Let's start at the top. Although business branding belongs under the clarification tier within The Marketing Circle, place it near the top of your marketing plan as a reminder of what consumers think of you. Also, you can find many of the relevant growth KPIs from previous months and years. If you put a summary at the beginning before you start writing you can remind yourself what you are hoping to accomplish. This is also a really good time to introduce to yourself and your staff, and what your best benefits and features are. This is called reputation branding and can be combined with your logos and images.
Another important jumping-off point: SMART goals for your marketing. You can keep things simple and write one main smart goal for the month, or you can take your marketing plan to the next level by writing smart goals for each campaign that you plan on defining in your marketing plan.
Smart Goals are defined by the information they contain and how they are written. If you follow the acronym from top to bottom, your goal looks like this:
Specific (what do you plan on accomplishing, include the product promo, what you like your campaign targets)
Measurable ( move from A to B, ie. increase sales from 100 units to 500 units, increase social media followers from a to b, etc )
Attainable (Make sure you set B as a challenge, but still attainable.)
Relevant (make sure your goal pertains to a specific campaign or growth)
Time Based (Set a completion date. Make sure there is a place when you can pat yourself on the back)
Once you know what your goals are, it helps to know your demographics. Although this sounds simple, consider your demographics by the "who" and "what", or by your products and services. How do your products/services, with their benefits and features, solve the problems of your demographics?
Now that we have all of that down, let’s get into the marketing methodology for chiropractors.
CLARIFICATION
Clarification is the process of organizing and creating expectations for your marketing plan.
Keywords
Each product or service has its own set of keywords. Not all keywords are used for SEO. Check out this article on the top 7 uses of keywords. It is best practice to find professionals to create your keyword plans, (Marketing Health Academy can help). However, if you're a Do-It-Yourselfer, Google Adwords has a great keyword tool, or you can find many other free tools on the internet. If you want to find your keywords, remember to think like one of your customers. What would they search for if they were looking for your services?
Link Building
You may not know all of the information that comes with your SEO keywords, but it is all important. When doing an SEO report you may need to know what the domain authority is for any given keyword so that you know what to place as a next level goal. Link building is one of the best (and most dangerous) SEO and keyword marketing tools you have. The more links you have to other pages on your website, the better the keyword becomes for you. However, there is a potential downside: If you overdo it on the backlinks, you run the risk of getting yourself black-listed from Search Engine Optimization Placement (SEOP).
Hashtags
Years ago, #hashtag was one of the greatest buzzwords. Today hashtag marketing has its own set of rules. You can use ritetag.com for some great hashtag statistics that go along with your plan. When thinking hashtag, don't think keyword. Think activity and verb. Things like #backpain, or #stressrelief. Hashtags don't have to relevant to everyone, but they should be to you and to your consumers. I have a family member who uses the hashtag #camrondadadventures. This means nothing to you and I, however is very meaningful to them. As a bonus, if they ever want to find a past post, they can always use that personalized hashtag to aid in the search.
When you have a list of relevant keywords, you can break information down even further by finding keyword trends based upon time and location. If your demographics are local, then you can look by city. When doing paid marketing, you want to get the best return for your dollar. This is easy to do with trends.google.com.
Now that you have defined and organized your information, and done your research to get the most successful guidance, you can start putting it all in motion.
COMMUNICATION
Before getting started with the science and action of marketing, let’s talk about a lost art in sales and marketing: relationship-building. Though the world has gone to a digital existence, it is still important to have one-on-one communication with everyone that you come in touch with. If you have a customer take the time to write a bad review, it is your responsibility to acknowledge their concerns and try to resolve them, especially with the whole world watching. Your response to all reviews (and how you respond) will tell potential patients whether or not they can trust you. This is the process of relationship-building without direct contact.
Many of the tools you have at your fingertips on social media don’t come with a financial investment (more on this when we discuss conversion). Reviews, for example, are an important tool that doesn't cost you a penny. Groups on Facebook is another great, cost-free tool you can utilize to provide information of value to your followers.
INSPIRATION AND EDUCATION
Consumers who research look for relevant information. They watch videos either for information, for fun, or for inspiration. You will utilize your social media, your videos, and your tutorials to inspire and educate. This is probably the one part of your plan that needs an organized calendar. Although we will discuss that in more detail later, you should at least create your calendar first. Make sure you put a link on the marketing plan to your calendar for easy access.
Now let's talk about content. For years we have heard that content is king. You can add all the content you want, but if you don’t use it for SEO and customer building, it won’t really work at all. However, if you follow the checklist and the rules set up by Marketing Health Academy, you will see great improvements in how your content has worked for you. Keep an eye out for our tutorial (coming soon) which contains the checklist.
Writing blogs is one way to dramatically increase your content offering. The trick is getting a blog to work in your marketing strategy. Blogs should promote SEO by utilizing specialized keywords, titles, descriptions, and links. When well written, it creates a platform of providing educational information that have value for the reader. Add a short video and now it is inspirational as well. Humans, more and more, are a visual breed. Videos are today’s version of cliff notes. Sometimes, a short video is all the viewer has time for.
Now let’s take a moment here to talk about Google My Business. Although GMB should be a subject all by itself, including it in the educational and inspiration describes exactly what it does. For the most part, Google My Business is free advertising. Following are just some of the great things you can do with GMB.
Posting content in Google My Business has virtually unlimited possibilities. They already have templates set up for product offers, event promotions, and more. You can place just about anything in the GMB “What’s New" post! Include links to your blogs, your tutorials, and your downloads. Posting an event is a great place to promote Facebook live chats, or even live instructional. Don't be afraid to get creative when posting in Google My Business! Because Google My Business is your local stop, it brings in local customers, so you don't have to worry about attracting people who could never make it to you.
When consumers research medicine and therapy practitioners, they are sure to check out the reviews as part of their research. Nobody wants to risk a visit to a doctor who has an exceeding amount of negative reviews. Reading reviews can help with questions to ask the doctor that perhaps were not previously thought of. Consumers can get a lot of information from reviews. On the flip side, you can get a lot of information from reviews consumers leave about you as well.
When you think e-commerce you probably think tangible items, but Google my business lets you link services to specific pages on your website where they can acquire more information.
The murky water should be getting a little more clear now. Your digital ecosystem provides credibility for you. The more you are utilizing reviews, the more SEO content you have, and the more you utilize social and development platforms, the more visible you become. Do a Google search to find the best chiropractor for you. You'll notice that beyond the paid results that come up, the chiropractors who have the most visibility tend to come up first.
CONVERSION
What it all boils down to: Conversion! The final section of your marketing plan has a two-fold purpose. It helps you to lay out a plan for your marketing dollars, (defines the marketing funnel in order to turn money into leads), by evaluating the past so you can create a future, one detail at a time. The charts you create in the beginning are a comparative from to what transpired the year before, (or last month depending on your growth goals). It also includes a comparative of website data from a previous date and time. Don't worry if you don't have a last year to compare to, you can always begin with a week over week, or a month over month comparison. In the long run, it will be become more beneficial to compare the same time frames year over year. Tracking your progress, or lack thereof, allows you to be proactive in your marketing spend. How can you possibly know how much money to spend, and where you want to spend it, if you don’t have a guide to compare it to?
Take for example your Google campaign to target winter skiing injuries. You know your demographics will be people who ski, and you know how much money you want to appropriate based upon keyword study, demographic study and previous successes.
You'll define specific landing pages for your campaign within your marketing funnel. (Be sure to include the components of “The Marketing Circle” in each landing page you create).
- Have you defined the purpose of the landing page?
- Do you communicate your ideas and the deal clearly?
- What is the offer at hand and does it have a call to action?
- What is the final conversion to your marketing campaign?
Once you have a landing page, you can list the steps along the way to move consumers along through your funnel. These steps allow the right consumers to move all the way through the funnel. Your checkpoints are there for you to determine the effectiveness of each phase of the funnel. Place your offering on social media through a weekly post. If you have an email client, make sure you create your mass email. Don’t forget to include any of your other marketing techniques. This is the basic template for each of your specific marketing funnels.
