Welcome back! This week we’re talking about mindset and how it impacts our marketing.

Why do we get in our own way with our marketing?

I’ve seen it over and over again. I bet that right now, you know what to do for your marketing. You have ideas that would work!

…If only you put them into practice.

So why do we do that – hold back from taking actions we know would help grow our businesses?

Today we’re focusing on three specific patterns of thinking that allow us to get in our own way, and some new ways of thinking about ourselves and about marketing to help challenge those thought patterns.

I want to help you get visible in your community so you can help more people with acupuncture. Let’s move through some common limiting beliefs so you have confidence in your marketing and can reach more patients!

🎙️ Episode 16: How to Get Out of Your Own Way with Your Marketing:

Show Notes:

Transcript:

Hello, hello and welcome back. This week we’re talking about mindset and how it impacts your marketing. Why do we get in our own way with our marketing? I’ve seen it over and over again. I bet that right now, you know what to do for your marketing. You have ideas that would work, if only you put them into practice.

So why do we do that – hold back from taking actions we know would help grow our businesses? Today we’re focusing on three specific patterns of thinking that allow us to get in our own way, and new perspectives, new ways of thinking about ourselves and about marketing, to help challenge those thought patterns.

So if you feel really resistant to putting yourself out there with your marketing, or to truly be consistent in your marketing, then this episode is for you. I find that, for many of my students inside Acupuncture Marketing School, these thought patterns prevent them from marketing altogether, from getting started, or from marketing with consistency and confidence.

This is important because, and I say this almost every episode but I’ll say it again, just in case you’re new here, consistency and repetition are completely necessary for successful marketing. You have to keep showing up and sharing your message with your audience or your community so that they eventually trust you enough to make an appointment. I want you to approach marketing with confidence and enthusiasm so you feel good about showing up often and being visible. This is much more effective than sporadic or halfhearted marketing. We’re talking about this concept today because I want you to have a wider reach in your community, to share this amazing medicine with more people, and have a bigger impact where you live.

And you can’t do that if you are hiding behind excuses for why can’t get started marketing or why you can’t commit to being consistent with your marketing. Having an awareness of your own thought processes around marketing is the first step to changing your thoughts.

And of course, please know in advance that this episode comes with zero judgment. If you can relate to any of the mindsets we’ll be talking about today, that is normal. You’re in very good company, because we have all been there, myself included. This episode is not meant to make you feel like you’re doing something wrong. We’re just bringing awareness so we can change it. And this concept of mindset blocks that prevent us from diving headfirst into marketing with confidence is so important and common that it’s Chapter 2 in Acupuncture Marketing School, which is my foundations marketing course for acupuncturist.

In Acupuncture Marketing School, first I teach the basics of marketing in chapter one, and before we get into the nitty gritty step-by-step of various digital different marketing approaches, we have to talk about mindset. In Acupuncture Marketing School, we actually talk about eight different marketing mindset that might be holding you back from truly committing to marketing, and doing it in a strong way. Today we’re only touching on three, but, as I said, this is a common block for a lot of wellness practitioners so in the course we dig in deep.

Okay, let’s get into it. Number one is feeling not good enough or not expert enough. This is a stumbling block for a lot of people in terms of marketing.

And there’s two sides to this coin. One is that sometimes practitioners feel that they lack the clinical experience or expertise to justify putting themselves out there in a big way in their community. They avoid marketing that makes them conspicuous or they have a hard time being visible consistently with marketing. Because once they once they start marketing, it’s probably going to work, and they’re going to have more patients, and then they’re going have to back up the words they said in their marketing,  that acupuncture can help and they are the acupuncturist to choose.

And that can be scary. There are a lot of acupuncturists who experience this, especially newer practitioners, but I have seen it in established practitioners as well. A fear of saying in their marketing, come see me for xyz, I can help, because they feel “less expert” than people who have been in practice longer. So you might experience this as saying to yourself, “Why should I imply that I’m so good at this when the practitioner down the road has been in practice 10 years longer than me. Who do I think I am?” or “Who will other people think that I am,” like will they think I’m overconfident” if I suddenly start getting visible in my community and showing up consistently saying, “I can help you.” Let me tell you, NOBODY is thinking that. Instead they’ll just be impressed with your confidence and probably wish they had the same. No one is thinking that.

Let’s address this one first, not feeling good enough and feeling like you lacking the experience or expertise to get visible in your community. First I want to say, I really doubt this is true. So many acupuncturists who bring this up to me are incredible practitioners. They have outstanding clinical and diagnostic skills, their bedside manner is perfection, they connect with their patients and get great results. But they always feel like they’re lacking something. If they just take one more class or learn one more skill, THEN they’ll be ready. Then they’ll feel confident in putting themselves out there.

It’s just not true. You are enough right now. More than just “enough.” To your patients and your community, you are an expert. You might not consider yourself an expert because you’re thinking of practitioners who have been studying this medicine for 40 years. Okay, fair enough. You’re not at that level. It’s something to aspire to. But right now, you are expert enough to help SO MANY patients.

And as an aside, I’m never going to ask you to say in your marketing, I’m an expert in xyz, so you should come see me. There are a million ways to imply your expertise, to share the depth of your experience, without saying those words. So don’t worry about that.

What does that mean, expert enough? It means that you only have to be a few steps ahead of someone else to be able to teach them something really valuable. And with your acupuncture degree, you are honestly more than just a few steps ahead in terms of your understanding of health and wellness.

Think about it this way. As far as your community is concerned, you’re an expert in acupuncture and Chinese medicine, because you have a master’s degree or doctorate. You have knowledge that they want to learn to so they can improve their lives. Remember that what is basic to you and me in terms of TCM theory is often new and groundbreaking for patients. Most of our patients, at least where I live, have not been taught to think about their body, the foods they eat, or how they live their life, in a TCM context. When I explain to patients about why they might want to avoid drinking smoothies with ice in the morning, the concepts of the digestive fire and Chinese dietary therapy blow their mind, because it’s brand new and yet it aligns with their experience. They are thirsty for this information, this knowledge that we hold that we take for granted. Again, a concept may seem simple to us because it’s so foundational to what we’ve learned and have been practicing in all these years. Whereas for patients, it’s a whole new paradigm of thinking about how their body works and paying attention to their body.

Wherever you are at right now with your knowledge and experience, even if you JUST graduated, there are people out there who are in this perfect place in their lives for what you have to offer and teach. Basically that’s your target audience right now, right? There they are. Even if you feel like, “I’m not expert enough, I need to get better, I need to practice more, I need to understand more nuance” despite that feeling, wherever you are in your practice, knowledge and experience right now, there are people who you can help in this moment. They need you.

And related to this, I have some kind of bad news. A lot of us imagine this imaginary point in the future, where we have total confidence in our clinical skills, in our ability to help people and answer their questions, etc. We’ll be this perfectly formed practitioner with the answers. And we imagine that when we arrive at that place, we will finally show up in a way where we know exactly what we’re doing and have all this confidence to be visible.

The bad news is, that we will probably never arrive at that point.

One of the best parts of being in this profession, one of the many privileges of learning Chinese medicine, is that it is a profession where you are always learning. And that never ends. And as far as I know, that’s a significant reason that most of my classmates, colleagues, and marketing students chose this profession. It’s endlessly fascinating and you’ll never be done learning.

Right, so that’s super, but that also means that you might never arrive at this magical imaginary place where you feel like you know everything, you have all the confidence, you can tell someone without a doubt, “Yes, I can help you with this or no I cannot.”

So that means that you’ve just got to get started now. You are expert enough right now. The place that you’re in, with your current experience, is perfect for certain people in your community who are ready for you. And as you continue to learn and grow and get go deeper into the nuance of Chinese medicine and your clinical skills and experience, then there will be a new subset of your community that will be in the perfect place for you to help. And you will find them.

I don’t know, maybe you’ve experienced that already, I know that I certainly have. Your practice and your patients evolve along with you. And I’ve talked to some colleagues have had the same experience. But the idea here is that you can’t let this feeling of not being expert enough as a clinician prevent you from putting yourself out there because wherever you are at, there are people in your community who are perfectly poised with the knowledge that you have. Okay, it’s time to get out there.

The other angle for not feeling good enough is concerning marketing skills. Many of my students will say, “I know what to do in terms of marketing. I can list 10 marketing ideas right now that would boost my practice, but I feel like I don’t know how to do any of them well enough to get started, or to actually hit Publish and release it into the world.” So many acupuncturists are afraid to get started with their marketing because they’re afraid they’re going to do it wrong. They’re worried they’re going to waste their time, or that they’re going to look foolish if they publish some marketing and it turns out to be “not right.” “Not right” in air quotes because I don’t know if that’s really possible.

This can also be rooted in perfectionism. A fear of putting anything out into the world until it is absolutely perfect. Tweaking and tweaking things a million times, spending SO much time on something, only to NEVER hit publish. Fellow perfectionists, I am giving you the side eye right now. I feel you. But this mindset is really a killer, because – more bad news! – there is no such thing as perfection in marketing.

The biggest shift you can make if this is your struggle is to start thinking about your marketing as a giant experiment.

Really great marketing is about experimentation at its core. It’s about collecting data on the marketing campaigns that you put out in the world, and then course-correcting, based on that data. This means it’s constant trial and error. And it’s cyclical, right? It’s marketing campaign, data, response with a new adjusted marketing campaign, data collection, response. Adjusting and course correcting, on and on and on forever. And of course, you will improve with time. I’m not saying you won’t get better at marketing, of course you will. But it’s the ideal of perfection that will make you crazy because it’s not possible.

In the same way that we practice acupuncture, we practice marketing. There really is no way to become an expert in marketing without diving in and getting through the messy middle. That is, you don’t become an expert in marketing based solely on theory. By reading all the blog posts and listening to this podcast, you can learn the steps you need to take, but you become an expert in marketing through the practice of marketing. By putting yourself out there, by publishing something online, or by going to the networking meeting. Release your marketing into the wild, see how it lands with your ideal audience, collecting that data, and then course-correct.

Another really important part of thinking about marketing as experimentation is remembering that the data you collect from your marketing campaigns is not personal. Let’s say you publish an Instagram post and you put a ton of work into it, and you get crickets. This actually happened to me recently, a couple of times last week. It’s so frustrating, and I feel you. I published a series of posts advertising a sale I was having at my office. I spent time creating what I thought were really beautiful sales images, but they just got really low engagement. Se le vie!

It doesn’t mean that I’m not a good marketer. Overall, the sales campaign on Instagram went well and we got new patients. But those posts really just fell flat. So it doesn’t mean, I am terrible at this or that I don’t understand my target market. It doesn’t mean that I’m not a good person. It doesn’t mean that I’m going to fail in business, and it doesn’t mean that I wasn’t meant to be an entrepreneur.

Tell me that you haven’t had these thoughts when you publish something online and then hear crickets. I know from working with so many acupuncturists on their marketing that these kinds of catastrophizing thoughts are really common. We launch one marketing campaign that doesn’t go well, and instantly we aren’t meant to be entrepreneurs, or we decide that marketing is stupid and doesn’t actually work, or we decide it will never ever work for us. We’ve all been there, which is great because it means we’re not alone. But that doesn’t make it true!

None of that is true. A failed marketing campaign is simply data. Not personal. It’s feedback so you can say, in the future, when I have a similar promotion, I will not include this specific style of Instagram post. I’m going to create something different, or I’ll do video or I’ll survey my audience and ask them what kind of content they want to see. Do you see what I mean?

If you feel like you are not expert enough at marketing, remember that you can’t become an expert without the practice, without that messy middle. And you will never probably arrive at that magical point where you feel like, I am the perfect marketer everything I create gets the exact response that I wanted, every single time. Because just like acupuncture is a practice, marketing can be a lifelong learning practice as well. Okay, will you get better? Absolutely. Will you arrive at a place where you have nothing left to learn? No.

That should take a lot of pressure off of you. Hopefully it liberates you and makes you feel like, “Okay, I have ideas, I’m just going to launch them.” And see how they do.

The last mindset I want to talk to you about that allows us to get in our own way, is when we feel so overwhelmed by our marketing task list, or by all of the options out there for marketing, that we do nothing. We never get started, we don’t try things, we just feel crushed by this obligation to do every single marketing thing that we learn about. And then we take no action.

We know for sure that the world of digital marketing can be very overwhelming because there are a lot of choices and the paralysis of choice is real.

If you do any sort of research on digital marketing, you will get a lot of messages from marketers that you should be trying to do everything. You should have four or five different social media accounts, make sure you’re visible on every platform, you should have a YouTube channel, or maybe a podcast, you should send out weekly newsletters, go to all the networking meetings, you should update your website or totally rebrand. You should do a giveaway or host an open house.

It’s just never ending, right? I feel exhausted just by listing all of those things.

If this one resonates with you, having so many marketing tasks on your list that you’re paralyzed, then I want you to scrap the list, and just choose two marketing avenues that you are willing to commit to. I recommend picking one social media platform and then one other kind of marketing. It could be networking in person, for example. Maybe you enjoy it and you decide you’re going to go all in, you’re going to go to every networking function in your community, every month. Or maybe it’s email newsletters and you commit to sending two every month.

But whatever it is, you’re only going to pick two, so that you have the mental space take action. And then you can really dig in and improve your marketing skills in those two areas. To spend time on them and commit to them so you can make strides in your knowledge and your confidence over time. In just two areas.

And if you have other lingering things on your list that you feel like genuinely need to get done, assess whether you need to be the one to do them. For example, maybe you feel like your website really does need to be redone, or that you actually need new branding.

If you have lingering stuff that has been on your to-do list for a long time, it’s time to acknowledge that you’re probably not going to do it, because you haven’t done it yet, right? And that maybe the reason is, you’re not the best person to do it. You’re avoiding it because it will take you a long time and be a pain. But someone else is probably an expert in that area, and could do it faster and enjoy the process. So in that case, it’s time to outsource.

Hire a web developer, hire a virtual assistant or a social media manager. For example, maybe you choose to commit to Instagram and writing an email newsletter, but you also feel like Pinterest is so important because it’s its own search engine. So you decide to hire a virtual assistant who specializes in Pinterest management.

You can find these assistants on websites like Upwork.com or Fiverr.com, F-I-V-E-R-R.com.

I’ve had a lot of updates to my website done through professionals on Fiverr, for example. And I found my first VA, virtual assistant, on Upwork.

All right, I hope today’s episode was helpful. Whatever is holding you back from marketing, please dig into it, so that you can move through it, because on the other side of our fear is opportunity. On the other side of this feeling of not being good enough, is the ability to show up with confidence, and to reach more people in your community with this incredible medicine. We can all change more lives if we work through some of these mindsets and learn to get out of our own way.

As always you can join me on Instagram @michellegrasek. Feel free to shoot me a message if you want to talk more in depth about some of the things that you feel like are holding you back from marketing. I want to help you have the confidence to get out there so that you can be visible in your community.

I will link to Acupuncture Marketing School in the show notes, you can take a look. If you feel like you need more in-depth mindset work, chapter two digs in deep.

I will also link to Fiverr.com and Upwork.com for you in the show notes.

Thanks for hanging out with me to talk about marketing, as always, I appreciate you. Talk to you soon.