3 Traits Our Top Chiropractic and Physical Therapy Practices Have in Common

We’ve been thinking deeply over the past few months about the qualities our best clients have in common.

As a marketing agency focusing on helping chiropractic and physical therapy practices, we’ve had the unique opportunity to see behind the scenes and understand the traits that make a successful and unsuccessful practice.

So we’ve compiled our insights and figured we’d give them to you, hoping it will improve you and your practice.

Let’s dive right in.

#1. They view their practice as a brand 🎨

One of the biggest differentiators between the most successful practices we’ve worked with and the unsuccessful ones has been how they view their practice.

Some view their practice’s brand like Apple, aiming to ensure their online presence reflects the quality of their services, while others see theirs as just another practice, merely hoping to get by and pay the bills.

The top practices focus on quality in everything from their websites and landing pages down to their logos and photos. When we ask them for assets, they either have them ready to go in a folder or are willing to create them to ensure their marketing is operating at its fullest potential.

Going a step further, the successful practices ensure their front desk has their pitch down and that they stay on script/brand. They ensure this happens by auditing their phone calls every week (using our AI dashboard that transcribes all opportunities) to ensure their staff is following protocol. They also ensure their staff is following scripted greetings and effective ways to handle common objections.

For example, there’s a reason Disney feels magical every time you walk into their parks and stores - because Disney pushes their staff to stay on brand. They don’t even refer to them as staff; they call them cast members, further solidifying the fact that the staff is playing a part, which is ultimately designed to delight the thousands of families visiting every day.

Isn’t that the same experience you want to give your patients? That they feel delighted every time they call your practice and schedule their appointments? That your patients feel better leaving than when they walked in?

Your brand is a reflection of every interaction your patient has with your practice—from the moment they go to your website to the moment they’re on the phone with your front desk.

The more actions you take to increase your brand’s perception, the more successful your practice will be in the long run.

#2. They believe in continuous improvement 📈

There’s a Japanese term that is at the heart of Toyota’s success. That term is Kaizen.

The quote below summarizes it well.

“The Kaizen Philosophy assumes that our way of life - be it our working life, our social life, or our home life - deserves to be constantly improved.” - Masaaki Imai

The most successful practices we work with have this element of Kaizen in their business. They are always looking for ways to improve things: improve their website’s design, improve their front desk’s script, improve their logo, improve their specials, improve their techniques, improve their services, improve their knowledge of chiropractic/physical therapy best practices by attending conferences, improve their Google review numbers, improve their practice videos . . . improve their practice’s brand as a whole.

They believe in making 1% improvements to their business every day.

Over the year, these successful practices get 37x better according to the math (as shown by the chart below).

The businesses we work with that succeed regularly meet with us to talk about ways to improve, and we do our best given our collective knowledge of healthcare marketing and consulting to help them achieve their goals.

#3. They treat their marketing as a journey and not a destination 🧭

Building a business and brand is a constantly evolving journey with various milestones along the way.

Having a marketing campaign perform exactly as expected and hitting your business goals and new patient numbers is intoxicating. Having marketing campaigns that don’t yield the initial results you were expecting is frustrating.

But this is a journey that every practice . . . every serious business . . . that wants to grow must take.

This isn’t just about marketing for chiropractic and physical therapy practices. Every major brand is taking this journey: Nike, Apple, CVS, Nvidia, Walmart, Amazon, T-Mobile, Salesforce, Ford, Tesla, Meta (Facebook & Instagram), the successful practice down the street . . . You name it, they’re running creative marketing campaigns that are either home runs or temporary flops.

They’re always experimenting. They’re constantly innovating and making their products, services, and brand perception better while simultaneously searching for new ways to introduce them to the marketplace.

The medium, whether it’s SEO, Paid Social, Direct Mail, or Pay Per Click, isn’t a single destination—they’re milestones on your practice’s journey toward continuous growth.

For example, we had a client recently tell us that a new patient found them on Perplexity (an AI competitor to ChatGPT). Does that mean our agency needs to master Perplexity advertising? Maybe, when the time comes and it becomes the norm to look for chiropractic and physical therapy practices on Chat GPT-like AI systems.

But this is just another reminder for us that the tools may change, but the underlying marketing and business principles will continue to remain the same: create a great service and brand, treat your patients like gold, keep making your practice 1% better every day, and market, market, market on whatever the latest, hot medium is.

If you’ve read this far, it means you’re curious about growing your practice.

Shoot us an email and we’ll send you a checklist of 10 super easy things you can do today to improve your practice's brand.