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
Digital Compliance for Chiropractors: What You Don't Know Could Cost You $20,000
When was the last time you thought about whether someone with dyslexia, blindness, or motor impairments could use your chiropractic website? Digital accessibility isn't just a technical specification—it's a critical business consideration that affects both your legal liability and your ability to serve everyone who needs your care.
Chad Sollis from AudioEye joins us to unpack the often-overlooked world of website accessibility compliance for healthcare providers. We break down why approximately 25% of your potential patients might be struggling with your digital presence right now, and how accessibility lawsuits targeting healthcare websites have reached record numbers in 2024—with average settlements costing small practices $15,000-$20,000.
But this conversation goes beyond simply avoiding legal trouble. We explore how people with disabilities control roughly $20 billion in buying power and demonstrate exceptional loyalty to providers who accommodate their needs. Chad walks us through immediate, practical steps you can take today to assess your website's accessibility, from using AudioEye's free scanner to implementing simple fixes for common issues like improper alt text, poor color contrast, and navigation problems.
As marketing budgets tighten across the healthcare industry, we also discuss cost-effective strategies for reaching patients through consistent, valuable content creation across social platforms. With ChatGPT now outpacing Google for many search queries, we explore how the digital marketing landscape continues to evolve and what that means for your practice's visibility.
Whether you're concerned about compliance, committed to serving all potential patients, or simply looking to protect your practice from unnecessary risk, this episode provides actionable insights you can implement immediately. Visit audioicom today to take your first step toward digital accessibility.
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Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of Marketing 101 for Chiropractors. I'm Dr D and I'm in today with Chad Solis from AudioEye and he's going to talk about compliance, website accessibility, things that I know you don't even think about on a day-to-day basis but could get you into some deep trouble if you ever do get audited. Thanks for being on the show, man.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you for having me Excited to be here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think security is always important and, as a solo entrepreneur, we don't know all this stuff. Let's be honest, we went to school to be doctors and then we end up owning this business and then we have all these things that we're responsible from from litigation, not hurting a patient, hipaa, compliance documentation, ehrs, software, cloud-based servers, it security, computer logins. I mean, you learn a lot being an entrepreneur, but are we doing it right? And that's why you're here today, just to give us a quick reminder of what's going on and maybe even help out some people that may need some help or a review. We'll get into that. So how'd you get into all this? That's always my number one question how did you get into this stuff? It seems geeky, but how'd you do it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, man, I have been doing. I've started in digital marketing, been doing digital marketing for over two decades across a ton of different industries, from high-tech B2B software to ed tech, to consumer packaged goods and consumer electronics, all the way into retail and e-commerce. He even had a short stint in some healthcare in a healthcare business and it's evolved. It started in graphic design, moved to traditional digital marketing like Google ads and Facebook ads and social media, and then into some operational pieces with automation and personalization, scale and growth. So it's been a wide variety over 24 years. A lot of fun. Worked with companies like Vivint is a national brand, adobe is a national brand. You might recognize Traeger, depending on the part of the country you're in as a national brand. So has worked with some big brands as well as some small startups and small, you know, solo businesses as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I like it and I like people like you outside of our industry, because it gets a little tight knit and we sometimes don't get the right perspective when you're all it's like the same your family members, we all have the same kind of perspective on stuff and sometimes when you go outside and you realize, wow, there's other people in this earth, they got a completely different perspective, which catches other things, which is really important. So digital accessibility when we say that, I mean half the listeners right now probably don't even know what we're talking about. Just because someone can click on your website and open it up on a desktop or on a phone may not be good enough for some people that have disabilities. So let's go into that. What are some things that maybe we don't think about? We'd like hey, we got this beautiful website. It does everything we needed to do, it has the information. They can click this button and call us. What is digital accessibility?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, if you take a parallel to like the physical world, you can have a beautifully designed building. You know, perfect architecture, good finishes, good finishes. But if you don't have a wheelchair ramp into the building and you don't have the automatic door to let people in and you don't have some of those mechanisms to access your building or the floors in your building, digital accessibility is the same as your website. You can have a nicely built website that looks good for you know the uh, an individual without disabilities, uh, but could actually be a giant barrier for someone with disabilities to experience or action on your website. You know, especially, there are a few industries that get a lot of attention with this.
Speaker 2:Healthcare is one of those industries, financial services is another, e-commerce, as you could imagine. Those are areas, those are verticals that everyone needs access to. They're not specialty to say. You know b2b software, necessarily, but, uh, in hospitality or healthcare, you know everyone wants access to that information, and so it could be as simple.
Speaker 2:As you know, someone might have to use your website with a screen reader, and so if you don't have good anchor text or good use of your title tags or good alt text on your images, they're not going to be able to understand the context of what's happening on your website. It could also be someone that has some kind of motor skill disability and actually has to use either a Puffer device or some other device to navigate, and so if you don't have the right navigation HTML on your website or your form set up the right way, you might not be able to actually have people contact you or complete. You know, if you have a kiosk in your office and that's how people sign in and that's how they tee up their appointment, they may not be able to do that, and so it's all those little details in aggregate can actually alienate about 25% of your potential client base.
Speaker 1:You see Great tips there. I mean the things we definitely don't think about. But hey, chad, I have a website developer that does my website. I'm good to go. Not always the case, right? I've learned that the hard way too, so, yeah, so, even though we have website developers or maybe a website hosting company because most of us healthcare people don't do our own websites it's very rare that I find people who do Not all of them are compliant either. Sometimes you hire them, you're like I hire them, I have a CPA, I've got a bookkeeper, irs, I'm untouchable. But even with the right people, if they don't do the right things, you can still be susceptible to trouble, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you can. You know, if you're not compliant you may want to add an attorney on retainer there, right? Yeah, it's. You know. To put in perspective that I do this for a living. I've done it for a long time. It wasn't until about five years ago that I actually had my first real engagement with digital accessibility, and that was because the company I was with happened to be sued and so we had to solve that problem. And that is, while it's unfortunate that it's not commonplace in our markets, yet it's becoming increasingly something that we need to be aware of because lawsuits are on the rise.
Speaker 2:Now there's two angles.
Speaker 2:You can look at this as a business owner. There's kind of the defense mode, where I you know I'm going to do this to protect myself from litigation, and then there's the offense mode of I'm going to do this because I don't want to alienate 25% of my potential client base, which also ultimately means dollars and cents to your bottom line, because when folks with disabilities find providers in any category, any vertical, that accommodate their needs through digital accessibility, they actually become extremely loyal to those providers and they have a $20 billion buying power behind them, dollar buying power behind them. And so you know there are two angles. You know my, my angle is, you know, do what's right, but also kind of the the more revenue oriented approach, being a revenue marketer. But you know your worst case scenario is do it for protection as well, because ultimately the average accessibility lawsuit will range from $15,000 to $20,000 in settlement fees, and that's not trivial, and so especially for small business owners. And so both those things are good angles to approach assessing the opportunity cost of investing in that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, those are great. I mean great and from a philanthropic perspective, you want to help these people. I mean especially in healthcare. 25%. I was expecting you to say like 1% or something like that, but you're right. 25% of people may fall into this category of having a disability visual acuity, whatever it may be and your website is not compliant. But you could serve them by being compliant, because guess who knows ADA compliance on a website more than anyone? People with disabilities.
Speaker 1:Imagine when you're trying to look for a phone number. This always gets me on a website, drives me nuts that I can't click it or call it immediately from my phone. That was like a six-year-ago problem and even up to today there's websites that are just outdated and they just don't work. See how irritating that can be for you, with all your physical abilities, to hit that number and not be able to make that call. It's frustrating.
Speaker 1:But somebody with a disability to not be able to read the about section or the service section or how to book an appointment you're going to lose out on them. They're out. They're going to bounce off that website and find the next healthcare provider that maybe does have it and will get their business for whatever it may be. These are great, great points there. What are some things right away after? This podcast is going to be top of mind for about six seconds for most chiropractors. So in those six seconds, how do we get through the world goldfish? How do we look on our website and make sure that there are a few things that are compliant?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you know the first thing you can do for free go and visit audioicom. We have a scanner that will run you through one time. Our automation technology Now something to keep in mind automation of any provider, even our competitors. We have the highest ranking accuracy as far as what's called the WCAG rules against accessibility. But even at the highest level, only 50% of issues can be detected through automation. So we recommend a hybrid approach of automation with professional services to make sure you're fully compliant. That said, visit our website. Plug in your website into our scanner. That'll give you some real quick tips on at least 50% of the issues.
Speaker 2:Some of those things are going to be real easy solves. You know you look at what kind of impairments that would impact someone experiencing your website. Something like dyslexia can be solved with a better use of font. Someone with color blindness? Better use of color on your website those are actually really easy changes.
Speaker 2:Someone that is blind those are actually that the use of your header tags, your alt tags, things like that. Those are also very easy things to solve and those would all come up in the accessibility scanner. So those are things you can do at low or no cost, and do that this afternoon and have immediate value. You know, and for small businesses you can actually, if what you see looks good to you. As far as like helping you be compliant, here we have a turnkey solution. You just you plug in a trial and you do a 14 day trial on the website and drop it into your website and you're off and running on the again on that 50% of compliance. So that you know those are things you can do this afternoon for little to no cost Great, those are great tips.
Speaker 1:Yeah, audioeyecom, that's fantastic. So do that, get checked and make sure that the you know the basics are covered. Then, when you say the other 50%, the things that you may not want to think, think about, or you may need somebody in your service you know somebody an expert in that to help stay on top of it, what does that mean? What does that look like?
Speaker 2:yeah. So a big thing with uh com driving to compliance and accessibility is context, and unfortunately, scanning tools just can't pick up the context. So, for example, it can tell you that alt tags are missing, but it can't tell you what to put in those alt tags to make it effective is one minor example. Context of link and navigation is another big one, things like that. So context is the biggest one where it requires a human to go through the page, understand the context of what's trying to happen, so you know how modals behave. A modal is like a pop-up, without opening a new window, how certain forms behave, things like that. It just requires context, and so that's where the human auditor can help with that.
Speaker 1:Great, yeah, it's tough that we have no clue what you just said, so that's why you need to have people like this on your team, at least reviewing it, or on retainer or monthly, whatever it is. However way you work this really important, some scary stuff from 2024. I know pretty close to home some chiropractors that have been audited and sued and you hit it right on the head with the $20,000 thing. It was $20,000. And they do. There's these sleazy attorneys just combing the internet for healthcare and just hitting from biggest corporations and just working their way down Optometrists, chiropractors, dentists they're just going. They're just they got nothing better to do with their lives. So they're going through this and you know if they truly are not compliant, they have a really strong case against you because you're just not compliant. It's just somebody with, uh, blindness or a dyslexia cannot read your site. Then they've got a strong case and it's hard to defend that. Um, you, you can resolve it and try and mitigate, but that's not what they're trying to do is. They're trying to go right to the end and get some type of settlement from you. So it's scary stuff. Yes, it's a small percentage, but it was the highest ever in 2024. And I'm sure 2025 is only going to be bigger. It's just the way it absolutely is. So definitely look into this.
Speaker 1:Another thing, you know, as I'm going through this with the lens of an entrepreneur and owning my own business and I'm just shaking my head, I'm like man, just another crappy thing to do on top of my list that's going to cost me money and do this. And you know, and things have gotten tight since 2021. This inflation thing's ridiculous. It's the cost of everything's gone up. The cost per click on Google has gone up. Facebook leads cost more now than any any other time. Just marketing goes up.
Speaker 1:Um, I charge a premium in my office, but that seems like some days not enough. That's how much are you going to pay for an adjustment? A hundred dollars, I mean. People are like what's going on here. So I know it trickles down and, as an entrepreneur, the marketing budget is thin. You know we try and follow that eight or 10% gross revenue thing. If you're running a healthy business, that should be a healthy budget for marketing. But boy does it get eaten up very quick. Um, so when we need to add things like this, budget gets involved. But what are some tips? Now, with this in 2025, as you've seen, the marketing um budgets get squeezed. What are good medium to small size businesses doing to help accommodate for that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and this will sound counterintuitive, but it is true. So a lot of marketing, especially for small and medium sized businesses, but even for large, is moving towards social media. And social media doesn't cost you anything but it does cost you some time. And the trick with social media is moving, not trying to go wider and finding like more people. It's actually driving more value within the people you know are already your target audience. So you know, I'll use chiropractics as an example. I've, like on my own social stream, I actually will occasionally see chiropractors on the stream and they're providing health tips and they're tips that you know you generally want someone to come into your office for. So that's where the counterintuitive part feels is like I'm giving away my intellectual property, uh, but what happens is that kind of content where you're adding value and not asking for anything in return. Uh, that actually creates loyalty. And then when they have a real problem that they need to solve, then they, the first person they think of, is going to be where they got that, that knowledge, that understanding, that value. And you know, again, for chiropractics, you know, maybe it's something more along the lines of like here's, here's stretching you can do, and here's, uh, health, other health habits. Here's how you uh your diet things that help strengthen bones or uh you know uh are healthy for joints and and healthy for muscle tissue and things like that.
Speaker 2:All those kinds of tips will leave them still, when they have a problem, back to you cause you are someone that provided them information, back to you because you were someone that provided them information.
Speaker 2:So those are things that cost you time but they don't cost you money, and so you invest in providing good quality content. It doesn't have to be long stuff, you know, 15 to 30 seconds in reels on Instagram TikTok on Instagram, tiktok. Youtube Shorts. Even written content still goes a long way. I would take time even in channels you wouldn't think about adding going to. Like LinkedIn is now becoming a channel where I'll actually see quite a bit of healthcare stuff pop up in my feed, and LinkedIn, where that's traditionally not where healthcare professionals have been, so it's really leaning into social media. You can make a pretty big dent, but commit to content and commit to it multiple times a week and over time that will get built out and shared and your audience will build and that will ultimately create some loyalty and even some digital revenue if you really get into it in a heavy way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, youtube could turn into a very useful channel if you build it, I mean, with tips and value, that's, you know, giving it away, showing people how to live healthier. Yeah, we talked about all this and it's so nice for you, outside of our industry, to repeat the same things. It's about being productive with your time rather than just constantly being active and doing things of lower value. So, you're right, even though you're going to trade money for time, make sure your time's worth it. Make sure your time is productive. That's what we try and teach with our coaching as well. It's like, yes, you got to make this time for it, but make it highly productive. When you put aside an hour of content creation every week to hammer out the videos that you're going to post, make it valuable, make it this stuff and you can reuse it. You can blast across all the channels. So, yeah, you just pretty much summed up a lot of the recent podcasts that we've been on talking about content creation. So, you're right, that's free, so that's great. And the ADI compliance thing.
Speaker 1:What else do you see? Where do you see everything moving forward now, with so many changes happening, with not just websites but now search compatibility? Chatgpt is now the number one search engine out there for all questions. It just passed Google about six months ago to ask the same questions that they used to ask on Google. Except they just don't get that hyper-local search results like Google provides to you when you're searching for a business. For example, shashibti is not there yet, but people are asking all the health questions there. They're asking all that how you know ranking for now. Now we're like, well, I've been doing all this stuff for 25 years on Google. What? How are we going to rank for for these guys? And voice capability now? Hey, alexa, find a close chiropractor. I can't get up off the floor. That's what people are saying. And, uh, alexa has got to shoot this information back. I don't know if that's your forte, but where do you see this going? Where should our focus be so we can be more productive rather than just randomly active?
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, no. The nice thing is the same practices that help SEO for search for Google are going to be very similar practices for AI. If you're on ChatGPT or Cloud or whoever Gemini, the same practices for SEO will generally help with AI. That said, there are some other things in addition to that which will help even accelerate that, which is going to be a little bit harder for small businesses, but still possible. You know. So AI will use third content uh and weight it a certain way.
Speaker 2:So, for example, if, uh, getting your articles posted, you know, getting you know. So for us we're, we're a medium-sized business, probably large by most of your audience standard, but but, uh, we, you know we try to get on uh websites like Forbes or fortune or uh, uh, even smaller ones like marketing, professional marketing, profs or things like that, where, uh, we get our articles posted there and then they link back to our website, but they also are talking about us. So the way that a small business could do this is posting articles on LinkedIn. That doesn't cost you anything. Posting articles on Medium again, youtube, things like that.
Speaker 2:The more content the short version of this is the more content you put in the public domain that does not require authentication to get into uh, but on major publications like medium like LinkedIn, like Forbes, uh, or you know whatever the healthcare or chiropractic uh version of those uh uh publishers are, that the, the AI engines or the AI engine optimization will pick those things up and weight them a little heavier than your traditional SEO stuff, and so that's where that becomes really helpful. But those are very possible for small businesses to do. Again, it's it's just taking the time to do the regular content and reach out and make contact with some of those publications so that you can become an expert writer for them. Um, you know, I know a lot of folks that you know don't come from a big company, uh, become a writer in Forbes because of persistence and then they're an expert on a topic, and that you know that can happen for someone with a little bit of diligence.
Speaker 1:Yeah, consistency, you mean, yeah, yeah, that's the key for all this. Everything's about being consistent. That's great. Great tips, man. I mean this is fantastic.
Speaker 1:Ai is a frontier. I could probably just do the rest of this year, every week, a podcast about AI and where it's going, and everyone's got their ideas. But we can start to see the trends now of what's how it's building up to be. It's an infinite amount of information here. 90% of it is good, 10% of it's lies, and it's at this end now where now AI is needed to go through and decipher fact and fiction.
Speaker 1:And we're in that infancy stage of AI where it's like just regurgitating information from the internet, but it's only picking qualified stuff, so it's automatically screening for qualified and for small businesses like us. Our articles, our blogs are not going to show up on and compete with the Mayo Clinic and the Cleveland Clinic and John Hopkins and all this stuff. We're not going to compete. When they say something about blood pressure and we're like, well, chiropractic can help lower blood pressure, we're never going to compete. So when somebody says, what can I do for blood pressure on Chachapiti, unless you're feeding it this information, where I'm going with this rambling is that because AI is in its infancy, we need to feed the information to the AI. So a little habit I've been getting into is at the end of most days, not every day, I'll give a little summary of how my day went and some miracles that happened today in the office and some good stuff from symptom base from the patients. Some miracles that happened today in the office and some some good stuff from symptom base from the patients. And I'm hoping that some way somehow in as AI builds, that it gets to know that hey, enrico is a chiro, local chiropractor in this area, and maybe start to build it in that way, because there's only so much information on our website and you can only put so much information on there. So these are the little tactics that I'm trying. I don't know if they're valid yet. We'll see how that goes, but you got to feed the machine If it doesn't know who you're at.
Speaker 1:Up until not too long ago, chatgpt's last update was like November 2024. So if you never said anything to it before November 2024, it doesn't know you right now. I think there was just a recent one. There was another one in March, so it was updated, but now I think there was just a recent one. There was another one in March, so it was updated. But until that update happens and you haven't given it any information, it really doesn't know what's going on, and that's going to open up a whole can of worms with you with compliance with AI. I'm sure we could do this again next year and see where you're at with that and how that's playing a game and being compliant with AI too.
Speaker 1:We need you, we need people like you. Tech is just growing like crazy and somebody's got to keep an eye on this stuff because it's always growing and causing with growth comes other problems. Right, that's right, that's right. Yeah, so cool. So your homework for today audioicom Go find the scanner, put in your URL, see what's going on there, going on there, and if you have bigger questions, please just send an email to chad and see what he can do for you or how he can hook you up or whatever his tools are to help you guys out. That's probably the best. Next step. Um, thanks for being on the show. Did we miss anything? Do you want to add?
Speaker 2:anything there? No, I, I think you, you covered it thoroughly, thank you yeah, yeah, you're welcome.
Speaker 1:That's great thanks for being on the show. We appreciate your time. Yeah, thank you for having me yeah.
