Why Your Chiropractic Marketing Isn’t Working (And How to Fix It Fast)

[00:00:00] Imagine like giving up your entire Saturday, packing up your car, paying, I don’t know, $400 for a booth fee. Oh, yeah. The absolute worst, right? And you spend eight exhausting hours talking to like 500 different people, handing out hundreds of those little branded stress balls. Like the little squishy spines.

Exactly the squishy spines. You shake a ton of hands, you finally collapse into dead, and then, uh, you wake up Monday morning, look at your clinic schedule and find exactly zero new patients booked. Yeah, and it happens every single weekend in the chiropractic industry. It really does. It’s heartbreaking. It is the ultimate form of professional burnout.

Mm-hmm. You know, you put in massive amounts of energy, but because the strategy is just fundamentally flawed, you get absolutely no return, which is incredibly frustrating. And honestly, what’s worse is. Your staff starts to actively resent having to do external marketing at all. Like Yeah. They hate it. Oh, for sure.

Mm-hmm. Which is exactly what causes slow [00:01:00] clinic growth and you know, stalled associate growth. So welcome to the Chiropractic Deep Dive. This is a special part of the Successful Chiro Podcast. We’re so glad you’re here with us. Yeah. And we are bringing you this deep dive. On behalf of our team at Five Star Management today, we are entirely focused on solving that empty external marketing calendar, and more importantly, filling it without completely burning out your team.

Yes, crucial distinction there. We’re pulling all our insights today from a recent, um, highly valuable Zoom training call led by five star management’s very own Dr. Noel Lloyd. It was such a great call, and really the central theme of Dr. Lloyd’s session is this idea that many hands make work light, right?

He’s talking about fundamentally shifting the dynamic of a practice. So instead of the clinic owner carrying the entire exhausting burden of marketing on their own shoulders, which happens all the time, well, constantly, but instead of that, you transition to a model where the entire team, those, the owner, the associates, the [00:02:00] chiropractic assistants, the COAs, right?

They’re all working synchronously. To produce like one to two extra highly qualified external events every single week. But I mean, to get to that level of production, we kind of have to look at why events fail in the first place. Right? Definitely. We have to diagnose the problem, and Dr. Noel Lloyd used this Waze analogy on the call that just perfectly captures the diagnostic process of marketing.

Oh, I loved this analogy. It’s so good. So if you’re driving down the freeway using Waze. And the screen suddenly flashes a warning for a massive rim bending pothole ahead. You don’t just plow into it, you know? No, obviously you swerve, right? You swerve. And in external marketing, there are these rim bender potholes that will just destroy your staff’s energy and frankly drain your bank account.

And Waze doesn’t just tell you a pothole is there, right? Yeah. The algorithm actually reroutes you based on where the friction is. That’s exactly, so the participants on the call identified some massive sources of friction, and the first one they termed. Stinkola energy. Stinkola [00:03:00] energy. That is such a funny phrase.

It is, but it’s so true. If your staff shows up to a corporate event and they’re standing behind a folding table with their arms crossed, just looking down at their phones. Exactly. Giving off this vibe that they’re basically being punished. I mean, that event is dead on arrival. Oh, absolutely. The clinic mantra Dr.

Lloyd shared is job fun, is job one. Yes. But okay, let’s look at the other extreme for a second. What if your team is super high energy, but it’s like. The wrong kind of energy. Yeah. Yeah. A participant on the call shared how they used to bring a massive spinning prize wheel to local family events. Oh boy.

Yeah. Flanked by baskets full of those stress balls, key chains, stickers, and they said kids were literally lined up around the block. And that is what we call the freebie toy trap. It’s basically the equivalent of marketing junk food. Okay. Wait, let’s unpack this because if I’m playing the devil’s advocate here, isn’t any exposure, good exposure.

If I’m a clinic owner and I have [00:04:00] 500 people walking away with a squishy spine toy that has my clinic’s logo and phone number printed right on, it isn’t that building serious brand awareness in my community. It feels like it, right? What’s really fascinating here is the psychological disconnect between interaction and conversion.

Okay. How so? Think about the parents in that scenario. You have interaction. Sure the kid spins the wheel right, but the parents are standing there completely overwhelmed by the sensory overload of a loud event and they’re just trying to keep your kids pacified so they can move on to the next booth.

That makes sense. They’re just trying to survive the street fair. Exactly. They are not engaged in a healthcare mindset at all. Your clinic staff is acting like Carnival Barkers, giving them this momentary sugar spike of attention. Oh, a sugar spike. That’s a great way to put it. Yeah. But just like junk food, it provides zero long-term nutritional value for your practice.

It’s just a disjointed connection. That makes total sense. You get the sugar crash at the end of [00:05:00] the day and your schedule is still completely empty. Completely empty. So even if you avoid the junk food calories, right, and you bring great professional energy, there is a logistical failure that can still wipe out all your hard work before you even like set up your table.

Oh, exactly. Yeah. And that is a failure to qualify the event, right. It is purely logistical, but it is ruthless. You absolutely have to qualify the business before you pack your car. What does that look like in practice? Well, let’s say you secure an event at a large local manufacturing plant. You show up, you deliver a phenomenal presentation.

I’m knocking outta the park, knock, get it outta the park. And then the very first employee who steps up yeah, realizes they have to pay entirely out of pocket because you are out of network with their specific corporate insurance. Oh, no. Yeah, you’re gonna get a cascade of cancellations right down the line.

It’s over. Wow. Yeah. The participants on the call also noted that geography is a massive qualifier. Oh, for sure. They found [00:06:00] that a 10 mile radius from the clinic is like the absolute sweet spot for conversions, right. Because of geographic friction. But wait, let me push back on that for just a second. Okay.

Go for it. If there is a massive corporate headquarters, say a huge tech campus with 3000 employees, and it is 25 miles away. Yeah. Isn’t that sheer volume of potential patients worth the drive? Like I take that ways, right? Every time you’d think so, but the math rarely works out in healthcare. Think about the patient’s daily routine, okay?

They might love your presentation at their office at 1:00 PM on a Wednesday. Mm-hmm. But are they gonna drive 25 miles through rush hour traffic on a Tuesday evening? Ah, I see where you’re going past five other perfectly good chiropractors just to get adjusted by you. No way. That’s so true. I’ll take your educational advice, realize they need an adjustment, and then go to the clinic two miles from their house.

Mm. You basically just did incredible marketing for your competitor. Oh [00:07:00] wow. You are planting the seed, but someone else is harvesting the crop. That is a brutal pothole. And actually speaking of brutal, there is one more pothole from the call that we have to cover, and it has to do with who you send to these events.

Staff unprofessionalism. Yes. A participant shared a story from years ago. They were growing fast, doing a lot of corporate marketing, and they hired outside massage therapists to help handle the volume at these corporate events, which sounds like a good idea in theory, right? But the clinic owner gets a call from an HR director.

Absolutely furious. Oh. Because one of the massage therapists was literally giving a chair massage to an employee with one hand while actively scrolling and texting on her phone with the other hand. Oh my gosh. And the result of that, obviously was the clinic being specifically and permanently banned from ever returning to that company.

Banned. It’s insane to even picture somebody doing that, but it proves a point. It absolutely [00:08:00] proves the halo effect. What’s that? The halo effect is a psychological principle where human beings judge an entire entity based on one specific trait or interaction. So the community. Specifically that HR director, they aren’t gonna separate the careless massage therapist from the clinical skill of your doctors.

Oh, they just lump it all together? Exactly. Mm-hmm. They assume your medical competence is exactly equal to the lowest level staff member’s behavior at that folding table. If the therapist is negligent. The Dodgers must be negligent. Man, that’s powerful. So we’ve mapped out the rim benders. We know to avoid the carnival junk food, the out-of-network logistics, the geographical friction, and those halo effect disasters, right?

Let’s look at the ways ropes that actually get you to a full schedule on Dr. Lloyd’s call. The participants highlighted some absolute golden ticket events. Yes. And the first of those being were the trade calls flat show. So yeah. Like local home and garden shows along with local farmer’s markets. Yeah.

One [00:09:00] participant booked a booth at a local home show for about $400. Mm. And they walked away with 22 new patients booked right on the spot now, plus another six who called the office the following Monday. I mean, that is a massive return. But why do these work so much better than say just a general street fair?

It’s because of the inherent demographic filtering. Look at who attends a home show or a farmer’s market. Okay. Mostly homeowners. Exactly. They are generally homeowners, meaning they are really invested in their local community. They live locally, almost always within that crucial 10 mile radius we just established.

Oh, right. The sweet spot. And most importantly. They have disposable income and a proactive mindset. They are literally out of their houses walking around actively looking to invest money into improving their lives, their health and their homes. And mechanically speaking, I mean, they’re walking around on hard concrete floors for four hours.

Yeah. Which means their lower backs and their feet are probably [00:10:00] screaming. Oh, definitely. Which actually perfectly transitions into the next golden ticket demographic. Local government and municipal service workers. Yes. This is perhaps the most brilliant untapped market discussed on the entire Zoom call.

I thought so too. One participant shared how they started doing short talks for city workers, municipal service departments, and utility crews. A lot of clinics might avoid those because they think it’s like not glamorous enough. Totally. But the participant did a single nine minute talk for a group of these workers and booked eight to nine new appointments right there.

Nine minutes for nine patients because the mechanics of the pitch are perfectly aligned with the reality of the audience. How do you mean? Well, the mistake most doctors make is giving a generic presentation about what subluxation is. You don’t do that here. You explain the how. Okay? You look at a municipal utility worker and you say, look, I know you spend three hours a day leaning into a trench, reaching over your head with a 15 pound wrench, right?

Let me explain [00:11:00] exactly how that specific torque compresses your L four vertebrae. Let me show you exactly how my clinic decompresses it. Wow. You are diagnosing their specific Tuesday afternoon reality. Exactly. And an added bonus, going back to our qualification rule, municipal workers are almost always on fantastic city or state insurance plans.

Oh, incredible. Insurance, which are usually incredibly easy to be in network with. You can apply that exact same localized pitch to police departments, fire departments, or even like. Baggage handlers at the local airport. Exactly. You are matching your mechanical solution to their mechanical stress. I love that.

But what if you aren’t doing a formal talk? What if you are back at a booth setting, say at a local cloth diaper? Exchange for a pediatric practice? Oh yeah. How do you break the ice without looking like you are just trying to aggressively sell them something? You use the Raisin dad joke. I love this sun much.

It’s so good. A participant with a pediatric practice was at this exact [00:12:00] type of event surrounded by busy moms, and instead of giving a dry clinical pitch, he stands in the aisle holding a giant jar of those chewy chocolate covered raisins. Mm-hmm. When a mom walks by, he just smiles and asks, Hey. Do you need a reason to talk to me?

But because of the jar, it sounds like, do you need a raisin to talk to me? It is an objectively terrible punny dad joke. Oh, so bad. But functionally, it is incredibly disarming. It breaks the ice instantly ’cause it proves you don’t take yourself too seriously. Right. But the true genius of it is in the physical mechanics.

Yes. He hands them this piece of candy, they take it outta politeness, pop it in their mouth, and because it is a dense caramel chocolate raisin, it physically takes them about 45 seconds to chew it. Yes, they literally cannot politely walk away or start a conversation with someone else while chewing. He has just bought himself 45 seconds of a captive audience, and he uses those 45 seconds.

Perfectly. He doesn’t pitch. He says, do you wanna see how a chiropractor [00:13:00] changes a diaper? Oh, that’s clever. And then he leads them right into a hands-on physical demonstration on a doll. That hands-on demonstration element is so vital, and it actually sparked a huge debate on the call about technology.

It really did. There is this tendency in the chiropractic space to want to look incredibly high tech. Oh yeah. Clinics will lug in massive 60 inch flax screen TVs, right. To show off complex Mm. MSG scans, you know, surface electromyography. Yeah. They want to show the heat maps and the muscle tension graphics.

Mm-hmm. Thinking this technological superiority will just wow the crowd into booking. Because we love our tech. I mean, as doctors, a shiny surface electromyography setup looks incredibly professional and authoritative to us. It looks authoritative to you, but to a patient walking through a home show that giant screen.

Creates a clinical barrier. Really? Yeah. It feels complicated. It feels expensive. The consensus from the top producers on the call was that the clinics [00:14:00] having the most massive success are actually stepping backward technologically. Mm-hmm. They keep it incredibly simple. Oh, so they bring out the old school Sam machine, the spinal analysis machine.

Exactly. It’s basically just two scales and a string grid. It’s like 25-year-old technology, but the sand machine requires physical touch. Ah, okay. When you put a hand on a prospective patient’s shoulder. Align them on the scales and physically show them, look, you are carrying 15 more pounds of pressure on your right leg than your left.

There’s a tactile, visceral connection. You aren’t pointing at a digital screen. You are physically interacting with their body. Exactly. It stops feeling like a vendor pitching a product. And it starts feeling like a doctor providing a real community service. Okay. So we have established where to go. The home shows, the municipal departments, we know the mechanics of what to do.

Ditch the junk food toys, use the Waze logic to qualify and rely on tactile demonstrations. Yep. But let’s get to the hardest part. How do we actually get the invitation to these corporate spaces? [00:15:00] Because I can hear our listeners right now saying. I do not have the time to sit at my desk and cold call 50 HR managers a week begging them to let me in.

And honestly, if you are cold calling, you are already losing. Oh, really? Yeah. This is where the playbook for acquiring events gets highly strategic, starting with what Dr. Noel Lloyd calls the bird Dog strategy. This is the ultimate Trojan horse. It really is. You use your current happy patients as your scouts, your bird dogs.

The mechanics are just so simple. Dr. Lloyd suggests putting a stack of mini flyers right on the front desk where patients check out right by the register. Exactly. And the flyer simply says, want a free chair massage for you and your coworkers at work? Ask us how. Look at the psychological shift here. A patient who already knows your clinic.

Already likes your doctors and already trusts your care. Sees that flyer. Yeah. They ask the ca about it. The ca says, yes. We love our patients so much. We will literally [00:16:00] bring our massage chairs to your office and treat your whole department for free. Wow. You hand the patient the flyer and say, just hand this to your HR manager.

You completely bypass the gatekeeper. You aren’t a salesperson whose email goes straight to the HR departments spam folder. Exactly. You are being physically carried through the front door of that corporation by their own employee, and the employee feels like a hero because they are basically demanding that HR bring you in as a perk for the staff.

It is frictionless acquisition, but okay. What if you want to target specific community groups where you might not have a patient bird dog. Okay. Yeah. What Then? That is where the YMCA hack comes in. Oh. This is about letting someone else do the heavy lifting of gathering your demographics. Yes. A participant shared that they simply pull up the local YMCA’s community calendar online.

The YMCA has already done all the hard work. You look at their calendar and see they have a new moms group meeting on Tuesday mornings and a senior walking club on Thursday afternoons, right? And crucially, [00:17:00] the calendar usually lists the specific organizer’s, email address, and community organizers are perpetually desperate for free content and guest speakers to keep their groups engaged.

But what is the exact phrasing? If I email the organizer of the senior walking group, I can’t just say, hi, I am a chiropractor looking for new patients. Oh, exactly. You offer localized value. You email them and say, hi. I see you organize the Thursday Senior walking Club. I am a local structural specialist, and I would love to sponsor the water bottles for your next walk and do a quick five minute demonstration on plantar fasciitis prevention for your members.

Oh, that’s brilliant. You solve a problem for the organizer and you tailor the clinical message perfectly to the demographic. It’s so smart. Now, let’s say there’s a specific massive local gym or a high end supplement store you really wanna partner with. Okay? You don’t have a bird dog and they aren’t on a community calendar.

How do you grease the wheels before you make contact? You utilize the five star review tactic. This is an absolute masterclass in [00:18:00] modern digital psychology. We all know how hard it is for local businesses to get positive Google reviews. People usually only leave reviews when they are like angry. Oh, totally.

So a participant shared that their chiropractic office assistant, their COA. Proactively goes onto Google and leaves genuine, glowing, five star reviews for the local gyms and businesses they wanna partner with. And they do it publicly under the clinic’s name. So it says, Smith Chiropractic left the five star review.

Oh, nice. The review specifically mentions the gym manager by name saying something like, we are so grateful to have John and his amazing facility in our community promoting health. Think about the psychological alert. John gets on his phone, he reads it, he gets that warm fuzzy validation, and he instantly loves Smith Chiropractic.

It builds a massive psychological bank account based on the law of reciprocity. Precisely. Hmm. So three days later, when the COA from Smith Chiropractic actually calls John to propose a joint health event for his gym [00:19:00] members, the friction is totally gone. Wow. John already views the clinic as an ally.

When that COA makes the call to John, the phrasing of the pitch changes the entire dynamic. One participant noted they completely skyrocketed their booking rate just by swapping out one single word. Oh yeah. The word invite language dictates power dynamics. Definitely. If you call a business and say, we offer this service to local companies, it sounds like a vendor pitching a commodity.

You were asking them to buy into something. Right. But if you change the script to, we are out in the community this month, and we’d like to invite your staff to take advantage of an exclusive health event we are hosting. It shifts the entire framework. You are no longer asking for a favor. You are offering an exclusive invitation.

They can decline the invitation, of course, but human nature dictates that they feel honored to have received it. And utilizing all of these strategies, the bird dogs, the YMCA calendars, the five star reciprocity, it [00:20:00] fundamentally solves the problem we started with. It really does. It shifts the burden of marketing completely off the clinic owner shoulders.

You are empowering your COA and your associates to build their own local networks. Organically, you are building a team of community ambassadors, which brings us to the final and undoubtedly the most critical piece of this entire operational puzzle. What’s that? Internal team motivation and culture.

Because you can hand your staff the ways map. You can teach them the Waze, routes, but if they don’t actually wanna drive the car, none of it matters. Then it is so easy for a busy clinic to just put their heads down. You get into the daily grind. Mm-hmm. You adjust. You write your notes, you go home. Yep. How do you rally a tired staff to actually execute these external events?

You have to gamify it, and you have to make it collective. Dr. Noel Lloyd shared a perfect example. He told his team, our collective goal is hitting 20 external events in May. If we hit it, I am buying the entire team a massive high-end lunch. [00:21:00] Nice. It sounds almost too simple, but it creates shared accountability.

He even puts mini posters up in the clinic tracking the progress. I love that because then the patient sitting in the waiting room see the thermometer filling up and they start asking, Hey, how can I help you guys win that lunch? The patients become active participants in the clinic’s growth, but hitting the goal is only half the battle, right?

You have to actually stop and recognize the victory. One of the participants on the call had a profound realization about this. They admitted to being a total workaholic. Oh, I know the type. Yeah. They said they would go out, execute a massive, flawless event, book 20 new patients, and their reaction the next morning would just be, great job, everyone.

Now let’s get back to the grind. Oh man. That is a surefire way to kill morale. If you don’t celebrate the wins, the staff stops seeing the value and the extra effort. Exactly. That workaholic participant realized that taking 10 minutes during the morning huddle to legitimately celebrate the ca, who booked the event, and [00:22:00] to celebrate the associate who executed it is golden.

It really is. It turns a good clinic into a great one because it moves the motivation from obligation to shared purpose. The ultimate fuel for that shared purpose is sharing the why. If your front desk ca busted her tail to navigate the gatekeepers and get a massage event booked at a local factory, she needs to see the clinical results of her administrative work.

Absolutely. When a utility worker from that factory comes in two weeks later and his chronic sciatica is completely resolved, after a series of adjustments, the doctor has a mandate to make sure the staff hears that testimonial. That is exactly right. When the CA realizes that her phone call directly resulted in a father being able to pick up his kids again without pain, she isn’t just filling squares on a calendar anymore.

No, she understands that her administrative work is literally saving lives in her community. That is how you turn a daily job into a lifelong calling. You know, if we synthesize all the strategies, the Waze routes and the Waze warnings from this Zoom call. [00:23:00] It leaves us with a profound operational philosophy to consider.

Look at your clinic schedule for tomorrow morning. Look at the names on that screen. What if you trained your mind and your staff’s minds to view every single patient walking through your doors? Mm-hmm. Not just as an isolated individual to adjust, but as a bridge. A bridge, a living, breathing bridge.

To an entire corporation, an entire school district, or an entire community group that desperately needs the exact healing you provide. Wow. Because when you make that mental shift, your community becomes the engine of its own healing. Exactly. This has been such a phenomenal tactical, deep dive, and we wanna make sure you have every tool you need to actually implement these strategies in your practice

right now. Our team at Five Star Management is completely dedicated to helping you get that calendar full and keeping your team energized. If you want to dive deeper into how this Waze map applies to your specific clinic’s demographics, you need to book a free call with Dr. George Birnbach. [00:24:00] We’ve put the direct link to schedule with him right in the show notes for you.

That call is an incredibly high leverage move for any clinic owner. I highly recommend it. And if you are serious about supercharging your clinic’s growth and empowering your team, we want to formally invite you to Five Star Management’s upcoming virtual workshop. It’s gonna be great. It is called The Profitable Associate, and it is happening this Saturday, April 18th at 9:00 AM Pacific Time.

The link to register for that workshop is also sitting right there in the show notes. Go click it. It will completely change how you view your practice’s potential. Finally, make sure you hit that subscribe button on the successful Chiro Podcast for more actionable tips, deep dives, and Waze routes to grow your practice.

Thanks for joining us, and we will catch you on the next one.