🍂 It’s officially fall and today I’m sharing four fall-themed ideas to boost your marketing this season. 

Fall is refreshing for so many reasons – the start of school, the shift in weather, upcoming holidays, my birthday. 😉

It’s a great opportunity to roll out some new marketing to grab the attention of your community and increase patient numbers.

Plus it’s also the perfect time to prep your audience for holiday sales and special events.

I’m sharing four marketing ideas for fall marketing and I hope at least one inspires you so you can get more visibility in your community and more patients!

Let’s dive in.

🎙️ Episode 20: Four Fall Themed Marketing Ideas for Your Acupuncture Practice

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Show Notes:

• Free Download: 20 Fall Marketing Ideas
• Website of Daily Holidays: https://nationaltoday.com/november-holidays
• Register for the free webinar with Unified Practice: Brainstorm Your Next 90 Days of Content in One Sitting (Link coming soon) 
• We’re Hiring! Job Description for Part-Time Acupuncture Position in Seneca Falls, NY
• Scholarship Waitlist for Acupuncture Marketing School
• Acupuncture Marketing School [15 NCCAOM PDAs]

Transcript:

Hello, welcome. It’s officially fall and today I’m sharing four fall-themed ideas to boost your marketing this season.

Fall is refreshing for so many reasons – the start of school, the shift in weather, upcoming holidays, my birthday. 😉

It’s a great opportunity to roll out some new marketing to grab the attention of your community and increase patient numbers.

Plus it’s also the perfect time to prep your audience for holiday sales and special events.

Now technically, most marketers start thinking about their Fall marketing in the summer. They’re planning 3 months in advance on average. And that would mean right now, most big businesses are making marketing plans for the holidays.

But – do not despair. There’s still plenty of time to do both – fit in some great Fall marketing and prep for the holiday season as well. So some of what we’ll be talking about today has some overlap with the holiday season, particularly Thanksgiving, Black Friday, etc., since it’s coming up fast.

So break out the pumpkin spice and let’s get started!

I also have a free Fall marketing checklist for you today. It’s 20 fall-themed marketing ideas. The 5 we cover today are on the list, but there are so many more great ideas for you, so I definitely recommend downloading it. The link is in the show notes (or click here to access).

Okay, let’s get started. When you’re thinking about your fall season marketing, or really anytime you’re thinking about marketing, I want you to remember that all you need to do is come up with a reason, one reason, to get in front of your audience or your community more often.

You just need one thing to share, and that can be the basis for a marketing campaign. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, it doesn’t have to be anything huge. Just one that acts as your basis for sharing more often on social media, sending more than one email to your subscribers.

The goal here is to get more visible in front of your community, and your reason for that doesn’t have to be complex. It can be as simple as, we’re hosting a canned food drive in the next two weeks, here’s how you participate. And reminding people throughout that time with those social media posts, emails, etc. Telling people it’s still happening, reminding them how it works, how they participate, how it benefits, them, and then of course reminding them when it’s ending.

Just the sheer fact that you’re showing up more often will help more people pay attention to you, build the know-like-trust factor, and get on your schedule.  

All right, let’s get into the list. I already mentioned fall-themed marketing idea number one: Host a canned good drive or a coat drive.

Choose a local nonprofit like the House of Concern or the local food pantry and ask them what their needs are as we approach colder weather and holiday season. A lot of places will collect canned goods or gift card donations in late October and early November to help prepare the increased need around thanksgiving. You can go about this a number of ways. You could ask patients to bring two or three non-perishable items to their appointment in order to get, for example, 10% off products at your office.

Or I’ve found that you don’t necessarily even need to offer them something in return. You can use this collection drive as a reason to keep showing up on social, emailing your list, like we just talked about, and promote the fact that you’re a drop-off location for the canned goods, or jackets and mittens, etc. And people will bring items even if there’s nothing in it for them.

This is especially good if you keep the donation box in a visible place in your reception area with signs explaining what’s going on. So people in the waiting room can read it. And it’s so helpful to post updates on social media like, thank you to everyone who has donated so far, we’ve collected this many non-perishable items or coats, please help us in our efforts.

And of course if you do this, don’t forget to remind people of when it’s ending and do a little push for last minute donations before you have to deliver them to the nonprofit. People are always the most active right before a campaign ends, so they’re likely to bring you items last-minute, but you have to remind them. And it’s a great way to show up excited with a strong call to action on your social media and email.

Fall marketing tip number two is to celebrate obscure Fall holidays as a reason to post on social media. Essentially, these are fun and unexpected opportunities to show up on social and build that know-like-trust factor.

A few fun examples include:

• National Coffee Day – Oct. 1 ☕
• National “No Bra Day” (Oct. 13) to celebrate Breast Cancer Awareness
• National Chocolate Cupcake Day – Oct. 18 🧁
• National Apple Day – Oct. 21 🍎
• National Chocolate Day – Oct. 28 🍫

Ideas for celebrating these days on social are really simple – take a picture of you with a cup of coffee at your desk, a photo of you or a staff member with an apple and talk about the properties of apples in TCM dietary therapy, a photo of chocolate on your desk at work. The caption could be, happy national chocolate day, chocolate is high in antioxidants and we’re taking a quick chocolate break here at ageless acupuncture! These can be really basic, that’s fine. Don’t underestimate how much people enjoy basic on Instagram.

If you wanted to take this idea to the next level, you could team up with other local businesses and feature them for a few of the different days. So feature the local coffee shop on national coffee day. Take a photo of you with a coffee in their shop. Feature the local bakery on national chocolate cupcake day, etc. I recommend reaching out to the business beforehand and ask them if it can be reciprocal.

You could say, I’m thinking of featuring 3 or 4 other local businesses on my Instagram account in October, and I would love to feature your business for national chocolate day. Would you be interested in a trade on Instagram, where we feature each other? Even just sharing my business page to your Instagram story would be great. Something like that. Lots of opportunities here to get creative and collaborate and show up in a really fun way.

Check out even more lesser-known holidays here: https://nationaltoday.com/november-holidays/

Tip number three is to promote Small Business Saturday and the shop local theme during Black Friday through Cyber Monday. Small Business Saturday was created by American Express to help small businesses get more visibility during the Black Friday weekend and to shift the focus from big box stores. I highly recommend starting your planning now for Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday.

This can be a really huge opportunity to promote your business and get visible in a big way. So decide now: are you going to offer a discount on services or products? How much? When will it start and end? Are you going to promote your gift certificates? Are you going to host an Open House, if that’s possible in your area depending on COVID. Are you going to collaborate with other local businesses who are also participating in Small Business Saturday? What would that look like?

In 2019 I worked together with a group of eight or nine other local businesses, all within walking distance of my office, and we did a Small Business Saturday Passport. The idea was, visit each business and get a stamp at each place. Each business had holiday-themed treats or drinks, like hot cider or mulled wine. And each place of course promoted whatever sales they had going on that weekend.

Then at the last business, submit your passport, which was a little postcard essentially. If you visited every business and got a stamp at each one, you were entered to win a big holiday basket made up of gifts from each business. It was really fun and drove a lot of traffic through each place. Now I understand this might not be possible with COVID, of course, but you can take whatever parts of this idea might work for you and adjust them.

Whatever you’re planning for this huge weekend, make these decisions soon and then start creating social media graphics and writing up your informational emails to send to your subscribers. Especially if you’re collaborating with other small businesses, you want to reach out to them ASAP.

People are ready to spend their money on Black Friday, and now more than ever, consumers are concerned with buying local and supporting local. So you want to lean into that really heavily in your marketing. Just remind people how much you appreciate their support of your small business. I think it’s really nice to be a little vulnerable and let people know how much heart and soul you put into your business, and how much it means to you to serve people in this way. And how grateful you’ve been for their support and for them continually showing up in the past year and half. This kind of thing resonates with people. It means a lot for them to support real people in their area.  

And then fall marketing idea number four is to host a fall-themed contest on social media. Contests are awesome on social media because they drive so much extra traffic to your account, you get tons of engagement, and ultimately it helps increase your reach, putting your business in front of new people. It can generate a ton of awareness and excitement around your account.

A really popular and simple idea is a fall photo contest. A few ideas could be, publish a photo on your Instagram account that answers the following question and tag us to be entered in our photo contest:

“How do you stay healthy and well as the seasons change/weather gets colder?”

Or, “Share your best fall-themed pet photo!” Or your favorite fall-themed photo of any kind.

Personally I think the pet one is the best – the most likely to get people’s attention and get a lot of entries. People love taking pictures of their pets, and any reason to get them dressed up in a plaid sweater is a win for most people.

So you can see that it doesn’t have to have anything to do with acupuncture or wellness. The idea is to get people to post the picture on their account and give them instructions on how to tag you in the caption so you know they’ve entered. And then share the photos to your Instagram story as people submit them. Trust me, people want to see photos of other people’s pets. Sometimes I think it’s secretly what the internet was built for.

Okay, so as a prize, you could offer a small but popular item from your retail store as a prize. Gua sha tools, jade rollers all do well at my office.

Or you could have the prize be unrelated to your business but fall themed, like a free pumpkin spice latte at the local coffee shop. So then it becomes a collaboration.

I hope some of these ideas inspire you to create fresh, fun new marketing for the fall season and as we head into the holidays! Collaborating with other local businesses is always a win, if you can.

If you want the full list of 20 fall-themed marketing ideas, the link is in my bio.

And of course, don’t forget our usual announcements! The scholarship competition for Acupuncture Marketing School is coming up ASAP! We’ll be accepting applications in just about two weeks. This year, Unified Practice, the acupuncture EHR, is sponsoring an extra scholarship seat, which is SO exciting. So we’ll be awarding three free seats inside Acupuncture Marketing School in October instead of our usual two. And yes, you can enter the competition even if you’re a student. We always give one scholarship to a student. The link is in the show notes to learn more and sign up for the waitlist.

And on October 7^th at 2pm Eastern I’ll be hosting a free webinar with Unified Practice. This webinar is all about content creation and planning. We’ll be Brainstorm Your Next 90 Days of Content in One Sitting, so definitely join us! The link to register will be available later today, so as soon as it’s ready I’ll pop it in the show notes.

And lastly, we’re still hiring at my acupuncture practice here in the beautiful Finger Lakes Region of new York. I’m looking for a warm, autonomous practitioner, ideally with experience in cosmetic acupuncture.

My goal, and I don’t think I’ve shared this here on the podcast before, but my goal is to do all the marketing for this practitioner and build them from part time to full time, as quickly as possible, so I can step behind the scenes of my practice and treat patients just one day a week.

So come work with me! You know I absolutely adore marketing, and I want to fill up your schedule and let you pretty much run the show four days a week, while I focus on growing your patient base.

And then of course, I’ll report back here on the podcast with specific info on how each marketing campaign went and how to replicate it at your office. It’s going to be a beautiful system of marketing and reporting back to you, my audience.

But I really need help at the office – I can’t do it all, all by myself!

I’ll put the link to the Indeed.com job description in the show notes. It starts at 1-2 days a week but as I said, my goal is to build as fast as possible once I move behind the scenes.

That’s all for this week! Thanks so much for being here with me. I’ll talk to you soon.