Hey there! I’m so excited to announce that the Acupuncture Marketing School Podcast is officially live!
Recently I polled my Instagram audience of over 9,000 acupuncturists and asked how you prefer to consume content. In other words, do you like reading blog posts or listening to podcasts?
The response was clear – PODCASTS! 65% of people said they preferred listening to podcasts as a way to learn new marketing content.
I’ve been thinking about creating a podcast for awhile because it’s a fantastic way to teach new concepts AND connect with your audience. So I’m thrilled that this aligns with how you like to learn!
And don’t worry if you prefer blog posts. I’ll be including a transcript of every episode for accessibility and for those who simply prefer reading to listening. Scroll down for today’s transcript.
Let’s dive in!
Episode #1: Three Ways to Make Your Acupuncture Marketing More Effective This Week
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Welcome to the first episode of the Acupuncture Marketing School Podcast!
I’m so thrilled that you’re joining me today. Today we’ll be talking about three things you can do this week to really improve the effectiveness of your marketing. Because I think that we all want to spend less time marketing, more time treating patients, and of course, making more money!
Before we dive in, I want to share a tiny bit about myself, because you might be wondering, “Who the heck is this person? Why is she teaching marketing? Why does she seem to like marketing so much?” And these are great questions.
I’m Michelle Grasek. I’ve been a licensed acupuncturist for about 11 years and I have a practice in the Finger Lakes region of New York State. I’ve been teaching marketing to other acupuncturist for about six and half years now and in that time I have had the amazing pleasure of teaching marketing to over 2,000 acupuncturists, both online and in person.
I run a website specifically dedicated to marketing for acupuncturists. It’s michellegrasek.com, where you can find blog posts and lots of free marketing resources, like checklists, workbooks, etc.
I’ve also been a PDA provider with the NCCAOM for three or four years now. And I often teach webinars about marketing to acupuncture state associations, to the Unified Practice EHR audience which I absolutely love, and overall I just really, really love teaching marketing.
People often ask me, “Where the heck does this passion come from?” I had an amazing marketing mentor in the first three years of my acupuncture practice. Her name is Deb, hey, Deb! We did a trade: cosmetic acupuncture for her marketing expertise. And she taught me so much.
She’s also just a very bubbly, energetic and entertaining person and she always approached marketing from a perspective of creativity and experimentation. Basically she was always having fun whenever she was teaching me about marketing.
I realized pretty early on that very few acupuncturists have a marketing mentor and they also don’t have someone who thinks about marketing in a super positive way and inspires them to feel the same. And that’s one huge reason that I started teaching marketing, so I could share Deb’s positive, creative perspective with other acupuncturists.
All right, let’s dive into today’s episode: Three things you can do this week to improve your marketing.
The first thing that I’m going to recommend to improve your marketing is to share your face more often, everywhere.
We’re going to talk about a couple places where you can do this, but let’s talk about why first.
As humans we evolved as social creatures and we really place a lot of value on being able to look at someone’s face to put our eyeballs on their eyeballs and decide if we trust them. This applies to both a static image and for video, of course.
Marketing is all about building trust and I think that we often forget this.
This is one of the foundations of the way that I teach marketing. The whole purpose of getting visible in our community, of educating people about how much acupuncture can help them, of being visible ourselves as the practitioners, is to help people learn to trust us enough to put needles in them. To make a financial investment in acupuncture.
So sharing your face really speeds this process up, again because we’re social creatures.
If I can put my eyes on your face it helps me with that decision making process, as I said: “Do I want this person to put needles in me? Do I want to share my personal health information with this person? Do I think we would be a good fit? Would I be comfortable?” Etc.
So while all of these kind of unconscious thoughts are going through a potential patient’s head, you can help them out by sharing your face more and more often.
We’re going to talk about three places to share your face.
The first, of course, is social media.
I recommend introducing yourself to your audience every two weeks on social media. You are going to hopefully going to have new people following you all the time and it’s a really good opportunity to simply say, for example, “#FridayIntroductions Welcome to our new followers!” or, “I noticed that we have a lot of new followers around here and I wanted to take the opportunity to introduce myself and the clinic.”
And then you can share whatever you feel like – a couple of thoughts about your perspective on your acupuncture specialties, and you can share some personal things as well if you like.
Remember that part of this is helping people to identify the real human being behind the brand. The better they get to know you, the more likely they are to trust you.
We’re also working with something here called the know-like-trust factor, which you have probably heard about if you’ve done any reading about marketing online.
Basically, consumers like to buy things from people that we know, like and trust. So we’re always trying to build that up, especially on social media.
And social media offers a really unique opportunity for us to share a bit about ourselves and build up that know-like-trust factor.
So again, every two weeks I want you to reintroduce yourself on social media. And please don’t feel awkward about this. Remember that new people have not seen your face yet and they need to. And some of your regular followers haven’t seen your face either, or need to see it again.
Honestly whenever I share a picture of my face on my clinic Instagram account, it gets the most likes. People are just drawn to faces, that’s who we are as social creatures.
I think you’ll be really surprised by the pleasantly positive feedback that you get when you show your face. People are sort of like, “Oh hi!”
You’ll probably get a lot more engagement on your introduction posts than others, so definitely give it a try!
Next I want you to add a thumbnail of your face to the footer of your email newsletter.
So hopefully you’re sending out an email newsletter to your subscribers at least once a month, twice a month would be great but if you’re doing it once a month, also super.
And you should have a template – so just a standardized template where you only have to edit the body of the newsletter just to make your life easy.
And at the bottom of this template I hope you have a footer with your contact information and your “Schedule Now” button.
So I want you to add your face so that when people are in the decision making process (“Should I click the schedule now button or not?”) your face is near it right to help them remember that you’re real person. And if they’ve decided, “Yes, I’m comfortable with this person putting needles in me,” it makes them more likely to click the darn button!
Lastly I want to challenge you to add your face to one more page on your website.
Let me preface this by saying that I know it’s obvious that you should have your photo on the “About” page of your website. When someone clicks the “About” page on your website they’re literally asking the Internet, “Who is the person who would be putting needles in me?” So they need to see your face!
You wouldn’t believe the number of acupuncturist websites that I have visited that don’t include the acupuncturist’s face. They have this beautiful bio all about the acupuncturist, all about your education and your passion for this medicine, but no picture.
You must put your picture on there! Okay, so assuming you’ve already done that, I’m going to challenge you to also add it to the “Contact” page of your website because this is a decision-making page on your website.
You probably have your address and another “Schedule Now” button or your phone number if they have to call you to schedule. But people visit the contact page looking for your address because they’re getting close to making an appointment.
They’re saying, “Well, how far away is this? How long would the drive be?” If you put your face on that page it helps speed up that trust building and decision making process to click the “Schedule Now” button.
So those are three places online that you can share your face more often to help build up trust.
The second recommendation I have for you today is to review and update the messaging or on your website so that it reflects the patient.
Let’s make sure your website is actually speaking to the people that you’d like to treat.
What happens really often on our websites is that we end up making our websites about us or our business. You know how you land on someone’s website and it says, “Seneca Falls Acupuncture has been in business for eight years and we specialize in cosmetic acupuncture and we have highly trained acupuncturists,” – blah blah blah, no one cares. I hate to say it!
People want to land on the page and immediately know that it’s a good fit for them. They want to hear about themselves!
Okay, so here’s a good example if you want more digestive patients, if that’s your specialty, for example. You could say, “Are you tired of feeling fatigued, bloated and constipated? Take control of your health and feel centered rested and comfortable in your body,” because you know that this is the struggle that people have.
You’re calling out their pain points and then you’re showing them the results. That’s what they really want to hear, that they can feel rested and not fatigued anymore and that they can feel comfortable in their body and not bloated, etc. etc.
So we just have to be careful that we are not talking too much about our businesses or even about acupuncture itself on the landing page of our websites. And I know it’s really hard not to talk a ton about acupuncture right on the homepage, because that’s sort of what we were taught to do, or that’s just what everyone else does.
But ultimately people do not care how we fix them. Give me acupuncture, give me herbs, make me stand on my head – if you can get rid of my constipation, I will do it. I will come see you. I will pay you.
So that’s why we’re focusing so much more on the symptoms and then the relief of those symptoms, the outcome. Paint them a picture of the better life that will have on the other side of a series of treatments.
Instead of talking about – you know, I get it, it’s hard not to do this because we want to talk about how acupuncture is in ancient, powerful medicine and is filled with so much wisdom. Yes, of course it is, but there are other opportunities to talk about that.
First you’ve got to hook people on your landing page. Help them know that your clinic is right for them based on what they are experiencing and then you can talk to them more about the details of how you’re going to bring them to this better life that they imagine.
This is easier said than done, right? This requires you to know your target market and your ideal patient avatar really pretty well.
Really briefly, to define those: Your target market is a broad description of a group of people who you’d like to be your patients. It’s usually demographic descriptions. And then your ideal patient avatar (and you can have more than one, but if you want to stick with one to make it easy in the beginning, that’s fine) your ideal patient avatar is a detailed description of a single individual who fits within your target market.
The better you know your ideal patient avatar, or I’m just going to call it the IPA for short now, the better you know your IPA, the easier it is to speak directly to them on your website. You’ve got to know what they want, what they’re experiencing now, what they need, and how they want to feel after acupuncture.
So take some time and think about this. An easy way to see if the message on your website is helpful for potential patients is to pick a friend or family member who fits within your target market, who is kind of your IPA, and unleash them on your website.
Set a timer give them three minutes and afterwards ask them:
- What kind of patients do you think I want to treat based on my website?
- Who do you think is a good fit to come see me, or who can I help?
- How can you make an appointment?
- Where is my clinic located?
Don’t give them a lot of time to do a deep dive on your website because the average potential patient is not going to do that. They’re going to skim over your site pretty quickly. Unless a person is super motivated and really interested, it’s rare for most people to comb through every page of your site. Instead, they’re going to land on your website, peruse it really quickly, probably not even go past the homepage and decide almost instantly: Is this what I need or is it not?
So that’s the information you want to get from this friend or family member. You want a broad overview: Who am I helping, how would they make an appointment, where am I located, what are the most essential things you picked up from my website? You can start there with those questions.
Obviously if they’re struggling to answer those questions or you feel like they’re not answering them correctly, then it’s time to really look at the message on your website and who it’s aimed at. Was it written with your IPA in mind? Reassess your target market, get clear on your IPA and try to set up your home page so that it reflects that person.
The last suggestion that I have for you today to rapidly improve your marketing is to get on video.
I know, I know you don’t want to. I totally get it. I didn’t want to in the beginning either, okay, but everyone who is now doing video on social media will tell you that the algorithms for social media massively prefer video to static posts.
So what does this mean, the algorithm prioritizes video on social media. Facebook or Instagram, for example, use an algorithm to decide how to rank posts that are published. In other words, which of your followers to show your posts to, how often, etc.
We’re all familiar with this but, for example, if you have 500 people following your Facebook page, and you publish a post, not all of them are going to be shown the post. They might not be online but even if they are, the algorithm might decide not to show it to them.
And honestly there are many factors that play into how Facebook or Instagram determine who to show your posts to. For example, the more engagement you get on a post (likes, comments, and shares) the more the algorithm is going to show your post to your followers. Another one of those factors is whether the post contains video.
So the first thing I would say is don’t panic! You do not need to do live video. Prerecorded video that you then publish after the fact is still very, very effective.
Plus remember what we talked about earlier, how your face helps build trust rapidly. Video helps build up that know-like-trust factor even faster than an photo of your face.
One of the first things that I teach all of my acupuncture marketing students inside my foundations of marketing course, called Acupuncture Marketing School, is the concept in marketing of touchpoints.
A touch point is any reminder about you, your brand or your business. So if a potential patient sees a Facebook post, that’s a touch point. If you had a giant billboard on the side of the road, that would be a touch point. If you publish a video or send an email newsletter, those are touch points.
On average in marketing we say that person needs 5 to 7 touchpoints before they take the plunge and make a financial investment.
And touch points can be warm or cold; it’s a spectrum. Basically the warmest touchpoints are the ones that build trust the fastest. So you need fewer touch points if they are warmer, to bring a person to that place where they trust you enough to make an appointment.
So if you were focusing on warm touchpoints the idea is that you’d need fewer of them overall. And that means less marketing for you.
So the warmest touch point is meeting someone in person and talking to them about whatever their issue is. Now, of course, during the time of COVID that’s not happening maybe at all depending on where you are or nearly as often as it was before, right? In-person networking really has been squashed.
The next best thing after speaking to someone in person is live video and then after that, recorded video. Because it’s that idea of people wanting to put their eyeballs on your eyeballs while you’re talking to decide if they trust you.
So again, I know video can be hard and I have a couple of tips for getting on video and feeling confident.
The first is to record by yourself.
Thanks to the magic of technology, you don’t need another person in the room with you to press the “Play” button, and this takes an enormous amount of pressure off of you to “perform.” It’s just you, by yourself. This helps my students so much.
Use a remote camera button and a tripod to hold your phone so that it doesn’t look like you’re taking a selfie. (Which is also fine, honestly, but if you want it to look a little more polished, you can use a remote camera button and a tripod.)
The next tip is to write yourself either a full script beforehand or at least some bullet points.
In other words, know what you plan to say and avoid off the cuff. This keeps your message crisp and clear and prevents rambling, which viewers generally do NOT like.
And then lastly, know in advance that it is normal to do four or five takes every time you record a video.
And even then you might not be perfectly happy with the result. This does not mean you’re doing it wrong; it’s normal. It still happens to me regularly. It’s about letting go of perfectionism because it doesn’t serve you; it isn’t worth your time to keep recording 10 or 12 times.
Okay, so don’t torture yourself. Pick one version that comes closest to the message you wanted to share, and publish it.
Keep in mind that the only person who knew exactly what you planned to say in your video, is you. Your audience has no idea what you intended to say or how you intended to say it, so they’re going to be way less critical than you are of yourself, honestly.
So find a quiet space by yourself, write yourself a script, record a couple of times, and then grab a version and hit publish.
I think you’ll be amazed with the engagement on your video, especially the first one that you release. The social media algorithm is really going to promote it to your followers.
I hope that these three tips I’ve shared are helpful for you today.
To recap, I would love for you to improve your marketing this week by sharing your face more often, by reviewing the message on your website and making sure that you are speaking to the patient about their pain points and the outcome they’re looking for, and getting on video.
I think if you start doing each of these things regularly, you will notice that your marketing is more effective and you have to make less effort in your marketing over time, because there’s more clarity for your audience and you’re building trust with them faster.
Thanks so much for joining me for this very first episode! Don’t forget to visit my website to grab your free marketing downloads, including my favorite checklist, 37 Authentic Marketing Ideas for Acupuncturists. You can download it at bit.ly/37acumarketingideas – I’ll also include the link in the show notes. Have a great day, and talk to you soon!