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
AI Broke Facebook Ads: What Chiropractors Need to Know
Something significant happened in early 2025 that's affecting chiropractors across the country - Meta rolled out their new AI systems, completely changing how Facebook ads work. The precision targeting tools we relied on for years have vanished, replaced by artificial intelligence making decisions about who sees your ads. The results? Lower quality leads, inconsistent delivery, and a lot of frustrated practice owners wondering why their marketing suddenly stopped performing.
This shift matters deeply for local healthcare providers. While Facebook made creating ads simpler with just a few clicks, they removed the precise geographic and demographic targeting that made the platform so effective for chiropractors. We don't need to reach everyone - we need to reach the right people within a few miles of our office who are actively looking for our specific services.
The good news? There are practical solutions that work in this new AI-driven landscape. Start by simplifying your campaign structures and letting Meta's algorithm learn from broader campaigns. Create compelling video content that tells local stories and showcases patient journeys. Upload your existing patient and lead lists to teach the AI about your ideal prospects. Most importantly, strengthen your follow-up systems - consider using landing pages with prepayment options instead of simple lead forms to filter for serious prospects.
Facebook ads aren't broken forever - we've just experienced a major crash and now need to rebuild our approach. The chiropractors who adapt by focusing on creative content and robust systems rather than targeting parameters will thrive while others quit in frustration. Take time this week to analyze your recent leads - how many actually showed up? How quickly did your team follow up? That's where your ads are truly won or lost in this new era.
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If you've noticed your Facebook ads aren't working anymore, you're not imagining it. The truth is, ads don't work like they used to. Since Meta rolled out their new AI systems over the last two years and finally launched them at the beginning of 2025, chiropractors across the board are seeing a major drop in results. You're not crazy docs. There has been a major change. Welcome to another episode of Marketing 101 for Chiropractors, where I keep you ahead of the curve. And the curve now is AI. Let's be honest with it. It's doing its thing. It broke the system. It really did because we were targeting in local audiences using your metapixels and data that you were building over time, and AI came in and was like nope, we're going to do better. But in order to do better, they have to relearn the whole thing, and they're relearning from the top down, which means big business, big industry. We're not big industry, so they are targeting, not targeting, but they're getting data globally and that doesn't help us when we're trying to target seven miles around our office. It doesn't really work. So what's really changed is the AI takeover, and you're feeling it, you're noticing it. Ads aren't working like they used to.
Speaker 1:Meta rebuilt its ads platform and launched it on us. I felt it March 2025. So that first quarter, that's when it went. Instead of letting us target people precisely as before, AI is now making all the decisions. You can easily make an ad now on Facebook. That was their whole point. It was like how do we just get people to do more advertising? Smart on Facebook's side, get in there and create an ad, create a lead ad, create a target ad, create an audience ad. You're all set. Awareness campaign, whatever you want. Click target ad, create an audience ad. You're all set. Awareness campaign, whatever you want. Click, click, click, click, click. Video picture boom. That's what they wanted was to make it super simple and even though they did, they said just trust the AI, do the recommended settings, do this stuff.
Speaker 1:It's left us kind of hanging and I know you feel this. There's been a shift, even if you're still I'm still using ads, we're still getting new patients from it, but boy is it messier than it was, and I felt it. I know you're feeling it because I coach a lot of you and you give me a lot of feedback and I run a lot of your ads and I see it across the board. So anyone that's saying otherwise is lucky and they're getting the same volume of patients. So the impact from all this is definitely lower lead quality.
Speaker 1:When docs are calling me saying dude, like people are just bad, like they don't speak English, they you know. When docs are calling me saying dude, people are just bad, they don't speak English. What's happening? How are we targeting these wrong people? They point the finger at me. I'm like we're trying here, we're trying to give as much as we can, but we don't have the demographic picks like we used to five years ago. Those are all gone, so we only have a certain amount of things that we can use for AI to figure this all out.
Speaker 1:Ads are getting shown to the wrong people. There's inconsistent delivery, same ad hitting widely different audiences. You're like why last week we got five and this week zero? What is going on with the leads? Yes, learning phase feels broken or like it's starting from scratch. You're right, you may be stuck in the learning phase in a lot of your ads and you're like what's going on? I just ran a very similar ad six months ago. Why is it still in the learning phase?
Speaker 1:Or even if you pay attention to these details, it matters to chiropractors specifically, because local businesses need precision and quality, not just volume. We know we can get the leads and that's been the thing. The lead volume is still there. We can generate 200 leads in a month, in a couple of months, two months, three months. We can do it, but the lead quality isn't there. Can we keep up with it? And because lead quality is rougher, it's even more strain on your team to make all the calls necessary to get these people in it's nuts.
Speaker 1:And then the automation. I feel like the world is just getting numb to automation, getting numb to text messaging, getting numb to messaging and emails. They're getting numb again. They're like I'm not going to check it. I don't check most of my texts myself. It's just the world we're in. We're just bombarded with marketing from our healthcare premium people, from our car insurance, from roofing companies I mean everyone. Insurance companies are swarming texting and phone calls and call centers like crazy because they need volume to capture the fish, and that's the game we do not want to play.
Speaker 1:So, even though there's a targeting thing going on, there's some practical solutions and actionable steps that we can take to optimize the tools that we have. I know some of you don't want to quit the Facebook stuff, and I'm not saying that. That's not what this podcast is about. It's to optimize our Facebook ads and what we can do to improve them. We need to simplify the campaign structures. Stop running 10 different ad sets. Let Meta AI test with fewer broader campaigns, fewer broader campaigns. So have one ad set, run two, three, four ad types pictures and videos and let it do its thing for a while.
Speaker 1:The first week is painful. Let it do its thing. Use better creative Copy and video should do the targeting for you. Use great hooks, local storytelling and testimonials and patient journeys and just cut through the noise. Get through it. Have a patient you know walking in, lying down on the table, getting adjusted, smiling, getting on up, doing your thing that you do you know getting and then them walking off and that's like a quick video of them coming in and coming out.
Speaker 1:The Webster technique's a wonderful one where they a mama 39 weeks pregnant. I mean come on. They come on in. Everyone knows what's going on there. She's pregnant, what is happening, she's getting on the table. She gets a Webster adjustment and protocol done. She gets on up some adjustments maybe or something else that you may do in the office to help pregnant mamas. She gets up, she do in the office to help pregnant mamas. She gets up, she walks out.
Speaker 1:There's no audio, there's nothing going on. It's overlaid with some easy music, but then the message is there or maybe you're narrating something. You see how long that video is and it's 33 seconds. You're like, okay, I'm going to talk for 30 seconds and record it on an MP3 on your phone. You record it as an MP3, your voice nice and clear, and you tell a 30-second story.
Speaker 1:At FLC, pregnant moms love us because when they come in it's warm, comfortable and simple to come on in, feel better, get adjusted. So realign the pelvis, whatever you want to talk about and help ease the birthing process so that labor and delivery becomes as simple as possible. If you want to experience the same service at FLC, we encourage you to come try us out. And then boom, you overlay the text, the offer, whatever it is there in that video. That's a Webster technique one. I'm just using it as an example. You can do that for general chiropractic, you can do that for pediatric example. You can do that for general chiropractic, you can do that for pediatric, you can do that for shoulders, knees, lasers, shockwave, whatever you want to do whatever you want to show discompression, whatever it is tell the stories in audio form so that people want to listen to it or they can see the text overlay on the video. The ad copy can do that for you as well. So then we got to tell stronger stories where capture the right people. That Webster one was a great example because you got to be pregnant to come on in to get that type of a treatment. Otherwise, webster is not really applicable to you as a 39 year old male. That's what we want to do there Leverage first party data.
Speaker 1:Upload patient lists into your Facebook. Yes, you can do this. First name, last name, email address, email address is the big thing. Retarget them. Do you want to use your EHR patient list? No, they're patients already. You can just recall them. You want to use your high level account wherever you were funneling in all your leads. That's the list, the contact list. Download that entire email list. Put it into Facebook, into the backend, into your audiences, and create a target, a retargeting group or an audience that you're going to retarget with ads to help hit those types of people, because not only are you going to hit them, you're going to tell the AI in there to also look alike.
Speaker 1:Target people like them. Teach the AI. We've got to reteach it. We're now counting on AI. So, instead of these pixels and data formats that are there, everybody's throwing away the server-type data storage and now they're using advanced AI, which means that now we're using these AI tools, these super tools that now can scour data faster than pixels or terabytes or storage devices or metadata or data itself, coding and all this I'm not a web developer, but all that stuff. There can now be hyper, hyper speed.
Speaker 1:What ai can do. This is the best way of ai. You as a person can create a website in it. You know a good website developer can sit in front of their computer and create a website in an hour I don't know, maybe a couple hours. Can can do that, they can code, that I can copy. They can basically do and create a generic homepage pretty quickly. Ai can use the exact same tools and if a thousand chiropractors call them at the same time and say, hey, we want a website up tomorrow by 9am, ai could do a thousand websites. That's the difference. On that. It's like a web. It can just do the tools faster and multiply that. That's what's going on, so as we're teaching it.
Speaker 1:So these audiences are a big thing. Follow-up is everything. Oh man, we're going back to the basics. You still need to follow up with all these people. Some of them are going to be more painful with these leads. But you signed up for this. You signed up for Facebook ads. You signed up for meta ads. Up for this. You signed up for Facebook ads and instantly signed up for meta ads.
Speaker 1:No one told you this fine print. You need an in-house call center to do this. Your team has to make the calls. Unless you want to do it, somebody has to make the calls. They're not just going to come in. I don't care how good your automation is to the booking process.
Speaker 1:It's there. If you are so stubborn that you don't want to do this, the only way around. This is not a lead form. It's there. If you are so stubborn that you don't want to do this, the only way around. This is not a lead form. It's going to be a landing page. So send to a website. Get rid of the lead form. Go to a landing page. Create a good landing page. Start testing landing pages that work the best. So you may want to create two or three and then test them and see which one is the best.
Speaker 1:Run with that one, where they go to a landing page. They give you the information, same thing Goes up into, and then on the next one they hit submit. It's a payment page your Stripe account, your PayPal account, whatever it is and you take the $99 deposit in order to book your $99 offer or whatever you're doing. Big button with the arrows pointing down pay now, secure your spot. 100% refundable, 100% guaranteed, 100% money back, whatever you need to say on the bottom, and then your disclaimers put that on there to book your appointment. Pay now to book and secure your appointment. And you can even put a little blurb on the bottom. We do this to prevent bots duplicate appointments and keep our schedule clean, to serve you better, to know that you're serious about this. If you're serious, pay the $99. Boom, that's how you do it.
Speaker 1:What you're going to notice is the amount of appointments are going to drop off. But the thing people are not looking at is you got a ton of leads before and Now you're like, oh, we're barely getting any leads. But when you look at the funnels, people are like we got 100 leads. How many? I literally had this two months ago. I'm like, guys, you had 103 leads. How many new patients? Yeah, two booked. One showed up. I'm like, guys, you're shooting 1%.
Speaker 1:I'm turning off these ads. They're like really, do we have to turn it off? I'm like, yeah, there is another problem going on here. One what if they did the $99 prepay? I think if they got 100 people landing on their site and they only had one prepay? We had a landing page issue that we could probably tweak, but I think that type of an ad would do better with the landing page prepay. And we had a landing page issue that we could probably tweak, but I think that type of an ad would do better with the landing page prepay and booking. There you go.
Speaker 1:Now your team can have an automation after the booking saying congrats on booking your appointment at two o'clock on Friday. We're so excited to see you. Email goes out with the paperwork Please fill out your paperwork and be ready for your appointment at Friday at two o'clock. Another text goes out like a few minutes later Do you have any questions about your appointment that I can help you with right now? I am real and not a bot. Hyphen your office manager's name or your CA's name, brittany. Boom Message be back right here, I'm be glad to help you. That goes out there. Then it's put into your EHR. The automatic text reminders will go out 24 hours before, four hours before, one hour before, whatever you have set up through your automation. Hopefully they've done their paperwork and, boom, you've got a new patient coming through the door.
Speaker 1:So we have to be smart about this. We know the tools. It's just. Which ones do we need to use at the right time? Diversify, so we've got to follow up. We talked about follow up. Sms nurture, yes, diversify.
Speaker 1:Put don't put all your eggs in one basket. Don't put all your eggs in meta. I don't know if this is the first time I've said that, but I don't think we can anymore. You just can't. You cannot put all your eggs into meta. We're going to have to start testing Google ads. You're going to have to get into it. Youtube, even tech TikTok is a secondary Um, tiktok is still organic. It still works really well.
Speaker 1:And Instagram, organic getting your content out there, the wow factor videos. Your team has to do this. You have to become, um, an Instagram influencer. You have to organically. That is the only way to really do this locally in your area is to become the Instagram influencer on the thing that you do the thing. And please be very clear on the thing. If you do a bunch of stuff and you go to my website, you're like Dr D, you don't do one thing, you do things. I'm like. I know that's why I'm not an Instagram influencer, but I got to pick one. It's got to be the Blair upper cervical technique and the testimonials we've had over 19 years. Like it's got to be that. That's the thing for me. What's the thing for you? That's what you got to run with and be the influencer for that.
Speaker 1:Focus on metrics that matter, not cost per lead, but cost per show up or new patient. I want you to think a little bit bigger here. If you're getting $41 leads, I want you to look at the big number, those guys that I told you about 103 leads. One new patient paid me paid $1,500 in ad spend that month let's say three months, $3,000 plus my ad spend, plus me. For that, it cost them $4,000 to get the patient in the door. That's nuts, that's ridiculous. That's the number where you're like stop the bleeding, turn it off. That ad is not working, that strategy is not working. Stop the bleeding. So change the mindset, shift a little bit here.
Speaker 1:Facebook ads are no longer set it and forget it, and that's why you're upset with your ad companies is because they're set it and forget it. They all are, they all are. I repeat, hello, they all are set it and forget it because they have multiple clients. You can't, you can't do it and I wish I could tell you hey, not me, call me, I'll just work with you one-on-one and no one else. No, I've always got five or six clients running around, but but it's five or six. I can. I can monitor it. You see, then I won't take more. Ads are now about creative and systems not targeting. It's getting the hook line, the hook ad, the hook ad. Copy. That what you're. They're turning advertising into posts.
Speaker 1:The major complaint in 2022 was like around covid time actually was there's too many ads on my Facebook. I don't like Facebook anymore. It's all ads. People were saying that they're trying to incorporate posts or sponsored posts into the feed that make it look like posts. I just gave you the secret to how we're going to shift. This is your videos have to be viral. They have to be Instagram-esque, tiktok-esque advertising where you slide into the feed and give people stuff.
Speaker 1:I don't want to say his name, charlie Kirk, because we're doing a lot with that right now but that type of quick bits about chiropractic, the punchline, the truths, the guarantees, the outcomes, the testimonials, the victories, that type of stuff. That that's how you got it. I don't know if that helps you or confuses you, but that's it. How do you bombard the algorithm with that to your feed and that and that's through the feed, right, so the people that follow you, so they're no longer set and forget it. Ads are now about creative and systems.
Speaker 1:And then think of ads as the start of a longer patient journey funnel, not the end. And I think that's why we're all frustrated with the lead forms. Type is because there is no journey, pops up on the screen, enter info, that's the end of it. They're, they're scrolling, they're scrolling, they scrolling, they're gone. Your video about sciatica they quickly watched it for like 10 seconds. You made it so easy with the lead form. They're like boop it auto filled, they hit send I'll do that 49 bucks, and they just keep scrolling. They forgot about you like two minutes later, but your text came through. They're like thanks for signing up. Oh, it worked. I guess I signed up for a 4949. That's awesome. Now you got to follow up right and there's no journey, so the funneling there works well. Putting them into a nurture sequence, emailing them more information about chiropractic, about the whole journey and story that you're telling, and keep your advertising around the thing, the thing that you do, that's going to be the way to do it.
Speaker 1:Ads aren't broken forever. I think we got into a car crash this year with meta ads and we're rebuilding the car. I I honestly that's how it feels like right now. I think we took the, the, the car, the cyber truck, and we smashed it and now we got to rebuild the cyber truck. They're just. They just changed. Chiropractors who adapt will thrive, while others are quitting and I'm starting to see it. They're quitting, which gives us an opportunity for those of us that stay in the game.
Speaker 1:Look at your last 30 leads. If you've been running ads, here's your challenge for the week how many actually showed up? How fast was your team's follow-up with them? And that's where your ads are really won or lost. If you want me to review your current ad setup or show you how to rebuild for the AI era. Just reach out to me info at enricodcom, I'll show you some tips. I can even send you some videos or I can put them up on my YouTube channel so that you guys can just watch this stuff for free and see how you can improve your ads. Don't be a quitter. Go get them, just modify, test and repeat, and that's how you duplicate some success that you had from before. And if you need help, lots of people out there to help you, including myself. Have a great week, stay well, keep doing what you're doing. Your community needs you.
