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
Meta Ads Evolution: What's Working in 2025
Meta advertising isn't dead—it's evolved, and chiropractors who understand these changes can still dominate their local markets. The platform has shifted dramatically toward AI-powered campaign structures, requiring a fundamental rethinking of how we approach Facebook and Instagram marketing for healthcare practices.
The most significant change is the transition to Advantage Plus (formerly known as CBO) and the reduced effectiveness of manual targeting. Meta's AI now reads your ad copy to determine audience targeting—when you specifically mention "moms with back pain" or "men with sciatica," the platform uses these keywords alongside its vast data collection (175 points per user!) to find your ideal patients. This means crafting the right message has become more important than trying to nail down the perfect audience targeting.
Short-form video has reclaimed its crown as the most effective content format. Patient testimonials, adjustment demonstrations, and direct-to-camera talks addressing specific pain points perform exceptionally well when kept under 60 seconds. The first three seconds are crucial—you need a powerful hook to stop scrollers, along with captions and a clear call to action. For maximum effectiveness, run 3-5 short videos under one ad set and let Meta optimize delivery automatically.
The quality of your leads depends heavily on your offer clarity. Vague promotions like "Come in for an exam" are being outperformed by specific, tangible offers: "$99 new patient special: exam, digital posture scan, and report of findings." The platform now offers a combined approach—sending some prospects to lead forms and others to your landing page based on their behavior patterns, giving you leads from both quick-action takers and those who need more information.
For established advertisers, retargeting has become 2025's gold mine. After running ads for a while, focus on warm traffic—people who have watched your videos, engaged with your content, or visited your website. These audiences convert at significantly higher rates when approached with testimonials and educational content that builds on their existing awareness of your practice.
Ready to see better results from your Meta ads? Turn on Advantage Plus, create scroll-stopping videos with clear offers, and focus on crafting messages that resonate rather than chasing the perfect audience settings. Subscribe to our podcast for next week's episode on converting these leads into long-term patients through SMS and email automation.
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Meta ads aren't dead. They've just evolved. If your ad results have dropped or your leads aren't converting, you're not alone, but you're also not out of options. Today, I'm giving you the 2025 meta ads update what's changed in the platform, what's working now and how to keep your ad strategy dialed in so you stay booked and busy. Welcome to another episode of Marketing 101 for you, chiropractors. There's been a lot of changes and I just wanted to keep you updated. I know you're working hard to try and market your business and I want to save you every penny you possibly can and maximize your results. That's what this is all about. So here's the major changes and I want you to utilize these in your ad strategies when you're moving forward.
Speaker 1:Ai powered campaign structures that's where Meta is going with all this. I know AI is talked about all the time. All it means is they're automatically putting them into your campaign structure. So Meta is pushing advertisers into Advantage Plus. So just click that Advantage Plus icon on the little slider to blue. It was formerly the CBO or campaign budget optimization for campaigns, but just put that on. It's just going to help your ads. It's going to help them get to the right people faster. It's going to help the learning phase faster. It's helped to get you out of the learning phase and get you more leads. Honestly, that's the key there on getting that all done. So more reliance on Meta's, machine learning for audience targeting and creative rotations, and then manual targeting still works, but only after enough data is collected, and I think this is one of this advanced things that many of you don't know is that when you're running ads even like for me, for eight years I've been running them on my same account. I've been running them, so I have a lot of audiences and a lot of data that's been in there.
Speaker 1:But for those of you that maybe have been doing it shorter time, the key with an ad and this is why all the ads are losers You're just not spending enough money and some of you can't. You need to put like six grand into your first month, but, to be honest, you need to get 250 leads within 30 days. Many of you are creating ads that you're not setting the ad budget to do that, and that's the key is once you hit that 250 lead mark, where they have 250 data points of people that have clicked and filled out your form or gone to your landing page and filled out the form. Now they have 250 data points of saying, okay, these are the people, the types of people that are interested in this ad copy and ad. Now that ad can really take off. It's that 250 mark. You'll see data results move faster. I've seen things in like 70 leads, boom, and then it's out of the learning phase and it's a high performing ad. I've seen that very quick within three weeks. So I've seen that the 250 is just when you look up the data on Meta's information pages and their tutorials. That's where that number comes from. But I've seen it in 70. I've seen it in sooner.
Speaker 1:The point of this is that we're just not putting enough. When we put 40 bucks a day towards an ad, we're probably not going to hit that. You would need what? $10 leads for a day, leads for a day. You'd get 40 in 10 days. You would get 120 in 30 days. See, you won't get to that 250 mark, right? 80 still won't get to it. You need to spend about a hundred dollars a day with $10 lead activation. So I'm getting off track. But anyways, ai powered campaigns use the advantage plus when you're creating your ads for that.
Speaker 1:Audience targeting is less manual now. So interests are more broad now. So stacking niche targeting doesn't work as well. You may have seen this over the last 12 months I have. You can no longer stack any niches or parents of toddlers, parents of school age, parents of kindergartners, parents of high school students when you're targeting you know pediatric practice as one example. It's just, it's too broad now.
Speaker 1:So lookalike audiences are less powerful and less fed by high quality custom audiences leads from your CRM or website visitors. So you should be putting your Metapixel on your main homepage, on your main website. This will just show the type of people that are going to and Meta is going to take that data and say, oh, 44-year-old female. Oh, 49-year-old male. Oh, 46-year-old female, oh, 39-year-old female and in way more data points. They actually take 175 data points from that person who clicks. Can you believe it? 175 data points from that person who clicks. Can you believe it? Geo-targeting, target, location, activity, age, email. They're taking where they are proximity. It's crazy the data points that they get on that. But anyways, I'm getting off track. So lookalike audiences are less powerful. You need your leads from your CRM or from your data list, uploading this list of emails from your EHR right into your ads manager, putting it in there and saying listen, this is the people that have come to me and spent money. These are the best. Now what Meta will do is see the emails that are actually profiles. It may be a small percentage of them, but then they'll be like oh, these are linked to these types of profiles. Now the data points go to the thousands for those people. Now you're getting just way better. So focus on custom audiences, first-party data and retargeting warm traffic. So landing page views, video views, instagram engagers retargeting them, which is just the retargeting option on your ads there as well.
Speaker 1:Privacy and attribution windows we can talk about that. Aggravated event measurements so AM still in place for iOS 14, those rules that came out three years ago. Remember they changed everything and then click funnels got nailed because they were just taking data. So those are still there. The 2025 updates and there's more restrictions is the one day click default attribution for new advertisers. So if you're creating a new ad account, it's even more painful to get rolling, so you can't have any click defaults on there. It's just going to take you longer to create an ad and get out of the learning phase. That's a problem. So if optimizing for app events which many of you are not you must specify your pixel, so you got to connect a pixel to that. 99% of you are not doing that. You don't have any app events for that.
Speaker 1:Delayed reporting Meta recommends waiting 72 hours before judging ad performance, so don't make any guesses within the first three days. Just kind of let the data reporting go, which is actually better than what they used to recommend before with the seven day window. So the AI is getting faster. That's why that tells me. So about three days to get some data and give the pixel and and your ad campaign a chance to learn what's going on, who they're targeting. That's really important as well. They're best practices for chiropractors. Now this is where we're going to get into some great stuff on this podcast High value offers that convert In 2025, vague ads is pretty much going to be wasted spend.
Speaker 1:Your ad copy should be longer and you should have clear, tangible offers. $99, new patient special exam, digital posture scan and report of findings. Come on in exam digital posture scan and report findings. Come on in test exclusively based angles. Looking for 15 moms. Looking for 15 women. Looking for 15 men with disc herniations. Looking for in Pittsburgh who want to ditch back pain and get their energy back. See what we're doing there. We're now targeting that.
Speaker 1:The AI that we're talking about in meta is reading your ad copy. It's reading it and saying, oh, they literally said moms, they literally said parents, they literally said men, they literally said women looking to shred or get slimmer. It's reading it and say, okay, we're going to send this to who we think women who are looking to get slimmer. And how do they do that? Everything that they click on Amazon, from compression garments to protein shakes, to protein shakers, to blenders, juice blenders, diet, anything related, diet supplements, I mean. Now they're targeting them. They're literally doing it for you. So your ad copy plays a bigger role and you'll get better leads from this as well. So the short hey, come on in for a $49 exam. Click here below. Not going to work.
Speaker 1:Short form video is king. Reels first, content converts. So what I want you to think is patient testimonials, adjustments, fast paced. You know, make sure you're HIPAA compliant. You have a video release form signed, you talking directly to the camera. If you tried everything from neck pain to this, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's a great starter for it. Use captions and hooks in the first three seconds and add a call to action at the end. Click below book.
Speaker 1:Now do this. Now take one of the 15 spots available and then a pro tip is run three to five short videos under one ad set and let meta optimize delivery. I think I've told you that, guys, about a year ago. That's still the best way. So short form video. If you're paying attention, you can see the bouncing of this bouncy ball with meta. Right, it was long form video about eight months ago.
Speaker 1:We are now back to short form video. So if you're not staying up with the times, it's not a bad thing. You're running ads you're doing well. It's still a great platform. The cost is going up per click. The $9 leads are gone. You're never going to get those again, but we're trying to stay and optimize as much as we can to get more leads. Right, the whole point is getting more leads so we can convert them into more new patients. That's always the call there. So we went from long form video. We're back to short form video, which means under 60 seconds. Copy still matters. Your ad copy still matters. Now, I gave you advice. This was probably over six months, probably end of 2024.
Speaker 1:Use chat GPT. Well, I think now using chat GPT is going to hurt you on your ad copy, the emojis, the hyphens, the dashes. Ai is picking it up. It knows that that's not true copy. It's not hurting you because you're using chat GPT not so much, but it knows it's not organic copy. It's considered copy. It's considered just you're copying other copies, you're just copying and pasting, and that, I think, is what's hurting you. It's not organic, it's not real. You're not telling yourself, differentiating, that you're a unique business. It thinks you're maybe like a franchise model or something along those lines and you're targeting and zoning in in one location, which makes it odd. Right? Why would a franchise target in on one location when they think you're a franchise and you're not? So I don't know if I understand it completely, but I think what's happening is AI generated ad copy.
Speaker 1:Change it a little bit. Don't just go to chat, copy and paste. Change it a little bit. Change the sentences a little bit, make it more. You see if that helps a little bit there.
Speaker 1:Long form still works, but hook and scroll stoppers are everything. That's the whole point. The first three seconds has got to be a hook, both in the ad copy and in the video. And then the scroll stopper got to be doing something on the camera. That is not illegal. That stops people to watch the video. Okay, so use questions still dealing with sciatica every morning video. Okay, so use questions still dealing with sciatica every morning. Boom, that's how I would start the video.
Speaker 1:Add emojis sparingly Uh, I would say kind of get rid of them. Break up text for mobile readers. So definitely space this out a little bit. Uh, space out the paragraphs. Have more paragraphs. Don't have this long copy, just consistent, like Instagram automatically does that it doesn't matter how many enters you put in there, and automatically bunches it all together on purpose because they have they have space. It's all about spacing and scrolling. Always close with a clear call to action Tap learn more to book your $99 exam before spots fill up. Book now to secure your one of 15 spots, whatever it is. Use that type of stuff in there.
Speaker 1:Use lead forms and landing pages. There's a new thing when you go into the ad sets, when you create your campaigns, is how would you like to? Would you like to send them to a website? Would you like to use lead forms? There's now a new option saying website and lead forms. I'm using it right now for all my ads and then meta will determine whether we send them to the website or whether this person is going to be more of a form filler. The form filler is still out playing the landing page because most people auto fill the forms and meta still sees as a quick turnaround for a lead capture. So they are showing the forms more, but they're also getting some of them automatically going to your landing page as well. So you're doing an automatic test there and even if it's 70-30, you're still getting leads coming from both directions.
Speaker 1:So people who are readers and detail-oriented are getting sent to your landing page. Great for them. More copy, more stuff to read, more videos to click on and learn more before they make it take action. And the other tire kickers are all going to your uh form and filling it out and you're dealing with the same hassles. But in those tire kickers you're catching some new patients out of it, which is the whole point, right. So we're minimizing 100 leads coming in all from the form and maybe you're getting 65 and then 35 coming in from the landing page and then you can kind of split test and see when you don't split test anything. You just look at the data and see which ones are coming in from where and invest more time and effort into better landing pages or continue doing forms. It's a great way to do that. So the native lead firms convert cold traffic well, so that's the whole point of it. So we're trying to take cold traffic fast load, mobile friendly, but for better quality. We want to test landing pages with calendar embeds, like high level and click funnels. You want to put your actual book appointment calendar in there and see if you can get appointments booked through your landing page. That's a great way as well.
Speaker 1:Retarget strategically. So 2025's gold mine is actually warm traffic. So after running ads for a while, you can then retarget. Retarget people who have watched 50 to 75% of the video length. Retarget them in your next ad. Instagram engagers want to retarget them all the time. Website visitors over the last 30 days retarget them as well. Use testimonials and facts videos for retargeting content as well. They've seen your ad. They've gone to your landing page. They may be not converted and booked an appointment. You're going to retarget them with more value, more information about the stuff that you're sending about them, so maybe sending them to a different landing page now with more videos that they can watch about sciatica, migraines, neck pain, whatever it is shockwave, whatever it is that you do in your office.
Speaker 1:And then you're always testing creatives. That's nothing new. Test them monthly. Keep the winner video. When you do the four videos or the four ads that we talked about, you'll have one that just runs away with it. It will have 80% of the ad spend 80% of the impressions and 80% of the leads that are generated. You're going to keep that winner and you may test. Maybe keep number two as well and then change out number three and four and test them against. Create a new ad, duplicate it. Keep the winner, bring another two different videos, test it there and see if this winner keeps going. That's a great way. It refreshes your ad, resets the learning phase and if you're retargeting, you speed right through the learning phase on that as well and then set a recurring reminder to refresh. One new video, one new hook line heading, one variation of your best performing ad. That's just the natural routine to go through.
Speaker 1:Agencies are not doing this for you. By the way. Just so you know, everything I tell you on this podcast is out of it, used to. Three years ago, it started out of frustration. I created this podcast out of frustration. As a CEO and chiropractor myself, I was like I wish there was somebody out there to do it all. There isn't, there isn't. You can hire five different companies to do it, but then there goes your marketing budget. So they're not doing this for you. They will run the ads and as long as they're getting leads, they'll run those ads. I had the last company we used a year ago. They ran our red light ads the exact same ads for nine months.
Speaker 1:Nothing changed, not even one word. I was like I think, if you change it a little bit anyways, whatever, I'm getting out of control. What to focus on going forward with your ads? Prioritize creative quality over targeting complexities. So don't take everything I said today and make it complex. Just keep doing what you're doing.
Speaker 1:Turn on the advantage plus and let it do its thing and get the leads. Don't quit. Get leads. You got to get the data. Shift the mindset from find the right audience to create the right message. You're going to lose your mind on the find the right audience I have. I'm now crazy. I'm a crazy person, man. I'm absolutely crazy trying to find the right audience. It's not going to happen. Create the right message that's where you're going to be free and relaxed. And nervous system regulation Finding the right audience, nervous system dysregulation it's going to be out of control.
Speaker 1:Build and use your own first party data email lists, web traffic, past patient data you can literally upload your patient list into meta. Track beyond meta, use Google Analytics, your CRM, your ROAS dashboards. Use all this stuff to help teach the machine. You can't manage what you don't measure. Meta will get people to your page, but it's up to your systems to convert them. All right, I think that was a good point. That's great. That keeps you nice and updated there. All right, I think that was a good pocket. That's great. That keeps you nice and updated there. Meta is not what it was in 2020. Just remember that. But chiropractors who adapt can still dominate. Great, creative, clear offers and simple retargeting strategies are what win in 2025.
Speaker 1:If you need help building or improving your ads, reach out. I love this stuff. I really do. I'm actually pretty full with clients. I'm at that point. I never thought I would do that, but I am. But I still love helping you guys. I really do, and if you know me and you email me. It's because you've gotten an in with me. So next week we'll talk about how to turn those ad leads into long-term patients using SMS and email automations. Again, the AI is out of control. Now it's gotten a lot better. You guys are going to get some great results from that. So keep tuning in, keep doing what you're doing. We need you, your community needs you. Have a great week.
