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
No BS Marketing: Proven Referral Systems That Work
Marketing legend Dave Mastovich pulls back the curtain on what truly works in healthcare marketing during this eye-opening conversation about systematic referral generation. Drawing from his experience scaling a healthcare system from $1 billion to $10 billion in just three years, Dave reveals why most healthcare providers completely miss five of the six essential target markets they should be focusing on.
The conversation dives deep into a refreshingly straightforward approach that any provider – from solo practitioners to multi-location groups – can implement immediately. You'll discover four simple yet powerful questions that unlock invaluable patient insights, and how sharing what you learn transforms casual patients into raving fans who eagerly provide reviews and referrals.
Dave challenges conventional wisdom about marketing metrics, arguing that "perfect is the enemy of good" when measuring effectiveness. His practical approach to calculating patient acquisition costs and lifetime value provides a framework that works without needing complex spreadsheets or consultants. The revelation about optimal marketing investment ratios is particularly eye-opening – spending too little can be just as dangerous as spending too much.
The discussion concludes with two underutilized strategies that deliver outsized returns: mystery shopping (seeing your practice through patients' eyes) and video marketing (showing prospects what to expect). Throughout the episode, Dave's no-nonsense perspective cuts through marketing hype to deliver actionable strategies any healthcare provider can implement, regardless of size or budget.
https://davidmmastovich.com/
https://massolutions.biz/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidmmastovich
https://www.linkedin.com/company/massolutions/
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Hey everyone, welcome to this week's episode of Marketing 101. I got a really cool guest this week, Mr Dave Mastovich. He's written a really cool book that we're going to dive right into on this podcast. Thanks for being here, man, Appreciate your time. Thanks for having me, Enrico. Yeah yeah, Tell us a little bit about what got you started, what made you write the book, who you help. Give them a little bit of a background and then I'm sure we'll dive into some great stuff. Sure.
Speaker 2:Going way back early in my career I had the opportunity to do turnarounds in the media, so I worked in radio, tv and print and that led to then jumping into healthcare and I ended up going into healthcare and doing some turnarounds of hospitals and then healthcare systems and one of those became one of the largest in the country. It was under $1 billion when I was brought there and within three years we grew to $10 billion with a B and that was UPMC Health System and that enabled me to really sort of lay the groundwork to establish myself as a marketing thought leader and someone that has done the marketing side, the revenue growth side, the pipeline growth side. And after that I saw there was parallels between education and healthcare, that education was about 10 to 15 years behind healthcare. So I jumped in and helped grow a university applying all this stuff to healthcare. Because both industries the ultimate consumer doesn't buy, the health insurance tends to pay or the government pays for both schooling and for healthcare. Parents pay, alumni pay, fundraisers pay over here, insurers pay, the government pays. So after that I then started Mass Solutions, my company, which is a growth marketing consultancy that also does marketing, implementation, activation.
Speaker 2:And after my first book, which was a good 10 years ago, I decided my second book would be for the new audience. So my first book, enrico, was the standard one. For anybody that's probably maybe over the age of 40. That books were about 200 pages and hardcover and all that stuff. And so for my second book I said I'm just going to take the no bullshit process. We built no bullshit marketing. We have a lot of IP around. No bullshit marketing. I said we're going to take that. I'm going to tell anecdotes and analogies. I'm going to practice what I preach. I talk about how anecdotes and analogies are what the science proves we remember. And I said I'm going to do a book in a hundred pages or less. It ended up being like 104. But a book in 100 pages or less, it ended up being like 104. So that's the book no Bullshit Marketing. I do focus a lot on healthcare. It's 17 contrarian ways to increase referrals for healthcare providers, and so that's the book and that's the background. Yeah, that's awesome.
Speaker 1:It's cool how you get into it. I always love the backstory. There's always a passion or something that gets people to. They always see you at the end for what you've done. They never see the journey and how hard and how much work it usually takes. But there's some great stuff in the book, like the systemic referral systems that you talk about and six strategic. We're going to dive into that because I'm going to learn a lot on this. With running chiropractic clinics and teaching and coaching and consulting chiropractors and people in the health care facility on how to grow and market. Referral marketing is the pinnacle. It's the foundation to all marketing. One, it's free. Two, it's organic. Three, it's trustworthy. Many different reasons why you want to start on a solid referral base and then build up from there. But yeah, tell us a little about that.
Speaker 2:Well, it starts off with knowing that there are six target markets, six right fit target markets that matter for any company, across business to business or business to consumer. There's these six right fit target markets that then you have to segment for your specific scenario, and those six right fit target markets are often not realized. So a couple of them are neglected. And the first one's not neglected, it's current customers. Well, it's sort of neglected because people actually probably don't market enough to their existing customers. The second target market is prospective customers. That's where we spend a lot of our time marketing. The third one is current employees. Got to market to them and market to them well, in the same way that you market to clients and customers and market to them well, in the same way that you market to clients and customers. The fourth one is prospective employees. But then it moves into the fifth one, which is current referral sources or centers of influence or raving fans, and prospective referral sources or people you can make centers of influence or make them raving fans.
Speaker 2:That's the start, at the crux of all this. That's what I learned from decades of doing this is what makes bullshit marketing. Is people not realizing two things that there's these six right fit target markets that you have to segment and drill down based on your scenario. And then you have to let the behavioral science and the math drive the creative art. Those are the two major takeaways that I've worked on and what drives no bullshit marketing as I see it, and what we do for all of our clients.
Speaker 1:Love it. Yeah, and it sounds like there's a strategy behind the way you put one through six as well. It wasn't just random, correct. It looks like one builds on the other as well it does.
Speaker 2:That's a great point. So what I found when I first started doing that first ever turnaround, way back when I was a kid, with two radio stations that were ranked dead last out of 14 in the market, was that current clients are what we neglect a little bit because we actually don't tell our story to them. We think, oh, they like us, we don't tell their story enough. Then we fixate on these prospective clients but we forget those other four target markets. We really don't do a systematic way of doing it. It's not that we forget completely. We kind of know we got to keep employees happy. We know we have to recruit people. We know we got to get people to refer to us. But we don't do it in the same systematic fashion on Ricoh that we do current and prospective clients or customers.
Speaker 2:So that's how it all came about. It all came about that way was start off just like everybody else, focusing on prospective new customers or new clients, and then I realized those other five were pretty significant and started building a system to make sure you could reach them again and again and again, all to drive pipeline growth and revenue growth.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think as soon as you say the word marketing, people think perspective marketing. They don't even think of their current client base as being marketed to. There's no reason to market to them. They're repeat customers, they're coming back or whatever it may be. So dive into that a little bit. How would you market to a current patient, a current client, somebody that's been coming in maybe often? What does marketing even look like to them?
Speaker 2:Yes. So with current customers, current patients, let's stay in the healthcare realm with chiropractic PT all those ones that listen to your podcast. In the healthcare situation we kind of do a half-assed way of talking to our current patients. We might include them in like a newsletter that we just kind of do a half-assed way of talking to our current patients. We might include them in like a newsletter that we just kind of force out and it's got way too much copy and way too many things we're trying to cover. Or we might maybe, if we're doing really good, we maybe send them a postcard around their birthday, you know, but really when you take a look at those current patients, it's the entire experience that you get from them and then you walk them through that. But you also repeatedly reach out and ask them their take and this is the big thing I talk about both quantitative, market insights and research and qualitative. Quantitative is you send out your survey every you know. Hopefully you use something like you know where you're able to get their feedback after every visit or every so many visits, but then also talking to them qualitatively, either on the phone or calling them aside and ask them just a couple basic questions. What's the one reason why you first came here? What's the main reason why you still come here? What's one thing that makes us unique? What's one thing you'd change still come here? What's one thing that makes us unique? What's one thing you'd change? Those four questions of a current patient are going to tell you so much to help you keep them and get other ones. And then you have to tell them that you listened. So you have to say in your newsletter make it better, make your email newsletter better and clearer and more concise, and say to them we've been talking to patients like you and we learned three things. First one was that you really love this and we're going to keep doing that. The second one is you said we could probably be better at this and we're doing X and Y to get better at that. Third one is you said why don't you do this? And we looked into that. And if you can do it, you say here's what we're going to do, and if you can't, you say why. So now, these trends that you heard again and again and again, they're real. If you heard them four or five, six times, when you talk to 15 patients, they're real. That qualitative research is real.
Speaker 2:You now come back and typically it'll be about three things you find out. And one you kind of already do and they told you they really liked it. The other, you learned and you started doing. The third one you either can, can't do or you're starting to do. Then you go back and tell them and what that makes them think is whoa, they listened to me. That makes them proud of being that person. That makes them more apt to give you a testimonial. That makes them more apt to give you a five-star review. That's because you asked them questions and listened and then showed that you listened. Most people do a survey and never do anything to tell Sound familiar out there listeners. You sent out the thing, you got all the thing back and you never went back and told anybody you did anything with it. That doesn't make them want to fill that out. That doesn't make them want to give you a five-star review. Yeah.
Speaker 1:No, you're right. We focus so much about modern technology and how to reach our patients and our prospective clients as well, and it's really moving towards getting into their text messages, getting into their phones, getting into right, getting as close to in front of their face as you possibly can especially when you're working like major hospital chain businesses like yours that you were helped. I mean, they really need to be present and whenever an emergency happens, that people think of them first. For us, we need to do that as well as solopreneurs or solo locations. But what are some challenges today that are different than maybe from 2000, that are maybe more competitive, or things that we should be focusing on to get that, I guess, preemptive, preemptive feeling in the community and in our areas so that we can help more people in that same way and then get into this type of marketing once we get in contact with them. I think it's the contact, it's that friction to get their information either an email or a phone number, whatever it may be.
Speaker 2:Well, I think the first thing, the reason I did this, the reason I started Mass Solutions, was my dad had a small business when I grew up and as I got into my career, I thought, wow, imagine what we could have done if I were able to go back in time and help my dad market his business. So that and many other reasons made me passionate about starting Mass Solutions and I wanted any company, regardless of size or industry, to be able to apply the same theories and tactics and approaches that I saw work at a multi-billion dollar company and other hundreds of millions of dollar a year companies. And so that's my first point is to everyone listening is the UPMCs of the world are great. There's no doubt that's a great organization. However, we had to battle you guys and you don't realize that that there was many conversations like, oh, this physical therapy place has eight locations and they're kicking our ass, okay, so you have to realize that you have a quality opportunity, that you have to. You have to take that story and tell that against the biggies and be able to talk about that and the reason this system works for any size companies.
Speaker 2:I just described you qualitative research with four questions and those four questions can be asked by anybody at your company and they have to do something really hard two things that are really hard. When you ask the questions, you ready, you have to shut up and listen. That's hard for all of us, but if you ask those four questions I told you to and you just listen, and then you track it, you just put in your phone. Talk to Dave Mastovich, he said this. Talk to Pete Harris. He said that it doesn't have to be any. Look, you're doing this for yourself. There's no grade. You don't get a C because you didn't put it in a spreadsheet. Do whatever you want with it, but just make sure you track it, paper and pencil in a spirit whatever you want, because you will see by the third person you do it the third, I guarantee it. Anybody can call me. If it doesn't happen by the third person, you'll get at least one trend that all three of those people said. That's how real this stuff is.
Speaker 2:So the things that I talk about in my book are things that can be done by a person that runs one chiropractic location. A person one chiropractic location. A person has eight chiropractic locations. A person has four physical therapy centers. Okay Now, yes, when you have 20, you do have more resources, you have more budget. When you have a hundred, you have more budget. But I'm saying you can apply this. Anybody listening can apply this. Anybody listening can take those six target markets. Anybody listening can do that market research. Anybody listening can go back and tell their patients what they heard yes, no, I love it.
Speaker 1:That makes sense. Start there, because if it's anything anyone has, it's listening, it's they have a patient base. So, right there, you have a source, you have a pool, you can get information from right off the bat. So ask those four questions and go from there. Great, so that's internal. Uh, what about like things like employee employee engagement? You said there's things that anyone can ask for questions. Anyone in your business can ask how do we get our employees engaged in the marketing process, both internal and for external?
Speaker 2:The first is those very same questions same four can be asked to employees and will bring you value. Why did you start working here? Why do you stay Now? You're going to be frightened when you do this. Why'd you start working here? Wow, it's 10 minutes closer than the last place I was. Oh geez, here I thought we were good. Same thing happens to me. Don't believe me. And then the second one is why do you stay here? Be prepared. It might be the benefits. It might be it's close to my house. It might be my boss is great. It might be I don't know. I need a raise.
Speaker 2:Whatever, ask them that, qualitatively, you've got seven employees. Ask each of them the same four questions. What's one thing you've changed? I want to get more money. Okay, beyond that, we all want more money. Beyond that, you just got to be prepared to ask these four questions. What's one thing you've changed? Another thing you can throw in is another way. You can just throw in and say what's one word you'd use to describe the company? Get your employees to answer that, because that'll bring you a lot of value about how they see you and what they see as your strength. So that alone will help. And then you come back and you tell them in an all hands-on meeting.
Speaker 2:You say over the last month we verbally talked to all of you to gather some qualitative insights and we heard a couple of trends. We heard A, we heard B, we heard C and we heard D. We're going to keep doing A. You told us to try to tweak B. You gave us this great idea about C. Now D you guys talked about too. I want you to know we researched that it's probably not going to work out. For this reason, you just got instant credibility. We told them a bunch of stuff. They agreed with two of them. The third one they're going to try to do. Fourth one they told us why they can't. Unless the person's just an angry person that we can't worry about, they're going to go. That's fair. They looked into it and said they can't do it. You just got instant credibility with your employees. You now are going to help with retention and you learn from them. So those same questions work for employees too.
Speaker 1:It's funny how it's engagement. It's both from your clients, your patients, your employees. Engaging them is what brings the best out of each of them and then you get the benefits because you can put that into your business and amplify that stuff, which is great. Another thing I work with my clients on and we'll be wrapping up soon. But if there's anything important you want to dive into, cut me off. But measuring Another thing that's in your book as well measuring not just the successes, but measuring marketing. I find that really tough.
Speaker 1:I just had a great conversation this morning with programmatic marketing, which is a newer realm for chiropractors and things like this about getting into geotagging and being on a commercial a 15-second or 30-second commercial in between Netflix or YouTube or whatever it is, whatever they're watching. That's kind of new. It's nice that you can geotarget it. Maybe for you in a hospital that made sense. Commercials were perfect. Television and radio made sense. You blasted over a larger area For a place with four locations or one location they have a very small thing. So that's the cool thing about technology.
Speaker 1:But it got me thinking that I asked them a question and it made me think it was how do I gauge the success? I'm just starting to figure out Google. I've been doing it for 20 years and I'm just starting to figure out the metrics and truly what budget should work and cost per click and the lead conversion on that. What is this new realm of marketing? But how do you measure this statistically to know what's working or not? Because most providers and entrepreneurs are just like dollar in, dollar out, new patient in marketing, dollar out and that's it. They don't really think about everything that goes in between.
Speaker 2:Well, the first thing I want to add to something on the last question was your data is gold, any data that you have. So the data of your patients is gold. I understand HIPAA. I'm not saying that. I'm saying that the name, the age, the zip code enables you to look at that and think and you're going to see the 80-20 principle. In effect, the 80-20 principle works with everything in our lives the clothes we wear if we look in our closet, 20% of our clothes are worn 80% of the time. The foods we eat 20% of the foods we eat are eaten 80% of the time. The same thing happens with your practices 80% of your patients will come from 20% of whatever activity. So, for instance, if you are getting referrals, if you're a physical therapy place that gets referrals, or a surgeon that gets referrals, or anybody out there that gets another provider to refer to them, 80% of that referrals will come from 20% of those referral sources, those providers. So your data you have to look at that, you have to start tracking that. So if you are getting referrals, you have to start tracking that, because 80% of them will come from 20%. So you then know I want to talk to more people that look like this 20%. I'm not going to completely ignore the other 80%. I'm going to look at these people that look like the 20% that refer the most. I'm going to go out to reach them. So that's the first thing that I want to make sure is your own data is good, both on the referral side and the patient side. So that's one way.
Speaker 2:The second thing is take that more broad perspective and say I want to look at my customer acquisition cost or my patient acquisition cost, and I will stress perfect is the enemy of good. You want to start somewhere. It's your practice, it's your data. There is no grade. As I said earlier. You don't get a B, a C or a D or you don't even get an A. You do what's best for you and you learn, so you do. You've done that with everything else at your practice your physical therapy place, your chiropractor. You've learned on the fly. The same as with this. So you go and say I want to try to guesstimate my patient acquisition cost, because if I can get my patient acquisition cost, I can then guesstimate my lifetime patient value. Those are both very important if you're not doing that.
Speaker 2:But people get hung up on trying to be perfect when it's. Just take the expenses that you have that go towards sales marketing to get the customers, and then look at how many new ones you got. You think you got from year one to year two and then divide those and you've got a rough patient acquisition cost, lifetime value. Go and see how long it is until someone doesn't come anymore. Just try to play with the data a little bit. Don't perfect, examine good. You probably already know this. You probably already know that it might be a year and a half that someone tends to come, or maybe they remain five years. They come for a year. They don't come for six months. Tends to come, or maybe they remain five years. They come for a year, they don't come for six months and they come once or twice a year in chiropractic. You know these kinds of things. Don't obsess over perfect.
Speaker 2:Now, as you gather more data, I want you to be more stringent with the actual specifics. But start out figuring that out, because then you can say it costs me roughly two grand to get a new patient, but the lifetime value is 3,700. That's when it's good. If it costs you two grand and the lifetime value is two grand, stop. That's not a sustainable business. But if it gets you 10 grand and you only put in one grand, don't think you stick your chest out.
Speaker 2:10 to one ratio is not good either. That means you're leaving market share on the table. If you're getting 10 grand and you're only spending a thousand to get a 10 grand person, you ought to spend two or 3,000 and get more of them, and so you'll actually get more patients and more market share, which, in the long run, is going to matter because of your margin. So those are some ways that I think you can look at KPIs that work. So get patient acquisition costs and lifetime patient value and the ratio of those two. That's pretty powerful and, again, perfect is the enemy of good. Don't worry about the CFO ranking you or your accountant to tell you that's wrong. You're off by eight bucks. We're just starting out trying to get something here, guys.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love your numbers and I love where you come from, because you just blew the socks off of half the listeners because you said something like two grand to make 3700. Even if you shave a zero off that, you got the chiropractor shaking in their boots like I'm gonna spend 200 to get 370 and they and they scratch their heads like that. That's a waste of time. Yeah, typically don't. They don't understand the marketing on this. So, even though they figure out it costs $110 on a Google client or to get them in the door or whatever, they're looking at their case value averages, which could be anywhere between $1,000 and $3,000 for most chiropractors, and that's still so. They're looking at $100 to make $2,000. And then when they try and apply other avenues, they realize, oh, nothing works. It's because your budget is way too low. It's way you're not getting the reach that you need to. But that's a whole different podcast for another time. I know that.
Speaker 2:I'll come back.
Speaker 1:Great, yeah, great, great post there. What else are we missing from the book? I mean you got. I mean we can talk all day about the book. But I asked you a little bit about the future. I mean, where do you think things are going? But anything you want to close off from you, take the rest of the podcast.
Speaker 2:It's all yours. I'm going to give a couple of things. The first is and this one might I don't know how your listeners will do I think you want to see and hear what customers see and hear. So I told you about how to hear you ask questions, be quiet and listen. But I would challenge you to uh, get some mystery shoppers.
Speaker 2:I don't know if anybody's doing that in chiropractic much, but we've done it for senior living quite a bit and I was one of the first to do this and I was really a challenge. So 20 or so years ago I did this in health systems and it was so hard because you had to, like, fake the person's prescription and you had to have doctors in on it and stuff, so you couldn't do hundreds of them. But if you get someone who comes into a chiropractic office or a physical therapy location and you were able to hire them as a mystery shopper and you brought them in, you don't need to do a ton of them. You can do three and you will be overwhelmed and amazed both good and bad at what they come back and tell you, because they will tell you their experience from the time they tried to book appointment online, had a phone call what they saw when they walked in the door, what they saw when they were taken to the exam room, how they were exited, and it's all stuff that you think you know but you're not hearing what they're thinking. They'll tell you and you might not agree with it, but it's perception.
Speaker 2:I was telling someone today what a client misperceived about what we did and I said it sucks and it's unfair, but that's how the client perceived us and that's not good for my solutions and I have to own that. And so I have to go talk to my team. We as the team have to go fix that and let the client know because I disagree. It's an unfair misperception. Now there's other times it's a fair perception. I go, oh shit, we're not doing what we should. That's what you're going to learn with mystery shopping. So see and hear what the customer sees and hears. The hearing is through the asking the questions and tracking it and listening, and the seeing is getting some mystery shopping. And then the third thing I would add to close is video, video, video. You got to be doing video. If you're not doing video in some way, shape or form, you've got to be doing video.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've been repeating that repetitively. People want to see what the experience is going to feel like, or what it's going to look like right, or what they're walking into for sure Hospitals, chiropractic clinics, I mean. They want to make sure they're afraid it's medicine, it's chiropractic, I mean, it's physical medicine, whatever it is. They're afraid of what's going to come. That's the thing, and it it shows them the inside and it may enlighten newer people to the possibilities of things they didn't even know about. Like, wow, they can do that. I didn't know they could do that. So video is totally, uh, totally came. With all the new apps and stuff, you can shoot video and have it out. This podcast will be up and going in about six minutes. It's just boom. Yeah, with all this stuff. That's great, man, this is awesome. Anything else you want to leave them with, or do we cover all the bases? Where can they reach out to you besides?
Speaker 2:you buying the book. Yeah, there's a lot of different ways. So masssolutionsbiz and it's M-A-S-S-O-L-U-T-I-O-N-S. Dot biz. We get you more biz and that's the company website. Mine is daveatmassolutionsbiz and I'll gladly talk to anybody. Anybody that emails me and asks I'll sign a book for them. You know anybody that mentions the podcast in the email and that's the website. You can hit me up on LinkedIn. Have a ton of connections and followers and I'm posting pretty regularly on LinkedIn. Happy to talk to anybody. Get the book on Amazon, barnes and Noble, wherever. It's a no bullshit marketing, dave Mastovich.
Speaker 1:Pretty simple. Thank you so much for your time. Appreciate it. Thank you Great. Take care.
