Chiropractic Marketing With Dinner Talks

Last Updated: May 7, 2019

Not many weeks go by these days without someone asking me about chiropractic marketing ideas. In the chiropractic field there are so many different things that can be done and chiropractic dinner talks often become a topic of conversation. The problem with doing them is that they are much more difficult to pull off than most doctors realize. In this post I’m going to give you some idea of how we made this work in our practice.

Collecting Leads

One of the most difficult parts of doing a dinner talk is getting people to come to it. In our office we found a way to collect leads that produced almost an endless supply. Whenever we went to a screening we set out a very large lead collector advertising a free dinner. At larger events we could collect hundreds of great new leads to call.

Once we had a collection of leads we had our team in the office call them to explain what the dinner was about and how they could schedule. The key to this process is follow up. The day before the dinner it’s important to call all the people that have scheduled and you also want to mail tickets to them in the mail when they first sign up. Failing to do these extra steps will result in a very poor dinner attendance.

Picking a Venue

It’s important to pick a venue for your dinner talk that can be closed door. Trying to talk over the top of a full restaurant of people can be almost impossible. It’s also very distracting to the people at your talk. It’s never a good feeling to see people you’re talking to looking around at sound coming from other people in the room.

Controlling the Venue

When I say controlling the venue I mean a few different things.
The room needs to have a door you can close or be in a different part of the building from the rest of the restaurant.
The servers have to bring water and drinks out before the talk starts. They cannot be walking though the room once the talk starts.
Dinner needs to be ready to be served within a few minutes of the end of the talk.
Once the talk ends you need to have staff going from table to table scheduling appointments. If someone asks for a card they do not get one. If one person gets a card the whole table will ask for a card and not schedule.

The Dinner Talk

As far as what you need to say at a dinner talk I think it’s up to you. I used to tell my story about how I got into chiropractic and I described how chiropractic changed my life. I have pretty powerful story so that worked well for me, but you can think of something that is powerful to you if you don’t. I believe the most important part is to create an emotional connection with them.
This form of marketing is one of the most difficult that you can do. It seems simple of the surface, but if you miss even a little thing the entire dinner can collapse. Trust me when I tell you that we wasted a lot of money learning the hard way how to make this work.

On the other hand dinner talks can be one of the most productive marketing events you can do. Imagine having 30 to 80 people sitting in a room listening to you talk about the benefits of chiropractic care for 20 to 30 minutes. It’s hard work, but that hard work can change the lives of a great deal of people in your community.

You may also want to check out some of my other chiropractic marketing ideas here.

By Mike Hamilton