192: The Four Stages of a Buyer

As a business owner, to think the idea that I have to pay a company every single month for the rest of my business career is daunting. That's true for a lot of people. And then again, there's a lot of people out there. They're like, no, you know what? I don't want to do the marketing. I want to have patients coming in. That's all I want to focus on. So you guys do the marketing. I will gladly pay you. You make sure we're getting quality patients in. I'll pay you forever. And then they're happy. We've got clients that have been with us seven and eight years. You are listening to Chiro Candy, the podcast of sweet chiropractic success. Here's your host, Billy Sticker. Welcome to another episode of the Chiro Candy Podcast. My name is Billy Sticker, your host and it has been a crazy couple of weeks. I hope you guys are ready for a fantastic 2025. We had a lot of family stuff like most of you did during the end of the year, and we are just ready for, for just a great year. It's already been very, very busy. We actually, if you follow us, if you've been listening to the podcast for a while, if you've been seeing what was going on towards the end of this past year, we, we did a huge promotion and it was a massive success. Well, in this, we had a deadline of people needed to sign up by the end of the year and we made them sign up by the 30th, so we'd be able to get everybody signed up and onboard, not onboarded, but charged and stuffed by the 31st. And then we ended up having a huge amount of people sign up. Like I think we had 20 something agreements come in at the very end of the day on the 30th, and then a couple, the 31st, well, we had already given the team off, so my wife and I were busy getting all those, all those things processed and that's things that we typically don't do. We have a fantastic team that does all that. But, but we had given them off. And I want to really give a shout out to our family for being patient with us because we were out of town visiting family and both of us were on our computers going through, trying to get all the chaos organized. But it was great. It's great seeing all these new accounts, all the returning accounts, just good stuff. Just like you and your business. You have just a great month and we, when you have a lot of patients that reactivate it's just good for business, right? It's good for morale. And it's really gonna, you know, I feel that it really helps set the tone for this year. And then over the past week, last week I was actually in, in Florida at an AI summit that was really, really good. I have been going pretty, pretty far down this AI journey. You know, we're obviously using it for, for clients right now for speed delete, that type of stuff with the AI. Our aica, which is responding to leads and all that. And it's been incredible, matter of fact, to talk to one of our clients who has been. He was actually a. If you know my story, years ago, I worked in office for a chiropractor that had an. We had an office in Port Arthur, Texas, and in Beaumont, Texas. And I shared the story how I was the marketer, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, he was business partners with this other chiropractor, Dr. Chris Fowler, who's in Mississippi, and they were going to start some practices in Houston. Then they ended up switching directions and doing some things different. But Chris has been a client of ours for probably eight years, give or take, and he was telling me that he absolutely loves the AICA because it takes all so much workload off of his team, following up with the leads, getting people scheduled. So we've been doing that. We're also doing some AI voice, which I know there's a lot of people that they're just not ready for that yet. But we've been doing some stuff with that. We're excited about it because there's a lot of neat things you can do from having IT answer phones for you and then transfer to a live person if they need to. It's so much better than the press one for this and press two for this department. It's not like that. It is conversational. We'll be rolling more stuff out and talking more about that in the future. But even having IT call patients to remind them of their appointments or to leave messages for people who missed appointments, and there's all kinds of cool things we can do with that. And eventually we are going to see the general public. They're going to get used to this. Just like we're already used to the, you know, press one for this department, two for this department. We don't like it, but we're used to it. I think this is going to be such a much better service because it can answer questions for you, it can transfer you to a live person. There's a lot of stuff it's going to be able to do. And that's not what this episode is about. But at this conference I went to or this summit I went to, we talked about all kinds of other use cases. So there's a lot we're going to be implementing here in our business. And I'm actually talking about this at Parker in Vegas. I'm doing a whole session on AI and how to use AI in your business, HIPAA compliant AI in your business. So if you haven't signed up, that'll be at the March 20th through the 22nd. Definitely want, would love to see you guys, see you there. But I'm doing a big session there and one of the things when it comes to AI, a great question to ask is what is the outcome? I need what are my systems and process we're doing, we're doing in the office and what's the outcome? I want to. And is there a way to not just automate it? And sometimes things are automated and we say that's AI when it's really. It's just a workflow, it's just a program. And then there's some things that you actually use AI to figure things out. So I've been going down that rabbit hole quite a bit for the past three or four months and my goal is to continue to do so and then be able to bring training to our clients. We just rolled out a school community where we're doing AI training in there just to help you guys stay on the cutting edge of what you can do with AI. That's going to make your life easier. But how do you do it compliantly? Right. Because ChatGPT did not sign a BAA. It is not HIPAA compliant. For you to upload things about your patients into ChatGPT. It's a big no, no. And I talked to somebody last week who we're having this conversation and he is, was actually a former client of ours. He was with us for three or four years. He said, billy, I never even considered that. And I've probably done that over a hundred times helping come up with. With scenarios. I'm not going to go too far down that. So I don't want to give up, you know who it is or get him in trouble. But you cannot use ChatGPT for that. But that is going going to be a different episode. I wanted to talk today. There's a couple of things I want to talk about which we can talk about. I can talk about that for. For quite some time. But when is it that you want to use a marketing company and when is it good not to use a marketing company? Because there are some things you can do on your own, and I really think it's going to be easier to do some of this stuff on your own in the future. So when is it good to use a company? When should you not? We're going to talk about that. And I also want to talk about four stages of a buyer's life. I don't even know if that's the best way to say that. But there are four stages, four different types of people that you're marketing to. And this holds true, really, with any type of business that's out there. And tell you what, let's start with this and then we'll kind of wrap up talking about when you should use a marketing company and when you should not. So if you look at just the general public, let's talk about chiropractic. The first group of people that are out there are the people that are symptom aware. They know they have a symptom. They're having some issues going on with their leg, you know, some pains going down their leg. They're having some numbness and tingling in their, you know, pinky fingers and you know, the side part of their hand or their wrist. They're aware of the symptom. And your messaging to those type people are totally different than people that are at other stages. But that's your first group of people. Your second group of people are people that are you have symptom aware and then they're problem aware. Like, oh my goodness. Okay. The reason I'm having this numbness and tingling in my hands when I'm driving is because there's a problem going on in my cervical spine, right? There's something going on with my neck that's actually causing the numbness and tingling. Or there's something going on with my low back that's causing sciatic issues. So that's a totally different message to those people because now they're symptom aware. Now they're problem aware. This is what's going on. I've shared this story before. I was in a head on MVA back in 20, actually April 20, 2012. It was our anniversary and I was hit head on. This guy was strung out on pills and he was going the wrong way down the highway and hit me head on, bumper to bumper. I was stopped because I saw him come in. I didn't know what was going on. He was probably doing 40 or 50. But fast forward just two or three weeks and I was at the gym, picked up a dumbbell and felt this unbelievable shock in my forearm. Working with chiropractors, I knew that there was something going on with, with my neck. I just knew that's what it was. So I was, had the symptom and was pretty, pretty aware that somewhat problem aware. Then I go and actually have an MRI to actually find out more about what's going on, right? So symptom aware, then you have problem awareness. After problem aware, they're solution aware. So somebody knows they're having these problems, they're having the symptoms. They realize, okay, this is a problem, what's the solutions available? And then it could be chiropractic, it could be surgery, it could be ointments, whatever it is, there's different solutions for different symptoms and different problems. And after they're aware of solutions, then they become provider aware, right? So they're aware of the symptom, aware of the problem, aware of the solution, and then they're aware of the provider. So when you're marketing, you should be doing content, speaking to each one of these people. You don't have to do it all at one time. You need to have some of your messaging go towards speaking to these people that are already having symptoms. Hey, are you having XYZ symptoms? Xyz, one of the things we see in our office all the time are XYZ symptoms. So you want to speak to the symptoms. You also want to have some, some of your content where you're speaking to solutions. Some of your, you know, some of you could be talking to the problem solutions and then some is just really just more call to action. Hey, I'm the provider, I can help you with all this stuff, right? So then they become provider aware. And a lot of your content can do all the things, but it really helps you making your content when you're speaking to the people in the different stages. And this is not only true for chiropractic or neuropathy or you know, somebody that needs, that's having knee pain or shoulder pain, any kind of joint pain and you're using stem wave or softwave, it's still the same type thing. They're aware of a problem, they're aware of the symptom, aware of a problem. And then now if you're talking about stim wave and softwave, this is a brand new solution that most people haven't even heard of. Was talking to one of our clients earlier today, had a one on one with him and this guy's Been in practice for 40 years. He's one of, there's a lot of chiropractors in his town. He's the only one that has this machine. He has other chiropractors sending people to him because he's using this machine and he's not trying to steal them from other offices. He's got good relationships, totally ethical. He said he's even had some patients say, well, why don't I just come over here? He's like, no, no, no, no, keep going to your chiropractor. But he's just crushing it with softwave or Stim Wave. I forget exactly which one, which one it is that he has. But that's a new tool, that is a new solution that a lot of people aren't aware of. So if that's something you have in your office, like this guy actually ended up, he was doing so well with them. He has three of them now and he keeps them pretty full because he didn't have to do anything. You know, his, his team actually manages all that for him or a lot of that for him. But that's a solution that we're able to market and get in front of enough people that they're coming in because, you know, this is, it's a new vehicle to solve a problem that they're having. So then they become provider aware. Anyway, hope that helps. Just a great, great framework that I don't think we've talked a whole lot about before. It's been a while I've talked about something very similar to that. But take that, use it, use it when it comes to your marketing. And even once you know it, you'll start looking, you'll see it in other places, other marketing messages. You can ask yourself who are they trying to target with this? Because especially bigger companies, this is what they do with their messaging. They speak to people that are at different stages in that. But let's, let's switch gears a little bit now. Talk about when you should use a marketing company and when, when should you bring this in house. One of the things here at Chiro Candy that we tell our sales team and our sales team, they've been with us for a long time. As a matter of fact, one of our main guys managed accounts for a long time and then was doing some sales and now he just does that part for us. But we don't, we are not for everybody. If you're brand new, straight out of school, chances are we're not going to be a good fit for you. We can still help you, there are things that we have to provide you that you can use and take these tools and go out and grow your practice with. Or maybe you're on the opposite end, where you are a big practice, we have practices doing multiple seven figures a year. And maybe you're on that end and you actually have a team that could manage your own ads. You know, maybe that you go there, too. Those are two examples on two ends of the spectrum of people who may not necessarily want to use a marketing agency. Because, let's face it, as a business owner, to think the idea that I have to pay a company every single month for the rest of my business career is daunting. That's true for a lot of people. And then again, there's a lot of people out there. They're like, no, you know what? I don't want to do the marketing. I want to have patients coming in. That's all I want to focus on. So you guys do the marketing. I will gladly pay you. You make sure we're getting quality patients in. I'll pay you forever. And then they're happy. We've got clients that have been with us seven and eight years. So there are different clients out there. And one of the things that we did at the end of last year is thought, how can we provide a service for any of those people? Because I understand we've been doing this for 10 years. I know where a lot of you guys are. You tried Facebook in the past or Instagram, or TikTok, whatever it was. And for most of you, it worked well for a season, and then it didn't work well. And then for whatever reason, you left the company you were with, you end up trying somebody else. They have another strategy, something else going on. Well, let's see. Let's see what they're doing. And now there's this new opportunity. You know, they're saying that their strategy works better. So you do that. A lot of you probably heard Red Ocean, Blue Ocean, it's a book. I've never read the book. I just know the concept, so I don't feel like I need to read the book. A blue ocean is plenty of opportunity. A red ocean would be marketing to chiropractors. And people have asked me before, they're like, oh, my goodness, chiropractic. You picked a perfect niche. Why'd you pick that? Because so many people just learn how to run ads and then go after chiropractors. There's very few agencies out there that have the background that we do, or they were a chiropractor, struggled in practice, and then decided I could make more money creating an agency. There are a few of them out there right now that I'm thinking of that are run by doctors who necessarily weren't the best chiropractors, but they were better at marketing. Okay, if, if that's, that's a ticket, that's great. But the majority of the companies out there are literally just people who learned how to do some ads, watch some YouTube videos, whatever, and started targeting chiropractors. And that's also why you don't see them around very long. I. There are very few companies that I can think of that are out there today that were here, you know, a year ago. It's a, it's all, it's brand new companies coming all the time. They don't have staying power. That's why I'm very proud that we've been doing this for 10 years. But for us to do this for 10 years, we have to be improving and changing things. And that's why we're getting into AI and improving our strategies and what can we do to be getting better? But chiropractic marketing is considered a red ocean because there are so many people out there doing it. And so what happens is, if we're not doing a great job, you're getting DM'd all the time. I know it. You probably Open up your DMs right now on Instagram or Facebook and you've got messages from other marketing companies, you know, promising you the moon. So knowing that, I understand that you've probably worked with a couple of different companies and maybe you had some success for a while and then you didn't. And maybe you're having great success now with somebody. Like, if we talk to somebody that they're already working well with somebody else, we don't want them to switch to us. If it's working well, keep doing what you're doing. But what can we do to speak to the offices that have really feel like they've been burned and they've tried it two or three times and they're like, you know what? I just don't want to spend any more money with a Facebook marketing company and not know if I'm going to get any results? I get it. I totally understand where you're coming from. And so that's why at the end of last year, we were thinking, what can we do to really be able to speak to both of those people, people that want to do it themselves, people that have the ability to do it themselves. They just need some instruction. And what about the ones who actually, you know, what, just handle it all for us? So one of the things is we've got to stay cutting edge. We've got to be doing everything we can to be learning the new strategies to actually communicate with Facebook. What are some new things they're doing? They're doing some new things with targeting and AI targeting right now. And then we're using some tools on the back end that's making this even better. It's working so, so well. So we've got to be getting better and better at what it is we do. But something else that we did is we thought, how can we lower the price if you followed us before? You know, we've historically, we've always been a lot less than typically a third of what other companies out there charge. So. So it's like, how can we lower the price? What can we do? So we did a prepay offer. You prepay for four months, you get a considerable discount on our services. But then we wanted to make it a really just unbelievable offer. And we did what's known as a value stack. I said, you know what, we're going to add this, we're going to add this, we're going to add this, we're going to give them this. And we literally stacked as much value as we can. One of the things that I teach, because I coach a lot of other agents, agencies also, and even some other business owners that aren't in the agency space, that just own small businesses and when it comes to sales, and this is true when you're doing your report of findings and things like that as well, you should never sell anything to somebody who doesn't need it. First off. That's rule number one. But if you have a service or product that somebody's going to benefit from and they're saying no, what they're actually saying now think about this, you can benefit them with your service, and they're still saying no. And you're thinking, this could change their life. Why are they saying no? They're saying no because their money, if you picture like the justice scales, right, their money to them weighs more than your solution. So what you want to do is in your presentation, in your, your day one, your day two, even from, you know, starting your marketing message, talking about the symptoms and, you know, the problems and the solution and the provider aware, all this stuff, whatever you can do to be stacking more and more and more value, if they can benefit from it, when you stack more value to where your offer weighs more than their money. They're going to say, yes, you have to tip the scale. That's why infomercials were so popular. You would watch them and they would stack all of this value and then they would say, but wait, there's more. And what, what are they doing? They're stacking more and more and more value to where you create so much value. It's like, oh my goodness, this is a no brainer. And that's really what we wanted to do with our offer. We stacked so much value and it's like, what? I can get all that for 5, 95amonth? This is a no brainer. And that's why we had so many people sign up, because we were doing that. But here's one of the things that we did and this is, we're still doing this. Whenever you're listening to this, there's a chance, well, I don't know. Hopefully we're still doing it. If you're listening to it recently after it was released, one of the things we did is we decided, anybody that signs up for this package, we're also going to show you exactly how to do all of the Facebook ads yourself. So our team has already put together training on how to set up the ads, how to do the targeting, how to do all the back end stuff, like step by step. What we teach our staff on is the videos that you get, like, this is how you set up all your Facebook and Instagram ads. This is how you build out the audiences. This is how you do your targeting. This is how you do your exclusions. And then we went through and did everything, not just Facebook and Instagram. You know, how do you do your reels, ad your stories, ad your feeds, all the different placements. And then we went in and actually even included a training series on Google Ads. We invested about $30,000 over nine months for a consultant to come in every single week and meet with our Google department and go over ideas and strategies and things like that. And we've been doing Google for years, but we've really honed it in and really gotten better and better at it over the past couple years. And we have training showing you step by step how, how we're doing all of our Google Ads. And then even TikTok ads. Rest in peace. We don't know exactly what's going to happen with TikTok yet. Is Mr. Wonderful going to come in and save the day? Is Elon Musk going to invest in TikTok too. I don't know, whenever you listen to this, maybe, maybe we've already heard something, but as of right now, it's still kind of up in the air. But we have clients that are getting very high quality leads from TikTok. They're not getting as many leads as what we're seeing on Facebook, but the. They're getting a much higher show rate and a lot more higher conversions from TikTok. So we even show you step by step how to do TikTok ads. And what we wanted to do is create a program that was good for the people who wanted somebody to manage all the ads for them, or they just wanted us to set up all the ads. They can work with us for the next three or four months and, and then they can have their team go through the training and they can take it over. Or if they're a brand new office, they actually have the time, they can go through the training and then just kind of take over ads themselves. So when should you use a marketing agency? When, when should you not? I think if you have the time, do it, do it yourself or work with somebody like us. Let us get it set up for you and then you guys take it over. Or if you've got a team, you've already got people on your payroll and you, you're looking for some, something for some of these people to do, then maybe you just have them go through the training and then start doing all the ads for you. Or if you're in between, you work with somebody like us. You can go through the training if you want to, or you don't have to go through the training. You just let us do all this stuff for you. But there's cool stuff in there. There's also all kinds of AI training and I'm not going to get into all this stuff. If you want to find out more about that, you can go to chiralkandi.com forward/best-offer. That's carolcandy.com forward/best-offer. And it kind of breaks down everything that we're, we're doing in this promotion. Literally wanted to create the best offer we could and it's been incredibly successful. A lot of people are having success with it. Even current clients kind of jumped in on board and so. So anyway, a lot of cool stuff, but that's going to wrap it up for this episode. We will see you guys on the next episode of the Color Kitty podcast.