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
Your Marketing Budget Isn't Working Because You're Not Tracking the Right Data
Every chiropractor knows the challenge: you need new patients, but which marketing channels actually deliver the best return on investment? In this revealing conversation with Scott Desgrosseilliers from Wicked Reports, we dive deep into the often-misunderstood world of marketing attribution and how it can transform your practice's growth strategy.
Scott introduces us to the concept of "reverse funnel math" - a practical approach to determining what you can realistically afford to spend on patient acquisition. Rather than relying on vague promises of ROI, he explains how to work backward from your average patient value to create sustainable marketing campaigns. What makes this conversation particularly valuable is Scott's emphasis on targeting specific pain points rather than generic chiropractic services.
Through concrete examples, Scott demonstrates how creating campaigns for distinct demographics - like pickleball players with elbow pain or CrossFit enthusiasts with lower back issues - dramatically improves conversion rates. He shares practical wisdom on crafting ads that resonate deeply with potential patients: "If I'm online and have that pain point, you already demonstrate that you get my problem more than just 'oh, I know a chiropractor can help me.'"
Perhaps most eye-opening is Scott's breakdown of patient value analysis. While many practices track basic metrics like cost per lead, Scott explains how to measure the actual revenue generated by different patient segments over time. This approach often reveals surprising insights - like discovering that one type of injury might generate three times the revenue of another, allowing you to shift your budget accordingly.
For practitioners with limited marketing budgets, Scott offers a pragmatic roadmap: start by optimizing internal marketing through email campaigns to existing patients, then focus external efforts on a single channel with condition-specific landing pages. He even shares a fascinating tip about leveraging Reddit to improve visibility in AI tools like ChatGPT, which derived approximately 5% of its training data from the platform.
Ready to transform how you think about marketing attribution? This episode provides the blueprint for creating data-driven campaigns that not only bring in new patients but attract the right patients for sustainable practice growth.
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Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of Marketing 101. Thanks for joining us. This week we got a really cool guest, Scott DeGrossier from Wicked Reports. Thanks for being here. Tell us a little bit about you and what you do.
Speaker 2:Sure. So Wicked Reports is a marketing attribution platform, and that means we have software that determines credit for your marketing to help advise you on where you're wasting money or, hopefully more optimistically, where you're making money and should scale your ad spend. So it seems straightforward, but there's actually a lot of intricacies to it. However, we can get into some of the specific use cases for chiropractors and offices with you today, so I'm excited to talk about that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was so cool and you or your team reached out to me and I read your LinkedIn. I was like this is a cool one, because that's all you do is you look at the analytics and you're in the background of all this and, as entrepreneurs, we're just at the front. You know what we're looking for. We're looking for a new patient and whichever way we can get it, that's what we want to do, and I find we cheat and run around corners, try to do it ourselves or maybe hire different people. But I like what you're going to do here and I mean this is going to be a great dive in.
Speaker 1:So you kind of guide me with where we go with this conversation and what is intricate data, because, again, I'm a dumb chiropractor not that I'm dumb, but that's all I see is I run my business, I want the new patients, so I'm seeing the front of this marketing machine and you're in the back with the in the engine room making sure that all these things work and how they work. So you help me, cause I don't know if I'm going to have the strongest questions for you, so help me out here. When, when we're looking at this stuff, what's front and foremost for you when we're looking at this stuff. What's front and for uh foremost for you when you're when you're looking at marketing?
Speaker 2:well, when you first you know you're going to launch ads to you like I need new patients, so you need to know what you can afford to pay to acquire the patient. And then that involves uh, you know what I call reverse funnel math fancy way of saying you work back from the outcome you want to get. So you look at your average patient value to start, and you can't look at the lifetime value because you can't just say, oh, I have a patient for five years, I can spend this amount of money based on five years. You want to get an ROI payback quicker. So let's say, you look at your average patient value over six months and I don't know what would be an average chiropractor value for six months.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, let's keep the math simple. It's typically around $2,000 for most successful chiropractors, but let's use $1,000 for, like, the three-month return of a patient that comes in, you know, for an acute injury, for whatever, 12 visits on average. Let's just say $1,000 to keep the math simple on this. Let's do the reverse funnel math there okay, so you got before.
Speaker 2:So we're going to start doing the math now, before we start with this thousand. Then, to help build our offer, we're going to look at what makes up a typical thousand dollar patient. What is, uh, what makes a valuable patient. So it could be, you know, I'd probably be pretty valuable. I was like early fifties CrossFit and pickleball always getting injured, seeing the chiropractor all the time. But you look at and see if there's any demographic thing or a geographic, because of course you're in an area as a chiropractor, so geo is probably going to be just the surrounding areas, but then it could be a certain age range. I mean, I and I know chiropractors can do a ton of things. I've been going to them on and off for 30 years. I think it's awesome.
Speaker 2:However, you got to have an angle that speaks to specific people in your marketing. So let's say, you look at a thousand dollars and you find a lot of pickleball injuries. Let's just use that one. Is that a common one or could it be something else? Yeah, yeah, yeah, ball injuries. Let's just use that one. Is that a common one or could it be something else? Yeah, pickleball, okay.
Speaker 2:So you're like okay, I'm gonna my thousand dollars in three months pickleball campaign I'm gonna run here. So then you look back and you say, okay, how did I first get them in? And it could have been for free consult or first adjustments discount, or maybe that's not your offer, maybe it's just you're going to give info around most common pickleball injuries and cures Something there. Before you even start getting into the math, you got to have an idea. Okay, I'm going to do a unique offer for these people, so we're going to try to capture their attention. Now that you know you have a thousand bucks. Now you got to decide how much profit from marketing is going to be in those $1,000. Because of course, you want to spend a dollar and keep $999. But you've got to get something realistic in there. So let's say maybe $200 or what's like a ratio that generally for I don't know chiropractor margins that well, different margins for different funnels.
Speaker 1:So if we use the Facebook, instagram or Meta meta model, we were trying to get leads in for 20 and if we're converting at about 40, for every three that we get, we should get one in the door. So for 60 bucks we should get a new patient that comes in through the door and pays that. Whatever the discount offer, whatever it is for meta, we're for google. We're probably up closer to the $100 mark for that. Just just. You know those are divided.
Speaker 2:Okay, those are great spreads though Econ. I mean chiropractors. I'm sure there's a lot of challenges in that industry, like everyone, but those are better spreads than econ gets. So that's one thing you can say hey, for all this work, I'm making a better spread on the market. All right, okay, okay so I'll do the round number uh okay, so we're gonna try to get sales at a hundred bucks and then so we're gonna try to get leads at you said twenty dollars that's.
Speaker 1:That's in great areas competitive like miami, philadelphia, san francisco. We're probably gonna get leads at closer to 40. But but yeah, 20 is really good. Let's say 30.
Speaker 2:going to get leads at closer to 40, but but yeah, 20 is really good, let's say 30. Okay, so then, from a marketing attribution perspective for we haven't even got to that part yet. But what we want to do then is create some unique ads for unique uh targeting, because otherwise they're just like, hey, come, get you adjustment. No one, I mean, that's not very. You've got to match the message to the pain point that the people have, and so let's just we'll work with meta. In this example, I would create different campaigns around different targets, like one specifically for the male pickleball player, and I'd show a male pickleball player in the image and maybe wincing or something, and it'd be around are you suffering? Because everyone gets that elbow issue, are you suffering? You know, you just try different one-line hooks around that and showing to male pickleball players 40 and older, and then you'll do a separate campaign doing the same one to females, even though it's the same messaging, and then the whole offer to get the lead in is get your pickleball injury tune up, or whatever you're going to brand it, but something around again pickleball pain, and however you're going to fix it, because then you have resonance of the message and and it looks like them in the image. I mean, no one's gonna know, one image is gonna look perfectly like everyone, but at least the same sex or the same age, general area, and so then the idea. Then then, when you're running it, you've got a couple of metrics. Yeah, you're looking at your cost per lead and your cost per sale, but then as people, as they accrue revenue for the different points, what we do is keep updating the amount that that ad actually made instead of using because that thousands of ballpark. It could be that the women come in and spend 1500 bucks and the guys are like 300. Or it could be that the pickleball injuries versus the CrossFit and it turns out CrossFit way more lucrative.
Speaker 2:People hurt themselves on the deadlift all the time, which that's what I would get in for the deadlift like three times. So you, then you might want to be like okay, it turns out the deadlift people are worth three grand. Let's use a deadlift person and someone doing the deadlift and wincing in the creative. Those things can make a big difference because if I'm online and I have that pain point, you, you already demonstrate that you get my problem more than just oh, I know a chiropractor can help me. That's going to potentially drive more Revit.
Speaker 2:But when then, with your funnel math, what you'll find, like you've got, you've basically given me benchmarks, meta twenty dollars, a lead, one in three or one in four converts and they're worth a thousand. But then I measure what actually occurs and I don't over correct initially. But once I've got enough customers in the door, I look at them versus the benchmark of. I have my women pickleball players, my men pickleball players, my women CrossFit and my men CrossFit and I look and see, okay, which ones are performing above the benchmark.
Speaker 2:I want to spend more there Because I've already worked out my bare minimum benchmark that I want. But where I'm beating the average, that's where I pour my budget in, because if I'm getting three grand or converting to one more customer a week because of the CrossFit, I want to make sure to be spending more there because I'll just be doubling the amount of customers I get from my pay. That, in essence, is how you use the day. You move it around based on where you you beating the benchmarks and where you're not beating the benchmarks. We'll talk to you in a minute, but I'll pause there and see if I'm all tracking right now.
Speaker 1:Tracking Great. I mean, I liked your specifics on you know the demographic. Yeah, Keep going, this is great.
Speaker 2:Okay. So now that I've got that, so I've got you gave me the benchmark data I ran just and I think that's what a chiropractor should do Just pick the two most popular, start. Don't start trying to solve 20 problems at once. Just do one or two. We'll stick with CrossFit and pickleball, because I know those happen All my friends. They just all of a sudden drop off the text thread. Oh, I can't play for the next month. I hurt my Achilles or whatever.
Speaker 2:Something's always happening with all of us and we're always like desperate to get back out there. Yeah, so you've got your. You know your male, female either two pain points. So the ones again, the ones that are doing better than average. You just you got to move budget there and spend more and you're always taking that the the longer term mindset, not the. Okay, they got to come in and first visit I got to double my money on them, but a short term time frame of three months, and then, as the three months go by, I've got my measurements and then I have to diagnose the ones that didn't work. So it could be, let's just say, the female pickleball player didn't work.
Speaker 2:Then you got to experiment there because you know, you still know that they're. They're dropping like flies and need help. So it's not that. Oh, I guess no one from pickleball is getting injured. That's over 50 and female. It's that your ad isn't working. So you need to experiment with new creatives and new hooks. Now you can just use chat gpt, ai for this. Um, you go into chat gpt and say I'm a chiropractor, I'm targeting women over 50 that injure either their calves or their elbows. Give me some ad hoc ideas and there'll be 10 good ones probably. Or when you read them you'd be like oh, just change one or two words. It's not like. It's going to be like a three-week market research project. It's going to take you like five minutes to get them in JetGPT and then you just test the other ones. And so then the breakdown of the funnel is the ad should generate clicks.
Speaker 2:So you look at click percentage and are you getting more or less clicks than you normally get? Because when you test a new creative and a new hook, is it getting more clicks? That's the job of the ad. The job of the ad isn't to sell them, it's to get the clicks. Then, wherever they go with the click when they get a book with you. That's the job is to capture the email. So then you analyze those by is it capturing more or less emails than usual?
Speaker 2:And you basically run two versions of the page at once. Unusual, and you basically run two versions of the page at once. Here's my one version with one angle and here's my other version where the the sign up box is at top and it's shorter. One has a video and one doesn't. Doesn't have to be meticulously everything you analyze. It's like big changes. One is a video, one doesn't. One is more dramatic, one is more balanced, or you know doctoral tone, yeah, and then when you get to the capture, the appointment, then you look at how many return rates come, and that could be a function of the doctor or it could be the type of injury you target. I'm supposed to get $1,000, but I'm only getting 300 here. What's happening? And is it the treatment? Is it I'm targeting an injury that actually isn't worth $1,000. I fix it too fast. That's fine for me as a doctor, but it's not fine for my paid advertising. So I got to switch to the longer term care. So those are how I break down chiropractor.
Speaker 1:Yeah, keeping so. Yeah, now. Now we slide into your world of analyzing this stuff. You tipped in it because your brain is there.
Speaker 1:That conversation is not the typical conversation I have with most chiros or digital agencies, because they're looking at the ROI and they talk about the thousand. All you need is two patients. We'll spend $2,000 a month and you just need two patients. They don't get that because I'm like well, no, I have to work with that patient for three months to get my $1,000, or two months to get my $1,000. So first they didn't get that. Second, you came back and said if you're too good or getting results too fast, you're not going to get your $1,000 case value average. From that, you're going to get $300. So you can just see where your mind is on this and that's why we've got to keep letting you talk more and me less.
Speaker 1:For the next thing now analyzing this stuff and getting it in there. I know my listeners understand they make $500,000 a year in gross revenue. Their budget is $50,000 a year in marketing because they know the 8% to 10% rule. That's $4,000 a month to spend. Now we get to play with this. If they can do it yourself, like I do, I'd get my $4,000 and I can go ahead and put that all into marketing. If I don't, I need to hire Scott or Enrico to help me out to do this. There's a fee for that, whatever it is, let's say two. It leaves me with $2,000 in ad spend. What am I doing with that $2,000 to go forward? Do I dive all into meta and try and test that for a few months to see what type of a result I get, or do I just start throwing seeds all over the yard, hoping something grows?
Speaker 2:So there's a couple of things you'd want. First, you'd want to dial in your email campaigns assuming you're capturing emails, because a lot of your customers you past customers you might have other services you can cross sell them. So, getting email and sms set up so that people show up for their appointments, but also then you stay on their radar with all the different other things you're doing, like if you're offering massage or acupuncture or pt pt's huge, probably, um, or if you're doing you got a gym as well your other services. You want to stay on the radar and email at least, probably once a week. So you need someone to write that email or you have AI write it for you really fast.
Speaker 2:Give it a topic. It doesn't have to be Nobel Peace Prize literature. You just want to stay on the radar. Or maybe do an offer hey, repeat customer $ dollars off if they come in for red laser treatment today. So, whatever it is, you can get more revenue from your existing customers a lot easier. So I first set up returning customer systems uh, meaning email and sms. Get campaigns going that are automated. So when those are going to be running on autopilot for you or before autopilot, at least there's someone writing one email a week, the offer of the week, whatever it is, because those some you could just snare one or two more visits, maybe more, just from sending an email from your current base.
Speaker 1:Yeah, internal marketing, we call that. So you do the internal stuff and then we we want to focus on the external stuff to try and acquire new customers to our business. So when we're looking at the data there, so we've done it, we've created the machine. We have a pickleball thing going, we have a knee pain thing going, we get our stats back. What are we looking for on a return? If we're spending, let's say, two thousand dollars a month on meta and we run these campaigns for a few months, what should we be looking at from a marketing perspective on a return on that?
Speaker 2:Well, there's no one perfect benchmark. It's by industry, but also it's relative to yourself. So when you first start, you're going to probably be below your benchmarks because you or there's a super right market and you're going to be above your benchmarks because no one's doing it. But you basically need to try to beat yourself every month. The scoreboard is yourself, not not an industry standard, because your, your region and your comp, you may have more or less competition than most people, or your geography may be more or less into chiropractic. You're willing to do it. So it's a scoreboard against yourself that you need to create. But then, with two grand, you need to pick probably one channel, because it's a lot to do too, and it could be that google keywords are a better choice than meta because those people are more, uh, pressingly looking for a solution. The challenge there is that the costs for clicks are going to be a lot higher, most likely. So again, it's the conversion math. So are you going to get because you're probably not going to get a one click, one sale in keywords? You've got to refine your message Now.
Speaker 2:One mistake I see is people will for keywords, all the different keywords they'll just throw it at the chiropractor homepage, you got to put it specifically to that page related to the cure or whatever pain point it is. So if it's pickleball, keep with that one. Then whatever injuries they're googling, that means oh, I might have heard a pickleball hurt myself. Whatever those keywords need to go to the we have the pickleball solution. Or if it's knee pain, it's got to go to your knee pain page on your website and if you don't have one, you shouldn't launch it. You should just create that one new page and worry about one new keyword, one new keyword cluster.
Speaker 2:I mean like everything around knee pain that's within 50 miles of Milwaukee if you're the Milwaukee chiropractor, 25 miles and just just be like. I want to see if I can get new customers that are hurting, that have knee pain and are looking for someone in Milwaukee so you could go that most competitive right. It's the most competitive but it's also the most likely to generate clicks. Um, so that one and then the additional one is to get your google my business site listing. You want to get that as up to date as you can because Google, particularly on Google Near Me's, it shows the local ones.
Speaker 2:So the more beefed up your Google Near Me Google Business which is a free thing the more beefed up it is, the higher it shows in results. So how do you get that beefed up? You get people to put reviews on your old customers, to put reviews on your Google my Business account, and then it ranks them, usually reviews descending. So that's a lot of free traffic you can get as well, which is something that is a must. People are going to, you know they're going to prowl around a little. Reviews are critical.
Speaker 1:Absolutely critical. You nailed a home run here. I think they're on if they listen to my podcast for the last few years. They're on their Google my Business. They have this.
Speaker 1:But the listeners out there right now, how many of you have a conditions tab on your website listing as many possible conditions as possible? I mean you should be building this like your blog section and then your blog should be talking about those conditions and how you resolve those. No one reads the blogs, but the SEO does. Google does and same thing with the condition thing and then when you're doing your Google AdWords, it's going to ask you for a landing page or where you're going to send these people to. It's going to be to your knee pain page, your tendonitis page, your plantar fasciitis page, your sciatica page. You need to have this stuff there. So think about that. And then many of you are missing that whole thing and your website guy can do this for you. The website team can do this for you. They create a one tab dropdown with all the conditions listed in there. Those are going to have specific landing pages to them, or landing sites that you're going to use in your Google links, and that's going to help you convert a little bit better. So that was great. That was. That was a good thing there. That's the next, the next level thing as well as well there. So that's great from the backend.
Speaker 1:Now we're getting into Google a little bit. Where do you find so the Google and so the Google my Business? You can even put conditions on there. I just recently figured that out, like six, seven months ago where you on your maps page on the bottom, they can scroll through images of conditions, and that's great too. We've had people look at that and scroll through that as well on the Google my Business page.
Speaker 1:Where are we going with AI and voice search? And how do we even get into this realm and play that game? I've had one, and he was in his twenties, this was about a month ago. He's like I went to chat GPT and found you. I'm like how wait, how did you even find me on chat GPT? He was just asking on how to resolve a condition and then his next question is who's the closest specialist near me that could do this? And a few of us popped up, but we actually ranked in there on the Google Maps, so chat should be people.
Speaker 1:But anyways, we're moving towards AI, and for me what that means is when I'm driving in my car, I can have a full-on conversation with my car and we can talk back and forth. That's where AI is going. Siri's been with us for a long time. Alexa's been with us for a long time. They're just becoming better at having conversational responses with humans. So when I'm driving, I'm like, hey, carplay, I have back pain. It's been bothering me for a while. Who are the best people to deal with in the area to help resolve this issue? They're going to have feedback. How do we play that game? How do we even get into that?
Speaker 2:So ChatGPT is still somewhat of a black box. However, it trained itself on the entire web and 5% of it came from Reddit, of all places. Wow, if you answer, the way to get listed then is you have your own Reddit profile. You can post things there and then you can answer questions there and put links to your practice and then ChatGPT mines Reddit. That's 5% of it. Now ChatGPT also mines YouTube and the whole web, so the more places you are, the more likely it is to cite you. We get inbounds from Wicker Reports at ChatGPT. There's no one precise thing we can do except for just keep getting exposure. They're gonna have an ad platform next year, so then that'll be a whole. Another place to place ads will be chat GPT platform, but for now it's just black box, unfortunately yeah, but that's the Reddit thing there.
Speaker 1:Hey, that was huge for the listeners right there. So create a profile, business profile, like brand it as your business and go in and answer questions on Reddit for people in your local area. You'll have like a Milwaukee page or a Tampa page and I've actually seen it and I've actually been in in those and answered questions for people uh, pediatric questions or hey, have you thought about seeing a chiropractor? And it's got our our logo on the top? Um, interesting, that's cool. Never thought about actually leveraging reddit a little bit. I knew about youtube and, because they're google, great, what else you got? This was this. This is it. We're good, I am. I am more than happy with this right?
Speaker 2:yeah, all right. Well, I'm glad I can help. Then I'm going to send this to my chiropractor friends in menomee falls, wisconsin.
Speaker 1:Oh, awesome, wicked reports um, if anyone has any deeper questions and they listen to this podcast Menomee Falls, wisconsin oh awesome, so with Wicked Reports, if anyone has any deeper questions and they listen to this podcast and they're like man Scott knows his stuff how do they reach out to you and maybe contact you or maybe even work with you in one way, shape or form?
Speaker 2:Sure, WickedReportscom has our marketing attribution platform. You don't want to be spending at least five grand a month to be on that marketing attribution platform. You don't want to be spending at least five grand a month to be on that Um the five forcescom. I have a course in data analysis and attribution for those that are really into it, and I'm available on LinkedIn. I got a unique last name. You can. You can find me there also.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. That's great and I would highly recommend you. Do I mean this is what he does Thanks? Do I mean this is what he does Thanks for being on the show? I really appreciate it. This was tons of great information and just get people to reach out to you.
Speaker 2:Sounds great. Thanks, enrico, take care, take care.
