Welcome, it’s December, Christmas time, holiday season. You can see the office is all decorated with presents and candy canes and all kinds of fun stuff. I love this time of year. This is probably my funnest season because we get to put lights up on the walls and just decorate all over the place, and to see the kids’ faces when they come to the office this time of year is just awesome, and they have a ton of fun. So, yes, I love this time of year.
But, again, my name’s Dr. Erik Kowalke. Thank you for ChiroSecure putting on this link to the children’s show. Myself and Dr. Monika do this every single month. Mine is the first Thursday of every month at 1:00 PM Eastern, and we go live with Alan and the crew. So thanks so much for ChiroSecure for hosting this and putting this on and getting the content out there. Hopefully, this is valuable for you guys. We like to keep this to 15 to 20 minutes and just give you some real tangible stuff that you could use every month and implement and see more kids and be more effective at seeing kids and ultimately push pediatric chiropractic to another level, allowing us to make a greater impact in the profession.
My office is in Grand Rapids, Michigan. We started in 2011, graduated from Life University. I’m also a part of SKED Incorporated, which does patient automation stuff and AMPED, which we help other chiropractors open offices. Yeah, that’s a little bit about me. But this specific episode I wanted to talk about just leveraging testimonials in your office, and this all started in this idea because if you Google search “pediatric chiropractic video,” there’s like 2.9 million hits in 0.59 seconds or something. But most of those videos on the first page, actually every single one of them, I think, is a pediatric adjustment video. So it’s a chiropractor that filmed himself adjusting an infant.
I’ve been talking to a lot of parents recently, and its interesting mindset-wise, because we been in chiropractic for so long that we just don’t see things and think about things like a parent would because we’ve just been in it so long. So some stuff doesn’t even make sense, like why would they even think that, because our minds don’t think like that anymore. So, it helps to get a parent’s perspective that has zero experience with chiropractics. I love doing initial day-one consultations with a mom that found us on Google or something, and it’s very raw because I really get to relearn like, okay, what are their objections? What are they thinking? It’s good I need to refresh myself like, “Oh yeah, this is where people are coming from.”
You’ll find their perception of chiropractic is so far from what it actually is and what we really do, and it got me into searching around a little bit. So I was like, okay, well what would I do if I was a dad and knew nothing about chiropractic, and I just started Googling some stuff on pediatric chiropractic? And no wonder what they think is what it is we do is so far from the truth because the stuff on the internet is so far from what we actually do. We really started to just leverage real testimonials in our office.
If you think about how we describe chiropractic care to new patients and families, most of it is subjective. We’re talking about how we find a subluxation. We’re talking about a subluxation. We’re maybe using thermography, SEMG, HRV. If they’re really little kids, we’re not taking any x-rays potentially. So, the objective evidence that we have is lower and the subjective is more. So people that are more skeptical are naturally going to… They can challenge all the subjective stuff that you’re saying. Well, real patient testimonials from real kids is, I would say an objective… It’s not objective, but how can you argue with a kid telling you that they’re better or a mom saying this is what happened to my kid. This is where they were and then we got adjusted, and now this is where we are?
You can’t really argue that, and I think the value that that brings and the level of trust that is developed through those testimonial videos between new people and your office is just extraordinary. So I would challenge you if you just thought right now how many fresh pediatric testimonials are people able to find, whether they’re on the walls of your office, whether you’re handing them out. Are you talking about them on your group orientation or your individual orientation? Do you have posters on the walls? Do you have stuff on your website? Is there pediatric testimonials with moms, like actual videos and pictures on your Facebook, on your Instagram, Twitter, Periscope, whatever you use?
It’s probably not great, and ours could be a heck of a lot better, and we’re really making an effort to do that. The few times that we’ve been able to get them into places where moms have seen them and they come into the office, totally different perspective. It’s like getting a warm referral because they trust you because they saw a mom tell them this is what happened to my kid. And so I just want to go through a couple of different ways on how we do that, how we capture them. What’s worked really well and what we’ve modified to just make a bigger impact and reach more people that’s been helpful.
The first way we started is collecting testimonial data from patients. So we started with just a sheet and we would hand-fill it out, or we’d hand it to them and say, “Okay, fill this out and bring it back with you when you come back next.” And most of them didn’t bring it back. So then we changed, and I think we use a SurveyMonkey now and we use it electronically. At the bottom they can attach an image, so this was huge. So first we just started doing the SurveyMonkey and then we tried to get a picture from them. Sometimes they would send it, sometimes they wouldn’t. So we figured out how to use SurveyMonkey and actually get them to attach an image to it, and then we connected that to SKED. So we use SKED to automatically send messages to all of our patients.
If Mary comes in with little Bobby, and little Bobby had an ear infection, two adjustments, his your infection’s gone. I say, “Oh, that’s awesome, Mary. Would you be willing to fill out testimonial for us and share this? There’s so many other kids out there and moms and parents that have kids with ear infections. If they only knew what you knew and had the experience, their holidays would be way better because they wouldn’t have to deal with ear infections.” Mary says, “Absolutely, I totally will.” “Okay, we’re going to send you a message right now. You’ll get a link to it when you leave the office. Go ahead and fill that out for me. On the bottom you can attach a picture,” attach a picture of little Johnny or little Bobby playing or smiling or the results of what happens when he doesn’t have an ear infection. She says, “Okay, great.”
All I do then is send a message to our front desk. We have a prerecorded message in our EHR that says, “Send testimonial survey,” and then they just pull up her name in our SKED dashboard. We have a template already set that has the text all filled out with the link to the SurveyMonkey, and so we just click Send, sends it to Mary. Literally, she walks out of the office. She has a text message and an email and a push notification that says, “This is the survey.” So she’ll fill it out, usually the same day within a couple hours, because we just had the conversation, attach a picture. It comes to us electronically and then we can turn that into whatever we want content-wise.
We can turn it into a document that we share in the office, which we do. We have specific testimonials in the office, a family of the month, kid of the month and practice member of the month every single month. We do new testimonials for those in specific frames in the office, so every month there’s new ones. And then we can also turn that into Facebook content because there’s so many people that have found us on Facebook now and found us off Google. So we try to get as much of that stuff out there as we can. And you can’t deny a picture of a smiling kid’s face or a mom with a kid. I mean they just, they just draw a lot of attention, and then the mom just tells her story. So that’s what’s worked really well for us. We’ve been able to get a lot of those testimonials that way.
The second way, and even better if you can do this, is to get an actual video, and it doesn’t have to be super fancy. With iPhones nowadays, the cameras are unbelievable, and you could just set it up on a little tripod or something and have a corner in the office. The biggest hurdle there is audio. You got to, has to be some appliance. If your office is busy, you got to try to find an exam room or somewhere to go and just have a, have it thought out ahead of time, okay, what are the three questions I’m going to ask them?
Have an introduction, know exactly what you’re going to say. Question one, what did you originally bring Bobby in for? Question two is, what were you thinking? Were you skeptical or what was your hesitation and how did you even come to finding this out to come into the chiropractic office? Because that’s going to relate to so many moms that you’re targeting. And then number three, what was your experience after you came in and you learned what we did and you felt comfortable and you moved forward? She’s going to say just awesome stuff to you. So those three things, you just keep it really simple, easy. It’s less than three, four minutes, if you can get, is best.
Capture that video, repost it all over the place, get the mom’s consent to do it. Get her excited about it and have her share it. Tell her exactly what you’re going to do, where you’re going to put it. Have her share it because she wants people to see it too. There’s just how much money people spend, chiropractors, on marketing, cold marketing, flyers, sending stuff in the mail, radio. I guarantee you your return on investment is going to be a 100X on doing this, spending the time, capturing the great testimonials and then putting money behind those, whether it’s Facebook ads or just organic and handing them out to people in your office than it would be just sending cold stuff out in the marketplace. So I really encourage you to do that.
So that’s what we should be doing about the problem of the perception of pediatric chiropractic and then how you should be leveraging your success in the marketplace. I would challenge you to try to do a new one at least once a quarter at the very minimum, releasing stuff on your website and on your Facebook and Instagram. If you can do it once a month, that’s even better, and then you want to make sure you have a Facebook Pixel in your website, wherever that testimonial video is because then every single person that views that will get captured into an audience that you can retarget with further ads.
And then if you work with social media people and you see other chiropractors in your community probably that have free specials and consultations and whatever. It works way better if you can, if you could hit them with testimonials and content and education, and then give them an offer to come in than just trying to give a cold offer, “Hey, come in for a free consultation of 29 bucks,” or something because you’ll get a bunch of people that want something for free, but maybe they’re not super interested. But if they watch a testimonial or they go to your website and you capture them, then you send them an educational video that’s related to that. So if I had an ear infection testimonial, I’m going to send them a three-minute video on why chiropractic care helps ear infections than just me teaching about it. They’re going to get that and then the next thing they’re going to get is maybe another piece of education, or then they’re going to get the video that is the offer to come into the office.
So just try to be strategic about it. I mean, you don’t have to be super crazy. Just start with something really simple like that. But those main symptoms, ear infections, colic, reflux, bedwetting issues in kids, scoliosis in kids, headaches in kids, back pain in kids, I mean parents know, man, my six year old probably shouldn’t be having headaches and they probably shouldn’t get neck pain or back pain. They’ll take Advil for themselves all day long, but they really don’t want to be drugging their kids for headaches. They don’t think it’s normal, and if they go in the hospital or their MD, they’re going to come up with something and just tell them “take drugs,” or tell them, “They’ll grow out of it.” So you guys are the only ones that are actually giving them a solution to help them. You just got to get it out there. They’re not seeing it, that’s the problem right now.
And so bigger vision-wise, like chiropractic as a whole and just reaching more people, if we can get this out there and everybody watching this… You get a thousand chiropractors that put a new pediatric testimonial out once a month, that’s 12,000 in a month. That’s 120-some thousand pediatric testimonials in a year. I think I did the math right, maybe 12,000. It’s a lot, right? It’d be awesome. I mean that would truly make a shift in the profession and it would change the Google searches and it would… You can’t deny that. I mean, an MD could say, “Pediatric chiropractic is so dangerous. I’d never taken my kid.” And they Google it and they see 10,000 videos and testimonials of kids get adjusted by chiropractors. They would totally discredit anything negative that they would say, but they’d say like, “Well, 10,000 people can’t be wrong, so it must work, it must do something.”
Honestly, I think that’s our best approach, just talking about chiropractic as a whole, reaching more people and getting over the stigma of it’s stuck to low back pain and that it hurts people and it’s whatever, that we’ve been stuck in for so long. That’s our play. I think that’s our best play. Get testimonials out there. You can’t deny that. We have already great research but they denounce that, and they don’t recognize it anyways and they can argue it. So can’t argue with mom saying this is what happened. I mean, even though it’s might be subjective and anecdotal, you get enough of them and it makes a difference.
So that’s my word for you for December. I hope you guys have a great 2019. Be super organized, prepare for 2020. We have our big team vision [inaudible 00:14:37] coming up, and we’re doing some fun stuff in 2020 and laying out the whole year. We know when all of our days off are for the team and all the big events we’re going to do. We know the themes we’re going to do for the year, which is why you always see this awesome stuff in the office. It just takes a lot of organization and preparation ahead of time to get all that stuff organized.
We’ll be back in 2020 but hope you guys have a great Christmas holiday season and go see more kids. Thanks, ChiroSecure.
Today’s pediatric show, Look to the Children, was brought to you by ChiroSecure and the award-winning book series, I am a Lovable Me. Make sure you join us next week right here at the same time. See you next week.
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