Answer · The Practice
How much should I spend on marketing?
Start somewhere better than a percentage.
Doctors often ask for a budget number first. Dr. Ben Lerner’s answer is different: marketing that lasts stands on three legs of the stool, in the air, on the ground, and online. Miss one, and spend becomes fragile no matter how large it is.
The point is not noise. It is integrity. As chiropractors, we want our life-saving message louder than the messages that destroy health. That requires a stool strong enough to carry the word into change, chaos, and ambiguity, the world we are already in.
Leg 1 · Community
In the air
Partner with leaders and organizations where you live. Relationships set the ceiling for a practice, and they outlast algorithm changes, election cycles, and economic noise.
Leg 2 · Inside the practice
On the ground
Events, talks, patient family dinners, PAD: marketing your own people. This is where lifetime value grows: resigns, referrals, and trust year after year. Corporate marketing calls this the most vital community of all.
Leg 3 · Where people decide
Online
Videos, reviews, presence, and campaigns. When someone looks for a chiropractor, or quietly checks whether to trust you, online is where they look. Skipping this leg is not a preference. Eventually the stool falls over.
So what about the spend?
A budget only makes sense after you know which legs are missing. Online without community relationships sets a low ceiling. Ads without internal marketing burn patients you never keep. Community work with no online presence lets someone else look like the best chiropractor in town by default.
One C3 client went from almost no internal (“on the ground”) marketing to all-in, and watched resign dollars multiply because the practice finally marketed its own people. The lesson is not a magic number. It is sequence: build the stool, then fund what the stool actually needs.
Teaching
Hear it from Dr. Ben Lerner
This answer is distilled from Ben’s teaching on the three legs of the marketing stool. Watch when you want the full voice, then come back to the call.