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The Flywheel Theory of Practice Marketing For Chiropractic Practice Marketing and Health Businesses

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kids on merry-go-round

More marketing for less effort in your chiropractic practice

There is good marketing, better marketing, and best marketing.

There is only one kind of bad practice marketing.

That is … NO marketing.

Unfortunately, “no marketing” is too common. The typical scenario in many chiropractic and health offices is this: “Numbers are down. Let’s do some marketing.” After a great effort and expense is made, the numbers go up. Then what happens?

Everyone becomes so busy that there is no time for marketing, and marketing gets tossed aside like an old pair of worn socks.

This contributes to the Practice Roller Coaster. First, there is some marketing. Then there isn’t. Then there is, then there isn’t. Up and down.

Good marketing requires regular attention and action. Like making a cake or cooking a steak, you must pay attention and make adjustments. You can’t turn on the oven, then turn it off to watch your cable program, then turn on the oven again.

THE MERRY-GO-ROUND FLYWHEEL

Remember those merry-go-rounds on playgrounds? Everyone would get on, and one person would push. With the same amount of force applied consistently, the wheel’s speed would increase. Just using an even push, the wheel moved faster and faster until kids started screaming and falling off. Great fun!

What would have happened if the person pushed the wheel a few times and then let it stop? Then pushed it and got it going again. And then let it stop.

All the momentum that accumulated would disappear. Then, getting it going again would require more force. What a waste of energy! And how exhausting to start it up again!

Of course, once it is moving, it doesn’t take much to keep it going or even get it to move faster just by steadily applying force.

Effective chiropractic and practice marketing is just the same. The merry-go-round is like a flywheel. A flywheel is a “mechanical device designed to store angular kinetic energy in a rotating mass.” (Wikipedia) It is used in various engines and has several uses, but primarily, it keeps the momentum, or the energy, going.

Jim Collins refers to the Flywheel effect in his book, Good to Great. “Each turn of the flywheel builds upon work done earlier, compounding your investment of effort.”

HOW TO KEEP YOUR MARKETING FLYWHEEL GOING IN YOUR PRACTICE

  1. Make a list. With your team, make a list of key marketing activities that you have done that have worked. Keep it simple.
  2. Marketing assistant. Then, assign someone to keep track of these activities. They assume the role of marketing assistant. 1-2 hours per week. They essentially are project managers who ensure all marketing actions occur.
  3. Keep to a schedule. The time allotted to do the marketing must be maintained and not get hijacked by “urgencies.” The temptation will be there. Whatever time is scheduled, don’t allow this position to collapse into other departments.
  4. Monthly review and push. Every month, you can assess what actions seem to be working. Don’t be too eager to discontinue a procedure — some marketing takes time. Gradually, you can add more activities that are working. Keep pushing the flywheel!

We plan on offering a course on the Marketing Manager System for your marketing assistant later this year to help you achieve your practice goals.

GOOD TO GREAT – IN CHIROPRACTIC AND OTHER HEALTH PRACTICES

From Jim Collins: “Good to great comes about by a cumulative process—step by step, action by action, decision by decision, turn by turn of the flywheel—that adds up to sustained and spectacular results.”

Keeping the momentum going,

Ed

(c) 2024 Edward Petty

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The Marketing Flywheel versus the “Paleo” Practice

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If you are like many chiropractors, other doctors and professionals, you are wasting potential revenue and don’t even realize it.

Before I tell you how this happens, let me give you a definition that I have been using for years that has helped many offices.

Definition of a Practice

A practice is a network of relationships that is created and sustained through communication and service.

OK. Keep that definition in mind.

Now, here is how you can lose extra income and create extra work for yourself and your team: You start out spending a great deal of time and effort on generating new patients and then on processing them. You get to know the new patients and hear their stories. You empathize with them, ask them questions, and examine them. You explain what you have found about their condition and worked out what you see as their best option for treatment.

During their first few visits you are sensitive to how they are responding to your care and so continue to communicate with them. You put all this work into your new patient in order to help them follow your treatment plan and get better.

But as the patient improves and their frequency of visits decrease, your focus on them lessens. Your attention gravitates to the new patients.

When the patient has moved through your care plan, they often just drift back out into their community with an inadequate lifeline back to your office.

You have invested in, and created, a great relationship with your patient. Wouldn’t it be a good idea to stay in communication with them? They know you and like you and your team — shouldn’t you keep the connection alive and active? Just because their health condition has improved, don’t you still have approaches to help them become healthier and happier?

They have family and friends that can use your help now. They also belong to businesses and other groups that could use your help. Why let this relationship atrophy? Why not secure that lost income as well?

The Other “Paleo” Practice

In some sense, the business is constantly starting and stopping. It is nomadic. This is the other “Paleo” practice: each day when the sun comes up across the plains, you are out hunting for and gathering new patients. This may be good for a diet, but not if you want a low stress practice. Wouldn’t it be better to create a business where existing long time patients would routinely stop by for care and refer their family and friends? This would save you a lot of effort, money, and stress, wouldn’t it?

The Practice Flywheel

A practice should be supported by business systems.

These systems are like an engine. An engine has starts and stops, but it also has a flywheel. The flywheel is a heavy wheel that, once it begins to spin, continues to do so with much less effort than it took to get it going.

A good practice is supported by a business flywheel, or a number of flywheels as there are different sub-engines in the business.

For internal marketing, the flywheel is the conversation that you first began. You want to keep it going and going. After you get it spinning in high gear, it takes little effort to keep it humming along.

How Do You Do This?

You put in place a system of constant communication with your patients when they are NOT in the office through e-newsletters, hard copy newsletters, notes and cards, Facebook, and any other medium available. And of course, there is also personally seeing them at events in your community – county fair, grocery store, restaurant, salon or barber shop, etc. You want to keep the conversation going.

A very effective method is through electronic newsletters. Done right, and they usually aren’t, these newsletters can improve the numbers in your office.

We have tested this and found that the offices that do have personalized newsletters to their patients have more returning patients, more referrals, and more wellness visits as a result. Hence, more revenue and less stress about generating new patients.

See link below for a procedural article on what we have found that seems to work best for e-newsletters. Your customized e-newsletter can fuel your Facebook page, website, hard copy newsletter, and other mediums. We have worked out a relatively simple and very cost effective system that offices are using now to make this work.

Keep in mind that if your patients are not in listening to you, they will be listening to someone. For example, there are about 80 ads for drugs every hour on television (http://www.topmastersinhealthcare.com/drugged-america/) and this statistic is more than ten years old. It has been estimated that each of us are bombarded with about 2,000 advertising impressions per day. How many of these ads influence your patients toward unhealthful products or services?

Customized newsletters, and the cascading communications that they can feed, cost little but they help to keep the patient flywheel – and the communication – going. And in so doing, the patient wins, the community wins, and so does your business.
-Edward Petty

Publishing Your Newsletter – Does your mailing bottleneck when it comes to time to do the monthly newsletter Follow our easy steps to get your newsletter out “simple and fast”.

Newsletter Content –  9 suggested topics to include in your monthly newsletter to keep the conversation going.