Chiropractic Advertising:


Are You Throwing Good Money After Bad? Michael Lenarz, DC and Nicole Rae Tilson, LMT


Are you feeling overwhelmed by the task of generating new patients? If so, you are not alone.


As a chiropractic student, I never fully grasped the entrepreneurial efforts my chosen profession would require of me. After all of the schooling, the debt, the National Boards and state licensing procedures, I was certain that within a matter of a few months in practice, patients would be knocking down my door. I had grandiose visions of being such an amazing chiropractor straight out of school, that referrals would sustain more growth than I could handle.


Then reality started to settle in. I started to come to grips with just how much effort it would actually take to grow my business. After a few years in practice, my first revelation was the importance of figuring out what type of advertising actually works. Years ago, it was Yellow Pages. (“What kind of pages?” the youngsters ask…) Today, the money going into advertising is focused on websites, SEO, Google Ad Words, Yelp and Facebook.


Here is the fantasy that most new practitioners have: All I need to do is sign up with an advertising outlet or two, and then sit back and watch new patients stream in the door.


Here is the reality: More often than not, you will spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars for a proposed advertising scheme and get little or no return for the money spent. I have done this more than once… probably more than twice….


True Story: I spent $30,000 for a “proven” Facebook Ad campaign that lasted 6 months, and it returned zero (yes, zero!) new patients.


It’s critical to have metrics to determine the effectiveness of the money you spend on advertising. One such metric you must develop is the amount of money you should spend on bringing in a new patient. Do you want to spend $100 to generate one new patient, or is it wise to spend $1,000 for one new patient?


This question of how much you should spend per new patient requires that you establish a key statistic called “Case Visit Average (CVA).”


This number tells you


the average number of dollars each new patient will spend accessing your treatment. Here is the formula for CVA:


$ of production over a time period / number of new patients over the same time period


(i.e.: Your practice generates $180,000 in production over 6 months and starts 60 new patients over that same six months. Your CVA is $180,000/60 = $3000 CVA)


Your advertising budget per new patient should be somewhere between 10% and 30% of your CVA. So if your average patient will spend $3,000 on services at your office, you should be willing to spend somewhere between $300 and $900 to bring that new patient in. Bear in mind that where you choose to fall within that wide range will depend on the stability of your practice, and ultimately, the size of your CVA. For example, if your CVA is $1,500, you should be spending less on advertising per new patient than a doctor whose CVA is $5,000.


When you look at the cost of any potential advertising campaign, you should also try and determine how many new patients that ad could bring into your practice. For example, if the proposed advertising


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campaign is a Facebook Ad program that will cost $3,000, and if you have determined that you are willing to spend 10% of your CVA per new patient ($300 per new patient): You should be able to reasonably expect that this ad will generate at least 10 new patients. If that estimate seems too high, consider the ad too expensive for your budget.


The caveat: You will almost always predict WAY MORE new patients from your advertisement effort then you will actually get! A good practice is to obtain an estimate for customer return from the person selling the advertising, and reduce that estimate by 70 to 90% before using it in your metrics.


When to get out vs. When to double down


With most advertising efforts, the person selling you advertising will explain that it takes time and commitment for the campaign to prove its effectiveness. The idea is that repetition of the content over time, to the same audience, is necessary to get noticed and to have potential customers take action. Indeed, this is a proven concept in advertising and how it works on the brain. But the question you need to ask yourself is “How long should I commit to this effort?” The answer to that question is partly going to depend on your budget. But as a general guideline, most online/web/SEO efforts should be given at least 90 days. Print ads should run weekly for about a month before starting to realize their full potential.


Surprisingly, newspaper and even yellow page ads can still generate a decent response, especially in areas populated by an older demographic. But these media are probably closer to the upper threshold of the amount of money you want to spend on a new patient. Search engine optimization, in conjunction


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