Marketing From Inside the Trenches

Hey there, and welcome back. I'm Dr. Vince Leone, executive producer and co-host of the Practice Builders Podcast. With my partner in crime, Dr. Kyle Pankinen, we deliver proven strategies to help you grow fast, specialize with confidence, and build profitable staff-run practices. Let's go ahead and dive into today's episode now.

Welcome to today's episode of the Practice Builders Podcast. So glad to have you here today. I'm your host, For today, Dr. Kyle Pinkerton. My partner in crime, Dr. Vince Leone, is taking just a little break over the Christmas and New Year's time. So, uh, I'm glad to fill in and, uh, just give you hopefully some good content to, uh, start out end '25, launch 2026. And, uh, today I'm just gonna kind of share the, the nuts and bolts of what I do for marketing. Now, I wanna preface this. Of the two of us, Dr. Leone is, he is the expert in marketing. I'm more the student, but I'm also in the trenches every day in full-time practice. And I just wanna give you kind of a glimpse of what a comprehensive marketing strategy looks like. The average everyday doc like I, So that you can see, okay, what can I do in the upcoming year or the next 3, 6, 12 months to implement more things to make your own marketing strategy a little more robust, a little more comprehensive. So this is just a practical lesson. And again, if you really need big-time help with Dr. Leone, and Dr. Leone was the inspiration for a lot of what I'm doing right now in clinical practice. I had a few things going prior to coming on board with him, but many of the things I'm going to talk about here today are a result of his ingenuity, his skills, his thinking outside the box, and so a great mind in our profession, and he is a gift. So with that said, Let's dig into— we're just going to call this comprehensive marketing from inside the trenches. So you need to look at marketing in a comprehensive, robust way. A lot of doctors, I think, get pigeonholed into thinking, well, I'm going to try to get some online presence. I need to do some social media stuff. And so Maybe they hire an agency to do their online marketing for them, and that's all well and good. And but I hear a lot of doctors, well, that, that online stuff isn't working that great for me. Or some say it works great, or it works for a while, then it doesn't work. And you cannot rely on that as your sole source. Okay, so what do I do for online marketing? Well, I do quite a bit on Facebook. I market decompression Neuropathy, chronic knee pain, and then we just have some generic chronic pain type ads. And you know what? I've been doing this for five years now. It works. Hands down, it works. Some months better than others. Some ads better than others. But Overall, if I look back over the course of the last 5 years, I've had just a nice steady flow of patients from online Facebook marketing. And so I always tell doctors, you can't ride the— you gotta ride through the ebbs and flows. You can't bail after, oh, I tried that for 3 months and it didn't do a whole lot. No, it's a marathon, docs. You're investing in it. And a lot of times people don't always respond immediately to their ads. A lot of them, I've had many patients tell me this that have come in over the years, oh, I've been seeing your ads on Facebook for 2 years, 3 years, 4 years, whatever. I just didn't need you right then. But, you know, I made up my mind that if I needed a chiropractor, You're the guy I was going to go to once I needed it. And now several years later, here they are in the office and they're maybe not responding, like clicking on a specific ad, but they're just seeing you. And maybe then they go to your website and look up a little bit more about you. And it's just, it keeps top of mind awareness by being consistently, in a sense, in their face a little bit. And I found that has served me quite well. And so do I have an overwhelming response to Facebook ads? No. But do every month, do I get traffic from it? Do I get leads from it? Are some of them quality leads? Absolutely, yes. How many, how many good niche patients do you need in order to make it worthwhile? Well, not that many. If, if you have $3,000 and $4,000 and $5,000 case plans, You get 10 good leads a month from your campaigns and you can convert 50% of them and get 5, you know, $4,000 patients. Well, that's $20,000 of added revenue when you're spending maybe $2,000 or $3,000 or $4,000 or $5,000 on Facebook ads. That's— I'll do that every day, no problem. And so that's an example. So there's other online things, there's YouTube and Google and stuff. I have some things going on with those as well, but Facebook is the main online one that I'm currently using, and that works, I would say, pretty good. Number 2, newspaper. Every— we have, I'll see, 1, 2, 3, 3 or 4 local newspapers around us, smaller towns. That we just rotate ads. So I have a chronic knee pain ad, I have a chronic neck and back pain ad, I have a peripheral neuropathy ad, and we just rotate those niches amongst these different newspapers. And they either half or full-page ads. And you know what, it works. Newspaper ads actually in my area— I'm in a rural area So obviously I can get newspaper ads a little bit cheaper, but nevertheless, people still read newspapers. It's predominantly the middle-aged to older audience. So if you're marketing to them, you know, peripheral neuropathy is a good one because that's the age demographic that's going to have peripheral neuropathy. But chronic knee pain works because a lot of older people have chronic knee pain. Chronic back pain works as well because a lot of people have disc degeneration and spinal stenosis and conditions like that. And so again, if you have availability to use something in newspaper in your area, it's old-fashioned traditional media, but I find newspaper— some months newspaper works better for me than my online marketing. And So don't overlook that. So don't just put a generic little tiny little ad. It needs to be something that's gonna catch people's eye. And you know, as they're going through the paper and boom, well, they see this picture of these feet with these lightning bolts coming out of it or something like that. In other words, something that catches their, their eye that they're gonna see. And then don't make the mistake of running the same ad year after year after year. You gotta mix it up a little bit in the sense of different graphics and images so that people don't get used to seeing it every week or every month or however often you run the ad. But you'd be surprised how many people come in because, yeah, I saw your ad in the newspaper, Dr. Kyle. So number 3, this is my— I don't wanna— my biggest funnels right here is radio, traditional radio. I am on, uh, 2 local radio stations. And so I do 2 different things on those. When I first got into practice in 2000, I was approached by one of the local radio stations to do some advertising. And they were, well, we can develop these little ads for you and run them so many times a day or so many times a week. And I'm like, nah, I'm not interested in canned generic ads that just keep running over and over again. I said, if I'm going to be on the radio, I want to talk directly to the people. And then they— so they said, well, we have what are called ad-libs. So what's that? Basically, in a nutshell, I go live on there. So the radio personality that is on that live that day, they call me, and you know, those— they got some music playing or some news is being broadcast, and so they call me And basically, Dr. Kyle, good morning. How are you? What are we talking about today? Okay. So then we that I give them the topic. All right. Then they say, okay, we'll plug in about thirty seconds here. And then the song ends. They come back on live. And then our guest today is Dr. Kyle Pankinen, and he's gonna talk to us about fill in the blank. So I talk about. Chronic knee pain, peripheral neuropathy, chronic neck and back pain. I do quite a bit of functional medicine in my practice, so I talk about functional medicine things as well. And though there's usually about three to four minutes is what I pay for, but I'm on live. I'm talking directly to the people, and I'll I'll say one more thing before I go much. All of my all of my marketing is education. I'm not trying to sell anything. I'm educating my my newspaper ads. I'm educating my online stuff. I'm educating my radio stuff. I'm educating, and so I pick out a topic and I educate about it. And at the end, you know, it's the the radio person. If you need to want to learn more about chronic helping your chronic back pain, call Dr. Kyle. Here's his number and his website. As simple as that. Those work amazingly well. I can't begin to tell you how many hundreds and hundreds of patients that I've had come in over the years that they say, Doc, I listen to you every Thursday morning on that radio station, or I, every time I hear you on that radio, on the radio station, Doc, I turn it up and I make sure I listen, or I really like what you shared about this the other day. They, they hear it. And again, do they come in instantly the first time they hear you? No. But what you're doing is you're establishing credibility. You're establishing that, oh, this doctor sounds like he knows what he's doing. Got them fooled, right? But no, you're educating, you're delivering good content, good information. And again, it's a lot of times, well, I've been listening to you for years. I— you're my doc. I just haven't come to see you. Until now, because now I need you. And I hear that quite frequently. And so when they, when they hear you week after week after week, they, you kind of become a part of their life and a media personality. And you almost become a mild little star within your own community because people hear you on the radio. So the other thing I do on the radio is I have my own show. So it's called Treat the Cause, and you can, you can literally buy airtime to have your own radio show. A lot of these little, especially AM stations and stuff, they, they love more content. And so on Saturday mornings on 2 of the local radio stations, I have a half-hour show, Treat the Cause. So I record it in my office just like I'm recording right now. Got a microphone set up to run into my computer. I record it and then I send the recording to the radio station and they, they've developed an intro and ending for the show. So I have 25 minutes of content. There's a couple 3-minute intro and a couple-minute ending. And so it runs for the 30 minutes of allotted time. One radio station, it broadcasts every week. And another radio station that does twice a week. Folks, people listen to your shows. It takes a while to build an audience, but I have a whole bunch of people that say, I listen to you every week, Dr. Carr. Oh shoot, I missed last week 'cause I was gone. And they're like, they miss it. And so it's all education. I pick out a topic and I educate.

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And there's very little, if any, self-promotion other than the intro and the ending. When I'm actually talking a lot about content, it's just that it's content and I'm trying to deliver the goods and And basically give people hope and inspiration and usable information that they can use to make wise decisions about their healthcare. So those are some avenues that you can use radio that have worked very well for me over the years. So from outside sources, online, newspaper, radio, every month I have is just a steady trickle of you know I get. Couple from the newspaper and a couple from Facebook and a couple three from the radio, and that adds up. And then of course you always have word of mouth. And then we have what we call so those are external marketing things that I do, and then there are internal. So every month, two times a month, I develop or I put out what's called a Did You Know series. And that's simply a topic again. So an example would be, did you know that spinal decompression therapy can help for chronic neck and back pain? Did you know that spinal decompression therapy can help reduce a herniated or bulging disc? Did you know that sciatica can be helped with deep tissue robotic laser therapy? You get the idea. You're basically promoting a service that you have for a specific condition. So all, all every twice a month, and I keep them short, 2 or 3 little paragraphs so that they're more likely to read them. You put a little catchy title on them when you send them out in the subject line, and every month people come in, oh, I read your article about— these are to existing patients. But there's a— you all, you and I all have existing patients that they don't know all the services that you have or all the things that you treat or all the things that you do. So you're just basically telling them over and over and over again, hey, we have spinal decompression therapy, we have deep tissue robotic laser therapy, we have shockwave therapy, we have functional medicine, we have NeonTrack. Whatever tools you have, you just talk about the conditions and then how that piece of equipment or that therapy or that treatment can help them. And so it's, again, it's, it's education-based in nature. Did you know series works really well? Develop your own. ChatGPT can help you with these. I, I developed my own. I'm old school, but ChatGPT can be an easy, simple tool to help you with that. Every month also in our treatment rooms, we put just a little tiny flyer on the table right next to where patients sit before I come into the room to treat them. And it has— we always every month run specials on Foot Leveler's custom orthotics. So that's just a little way people can know there's a sale this month on orthotics, $25 off. Or reorders are $50 off, whatever the case might be. Or, oh, I see they're running an end-of-the-year special. So I've had several patients— we're in December now, we're running a good special on foot levelers, end of the year. So, oh, I want to update my orthotics, Dr. Cobb. Okay, so little things like that. So you can promote a specific sale on a specific product, maybe it's supplements. Maybe it's back braces, orthotics. All those things can be— you can put little internal advertisements on certain products that you sell in your office. And then finally, you know what's one of the best ways to promote? When you're treating a patient. When you're treating a patient, oh, this neck pain you're having, all this heel pain, yeah, we'll do good chiropractic work on, but you know, we have this laser now. And I've been treating people for the last several years with laser and it works 93% of the time. We get really good results with laser therapy for whatever we treat. I think we should do some laser therapy on your heel pain or on your neck pain. Or you just give them promotional material. So, you know, I think your case, Mrs. Jones, if we added laser to it, would really—

Really help.

Help along with this good chiropractic work that we're doing. I'm going to send you home with a brochure and a handout that I put together that'll explain all about the laser and answer all the questions that you might have about it or shockwave therapy. So I send home with in-office education-based material. They take it home and read it. Next time they come in, oh, did you get a chance to read about that laser or that shockwave?

Oh yeah.

Is that something that you are interested in or want to do? Oh yeah, let's do that, doc. You know, soft. It's very soft. Are you interested in that? Do you want to do that? Do you want to add that into your care? A lot of times I just flat out say we need to do this, but because I'm confident in talking about recommending it. But if you're not that way, just, just ask, are you— is this something you want to do, or is this something you're interested in? You can drive patients to your cash-based services just by every chiropractic patient that comes in, just telling them what you have to offer besides the chiropractic adjustment that they're in for. And you'd be, oh, I didn't know you had that laser, doc, or I didn't know you had that shockwave, or, and you just, you talk enthusiastically about it. So those are all internal things. And then of course, Don't forget the power of local events. So for 25 years, I have volunteered as the team doctor for our local high school football team. I know nobody ever asked me to do it. I just— my first year in practice, I literally just showed up. I just literally walked onto the sidelines and said, hey, I'm Dr. Kyle, I'll check any athletes that get injured. And they're like, oh, okay. They knew me because I was a local product, but A lot of local sports teams would love to have somebody that is at the event, even if even if maybe the major high school event, maybe they they hire an athletic trainer to be there. But okay, well go to go to some of the junior high events or the junior varsity events, or or go to the school board and ask, hey, I'd love to be the team doctor. What can I do to get my foot in the door here? And I hey, by the way, you don't have to pay me to do it. I'll do it for free. Give back to your local community. That right there, Docs, did more to promote me than just about anything I did my first number of years of practice because I'd be on the sideline. There's hundreds of people from the community at these games and athletes get injured. And what do you do? You go out and you're the one evaluating them. Well, who's that guy? Oh, that's Dr. Pankinney. He's the new chiropractor in town. Then what do you do? You evaluate the injured athlete and, oh boy, this— we might need to get some x-rays of this. Why don't you make an appointment with me on Monday morning? We'll take an x-ray of this. Or, boy, that's a rib injury that could really benefit from some good chiropractic care. Let's talk to your parents and see if we can get you checked on Monday morning. And it worked like a charm, docs. The Lions Club. I was in my local Lions Club, my local commercial club. In other words, I got out of my office and I got into my community, and I it was rubbing shoulders with fellow professionals and businessmen and women and volunteering, and that really drove traffic. Not because I was out there necessarily advertising it, but I was out in the community. And people saw, hey, that chiropractor, he's actually pretty nice. He's a real person. He's not some strange, strange person. He's actually kind of normal. And those things can really be helpful. So what have I— what have we done over the years? We've just developed a comprehensive protocol or strategy of doing many different things, both externally Internally, in the community. I've done many talks in my community over the years too, for free. I'll just put on a talk on a certain topic at my local community center, and we'll supply some drinks and some food and just talk education-wise about whatever condition or conditions you're passionate about. Those work great too. And so all this to say, I don't have any one marketing strategy that just works great. I don't. Facebook works decent, newspaper works decent, radio works pretty good, all the internal things, but all taken together, it's just a steady flow of 30, 40 new patients every month, month after month, year after year. And a lot of them are coming in from word of mouth, but a lot of them are also coming in from all the different marketing avenues that we do, and it all works together. So that's what I tell doctors. It's got to be a comprehensive strategy and not just relying on, oh, that, that online marketing just didn't work so well for me. It'll work, but it's not the only thing to do. That's the main thing. And so develop all these different areas where you get some, a little bit from each bucket, and you'll find that that over a course of time, that'll win the day. So my challenge to you, docs, is to think about, okay, well, the things that I talked about today, what are some areas that you can add that streams of marketing some buckets that you can draw from, that you can add to your arsenal in this upcoming year. And don't do it all at once, but maybe add 1 or 2 things over the next 3 to 6 months and then kind of see, track how it does, and then start to add the next and the next. And you'll find that you've become this unstoppable marketing force with a steady stream Reliably, predictably, month after month after month, year after year. So I hope that resonated with you. Yeah, if you like the episode, give us a 5-star review. And, uh, we're certainly happy with our audience size growing for the Practice Builders Podcast. And, uh, Dr. Leone and I love doing it.

It's fun.

And we're here to educate, we're here to deliver good content, and we hope you're gaining something from it as well. So Dr. Kyle Pankinen signing off today for Practice Builders Podcast, and we'll be back real soon with another episode. Have a wonderful day.

Hey, it's Dr. Vince again, and hope you enjoyed that episode. And if you're ready to grow your practice fast with high-value decompression decompression patients, then the Decompression Accelerator could be a phenomenal option for you. This is our 90-day sprint to help you scale with proven systems, staff-driven protocols, and full marketing support, and it's all guaranteed. Spots are limited. Head to www.decompressionaccelerator.com to learn more.