Welcome back! I’ve been on a bit of a hiatus, as you know, but interviews with fellow acupuncturists and marketing experts are on their way in November! Stay tuned.

This week I’m sharing why I teach marketing, about the person who taught and inspired me, whether I have any formal education in marketing, and more.

I say it all the time – I love marketing, and I love teaching it to fellow acupuncturists. BUT I don’t often talk about the background behind it. 

One reason I’m sharing is that I do NOT have any formal training or education in marketing, and I hope that helps you realize that anyone can learn marketing, and learn to love it. You just need some guidance, hopefully a great teacher, and a bit of dedication.

I’m also sharing a story about one patient who didn’t want to pay me for continued acupuncture treatments, but offered me a deal on something else instead.

The stories are related, I promise.

Before we dive in, don’t forget that Acupuncture Marketing School is on sale this week for $200 off! Plus anyone who enrolls this week gets free access to the new Patient Boost Bonus training.

Use code PATIENTBOOST to save!

The discount code expires at midnight on Monday, Oct. 31st.

Show Notes:

Episode #45: Why I Teach Marketing

Subscribe to the Acupuncture Marketing School podcast on Apple Podcast, Stitcher, or Spotify

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Transcript:

[MICHELLE GRASEK] (00:04)

Welcome to the Acupuncture Marketing School Podcast. I’m your host, Michelle Grasek, and I’m here to help you get visible in your community, take marketing action with confidence and get more patients in your practice and more money in your pocket every week. We both know you’re a talented, passionate acupuncturist and that acupuncture has the power to change lives. So let’s dive right into this episode and talk about how you can reach more patients.

(00:35)

Hi there. Welcome back. It’s been a little while. I wanted to share with you something that I don’t talk about a ton and I was recently interviewed by Jason Stein on his podcast and we talked about this a little bit, how I got into teaching about marketing to begin with. I have mentioned in the past that I had a wonderful marketing mentor, her name is Deb, hey Deb, and I just wanted to share that story with you today because this week Acupuncture Marketing School is on sale, $200 off with the discount code, [PATIENT BOOST]. Whenever Acupuncture Marketing School is getting a lot of attention, lots of questions from acupuncturists and acupuncture students who are thinking about enrolling, this is also one of the things that comes up because I have a very structured way of teaching marketing inside Acupuncture Marketing School, and occasionally people are just wondering, did you have marketing degree in undergrad, that sort of thing. And I did not.

(01:39)

The first reason I want to share this with you is because I think this should make everyone feel a lot better about the potential of marketing their practice. Because you can learn it, you can do this and you can be successful at marketing even if you had no background or formal education in marketing, even if you haven’t worked in marketing. Something else I wanted to add is that I’ve also had a couple people enroll in Acupuncture Marketing School very recently who told me that they were in marketing in a previous career, everyone always says in another life, like pre-acupuncture, and that they found that marketing themselves was a lot harder than doing the typical marketing that you usually go to school for. If you are working for a really big company and helping market L’Oreal for example, that is way different than marketing yourself and being able to be visible as an individual and comfortable telling people in your community how much you can help them.

(02:50)

And knowing how to articulate that message in a way that really lands with people and helps them understand very quickly what you can do for them. So all of that is very different from the typical marketing that people might think of if they had a job in marketing before. If you are new to marketing or you had no background in it and really all you want to do is treat patients, then I get it. You are in such good company and you can still learn to do marketing and learn to do it well, specifically to build your small business.

(03:30)

I just want to talk a little bit about Acupuncture Marketing School. So Acupuncture Marketing School is a self-paced class. This is one of the number one questions that I get about the class. It is self-paced. There is no live portion. It’s videos and worksheets that you can download and watch at your own convenience. This class is really for beginners. So I usually say that if you are in the first one to five years of practice, it’s a great fit and it’s also a great fit if you have been in practice longer, but never really had to actively do marketing to find new patients. For example, I always have people ask me this question, “I’ve been in business 10 or 12 years but there was never any competition in my area and now more and more acupuncturists are popping up and they’re all younger and they’re really great at social media like TikTok or Instagram or whatever.” And while a lot of times people are like, I’m not necessarily interested in becoming TikTok famous, fair, me either, I still recognize the importance of getting visible in my community, but I have never had to do this before and didn’t learn it in school because most of us didn’t and I just need help with that.

[MICHELLE GRASEK] (04:50)

So Acupuncture Marketing School is also a really great fit if you find yourself in that boat. I do teach Social Media Marketing for beginners inside Acupuncture Marketing School, so if that is totally new for you, that might be helpful. But the focus of the class is not necessarily social media. We talk about a lot of other foundational marketing concepts before we even get to the chapter on social media. And of course, there is a chapter on email marketing, lots and lots of fresh ideas, but you have to have that strong foundation in place first, which is what I walk you through in the beginning chapters of this class. My long-winded point is simply that Acupuncture Marketing School is great for marketing beginners whether you just open your practice or you’ve been in business a little while longer, but you’ve realized that you need to make a more concerted effort to get visible in your community right now.

(05:44)

It’s also a good fit, if you have ever felt just overwhelmed by marketing, like you know there’s a lot of options, you feel like maybe you know what you should be doing, but you don’t know where to start. Or if you have tried marketing once or twice but felt like you didn’t get any results, that is something we talk about inside Acupuncture Marketing School. And I’ll share this with you, this is really key in terms of basic marketing information. I wish we were all taught in acupuncture school. Most marketing avenues require three months of consistency before you should expect to see results. And of course, it depends on what it is, but a lot of different marketing avenues require repetition and consistency in order to see results and then be able to evaluate those results and decide how to tweak them so that you can see if you can do your marketing a little bit better and have even better results. But nobody’s telling us that so we just try something once and if it doesn’t work, then we’re like marketing doesn’t work. So if you feel that way, Acupuncture Marketing School might be a really great choice.

(06:55)

Again, I’m going to walk you through the process of understanding the “rules of marketing,” the basics, the foundations and how to apply them to creating a real marketing strategy for your practice from start to finish. And the discount code is [PATIENT BOOST] to get $200 off. You also get, if you enroll this week, access to the patient boost bonus for free and that’s lifetime access. So this is a mini training that I decided to share because I realized that a lot of acupuncturists were never taught how to launch a marketing campaign and see it through to the end. We, again, it’s one of those marketing things that we just didn’t have time to learn in acupuncture school. There’s so much else to learn, of course. But how many emails should you send? How often should you be publishing social media if you are hosting a sale or if you have a special event coming up and you’re trying to get people to register for your event?

(08:03)

We have no idea how to do this, no idea what is considered normal and acceptable to get results. So that’s something that we talk about in the patient boost bonus. I use this very specific strategy in July each year in my practice, and it makes August typically the best month ever in my practice. So this year I launched this sale for one of my services in July and let people sign up for it all the way through the end of August and it made August my biggest month ever at my practice. It increased my monthly revenue 31% compared to the average of the six months before that.

(08:47)

It’s a really clear-cut and much easier marketing strategy than you’re probably imagining and it typically gets great results. Okay, so that is the patient boost bonus that is included for free if you sign up for Acupuncture Marketing School this week. The link for Acupuncture Marketing School and to take a look at the patient boost bonus as well as the discount code are all in the show notes if you want to click through and take a look. The discount code expires on Halloween Monday, October 31st at midnight Pacific Time.

[MICHELLE GRASEK] (09:20)

Okay, let’s talk about how I got into teaching marketing. I don’t have a marketing background as I mentioned. My undergrad was in Biology. I did research on Wraths. I studied abroad in England and got a Literature minor and I went directly from undergrad to acupuncture school, so no marketing experience at all. But when I first got into practice, I met, I mean, I was definitely struggling with marketing my practice. I don’t think I was doing anything except for a Groupon. I had a website and I think maybe I had a Facebook page, but I decided to try Groupon because at the time it was sort of a gray area in New York state. Now I think you’re not supposed to do Groupon, I’m not really sure, but it was like, okay, for acupuncturists to do Groupon at that time. Maybe it’s still fine, just uncertain.

(10:09)

One of the patients that came through this Groupon, her name was Deb, and she had four acupuncture treatments and she of course, has given me permission to show this, and at the end of her treatments, she had cosmetic acupuncture by the way, at the end of her four treatments through the Groupon, she says to me, “Look, I really love this cosmetic acupuncture stuff and I know I need more treatments. I would like to continue, but I don’t want to pay you for the treatments.” I obviously, I was really confused. I was like, “Okay, like I’m not really sure where we go from here.” Her response was that she wanted to do a trade. She said, I noticed that you don’t have much marketing and it looks like maybe you need help with it. She is such a bubbly, effervescent person. She was saying this completely without judgment. She was very excited about sort of pitching me this idea and she said, “Why don’t we do a trade for marketing help and expertise and cosmetic acupuncture?” Because she had been in marketing for about a decade. I had never heard of doing a trade like this before. I mean, I’ve done many trades since then, but this was a first for me. I don’t even know if I’d been in business for a year and so I said, “Yeah, okay, let’s go for it.”

[MICHELLE GRASEK] (11:34)

As I said, she’s so enthusiastic. Her personality just exudes warmth and cheerfulness and I felt like if anybody is going to teach me marketing and make it enjoyable, it’s going to be this lady. It turned out to be a beautiful partnership. We did that trade for three years. So I would give her cosmetic acupuncture once a week, and then we would sit down once a month for hours on a Saturday and we would brainstorm and make up a plan for my marketing for the upcoming month. Deb really taught me a lot of the foundational aspects of marketing that made such a huge difference in having enough confidence to be able to continue learning, marketing and practicing it even after we weren’t working together anymore. And that is huge. One of the things that she taught me was to trust my intuition and to lean into my creativity.

(12:36)

What I mean by trusting my intuition is sometimes I would have these really good ideas for something like fun and funky to do with my marketing, but I would be afraid to launch it because I thought it would be too much or maybe it wouldn’t be “professional enough,” would people take me seriously, that kind of thing. And then often we would tweak it and launch it together and it would go over really well. So it’s sort of like following your gut for the marketing things that you think your audience is actually going to really enjoy and respond to and engage with.

(13:09)

Working with Deb was absolutely wonderful. And as I said, she taught me pretty much everything that I know about marketing core concepts and that really gave me the confidence to move forward and learn more and more. She also inspired me to think about marketing in a positive, and as I mentioned, really creative way. You are building something from nothing with your marketing, the same way that you are building something from nothing with your business. I read once that when you’re an entrepreneur and you are creating a business, what you’re doing is creating a tiny universe and inviting other people into it. And how incredible is that, that you get to sort of sculpt and shape this universe to reflect something that is beautiful and meaningful to both you and your patients. And then with your marketing, you get to share it with other people and say, “Hey, come join me. I’ve got something that is amazing. I think it’s really going to help you. Just come check it out.”

(14:15)

Deb totally helped me crystallize that perspective on marketing, and I am endlessly grateful of course. And after a couple years I realized that very few people were able to have any of these conversations about marketing. I knew right away that I was crazy lucky, very privileged to have this marketing mentor just dumped into my lap and have her take the initiative and say, I want to do this trade with you, what do you think? I’m so grateful I said yes and I realized eventually that everybody deserves that and I wanted to bring that message and that energy to the acupuncture community at large. So that is why I started teaching marketing. That is why I put together Acupuncture Marketing School. That is why I love doing free webinars and teaching in classes at acupuncture schools because it really is an angle on marketing and just discussions about marketing that we don’t get to have enough of.

[MICHELLE GRASEK] (15:19)

And I think we can reach so many more people if we are committed to sharing more information and getting more visible in our communities. That’s all marketing is. We just need the confidence to put ourselves out there 1% more every day or every week and just be committed to learning and doing a little bit better with our marketing. And someday you’ll turn around and realize like, hey, marketing is not stressful or difficult anymore, that you enjoy it and it’s working. I want you to be able to share acupuncture with as many people in your community as possible.

(15:59)

Quite a while ago, I was listening to the Geological Podcast and one of the guests said that she believed that one day acupuncture would reach critical mass in the United States, and we would have reached enough people through treatments and our message to essentially make acupuncture part of mainstream medicine. I believe that is true, but my question for all of us is how will we ever reach critical mass and get acupuncture to be accepted as part of mainstream medicine if we are afraid to be visible in our communities? I know it’s a tough question, and I just want to say that marketing does not have to be scary. I mean I mention this all the time, but that is really the point of all of the teaching that I do surrounding marketing is to help all of us realize marketing doesn’t have to be scary and that even if it does feel scary, it is worth it because our ultimate goal is much bigger than us as individuals. It is reaching more patients with the healing power of acupuncture.

[MICHELLE GRASEK] (17:19)

I hope this episode is helpful and a little bit inspirational. I hope that you lean into creativity and treating your marketing as an experiment and lean into your intuition about your marketing as well. If you have questions for me about Acupuncture Marketing School, I’m totally happy to chat with you and answer those. My email is michelle@michellegrasek.com. Again, the sale for Acupuncture Marketing School runs through midnight on Halloween, felt very appropriate as a deadline. The link is in my bio, if you want to check out Acupuncture Marketing School and the patient boost bonus, I know it’s been such a long hiatus with this podcast. I have some wonderful interviews coming up for you in November. You are really going to enjoy these guests. I think we talk about marketing, practice building, alternate streams of income for acupuncturists, you name it. These are really fun, insightful conversations and I just can’t wait to share them with you. Talk to you soon.