Hey everybody. My name is Brandy Kinnear. I am a digital marketing strategist and the founder of Your Ideal Patients. I am your special host, subbing in for Dr. Nathalie Beauchamp today. I just wanted to do a big shout out to ChiroSecure for hosting this. Today, I really wanted to bring some wisdom on what the heck to do with your marketing during uncertain times.
Marketing has always been a crucial component to any business, but times have changed a little bit over the last couple of weeks, regardless of where you are in the world and in North America. One thing is for sure, there are some special tweaks that you need to do in order to get your message across to your patients in the right way. I’m going to break that down for you. I’ve got a little presentation I put together. If you’re ready, let’s dive right in.
Let’s start first with social media. What we have right now is unprecedented times with what’s going on in the world, but also unprecedented times with the amount of people who are actively watching and engaging on social media. If you didn’t already have a strong social media strategy, there is no time like the present to dig into this, because the audience is there waiting for you. The question at the end of the day is how do you go through social media right now? What kind of communication do you need to have? Who do you need to be? How are you going to stand up and stay present for your patients, current patients? Also, always remembering, this is a great opportunity to build new relationships. While anyone has quiet time, this is the time to build in a business and social media is a really great place to start.
Building relationships and adding value is really what you can do the most of at this current time. Now, I’ve talked to hundreds of docs over the last couple of weeks. One thing I know for sure is if you’re starting to take an angle on the conspiracy theories and the negative side of this and really creating concerns about the numbers and the data and all that, that isn’t necessarily what your patients want to hear from you right now. They want to see you standing up as a leader. You want to be cautious with any of the things that might be considered polarizing in a negative way.
Building relationships and adding value, and let’s just jam on how we can do that. The first thing everybody asks is, “Okay, what the heck do I write about? What do I post? Where is this content coming from?” I’ve been putting together some really simple things that you can do that are going to help you out if you’re feeling stuck right now, which honestly, almost every doctor I spoke to in the last month has been feeling just overwhelmed with trying to figure out business, trying to figure out payroll, and what they’re doing for the subsidies from the government, and cleaning supplies and all of that. But what my mastery is, is looking … I’m not a practitioner, I’m a digital marketing strategist. I help businesses grow. As soon as this whole problem happened, the first thing I said was, “Geez, how am I going to help doctors stand out as experts right now? What does their positioning need to look like online?”
I’m going to break down for you some of the key categories that we use in the agency when we’re creating content for practitioners. One of the best ones is engagement. Engagement are simple conversation starters. You can literally just be typing this in if you’re using Facebook as your platform, typing it in and just get the conversation flowing. Because conversation starters get a ton of comments if you do them right, this helps Facebook understand that what you’re saying is valuable. So get the conversations going.
There’s an entire list I’ve put together for some of my clients on what things to say, but why not asking, “What do you miss most right now? What are you doing to stay fit? Show us your homework station.” Start getting creative with actually things that you’re thinking of that are going on in your life and how they’re going to reflect with others, and just ask the questions. Do them somewhat regularly, because again, you want to feed Facebook, you want to give it the juice so that Facebook says, “Hey, this doc is putting out some really cool stuff,” so they’re going to keep showing your content to organically to your patients or anyone who follows you actually.
Problem solving, this is another key component. Normally, I would call this the educational component when we’re building out social media campaigns, but in the current times I’m calling it problem solving. If you were to sit back and take a look at all of the current issues, and I’m going to go with health-related issues because we’re really talking about an education/problem-solving solution that you as a doctor can provide. What are the current issues your patients are likely facing right now as it pertains to their health and something that you can jam on?
One of the biggest ones for chiropractors I’m sure is all the people that are at home on really bad office chairs and makeshift ad-hoc work stations that are putting all of their alignment off, their muscles are a mess, they’re stressed. I would also look at what it’s like communicating with husbands and wives that are home all the time and children, and what about staying positive and calm and getting enough exercise, eating nutritious foods, supporting a healthy immune system. I’ve been really making sure that doctors are clear on using the words, “Boosting your immune system,” has a lot of negative connotations right now. The FDA is coming down on people that are using these terms. I like to use, “Supporting a healthy immune function,” or, “Supporting a healthy immune system,” because it really gives that blanket coverage, everybody understands what it means, but you’re not making claims.
I’m a huge lover of chiropractic, I know exactly what it can do for health, but again, if we’re going to start getting into some of the things that might be polarizing in a negative way or attracting negative comments, supporting a healthy immune system. I mean, I work with a lot of functional and naturopathic doctors as well and I tell them the same thing. You can tell people what supplements to take, but don’t tell them that it boosts their immune system because you can’t actually prove that medically, scientifically. You just don’t have the references to back yourself up, so you get into this whirlwind where MDs might be commenting and people that don’t believe in the chiropractic lifestyle and this type of health management start getting attracted to your page and trolls and the whole bit. There’s a lot of trolling going on right now.
Current issues. Make a list of all of the current issues that people are facing and start sharing education about them. The chiropractic lifestyle is key here right now. I mean, chiropractors are probably the healthiest of all professions that I’ve ever met and there’s a lifestyle component to that, that you may or may not be sharing with your patients in your practice, but you might be doing for yourself. Think about the core things that people are needing to focus on, stress management, sleep, eating healthy, movement. If you want to get into really specific stuff as it pertains to movement, start getting into stretches that they can do and core exercises to strengthen. This is just you adding a ton of value.
Laughter is medicine. I love this part. I know not everybody is super funny and it can be really hard to figure out how to be funny on social media. My suggestion is to share other funny things that you’ve come across, if you’re not the guy or the girl that makes everybody laugh at the party. But sharing laughter and sharing fun things on your social media, it’s a great opportunity. Laughter truly is medicine. At the end of the day, people get a sense of who you are if you’re sharing some fun, light things.
If you’re being super heavy all the time, I want you to just think of social media as this party. You’re at a party and you’re just in a group. You’re not on a stage talking to people, you’re in a group. Everyone’s talking and you’re making some comments and people are sharing and maybe somebody’s cutting a joke. That’s what social media is. You want to make sure that you feel like you’re in a group and just giving some light information. If you feel like you’re on a stage and you’re talking down to people and you’re just educating all the time, it changes people’s perceptions of you.
Lifestyle is another great one. These are the categories that we’re breaking down for the content that you’re going to create for social media. The best thing I think everyone can do right now, if you haven’t already done this or if you’ve done this, remember to share it, is your story. Why did you get into chiropractic care in the first place? Why are you a service-based person that’s dedicated your life to changing the health of others? This story, if you haven’t already crafted it, I would probably recommend getting the StoryBrand by Donald Miller, it’s an amazing book. But start looking into your story and start sharing your story, because now it’s a great time to shed light on why you are the person that you are, why you’re standing and considering yourself essential and you’re front. You don’t want to be staying at home, you know that your patients need you. You’ve got to share that passion, so share your story.
Share what you’re doing at home. If you’re stuck at home, share some stuff, some fun things about your family, what you guys are doing to stay healthy, how you’re managing stressful times. I did a post for my group, my social media program, last week and it was all about the five stages of grief. If you really look at the five stages of grief, we’ve all gone through it in this coronavirus time. This is legitimately a grieving process that we are going through. You can start sharing some of that kind of stuff and make sure that people can resonate with you and learn a little bit more about you at a time when, as I said before, there’s a massively captive audience.
Here are some top tips for social media. If you don’t have a Facebook group and you’re feeling like you’d like one, now is a really good time to do that because it’s really about putting an audience into one place where you have a forum. If you took a step back and said, “Wow, I have all this stuff I want to say, where am I going to send it? Who am I going to share it with?” Well, there’s your Facebook page, your business page, your personal page, perhaps you have an Instagram account, maybe you’re doing videos on YouTube, but if you had everybody in one core area where you could communicate effectively with them or you are looking for that type of solution, that’s a Facebook group. You could be adding people to your Facebook group and expanding your audience at the same time.
Creating videos, videos are key right now. A lot of docs have been … Years, I’ve been trying to get some key expert practitioners to get up and do some videos and they’re like, “I’m not doing them, Brandy. I can’t do it.” Ironically, no matter how much PR training we did, now they’re doing videos because they realize that their voice needs to be heard. You need to be standing out as a health leader at this time. People need to hear from you, people want to hear from you. The best way to do that is through video. Pro tip, put a little bit of money behind those videos. If you’re putting out videos, spend a little Facebook dollars behind them and boost them out into your existing audience and to a new audience.
Repurposing your content. If I was to be jamming on how to build content for an hour, I would give you an entire process on how to repurpose content. Now, we’re going and getting content quickly so we can stay relevant and consistent. I would take a look at the content that you’ve been putting out in the past, change the messaging a bit to reflect the current situation, and just repurpose it. You don’t necessarily have to come up with new stuff. You do need some of those conversation starters, you do need to create videos, but some of the educational content that you’ve already created, it’s a good time now to just repurpose it. Be consistent. Audiences are active right now, showing up daily will be the difference between somebody who’s remembered and somebody who’s not.
We’re going to jam a little bit on email marketing, because while we need to be current on social, we still need to be connecting with our people via email. We have to understand that there’s all these different audiences, and your people on social might not be the same people on your email. Now is a great time to protect potentially cohesively bring them over to your Facebook and vice versa, but you need to make sure that you’re consistently communicating on email as well. What can you talk about? Current updates, successes that you’ve had for patients in your clinic, education. Again, go back to the problem solving, the educational content that you’ve potentially already put out before, spin it with new messaging for the current situation.
Lifestyle. Hey, we’re all in this together, right? It’s actually the most level playing field we’ve ever had in our entire lives, talk a little bit about that. Talk about what it looks like. Help people to understand that you empathize with the situation, you’re in it too and here’s what you can do together. Videos of helpful topics, sending traffic over to your social media. Listen, if people aren’t following you on Facebook and that’s where you’re doing all these videos, just send them some emails saying, “Hey, I did this video over on Facebook,” grab the link, put it in the email and say, “Come on over. I’m sharing tons of amazing stuff.”
Challenges, challenges and contests. If anybody’s got that fun vibe to their marketing or want to add in a little bit of a fun vibe to their marketing, challenges are a great opportunity right now. You could do a challenge where let’s say people are showing you their crappy work station or showing you the mess in their house after the kids have been homeschooled all day. Whatever creative things you can come up with, ask people to send in their pictures, their comments, comment on your videos, do a challenge. You could also do a healthy weight challenge, do a seven-day cleanse, do a weight-loss challenge. Have a little bit of a gift at the end for the winner and maybe the gift is gift cards from other businesses in your community or some kind of pay it forward, so money for the food bank or something like that. This is a time to really rally the community.
Then lastly, I really want to talk to you about leveraging your community. I have a business partner, Dr. Nathalie Beauchamp, where we do virtual summits. We’ve been doing them for a while and one of the things that we love the most about virtual summits is it really pools experts together and builds these amazing relationships. Now, you have the same opportunity to pool people together and build amazing relationships for your business, which you likely haven’t been doing in the past. A lot of people will start off their business and will join the BNI groups and the chamber groups and all of these networking groups to try and reach out and meet people, but then once you’re in business you kind of leave them to the wayside, you’re like, “Oh, it’s fine, I’m busy now,” and you stop building those referral relationships.
But I’m fairly confident in saying anybody on this call, everybody that’s watching this would agree with me that building referral relationships has been a key component to growing your business, and in fact, those relationships and those referrals are of the best clients that you can get. When people truly know who you are and what you do and they send you clients, this is the best, most organic, easy marketing that you could have. So why not use this time to start leveraging your community and building those relationships?
I have been putting strategies together for a lot of my clients where we’ve honestly wanted to go out and be part of different groups and share different audiences and just hadn’t had the opportunity. Now, timing is key. When I say sharing audiences, when I put together a visibility for a plan for my clients, I’ll say, “Okay, let’s look at the podcasts that you want to be on. What Facebook groups would you like to participate in? Who’s got a program that you’d like to share your knowledge on?” We would do the research and build it all out. Well, now this is the same thing. Why not figure out whose audience you’d like to be a part of and start building those relationships, because the fastest way to the finish line, and I’m not calling this, we have no idea when this is finishing, but the fastest way to growing your brand and building an audience is sharing in the audiences of others. Make a list for yourself and figure out where can you add value.
Actually, let’s go down to who can add value to your audience, because it’s not just what you can do for others, but it’s what people can do for you as well. Who has an expertise on a specific topic that you don’t feel like you’re an expert on that can come and speak to your audience, whether it’s just on your Facebook business page and you record a video and you’ve post it there and you boost it up, whether you’ve got a Facebook group, send it out via email to your patient list. But maybe there’s a nutritionist that’s local to you, maybe there’s a strength coach, maybe there’s a naturopathic doctor, maybe there’s somebody that does farm boxes or organic meat deliveries. There’s got to be a whole list of people that you could build relationships with right now. Maybe there’s a local health food store that’s closed because they’re not considered an essential service, which I know is completely shocking, but perhaps it’s a good opportunity to build a relationship with them and add value, have them come and add value to your audience.
I’ve flipped that on the same side is where can you add value to other audiences? Are there corporations or local businesses that have sent everybody home and they’re all working from these makeshift workstations and they’re not sure what to do. I mean, I personally need chiropractic care right now and I’ve been getting regular chiropractic care, so I’m already an active user of the service, but think about all the people that don’t know how to stretch, need to understand ergonomics. Maybe it’s more about health management, stress management, mobility. Whatever it looks like, now’s a great time to reach out to corporations or those businesses and say, “Hey, can I do a live webinar or a live Zoom chat to your staff at home and just help them understand how their worker ergonomics are going to longterm effect them if they don’t do it properly? Can I do workouts or stretching?”
Whatever that looks like to you, whatever you feel like you’re an expert on and you could share with your local audience, now is an amazing time to reach out and start building those relationships. Wherever you can put that information and whoever you can pool together, you should be making this as a priority, because let’s face it, it’s almost like going back to the stuff that we did grassroots when we were growing our business that worked and now we actually have time to do more of that.
I just want to leave you with this one quote, “When the dust settles, what do you want to be remembered for?” I guarantee you there will be people that have sat back and have been really quiet and haven’t done anything to engage their audience and stand up as a true health leader at this time and add as much value as possible in their community, and there will be people that are doing that and the audience will be listening to them. So if you want to really be remembered when the dust settles, now is a really crucial time for your business. Thanks, guys.
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