EPISODE 496: Modern Guerrilla Marketing

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.

[00:00:00] Jay Conrad Levinson found that most sales happen after the fifth contact with a prospect. Most business owners give up after the second. Most chiropractors give up after the first. Today, in this episode, I'm gonna bring back an old book and an old concept, and it's gonna be about guerrilla marketing.

Not the animal gorilla, uh, but, uh, the guerrilla that is spelled G-U-E-R-R-I-L-L-A, like guerrilla warfare. You've might have heard that before, and I will define it before we dive into it today's episode, and we're gonna really discuss what is m- modern guerrilla marketing now, right? He wrote this book in 1984, and we're gonna dive into what that is.

Before I do, I, I wanna make mention, uh, we've got Thrive coming up January 30th and 31st. What is coming up sooner than that is the early bird pricing is gonna end December 4th. Uh, we've already got quite a few people in attendance, which is [00:01:00] exciting. We had a lot of people sign up early on and then sprinkling in throughout the months, uh, but we are going to be ending the early bird discount, so check it out, join us.

We'd love to have you there. Again, easy to get to in Atlanta. A lot of cheaper... I shouldn't say cheap because it's not cheap, but cheaper. Nothing's cheap anymore as far as flights, but a lot cheaper. I've talked to some people where they're kinda surprised how more affordable the flights are directly to Atlanta than other areas, which was part of our goal.

Uh, it's a five-minute tram ride from the airport to where the, the hotels are and the conference center. It's gonna be super easy to get to and very impactful. We've got, uh, myself, Mark King, Bobby Mabee speaking. We got Lindsey Muma, Holly Tucker, Brett Winchester, Brandon Steele, and then none other than Kurt Kippenberger is our MC for the weekend.

So we're bringing the thunder as far as speakers and heads down work and a lot of ability to connect with these speakers and other people that signed up. Uh, the people that have signed up so far, we've got some really impressive [00:02:00] chiropractors that are signed up as guests. We've got, uh, office managers.

We've got students. It's, it's gonna be designed really, uh, for high-level business that you're gonna apply. But even if you are a student, it's really good to start hearing that stuff now, and we do have a student discount. Uh, but it... the material will be designed for chiropractors, uh, that are really looking to get better at business, and that's a lot of you.

Uh, and again, if you are a student, uh, that should include you as well. So check that out. You can go to Bitly, B-I-T dot L-Y, forward slash thrive2027. You can go to our website, Modern Chiropractic Mastery, and find it there. You'll find it in our Facebook groups at Modern Chiropractic Mastery.

We'd love to have you there. Sign up before it's too late, and we will make sure that you get a ton out of it.

So all right, let's dive into our show today, uh, Modern Guerrilla Marketing You know, like I mentioned, Jay Conrad Levinson, he wrote "Guerrilla Marketing" in 1984, [00:03:00] and he, you know, told small business owners something that still makes people uncomfortable.

Uh, you don't need money to win. You need time, energy, and imagination. Forty-plus years later, that idea hasn't aged, but the battlefield has. In this episode, I'm taking Levinson's original guerrilla principles and rebuilding them for 2026, where your patients are being influenced by AI search summaries, 30-second videos, and peer reviews before they ever see or sign up front.

This is the follow-up episode to episode 299 I did with Dr. Todd Sullivan. If you haven't listened to that one, go back, um, back after this and, and you'll hear exactly how these weapons play out in a real practice. So what is guerrilla marketing? Like I mentioned, it's, it's not, um, the, the animal. It's a French term.

Uh, it's actually a French term for little war, which is where you get guerrilla warfare, right? [00:04:00] Um, it comes from the Spanish guerrilla, itself a diminutive of guerra. Uh, so that's a fancy definition. Don't worry about that too much, but essentially war. The term originally originated to describe irregular small-scale combat instead of large armies meeting at an open battlefield.

Guerrilla fighters use ambush, sabotage, hit-and-run tactics, and knowledge of terrain to outmaneuver a bigger, better-resourced opponent. Jay Conrad Levinson borrowed the term for his 1984 book, "Guerrilla Marketing," because he was writing for small businesses that couldn't compete with big companies on advertising budgets.

His pitch was that a small business could win against larger competitors the way guerrilla fighters beat larger armies, not through brute force/money, uh, but through three things: cleverness over cash, right? Using imagination, humor, or [00:05:00] surprise instead of ex- expensive ad campaigns. The second is unconventional tactics, right?

Stunts, street-level tactics, and grassroots methods rather than traditional TV print ads. Um, and then third is agility, right? Striking quickly and cheaply in unexpected places rather than committing to one big costly push.

So the military metaphor was deliberate. It framed small businesses as underdogs who could still win a war for customers' attention by being scrappy and strategic rather than well-funded. Now, with this, and part of my whole thing, is I wanna be able to do guerrilla marketing, uh, and modern guerrilla marketing elegantly, right?

Um, so one of you, you might have heard that, you know, definition there of unconventional tactics like stunts and street-level tactics and grassroots methods. Those first two words I don't kinda like. I don't like stunts and street-level tactics for a chiropractic practice, but I do believe [00:06:00] grassroots and a lot of things that are c- unconventional still can be elegant and credibility enhancing versus credibility detracting.

So I just wanted to make sure we're on the same page with that. So that's kinda what guerrilla marketing is and where he took it from and the analogy And so we're gonna dive into, uh, some of that, right?

Now, many chiropractors think they, they get good enough at the adjustment or treatment and the marketing takes care of itself.

Well, the reality of it is it usually doesn't, okay? And, and then sometimes it will, but then if you wanted to add another doctor or team members, it, it really doesn't, okay? And this is exactly the trap Todd and I talked about in episode 299. It's the same trap Levinson was writing about for every small business owner back in 1984.

So it's not just chiropractors, but just too many chiropractors rest on their laurels of, of, [00:07:00] uh, either not thinking they have to market or kinda like I mentioned earlier, they might have one touchpoint with a person or a place and think that that was enough and then say, "Oh, that's-- it didn't work," when the reality of it is, is, like, you need a lot.

Five touchpoints, six touchpoints. It's gonna take time, uh, to cement that referral from someone, okay? So what guerrilla marketing actually is, um, really, you know, again, it's, it means the reaching customers who already want what you offer through inexpensive, targeted, high-frequency contact, not expensive one-shot mass advertising.

And I'm not saying don't do Google Ads or don't do Facebook Ads. It's all fine, right? But you really n- you can... The difference is, is like you can't, most likely can't spend $20,000 a month on Facebook Ads or Google Ads, whereas some big companies spend h- a million dollars a month, right? So we have to be [00:08:00] very strategic with it.

And really the core mindset shift is, is the, the one idea that the whole book hangs on is that guerrillas substitute time, energy, and imagination for money, right? So that needs to stop being a nice idea and start being your business plan, okay? And he's got a-- Levinson had a five-step blueprint. So his original framework was: define your target market, research what actually motivates them, decide how you'll appeal to them, choose your channels, and then test everything against profit, not interest, okay?

If that sounds familiar, it should. It's almost exactly the, the modern chiropractic marketing roadmap that I wrote about and talked about, uh, where we talked about the destination, fuel, GPS, and vehicle. You know, Levinson and I are, are pointing at the same map. He just drew it in, in 1984, and I'm drawing it now.

Um, and so you, you really [00:09:00] wanna make sure, you know, kinda going back to those five, define your target market. That's where we, you know, we run our clients through the audience builder exercise, which I wrote about in the book, where we gotta define your... You, you have a clearly defined audience, then we need a clearly defined message that's congruent with it.

So that's the, the part where he says research what actually motivates them. We gotta get clear on what motivates them. And that's where a lot of the Donald Miller building a story brand stuff is really good at and, and hits that part of it for sure, um, which is, which is great.

All right. So, um, the, the other part here that I wanna make sure we get, that last one, is test everything against profit, not interest.

Uh, that's a big one, okay? Um, increased interest doesn't automatically mean increased profits, right? So that's, that's marketing ROI, right? When you get profits from it. That's what we would call lift, I wrote about in the book. Um, a guerrilla doesn't ask, you know, did people engage with this? A guerrilla asks, did this fill [00:10:00] an appointment slot, okay?

With your, with your marketing. And you have to do a lot of it. Um, you have to do it consistently, and that-that's what's gonna move the needle

All right. So in 2026, we've kinda changed the weapons, but not the war, right? So again, as the, as the analogy goes with the guerrilla marketing, guh-- you know, he's talking about war in a sense, a war for customers' attention. And the w- And, and the war hasn't really changed. It's just the, the weapons have, just like in real life, okay?

Um, so his principles are timeless. The weapons like, you know, flyers and yellow page ads and classifieds, they're, they're not. That's a lot of stuff if you read the book from, from back then, he's talking a lot about that. Um, and so that's obviously changed. And a few things that I wanna mention that has changed is attention is fragmented and very local again, right?

[00:11:00] Post-2020, uh, people re-localized their trust, neighborhood, community, word of mouth carry more weight than they ever really have in decades. Um, number two, proof is public, right? Reviews, testimonials, and patient-generated video are now the guerrilla's version of the free sample. Number three, search has a new front door, right?

Patients are asking AI tools, not just Google, um, "Who's a good chiropractor near me," right? That's a Google phrase that you would put in. Most practices don't exist there on the AI search yet, and it's a wide open flank that we gotta make sure we're tackling. And that's something that we've been-- we've had webinars and guests in our mastermind group and our coaching on AI search and how to kinda dominate that.

'Cause, you know, guerrilla marketing was never about the weapon. It was always about the mindset. In 2026, the mindset is the same. The, the terrain has just moved, okay? And we have to adapt to that [00:12:00] And so the Guerrilla five from what he talked about, um, we'll, we'll break down and kinda go through a little bit of modern stuff with it, right?

Um, the, the first one is the turf weapon, or we're gonna break it down into weapons to keep our analogy going, right? And the turf weapon is you need to own your own radius, okay? Own your radius, and that's where you need to own a one to three-mile radius before you try to own the entire city, okay? Um, you know, youth sports team sponsorships, employer wellness talks, gym, CrossFit, HYROX partnerships.

I mean, just own it, okay? Show up in person consistently before you ask for anything, and that's what-- where guerrillas are gonna dominate markets. They dominate the turf around them, and you gotta own it, and I've seen chiropractors do such a good job of that, and s- chiropractors do such a bad job of that.

I, I mean, there's some that are just owning the [00:13:00] turf around their business, and it's really, really cool. Number two, the proof weapon, okay? So borrowed trust. He had... You know, Levinson used to use a free sample. Um, now that's kinda reimagined, right? So you wanna systematize review requests at the exact right moment in the patient journey.

You would like to have video patient stories, real outcomes, real language, not stock testimonials. Um, you'd like to have some front stage v-visibility like Strategic Coach would talk to-- would talk about front stage. What a perspec- what a prospective patient sees before they ever call, okay? Um, in 1984, a guerrilla asked for a referral.

In 2026, a guerrilla asks for a review and makes it effortless. Gotta get the reviews going if you're gonna win that proof, uh, weap- uh, war

Number three, the signal weapon. So organic content. [00:14:00] And this is where MCM hangs its hat often. You know, MCM has evolved over the years. We're, we are like a full suite of business practice growth.

Uh, being in our program, it's like being in a business school for, for chiropractic, and we do a lot. But where we really started was with organic content or content marketing, right? You've heard me talk about content marketing all the time. And so the modern free equi- equivalent of a guerrilla street tactics, right?

That you would have done before where you had to get out. You know, if this is 1984, I mean, a lot of you weren't even born yet. But, uh, if you were ru- running a chiropractic practice in 1984, it was all about getting out there, okay? And so now short-form videos is the new flyer, right? Cheap to make, expensive in time and imagination, exactly as Levi- Levinson intended.

Consistency beats virality. Showing up weekly beats one big swing. I think that's the one thing that I get frustrated [00:15:00] with, with chiropractors is they'll, they'll delve into a little bit of content marketing and do some video and stuff like that, and then they don't become an influencer or have huge, massive viral, and they don't think it's worth it or working and worth the effort.

But it, it truly is. I, I, I, I could sit here and do a whole show on, on why it is. I probably need to do that again just to remind everybody. Okay. Uh, lastly, under this signal part here is educate, don't sell, okay? It's the give value first instinct that guerrillas have always used. Nobody wins guerrilla marketing with one perfect post.

They win it by showing up when it's boring. And that's where I think I see certain chiropractors doing that. They show up when it's boring and do it constantly, and it works. Okay, number four, the follow-up weapon. Persistence as strategy, okay? Um, you know, some of the tactics that you wanna have with [00:16:00] this is reactivation campaigns for, for inactive patients.

Uh, we hit that constantly. We are always doing it. It's like the best form of marketing you can be doing, and it's strategic. Okay? Um, you wanna automate but have a personal kinda touch to a lot of your marketing. That's important. And then there's the uncomfortable truth. Most of your competitors quit after one touch, okay?

Persistence isn't pushy. Silence is what loses patience. You need to be persistent. You need to be an educator. You need to do it day in and day out, and that's how you're going to separate yourself from the other practices

Number five is gonna be AI visibility weapon. So this is a modern tool, obviously. Um, the one weapon Levinson couldn't have written about, and it's really the clearest guerrilla opportunity, [00:17:00] um, in that book spirit, uh, you know, if, if it ha- if it ha- if it had known about AI.

Exploit the channel everything else is... everyone else is ignoring. That would be it, right? A lot of people are ignoring the AI search right now in chiropractic, and you don't wanna be doing that.

You need to be structuring your online presence so AI answer engines can actually find and cite your practice. Okay? You owning clear, specific, well-documented expertise is online. AI systems reward clarity, not cleverness. And then you gotta have that first-mover advantage, right? Almost no local practices are doing this yet, and so you can get that first-mover advantage, which is huge.

I'm such a big proponent for that, is first-mover advantage. It's just like getting on top of it quickly. Um, Levinson, back in the day, he, he told small businesses to go where the big guys weren't looking. In twenty twenty-six, that is this: the AI search. Okay? So, um, I, I... [00:18:00] Again, I'd love for you to go check out the episode I did on episode two ninety-nine with Todd Sullivan.

Um, we, we talked about ten strategies, so it's really, really good for there. Um, he talked a lot about community outreach, which is gonna be that turf weapon. He talked a lot about referral systems, which is gonna be that proof weapon. Really gonna be, uh, good. If you want the tactical in the trenches versions of this, just go listen to that episode.

Really, really, um, thought he did a great job on that, and I wanted to touch base on the concept again. 'Cause, you know, the podcast, uh, believe it or not, in Apr- coming up in, like, six months will be our ten-year anniversary, and I've not missed a week of, um, episodes, so there's a lot. We're actually got our five hundredth episode coming up here soon.

Uh, so there's a lot. So every so often I look back on my list of things like, "Oh, you know what? That's a new topic that I think we can freshen up a little bit." But he hit some really good points in there, which was, which was great. Okay? Um,[00:19:00]

now I, I just wanna touch on something here, and I did earlier, right? So ethics is not an option, okay? This is core to your credibility, all right? So you need to have elegant, ethical guerrilla marketing. It builds trust, okay? Manufactured urgency, fake reviews, and manipulative AI-generated content, it really does nothing for you, and it's not gonna serve you in the long run, okay?

I believe that's peril, and it's not what this show is about, not what we as a company is about. You know, every weapon above works because it's honest That's not a constraint on guerrilla marketing. It's really the whole point. You have to be ethical, elegant, honest, and you can do it in a guerrilla marketing fashion, and I highly, highly recommend you do that, okay?

And I wanna give you a little bit of homework for this one, okay? Um, pick one of the guerrilla five that we talked about. Not all five. Pick one. [00:20:00] Do it for the next 30 days before you touch another tactic, and after 30 days, then you can move on to the second one that you'd like to do, okay? And so just, uh, get at it.

Take massive action. That's what guerrilla marketing is about. You can do it, uh, with a lower budget. And then I recommend once you start having some profit, doing well, then yeah, reinvest some of that into Facebook Meta ads, into G- Google ads, into whatever else you wanna do, right? One thing we're doing right now that we haven't done in a while, and we're gonna test it, probably costs us $500 to $1,000, is we've got a handful of neighborhoods right around us, a few that are good neighborhoods.

We get patients from there, and we're gonna do a, a direct m- You can actually mail specifically to a neighborhood. You can t- like, we have a company that we work with locally. I highly recommend you do it locally. Find someone. But they do the design of our six-by-nine little mailer, which is cheaper than a full, [00:21:00] uh, piece of mail or, say, a newsletter.

And then I can tell them, it's like, "I want you to send this to this neighborhood, this neighborhood, and that neighborhood." It'll just go to them. And we got-- we're running it for us. It's gonna be a shockwave offer, and we're gonna sprinkle that around maybe for a few months into the few neighborhoods, see how it goes.

A little bit of R&D, a little research and development. See if it's worthwhile, and if it is, then we, we, uh, some other neighborhoods we can hit up, and we're gonna see how it goes, okay? So it's just something we're doing on the guerrilla marketing front. We do a lot of other things already, but we're continuing to try to improve in our practice.

So hope that was helpful. Please let me know if you have any questions on this. You can always reach out to us. You can go to our website, fill out a form, and I'm here for you