Andrea Maxim, ND

Practice Building

Target Your Marketing Efforts

I was asked by a first-year student, on their first day at the naturopathic college,

“What is it that you like the least about naturopathic medicine?”

This was such a change from the questions that most new students ask, such as:

• Should I figure out my niche now or is it ok that I don’t know what my favorite modality or disorder is?
• What should I do now to make sure that when I open my practice I will be successful?
• What are NDs doing to help spread the word about the profession? (ie, how easy will it be to hang my shingle and get new patients? My favorite question!)

So, I sat and I pondered briefly what it is about this profession that can be daunting, at least to me. The first thing that popped into my head was the number of hats that we have to wear as entrepreneurs. If you’re anything like me, you’re wearing the naturopathic doctor hat, the CEO hat, and the hats of every type of administrator needed to run your business. Unless you’re using your time wisely, wearing all of those hats simultaneously is exhausting and incredibly unproductive.

As a business owner, you must be territorial about your time. You need to block off patient hours from business and marketing hours, and separate both from personal time. The merger of any of the three will create overwhelm and mental chaos. So, in the interest of making your life easier, I thought I would help you examine your marketing efforts, and create a system that helps you prioritize your time where the return on investment is the greatest.

Marketing Madness

Remember the saying: The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Do you think your committing marketing insanity in your practice?

The most common places I see this is in blog posts and social media posts. You may spend hours writing a great blog and feel really excited to post it to your social media platforms. You hit ‘click’ and… crickets. Then you do the same thing again and you get tons of engagement.

The same principle with speaking engagements. Many practitioners are busting their butts creating presentations, booking seminar locations and spending hours delivering them. You leave the room with many promises from attendees that they will book in with you and… crickets. Then you do another seminar and get 5 new bookings.

Have you ever stopped to think about why some things are working, while other things aren’t? This is where tracking your numbers can make a big difference. In a podcast I recently posted on my website, I interviewed Igor Klibanov to find out how he created a 6-figure personal training business just through live speaking engagements. At first, he was like most of us, putting himself out there and not seeing results. Then he started to pay attention: Which efforts were converting the best? Which efforts resulted in the greatest revenue generation? Just by keeping track of his conversions from each seminar, he was able to pinpoint the best target market and how to direct his talks to convert more new clients. By taking action based on his observations, he has seen 7-fold growth in his business in the past few years.

Track the Results of Your Efforts

Never recreate the wheel. If this is something that successful people are doing, then maybe you should give it a try. Just create a spreadsheet and, from this point forward, keep track of every seminar or blog post or social media post that you do. Along the header, put in the following titles:

Title – Date – Content/Topic – # people attended /viewed – # comments – # people who contacted me – # people who booked an appointment

You may have more steps between engagement and booking into your office. If you’re using online lead magnets like free downloads or a video series, you will also want to track:

Views – Downloads – How far down your funnel do they go (stop at email 2 of 4? Watch your video or not?) – Book into your office

Once you get comfortable with this, I encourage you to also track extensive information on people who book in with you because of these efforts:

Gender – Age – Married – Education Level – # of kids – Age of kids – Income – Common health issues – etc

The more specific you are, the better you will be able to create targeted content, put it out there to a receptive audience, and watch the conversions significantly increase. Without tracking these numbers, you may continue to beat your head against a wall and not achieve the results you know you should be achieving. Five minutes of effort might just save you hundreds of dollars and hours of time in your marketing efforts.

Get Started Now

If you’re interested in other ways I can help you grow your practice, please check out my podcast, Profitable Practice, and my online course, MAXIMize Your Clinic. Enjoy! I hope to hear how this helps transform your practice this year!

Your #1 fan, Dr. Andrea.

Andrea Maxim, ND graduated from the Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine. She created The Maxim Movement – a movement that helps like-minded people move towards MAXIMizing their digestion, MAXIMizing their hormones, MAXIMizing their weight loss and, of course, MAXIMizing their health. To support her vision, Dr Andrea has completed her first book, MAXIMized Health: The New, Intelligent System for Optimal Digestion and Hormones, available for purchase on her website: www.TheMaximMovement.com.