Steadfast Clinics are the distributors of IDD Therapy (Intervertebral Disc Decompression) and the Accu SPINA physical therapy machines. The ground-breaking treatment was developed in America more than ten years ago and is the fastest growing non-surgical treatment in the UK. Steadfast heads up the clinic network where in the UK there are around 40 locations with more clinics joining each month. It wasn;t always like this and the company’s Director, Stephen Small remembers the initial struggle to introduce the concept of IDD to a somewhat resistant market when they were first trying to launch.
The best way to describe the introduction of IDD machines was ‘disinterested meets hostile’. As with any new back pain treatment there is always a credibility gap until the trust builds. There is the view that something might be yet another gizmo. Certainly the initial perception was that IDD therapy was just traction, an outmoded treatment for low back pain, and since traction didn’t work why would anyone be interested? We definitely had our work cut out.
Those early days of our own attempts at marketing still bring me out in a cold sweat when I think back. Originally, I was advised by a senior spinal surgeon that the best target would be other spinal surgeons as IDD was the perfect adjunct. But with hindsight that was never going to work as spinal surgeons are specifically focused on surgery. That early marketing was very unsuccessful and very costly.
It didn’t take us long to realise that without a PR company on board we were not going to reach the right audience of interested parties. We thought, and now we know, that PR opens doors and lends valuable credibility.
Although we have worked with a few PR companies over time, working with Panpathic has been more than just a sales and marketing exercise for us. We had grown the business slowly, one clinic at a time, but then around two or three years ago when we were really getting established, we knew that what we needed was patient-led/patient demand for IDD treatment and without the right PR we were not going to reach that audience of interested parties.
Since taking on Panpathic we have had articles in Top Sante, Positive Health, My Weekly, The Sun, Woman and Home, The Daily Record and Pick Me Up, to name a few, and IDD treatment is more widely known and accepted, highlighted by its coverage in its own right by Aviva Insurance.
Working with Chantal and the team has been brilliant. It has helped us achieve strong and solid credibility and we have been able to get visibility into publications that really reach a lot of people. Panpathic has helped us to produce case studies which gets our brand out there to the right audience. If someone is looking for a solution for their back/neck problem they are more likely to be drawn to a real story where someone is describing their own personal experience of using IDD, much more than just reading an advertisement where a lot of the scientific stuff is going over their heads anyway.
I think anyone wondering whether to use a PR company or not has to first satisfy the question as to whether they are better off spending on direct advertising or trusting the PR company to build up their credibility through the sort of coverage that you just can’t get through advertising alone. For us it was a no-brainer and we have been more than happy with the service we have had from Panpathic.
We know that an article in a publication might not lead immediately to someone using IDD, but what we are doing by going down this road is building an archive of articles and with that comes the credibility we want. That’s real value for money in my book.
For us, the cost benefit for the coverage we have had through working with Panpathic is a far, far better return than any advertisement we could ever buy. People want to hear real success stories from real people. It’s genuine, and there’s no way we could have got those case studies into publications ourselves, that sort of exposure is way outside our skills set.
We are still breaking through the market but with the help of Chantal and the team we can definitely feel the crescendo building. I am not saying we are going to be the lead item on News at Ten anytime soon but we are definitely on the right trajectory. I have no hesitation in recommending Panpathic.