Marketing 101 for Chiropractors
Digital marketing is evolving faster than ever, and as a chiropractor, you're not just a healthcare provider—you’re also the CEO and marketer of your practice. Without a solid grasp of marketing fundamentals, it's easy to fall for one-size-fits-all strategies that waste time and money.
Join us as we break down proven, cost-effective, and innovative marketing tactics designed specifically for chiropractors. From social media mastery to Google Ads that convert, we’ll equip you with the tools to attract more patients, build lasting relationships, and dominate your local market. Stay ahead, stay profitable, and take control of your practice’s growth!
Marketing 101 for Chiropractors
Maximizing Patient Engagement and Compliance
Is your chiropractic practice ready to navigate the ever-changing landscape of digital marketing? Discover crucial insights with Dr. Enrico Dolcecore as he unravels the latest digital marketing strategies every chiropractor needs to know. With Meta's sweeping privacy updates reshaping Facebook and Instagram advertising, Dr. Dolcecore highlights the urgent shift towards landing pages to remain HIPAA compliant and avert potential ad account suspensions. We explore why digital agencies are reallocating budgets from Meta to Google and how landing pages enhance ad effectiveness across platforms, ensuring your practice stays ahead of the curve.
In our conversation, we stress the importance of contingency planning in marketing strategies. Learn how to safeguard your practice from disruptions like account suspensions or tech changes by diversifying your advertising efforts. Dr. Dolcecore offers actionable advice on harnessing the power of referral marketing through robust community engagement and networking. Strengthen your local connections and communicate your services effectively to build a reliable patient base. As we approach 2025, ensure your practice thrives by embracing these strategies and maintaining compliance in an ever-evolving digital world.
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- Book a free discovery call with Enrico to level up your business
Welcome to another episode of Marketing 101 for Chiropractors. I'm Dr Enrico Dolcecori and, just like every week, another podcast on another Friday. This is a huge public service announcement for all chiropractors we're going to talk about. We're going to spin this into landing pages in a second, but Meta has been on a tear since the beginning of 2024, so over a year. They're doing an overhaul on privacy. If that is the true fundamental thing of what they're doing, great. If not, who knows what they're doing on the back end? But they're strictly saying that privacy is an issue here.
Speaker 1:European countries have been suing as far as how they're collecting data. You've seen a lot of pixel changes over the years, but over the last 12 months, privacy has been the ringing bell for meta, so Facebook and Instagram, and they're really locking down on this. Now. The next step to this is now they're going through all their industries and saying, okay, where are we slipping through the cracks on privacy? And how we're tracking and how we're cooking and how we're? You know anyone that uses the Facebook platform? But not only that. Are our advertisers breaking any privacy issues here? And it's starting to trickle into the Facebook form which many of you use for your ads. I don't know if the digital agencies are all on this I hope they are but what's happening with the Facebook form is now they're saying okay, well, privacy, privacy equals HIPAA. Hipaa equals healthcare. What's happening under HIPAA? Collecting a patient's name, phone number and email could be a HIPAA violation and a privacy violation for healthcare providers, because they will put in this information on Facebook. They'll fill out your form, they'll reply to your ad on your offer and give you their information. All okay at that point. But once you make the call to them and they do book in as a patient, they become a healthcare patient. So now, how did you obtain their data? And now they're going to say that HIPAA. We're breaking HIPAA laws by taking those that information and processing it through an unsafe process through Facebook forms, which is non-HIPAA compliant. Unfortunately, facebook never made this, but from the back end, from my perspective, I would argue it is HIPAA compliant because you are the owner of your ads account. No one else can really see all that information, but with CRMs and everything that happens and how they can integrate with Facebook from third parties, they can take that data and put it into non-HIPAA compliant systems, which things like high level claim to be HIPAA compliant, but a CRM can be argued as non-HIPAA compliant because it took that data from another source.
Speaker 1:Anyways, long story short, what does this leave us? You're going to have to pivot very quickly here now, today, and switch towards landing pages. Now you're going to say Enrico, come on, don't do this to me, man. You've been talking for three years about landing pages versus forms. You've led us to forms because less friction to transaction. The patient gives us the information we follow through with good CRMs, good texting and emailing. Right when they fill out the form, our team calls them as fast as possible. We do all the right things to convert as many leads to new patients as possible. It's been working. Don't do this to me. Well, it's not me, it's meta, so I'm protecting you.
Speaker 1:What's going to happen is I think this is going to be a light switch. That's how fast it's going to be. They're going to be like you can't do this anymore. Then, if you have ads going, like myself, ads are going and they do the light switch on a Monday morning and we're collecting data all Monday, all Tuesday, all Wednesday they'll flag us and say, hey, you're collecting patient information. Your ad account is now suspended. I think that's worst case scenario and I feel like many people are going to get trapped, especially if you hired a digital marketer to do this for you. I'm not picking on anyone specific, but if these marketers are not on top of this, you're going to notice that, um, you might get caught and your ads account will be disabled. It's a pain to get these things back up. You pretty much have to create a whole new account, or get your spouse's account and create an ads account there and go through them. Hopefully they'll let you do that. So that's where we got to not get banned on advertising.
Speaker 1:Now, what is the tendency that I've been seeing to determine this? One, the Facebook policies. You read them, you're like, oh you're, this is fishy, you're doing something. I don't like. This. It's obviously healthcare related, because they're bringing up hippa, which I don't like. So that's us.
Speaker 1:And then number three is there's this shift to google by a lot of major digital agencies and web companies that do advertising on a SaaS platform for all industries, not just chiropractic. They are going back into Google and Google ads and taking their money out of meta for now and putting it there because they're really worried this is going to slow down the click rate from on from lead forms, from forms, right. So now they're creating landing page. So they're going to google, which is smart, in the meantime creating and putting more into the ads there and creating landing pages for the google ads so that people that click on the ad or click on the information or whatever advertisement they've got going on, land on the right landing page for that information to match up, so they're not just going to the homepage of your website. This is good, that's really solid marketing. But what's happening is because they're pulling out of meta to do this. Then when they create the landing pages and they see the results on Google, they'll cross test on meta as well and see if the clicks that are going to the landing pages are converting to new patients that are actually coming in. And what you'll see? There is a decline Because, again, if you've been listening to me, facebook forms create more leads for the same price.
Speaker 1:So let's say you spend $50 a day on your Facebook ads and now you convert and you've been doing forms and at the end of the week you get 25 leads from that money. You get 25 leads per week. You get 100 leads a month. $50 a day. It's a really good ad, right, it's working well.
Speaker 1:Now you're going to switch for February into landing pages. You're like okay, I'm going to keep this ad going, but I'm just going to change it from form to website and my website is going to be the landing page on this offer. That I'm doing. You create a landing page and you follow all the rules. It's a good URL. It's a sub domain for your, for your main URL. It has a form. Right at the top it has the offer very clearly linked there. It's an autofill. You do everything right and then at the bottom you can put some more information, make it look like a web page. You with your own clinic location, your hours of operations and testimonial, whatever that relates back a YouTube video talking more about the offer or the prior. Maybe you're doing neuropathy or spinal decompression, whatever it is. You do everything right and nothing changed.
Speaker 1:And then in February you're going to see this go down to seven leads per week and you're like, hang on a second, we were getting 25. Now we're getting seven. Just that barrier of people clicking on the ad and going to a landing page is going to turn them off. They're going to be like no thanks, I don't want to go to that webpage. I don't know that webpage. I don't recognize that webpage, so we lose them. The ones that are interested in the ad and the offer. They're like no, I really want this. Those are going to be the seven. Okay, so you're going from a hundred leads per month to 28,. Seven times four Makes sense to see where I'm getting these numbers. And these are just hypothetical numbers. So you're going to be like, oh my gosh, these ads suck.
Speaker 1:Now, however, please know your metrics. Know your metrics the impressions that you get, the link clicks that you get, the leads that you get and the conversions to new patients that you get. You'll notice for those of you that do 50, 100 leads per month those ones I have two clinics One of them does that and the conversion rate. When you go to look at it, you get 40 people out of the 100 to come in. You have a 40% conversion rate. Okay, because they're cold, cold leads. Lead forms are very cold leads, right. They're hard to get on the phone, they're hard to respond. They tell you to stop on the text messages. They're just tougher leads, right? Okay, now you have this good landing page funnel which gets you the 28.
Speaker 1:Do the data, do not quit. Do not turn off your ads. I would do this in February and in March I would get 60 days of data. Take those 60, 28 times two, those 56 leads that you get in February and March, and look at your conversion rate. I wouldn't be surprised if 35 out of the 60 are coming in, or 40 out of the 60 or, even better, 45 out of the 60 are coming in as new patients. So you go back and you look at this and you're like I was getting 40 new patients with the hundred and now I'm getting 45 new patients with the 60. Your team in April is going to love you because now they're not calling a hundred people and getting a bunch of no's, they're calling 60 people and getting 45 of them in the office. So you're going to have a higher conversion rate because you're going to have higher qualified leads that actually fill out your form. So just preparing you mentally for the shifts that you may have had.
Speaker 1:For those of you that have always run landing pages make them better, tweak them better, run some Google ads as well alongside, for a lower amount, so that you dominate your area as far as how people find you, so they're just scrolling through Instagram. They see your ad. They keep scrolling. Then they go to Google. They're like I got low back pain. Then you pop up on the maps because you're six miles away and they're like, oh, I recognize them from somewhere. And that's how marketing works is on, impressions Makes sense.
Speaker 1:Go to last week's podcast with dr Jeff yeah, dr Jeff Greenfield. He did a great job. He runs a Probolytics. Now it's a marketing company, doesn't even practice chiropractic anymore. He literally does this for huge companies and same rules apply. Whether you spend ten million dollars a year on on ads so a million dollars a month or you spend two thousand dollars a month, whatever it is, the rules apply the same. It's the same marketing rules that you want to keep going and you don't stop your ads.
Speaker 1:But I think you need to make this transition now, like I don't want you to do this on the 11th hour. Your landing pages are going to be brutal. They're going to be quickly set up for those of you that truly, you know, have clinics that are machines and are always, you know, getting new patients and always converting and always doing this stuff. And you got associates, you got mouths to feed. You got a family and all this stuff. You're not gonna pause your ads. You're gonna get it frustrated. You're gonna want to keep this going. There's no time to stop or slow down.
Speaker 1:So I never understood that pause my marketing thing. I don't get it when people like, hey, just stop the marketing, but what else are you doing for marketing? I've been coaching you for a while. You don't do Google ads. You don't do referral marketing. You don't do anything. They're like no, I just get natural referrals. Okay, you can count on that for now, if that's what your marketing is, but wouldn't you double down on referral marketing? If you're going to pause everything else, the plan should be okay. My ad account got suspended. What do we do? What's our backup plan?
Speaker 1:Let's talk about this for the rest of the podcast. Here's your contingency plan. If Meta is like, hey, we're done, we're just closing Facebook, you're like what is happening? Or whatever, google gets overtaken by aliens and they close it because the aliens don't want us to use Google anymore. Whatever happens, what's your contingency plan on this? You got to double down on the things that work.
Speaker 1:So every chiropractor I talk to referral marketing, like patients referring to their office, is their number one source of new patients, or if it's not the number one source that drives them, it's their number one. They love those ones because there's no selling involved. The patient comes in, they need you, they know, they've already been prepped by this person who's their neighbor and they're ready to go. How do you double, triple, 10x, that process? Or, if something's working for you and you need growth and you need to scale your practice, how do you 2X, 5x or 10X? That Is it just dumping money into it? What is your contingency plan?
Speaker 1:So for referral marketing, it's literally putting on steel toe boots and going into your community boots on the ground marketing. So now you're going to go shake more hands, go back to your network of 90, the people that have referred to you, the providers that have referred to you, the pizza places, the hair salons, the booster juices, the, the what do we have here in the States? Tropical smoothies, whatever. You're going into the health shops, the health food stores, you're going into everywhere and you're just telling everyone where you're located and what you do. Where you're located and what you do, just like any other marketing program out there, and then you're telling every single patient to refer to your office. They're going to do your long-term patients.
Speaker 1:We'll be like is everything okay? You'll be like no aliens took over Google. We need to do this now. I need you, sally, to tell people about us. I always talk about you, but you got it, doc, give me more cards. That's what will happen.
Speaker 1:Have you ever done that? I don't know if any of you have burned the boats before in your career. Done it once. Don't recommend it, but I do recommend it because it changes you for the better. Once you burn the boats, there's no turning back, and when there's no turning back, you got nowhere to go except fail and die or succeed. So that's why I don't like it, because of the scary part about that. But that fear drives you unbelievably. And you're well-equipped. You're doctors, you have an education, you have entrepreneurship running through your blood. You have all this stuff, all the artillery that make you successful.
Speaker 1:So what's the contingency plan? Okay, I'm not saying World War III or aliens or anything like that. What I'm saying is like, what happens when you or you make a decision and you're like screw these Facebook ads, I'm out of here. Okay, they've been a source of new patients for you. You're going to turn that faucet off. What's the contingency plan? What's the backup plan for that? Got to be ready for it.
Speaker 1:Whether the tech companies switch it off on you, elon Musk goes crazy. I don't know Whatever could possibly happen right After COVID. Who knows what could happen? And they turn it off. What have you turned it off? Funds become low. I don't know what it is.
Speaker 1:I've heard all the excuses of what people turn off. I just can't wrap it around my head in my entrepreneur journey over 17 years how you turn off marketing. I'm just like I would freak out if we had zero marketing going on. I don't think I've ever gone with no marketing when I had no money starting up in Canada, right out of school, or in the US, I was boots on the ground, networking, going to networks. I hated them. You hate the actual thing. I felt like a waste of time.
Speaker 1:But the people that were there end up becoming the staples and referrers to your business. One because you're in a networking group and that's the job. Some of them, like BNI, are like if you don't bring in referrals, you're kicked out. They have strict rules, so that's cool. The other ones have non-strict rules. But once you become friends and you're there every single week with people and you're actually helping them and you get that one referral, like as a chiropractor.
Speaker 1:I found it really tough. Naturally you will get everyone in that group will become your patient if they don't already have a chiropractor, and everyone in the group can easily refer to you. You are an easy referral for most networking groups out there because everyone can use a chiropractor. Okay, there will be one or two people in the group that just don't like chiropractors. We'll never refer to them, we'll never go back and never do anything. But they'll say hush, hush, they won't give you a hard, they won't give you a hard time. That's about it. So you get out to them, you're easy to refer.
Speaker 1:I found the hardest part about networking was me finding referrals for the roofer, for the plumber, for the realtor, for the. But as you start to grow your practice, it's amazing how many people lie down on that table and say one little thing and I was giving out a referral every week. I had a referral every week for somebody for something, because somebody said something on the. It was one of our patients and I referred them like, hey, I got a guy. He does like mold, checks your house for mold, or I've got a guy that cleans carpets. I got a guy that you know does. It's crazy, it's absolutely amazing.
Speaker 1:So back to grassroots here. The world is post-COVID now, officially America's post-COVID. Officially we're back to whatever normal is in quotation marks. So community is now your focus. Everybody wants to be back in a community. They miss it, subconsciously. They miss it, whether they're conscious about it or not. Some people are like, oh my gosh, I'd love to be part of a group again. They're consciously aware of how they feel. Everyone else that doesn't agree or hasn't thought about it is just because they're subconsciously craving community and they just don't know where to start. They're like what do we go back to? What do we do? So they are. So you getting out there and getting in people's faces, they're going to actually like it. They're like oh, there's stuff going on. So think about that stuff.
Speaker 1:Your contingency plan and the whole point of this podcast, psa, the Facebook forms that you've been capturing all your information, may become HIPAA non-compliant, which will affect all healthcare, specifically you chiropractors. So have the contingency of landing pages set up now. What I would do if you're not a person that creates webpages like me, I'm not. Delegate it to your web team, whoever hosts your website. I would call them up and I would tell them hey, we need these webpages for the three or four modalities that we advertise all the time, or the two offers that we have all the time. I want you to look at this offer. I would screenshot the Facebook ad, send it to them, say, hey, match the brand on this on a landing page for us. It will be a hidden page. You will have the URL that you can go to at any time. You copy that URL, you put it in as the website page for your Facebook ad now. So it's going to be like do you want to create a landing form? Do you want to go to a webpage? You want to go to an app? You're going to pick website and in the URL you're going to put your landing page and they'll redirect them to a sub domain on your main website so that you're brand specific. The domain is clear and Facebook allows it and it goes there, and that is your contingency plan to move forward.
Speaker 1:I would work on this now. It's the end of January, right now, like now 2025. So this is when you do it. Keep doing what you're doing. I will keep you armored and ready for success each and every week, like I have been for over two years. Over two years I've been doing the podcast and over seven years doing digital marketing and coaching for chiropractors. It's not going to stop. I'm going to keep doing it. I love it. I love helping you guys. I love helping the profession, one practice at a time. It's been great. Keep doing what you're doing. Your community needs you and you. Getting banned from doing ads doesn't serve you or your community. So stay on guard, stay compliant and keep serving your people.
