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Welcome to the Look to the Children’s show for this wonderful month of July. Hopefully it’s sunny and beautiful or wherever you are. Uh, if you haven’t tuned into our show before, my name is Dr. Erik Kowalke. I filmed the first Thursday show of every month. Uh, Look to the Children with ChiroSecure. Goal and mission of this show is to just bring chiropractors real content for pediatric chiropractic care, spread the message of pediatric chiropractic care and give you guys some tools and assets that you can use to take back to your practice, implement and grow your clinic. And we got to give a huge shout out to Dr. Stu Hoffman and ChiroSecure and all they do for this profession, of course, to the host of this show. And they, they pour a lot into all the resources where this, so we’re super thankful and excited to, uh, just bring this content to you every single month.
All right, so I’m excited to get into a pediatric nurture campaigns. So if you’re watching this, that title probably caught your attention, and you’re wondering what the heck is a pediatric nurture campaign. I’ve heard of nurture campaigns before, um, but I’ve never put it in play in a pediatric sense or in a chiropractic office, nonetheless. And so the big concept of this is what do we need to do to communicate to parents posts signing on to care. So if you will go back and watch some of the last previous shows may and June, we talked about communication techniques prior to coming into the office communication techniques around the conversion process. And now we’re talking about retention and communication techniques around retention and retaining people and really educating them. And it’s a big fall off. I think for chiropractors, you know, our office is in grand rapids, Michigan.
We see tons and tons of kids. 40% of our office is pediatric. Um, and it’s, you asked the chiropractor, their stats, and they’re going to give you how many people they see every week. And they’re gonna give you how many new patients they see, and they’re gonna give you their patient visit average. Um, but most chiropractors put a ton of energy and time and focus on getting new patients. Uh, the conversion day, one day, two processing gave them started so that all this touch point, and then once the person signs on to care or starts care or gets their first adjustment, it’s kind of lackadaisical and left to the patient to kind of get more information and resources from there. I think it’s important to remember that people constantly need more information. You know, we, we, we think it’s obvious, but the amount of information they’re getting the first visit they’re in our office or the first and second visit, depending on how you do your day.
One day two is a ton of information. They’re retaining probably 10% of what you actually told them. And just imagine how they’re communicating it to the other people in their community, not only their spouse or their friends, you know, Hey, you went to a chiropractor, how did it go? What do you think they’re going to say? So this is the wild card is not only do you have to be a good communicator, but you have to communicate effectively enough that empowers them to be able to communicate it effectively to other people that they know, which is key to referrals, because if they can’t communicate what the heck you’re doing and how you communicate it to them in a simple, easy, you know, sizeable way, um, then you won’t get a lot of referrals and people won’t tell people, not because they don’t like your office because they don’t know how the heck to tell other people what it is that you’re doing just through the way that you were able to communicate it to them.
So these specific nurture campaigns, I’m going to go through just some quick 15, 20 minutes today, stuff that you can implement right away in your practice. And, um, maybe just shine some light on some areas that you can give more focus in your clinic, um, to hopefully improve retention of the kids that are starting here in your clinic and the families, uh, specific through ways of automation even cause we started skin. So we try to automate as much as we can by still personalizing it. So it doesn’t feel like a bot, um, but it’s automated so that you can do more with less time and less effort and less CA’s time and really leverage your, your time in your clinic to take care of people. But you’re still doing all this other stuff, um, that allows them to refer more people and get more retention.
So let’s start with pediatric nurture campaigns. What to communicate to parents after a child starts care, uh, is super, super important. So you got to think what you go through on your first day, one day two. This is what I would do. I would go through. What are the main things you communicate? What are you doing with your objective findings? Are you doing HRV? Are you doing thermal? Or are you doing SCPMG? Are you doing posture analysis? Are you taking pictures? Are you doing x-rays? What are all the objective analysis things you do? That’s great content to add into post care information and post-care education so they can sign care and start care and still have no clue really about x-rays or what you went over. They’ll just nod their head and be like, yeah. Yeah. Sounds good. Sounds good. And they’re thinking in their head, I just want my kid to stop wetting the bed.
So you sound confident and I kind of trust you. So whatever it is that you’re telling me, it sounds like, you know what you’re talking about and I want my kid to stop wetting the bed. So I’m going to say, yeah, and I’m going to just do whatever you do. But if you interviewed me afterwards and you’re like, um, you know, tell me what you saw in little Johnny’s x-rays and what that means. Most parents aren’t going to have any clue. So it’s not your fault. It was just too much information too fast. Use that to start to educate them, create an email that you could send to them that has that information. Like what does a normal, x-ray what doesn’t have normal. X-ray some of the stuff you go through in your day to just put that into a piece of education, it could be a handout.
You could send it by email, could send it by text message. We’ll talk about that. Get the information into their hands. I’d let them slowly kind of digest the information that you just pounded in day one and day two, uh, agreements. Hopefully by the time they started caring, you’ve gone over important agreements, but this is something I see a lot with chiropractors is we jump right to, uh, the plan without really addressing what is the main problem and getting an agreement from them on what the main problem let’s use a little Johnny, for example, like he’s wetting the bed. Uh, you would think the problem or the parent would think the problem is Johnny what’s the bed. We would think the problem is subluxation as chiropractors. The real problem is what happens, Johnny, what’s the bed. And now we have to change the sheets every night and he doesn’t feel confident enough to spend the night at friend’s houses and it’s affecting how he interacts with his peers and it affects his confidence and it affects our ability just to, you know, live our life because we’re changing sheets and worried about him when the bed, every single night, that’s the real problem.
And subluxation is, you know, obviously the cause if that’s what we could find and fix and correct and improve that child’s life. But communicating that on day one and really getting them to understand, Hey, this is the problem. What are the goals? So if you establish the problem, getting agreement on the problem, the next one is setting up realistic goals. Like what’s an immediate goal. We want Johnny to stop wetting the bed. What’s an intermediate goal. Johnny can then, uh, you know, sleep through the night without, you know, having to change his sheets and he can spend nights at friend’s houses. And long-term goal is we improve the health of his spine and nervous system. And, uh, he can never have this problem again. And in fact, he can prevent all these other problems from happening because he knows what good spinal health is. And we’re going to do our best to keep his spine healthy.
And, uh, his nervous system functioning at a hundred percent communicate and help the parent realize what are the goals? What are we trying to do here? Because your recommendations are always based on their goals and your findings. And so clearly communicating the goals, uh, is so important. It’s so easy as a pediatric chiropractor to be so excited to adjust them and take care of them. You know, they’re going to get better. You just want to get them on the table that you start adjusting them in the parent’s mind. They don’t really, they think the problem is just wetting the bed and all they want to do is get him to stop wetting the bed. So your plan is to start adjusting them right away. And they think, well, if you can adjust them and they can stop putting the bed, we’re good to go here without realizing, well, what caused it?
And what’s the plan to fix it. And two, I agree to that as a mom or a dad with their child. So all of those steps are really important. And then laying out the path on what it is, what is it that we’re doing, uh, to get them better? What are all the techniques that you use in your office? What are all the methods? What should the child or parent be doing, uh, you know, to help their child with whatever the condition is that you’re doing. And so you can go all the way from extreme ADHD cases to, you know, simple stuff like headaches and back pain and kids that usually resolves pretty quickly. Each one of those cases and scenarios, I’d encourage you to kind of see where your practice fits. What are the top five, most common things you see kids, and then set up some specific scenarios like this on, okay.
Kid comes in with this sort of a thing. Here’s a typical problem. These are the typical goals that we see and start treating your team around that. So everybody’s congruent. Um, and then finally develop the, the goals and you got the path, they know how you’re going to get through. They know what they need to do. And then you just present the plant around. This is what we’re going to do, and this is how we’re going to do it. So those are the agreements you’re getting from mom or dad prior to even them committing to care. Hopefully if you haven’t, I mean, we’ve all fallen into this trap. Um, you just gotta go back and reiterate this stuff. You’ve got to make sure they understand the problem and the goal and the path and the plan. And you got to make sure that they understand, uh, how they’re getting there and what really they should expect from your office.
And, you know, start, start educating them on spinal health, longterm, very, very important. Um, goals just went through that, uh, education specific to their child. So this is super important. Um, you can develop very specific pediatric education, which I’ve encouraged you to do film a video, uh, write a blog, post, whatever. If you’re a pediatric chiropractor, you’re passionate about something, tie it to awareness month around a condition. Or, um, if you read articles and you see that, you know, the childhood obesity rate is X or the childhood, um, chronic disease rate is so many percentage, do a piece of information on that to educate parents and start compiling this stuff you, um, content that you can share. So the problem we’ve had for so many years is there’s no lack of content that we have in our office to deliver it’s the ability to effectively deliver it.
So what we’ve always done is just printed it off in a piece of paper and we’ve handed it out in the office. There’s as many people as we can. And, uh, if you put a trashcan next to you outside your front door and you hand flyers out all day long, guess what that trash can is going to be full by the end of the day, all the flyers you were handing out. So you got to figure out different ways to deliver the information. And we’ll go through that at the end here. Um, don’t fret, the communication methods are so much better today than they ever were. And you can automate stuff. You can go back and find it later on. You can really utilize this. So you’re not wasting your time creating content to use ones that you’ll never see again. So education specific to their child is super, super important.
Um, and I’ll, I’ll show you through, um, SCAD, if you guys want to see this, this is how we do it in our office. We can take specific cases with kids. So, um, you know, I work with Tony eval a lot with pediatric experience, and he, if you hear the stuff he talks about raging bowl and, um, different scenarios around kids with disorders. So there’s a whole series of content that you can send kids that would be in the range category or, um, kids that are in the, you know, infant category. If you want to just keep it simple and do infant toddler, adolescent, teenager, you can create content for each one of those groups. You can tag those people in your software, and then they just get series of information that you set up. So you have specific, uh, nurture campaigns set up by condition.
I mean, imagine that you’re a parent and you have a teenager that got hurt in sports. You bring them in. You’re thinking, I have no idea what chiropractic care is. I just hope that this guy can help them. I get tons of information. My kid starts getting better, but I’m getting texts and I’m getting emails teaching me about what is a concussion? What, what, what are we seeing developing spines? Did you know, the sacred was five separate bones that fuse this together. Like all of this stuff that principal like, wow, I had no idea I’m getting all this content. So you’re just pouring value onto that mom and that parent and the dad. And you’re building value and trust, which in turn is going to pour through on retention and referrals. Guess what they’re going to talk about to their friends. They’re going to talk about all this stuff.
You’re sending them in the communication that you’re delivering and because it’s stuff they never heard before, and their mind is thinking that now because their child is experiencing it. So there’s never a better time to educate somebody that wants the education because their own child is having a thing. And so I, I can tell you this with pediatric chiropractic care, um, it’s almost easier to educate parents without have a child with an issue than it is with their own issue, because people can just deal with stuff. And we’re, we’re we’re you talked to a mom or a dad, or if you have kids, we care more about our kid than we do ourselves. So, you know, if you try to educate me on like, you know, you should be doing these exercises and stuff, I’d be like, okay, I’m fine. You know, my kid has an issue going on and I’m listening a little bit more intently around what you’re telling me, because I want to make sure I don’t screw my kid up.
And, you know, I could have done something that I didn’t do in 20 years from now. I’m going to wish I would have done it. Uh, and so you have the ability to really connect with parents. They’re listening more than any other patient that you see in your clinic or any scenario that comes in, um, definitely be intentional with it and be specific and create great content specifically for those kids. How do communicate with parents after your child starts care? Uh, this is stuff I just mentioned in person handing flyers out. It’s still fun to do, especially if you have a, you know, a busier office that they wait a while in your waiting room, and you can have a person that does experience in your office or a check-in CA that hands information out. And, you know, if you, when you were always doing so many events, like you look at this wall behind me, we do a big coloring contest.
Kids love coloring contest, and I love coloring contest and it’s fun. And I love just taking them all over the wall. So we do coloring contests all the time. Uh, but handing out like, Hey, this is an event we’re doing. This is what we’re going on. This is a dinner with the doc going up. We’re having our 10 year anniversary in August. We’d love if you could participate in, you know, all this information. So obviously in person, still awesome emails, we’ve made it so easy for you to do this. So if you, if you have an EHR system and you’re using skip, you can automate all of your nurture campaigns. Once you create it, once there’s templates, you can create it. Uh, we have templates for certain organizations. So if you’re part of the pediatric experience, we just, boom, check that box. You get all these templates that you can use to send specific nurture emails based on specific conditions.
It’s super sweet. We call it campaigns, uh, and then text messaging. Uh, if you have any ability to send text messages from your EHR or from whatever software you’re using, you’ve gotta be sending these text messages the day after they come in as a new patient, you gotta be sending them one week, two weeks, three weeks, all the way through week six, and then you gotta be sending them at three months, six months, nine months, 12 months at the bare minimum text messages and emails. This is education. This is bringing them this isn’t, uh, uh, a newsletter like this is what’s going on in my clinic. This is specific education to whatever their thing is. So if they have a teenage child it’s teenage education for six weeks, why is it important that teenagers get chiropractic care? If it’s an infant, why is it important that infancy of chiropractic care?
If it’s a pregnant mom, why is it important that infants get categorized to care and pregnant moms need chiropractic care? So it’s putting a little work in, in the front end of customizing this for who you are. So in our office, I film videos. I post them up to Vimeo and then I put a link in our skip stuff. And all these videos go out to welcome new patients and to, you know, educate them post, uh, starting care. And that has dramatically improved our retention. And, um, it’s no more, all I do is create at once and there’s no more work. You can automate that system in that process. We use sketch to do it. Obviously we created it. You want more information on that? I’d be happy to give it to you, but if you have a system that can do this, please, please, please update it.
Use it. It’s awesome. Uh, why communication after they start here is key to retention and a referral based practice. Uh, they don’t remember what you said. And, uh, I think what we missed, and I, I mentioned this in the beginning is they don’t communicate it to others. Not because they don’t believe in you or they don’t think you’re awesome, or you didn’t help their kid it’s because they don’t really know how to communicate it. So you’ve got to use very simple terms. Tony eval is amazing at this. If you can connect with him on specific kids stuff, or you, you watch his just sign up for pediatric chiropractic today, get in there, listen to this stuff, listen to these. Look to the children’s shows Dr. Monica burger is awesome, uh, later on in the month. And she shares so much good content that you can use, uh, to teach moms simply in deaths.
What, how do I explain what’s going on with my kid in a simple way? And that’s the mindset you want to be thinking when you’re communicating with a mom and you see them glaze over. I keep saying mom, cause most of the time mom brings the kid in, but, or dad, you see them start to glaze over and not really understand that’s that’s your key. Like, okay, this is important information, but they’re never going to be able to remember this. So what do I really want them to remember? And you got, and your conversation with that. And then that’s gotta be the followup message that goes in their email after their first day is the top three things you want them to know, you know, the top three things about teenagers that why they need chiropractic care at the top. You know, what is the goal?
What is the plan? What are we going to be doing? Um, why is that important that they stick to this frequency? Why is it important that they do exercises? Why is it important that they take these supplements? If that’s your, your, your game and what you’re doing, um, to help kids get better. So effectively communicate using text messages, using emails, using nurture campaigns is super, super important. So, uh, hopefully you guys got something out of this and you can take this back to your practice and you can start implementing one more thing to help more kids see more kids. Uh, obviously if you want more information from us, scan that life. My name’s Dr. Erik Kowalke can reach out to me on Facebook or Instagram. Uh, if you have specific questions or want to see how we run stuff in our clinic, I’d be happy to share that with you guys and, uh, go to our website 20 minute strategy call. If you’re interested, you can see what Scott does and how it works with your EHR. Um, but it allows us to see lots of kids and families really super easily, and, um, just provide an amazing experience so we can focus on all these coloring contests and sheets and all the fun stuff that we love to do as a pediatric chiropractic office. So hope you guys have an amazing July and look forward to seeing you again in August
Today’s Pediatric show children was brought to you by ChiroSecure.