EPISODE 470: Becoming the Disc Injury Expert In Your Community

Hey, chiropractors. We're ready for another Modern Chiropractic Mastery Show with Dr. Kevin Christie, where we discuss the latest in marketing strategies, contact marketing, direct response marketing, and business development with some of the leading experts in the industry. 

Welcome to another episode of Modern Chiropractic Mastery. This is your host, Dr. Kevin Christie, and today I am going to discuss, um, positioning in your community. I'm gonna use, uh, being a, a disc injury expert as the, uh, kind of topic that we roll through. But when we, uh, have our coaching clients, one of the things we always do, and I've, I even had this, uh, in my book that was, uh, published by Parker University doing it right.

Modern chiropractic marketing, but it's the audience builder tool. Uh, it really helps you have a clearly defined audience and then a clearly defined message to get there. So I'm gonna kind of roll through that, that tool that we use, but then use, uh, the disc patient as kind of our example as we, we do run through this.

Okay. And, you know, I think a lot of chiropractors could. Strongly consider, you know, really trying to position yourself as the disc expert. Obviously there's plenty [00:01:00] of chiropractors that have, there's, there's certain, um, modalities, you know, like say, uh, decompression that does that. There's, uh, certain trainings on understanding disc injuries that do that.

There's, you know, this isn't, um, you know, anything revolutionary as far as a chiropractor. Becoming a disc injury expert, but I want to, um, kind of talk about how you could get your message out there a little bit more. Right. And when we go through this audience builder, the, the first thing we do is the XY axis of positioning.

It's a Seth Godin, uh, concept, and you got your vertical and horizontal axis, and you've got your four quadrants. And on the vertical axis, say you got expert on the top and non-expert on the bottom, and on your horizontal axis you would have something like maybe generalist or wellness. Uh, and then on the other end of that would be.

Uh, something very specific, like, let's call it disc patients, right? And you want [00:02:00] to do enough to become the expert in disc injuries and you gotta move that needle up out of maybe the non-expert disc, uh, quadrant to the expert disc quadrant. And that's gonna happen, you know, various ways. Yeah. You, you know, being clinically.

Skilled at it is a huge one. That's, that's kinda the table stakes. But if not enough people in your community know about what you do and your expertise, then in the eyes of enough people, you have not reached expert level, right? You're kind of in that non-expert level because frankly, just not enough people know you.

Okay? And if you're lucky enough and you work hard enough and you're brilliant enough, you. Can sometimes even transcend the profession, right? Like certain folks, someone that would come to mind, it'd be like Stu McGill, uh, and Disc stuff. I know he is not a chiropractor, but he's kind of transcended and, and he's become [00:03:00] one of the experts in it, uh, nationally, uh, I guess I should say internationally.

I don't need you to worry about becoming the international expert in disc injuries. If you do, awesome, but let's assume that's not gonna be the case. I need you to be the expert in your community and when you can really hone in on that and say, yeah, I want to do that. Then we can actually make progress in turning you into, uh, the expert in DISC patients.

And again, I'm just gonna use DISC in this call. Uh, but you could apply this to anything else if you wanted to be desk workers or runners or, you know, plantar fascitis, foot, ankle, right? Any of those, you could do a lot of different things. So step one is getting clear on how you wanna position yourself.

And we've, we've done that. We're gonna do that with discs. Okay. Um, then you gotta determine, you know. The psychographics of your ideal audience, right? Because I could, I could break down a lot of different psychographics of disc [00:04:00] related patients and, uh, that the psychographics are gonna be different than the demographics, right?

So demographics are gonna be age, gender, income level, education, that type of stuff. And that's fine. You know, you, you doing marketing towards that is not. An exercise in futility, but I think starting there is not what we want to do. We want to actually focus on the psychographics, and that's going to be the personality traits, values, attitudes, interests, and lifestyle of the consumer.

Okay. And so some of the things that come off the top of my head on, uh, psychographics, that a lot of chiropractors, um, you know, kind of yearn for in their patient base are people that are health conscious, right? You could have the disc patient. That's, uh, super healthy and is a, a power lifter, right? And very health conscious.

You could have a disc patient who is, uh, a cigarette smoker, sits at a desk, uh, you know, 10 hours [00:05:00] a day, hasn't worked out in 10 years, and is 30 pounds overweight. Um, not very health conscious. You may not want that psychographic. You want the disc, but not that, uh, psychographic, right? Uh, another psychographic could be active lifestyle.

It could be, you know, obviously values natural solutions. There's people that get disc injuries and they want nothing to do with natural solutions. They just wanna go under the knife tomorrow. Um, you know, other psychographics, high quality of life, maybe weakened warrior seeking health longevity, right?

Those are the things I would say are on the, some of the examples. There's probably many more, and you can, you can work through that, uh, of psychographics that most chiropractors are looking for. And so when you're setting out to say, yeah, I want to be the disc injury expert, um, I want. But I want patients that have disc injuries that are mostly in these psychographics.

It's not gonna be perfect, right? You are gonna have that, uh, cigarette smoking sitting, [00:06:00] uh, 30 pound overweight, hasn't worked out. Patient in your practice, it's gonna happen, but when the majority of people in your practice fit the psychographics, you like. Then you can handle the ones that don't. It's when you're 80% of your practice are psychographics you don't like, where you start to get frustrated, burned out, and you're not getting the satisfaction you want out of the results you're getting, frankly.

And the results are gonna be hard with those people too. So, uh, so that's step two is determine the psychographics and then Yeah, you can do. You know, a kind of a demographic check and say, okay, um, do who, obviously with disc, uh, there's gonna be an age component. We know that. Uh, you might also say, you know what, um, I'm out of network with insurances.

Uh, it's a little bit higher. Cash rates, I, I, I, I do need people that can afford my care. So there's a financial demographic there that you might consider, uh, when you go, uh, to, to figure this out. Okay.[00:07:00]

Now we move on to step three, which is determining groups of people that you want to target in your marketing and your messaging. And what I like to do here when I'm, when I've gotten clear on say, a type of condition that I want to target. Like disc, I will say to myself, okay, who suffers from disc injuries?

Right? Um, could be golfers, right? That could be a group of people. And what I like to do here is like, okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna pick a, a condition like disc. I'm gonna pick a group that suffers disc injuries, and then I'm gonna do my psychographic. Crosscheck. All right. Golfers? Yeah. Health usually, uh, active lifestyle, right?

A lot, A lot of them do value natural solutions. They do want a high quality life if they wanna play golf, uh, they are seeking health longevity, right? A lot [00:08:00] of 'em are weekend warriors and a good amount of them are. Health conscious, then you can go and do your demographic check. Yeah. Golfers usually, if they can afford to be golfers, can afford your care, and they're usually of a pretty good age that suffers from disc issues.

You also might wanna deal with stenosis. I'll let you figure that out if you wanna also be the stenosis expert. But, um, we'll move on to just focusing on DISC for this, uh, sake of this podcast. Right. Um, I would say desk workers would be another great one. Strength, power, weight, weightlifters. People like that for sure.

Right. Other rotational sports. I mentioned golfers, but it could be, it could be tennis, uh, could be CrossFitters, right? Definitely could be that. And so start to think about what I could, there's a laundry list of 'em, but you get the idea, like start thinking about where you would find these groups of people that do deal with.

Disc issues and then check the psychographics and check the demographics, [00:09:00] and now you've got your groups. That's a big part of building a clearly defined audience is okay. What groups of people. Then what you would do is when you're building this out is, um, let's just take golfers, right? So I'm just going to focus on golfers with the disc issues right now.

Um, you want to figure out where you find these golfers. There's offline congregation points and there's online congregation points, offline congregation points, gonna be golf courses, country clubs, golf stores, teaching professionals, golf specific personal trainers, right? Um, all really good ways in the community.

To get referrals and to do workshops and get ref, you know, a, a teaching pro is a good gatekeeper where they can send you many people and so start getting out there. That's the offline congregation points. And then you got the online congregation points, right? It could be something like. Facebook specific targeting.

If you're TPI certified, TPI golf referral director, they have, maybe there's a [00:10:00] closed Facebook group in your area of golfers. Instagram's good YouTube searching for golf health and performance tips is, is prevalent. And then frankly, with the online congregation points is if you create a lot of good content articles and videos and posts on social media and stuff on your website and messaging around it.

You will sift, sort, and screen through everybody and, and you will become a magnet for those golfers that are dealing with disc injuries, right? And if you do a good job of it's creating disc injury content and you're good at treating discs, then uh, golfers will find you. Uh, and, and other providers would refer to you as well, right?

So an offline congregation point could be, um, you know, primary care doctors and obviously MD orthos, uh, that are looking for conservative care of disc injuries. Uh, maybe you're McKenzie certified and you connect with other PTs. There's other people that you can connect with. That would, um, [00:11:00] that would attract referrals, uh, for disc patients.

All right, so now you got clear on, okay. I got my, I position myself as the disc injury expert. I want these types of psychographics. These are the groups that suffer from disc injuries. I'm gonna do a crosscheck of psychographic and demographic. Then I'm gonna tease out where I'm gonna find those groups like golfers and desk workers, and, and really have a plan of attack to get out there into the community.

Now you've, that's, that's your clearly defined audience. You know, I, I went through one, uh, and you would go through different ones. And again, you could do this for other things. You don't have to only treat discs, uh, as you can imagine. But this could set you up really nicely to, uh, target this in your community and.

You know, put a megaphone to your expertise and amplify your message out there, and people will start considering you, uh, the expert. Right now I'm going to, I'm gonna touch on one thing here on the messaging [00:12:00] side. So usually when we, when we go through this audience builder, we spend kind of half a time building on the audiences that our client wants.

Then we spend the other half on the messaging around it. And one of the things we do, and I'm just gonna. Work on the golfers, again, on the messaging is if you're familiar with building a StoryBrand, uh, by Donald Miller, he has seven characteristics of the story. I think it was chapter 17 in my book, I got clearance by Donald Miller to write about it and tease it out how it pertains to chiropractor.

So you could reference that. Uh, you can go to Amazon or my website, uh, to get our, get my book if you need to. Um, but he talks about the seven characteristics of a story. Where is one is the character. Who has a problem number, which is two meets a guide, which is three who has a plan, which is four, and calls 'em in action, which is five avoids failure, which is six, and leads to success, which is seven.

Okay. Uh, in this scenario, the golfer is are [00:13:00] character, which is one you are the guide. Which is three. The problem number two, Donald Miller breaks down into external, internal, and philosophical conflicts and how that would relate to say a chiropractic situation. Here is the external conflict in my mind is gonna be the diagnosis, right?

The, the low back disc injury in, in the golfer. That's the external conflict. The internal conflict is the driver that says. To this person, I need to go see somebody for this. Right? You'd be, we all know, like a lot of people deal with pain for a while before they actually do anything about it. It's the internal conflict that motivates them to, to seek a solution, right?

And so some of those internal conflicts for the golfer might be they don't want to miss out on the member member golf tournament coming up. Uh, being able to golf play satisfies their competitive drive. Socializing with friends is important to them. Uh, not being able to play golf makes them feel old, right?

Those would be the internal conflicts where they, they raise their hand and say, I need to see someone for this [00:14:00] now. Who are they gonna want to see? And there's the philosophical conflict here, which is, uh, maybe they don't want surgery. They're, they're trying to find someone that's not gonna put 'em under the knife.

They don't wanna be prescribed long periods of rest. They don't wanna go to that doctor and say, yeah, stop playing golf for three months. They don't want that. They don't want pain medications, right? I'll allow Tiger, tiger Woods, um, afraid they have a disc herniation that will prevent them from, from playing golf.

And, and they have all these. Nightmare concerns about what a disc herniation is. Okay? That's a philosophical conflict. And when you get clear on your messaging, on the content you create, or the conversations you have with golf pros, or you do a workshop and you're clear on this and you position yourself as the solution to get them back to playing golf quickly without pills, drugs, or surgery, and long period periods of rest.

That's why people want to go see you, right? And if you do this long enough, because they may hit the internal conflict and say, [00:15:00] yeah, I need to see someone for this. But they can go see orthopedists, physical therapists, other chiropractors, massage the like, all these other people that they think they can go see.

We need them to think of you. And when you do this long enough and, and, and diligently, you become the expert that solves their problem, right? And so you need to get clear on those messaging points for this. And we tease this out for a lot of different types of audiences that chiropractors would want.

And then from there, you're gonna apply this messaging to your website. Um, to your blogs, to your videos, to your patient communication, to public speaking to your meetings, right? And that's something that we work with a lot on our clients on getting clear with that. And so now if you do this right, you will, um, have the clinical skillset that you are confident in to actually assess and treat disc injuries.

And you are now, [00:16:00] um. Possessing really good, uh, positioning, audience building and messaging to get the message out there concisely and consistently to motivate enough people to come see you and turn you into the expert. Right. And I think, uh. I think you can get amazing results when you combine. I shouldn't say I think I know you can 'cause I see it all the time and obviously I, early on and I just kind of mentioned it, is you do have to become really good at disc uh, patients, disc patient care, right?

Because the, the killer is when you think you can put lipstick on a pig. And have really good marketing and messaging and get people in. But if you don't have the goods and you don't get people better, then it's just not gonna work out. Um, you, you, you're gonna struggle, you're gonna spin your wheels. It's when you have good messaging and marketing and you get out there consistently and people come in and you get great results, that the [00:17:00] whole thing just takes off.

And so I, I implore you to continue to get even better. With managing disc related issues. Okay. Um, and, and I, and I know you can and there's a lot of ways to slice it. Uh, one of the things that I know a lot of you, uh, heard about and like, is McKenzie protocol. I think that's a great one. I don't, I don't have any, um, official sponsorship or anything with, with them.

I do know that, um, MPI is is actually having a master series on. The disc, and that's gonna be with Brett Winchester, Mark King and Tom Lotus. And Tom Lotus is. Uh, really, he, he's a good example of someone that has positioned himself as an expert in disc related issues, uh, on a, on a pretty high scale and, uh, to the point where he's now teaching it with MPI.

And obviously we know about [00:18:00] Mark and Brett. And their skillset. And so if you really want to, um, enhance your evaluations and assessments and treatments of DISC patients and be able to really hone that, I, I highly recommend you check out, uh, that master series disc, uh, seminar. So it's a really good one.

It's gonna be on June 6th and seventh. Um, it's gonna be in Chicago. Easy to get to. Good weather in Chicago and June, I'm usually in Chicago for June. It's, it's amazing weather. Uh, so it'll be there. Um, and again, that's gonna be, uh, Brett Winchester, Mark King and Tom Lotus. June 6th, seventh, uh, 2026. Just go to motion palpation.org.

Uh, I, I really believe in what MPI does, as you know, I believe in the, uh, the training they do around the disc. I know there's other things you could supplement it with, but if you go here. Whether you feel like you're a beginner or even advanced, uh, with disc stuff, this is gonna get you even better than you currently are, and then you'll have [00:19:00] all the confidence and conviction to then work on what I just talked about for the last, uh, 20 minutes here.

Around positioning yourself as the expert with great marketing and messaging around that. And when you marry the two great clinical with great, uh, consistent marketing, that's when you will, uh, develop the patient base that you want and grow the practice that you desire. So check that out. Motion pal patient.org.

June 6th, seventh this year, um, you will not regret it. Hope that was helpful for you to understand how you can position. Again, I use the disc as our example today. Um, you could use, uh, injuries, right? You could use sports. You, you could use patient populations like pregnancy and pediatrics, right? There's a lot of things you can do.

I wouldn't do too many, right? If you're, um. You try to please everyone, you please, no one. And I think, uh, getting really clear on four to six, uh, really helps you get going and building [00:20:00] a great strategy for your practice. Okay.