The Art of Sustainable Marketing
As we cross the midpoint of the year, it is easy for our marketing strategies to wain and start to appear stail. In this article I will be going through how you can stay in the ‘’golden zone’’ and keep your marketing fresh whilst maintaining consistency for long periods of time. Online strategies such as Facebook and Instagram have become ever more prevalent and necessary for a Chiropractic Businesses to survive and thrive. We have been running these online strategies for 5+ years now and still maintain incredible, consistent results, but how do we do it?
Marketing sustainably is the key to creating long lasting strategies that deliver results again and again. Our secret to achieving years of quality results is by being Freshly Consistent … NOT Consistently Fresh. Creating a new marketing strategy that delivers consistent results is HARD. It requires a bunch of good ideas, months of testing, lots of time and a sizeable budget. When we find a strategy that works and is profitable, it is important that we manage it correctly to ensure we can use it again and again. We do this through being Freshly Consistent.
So, what does Freshly Consistent actually mean? Being freshly consistent is all about utilising the same proven strategies repeatedly but altering small details each time. This keeps things looking and feeling fresh to your customer, whilst providing assurance of results for the business by maintaining the underlying core process. Being Freshly consistent is much more beneficial and attainable for chiropractors than trying to be ‘Consistently Fresh’.
Consistently fresh is the idea that you have to completely change up your strategy each time you run a campaign, with the hope that this will keep your business ‘relevant’. The truth is, people usually opt for this strategy out of fear that audiences will become tired of their old strategies. For the most part, this is not the case. Yes, it’s true that over time the market changes and adapts. However, this doesn’t happen overnight and is a slow, constant process. By making small consistent changes to proven strategies, you are much more likely to stay on ‘trend’. If you try to be ‘consistently fresh’, you will find yourself chasing you tail, never knowing what kind of results to expect, struggling for time, failing to maintain consistent frequency and will have many failed campaigns before stumbling across one that actually works for you.
Basically … it’s OK to be boring!
Marketing seems complicated and can appear intimidating. But for Chiropractors all you need to make sure you do is be consistent by rinse and repeating strategies that are proven to work and to be profitable. A huge benefit of being a part of the Inner Circle or Done for you service is that you do not have to invest the time and money into making the mistakes needed to form new strategies. Just sit back, relax, and allow us to make the mistakes for you!
Over years of advertising, many of our favourite strategies remain the same at their core. It is true that if you were to compare our ads from four years ago to today, they would appear wildly different, but this is through years of being freshly consistent, not through drastic changes in an attempt to predict the market or stay relevant. Some of the core online strategies that have worked for us for years and continue to work for us are:
- Facebook Lead Generation Advert
- In House Spinal Screenings
- Health Talk Event
Simply put, if a chiropractic business is willing and able to consistently run these three marketing campaigns online, they should never have a new patient problem.
I speak to Chiropractors every day about their clinics marketing and have consulted 100s of individual practice owners. Each and every time I hear the same phrases:
1) ‘’I don’t have time to focus on marketing’’
2) ‘’I occasionally market and get great results, but I can’t maintain consistency’’
3) ‘’I don’t have the skills and expertise to market effectively’’
If your reading this, the likelihood is you fall into one of these categories or have done at some point in your career. The truth is none of these are good excuses not to market. When running a business, marketing is your food and water, it feeds the business and your business won’t survive without it. If any of these statements sound like you, you need to find more time for marketing.
That can be achieved by:
1) Finding time to do it yourself. This can be rewarding and attainable in the short term, but if you are a practitioner, I would advise against this approach. Marketing is not your genius zone and you need to dedicate as much time as possible into your craft and to leading the business. As your business grows, your time will be stretched, and you will inevitably fail to maintain consistency in your marketing.
2) Hire someone onto your team to do your marketing for you. A solid option but also problematic for a few reasons. One, it is very hard to find true marketing expertise, especially when it comes to our small niche (Chiropractic). Two, a full-time marketing hire is very costly and for many small clinics, they will not bring in an adequate return on investment to make it viable. To hire a full-time marketer who already has paid ads experience, you are realistically looking at a 25K+ Salary. You can hire someone straight out of Uni for a bit cheaper, but it will be several months of coaching before they are at all capable.
3) Create a ‘’Super CA’’. This is a good option for many practices. Using the resources supplied within the inner circle, if you have a CA who has shown an interest and aptitude for marketing, it is feasible to train them up and have them help with the marketing alongside their CA responsibilities. The main downside with this strategy is time management for the CA and also the threat that they can simply leave your business whenever they choose, setting you back to square one.
4) Hire someone externally to take care of your marketing. Within chiropractic it is no secret that 99% of ‘agencies’ deliver poor results and are to be avoided. However, we do offer an agency in the form of our ‘Done for you service’. Within this service Ryan’s personal team will take care of all your digital paid advertising for you. This cost’s less than half the price of hiring a full-time marketing person and guarantees quality results and industry expertise. Putting my usual modestly aside, I do feel like this is a great option for the majority of Chiropractic practices and if you are interested in finding out more, please reach out via email at Daniel@dcpracticegrowth.com
Success in business feels like it should be an exciting rollercoaster ride, but in reality, success is often boring. By utilising strategies that have already been thought out, tested and proven, you take all the guess work out of your marketing. Allowing you to forecast results, spend more money, achieve better results, and save time! Creating campaign ideas from scratch is incredibly time consuming and for many Chiropractors, is just not feasible. However, taking the same proven strategy and giving it a small facelift will dramatically decreases your time spent on marketing, allowing you to market much more consistently and really build some momentum within your practice. So next time you are having a meeting about your marketing or planning your next campaign, focus your energy on being Freshly Consistent … Not Consistently Fresh!
BONUS FOOD FOR THOUGHT!Grab your favourite snack or hot drink of choice and take a look at the graphic below. Have a think about what quadrant your marketing currently lies in and how you can move towards the becoming Freshly Consistent!
