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 $29 Exam Isn’t The Problem, Your Strategy Is
- Join Marketing 101 for Chiropractors Facebook Group here
- Learn more at EnricoD.com
- Book a free discovery call with Enrico to level up your business
After working with hundreds of chiropractors, the number one pain point I'm hearing consistently recently is I'm spending money on ads, but I'm not getting real patients. Just junk leads, no shows. That single frustration sums up what most chiropractors feel. They know marketing is necessary, but they're bleeding time, money, and energy on campaigns that don't translate into reliable new patient flow. So let's build on that on this episode. I hear the frustration. I'm trying to tackle these things in my office as well. And the thing is, we've got to try and help you understand why marketing is underperforming and how to shift your approach from chasing leads to building systems that bring in consistent and high-quality new patients. I have consistently been running ads since the day I opened my office, three months before I opened my office. We're going on to eight years. I've been using meta ads consistently. It is our billboard advertising that is the fundamental marketing that we do. Have we tried other things? Yes. Google campaigns, world ads, performance max campaigns, uh, exterior digital agencies, um billboards, not so much yet, um, phone strategies, call centers. We've tried a lot of different things, and social media is the most powerful thing to do by using the organic reach you can get on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, and then paying for ads on top of that. And Meta still wins for the cost of doing business in marketing. For a thousand bucks, two thousand bucks an ad spend, you can still be in the game, which you can't with any other type of marketing. It all costs thousands of dollars to do. So you're running ads, boosting posts, maybe even paying an agency, but the phone isn't ringing with real patience. If that sounds familiar, this episode is for you. Breaking down the biggest marketing mistakes chiropractors make and how to finally fix it. You're not crazy. The system most chiropractors are using is broken. It's broken. It's not your city, it's not your budget or your offer, it's the strategy. Have to change the strategy. The$29 vatient exam strategy doesn't work anymore. It just doesn't. It's not the$29, it's not Facebook. It's the strategy, does not work anymore. Chiropractors are measuring the wrong metrics, first of all, so you don't even know where to pivot. Lead count instead of booked deployments or collections. Some of you I ask, how's it going? How much collections are you getting from that? And they can't sift out what the marketing dollars are that are coming in versus the organic dollars are, and that's an issue. How do you know what to spend next month if you don't know what last month brought in? Agencies brag about the cheap leads that mean absolutely nothing if the people don't come in. You're left chasing no shows and wondering if meta ads don't even work anymore. You don't need a hundred leads a month, you need 20 that show up, convert, and refer. And I know this firsthand, but I know it. Because if you can get 20 DCOM, you can get 20 Cairo or Shockwave, and then you get 20 referrals, you've got a multi-doctor office that's thriving. Um, but if you can't keep that predictable each and every month, how do you keep other employees employed, not knowing what you're gonna make next month? It's it's stressful, and that's what we need to crack here. Facebook can work, and it can work for a certain ad spend. So if you're trying multiple things, spending a lot of money, then paying the agency on top of this, you're gonna get stressed really quick because getting 50 new patients is going to cost a lot with the agency, it's just the way it's gonna work. Um, but if you can figure out some of this yourself, you can reduce that cost, and still, if you need 50, you can rev up to 50 if you need to. So we need to walk through three layers to really sift on how to do this well, and it's the ad, the landing page, and the follow-up system. We talked last week on the episode. If you didn't hear that, go back and listen to that after this. They're gonna mash very well. We talked about specifically the landing pages. So the ad is stop trying to sell adjustments on Facebook, it's overwhelming, there's too much going on. Most common YouTube videos are neck crack videos.
unknown:It's getting engulfed.
SPEAKER_01:Everyone knows you know, chiropractors are doing crazy stuff. It's now over the web, it's there, they're they've gone viral. You do not need to compete with that anymore. Ads need to build trust first. If you haven't been active on social media, you haven't had an active Facebook page or Instagram page, you don't post things, you have an organic disadvantage. Then you're trying to force ads to get to the top, which is a good strategy because now you're gonna get in front of people, but you got to go back to the basics and build trust first because you haven't built anything, no one knows anything about you. So, short videos showing who you are, what you do, and who you help is a great organic way to start this coming with your ads. Real video of the doc works better than stock footage or generic uh health codes. Use you, the real person video format and pictures works the best. And you want to build your face and your brand. If you have multi-doctors, get all of them on there, get everyone's face on there. The landing page, don't send traffic to your home page on your website or a form only lean magnet. Don't do it anymore. Build custom landing pages that are specific for your marketing. Your website has other SEO features on it that are there in place on purpose, like your contact us page, a good SEO-based contact us page as a cap shot, some other things on there to help make sure that the people that are requesting information are actually people and not bots to save you time and effort. Uh, but then they have a loaded other loaded other things on there: banners, uh, drop-down menus, footers, other things on there that are custom to your website. What that does is create a lot of fluff on a landing page where you're trying to grab people's attention very shortly. So creating your own landing page plays a huge role in muffling out the noise from this. And it can be separate and it can be tracked differently, and you can put different pixels on there, and you can do all of your cool stuff, and you have separate landing pages. Uh, a real landing page pre-qualifies people. That's the point of a landing page. It's not there to show all your other services and all that stuff, it's there to capture their attention and match the ad copy, show your face, your office testimonials, and why the why behind the care that they're gonna get. That's really quickly. That's done with Google reviews, that's done with a map of your office to show them where you are and look at the little quick things that you can put on there uh to build trust fast. You've only got a few seconds to catch them. The follow-up system, this is where the work is, this is where the foundation is. 50% of your leads will never convert without fast human contact. I have to put that word human in there now because AI is just not working. People are not responsive to it because they get so many texts and so many voicemails done by AI. Um, even when you call major corporations now, it's all AI on the phone. It may even sound like someone's talking to you, and at the very end, you say something and not they don't respond because AI didn't qualify what you said. Umate texts and emails immediately. Still do this, still send them the automated text, the automated email saying thanks for signing up. But make sure your team calls within five minutes. You can say, But what about after hours? Well, that's what the automations are for. The automations are there just to make sure you have that instant, like, hey, we got you, but it's 11:15 at night right now. Uh no one's gonna call you from our office. Like, that's the kind of thing we're gonna call you during our office hours, which are and then uh can be right there in the text. We'll call you during our office hours eight to six, Monday through Thursday, and eight to three and Fridays.
unknown:There you go.
SPEAKER_01:You don't need more ads. Um, you need a system that turns clicks into conversions and convers sort of into conversations and then conversations into conversions. Uh, that's what transforms into care. So when you convert people on that landing page, we gotta get them into a conversation. We gotta confirm appointments via text, don't rely on email alone. Got that appointment booked after the verbal confirmation or a voicemail, and you put that in there. That's the best to success on that. Then we want uh the secondary pain points, so consistency in this. We want to marketing isn't something you set and forget. I think we're all guilty of this too, but if it isn't working, we kind of let it run in the background and we forget it. And sometimes you tune in weekly, and I highly recommend that. Chiropractors often give up after a bad week or a bad month of analyzing data. You can't optimize what you don't track. Most don't even know their cost per show up. And when people talk about me and ask me, what do you do? I tell them I do seven years worth of stuff. I do seven years worth of stuff, and it's built off of that. It's kind of like I had a kid at the gym, he's probably in high school, 16. He's like, hey man, you know, and I'm not playing shape or form, but I have been lifting for long, 42 years old. He's like, Man, how do you get shoulders like that? And I was like, Thanks, man. Thanks for those. Like, and I my my legit response was like, hey man, 20 years, 20 years, pretty consistent in the gym. He's like, oh like there's no fast way on this. And uh that was it, that was the banter back and forth. I'm like 20 years on and off since I was doing this, lifting, putting in the work. That's that's how you do that. And uh maybe if you're good, that was great. Thanks, but and then number two is an honest answer. There was no cheap way or quick way to get there. You just gotta put in the reps, and then um, there's more to it, water hydration and all that good stuff. But it's really good for time that you do this stuff. Same thing with the lead one. I I still run lead forms, landing pages, and meta inform, the quick ones. We still get some bad leads there, too, but we still convert. So our inform works well for the three nine decompression, three night bar discounted decompression for session. We still have a high conversion rate on that. I would say eight out of ten are responsive, and six out of ten hook. It's I'm not turning it off. It's been running. I have the same one for two years of me talking about the disc. And I run that. So then I got other kairos all over the country. I'm like, can I have that video? I'm like, sure, you can have the video, but it's not gonna work the same for you. And not that I'm more good looking or have bigger shoulders than you, it's not about that. It's that when once you create this video and test it in your market, it's all based on the work of your social profile before. Do you have interest? Is your pixel built up? We've been running it with the same pixel for seven years. That pixel data knows, even though they screwed it up this year with the AI algorithm, uh, has been building that information. Some of you are creating a new pixel. First time in 2025. I'm like, oh boy, this is gonna take some time. Like the we gotta go straight to a landing page because if we use forms, it doesn't know who your ideal patient is, and you're gonna get a bunch of odds. It's not gonna work well, and then they're upset because the form's getting them like one lead a week. I'm like, this is gonna rev up. How was that lead? Did they call that? Yeah, they actually let's have voicemail, they call this back. Great, at least you got a response to the lead, but convert them to a new patient. Like, do it, right? It's your job. So the fix here is to track three numbers. We gotta we gotta track three numbers. You can't optimize what you don't track. Remember that. Cost per lead, we need to know that so we know how much to spend based on our conversions, cost per show-up and cost per new patient. Okay, your digital agencies all look at cost per lead because that's all they care about. If you're giving them$1,500 an ad spend, very simple. They're looking at how do we get you convert new leads? But really, you need to look at, and I gave you some examples there, 10 leads, eight out of ten are responsive. So 10 leads for$27 per lead. It's making$30 per lead for easing money.$30 per lead,$300 out of the$1,200 that we spent, converted um, let's say a thousand, three hundred dollars out of the thousand that we spent in ad spend, three hundred dollars was what went to ten leads per show-up. Eight out of a thousand right dollars. So now we're looking at eight. How much did that cost? It's gonna cost more per lead now. So if ten leads came in for thirty dollars, eight show-ups cost us forty dollars per lead, and then the cost per new patient, six out of the eight showed up. So now we got another two down. We got fifty, sixty dollars per, I'm not doing the bathroom right here, sixty dollars per new patient to show up. Okay, that's not that's not work. Six out of a thousand, uh ten out of a thousand would be a hundred, five would be 150, but 150, 140 per patient to show up into out of the thousand dollar ad spend at six. Does that make sense? Just simple math. Our numbers are better than that, but you see how you do this? Then you're like, okay, we're converting$140 out of our ad spend, out of the thousand, to get six new patients in our room taking x-rease to talk to them. And hopefully they have a really good close rate. So five out of six of them are starting care under some type of correctional plan, right? Or something starting care. So you got those five out of six started. Now, now you can reverse engineer. Your average cost per care plan is a thousand, you discount right to eighteen hundred, whatever. Five times two thousand equals ten thousand plus the discount equals eighteen. Um eight thousand dollars. Gosh, I'm off today. I'm sorry, guys. Eight thousand dollars in closed care plans that started care review five out of six, you spent a thousand in ads. Once you reverse engineer this, that is why you don't turn off your ads. It generates that for us each and every month. I think 10 to 20k a month is coming off of Facebook ads. If I run one ad, close to ten. If I run two ads, close to twenty. Say Rick, why don't you run five ads? Well, I've tried. There's a limit to the upper upper that you can get to. Okay, so that's that's how this works. You need to know your cost per lead, cost per show up, and cost per new patient. And then now, once you build some data, it only takes a couple months, it only takes two to three months to build that data. Once you have that, you now have the power to really take control of your advertising. And no one can swindle you or swift you into thinking any other way, any new gimmick, because you know your numbers. That's the thing. So switch her instant forms to landing pages. Go to last week's podcast to learn how to build up a great landing page very quickly. At a confirmed appointment required step at the end. This can be either directly to your EHR, which I don't recommend, or directly to your in-house calendar, which is a high-level Google calendar, but something separate so that your team can use that for Wiggle room. So if it's double booked in your EHR, you can actually call them up and do that. Um, it's all because of no shows. You don't want no shows clogging up your EHR. Use retargeting ads afterwards, after the three months. Now you're gonna retarget those people that didn't click, didn't book, uh, saw your ads stopped, were curious, went to your landing page, bounced off. Uh, who clicked but didn't book, we're gonna retarget them in retargeting ads. Show your face in the ads. People buy you, not your price. Doesn't matter what price you've set. I've done everything from night free consoles,$19,$29,$49,$47,$69,$99.
unknown:I've done them all, and the results don't vary by much. I'm gonna be completely honest with you.
SPEAKER_01:It's all about the ad copying the value. Review your ad comments weekly to spot real engagement and engage with them in the comment section. It builds the algorithm, shows your ad to more people because you're responsive. If your marketing feels like you're throwing money into a black hole, it's not because chiropractic marketing doesn't work, it's because it's being done wrong. Stop chasing leads and start building systems. If you want to fix your funnel, join the marketing 101 Facebook for chiropractors, post your ad and your landing page, and I'll be more than happy to break down what's working and what's not working for your marketing. That's what I do for absolutely free. I run my clinics, I'm in there, I adjust race week, I have associates, I do this, I'm in it with you. It's very different than a digital agency. I just love fixing problems so that you can thrive. That's my purpose. And the digital space. I've taken the time, I've taken the time to learn this stuff on my own because it's just my personality, and um was ticked off of the digital agencies, you know, custom chiropractors, and I've learned it, and I know more than the basics, more than enough to run efficient advertising for my practice. That's work, I give me prosperity, it can easily be done for you. So reach out to me at anytime. Info at enrico d.com, and I respond to that email all the time. Some of you even have myself number you can text. Stay well, stay healthy, keep doing what you do, and your community needs you, and that's why you're putting in the effort to do this stuff, and I know it, and keep it up.
