Contributed by Kevin Christie, D.C. of Modern Chiropractic Mastery
One mistake chiropractors make when starting in practice is failing to position themselves appropriately in their community. Lack of guidance, understanding, and wanting to be everything to everyone are typically involved. Before we implement any marketing strategies, messaging or campaigns, we need to determine our position.
Positioning yourself effectively as the expert in your community around a niche specialty or small set of niches will allow you to grow your practice and command an appropriate level of fee-for-service. This is the first step in developing your clearly-defined audience.
We are all at different points in our careers and have different goals for our future. We are fascinated and motivated by different kinds of patients and the size of our practice(s). Only you can determine that, but I implore you to seek clarity and be honest about your current position in your community.
From there, the Roadmap (See NCAA Marketing Academy) can get you from where you are to where you want to be in your community.
You may have already positioned yourself strongly; now, you can leverage a well-thought-out content marketing strategy to ignite it.
In late 2018, I invested in Seth Godin’s Marketing Seminar, an online course. In one of the main lessons of that seminar, he discussed the X-Y Axis of positioning. The example he used here related to chocolate bars was fascinating.
100 years ago, the Hershey chocolate bar was positioned as Excellent and Inexpensive. Then, someone came along and added nuts to a chocolate bar and developed their own X-Y Axis of delicious chocolate bar with nuts. Dark chocolate arrived and was marketed as the healthy-option chocolate bar. Then, organic chocolate bars were developed and were able to charge a premium while being seen as considered healthy. All these chocolate bars targeted different positions in the marketplace. Subsequently, with other types of tasty and healthy chocolate bars, we now consider the Hershey chocolate bar to be standard and not as well accepted as others.
The take-home point from this example is that you can find your unique position in the market.
On the flip side, if you aren’t careful, other chiropractors in your community who practice great marketing and positioning may force you into a position you aren’t pleased with, and your practice may suffer.
If you positioned yourself optimally and spread that message with consistent content marketing, you can thrive no matter what the competition is doing.