Dos and Dont's of Creating Patient Education and Promotional Materials

Your patients come to you in search of guidance and advice about certain topics. Sharing educational materials -- not only online through your chiropractic website and blog, but also in the form of physical handouts -- can help go a long way in helping to maintain a healthy relationship with your patients after they walk out the door. Best of all, you don’t have to spend a lot of time or money to create quality materials that educate and inspire your current and future patients.

In this article, we’ll focus on providing advice for creating physical handouts to help educate patients and promote your chiropractic practice. These materials are meant to supplement, rather than replace, your content marketing.

DO: Repurpose as much content as you can

Many chiropractors have difficulty finding the time to create educational materials for their patients. However, you likely already have more content available than you already know. This means that you can create items without having to invest time in researching topics. For example, every time you publish a blog post or email newsletter, you can print it out and share it with your patients at the end of their appointment. You can also distribute these materials to current and prospective patients at networking events. Another option is to simply create materials/collateral that share news and facts about your practice (new/existing services you offer, FAQs about visiting your practice, etc.).

DON’T: Skimp on quality

Many chiropractors believe that printing out a brochure or a print version of their email newsletter is better than doing nothing at all. While that may be true in some cases, this strategy is certainly much more effective if you actually spend a few minutes on making these materials appear as professional as possible. You don’t need to have a graphic design degree, but you should aim to make your materials look as flawless as possible.

Thankfully, there are many free tools out there to help you create visually appealing brochures/pamphlets and business cards that you can share with your current and prospective patients. For example, Canva is a free graphic design software that makes it easy to create visually appealing assets that you can print out and share with your patients.

Canva chiropractic templates

DO: Remember to include your contact information on everything you give out

Even if you don’t currently have time to publish blog posts or create any other sort of content from scratch, you can still create physical items to share with your patients, like appointment reminder cards and business cards. Once you’ve figured out a good vendor to help print out those materials, all you have to do is train your staff to hand these items to patients before they walk out the door. You can also give them out to anyone you meet at community/networking events. Most importantly, remember to include contact information for your practice, such as your physical address, email, and phone number, so that current and prospective patients will know exactly how to book an appointment or ask you questions when they do eventually need to seek out chiropractic care.

DON’T: Get complacent

Once you get the ball rolling on educational materials, you should experiment with new ideas, and gauge how your patients respond. This means that once you’ve printed out patient brochures and home care guides, you should experiment with new types of content forms like infographics, postcards, and maybe even branding-focused take-home items that are inexpensive, but still help promote your practice. Ideas for such items include branded ballpoint pens (about 50 cents each), keychains, calendars, stress balls -- anything that you think your patients would want to take home and use. As your patients continue to use these items at home, they will be more likely to remember who to contact when they need chiropractic care. These items are also a great way to promote awareness of your practice at networking events.

Bruce Hogan

Bruce Hogan is Co-founder & CEO of SoftwarePundit. He leads the team's research and publishes content about software products and trends. Bruce has experience investing at multi-billion dollar private equity firms, leading teams at venture-backed technology companies, and launching new businesses. You can connect with Bruce on LinkedIn.

Bruce is an expert in several software categories including:

  • Dental software
  • Mental health software
  • SEO software
  • Social media software

Comments and Questions