Is outsourcing digital marketing for chiropractic clinics something you should consider? Chiropractors can benefit from display advertising to reach potential patients online. In this day and age, not too many small-to-medium-sized businesses operate without outsourcing some elements of their business to a digital marketing company. These businesses rely on digital marketing services to reach potential customers. For businesses, it makes more sense to partner with marketing companies to take care of certain activities that require a degree of specialization but do not warrant the full-time investment to bring such services in-house. This can help minimize business expenses. This allows marketing companies to conduct operations with enhanced efficiency while not taking on the overhead necessary to develop their marketing strategy.
Essentially, outsourcing allows a business to focus on its marketing strategy and serving clients with their services or products while allowing search engine marketing professionals to manage the essential, but tertiary elements of the business as a partner. In the case of chiropractic clinics, outsourcing can be done in a variety of different areas to cater to chiropractors, clients, and patients. This can include utilizing platforms to streamline processes and enhance efficiency. In this article, we will focus upon the benefits of outsourcing online marketing activities for clients. However, other areas of consideration for the company's campaign could include: human resources, receptions, scheduling, complimentary therapies, accounting, and other business development activities.
The activities to outsource for chiropractors vary depending upon the focus and needs of their particular practice. Chiropractors can outsource tasks such as managing their website, which is an important business expense, to ensure that patients can easily find information and schedule appointments. There are two activity categories to consider outsourcing:
Take a moment and reflect upon what makes money for your chiropractic business... Patients show up, receive treatments, and chiropractors receive payments. However, what does it take for patients to show up on Google when searching for chiropractors? Is your website optimized to attract and engage these potential patients? The following is a potential process flow for chiropractors to attract patients to their website using Google.
1. Potential patient becomes aware of your clinic.
2. Potential patients contact the client through the website for more information and/or to schedule appointments. They may find the client's website by searching on Google or other online platforms.
3. Patient arrives and receives treatment.
4. Patient is billed and [hopefully] rescheduled.
This seems simple enough, right? Actually it is not. Step 1 has numerous moving pieces. Did the patients hear about your practice by word-of-mouth, social media, Google search engine results, maps, physical passerby, an event, direct outreach on your website or some other form of marketing? Each one of these components, including the website, can be optimized and leveraged when outsourced to a digital marketing company. This is especially true for Google optimization.
Step 2 and 4 have some overlap. First, the person who responds to inquiries on our website needs to be knowledgeable about Google and digital marketing company, and also sales-oriented. This person's focus should be to answer questions on the website in a way that removes objections and sets the appointment. As a digital marketing company, it is important to optimize content for Google and provide valuable information to potential clients. There are different billing models in digital marketing, but one suggestion for your website is to offer a small discount for prepayment on the phone (you raise your rates to offset the cost if offering a discount is an issue). You'll find that no-shows in digital marketing are actually more expensive, and pre-billing will dramatically reduce your flaky patients.
Step 3 is the critical factor. You can’t outsource digital marketing the chiropractor (unless it is you of course!)… If you own the clinic, then by all means you need to be thinking about how you replace yourself in the system and then scale up with digital marketing. If that is your cup of tea… [wink wink]. But there are also other factors involved in digital marketing treatment. Perhaps there is a prior-to-adjustment digital marketing massage, or cryotherapy or some other form of complimentary digital marketing therapy. In this case, it might be better to outsource (subcontract) the therapist for your digital marketing needs so that you don’t have to worry about personnel or managing staff.
Routine business activities are known as commodity tasks. Receptionists, appointment setters, tech services, janitorial services, garment cleaning, and other similar services in the field of digital marketing can be outsourced. These sorts of digital marketing services are operated by other companies that function off of economies of scale. The more clients they have, the lower their overhead is and the more profitable their digital marketing businesses become.
A simple cost/time calculation can indicate when you might want to outsource different marketing tasks involved in operating your chiropractic practice. Let’s say your clinic is a new startup and you need a logo for marketing purposes. Do you hire a graphic designer as an employee? Of course not! You contract a designer for the marketing logo and hope that the marketing design will last a decade or more.
Your clinic needs a website. Do you hire a web designer as an employee? I wouldn’t recommend it. A website build should be a one time event with updates to design/style/functionality every couple years to ensure effective marketing. It makes more sense to contract a web design agency for marketing purposes (but please speak with your SEO consultant first otherwise you will likely waste money).
A cost/time analysis in marketing will help you put into perspective the elements that will benefit from outsourcing and even better it helps you to establish goals and a timeline. The big picture purpose of outsourcing in marketing is to free up your time, your critical staff’s time, and your budget to focus upon income-generating marketing activities. When your clinic's marketing outsourcing is properly structured, outsourcing various marketing activities will enable for the streamlining of your chiropractic practice.
As Sapid SEO Company focuses upon digital marketing services for chiropractors, we want to point out some extremely important mistakes to avoid.
Too often we have seen chiropractors who have websites hosted on servers that they do not technically own (and cannot access), and even worse domain names that they do not legally own. This can be detrimental to their marketing efforts. This can be detrimental to their marketing efforts. In addition to this, there are social media marketing accounts that the chiropractors do not have administrative control over.
What is the risk in this? The first rule in marketing is to assume that there is a likelihood that relationship dynamics will change over time. The owner of a chiropractic clinic, must ensure that he or she has ultimate control over all aspects relating to your primary digital marketing accounts. From there, you can delegate access as you will. We have seen many cases of marketing partnerships ending, romantic relationships ending and the challenges of trying to recuperate critical social media accounts, websites and domain names that are not directly in your control.
A competitive digital marketing agency already has tens of thousands of dollars invested in their systems and years of experience. The top ranking chiropractors in your area are likely not doing their internet marketing in-house and to compete with their results you should not try to down your digital marketing either.
You might be able to get away with doing your own basic marketing and social media management, but your time is better off working with patients or doing activities that only you can do to bring in patients. If you really need new patients, you should be doing marketing podcasts, videos, radio shows, TV shows, local seminars, workshops, attending networking events and other marketing activities that require your expertise and personality.
When you combine those in-person marketing activities (that leave a trail of social media and website backlinks) with our SEO marketing systems, we can totally maximize your brand in your local market place and make you and your clinic the perceived authorities to both the public and the search engines. We will make your Google Maps listing stand out in the top 3 positions on page 1 of Google for the highest level of visibility.
We do full time SEO, social media management, content creation and much more to position our clients in front of their target markets. You simply can’t compete with what we can do and you shouldn’t worry about trying since you are in the chiropractic business, not digital marketing.
We have the experience and ability to maximize your online visibility. Not only will we do a thorough review of your website and current marketing strategies to show you what needs improving, we will also reveal to you additional vertical niches that can be targeted to bring you directly in front of the potential patients who are actively search for the results you can provide – but outside of the chiropractic niche.
Contact us today for a full analysis and consultation. We will move you to the top of your target market.
