New patients don’t appear out of thin air.
Before your patients became patients, they were leads. And before they were leads, they were prospects.
For these prospects to become leads, they had to become aware of your services. Developing this awareness is called lead generation, and it’s one of the trickier parts of marketing a chiropractic practice.
If you’re having trouble attracting leads to your practice, don’t worry. This article will provide you with 17 simple, actionable ways to generate chiropractic leads and turn those leads into paying customers.
In the modern marketing sales funnel, getting a prospect’s name and email address is the quickest way to turn them into a lead.
But most people won’t give away that information freely. To entice people who visit your website or social media pages to give you their email list, you need to give them something in return.
In the chiropractic world, that something typically takes two forms: a free examination/adjustment, or a free eBook.
Offering a free visit to your office in exchange for an email address is a great way to get some traffic in the door if you’ve just started your practice.
However, these free visits can clog up your schedule and prevent paying patients from booking with you if you’ve got an established practice. So I only recommend doing this if you’re particularly hungry for additional customers.
Writing an informational eBook can take more time upfront. However, if you write it correctly, it can be an evergreen piece of content that continues to generate leads for years after you first create it.
Possible topics for an eBook might include the following:
If writing isn’t your strong suit, don’t worry. You can hire quality ghostwriters at freelance sites like The Content Authority.
Once you’ve got a lead generation offer set up, you need to promote it to prospects. And one of the best ways to do that is through Facebook ads.
I mention Facebook ads because it has an ad format specifically designed for lead generation. You add an image, a bit of text describing the offer, and the text you want for your call-to-action (CTA).
Once you’ve created the ad and told Facebook which demographics you want to target, their ad-serving algorithm will show the lead generation ad to the people most likely to sign up.
One of the best parts about using Facebook for lead generation is how cost-effective it is. The minimum daily advertising budget on Facebook is $1, so you can test out a bunch of ads on the cheap to see which is most effective.
You can’t generate leads online without website traffic. And the single-best way to get traffic to your website is by creating high-quality blog posts.
Blog posts can send traffic to your website in a few different ways.
If you write a genuinely helpful post that targets a specific keyword, you stand a high chance of ranking for that keyword in the Google search results. When readers search for that keyword, some of them will click on your article, thus bringing them to your website.
If you have a lead generation offer set up, you can use it to convert some of that traffic into leads for your chiropractic business. And if that traffic is local, there’s a good chance they’ll end up booking an appointment.
Perhaps the more effective method of using content for chiropractic lead generation is by sharing it on social media. This is because most people who follow you and your practice on social media will be local to your area, making them much more likely to book an appointment than the average visitor from the Google search results.
To increase engagement from sharing your post, make sure you use a concise and catchy headline. This is especially important on Facebook, as their algorithm notices when a particular post gets a high amount of engagement and prioritizes showing that content in your followers’ news feeds.
If you’ve got any video marketing savvy, starting a YouTube channel is an excellent way to generate leads. You can also share videos you make for YouTube on other platforms, like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter ‒ thus exponentially increasing the impact a single piece of content has.
Here are a few ideas for videos people local to your area might find interesting:
Instagram is another platform that advertising can work exceptionally well on. Like Facebook, they allow you to target prospects based on location and certain demographic information.
Although there are several ways to generate leads with Instagram ads, your best bet is to promote your lead magnet.
Note: You’re probably picking up that having a lead magnet is integral to many of the strategies on this list. If you don’t have one yet, I urge you to develop one as soon as possible. To help you with this, here are a few useful resources:
According to BIA/Kelsey, 97% of people read reviews for local businesses. And according to Statcounter, Google has more than 90% of global search engine market share
Putting these two statistics together, it should be evident that Google’s online review service is the most important one out there.
Almost everyone who is searching for your business is using Google to do so, which means nearly everyone will see your practice’s reviews on Google.
And those reviews are super important. 93% of consumers say online reviews impact their purchase decisions. So if your Google reviews are less than stellar, your lead generation efforts are going to suffer.
The best way to build up a base of positive Google reviews is to ask your existing patients to leave them. Here’s the easiest way to do that:
While Google is the review service you should be prioritizing, asking for Yelp reviews can also help with your lead generation process. As Yelp is specifically a review website, many consumers will search your business on there to see if you’re worth a visit or not.
Ranking high in organic search results is crucial for lead generation. If people can’t find your website on Google, you can’t turn them into leads.
Here are a few of the most impactful and actionable local SEO tips I have to offer:
One of the easiest and pain-free ways to generate leads is by asking existing patients for referrals.
People trust the recommendations of their friends and family over all other sources when it comes to choosing products and services. If you can turn your best patients into advocates for your practice, you can attract high-quality leads with almost no effort at all.
The most important part of this process will be asking patients for referrals. Here’s a simple three-step strategy you can employ to make asking for referrals as smooth and automatic as possible:
People trust their healthcare providers almost as much as they trust their friends and family. If you have a relationship with other healthcare providers in your area, they can provide you with a consistent source of leads if they’re willing to recommend you to their patients.
Here are a few things you can do to encourage other practitioners to send patients your way.
Sticking a lead generation form on your website is a smart idea. However, you can turn your site into a lead generation machine if you optimize it to convert as many visitors as possible.
Here are a few lead generation optimization tips for your website:
The content you share on social media doesn’t have to be all your own. You can leverage interesting and creative content from other websites and influencers to increase engagement among your follower base.
Ranking organically in the Google search results is a fantastic way to get leads. However, it’s not the only way to use Google for lead generation. Paying for ads places you at the very top of the Google search results.
If you have persuasive ad copy, a direct CTA, and a landing page optimized for conversion, a PPC ad on Google can be one of the fastest ways to generate motivated leads.
If you’d like to give Google Ads a try, here are a few tips to get you started:
If you feel comfortable scripting and shooting a video yourself, or if you have the funds to hire a professional, running video ads on YouTube can generate a lot of leads in a relatively short period.
Like Facebook and Instagram, YouTube’s advertising platform has geotargeting capabilities. So you can run ads that are only shown to viewers within a certain radius of your practice’s location.
Creating video ads is a complex topic that I can’t do justice in this article. If you’d like more information about running ads on YouTube, here are some excellent resources:
Most of the advice contained on this list involves developing your website and social media presence. However, these aren’t the only ways to generate leads with the internet.
Some people skip Google entirely and go directly to medical directories to find a good chiropractor. To ensure you show up when people use these directories, submit your information and ask to be listed.
Here’s a list of essential directories you need to be a part of:
Not all lead generation needs to be done online. If you set up a booth at a local health fair, you can acquire a ton of leads by providing free examinations and talking to people about the services you offer.
To find upcoming health fairs near you, go to Eventbrite and search for health fairs in your area.
If you do attend one of these events, make sure you bring a signup form to collect names and email addresses. It would be a real shame to spend all that time and effort talking to prospective patients if you didn’t collect any personal information that would allow you to follow up with them later.
Adding your website, business address, and contact information to your email signature will likely have minimal impact. However, it takes such a small amount of time to do so ‒ if it generates a single lead, it will have been worth you
