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
Five Steps to Transform Your Practice's Marketing Approach
Marketing without a plan is like treating patients without a diagnosis—you might occasionally get lucky, but you won't consistently achieve results. In this conversation with Corey Morris, founder of Voltage and creator of the Digital Marketing Success Plan, we uncover the strategic framework that separates thriving healthcare practices from those struggling to grow beyond word-of-mouth referrals.
"Marketing often gets looked at as a line item or expense if it's not connected to an outcome," explains Morris. This mindset shift is fundamental—viewing marketing as an investment rather than a cost changes everything about your approach. For chiropractors and other hands-on healthcare providers, this means clearly defining what success looks like first, whether that's more new patients, higher retention rates, or improved online reputation.
The START framework (Strategy, Tactics, Application, Review, and Transformation) provides a roadmap for healthcare marketers that eliminates guesswork. We explore how to identify which channels and content types best serve your specific practice goals, and why creating educational content that addresses pain points positions you as an authority before prospects are ready to book.
With the digital landscape constantly evolving—from Google's dominance to the rise of AI—we discuss practical ways healthcare providers can adapt without becoming overwhelmed. Morris offers valuable insights on using artificial intelligence tools to scale content production across multiple platforms while maintaining quality and authenticity.
Ready to transform your practice's marketing from random acts to strategic growth? This episode delivers actionable advice for healthcare professionals looking to build sustainable marketing systems that consistently deliver new patients while maintaining the personal touch that makes their services special.
Website https://voltage.digital/corey-video-mtg
Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/coreymorris/
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/voltagekc
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Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of Marketing 101 for Chiropractors. Awesome guest this week, corey Morris from Voltage, is going to dive into why you need to have a plan when you market. Thanks for being on the show.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, tell us a little bit about how you got into this. Many people know my story. I'm a chiropractor and then I kind of forced myself into marketing with frustration.
Speaker 2:So it's more of a second thing for me. But what about you? How'd you get into this whole marketing for medium and large businesses? Yeah, this is not where I thought I would be.
Speaker 2:If I look back to growing up, I'm every you know one in my family essentially has doctor in their title, except for me, and I broke the trend even a generational one by going to business school.
Speaker 2:So I ended up coming out of school with a marketing degree, but that was really when a lot of things digitally were blowing up. This is the 20th year of my career, so think back to 2005, when things were still hard-coded and we were still in a much earlier version of the web compared to now, and navigated my way through being a project manager, learning how to code, basically, and then into search engine optimization and broader digital marketing, as we then went from internet and online marketing to calling it digital and rallying around that term, probably about 15 years ago as well, and so through that journey, I became an entrepreneur as well, went from employee to owner. So my journey in the business world is not one that I would have ever predicted of how it went, but now own a digital agency called Voltage, own a company called Digital Marketing Success Plan and I know we'll get into unpacking some of that as well, but we help, as you mentioned, businesses of a range of sizes in our focus and expertise within digital marketing and building websites for them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's awesome and you've seen it. I mean, you've seen the struggles, you've seen the problems, you've seen the leaky buckets all in marketing, and that's why you're here today. We're going to talk about it, and the thing I love about it is the the digital marketing success plan. The plan that you've laid out in five steps, that you know, tells us what to do before we actually do it. Maybe some organization gets us a little bit further and a little bit deeper into the goals that we're trying to attain. So let's, let's dive into that. Where do you think most, you know, let's be specific with healthcare and chiropractic and you know, physical therapy and that stuff, those types of brick and mortar facilities that do hands-on services. Where should they start when building a plan around marketing?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So naturally we want to gravitate toward like, let's do the action, like what do we see somebody else doing or where, where do we think our audience is? And we, we don't necessarily go as far as we need to invalidating how this makes us money or to work backwards from what our end goal is and what we want in our practice. And so and those goals can be different it should be different for every individual practice or business of do I want to grow and scale? Am I in an aggressive mode? Do I want to bring on you know partners? Do I want to bring on more practitioners? Do I want to make this thing 10X what it is now, or open more locations, whatever it is, or do I want to operate as a lifestyle business and stay focused, personally, hands on on the mission of where I'm going, but be able to have a focus on quality and not quantity and make sure that I'm sustaining the thought leadership and the things that I need to do to educate my patients and to stay in front of them. And so those are two ends of the spectrum, and there's probably a myriad number of other ways and options in between of how we shape our business goals and what marketing you do, and digital marketing should be a reflection of that. So, naturally, working backwards from your business ultimate business goal and quantifying what the metrics are around that and understanding those is the key starting point for us before we start putting a dollar into marketing.
Speaker 2:Marketing often gets looked at at any time in most types of businesses as a line item or expense if it's not connected to an outcome or a business outcome.
Speaker 2:It's not connected to an outcome or a business outcome. It's honestly something that is an investment and should expect a return on investment, just like we're putting the expectations on what we do in financial or real estate investments outside of our businesses or even within our businesses. Looking at it that way changes and kind of gives you a different lens to look at it through and not just look at as a set of activities or things you have to do because someone told you you should do them, but to have them be more personal, with conviction, connected to your mission, your goals. So starting by identifying your goals is critical, and that gets into the first part of my five-step process of strategy and defining that strategy, and so that's really where I start with.
Speaker 2:Anything is, what is that unique thing that we can connect and quantify. Is it more patients, is it more leads that we get through the website, is it more phone calls, more booked appointments? Or is it around reputation, even, or retention and not having to go out and scale an ad if you're not trying to do that, but at the same time you know a few hits to your ratings online. Fair or unfair can really have an impact as well, and so how you quantify that is step one of business outcome, and then the marketing and digital touch points that can impact that.
Speaker 1:Love it. Metrics are so important because, without knowing a lot of, a lot of business owners don't look at the metrics properly. I mean, they're looking at the cashflow collections, new patients, uh, and basing marketing off that. And and we talked about this by knowing your internal metrics, the the more specific metrics, the the calls, the conversions, the hard conversions in the office, both from marketing into your office and then the conversions in your office, and what the case value average is per patient. You know, knowing these little things can really dictate the strategy of marketing you're going to put forward, first off and second the ad budget to. Sometimes you don't need to spend as much as you think you need to, or other times you got spend a lot more, depending where you are in your business and for growth. So, metrics, I love that. Great job, corey, great. So we start there, we understand some fundamentals about metrics and then we decide, hey, we got to definitely market, we got to do something.
Speaker 1:Word of mouth referrals are great. They only get you so far. People only know so many people and they're only willing to refer, isn't it? And they're only willing to refer. You know they're more like, isn't it true? They're more loud when you do something wrong to leave a bad review than if you do something right to actually refer for you.
Speaker 2:And that's the truth.
Speaker 1:That's just human nature. I mean, when we give you a hundred dollars and you paint our wall for us and it looks good and you leave, we expected the wall to look good, that's why we gave you the hundred dollars. We we expected the wall to look good, that's why we gave you the $100. We're not going to go raving up and down the street saying this is the best painter ever. So it's an expectation when you trade that energy, right. But when you give you $100 and you do a bad job on that wall, boy, are we going to go to Google in like three seconds. My wife's going to be on Google in like six seconds and you're going to get the worst review you've ever read. So we know that right. So now, word of mouth referral is great, but when we need something like voltage, we hire like hey, voltage, help us out, let's get going here. Let's get our SEO going, let's get a reputation going, let's get some more calls and people coming to our office. What's that step? Look like. What's planning for that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so the five-step process is an acronym called START, and this is a start-to-finish process and framework where there's not a magic answer just as I talked about a minute ago for everyone, because everyone's goals are different, your practice is different, your level of expertise that you want to be known for, your specialization, how you're different from the next clinic on the corner, even if you're friends and you went to school together and you, you are very similar. There is something different in your culture, your mission, your vision, your values that you want to carry forward and and your unique you know opportunity to serve your patients in your community. So, within that and understanding that and having you know your, your strategy and goals, knowing that you know, if you've quantified it to the point of knowing that I need 20 new patient, you know leads or phone calls or or booked appointments a month, then you can carry that forward into. So that's, that's part of locking down your strategy. That's the S, the T. Then you carry that forward into tactics and this is now where we can evaluate and put anything on the table and challenge what you've been doing.
Speaker 2:Are those leads available in Facebook or through organic posting or through ads? Are they available in Google no-transcript. So if you heard about that awesome channel, it's working for somebody else. Go do some research on that. There's some great free tools and affordable tools out there where you can go validate how much traffic there is around my location, how many times people are searching for things, how many people are in its target audience.
Speaker 2:If you're doing some Facebook research or whatnot, through meta, to understand what is the real opportunity here and how many dollars might it take. To your point a minute ago of you know you might need ads and you might need to really dial them up, okay, well, how many, how many dollars does it take to get the number of clicks and, based on some of that math we talked about a minute ago, how many does that lead through to a booked appointment and what does that look like? And so when you've got your strategy nailed down, know what your goals are and then you have your tactics mix. That's when everything really flows through the rest of the process as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah for sure, then you can. Then then you can dial up and dial down on your marketing according to your business goals. After that, once you find the system that works and that's probably the longest process is in marketing. It's a course correction all the time of trying to figure out what's working while building the background as well. Seo is forever. It's not a one-time thing.
Speaker 1:I love these people like oh, I got to hire an SEO person to help me out. And then they're like well, I let go of my SEO person, it wasn't working. I'm like what are you talking about? We're always uh, we're always optimizing the internet for our search. What are you talking about? So they don't get that concept there as well? What are some you know as a from a chiropractic perspective, where they're very personal based? I mean, we're not giving literally anything except a service. There's no, there's no pills, there's no injections. There's no, there's no tangible thing that they walk away with, except for the service by hand. Very much like physical therapy In these types of settings. What do you feel a logical starting point or a logical marketing plan looks like for something like that?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So if we've gone through the step of understanding, you know again the business goals and then how marketing can, could and should support it. And then you know quantify that by the tactics and the channels and platforms we should be in. Now we get into this leads really well into the A, the third step of looking at its application step of looking at what assets we need, and a big part of that is what kind of content, what kind of messaging, and so this is that how you're defining, you know where, how you show up to someone online and what first impression you're making. And then ultimately, the second impression I mentioned a moment ago. You know, maybe there's a guide, maybe there's talking about an approach and whether it's, you know what type of hands-on approach or what the experience is going to be. So there's everything from I. You know I have pain. I've maybe never been to a chiropractor before and this is a personal story right Of you know I have back pain. Who do I? You know I'm Googling, I'm looking it up and then I get a level deeper and now I'm looking at different methods you know from and different approaches from different clinics. And or, you know now I'm getting into, does my insurance cover this and how? How does this get billed? What? What does a plan look like? What is the first appointment look like in the education in that when some in the office, versus getting onto more of a maintenance plan of going, you know, weekly or biweekly or whatnot too, and get it after things are in better shape, after I get through some of the acuity issues, so any of that content that you have of the patient experience, you probably do that well, right, because you know how you greet someone, welcome them through the door the first time.
Speaker 2:But it's really thinking about digitally. Yes, there's that last click, someone searching for you know chiropractor or physical therapy near me today. Right, and that's where they're looking at reviews and they're one click or phone call away from coming into your clinic. You absolutely need to be, show up there and be there and put the right foot forward there. But how much further do you want to move further away from that into the education space and be where somebody is searching by symptom or by? You know what causes them to think about and research what you know where they should go before they get to the? I'm looking for a chiropractor or PT near me where you're in a very competitive space. So there's an opportunity to get further upstream there.
Speaker 2:But that requires an understanding of what content you can produce, what commitment you can make to that and what level of investment, when that doesn't immediately necessarily translate from click to conversion in terms of your analytics, but it supports the ecosystem.
Speaker 2:So getting an understanding of what kind of ads we need to create, what kind of landing pages we need to create, what kinds of content and a content calendar, how many times we should be posting, are important.
Speaker 2:One of the things that I talk about often, regardless of industry, but this is one that is really critical. When you're wearing multiple hats or someone in your office is wearing multiple hats of you know, could they, how many things are they doing and and do you understand what and why? You know you're posting seven times a week on Facebook and is it working for you or not, or uh, and getting that right and making sure you understand your content calendar or you're consistent with it and it doesn't fall off for a few months when things get busy, or you know we've got, you know, a staffing issue, or we've got some got to get caught up on billing or whatever it might be and all of a sudden we stopped doing something. So understanding how you're going to apply, you know your strategy and your tactics and how it's going to come to life for you is really critical.
Speaker 1:Yeah, great tips there. I mean, you talked about everything there. Now we're going to talk for two more hours on marketing, but let's keep it tight. The thing that came up for me is the value of content. So maybe from your perspective, when we're developing content, time is money. So if we're going to put effort into developing content, where do you find the highest value? Maybe let's look at it from a SEO perspective. For long-term gain, how would you value the content that you create? Is creating text form blogs and putting them on a proper page on your website for Google to eat up over time? The best form of content? Is it video? Is it pictures? Is it ads? Is it boosting? What is it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so I'm not going to take the cheap way out here and say it depends, but there's it really, as we and I'm going to rip off the bandaid here and say AI for the first time in the show and either one of us had yet but the, the, the emergence of AI has coincided with a lot of the distractions of okay, now we had smart speakers we're talking to, we're talking to our phone. There's a lot of searches that have the words near me in them, because people are looking for localized content or looking for something around them today, looking for, you know, something around them today, you know, five, 10 years ago, all of our focus was on what does Google think and what does Facebook think and what do we do for those, feed those. So the job is getting harder for us now because there are more sources the AI sources, people asking questions in random places and more channels than ever before. So I see it as an opportunity that we don't have. We're not, you know, having to serve the Google machine and follow its rules as much. But all of that said, even though we're still still playing out and Google is still the behemoth and Facebook is still where a lot of consumer searching and content is consumed. It's more important than ever to get out of the noise and out of the vacuum and not just throw stuff out there and focus on quality of content, not just the volume. It's not about saying we did our 30 posts this month and check that box and we hope it worked, but it's really to create it in a way that resonates and to get as much feedback as we can on it. So I love video content. There are amazing stats around it, but you know and you can be found.
Speaker 2:But if, if it's a research topic and you are creating that thought leadership upstream and really trying to educate on why my back might hurt and what my options are, and to really compare and contrast, like the chiropractic approach versus a medical approach, or when PT and chiropractic you know I've again been through both of them and my back is very personal to me because I've got the. You know what I have for the rest of my life with, with, uh, with my condition, with arthritis, but it's it's. How much do you want to do? And where are people consuming that? If it's on YouTube, obviously it's video. If you are landing them on your page and you're trying to explain to them and educate them, but also educate them on your practice and how your approach is different. Then there's probably a mix of video and text and you bridge that in the middle. Um, if they have filled out a form or they're close to it, or they're looking at your culture and what's different, then as much personality as you can get in there as possible and you're comfortable with. If you're not a video person, then give them a lot of imagery and text.
Speaker 2:But in terms of what Google's looking for, I feel like we often overlook the fact that YouTube is the number two search engine, and so if we're creating content anywhere, I love to create it with all the channels and platforms in mind, so we can create one big, meaty piece of content that we can then repurpose out and get into all the different channels. I'm not saying we should copy and paste a 700 word long blog post from our blog to Facebook, but we but we can take parts and pieces of that and whether we record shorter snippet, two minute videos off of it or have 20 or 20, um posts in that given month, all pointing back to it, taking kind of a cornerstone approach that we can trickle out with cobblestones and get more return on investment, for what we produce is important, so I don't necessarily think as much about you know format first. I'll think about content, the big piece and the messaging first, and then how we can trickle it out.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, and you're right. Ai is here. I mean, it's just the way it is. You shouldn't ignore it. I should say you should not ignore it. Like you said, the disbursement of information is going to happen exponentially. It's happening. Google's no longer. It's still behemoth, it's no longer the main source of information and search. Actually, as of, I think, january 2025, it is now chat.
Speaker 1:Gpt Gets more questions asked to it than Google, so that's an issue. Now, how do you rank in there? So there's a whole bunch of things there, but AI is the only way to really help you disperse as much information as you possibly can across as many channels as possible in a realistic fashion. There's just no way to do it, especially as a solo entrepreneur. It's just not going to happen, so you're going to have to use AI tools to move forward. So now this is where I leave it to you. You guys are using AI in marketing. Again, from our perspective, what are some great ways to just maybe get started on this? Or to look into not specifics, not specific AI channels, but how to really globally look at AI and be like how can I use it to maximize productivity and get content out there on a regular basis?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I always give the quick disclaimer that you know AI is probably the one of the most misunderstood or, you know, undefined things. So right it's. It's woven into a lot, you know now, because every software developer had to say that they were leveraging it. So it's woven into a lot of the different third-party tools that we use. It's built into now the search results from Google and you know, chatgpt has its own. Openai has its own search function as well, but then we can natively use it right. And so just my favorite one still to this day is ChatGPT, because I've spent so much time training it that it's hard for me to go replatplatform and I'll test the others, but it's hard for me to go start over in others.
Speaker 2:The challenge is no matter where you are in terms of your own use of it. The challenge is I have friends who are on the leading edge of building software, leveraging AI and their custom models, and we have our own here in my agency. But everybody feels like they're behind and there's this crazy imposter syndrome and we all feel like we're not there. So the people on the bleeding edge of it that I know feel like they're behind somebody else, somebody who hasn't touched it yet because they're busy running their successful business also probably feels some level of being behind, unless you're just writing it off entirely. But regardless, I find that a lot of people are wired one of two ways. Either I chase the shiny object and I'm super into that new tech thing the next phone, the next piece of hardware, the next piece of software I've got more paying for software I don't need because I want to test everything or you're so busy running your business this is an overwhelming concept and you want to test it, but you always get to the end of your day and it gets squeezed out.
Speaker 2:So being intentional and having guardrails in no matter which camp you're in, for me is important. So if you're, you've got to put parameters around it and make sure that you aren't just going and chasing that shiny object where your traffic might not be yet. So pull yourself back if you're on that side of it. And if you're on the side of it, where your guilt comes from, the fact of, hey, it just keeps getting pushed out of my day and I don't want to fall behind, but I'm so busy with what's working now You've got to schedule intentional time to go test. I mean, my wife and I um, one night, you know, spent from 7 PM to midnight on a Friday night in two different industries sitting on our computers testing out back when things were emerging. Um, spend some time with chat GPT and doing some training on it and testing on it, and that was fun for us, but it did get squeezed out of our day to day for a while, and so having understanding what it can do and leveraging it is important.
Speaker 2:I've spent over a hundred hours training and just talking back and forth with it and testing it and understanding what it can do, and so, if I take myself out of being in a business, there are some things, yes, that scare me.
Speaker 2:Right? I'm not going as far as giving my voice and having it be me in video or vocal content, but it's amazing what it can do in terms of writing for me. I've given it all 24,000 words of my book. I've given it years of blog posts and social media posts, so now it can accelerate content creation and it's not just creating crap out there that I have to go, you know, rewrite entirely or spend three times as long on to go rewrite and fix. It's giving me my content back in a format and vehicle that I can use to really scale much faster. I was personally considering a virtual assistant a couple of years ago and I'm so glad I didn't get into a contract there because I can go back and forth in real time and correct things in AI and get the right content within minutes, versus going back and forth over days of somebody else manually creating the content.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean it's a tool to use. I've done some other podcasts on how chiropractors can use AI, chat, GPT, all these things to do your weekly emails to do task-oriented stuff, to set up posts for social media in text format with pictures, things to just help you speed up. You still have to create the content, but what I found AI has done in our practice to really help is to keep our workload about the same that it was in 2019, where we were still shooting the videos we're still posting on Facebook, YouTube, all that stuff, repurposing content, and now you have all these AI things that can splice your videos into real stories and all these things and you can just blast them across all the platforms now. So I find the time that I spent creating content, especially video or educational stuff, is about the same. It was in 2019. Thanks to AI, since 2023, when I got into it, Um, thanks to that, because I felt like 2021, 2022, we're just doing more and more work to try and get content done.
Speaker 1:And the AI. Now when you look back, you're like, hey, man, you really saved me a lot of time, Because to get this all across all the platforms, I mean, I think I would just have a studio in my office and I'd just be a professional YouTuber Because I mean there's no other way to get this done. I don't know how the heck we do this. So if you use it properly, it does save you a lot of time and it really doesn't cost. A lot of people are like oh man, how much does it cost? Is it a lot of software? It's really not. It's these little programs that you use. I use Opus to clip some stuff. I use ChatGPT, which is a free version or $20 a month. Whatever you want to do, it works. It works for us. So it's very affordable, very doable. Anything else, I think we missed the last step in the marketing success plan.
Speaker 2:So it just rounds out with the with R, which is review, which is essentially reporting and getting being able to, you can measure everything.
Speaker 2:We talked about it kind of in the strategy phase when we quantified what we want to measure, know third party software, or you know practice management software that doesn't, out of the box, integrate with Google Analytics, or what you're doing to track things, or your phone system, or how you want to track things, even if you're just asking everyone who calls or fills out a form having a system where you can close the loop on that, to really be able to track ROI, as we talked about earlier.
Speaker 2:And then the last step is called transformation and that's making sure that we didn't do all this work in the first few stages to then say, okay, we're now going to implement and it's disorganized. So this is about getting a literal plan on paper, even if it's a one pager, where you've recapped what you've defined as your plan and get it into practice, so you don't get busy in two months and put it on the shelf, for the next shiny, flashy thing coming at us is like hey, you know, let's do that. Okay, let's time out, even if it's a five minute conversation of how does that change the priorities of the things we're already doing, how does it change budget allocation and where we're putting our focus or who's going to do it if we're already maxed out? And so having a documented plan makes it not just one person's job and doing what's in their head, but gives some accountability to it and makes it actionable. So that's the transformation step of the T. So it's strategy, tactics, application review and transformation.
Speaker 1:Awesome, Awesome. You can buy the book right. You can just get it right from your website or on Amazon.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it's on Amazon. I've got a standalone website for it too. It's a long title Digital Marketing Success Plan, so I've shortened it to the DMSPcom so you can find the framework there. I've got some free resources that you can grab there, um, and it'll link you over to Amazon as well.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Thanks for your time. This was great stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you for having me. I enjoyed it. Yeah, take care.
