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, New Rules, Real Patients
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Your Facebook and Instagram ads didn’t suddenly “break.” The game changed. We dive into what’s really driving higher CPMs, inconsistent leads, and a surge of ghost form fills—then lay out a practical plan any chiropractic clinic can execute this week. From why targeting matters less to how attention rules everything, we break down the creative formats that actually win today: short doctor-to-camera videos, quick demos with spine models, and anatomy overlays that make complex issues like sciatica or shoulder impingement feel simple and urgent.
We also get honest about budgets and expectations. With more advertisers crowding healthcare niches, spend needs to rise—but not before your funnel is tight. We walk through a clean path from scroll-stopping hook to clear intro offer, trust-building proof, and fast phone follow-up that converts clicks into booked visits. You’ll hear why resetting campaigns now hurts performance, how to rotate fresh ads under the same learning container, and the cadence for creative refreshes that prevent fatigue.
Buyer behavior shifted, too. People click, snoop, and bounce if price and proof aren’t obvious. We show you how to meet them where they are with transparent pricing, local relevance, and authority statements that build confidence. Then we zoom out: only about a third of your buyers live on Meta daily. The rest are on TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, Pinterest—and increasingly inside AI-assisted search. We share quick wins for SEO and AEO so reviews, schema, fast pages, and helpful condition content lift your clinic when someone asks, “best chiropractor near me.”
If you’re ready to move from polished-but-ignored ads to human, educational videos that earn attention and trust, this conversation gives you the blueprint. Subscribe, share this with a colleague who’s blaming “the algorithm,” and leave a review with the one creative idea you’ll test this week.
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- Book a free discovery call with Enrico to level up your business
Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of Marketing 101 for chiropractors, where every single week we give you tips to help move your practice in the right direction. If you're doing meta ads and you're used to crush it with them and flow now feels inconsistent, you're not crazy. There's a lot of stuff going on. Your cost per click is going up, uh, your qualities are feeling different, and the patients aren't booking like they used to. You may be noticing this of what's going on. And what we're gonna do today is explain what's changed so you understand it, why it's happening, and most importantly, what you can do right now that you must do to make the change shift for your practice and your advertising. Uh, offices that run ads need to listen to this. If you're doing anything on Facebook and Instagram, you this episode's for you. Clinics that are starting to see slowdown in growth, or docs that are blaming the algorithm. This one, stay tuned for. This isn't about panic, it's about adapting. We always want to adapt. So here's the reality check with everything. This is what everyone's really experiencing with their ads over the last, I would say, nine months. There's been like this kind of we feel like you got them going, and then they kind of tail off. You feel like you got them going and they tail off. Uh, leads might be down or inconsistent. You might have a week where you're like, oh great, we got four leads, and then all of a sudden three days with no leads, and you're like, what are we doing here? The cost per lead is creeping up. There's an inflation thing that's happened over the last 12 months because of the switch to AI on Meta, where now it is starting to see more of a cost to get it out there. Uh, there's more ghost leads. I don't know what that's about. I'm trying to like who's out there, what's happening? But the hat, I call them hackers, but these ones, and they're mainly out of China. Uh, they throw out thousands of devices. This is where all your stolen iPhones go. They end up over there. They have these mega walls, they're called, where they hook up all the chargers to them. And on one computer, one hacker can sit there and control a thousand iPhones, like they're typically iPhones. Uh, and they they've broken into them, they have the IPs, they have all the social profiles in there. They go in there, they've hacked into the Facebook accounts, and they just go out there and uh either use the hacked account or create new Facebook accounts under there, and then can just stream and they just put stuff out there as all these bots. These are what bots are really are. Uh, crazy that that's what these people do, but obviously there's some money to be made for them. And what that's doing is it's filling out all these forms, both land your landing pages, your in-house forms. They're just filling these things out, trying to spread as much data as possible and obtain as much data. So you're getting a lot of this ghost stuff going on. You're getting patients' uh shopping price. They truly are not on exactly your offer if it's 49 or not, but the shopping price, they might be clicking on your on your social platform that you're advertising on, checking your Facebook page and your Instagram page. If you don't have prices there, they may actually go to your website. Uh, and then most chiropractors do not have their prices on there. So the price shopping becomes tough for them and they give up. Ads look identical, but results are different. So you might be noticing that too. Most of you don't have a broken ad, you have a changed environment, and we need to adapt to this environment. Meta's algorithm shift means that you have less reliance on targeting. We used to have this whole targeting thing, and I don't mean that eight-mile radius around your office, not that targeting, but the demographics. We used to be able to go in there, put household income, try and choose higher people, traffic people who worked in the area, traveled through that eight-mile radius bubble. You can't do that stuff anymore just because of geo-targeting rules, both in the EU and the United States, they have to follow all these rules now. Um, so there's less reliance on the targeting. There's more emphasis on creative engagement. Uh, the viral TikTok mentality is what all algorithms are following because that is what engagement gets. People stop on the videos, they watch the cats do some silly things, then they're off to the next video where the cockatiels are singing their little chirp song, and then they're off to the next video of a guy chasing, you know, the burglar down the street. You guys know what I'm talking about. This is our feeds now. Doesn't matter which streaming you're using, whether you're using TikTok, you see this, whether you're using Instagram, you're starting to see this, whether you use Facebook. And then once they learn the stuff that you're stopping on, you're just getting more and more of that. And trust me, it's not medical advice, it's not chiropractic adjustments. It's harder for you to get into that algorithm. So the platform pushes video and authenticity. So, how do we as chiropractors get into there with our ads to get into the algorithm? It's the fun, quick stuff. The fun, quick videos that people are just want to see. Yes, do they want to see the adjustment? For sure. They want to know how it's being done. They also want to know why it's being done, and they also want to see the fun side of it too. Who's the doctor? Who are they gonna see in there doing the funny stuff? Are they relatable? These quick videos can be quite effective. And the most effective one that I'm seeing, even though there's a lot of creative stuff out there, is the doctors sitting, overlaying themselves, explaining a particular problem and being creative with it, either holding a model in their hands, showing how the disc compression works, showing how a disc herniation works, or floating anatomy in the background where they're illustrating or narrating what uh sciatic nerve pain is like, what uh entrapment syndrome is, what shoulder entrapment is, what adhesive capsulitis is, what spinal dislocation is, what spinal fixation is, what uh migraines are started from, where the arteries, like these cool 3D uh anatomy stuff in the background, or overlaying anatomy on working on a patient. So if they're doing some active release on their shoulder, they'll overlay the anatomy translucently on top of it, showing how the scapula, where the scapula is and where the trapezius is on top of the patient that they're working on. There's some cool stuff you can do on your phone overlay. Now I know I've lost, you know, 20% of your like I don't have time for this stuff. I'm giving you the recipes on how to sell cakes here that will fly off your shelves and make you successful. So you do what you want with that. But that's where we're at right now. How do we get into that TikTok feed? How do even if you don't use TikTok or don't even post on there, how do we get into that TikTok um algorithm? How do we get into that viral feed where people are, you know, stopping, watching? That's where you get them to click. And once you get them to click, now we can get into the professional stuff and funnel them into a medical funnel or a chiropractic funnel where we're sending them to more information about the video that they just watched, more information about what we do, more information about how to sign up, more information about price so that they can see it right there. And typically that's what your$49,$29,$39,$99 offer is is to say, hey, you know, whatever our prices are, you can get started today for$59. And that's why we do that is to get them to give you the information, call them up, and then your team does the rest. Hey, we normally charge$200 for this visit, but you signed up for the$49 promo, so it's only gonna be$49 for you. Um, what day works best for you? That's how that's how we do that. So Meta isn't rewarding the perfectly polished ads anymore, it's rewarding attention. How are you gonna develop attention in there? Yes, you can use ads to do that, but we need video, video, video that actually works and gets attention. Now, the rising ad costs, what do we need to do about that? There's just more businesses doing this. Everyone is on the meta ads now, everyone's doing this. Healthcare niches are more competitive. You're seeing this, more and more people are doing uh red light therapy. I've noticed that we got rid of our red light. I was just like, I'm not dealing with this, uh keeping up with the Joneses stuff, forget it, it doesn't serve my practice anymore. Just that this has just been the last month. I was like, that's it, get rid of the bed. We're done with that. We're gonna focus on chiropractic. Um, because that's where we do most of our bread and butter anyway. So if everyone's doing this and the dog groomer down the street has a red light bed now for their dogs, I was like, forget it. I'm out of this. This is stupidity. We're done. Uh, seasonal fluctuations can happen. Uh, the higher CPM doesn't mean your ads are bad. It actually means you have to increase your ad spend. I know that's what you need to do. It doesn't have to be a lot, but you're gonna have to creep it up a little bit to keep up with the competition. I mean, I don't think the$20 and$30 days exist anymore. I think we need to be spending$50,$60,$70 a day on those ads. It just is what it is, which means your prices need to go up too. Hint, hint, wink, wink, nudge nudge. You gotta increase your uh adjustments by five bucks. Like that's it's 2026. You gotta do it. I don't care what your fee was in 2025, it's now five dollars more. It just has to be. Uh, especially for chiropractors running the same niches, right? I mean, there's only so many things you can do. Chiropractic special for 49 bucks, the decompression ad, the stock adjustment videos. Uh, if your ad hasn't changed in the last six to 12 months, the market has already tuned it out because of how the algorithm works. So, using that winner, I know I use my decompression winner for the last like three years. I've been using that ad where I squish the disc and I talk about it, and I've seen that one start to even go down too. I think this AI stuff is a lot smarter. I mean, it's it's seeing it, it's seeing, you know, the same video. How do you repolish it? Can you just change the music in the background? Does that trick the algorithm? I don't know. You just might have to reshoot the video with some new new stuff, especially if it's been more than a year old. Uh, buyer behavior has changed. Your buyers have changed the way they purchase. They click, but they don't commit. There's no longer filling out the form blindly anymore or going to your landing page and doing it. They're clicking, but they're snooping. They're now like, well, what are you? Like, what is this landing page? Just landing, oh, okay. So you guys are located over here, yeah, five miles from my house. That works. Um, okay, and they go through there and then they bounce, right? They're like, oh, okay, looks legit. We're out. They research more and they need more trust before booking. You we we're using meta ads, and you got to remember, only 30 to 35 percent of people use uh Instagram or Facebook. Can you like I want you to stop for a second? 30 to 35 percent, no matter where you are in the United States, of your local demographic has a social profile that they actively use, meaning that they tap into the app every day or relatively frequently. You gotta think about that for a second. If only 30 to 35 percent of the people out there that you're trying to reach are using this and you're putting all your eggs into that basket, we're gonna get burnout by the time 2025 comes out, right? If you've been doing this since 2020, it's now 2026, and we're bringing it, we're burning out. Where is where are all your your energy going? And if it's been meta ads, you may notice a decrease there. Uh, so we need to just think broader. The behavior has changed, and where are the other 65% of people? Buyers, I'm talking about buyers, so I'm not talking about you know the 16-year-olds. We really don't care what the 16-year-olds are doing because they're not your ideal client, they're not gonna call you up and book an appointment. Uh, their parents are gonna do it. So the parents are the buyers, so we gotta think about that. Where are the other 65% of people? They are scrolling the internet, they are using other applications, not Instagram and Facebook. They are using um X, they are using TikTok, they are using um Reddit, they're using Pinterest, they are using um what other platforms to cut AI. They're using Gemini, ChatGPT, Jasper. They are getting all their information from there. So we need to understand that's where the other 70% is. So as you continue to fine-tune your meta-ads, I want you to just be in the background doing little things for your SEO and your AEO to keep you relevant on all the other AI search. You need to. And AI search is still heavily favoring the reviews and the online information. That's all it's got right now, until we talk to it and feed it enough to understand. And we'll know, we'll know when we've crossed that plateau. When you say, create an image of me and what you think I do, and it scares you. When when you get it back, you're like, Did someone take a photo of us? Like, it's gonna be like once we get there, AI will no longer rely on the internet data because it's we'll have it completely downloaded into its intelligence, and now it's moving on. What's in real time happening right now? What are people searching right now? What are the one billion prompts that we're getting per day? One billion and analyzing it in seconds, um, going to tell us about what's going on. So then it's gonna be how you are a you know, artificially intelligence engine optimization, how your people are talking and finding you. That's how it's gonna learn. Hey, find the best chiropractor uh near me. And then you'll pop up and you'll act they'll do activity on it. They'll click on there on ChatGPT, they'll go to your website, they'll book an appointment. You will have uh tracking data that AI is gonna ask you, like a pixel they pretty soon coming out. Chat GPT is gonna send it to you and be like, hey, put this pixel on your website, and we'll be able to track who's going from Chat GPT, just like Google does, to your website. And now you're gonna communicate directly with AI. Um, that's Gemini too. Google's doing it. Google's already doing it, by the way, because they already have the infrastructure for it. So that's where we're going with this stuff. And I need you to kind of start going onto this side of the fence uh with this stuff. Okay. So that's what we have. Buyer behavior has changed, and the big mistakes chiropractors are making right now. This is what I want you to fix this week coming up. You're gonna think about it this weekend and you're gonna you're gonna fix it this week coming up right away. Mistake number one blaming the targeting. Quit messing around with the targeting. There's nothing you can do about it. You pick your radius, you pick your a, I would still pick age, you can do men and women if you want, or just women, whatever you want there. You can still do the nitty-gritty, but broad and strong creative wins over all the other detailed stuff. Detailed targeting isn't magic anymore, it's not working. Mistake number two, constantly turning ads off. This was this is weird for me to even say on a podcast because I used to tell you this two years ago. I'd be like, your ads start to creep down, turn it off, duplicate, create a new one, start from scratch, change the ad copy, change the text, refresh it, go. Now it's resetting the learning phase kills its performance. I can't wrap my head around that. So you go into the ad that was doing well for you, and you create new ads in underneath the ad set, under ads, new, new text, new ad copy, new videos, and you turn off the old ones. You literally turn them off, and now you have a new stack underneath it. So now you got five new ones. You had five before, now you got five new ones. Five of them are gonna be turned off, five of them are gonna be turned on, and you're gonna run these five ads, these five videos, underneath the same campaign. That's interesting. I've been testing that, and I think that theory is correct. It works a little better than starting from scratch. Mistake number three: thinking more budget equals more patients. How many of you tried this? You're like, oh man, we got 35 leads last month, and we got 15 new patients. I'm just gonna double my ad spend, get 70 leads and 30 new patients. Has it worked that way? Does the linear mathematics that we learned in sixth grade actually work in the universe? Absolutely not. So, mistake number four, not updating your creative. Give a rule, you know, new creative every three to five weeks is minimum. You have to put at least another another video or picture on there to stimulate your ad and upgrade your creativity style, your POV of adjusting, your doctor talking directly to the camera, patient education reels, day in the life clips, uh, and then fix your hook. Teach them to open ads with pain-based questions. All your ads should be like, are hey, hey Pittsburgh, are you suffering from blank local relevance by saying where you're at and authority statements? Then if you need this, you need to if you have this, you need to come to ABC Chiropractic because we are the go-to stop for migraines. Um if you're only if you've only been told surgery is your only option, then we want to do it this way. So that is that's my big stuff for this week for you guys. There's a lot going on there, but rethink your creative when it comes to this. And if you need help, reach out to me. Info at enrico d.com. I'm here for you anytime to ask any questions. Keep doing what you're doing and catch us next week on Marketing 101 for chiropractors.
