Starting a new year can be refreshing, but stressful when we look over the year to determine the highlights and the lows and setting up new goals. The truth is, it does not have to be stressful and the common top goals for chiropractic offices are realistically achievable. In addition, using strong software that supports your goals can make your goals even easier to reach.
Step 1: Define your goals by finding office weaknesses.
Look over your practice to see what you would like to improve on. Sometimes this is not so easy to figure out – as small details hidden in the structure of how your office works can heavily affect certain outcomes, such as poor use of time management which shows you could have taken in more patients than you thought.
The best way to see office weaknesses is to look at chiropractic software that measures your office’s performance. It can be difficult to see what needs to be improved if you are constantly working in the environment you need to analyze.
Studies show it is easier to see solutions to problems others are having because of psychological distance. This means it is much more difficult for someone to see the actions they must take to improve their own office due to a locked perspective from working in the same environment – which leads them to hire outside sources to analyze and determine solutions for them. Digital Patient Chart measures your office’s performance from the inside and the outside – giving you a bird’s eye view to see the entire picture.
With software that collects data on how staff time is used, new and recurring patients, marketing tactics, and more – you can visually point out the areas that need improvement.
Let us use one goal as an example: Attract more patients.
It is easy to set up this goal, but how do you achieve it? It is at this point you want to investigate your chiropractic software and see what is affecting your ability to attract more patients. Is it time? Is there a lack of email marketing and engagement? How is your social media performing?
Step 2: Get specific.
Once you find out what your goals are, it is best to get specific. Yes, the goal may be to attract more patients, but that is extremely broad and does not help you focus on how many you should be shooting for. Let’s take this goal and make it specific by saying “I want 20 new patients per month”.
Step 3: Create small steps to achieve your goals.
Once you find out your office weaknesses, it will be easier to create small steps for you to reach your goal. Let’s say your goal is to attract 20 new patients per month and when you look at your software you see that you have not been using email marketing or social media consistently. This often happens due to how much time it takes to post and email each week. Let us be honest, it does take up a lot of time…but it doesn’t have to!
When we look at the goal “attract 20 new patients per month” we now need to see what it will take to get you there. If the software shows your email marketing is absent or below ideal along with social media usage, these marketing outlets can work toward you reaching this goal. Now, let’s break it down:
- 2 Facebook Page Posts per Week
- 3 Instagram Posts per Week
- 1 Biweekly or a Monthly Email Newsletter
The point for these would be to help educate and spread value to your current and potential patients so they can engage, share, and spread the word of your office. Plan ahead about what content you want to share and post and make it a variety that does not specifically stick to “selling” your service: sharing patient testimonials, helpful exercises or tips for spine health, etc.
To help with planning ahead, Digital Patient Chart gives you the ability to schedule email campaigns you create ahead of time as well as providing you with visually pleasing, ready-to-use templates to show professionalism.
Step 4: Measure your strategy as you go.
This is extremely important. To know if you are going to reach your goal, you need to know if your steps you set up are working. Digital Patient Chart’s ability to measure your office performance will let you see what is improving or what is still needing improvement. Seeing an overview of your office performance will help you tweak your strategy until you are satisfied.
As our example of using email and social media to help us reach our goal of "attract 20 new patients per month" – you might realize from Digital Patient Chart’s analytics that you are doing better in social media, but your open-email rate is lacking. This means you need to tweak your emails, change up content, and see which type of emails get more clicks. Digital Patient Chart gives you this vital information about how your emails and social media are performing and can let you know where your website clicks come from.
In addition, Digital Patient Chart oversees your entire office performance so no matter what your goal may be or your strategy, you can see the difference it makes based on the analytics provided. Knowing this information is crucial for setting up a strategy that works.
Don’t just make new year goals, reach them by being specific, overseeing your office performance, and measuring your strategies as the year goes on. Digital Patient Chart helps you achieve your goals faster by showing you which strategies are working and notify you of problem areas the office may have that could be negatively affecting your goals.