true, of course, in person but also in digital spaces. When your patients book their appointments on your website, it is your practice’s responsibility to safeguard their infonnation against bad actors. Having a secure website and managing your online presence is key to keeping your patients — and your reputation — safe.
“An easy way to establish yourself as an expert is by educating your audience”
Updating your website regularly is also necessary for keeping your site secure. Outdated software is a beacon for viruses, malware, and hackers. Site updates usually include security patches that help keep you and your information safe. You may consider enabling auto-updates so you can rest assured that your site is protected.
Unsurprisingly, strong admin passwords also help protect your website. When choosing your password, you should avoid commonly used passwords (i.e., 1234, password, etc.). Hackers and malware can crack coimnon passwords faster than you might expect, so it’s important to use passwords with uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and special characters to fortify private information.
Also, be sure to stay up to date on digital security measures and train your staff about potentially dangerous content, including suspicious emails, links, and other online attacks. Antivirus software can provide an additional layer of security for your website and your chiropractic computer systems by scanning for issues and detecting any weaknesses.
Furthermore, you can use tools like secure sockets layers (SSLs) to create encrypted links between web servers and web browsers. This ensures any data exchanged between them will be secure. Many website-hosting companies include these, or you can simplify your security measures by using Online Chirp’s secure websites, contactless forms, and emails. This ensures your patients’ data is always safeguarded against potential threats without any additional stress or complications.
Establish Your Online Credibility
Once you have set up your website, you have a platform to showcase your expertise to your community. This is one of the best ways to show prospective patients that you are a chiropractic authority while also providing context and insight into your services. Inevitably, the more your community trusts that you’re the go-to chiropractic expert, the more they’re likely to book an appointment with you.
An easy way to establish yourself as an expert is by educating your audience. Post infonnative and engaging content on your website and social media profiles. You can cater your content specifically between platforms to build an online following that promotes patient conversions. For example, your website may be a good place for articles that highlight your skillset or how the latest breakthroughs in your held may impact your patients.
Another great example of engaging educational content for your website is using a 3D spine simulator. A digital rendering of a human spine offers an interactive way for patients to see how many systems can be impacted by spinal health. It gives prospective patients a learning tool before they enter your office and also provides you with a nice visual aid to reference when you describe your work to patients.
Your social media profiles are great places to include educational clips or infographics, practice updates, new offers, and more. These help keep you at the forefront of your followers’ minds and offer the potential to reach people who may have been unaware of your practice. Social media platforms are also good places to foster an online community, discuss important chiropractic topics, and engage with potential clients directly through coimnents or messages.
People may not realize how they could benefit from chiropractic services. In fact, only about 10% of the U.S. population sees a chiropractor regularly, so your content may very well inspire people who never knew they needed a chiropractor to book an appointment. Just as you can outsource web services to a third party, you can also outsource your social
Use SEO to Your Advantage
One of the most misunderstood digital marketing concepts is search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is crucial because it makes your website more visible in search engines, drives traffic to your site, and gives you more opportunities to book new patients. Ranking higher on search engines, such as Google, can help prospective patients find your practice more easily. If you don’t use SEO to your advantage, web browsers may find your local competitors before they find you.
The most commonly known aspect of SEO is keywords. Keywords are the words or phrases people type into search browsers to find relevant content online. Therefore, keywords are only as effective as the number of people who search for them. You can research keyword data to see what people type most frequently into search engines. Once you’ve analyzed this data to see what people type into search bars to find chiropractors online, you can implement the findings on your website to ensure your practice shows up at the top of search results.
However, a good SEO strategy takes more than just picking the right keywords. Search engines use complicated algorithms to detennine which sites should be ranked highest in their search results. For the best results, you may consider consulting industry experts. [Of course I’d suggest] Online Chiro’s digital marketing team. They are able to do regular performance check-ins to review what’s working for you, what isn’t, and revise your strategy accordingly.
Those who feel they have a firm grasp on the latest digital trends can set up and analyze their data from resources such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Bing Webmaster. These allow you to monitor your search traffic, the number of people who saw your ad (impressions), clicks, click-through rates, and much more. These resources also grant you the ability to identify and fix issues, including malware, server errors, and site load issues that can affect your search performance.
As you become more familiar with your website, social media, and advertising trends, you can adjust your SEO strategy to optimize your performance. Try not to become discouraged if one area isn’t performing well; simply adjust your strategy and try again. Adapting to the changes in the online landscape will be invaluable for your practice’s growth.
Take Advantage of Paid Positions
We’ve all heard the expression, “You need to spend money to make money.” There’s no place this is more true than in paid advertising. By Including room for paid promotions in your marketing budget, it gives you unmatched potential to book more appointments, improve your online visibility, and gain an advantage over competing practices.
One of the largest online platforms for paid promotion is Google Ads. Google is the world’s largest online search engine, and paid promotions bring your content right to the top of browsers’ search results. You can set a limit for your campaign spend on Google Ads, so this form of advertising is accessible for any budget. There’s no minimum, so you can choose a monthly, daily, or even a pay-per-click limit.
Social media platforms, such as Facebook, also provide opportunities for highly customizable, paid promotional content. You can create all types of creative advertisements, including photos, videos, slideshows, text, and more that can help brand your practice.
During Facebook’s 2022 first-quarter report, they stated they have around 1.96 billion active daily users. Facebook Ads allows you to target a highly specific audience based on location, age, interests, etc. You can define your ideal audience based on these criteria, then advertise to the people most likely to become your patients. Furthermore, studies have shown that Facebook offers the highest conversion rates of any social media platform. This means that Facebook ads can reach a wider audience, are more compelling than many print advertisements, and find the specific people you’d like to see your content, who are then more likely to visit your website and convert into patients.
Google and Facebook are both notoriously data-driven and allow you to examine analytics, including click-through rate, impressions, demographic info, and much more. You or your marketing team can analyze these findings and adjust your advertising campaigns as needed.
Play around with the platforms and types of content that work best for you and your practice. There are many ways to be successful online, and fun creative content can work just as well for a chiropractor as it can for any type of business. Take a look at other businesses’ or healthcare practices’ social media profiles for inspiration and bring your ideas back to your marketing team to try out.
Create a Positive Online Reputation
Once you’ve built your beautiful new website, set up your social media pages, gotten the hang of SEO, and begun building ad campaigns on Google or social media, it’s important to monitor your practice’s online reputation. Quite frankly, if you only take away one thing from this article, it should be how important maintaining a good online reputation can be for your practice’s success. More than 90% of people research and compare reviews online before deciding on a healthcare provider, so your digital presentation is a critical part of improving overall patient acquisition.
There are several ways to monitor your online reputation. One way is simply by scouring the internet and hoping you don’t miss any article or online review that mentions your practice. Of course, this is tremendously time consuming, not very efficient, and leaves a lot of room for error.
Another way is by downloading software that will notify you whenever you’re mentioned on major review sites, such as Yelp, Google, or a physician directory. This can give you a jumpstart to acknowledge positive reviews and address any negative feedback but may still take more time than the average chiropractic office staff has time for.
There is, however, a simpler way to protect your online reputation than scouring the web or purchasing costly software. Our software, for example, at Online Chiro offers reputation management services as part of their marketing packages that work within your existing framework to provide handson assistance. You can prioritize your patients and their care, rather than staying glued to a computer screen anxiously awaiting positive or negative reviews.
Use an all-m-one solution for reputation management with a comprehensive reviews dashboard, compare competitor reviews, and connect all positive reviews to your practice digitally. You can also highlight positive reviews by creating a patient testimonial page or using a streaming widget to showcase your practice’s latest reviews on your website.
You can set up your reputation management services to request more reviews from your patients, allowing you to get more five-star reviews from your most loyal patients. This gives your patients a platfonn to talk about their experiences, offer firsthand insights into your practice, and share what it’s like to work with you. Businesses alfiliated with positive reviews often rank higher than those without them, so your digital reputation offers the added benefit of improving your SEO score.
Of course, sometimes patients leave less-than-positive reviews. Negative or neutral reviews can impact your overall reputation, so it is important to address any concerns and try to resolve them as they arise. This shows your community that you are always improving as a chiropractor and genuinely care about every patient who walks through your doors.
Conclusion
In today’s competitive market, establishing yourself as a trusted chiropractor requires more than offering stellar service within the four walls of your practice. You must also develop a digital footprint that expands your influence into the greater community. Digital marketing prompts chiropractors to find strategies that often demand more attention, creativity, and money than ever before.
Thankfully, all-m-one marketing services propose a simple solution to the newfound (and ever-expanding) requirements of successful chiropractors as they move into the digital realm. If you’re ready to take advantage of all that digital marketing has to offer but aren’t sure where to start and don’t want to break the bank, contact a member of Online Chiro’s expert digital marketing team.
We have industry-specific expertise that keeps you abreast of the best practices for chiropractic marketing and can give you a leg up on your competition. We do it all by creating compelling websites, improving your SEO, monitoring your online reputation, handling your social media marketing, and so much more.
Digital marketing doesn’t need to be overwhelming. When you work with experts, it becomes an exciting way to expand your success. The best part is when you leave the marketing to us, you can focus on what matters most to you — your patients.
Tom Daniel is the general manager of Online Chiro, the leading online marketing service for chiropractors offering powerful websites, reputation management, search engine solutions, paid advertising, social media, patient education, and the services you need to affordably grow your practice. Visit bit.ly/top6chirotips to download our2023PracticeGrowthGuideformoretipsandtricksabout growing your practice and boosting your online presence. You may contact Tom at [email protected] and visit www.onlinechiro.com.
