If you want to take your practice to the next level, there are specific marketing and branding aspects to consider. Marketing and branding aren’t the same things; however, they go hand in hand when it comes to promoting your business the right way. Unfortunately, if your marketing and branding are not done right, your business will be just another blank face in a crowd. There won’t be anything that makes you stand out—nothing that people immediately associate with your brand. For example, if we were to say do you want a Coke, you would immediately picture the red can and the sound it makes when you pop one open.
So let’s talk about branding tips for chiropractors.
What Is a Brand?
A brand is an intangible marketing and business concept that helps people instantly recognize a person, company, or product. A brand is what makes a business’s goods or services stand out from others. A brand is a combination of perception, value, and awareness of any given product, service, or company.
What Is Branding?
Branding is the promotion of a specific product, service, or company by using advertising and distinctive design that makes that product, service, or company instantly recognizable.
When people think of branding, they usually think that branding only has to do with your logo, matching colors, etc. And those things are important, but that’s not all there is to branding—branding and name recognition are so much more!
So let’s take a look at the aspect of branding that most people miss.
What Is Your Brand?
Do you know what your brand is? Have you specifically and purposefully branded your chiropractic business to be instantly recognizable? Ask yourself the following questions to help determine whether your practice is properly branded or whether your branding could use a little work.
1. Do people instantly recognize your chiropractic business by name?
If people instantly recognize your chiropractic business by name, then you have probably done a good job with branding your practice.
2. Where does your chiropractic business rank in the search results?
Does it rank highly? Or is it pages before you get to it, or perhaps it can’t be found at all?
The proper branding will help your website rank higher in the search engines. And the higher your website ranks in the search engines, the more your practice will be seen as an authority in your industry. It also means you will get more traffic, which generally results in more business.
3. What does the public think about your chiropractic business?
Does your practice have a good name in the community? Public sentiment will show you whether your brand has a positive or negative image. If it’s negative, you have some work to do. It’s possible to change a negative business image, but it will take extra effort to help you transform that image.
4. Do you have online reviews and testimonials?
If so, what are they saying? Are your reviews good, bad, or indifferent? Did you reply to those reviews even if they were negative?
Having online reviews and testimonials is another aspect of branding. Most people turn to social proof from reviews and testimonials of others’ experiences to help them make judgments and buying decisions about a product or service they are interested in.
A review or testimonial is often the final leg of research people look for before making a final decision about which product or service they ultimately choose. Therefore, online reviews and testimonials are an extremely important part of branding.
It’s equally as important that you immediately respond to those reviews and testimonials, whether it’s a quick thank you, we appreciate your business or it’s in the form of a rebuttal or explanation of why something negative occurred and what you did about it.
By responding to positive reviews and testimonials, people will be able to see that you genuinely appreciate their business. This will also help confirm others’ decision that choosing your practice over another is the right choice.
However, if the review or testimonial is negative, that gives you the opportunity to explain your side of the situation. And if you are at fault, you can tell what you did to resolve it. This will show people that you are human and not exempt from occasional mistakes and are graciously willing to admit it and make it right. This will also go a long way when it comes to positive word of mouth versus letting people draw their own conclusions. Conclusions that are frequently wrong because they are based on only one side of the story. Again, branding by building your brand.
5. Do you have a high star rating?
What are people saying as they give you high or low star ratings?
Does your practice have star ratings across the different social media platforms such as Google, Yelp, etc.? Star ratings are another form of branding. People who are looking for a chiropractor will quickly look at your star ratings before going any further in their search, which makes them extremely important. So if you have low star ratings, even if they are unjustified, it’s probably costing you patients.
Anything that can be seen online or offline that represents your business contributes to your brand and how it is perceived. Use the information given along with your star ratings to improve or build on your brand and your brand’s reputation.
6. Does your chiropractic business deliver on its promise to help clients?
The absolute worst thing you can do is to not deliver on your promise to help your clients. Not doing what you say you are going to do is the quickest way to get negative feedback—feedback that often goes viral. However, if you deliver on your promises and go even further by going above and beyond what a patient expects, this is one of the best ways to get new patients. This is because, just like when people have a bad experience, they tell everyone they know. It’s the same when people have a good experience, they are so grateful they want to tell everyone about it. And online platforms and forums make that extremely easy to do in this day and age. Again, everything you do contributes to your brand and your brand’s reputation.
7. What value does your chiropractic business bring to the table that other chiropractors in the area don’t?
What is your unique selling proposition (USP)? Part of branding your business means doing things differently from your competition. Doing something that makes you stand out above the crowd. What do you do that makes people instantly recognize your practice as better than someone else’s? Are you known for a proprietary formula, procedure, or in-house product, etc. that your patients can’t get anywhere else? Think along those lines when trying to come up with something that makes your practice unique. Again, this is all part of branding.
Now let’s go over the assets that are traditionally associated with branding.
Branding Your Core Assets
One of the most important aspects of creating your brand and your brand’s personality is properly developing your core assets. You want core assets that will compel a potential patient to contact you or engage with you versus your competitors.
- Business name
- Logo
- Colors and overall color palette
- Slogan and tagline
- Voice, tone, and personality
- Design style
Your core assets across all online and offline mediums should match in color, logo, design style, fonts, voice, tone, and personality. So decide beforehand how you want your business portrayed and what personality you want it to have. Then make sure all your core assets match.
Your core assets and how well you maintain your online presence play a significant role in establishing your business’s “personality.”
Now let’s move on to building and maintaining your brand.
How to Build and Maintain Your Brand
You will begin by determining what your current brand perception is. But how do you go about doing that? You can start by doing the following.
- Ask your current patients what they think and how they view your practice.
- Monitor your practice’s business name for social media mentions.
- Analyze your star ratings and what people are saying about you in their reviews.
Next, you will want to review the following information.
- Your brand messaging – Are you conveying your value? Is your website copy clear and concise?
- Look at your digital footprint – Can people find your practice quickly and easily?
- Have you claimed your online directory listings such as your Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business), Yelp, and all appropriate social media profiles?
Lastly, you will need to perform activities that will help you build and maintain your brand and your brand’s reputation.
- Run a brand sentiment analysis to compare what people are saying about your business. Then use that analysis to improve on the positive aspects and improve or change the negative aspects of what people are saying about you.
- Actively seek more reviews and write meaningful replies to those reviews.
- Measure your total average star ratings across all review platforms.
- Run email marketing campaigns that send surveys and questions to your current patients asking them for their opinion about your practice. Ask them what they like, don’t like, and what they would change about your practice if they could.
- Organize your brand’s visual assets in one location. This will help you maintain your brand’s look and feel because you are able to view everything you’ve done from one place. It will also help you identify holes in your marketing and find things that look out of place so they can be changed or removed.
- Make it easy for your patients and potential patients to reach your practice using text message, email, social media direct messaging, and website chat.
Yes, that’s a lot to keep up with. And to do it right generally requires loads of tools and platforms to build, perform and maintain it all. However, if you use an all-in-one solution for all your daily marketing and branding tasks, you can easily manage everything without the hassle of having a variety of tools and solutions on different platforms.
So what should you do?
Attend a Surefire Local Marketing Platform Demo!
Let’s take a look at one of the top local marketing platforms for a quick, easy, all-in-one solution you can use—Surefire Local Marketing Platform. With the Surefire Local software, you can perform nine of the most important online marketing activities all from a single dashboard.
- Ratings and reviews (request, manage, and respond)
- Business listings (70+ directories)
- Content marketing (generate, schedule, and distribute)
- Lead generation (track leads, sales cycle status, and follow-up)
- Local paid ads (pre-built, location-based ad campaigns on any social media network)
- Analytics and reporting (insight, track, monitor, measure calls, web traffic, paid ads, and social media campaign effectiveness)
- Competitor analysis (keyword and local search term discovery)
- Geo-location check-ins (provide location-specific check-ins to help patients find your practice and give them important information)
- Text message marketing (answer questions, directly engage, and convert more leads by chatting and texting with your patients and potential patients in real-time)
This will not only put you in control, but it will also save you loads of money because you won’t have to continue paying for a variety of separate tools or a local marketing agency to do everything for you.
Why Not Let Surefire Local Help You Take Your Business to the Next Level?
If you would like more branding tips for chiropractors or more information about our services, consider taking a tour of our software!