Planning Your Marketing Budget

Contributed by Kevin Christie, D.C. of Modern Chiropractic Mastery

When planning your monthly and/or quarterly marketing budget, you need to take into
consideration all expenses related to marketing, not just ad spending. A common
mistake I see is a chiropractor hiring a marketing agency for $1500/month and not
realizing that they will
also need to spend $500-1000 monthly on Facebook and Google advertising.
Here is a short list of typical marketing expenses for a chiropractic office.

  • Google Ads
  • Facebook Ads
  • Website Expenses
  • Fiverr Work
  • Email Platform
  • Marketing Agencies
  • Direct Mail Campaigns
  • Graphic Design
  • Print
    Marketing Return On Investment
    During my 2018 interview with Sam Carlson of 25th West for our Marketing & Business
    Virtual Summit, he discussed a phenomenon called “Lift.” Lift is the growth your clinic
    gets from consistent and effective marketing that you can’t directly measure.
    Sam discusses a chiropractic client of his that was seeing a certain number of new
    patients each month during the marketing campaigns implemented by
    his company. After a while, the chiropractor discontinued his marketing services for a
    couple of reasons, one being difficulty directly measuring the ROI. However, once the
    marketing was turned off, the clinic saw a considerable decline in new patients each
    month and decided to bring Sam back on. They had lost that marketing lift that their
    content marketing and the campaign were producing.

Sam calculates Lift by taking the growth of your clinic over the last 3 years and then
what it looks like after six months of consistent and effective marketing. That is Lift. That
is why it is imperative to know your clinic’s number of new patients, office visits,

revenue, profit, office visit average (what is the average office visit revenue), new
patient value (how much is a new patient worth), etc.

● Example of Office Visit Average: Each office visit, on average, is worth
$60.
● Example of New Patient Value: Each new patient, on average, is worth
$1,000.

Knowing these numbers will not only help you gauge Lift but will also help you know
how much you can spend on marketing to attract new patients and/or office visits.

Posted in Marketing.