Chiropractic Coaching: Developing Your Virtual Strategy

Hello, everybody, and welcome to Thrive in Five. I’m Dr. Dennis Perman, and I’ll be your chiropractic coach for today. This edition is called Developing Your Virtual Strategy. To be competitive in today’s chiropractic marketplace, we all need to consider integrating a virtual strategy into our menu of services.

What is a virtual strategy? A virtual strategy is a way to use contemporary communications technology to influence, serve, and lead your patients and prospective patients, whether or not they physically come to your office. The science has evolved to such a level of transparency and simplicity that any provider and any end user can connect easily and expediently.

Patients can make, change, or cancel appointments online without talking to anyone or touching a phone 24 7 365 and completely independent of office hours. There was a time when it was financially inconceivable for a field practitioner to consider a television or even a radio advertising campaign, but now anyone can record specialized promotional video on their phone and post it on their landing page or on Facebook, Instagram, or x, and reach hundreds or even thousands of neighbors with their message for free or for a manageable fee.

Promotional video started with movie trailers and TV commercials, evolved into infomercials and MTV, and is now in the hands of anyone curious enough and determined enough to master the equipment and put in a little time and creativity. If you’ve been watching the rise of promotional video on social media, in email and on websites, you’ve probably noticed the trend towards keeping it short.

Brevity is not just recommended, it’s essential, because people will typically decide if they’re going to watch a video in just a few seconds. And when most people see a video any longer than a minute or two, they don’t even click on it. So if you’re going to use video as part of your virtual strategy, keep it short.

Now as far as I know, no one has yet mastered the art of adjusting a patient through Zoom, though I confess I’ve dabbled with distance healing over the years with good results. But what I’m really talking about here is the lesson so many businesses have learned in the post COVID era. People have gotten out of the habit of leaving their homes except when absolutely necessary.

If you look behind the commercial real estate collapse, the successes of Netflix, Amazon, and Peloton, and even Zoom itself, what’s the common denominator? People used to do those things outside their homes, and now they find that they no longer want to or need to. Access to every drug, doctor, or therapist, as well as most retail scenarios, is a phone app away, and as a result, patients are being programmed to do everything from home.

Unless we adapt our strategy, we may find ourselves competing over a shrinking share of the healthcare consumers, many of whom will be seduced by the convenience of being served in their homes or offices. They much prefer that to physically visiting the doctor’s office, except when they really have to.

You probably already know that the franchises use their vast resources to reduce friction, offer low pricing, and serve conveniently. But they may not have a good strategy for virtual care for their patients, which could give you back some competitive advantage. You also need to be concerned about the multidisciplinary centers, who have a leg up on virtual care, since they integrate medical specialties that may lend toward an online setting.

Here, you can claim back competitive advantage by offering services they don’t offer, like functional medicine or brain rehabilitation exercises using functional neurology. Notice that this follows the lifetime patient formula. In addition to providing them with regular chiropractic care, you can make the need for better lifestyle decisions more visible to them, and they’ll commit to home care, improved diet, nutritional supplementation, and stress reduction.

Then, the additional services and products you offer make sense to them and fit their perception of their needs, contributing the final segment of the lifetime patient formula. So let’s look at the different elements of your virtual strategy and see if we can all upgrade our application of the current methodology to improve our service and increase our impact.

There are two broad categories of your virtual strategy, inbound and outbound. Inbound means the patient or end user is contacting you. Examples of inbound virtual strategy could include patients managing their appointments and care plans online, patients going to your website or landing page to begin their care by filling out forms and arranging for payment, or patients visiting your blog for information on health and wellness.

Examples of outbound virtual strategy would be promotional email, texting confirmation messages to patients on their cell phones, podcasting, or posting video on social media. There are also two broad types of marketing which apply to virtual marketing as well, hunting and farming. Hunting means generating new leads and converting or closing them.

In other words, asking for referrals, producing events, sponsoring talks, and networking with other professionals and businesses would be examples of hunting. Farming means nurturing and growing current or longer term accounts. In chiropractic terms, it would entail building a strong back end that provides a variety of relevant services and products to a more concentrated and engaged clientele.

and cultivating patient compliance with expert patient education and case management. It also means developing relationships that spin off qualified referrals, beginning with the farming cycle again. So hunting is more about becoming a master at prospecting for new patients, while farming is more about becoming a master of engagement and relationship with patients, so they stay, pay, and refer.

Both hunting and farming are necessary. In the beginning, when a chiropractor first opens a practice, he or she is hungry and needs to hunt to get some new patients and start the process of success. But once a doctor gets set up and has conquered the basics, he or she can start to farm, where OVA, the number of dollars per visit, and PVA, the number of visits per new patient, are built and the practice becomes less dependent on a flow of new patients.

Through farming, the relationships with the patients continue to bear fruit. Some doctors love hunting, some love farming, but the best practice is use aspects of both. Whether you concentrate more on inbound or outbound marketing, whether you prefer hunting or farming, open your mind to enhancing your practice model with a virtual strategy.

You can also add specialty services that can be delivered virtually. For example, if you were at SuperConference 2023, you met Reed Davis, whose FTN Functional Dynamic Nutrition program is the shortest distance between you and providing advanced functional medicine services to your patients, much of which can be delivered virtually.

You’ll be making the invisible visible for patients by showing them lab tests that validate your position on their health and their best options for receiving the care they need. This new way of thinking delivers chiropractic care concisely and efficiently, reinforces home care recommendations, and uses off site consultation and coaching to expand access to services and work with the current trends instead of against them.

If you want to know more about this cutting edge material, go to the Six Essentials landing page by scanning the QR code you see on the screen. Thanks for watching. I’m Dr. Dennis Perman from The Masters Circle Global, where legends are made and legendary practices are built through chiropractic coaching.

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