I recommend that you develop a class and encourage all of your patients/clients to attend, with spouses and friends, as soon as possible after they begin receiving your service. In my office I teach a two-part program based upon my book’s subtitle “Surprising Stories and Insights for Releasing Pain (that’s Part 1) and Restoring Whole Body Health” (Part 2).

Also, whenever prospects call us to inquire about insurance coverage or have other concerns and aren’t ready to schedule immediately, my staff invites them to attend a class. This can help take them out of “shopping for cheapest” mode into

People are struggling all around you, waiting to know about your life-changing solutions. What will you do to reach more of them? What can you do to truly shift the mindsets and behavior of the people in your community? You have a RESPONSIBILITY to bridge the communication gap between you and your public so that you can reach those who desperately need the benefits of your services.

Generally speaking, people desperately fail at change and the status quo thrives! Because of fear, the majority say “NO” to nearly everything other than the safety of the status quo. It becomes wired

A Unique Competitive Advantage (UCA) answers your public’s questions:

• Why should I favor you with my business instead of your competition?

• What’s unique about you, your company, and your services? And most importantly:

• What’s in it for me?
  

Here are 10 ways you can begin to answer those questions:

1. Benefits. What are the benefits of working with you? What do you offer (that others don’t) in the interest of better serving your clientele? It is important to differentiate here between a FEATURE (a statement of fact describing a positive attribute) and a BENEFIT (a statement of value that elucidates the

Mainstream is not a target audience. In fact, by trying to appeal to a target market that’s too wide, you wind up not really appealing to anyone in particular. There are people who can survive as a Jack- or Jill-of-all-trades, but they rarely thrive.

The world doesn’t need another mainstream service provider. Rather, the real opportunity is to find a niche and provide them with something they will walk through fire to buy. Even if it’s polarizing. In fact, especially if it’s polarizing.

If you provide something remarkable to a targeted niche and deliver it with passion, the idea can

The concept of generating traffic is universally misunderstood, especially by professionals unaccustomed to the idea of “lead generation.” Despite the decidedly “sales-y” sound of it, lead generation (or “traffic generation” if you prefer) is really nothing more than exposing your personal inspired message to the public for their own benefit. Considered in this light, it is not just your right as a business owner to generate traffic, but your obligation as a passionate service provider.

Since service professionals are masters at reframing their vocabulary, I’ve created some alternate terminology you may find more empowering. If the term “traffic generation” sounds a bit to you like you’ve had a fender-bender on a busy highway at the height of rush hour, then consider any of these equally acceptable phrases:

• visit initiation (you’re not generating traffic, you’re initiating visits)
• invitation offering (you’re offering invitations)
• relationship seeding (you’re seeding relationships)
• client opening (you “open” your involvement with clients)
• relationship opening (you “open” relationships)
• client origination(you “originate” client visits)
• relationship opportunity promotion (you are promoting relationship opportunities)
• audience outreach (you are reaching out to your audience)
• offer promotion (you are promoting offers)
• prospect mining (you are mining for prospects)

Business owners generally speak in terms of “cost per lead” or “lead-to-sale ratio.” But these statements neglect the most important aspect of leads: their quality.

I can produce 20 million leads for you tomorrow. It will be in the form a white pages CD ROM containing names, addresses and phone numbers of homes all over the United States. The cost will be approximately $0.000005 cents per lead. Your target audience is in there somewhere, but it’s not cost-effective to reach them that way.

It’s important to establish a “gold standard” prospect in order to know how to develop a successful marketing strategy. You have probably already defined your target market in terms of quantitative aspects such as age and assets, and for qualitative criteria such as willingness to consider your approach to healing and health. But we must go further to determine your ideal prospect, your “gold standard.”

To pinpoint the criteria of your gold standard prospects, ask yourself these questions:

Video Blog:
(Click on image below to go to video page.)

The most important marketing strategy for chiropractors–ever–is often the most overlooked. In this 23-minute video blog, I take you through the six things you can do–at zero cost–to implement this fundamental principle of good business.

I encourage you to take seriously the message of this video because all too often it is brushed aside as obvious. I’ll go so far as to say that you should attempt no other marketing strategy until you master this one. Take notes and consider what score you would give yourself on each of

Video Blog:

Transcript of Video Blog:

Today, we’re going to talk about how to differentiate yourself from every other natural health practitioner in your community.

The bane of all business owners is a public who sees their product or service as generic. This phenomenon has certainly not eluded the natural health care field, as practitioners struggle to set themselves apart from the ocean of alternatives available to each patient.

Think about some of the phrases that you hear out there.

• “You ought to see a chiropractor.”
• “Have you tried acupuncture?”
• “I think I need a massage therapist.”

Where in these statements do you hear anything about the unique offerings that one practitioner offers over another? The task of differentiating you and your practice from everyone else in the market is fundamental to your success.

The first step in the differentiation process is the development of what I call your Unique Competitive Advantage, or UCA. Before I tell you what that is, I want to focus for a moment on the word “unique,” which is often misused. Unique doesn’t mean extraordinary, or amazing, or exceptional. It means “one of a kind.” So when we talk about a Unique Competitive Advantage, we’re talking about something that nobody else offers.

The Unique Competitive Advantage is the distinguishing benefit you hold out in all your marketing, advertising and sales efforts. It is the philosophical foundation of your practice, and its essence should pervade everything you do.

To help you determine your Unique Competitive Advantage, I’m going to ask you one thing. Master this question and you take a quantum leap in your ability to create success as you’ve never imagined it. This is the single most important question because the right answer to it, as I’ll demonstrate, is the key to the marketing vault. It doesn’t just marginally increase things, it multiples them far beyond the ability of most people to even conceive. It’s that important.

Here’s the question:

• “Why should I, your prospect, choose to do business with you versus any other option available to me?”

And, when you have a great answer to that question, you can absolutely dominate your market.

Your Unique Competitive Advantage is a forceful statement that succinctly describes why a person should favor you with their patronage. Your UCA is what you say to your past, present, and future prospects and patients that is compelling, that is magnetic, that cannot be ignored, that must be responded to, that draws them to you like a moth to a hundred-watt bulb.

Once you develop your UCA, you must then incorporate it into every aspect of your marketing so that every point of contact contains the opportunity for your public to associate that unique offering with you or your practice.

I’m going to give you an example to consider, a model of one of the best UCA’s invented in maybe the last thirty years. What you want to do with this model is you want to take it home and lay it down next to your own Unique Competitive Advantage and see how they compare, and if they don’t compare very well, then it’s a good time reconsider your marketing message.

Video Blog:

Transcript of Video Blog:
Today we’re going to answer a very basic but important question: Just what in the world is “marketing” anyway?  When you think of marketing, what comes to mind? An advertisement? A direct-mail letter? Yellow-page listings?

If I mentioned “public relations,” you would probably agree that that was marketing, too, right? How about your printed materials, or the sign in front of your office? But if these are all different aspects of marketing, if marketing encompasses such a wide variety of disciplines, then how can we define what it is?

If you type the phrase “definition of marketing” into Google, you’ll get some interesting results. Here’s one:

“Marketing is an integrated communications-based process through which individuals and communities discover that existing and newly-identified needs and wants may be satisfied by the products and services of others.”

Wow. That’s a mouthful!

The American Marketing Association says that “Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”

Well, that’s a little better. . .

Here’s one that’s simpler still: The Chartered Institute of Marketing, defines marketing as “The management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably.”

There’s nothing wrong with any of these definitions, except that they’re a little bit hard to carry around in your head for easy reference as you’re planning your activities. So here’s my definition of marketing,  which is as practical and fundamental as I can make it:

I’m not a doctor and I don’t pretend to know the first thing about what doctors do. But I have spent my life studying marketing and to be frank, that’s something not many doctors know much about.

So we’re going to have some fun exploring the wonderful world of marketing and in the process, we’re going to show you how to create amazing systems that:

• Make your job easier

• Save you money

• Increase your profits

• Help more people benefit from your healing wisdom

To those who don’t make it their business to master it, there’s nothing more confusing than marketing. In my 20+ years of consulting, I’ve only met a handful of business owners who could even properly define what it is. That’s why we’re going to start with a definition.

What is Marketing?

Many people use the term marketing interchangeably with advertising, sales, public relations (PR), or promotion. Others think it is the umbrella that encompasses all these concepts. If someone tells you they are a marketing rep, they could be a salesperson, a copywriter, an order taker, a manager, a PR person, or any of a dozen other jobs.

So what is marketing really?