Do you know the value of your holistic practice’s online reputation? Research shows that 63% of patients choose one provider over another based on a strong online presence – that’s a major win for those who capitalize on these opportunities.
As patients leverage the internet to discover and research different holistic providers, appealing to your online audience is more important than ever, even if you’re not currently accepting new patients.
Let’s dive into a cornerstone of your practice’s online reputation: your website.
Why Does Your Holistic Practice Need a Website?
A website demonstrates authority and validates your presence, both online and your physical existence within your community. Your practice’s website is where you can further drive patient engagement, distinguish yourself from the competition, and empower patients to learn more about you. It’s a tremendous resource to leverage!
How Does Your Website Impact Your Online Reputation?
The truth is that your online reputation is being shaped whether you’re managing it or not, so it behooves you and your practice to steer the digital ship. Your website is your comprehensive path into the digital buzz around your practice and can help communicate important information to your patients and those shopping around for the best care.
You always want to put your best foot forward, right? Creating and maintaining your holistic practice’s website is a surefire way to do that. Since the possibilities are endless, there are countless ideas and methods to use when crafting your site, but the most important thing is to put forth your best representation of who you are and what your practice strives to do.
5 Things to Feature on Your Holistic Practice Website
Your options are nearly limitless, but here’s where we recommend you start with including on your practice’s site:
Mission Statement, Guiding Principles, and Other Foundational Writings
Your holistic practice’s mission statement is a core piece of writing that should absolutely be featured on your website. But why stop there? Consider including a section or page that features your practice’s foundational writings so that patients can reference them. This will help distinguish you from the competition and shape a meaningful online reputation.
About Us
Everyone loves a good origin story; share yours with the world on your holistic practice’s website! Potential patients in the research phase will connect well with learning more about you, how you got started, and what drives you – and current patients will build a deeper connection to your practice, too. Your “About Us” page is a core element of shaping your practice’s online reputation.
Links to Social Media Accounts or Other Platforms
If your holistic practice isn’t utilizing at least one social media platform, then you could be missing connections with a multitude of patients. Your practice’s website and social media accounts are perfect complements to each other which means you should link them together when possible. Point website visitors to your social media accounts and vice versa to further affirm your practice’s online reputation.
Contact Us, Location Details, Hours of Operation
Your patients finding you online is awesome, but at some point, they’ll need to visit your practice in-person. Be sure to include pertinent details to make this happen, including contact information, location details, hours of operation, and more.
Blogs or Articles Relevant to Your Specialty and Interests
Sharing your thoughts on new developments within your specialty, writing a response to other thought leaders in the industry, spreading the news about upcoming events and why they matter to you are just a few things you can write about for a blog on your website. You don’t have to be a great writer to get started – just taking a few minutes to write can help you further connect with your patients and start a conversation with them!
Want More Time to Refine Your Online Reputation? Partner with Holistic Billing Services!
We know all too well that a huge burden for holistic practices is the medical coding and billing process. It’s cumbersome, complicated, and can lead to a multitude of issues with your revenue cycle if not properly managed. None of these features bode well for your goals of developing a website and distinguished online reputation.
That’s where the friendly, knowledgeable experts at Holistic Billing Services come in! We have decades of experience and expertise in your specialty, so rest assured that we know how to handle your revenue cycle. Ditch the mountain of paperwork and frustration with rejected claims – we’ve got it all covered!
Let us take on the burden of medical billing so you can focus on what matters most: your patients.
Did you know that the US chiropractic industry is worth around $15 billion? Chiropractors treat approximately 35 million Americans annually and that figure is only growing as people continue to turn towards holistic treatments to help their ailments.
If you’re wondering how your chiropractic practice can attract new patients while retaining current ones, then your marketing strategy is one of the core features of your operations to evaluate and refine.
From leveraging word of mouth referrals to encouraging your patients to leave reviews, we’ll dive into a few top marketing tips for chiropractors that can help promote your practice in a sustainable manner.
Keep reading to learn more!
How Much Should You Budget for Advertising Your Chiropractic Practice?
One of the immediate questions you likely have for any facet of your practice is about cost: how much something will cost, how can you be sure it’s worth it, how much effort will it take you to execute, etc. are all valid queries. Marketing efforts are no exception, of course.
It’s recommended that you spend around 5% of your gross revenue on marketing efforts if you want to maintain your practice and somewhere between 7% and 15% of your gross revenue if you’re wanting to expand and scale your practice.
For example, if your gross revenue is $10,000 per month then you should put aside $500 for marketing initiatives. Of course, marketing budgets can change over time and other factors come into play, so these numbers are all relative to your particular practice and goals.
What Is a Customer’s Lifetime Value + How Does It Impact Your Marketing Efforts?
Your patients are how you keep the doors open–or rather, the profits you garner from delivering great chiropractic care to them are how you keep the doors open. But how can you estimate the financial gains your practice will earn from each patient?
That’s where knowing a customer’s lifetime value is the ace up your sleeve. Abbreviated as CLV, this formula helps you anticipate the total financial worth of a patient at your chiropractic office. This math can be applied to any industry and is especially helpful to those working in the healthcare and service fields.
A customer’s lifetime value can be calculated in the following way:
Average Annual Value x Relationship Years + Patient Referral Value
= Customer Lifetime Value
Let’s put this into practice and say you have a patient who visits your chiropractic practice once a month and each visit costs $100. The total revenue generated is $1,200 and you factor in a 20% profit margin, so the Average Annual Value of that patient is $240.
Let’s say this patient continues to visit your practice for 5 years before moving to another state; the math would shake out to this:
AAV ($240) x Relationship (5 years) = $1,200
When you start consistently tracking this metric at your chiropractic practice, you can leverage marketing tactics and strategies around pricing, sales, patient referrals, patient retention, and more in order to reduce costs and boost your profits.
After all, knowledge is power–when you know what to financially anticipate from a typical patient over the course of their relationship with your practice, you can make better informed decisions about how you engage them.
For example, if you know that an average CLV at your chiropractic practice is about $500, then you wouldn’t want to exceed that figure for your marketing budget.
Take a Crack at These Marketing Tips for Chiropractic Practices
Ready to revamp or ramp up your marketing efforts to maintain or scale your chiropractic office? Check out these marketing tips:
Keep Your Website Updated and Accessible for Mobile Users
Everything and everyone are online these days, so it’s imperative that your practice has a solid website that looks professional. Potential patients will find your website while searching for chiropractors to check out, so having a nice website that reflects you and your practice can help distinguish you from the competition.
In addition to ensuring that your site is optimized for mobile users, which is a feature in most DIY website building platforms, consider including the following:
- A section that outlines your background and the values that guide your practice
- Your mission statement
- Contact information, hours of operation, location details, and more
- A place for announcements or specials
- Social media links
- A blog where you demonstrate your expertise and interests through engaging articles
- Link to leave a review on Google and other rating sites
- And more!
Personalizing your site will help clients, both new and existing, learn more about you; building that relationship is critical to long-term success!
Get Engaged with Your Community
Engaging with your community can take form in a multitude of ways, ranging from hosting an open house to sponsoring a little league team or offering discounts for first responders and veterans. Whatever you’re passionate about, see if there’s an existing event or organization you can connect with–or start your own initiative to spread the word! This demonstrates your care for those in your community and helps raise awareness of your practice and values.
Don’t Ignore Social Media Platforms
Just about anything can go viral these days–why not a montage of your crunchiest chiropractic cracks? Or maybe you have a charming parakeet in your waiting room that the internet would love to meet. Regardless of the potential to go viral, utilizing social media platforms is a no-brainer to connect with your patients and keep them informed of what you have going on each month.
Wish You Had More Time to Get Creative with Marketing Strategies? Partner with Holistic Billing Services!
Marketing efforts can take creativity to ideate, time to execute, and energy to maintain and track–if you’re swamped with your medical billing and coding processes, then you already don’t have the bandwidth to pursue this important component of your practice!
Your friendly experts here at Holistic Billing Services completely understand where you’re coming from, and we have the experience you need to support your revenue cycle. From accurate coding and prompt submission of claims to answering your questions and keeping up with healthcare legislation, we’re here to help you succeed!
One of language’s inherent qualities is the capacity to have more than one way of saying the same thing—or at least, what might be perceived as the same thing. There seems to be another way of phrasing something in countless cases, which can be helpful for connecting the dots between ideas or it can result in the feeling that you can’t quite find the right word you’re thinking of.
Holistic medicine is no exception, especially when it comes to the connection between your practice, your patients, and the general public who may or may not know a lot about the intricacies of holistic medicine.
That’s why it’s helpful to take a step back to see how people might be referring to holistic medicine, such as integrative medicine or functional medicine, and then dive into the various terminologies to see where they overlap and where they differ.
In this article, we’ll break down a few popular terms for holistic medicine and discuss why it’s relevant that your practice is aware of them, too.
How Is Integrative Medicine Defined?
Let’s begin with answering the question: what is integrative medicine and how is it defined?
According to the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona, integrative medicine is defined as “healing-oriented medicine that takes account of the whole person, including all aspects of lifestyle. It emphasizes the therapeutic relationship between practitioner and patient, is informed by evidence, and makes use of all appropriate therapies.”
They’ve further defined 8 principles of integrative medicine, including points like:
- Patient and practitioner are partners in the healthcare journey
- Medicine and treatments are grounded in evidence that proves their effectiveness
- Natural and less invasive interventions should be used when appropriate and when proven to be effective
- And more!
Integrative medicine differs from holistic medicine because it involves a global approach to healing, including Western techniques and Eastern medicines.
What Is Functional Medicine?
Integrative medicine is often interchangeably referred to as functional medicine—but this isn’t entirely accurate.
Whereas integrative medicine strives to leverage any kind of medicine, treatment, technique, etc. to help the patient on their wellness journey, functional medicine aims to address the root cause of illness by enabling optimal functions of the body and organs.
The Institute for Functional Medicine explains that “the precise manifestation of each cause [of disease] depends on the individual’s genes, environment, and lifestyle, and only treatments that address the right cause will have lasting benefit beyond symptom suppression.”
Functional medicine differs from integrative medicine in terms of approach; where integrative medicine seeks to utilize a variety of methods and techniques from around the world and different traditions, functional medicine starts with a deep dive into the patient’s individual make-up.
Other Terms for Holistic Medicine & What They Mean
Let’s dive into a few other common terms related to holistic medicine and what they mean:
- Homeopathic medicine: This is a particular approach to healing that utilizes plants and minerals to help the body heal itself; there aren’t any regulated certificates or official trainings for homeopathy and this genre garners doubt and skepticism regarding how effective it is
- Alternative medicine: This is a catch-all term that relates to anything beyond the traditional Western medicine approach, methods, techniques, etc.
- Naturopathic medicine: An ND is a medical license that uses natural substances to balance a patient’s internal chemistry; NDs are considered primary care physicians, although not every state supports this medical degree
Why It’s Important to Know How to Define Various Terms for Holistic Medicine
Patient education efforts are always a good idea and can take shape in countless ways; one way is to help define various terminologies for your patients to learn more about holistic medicine.
Articulating the various terms that people might refer to your practice can help them realize the intricacies and multiple facets of the work that you do, which leads to a deeper appreciation and can encourage more dialogue between you and your patients, your patients and the general public.
Gaining an awareness and better understanding of the different phrasings people might have for your practice is also beneficial on the marketing front.
For example, people in your community might be looking for “integrative medicine” on the internet instead of “holistic medicine”. By knowing this and learning more about your potential clients, you can target those keywords if they resonate with your practice, or, at the very least, you can provide educational material explaining what other terms mean.
Putting yourself in the potential client’s shoes can help you understand their thought process, connect with them in a more meaningful way, and build better relationships.
What’s In Holistic Billing Services’ Name? More Time and Energy for Your Holistic Practice
We know that operating a successful, impactful holistic practice requires a plethora of skill sets, time, creativity, and more. You have to wear many hats, which can get overwhelming and result in mounting frustrations and impatience.
But what choice do you have? When it comes to the medical billing and coding process, the burden doesn’t have to fall on your shoulders alone. That’s where Holistic Billing Services is the ace up your sleeve!
With our friendly experts by your side, you’ll enjoy an optimized revenue cycle, accurate claim submissions, prompt payment, and most importantly, more time and energy for your holistic practice.