Chiropractic Print Advertising

BY: MIKE HAMILTON
INCEPTION ONLINE MARKETING, OWNER


In our office we had a great deal of success with chiropractic print advertising.  It was really the thing that exploded our practice in the first year.  Year after year we were able to reach out to hundreds of people, and our office quickly became the most well known office in our city.  The branding message we used caused my wife to become very recognizable in an area of over two hundred thousand people.


This Ad Generated 300+ New Patients:

Patient Generating Ad

The reason most people fail with print advertising is because they listen to what the advertising reps tell them they should do. Remember the advertising rep probably learned out of a textbook. Marketing is dynamic and you have to make on the fly adjustments to make an impact.  I’m going to show you how I was able to generate enough new patients to overwhelm most offices.  Some of our ads generated so many calls that we had to hook up an additional phone, and have a staff member sit there all day to answer them.  I think our record was over 80 calls in one day.  The final total from that ad was over 300.

Print advertising is easy because you don’t have to go outside to do the work.  You need to be a good writer, and you need to show your ads to a group of people.  Whenever I created a new ad our staff would sit together and look at it.  I wanted them to speak their mind about what they felt about the ad.  I can’t tell you how many times their advice made a huge difference in the final product.

We also used to gather newspapers, and go through them together.  The instructions were this… “when I turn the page I want you to instantly tell me what you look at first”.  This process helped us to design some of our most successful ads.


When we first ran this pink ad – we had so many calls we had to hook up another phone just so we could answers all the phone calls we were getting.  Front page placement was critical.

Pink Ad

Writing good ads is as simple as following an equation which goes like this:

  • Have a great title.  Don’t make the title overly crazy and make your office into a sideshow act.
  • There must be an interesting photo in the article.  Preferably something cute.
  • The article must be written in ordinary language.  I know you’re a doctor, but nobody wants to read that kind of language.
  • The article must be about someone that has a problem that others can identify with.
  • The article should talk about all the things they did to overcome the problem with no success.
  • The article should then move into how they found out about chiropractic, and how they were skeptical at first.
  • You can then tell the reader how amazed the patient was with the changes that happened.
  • The article should explain some of the other things that chiropractic can help.
  • The close is an offer to the reader to help them with the problems that they have.

That’s the flow of a great marketing article.  If you follow those steps I know you will have success.  The great thing is that stories that fit this model happen in your office every month.  Just tell the stories that are happening in your office, and you’ll have great success.

The videos below will walk you through some of the details of print advertising.


Print Advertising Overview


Print AD Placement


Print AD Colors


My Thoughts On Writing An Ad