The 4-Hour Fix for the Chiropractic Healthcare Practice Roller-Coaster

One simple role that keeps your chiropractic marketing — and your growth — on track.

Most practices don’t have a marketing problem — they have a bottleneck problem.

When you work on marketing, your numbers go up.

When numbers go up, your attention goes to patient care – along with staff management, billing issues, and minor organizational glitches.

This is a pretty standard routine in almost every office we’ve worked in.

But what started as a growth spurt soon sputters.

Your marketing activities begin to slow or even stop.

Sooner or later, you fire them up again with a new marketing campaign, new seminar or coaching company.

Something new. But over and over, these ups and downs can wear on you.

This is the Practice Roller Coaster.

Practice Marketing Coordinator

One of the simplest ways to smooth out that roller coaster is to assign a trusted staff member a small, defined role as marketing coordinator — even just four hours a week.

Their job isn’t to “do all the marketing.”

It’s to make sure your systems keep moving — recalls, referral programs, tracking metrics, and keeping new ideas alive.

This small shift removes one of the biggest log jams in most chiropractic offices — marketing inconsistency — and replaces it with predictable, sustainable momentum.

The Marketing Manager System for Chiropractic Healthcare Practices

In the early 2000s, I published The Marketing Manager System. It was 3 binders worth of information: the Marketing Manager, the Marketing Toolkit, and one for external events. We later made it into a software.

Palmer College purchased a pile of them, and hundreds more went out over the new Internet.

The core principles of the Marketing Manager System revolve around 4 facts:

1. The main reason your marketing isn’t working …is because it isn’t done.

2. The next reason: no one is in charge of it.

3. The third: not enough consistent time is set aside for marketing.

4. And fourth: the person in charge needs support and accountability.

It is THAT simple --- but it is not easy.

There’s always pressure to handle immediate issues first.

And who has time for marketing?

And so, the Practice Roller Coaster continues.

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Support and Accountability

Because marketing always takes a back seat to the front desk, billing, therapy, and — of course — direct patient care, it soon becomes orphaned.

To avoid this, the clinic director can ensure:

1. Regular weekly time is scheduled for the marketing coordinator to work. (4 hours)

2. Monthly review and planning meetings with the clinic director, chiropractors and team.

3. Stats and graphs. Complete marketing metrics with charts to show trends.

4. Accountability. Written monthly marketing plan and report from the coordinator to the clinic director.

This is tried and true and will work for you.

It is not that your marketing is not working – it’s that it is not being managed.

Get someone to spend just four hours a week keeping it alive, work with them, and you’ll see your numbers go up — and your stress go down — as you step off that Practice Roller Coaster.

Ed

P.S. We’ll soon be launching a Monthly Marketing Manager Program designed to support your Marketing Coordinator with training, systems, and accountability. Stay tuned.