Mastering the Instagram algorithm is nearly impossible, but the platform is still useful for marketing your acupuncture practice.

In this episode, I’m joined by Instagram expert Molly Cahill, who specializes in helping acupuncturists and chiropractors use Instagram in a way that feels natural, strategic, and actually brings in patients.

We’re diving into realistic Instagram strategies and what works best on the platform today. 

What you’ll learn:

  • Realistic strategies to help grow your local audience without burning out 
  • Why unpolished, natural posts are performing better than curated graphics
  • How to capitalize on Instagram as a search engine

Find it quickly:

  • 3:24 – Meet Molly Cahill
  • 9:45 – Returning To Instagram’s Casual Roots
  • 14:35 – Creating Video Content Might Be Easier Than You Think
  • 20:52 – How Instagram Functions As A Search Engine
  • 25:50 – Using Hashtags On Instagram Today 

Mentioned in this episode:

🎙️ Listen to Episode #112: Instagram Marketing Tips for Acupuncturists with Molly Cahill

💙 This episode is sponsored by Jane, a clinic management software that’s here to make practice life a little easier.

Ready to get started? Use the code ACUSCHOOL1MO for 1 free month at jane.app.

Subscribe to the Acupuncture Marketing School podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify

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Transcript:

Michelle: Welcome to the Acupuncture Marketing School podcast. I’m your host, Michelle Grassic, 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.

Hi there. Welcome back. Today I’m joined by my friend and colleague, Molly Cahill, an Instagram specialist who teaches acupuncturists and chiropractors how to use Instagram in a way that feels natural, strategic, and actually brings in patience. So if you’ve been feeling overwhelmed by Instagram or wondering what is working on the platform right now.

I hope that this episode is a breath of fresh air for you. Molly shares realistic strategies to help you grow your local audience on Instagram without burning out, and especially without spending all day creating content. So in this episode, we talk about why unpolished natural posts are performing better lately on Instagram than super curated graphics, whether Canva graphics are in or out in 2025.

What’s working better right now? Reels versus carousel posts. A quick, easy idea for recording video at your office, even if you are short on time. How to capitalize on Instagram as a search engine. And this is such an interesting question, whether Instagram can read the text on images and videos as part of its search function.

And then lastly, we talk about hashtags in 2025. Are they dead? Are they still useful? How are we supposed to use them? Where do we put them, et cetera. I hope you leave this episode with some practical advice that you can start using right away this week. So let’s dive in. Today’s episode is brought to you by Jane, a practice management software and EMR that I use at my practice to keep things running smoothly behind the scenes.

When I first started looking for a practice management tool, I wanted something that felt more like a teammate, not just more tech to figure out, and that is part of why I switched to Jane. One of the things that I love most about Jane is their support team. You get unlimited help from real humans, even on Saturdays by phone, email, or chat.

All at no extra cost, and it’s easy to learn about Jane in your own time too. There are Jane guides packed with helpful tips and updates, and their resource center’s always growing. And Jane has a wonderful community of practitioners. So even if you’re running a solo practice, you don’t have to feel like you’re doing it alone.

So if you’re curious about Jane and what it can do for your practice, head to Jane app slash demo. And if you’re ready to get started, you can use my code ACU school, one mo for a one month grace period applied to your new account. And of course I will put the link and the code in the show notes to make it easy for you.

Hi Molly, how are you? Hi, I am happy to be back with you. Thank you so much for being back. I am really excited to pick your brain about Instagram today. Why don’t you introduce yourself before we dive in.

Molly: Okay. So I, uh, Molly Cahill, I have been working with holistic health professionals for like. Gosh, six years now.

Instagram, mostly Instagram and email marketing. I am not a clinician practitioner, whatever, what’s the word most people would use?

Michelle: Um, I think acupuncturists use practitioner a lot, a clinician also. Makes sense. ’cause you you work with pretty wide variety. Definitely. Chiropractors, acupuncturists, and naturopaths.

Molly: Lots of chiropractors. Yeah. Functional medicine, naturopaths, lots of chiropractor. I, I even have some like myofascial release people. But acupuncturists, y’all. I, I have to say, I hope none of my chiros are listening to this. I’ve been, y’all are just like the nicest, most like, gentle humans. But I have to say, I have identified that y’all’s issues are different than my chiropractors.

’cause most of you just don’t wanna show up at all. You have visibility issues, all of you. What is it? Not all of you. That’s a generalization. But it’s so funny ’cause I thought I could like interchange a lot of the like chiropractors and acupuncturists, but mm-hmm. No, no. Y’all are very different. Um, ’cause a lot of, you have like a lot of like you work in offices together and all of that.

As you know, I get acupuncture personally and it has been such a game changer for me that I just am like, why the hell did more people not get care? So like just going back to the whole introducing myself, that’s why I do what I do, is because there was a hot minute where I thought, oh, maybe I’ll go back to school and be some type of practitioner.

I didn’t know what, and then I realized like, no, that’s ridiculous. You’re squeamish. You have a bachelor of arts. You would have to take a million prerequisites. You have no, you know, you’d go into debt like let’s just, I am good at marketing, I’m good at sales. I am your ideal patient. Like I said, I get acupuncture, I get chiropractic.

I just sent off a GI map yesterday like the, are you familiar with the GI Map? I’m about to do an HTMA test. I do subconscious work. Like I said, all the things I do, I work with a homeopath, like you name it, I do it, and so I am all of your ideal client. I think that makes me uniquely positioned outside of, because I can speak the language of the people who are not familiar with your modality.

So, yeah, I was in, uh, medical sales for six years before this. Uh, before that I sold ads in a newspaper and when I was in medical sales, I called on pain and addiction clinics for six years every day. And it’s a very, very, very sad state of affairs. You’re like, wow, if, if, why are more people not getting acupuncture, chiropractic, whatever, that could have potentially saved them from being now in this very, very unfortunate place of addiction, not by choice.

You know what I mean? Like these people didn’t like wake up one day and be like, man, I can’t wait to get addicted to pain meds. Yeah. I just, I’m very passionate about what I do because I’m like, I feel like I’m helping. I don’t feel like I know because I have the results to prove it. I’m getting more people under.

The care of lovely humans like you.

Michelle: I, I think you’re so right that as a marketing expert in an acupuncture patient, you are in such a unique position to know how to help acupuncturists speak to their ideal patients, right? So it’s not just that you’ve had the experience, it’s that you can articulate all the different parts of that journey and how people should.

Incorporate that into their marketing. ’cause it’s, it’s not just enough to be able to articulate it and identify the parts of the journey, but then you have to know like, whoa, how do I plug this in to a, a marketing thing? And random thought for you. ’cause I was an acupuncture admissions counselor for like four years.

You can totally become an acupuncturist with a bachelor of arts. You probably don’t have to take that many pre-reqs because some of them you can take in your first year. ’cause for the people who didn’t have a lot of sciences, you could take some like core sciences in the beginning. There’s like a basic chem class.

Et cetera anyway. You know, if you need a, if you need a

Molly: midlife crisis. Oh, good to know. Yeah, I don’t think, I think I’m good. I think I just enjoy helping y’all do the marketing piece and you know, I get to just go get treatment and it’s great.

Michelle: Well, you thoughts, lemme go back a second. So I’m enrolled in your Instagram class, the Wellness hub.

I kind of feel like Instagram class Holistic marketing hub. Yeah. Because I was just gonna say, it’s so much more than a class, right? It has all these different parts. It has some live components to pick your brain. It has all of these scripts, this huge library of scripts. And I am enjoying going through it because I have this love hate relationship with Instagram in the past couple of years, pretty much since they introduced reels where I don’t like using Instagram as much as when it was just pictures.

Because I think, and I imagine most people would agree that videos are more work. Right? And Instagram has also changed to become so much more strategic. Right. It’s a lot of people are advertising on Instagram. There are not that many people who are just there to be like, here’s pictures from my vacation that I’m publishing just for my family and friends.

Like they’re out there. But there’s a lot of advertising that’s going on. I don’t really teach it that much anymore because you know, I have some strategies that work well for my clinic, but they’re very kind of isolated, right? So I’m not teaching like this big picture Instagram strategy. I love your marketing style.

I kind of feel like we agree on a lot of stuff. I’m like, oh, okay. These are things that I would angles from which I would try to teach marketing. Um, so anyway, I, I feel like I’m loving this big picture perspective. And of course we’ll put a link to the class in the show notes for people. Um, but as I’m going through, I am realizing that there are questions you’re answering in this class that my audience would like.

Die to know, they’d be like, what? I should be doing? What? How should I approach this? That’s why this isn’t working, et cetera, et cetera. And so my number one question for you today, at least to start with is, is Instagram a search engine or not? Where is it evolving? What is happening with Instagram?

Molly: It is now more, but can I go back to Sure.

Something you said because you’re gonna love it. Listen. Okay. I just did a podcast episode on my own podcast, holistic Marketing, simplified about this very topic. So in 2025 and beyond, we’re seeing people are so over it, the perfectly curated everything. We are seeing less Canva, we’re seeing less produced and edited videos.

A lot of this is like my own theory, right? Like I’ve, this is just like me observing. I think the reason that TikTok came in and kind of. I don’t wanna say surpassed, I’m not on TikTok, but kind of, you know, just blew up is because people were treating their TikTok like very casual. It was like, here’s me in my messy living room with no makeup on and my hair in a bun.

Almost like you would do if for your guests who are familiar with like Instagram stories. Like I said, it was just like not curated. It was like, here are my thoughts, and it like took off. ’cause it was so refreshing. ’cause Instagram got to be this place where it was like perfectly, here’s my grid pattern and here’s, this is so beautiful and here’s my perfect filter and here’s my professional everything.

And that’s just not what’s quote working anymore. And I hate to call it a trend because it’s like really, it’s just going back to real life. Now even more with the emergence of AI and these weird AI videos, have you seen those where you can have your ai, have you seen

Michelle: the ones where it’s like cats in a fashion runway and they’re like wearing fashion outfits?

I, this is what Instagram is serving me, and I find it so disturbing. I’m like, oh, no, no, no. I wanna see real cats.

Molly: Yeah, no, I have not seen that, but that sounds weird. Okay, so think back to like when social media first came out and it was more, here’s my digital camera sim card photo dump. We are really seeing that come back, which is amazing.

So if you hate, there are still accounts that don’t do a lot of reels or videos. We are really seeing that now for our agency. I have a Instagram management agency where we run about 30 accounts. Majority are chiropractors. We do have one lone acupuncturist right now. Oh, we have a naturopathic doctor as well, but most, mostly chiropractors.

I get real time feedback of what’s actually working right. We do not post single images anymore, very rarely, but what we’re seeing is these really uncurated carousels, and for those in your audience who don’t know what a carousel is, you do, it’s just a multi-image post, right? It’s where you can swipe through ’em.

So I’ll give you a link after to to post in your show notes an example of what I’m talking about. These really uncurated carousels with photos from your camera roll. I mean, you can also do them with more. I’ve seen

Michelle: these, yeah. Yes. Actually, I remember seeing one in particular on your account where you were talking about how these carousels, ’cause you’re putting text on top of almost like a photo dump.

And I loved seeing the uncurated photos and the text also like teaches you something or has a point, right? It teaches, uh, shares a message.

Molly: I agree. And I just taught a full class on this inside of holistic marketing hub. So, ’cause you’ve already had a few people from your lovely, your audience is amazing.

So shout out to you what you’ve, what you’ve built. But I’ve had a couple of your people join already. A couple people were actually on the live call where I taught. Because here’s the psychology again, this is my, this is Molly’s theory, not proven. But when everything is pre-made and beautiful and bashed and highly edited, I think it sends a subconscious signal.

To your reader that says, oh, Michelle’s not online right now. This was made ages ago.

Michelle: Yeah. It feels, it feels artificial, which we don’t trust. And then the whole point of marketing is to build trust.

Molly: And if you want your audience talking back to you, the stuff that feels more uncurated and real time and raw, it’s like, oh, I’m, I’m gonna put a comment here because I feel like Michelle’s here and she’s more likely to respond to me because it’s her.

Don’t get me wrong. I, I hear people, especially more type A, they’re like, oh my God, you mean I have to post in the moment every day? No, you can still batch create, you can still plan things out ahead of time. I mean, how do you think we run an agency of th you know, there’s no way we could post at all of the moment.

Right. And we do still use, I’m not saying we do no Canva graphics or No, you know, more polished videos, but we mix it in like it’s a, it’s a healthy mix of everything. And, and so again, if, if you don’t want to, if you’re like, what is she talking about? I’ll give an example for you link in the show notes.

And then another thing I wanna point out, I actually think that videos are faster. I don’t know if it’s just because I have muscle memory and can do it so fast because Sure. If you’ve got like a longer talking to the camera video or something that needs a lot of editing, like I could see, or like maybe you have a bunch of different shots like that could be a longer video.

But if you’re just doing like a B-roll type video, and again, for people in your audience who don’t know what that means, a lot of people say, Breal, that’s incorrect. B-roll is a very old journalism term. It is not invented by Instagrammers. It just means the, the secondary footage, essentially. If you’ve ever watched the local news and like there’s a reporter who’s like reporting on a car accident or something like that, and then the reporter’s talking to the video and then it cuts to a video of panning the accident, that’s B roll.

So a B roll reel is like, maybe you’re just like doing a pan video of five to seven seconds of the inside of your clinic or. A patient like you, you pan over their abdomen showing points that you’ve done in their abdomen for something specific, or I’m thinking about you for cosmetic, you’re panning their face like, you know, don’t want Botox.

Like, try this and like, and those videos take, I mean, they take me, when I first started, I would, you know, obviously they took a little longer, but now I can pump one out in like five minutes. Because it’s just that five to seven seconds of footage with a really scroll stopping text hook on top of it, and you’re done.

I write. Um, so if, if you’re in holistic marketing hub, I have a lot of acupuncture captions and, you know, hooks already, like pre-written that you can just steal. I also have in there exercises of how to pull these hooks without, and so I can kind of give y’all like a simple exercise is like, pull your last whatever feels doable.

If three feels doable, start with three. Pull your last three new patients, what did they, they were ideal. The ones that you’re like, yes, these are the right people. What did they list on their intake form? Is there either like chief complaint or however you have the wording on your intake, why? What did they list?

And then you use that language as your hook. So it’s like, I wanna get rid of my elevens with out Botox, it’s like, then the hook on your reel is wanna get rid of your elevens without Botox. It’s like not that hard. It doesn’t have to be that deep. And then you just have a five to seven second clip of you panning over someone’s face with the needles in it that there’s your

Michelle: reel.

Since I have been inside the Holistic Marketing hub, I did put a notice out on my clinic Instagram account asking if there was anyone who wanted to do a trade for acupuncture and coming to my office to record B roll, because that is one thing I was struggling with was remembering in the moment to.

Record some B roll of a patient and then also get them to sign a waiver, right? Like trying to do everything right. That was like the most popular Instagram story I’ve ever put on my clinic account was saying, who wants to come record B roll and get a free treatment? I ended up having a local business owner that I’m acquainted with.

She came to the office, she was there for an hour. The patient signed a release and it was actually mostly footage of my associate ’cause I want her to get more patients. So her treating this person, she must have taken 40 videos, but they’re all very short, right between like three and 12 seconds. And then she also took a bunch of pictures.

She did B roll of the reception area of the building, blah, blah blah. So it’s like content for months in exchange for one treatment. So yeah. Thank you for that.

Molly: Yeah. I have a local client and I went and filmed for them four months ago, uh, for one hour. Uh, their husband and wife Chio Duo, so like wife sees more babies, pregnancy, husband sees more athletes, regular Joe’s.

They, I came in an hour where they happened to have a good variety of all of their ideal, like avatars, essentially. And we’re still using that video. So it’s not something, because that’s exactly what you said, Michelle. It’s like, well, I just, I’m very present with my patients. I don’t wanna, I’m like, you can still be present, I forget.

You don’t have to. Yeah, of course you do. You’re in the moment. You’re doing, you didn’t go to school to be a videographer, a content creator. You went to school to be an acupuncturist. So if you can schedule these things intentionally, like exactly like you said. That works great. And then my, my little extra tip for that would be like, right now you’re wearing a red shirt.

Like I would wear something a little less memorable or like if you have a sweater, like put a sweater on or you know, just something to make it look a little different. But even if you don’t, it really doesn’t matter. Nobody’s paying attention

Michelle: like an outfit change almost so that people don’t. It’s not super clear that it’s all on the same day, and that’s a good idea.

Molly: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you totally can, like, honestly, no one’s gonna be like, um, you’re wearing the same shirt,

Michelle: but oh, actually one of those people who wears the same thing to clinic almost every day. Anyway, I’m a cartoon character is what I tell people. You know how cartoon characters always wear the same outfit?

It makes them instantly recognizable. Right. I’m like, I hate picking out clothes in the morning. I’m like, my summer outfit is now going to be a nice black t-shirt and a white pair of linen pants, and this is what you will see me wearing until it is too cold for linen pants. The end. Perfect.

Molly: All right, well, I’m gonna be on a plane tomorrow.

I’ll come, I’ll come get a treatment and I’ll be in your video.

Michelle: Taking a quick break to remind you of today’s sponsor, Jane, the practice management software and EMR that I use at my practice. I wanted a tool that felt more like a teammate, and Jane really delivers, especially their unlimited support from real humans by phone, email, or chat, even on Saturdays.

Plus, their online guides are step-by-step with screenshots and little arrows telling you what to click. They make learning to use Jane really easy. So if you’re curious what Jane can do for your clinic, visit jane.app/demo. And if you’re ready to get started, use my Code Accu School, one mo for a one month Grace period on your new account.

And of course the link and the code will be in the show notes for you. All right, let’s get back to Molly’s interview.

Molly: Okay. So yes, is uh, Instagram becoming a search engine and the answer is yes. So not too long ago I was looking up, you know, those, uh, those Japanese head spas have like gotten really popular.

Have they made their way up there? Have you heard of that? So I was just curious if there was one here. And so I typed in like Japanese head spa Cincinnati. ’cause that’s where I live. Wouldn’t you know, this is, this was wild to me. This is the first time I’ve ever seen this happen. The first result that came up was.

Reel on Instagram. I’ve never seen that happen. Wow. And the text over the reel was Cincinnati’s first Japanese head spa.

Michelle: Okay. That leads me directly to my next question, which is now that, okay, now that we know Instagram is a sort of search engine, can it read text on a, an image or a video? Because historically Google’s not reading text that is embedded.

But I have no idea how that works on Instagram.

Molly: Yes, it is. It’s wild. Like even, so one thing you can play around with is you could just kind of start Googling stuff, but another thing you can do is go right to Instagram. You can do this on instagram.com desktop or from the app. And so right now I’ve got instagram.com desktop pulled up, and in the search bar over on the left, like the little magnifying glass.

I’m gonna type in cosmetic acupuncture, and I know not everybody does cosmetic. It’s just a very easy example. I’m just gonna hit enter and see what comes up. I would recommend everybody do this exercise to kind of help you understand. How it’s working. So right now, everything that’s coming up literally are graphics that say cosmetic acupuncture on them.

It will also pull, if that’s in the actual caption itself. So it it’ll, it can read graphics, it can read text over reels, it can read captions. And then with that, people always ask me, will I keep seeing that hashtags are dead? Well, they’re not. They’re just being used differently. So hashtags almost double as a keyword.

I have seen posts come up before for a keyword where the keyword wasn’t actually on the graphic. It wasn’t on the video, and it wasn’t written out in the caption, but it was hashtag So for example, like I think I, what did I do? It was like green smoothie, I think hashtag green smoothie. I was using it just for research purposes.

And Green smoothie was one of the hashtags, but it wasn’t the text over the, over the screen or the video or in the caption or whatever. So they almost kind of double as hashtags, kind of double as keywords, but where, because all of you draw a local audience, you need to be using as many local hashtags as possible.

So remind me what city you’re in. Um, so I’m in Seneca Falls, New York. Okay, so I just typed in hashtag Seneca falls into the search bar. That’s a great hashtag. I hope my clinic popped up. Let me see. Let’s see. So you’re gonna pretend

Michelle: that there’s no other businesses using that hashtag?

Molly: Well, I mean a lot, but see that’s the beauty is like a lot of people aren’t because they don’t know.

Right. And sometimes you’ll see like, here’s what’s even weirder, is if you type in the hashtag Seneca Falls. And then just versus just typing in the keyword without the hashtag symbol in front of it, you’ll see different results. It’s bananas. Interesting. Okay. Uhhuh. I don’t know why. I mean, and I had somebody ask me, well, why is my clinic not showing up?

Like, it doesn’t necessarily mean anything. It just, you know, keep going and you will. ’cause not all of our clients rank in, in the hashtag, sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. And then you can play around with it. So like, if you’re in a smaller town. You’ll probably need to put, like I said, just play around with this.

So for you, Seneca Falls is a good one. And then Seneca Falls, NY looks like it’s a good one. Um, and then just kind of make a brain dump list of all of the parts of town that you pull people from. So if there’s like another town, if you’re in a large city. So one of your lovely audience members was in LA and she asked me about hashtags for her.

Like start thinking about like, they’re not called borough boroughs in la but like, we have a, a client in Manhattan, so we will hashtag like certain boroughs or streets or sometimes almost like neighborhoods. Yes. Neighborhoods. Or like you, like, you know, you know what the, I don’t wanna say s slang is, but like, you know what people refer to your area as.

Yes. We have one client in a tiny, tiny, tiny town. And their like, local way of talking about where they’re from is not their city, it’s their county.

Michelle: Okay. Yeah.

Molly: So like, you know, don’t ask me, don’t be like, well, what should I put? I’m like, you know, you already know, you know where you live and you know what people refer to your area as like people in the DC area, they call it the DMV, you know, so like I said, you know the little local slang for where you’re located.

So just take the time to, to put that into the search bar and see what’s coming up.

Michelle: I am so glad we’re talking about this because. Hashtags was gonna be one of my questions because people are asking like, are hashtags dead? What is the head of Instagram saying about hashtags? I don’t understand. Okay, so we’re focusing on location, which is great.

Where are we putting the hashtags? At the bottom of the caption in the first comment? What’s the good place to put them? And we get, so this is two part question. So we get 30 hashtags, right? What proportion of them should be location versus symptoms?

Molly: Your hashtags go in the caption itself. If you put them as the first comment, they don’t register as a keyword for that post, and you could still show up in like a.

If someone literally is searching something very specific like hashtag Senal falls acupuncture or something, very few people are using Instagram that way. I do because we were, we were a military family, and it’s more common with hair people, like more hair. People tend to know this trick, so anytime we move to a new city, that’s how I would find my hair person was by typing in hashtag like city name hair, whatever.

People

Michelle: forget they can create their own hashtags. Like you can establish a hashtag for your clinic if you would like. But that’s sort of what those hair people are doing, right? Because they get, they’re getting very niche, very small towns, but yeah, I, I have seen that.

Molly: Yeah. If you’re, if it’s like Los Angeles hair, there’s gonna be a million posts under that, right?

Even if you’re in a small town and like no one else is using that hashtag, it’s okay because it still helps people find you. Going back to you said, what is the head of Instagram saying about hashtags? We used to see that using hashtags on posts would actually increase the reach, and we don’t see that anymore.

But that doesn’t mean that they’re not working. They’re just being used in a different way. So I like to think of your hashtags and keywords. It’s not as difficult as you’re probably making it in your head. Literally all it is is the Google map of your post for the algorithm. What is this post? Hey algorithm, here’s what this post is about.

Here’s who I want you to show it to. That’s it. So when we were writing captions for clients, we used to say things like, patients in our clinic report increased energy, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, now we would say patients in our Seneca Falls Cosmetic Acupuncture Clinic report. If you have someone who has done your website properly, they’ve probably already written your website copy this way.

Michelle: Mm, okay, gotcha.

Molly: And it’s just translating over to Instagram, so yes. So, okay, so in the caption itself is where the, the tags belong. I don’t use 30 anymore. You can, there’s no strategy to that really. I’m just finding like, to be more specific. So years ago you could use like 30 hashtags. Like let’s say your post was about cosmetic, but you could probably also get away with putting in like fertility, acupuncture, or like.

Pain relief hack, and now that doesn’t work anymore. You wanted the hashtags to be, I think about three, three types. One, your location, and you said how many, as many as you can find in your area. Like bigger cities are gonna have more, like for example, if you’re in like Raleigh, North Carolina, hashtag Raleigh, hashtag Raleigh, NC hashtag Raleigh, North Carolina, hashtag Raleigh.

Moms. All of that is gonna work. So don’t, don’t be like, oh, I gotta have this specific number. It’s like whatever you can find in your area. Right? And like I said, do that brain dump of areas of town. You pull people from this. So that’s one is your local. The second is your overarching niche. So it’d be like acupuncture, acupuncturist, maybe you could even think about something like, I don’t know, alternative tcm.

I don’t know. I’m trying to think of like. May, maybe some more alternative, like umbrella terms

Michelle: if you wanna Yeah. Like um, natural fertility things maybe that our ideal patients would be searching for if they don’t realize that acupuncture is the answer to their question. Okay. So they’re like googling or searching Instagram for different keywords.

That would lead them to us and be like, oh, that’s us.

Molly: Exactly that. Exactly that. So like, uh, natural fertility solutions or like natural acne help or whatever. That’s probably too long. But you could, like I said, go into the search bar and just play around with it. Then the third is post specific. So like I said, first location second is more like overarching niche, and then third would be post specific.

So if you’re specifically in that reel talking about cosmetic acupuncture for acne, you would just use like more acne specific hashtags.

Michelle: So I remember that. Inside the holistic marketing hub, you had created like some examples for this concept of Instagram search feature, being able to read text that’s on a reel, and I think you had, it was probably a chiropractor example, but it was like putting the text on top of a video that essentially said, like that sentence you were talking about, including in the caption, like in our Seneca Falls Cosmetic Acupuncture clinic, you know?

Did you know we have an alternative to Botox and that’s like chockfull of keywords because now it’s actually reading the text on the reel. So it’s not just for the benefit of the people who are scrolling past it as a hook, but also for that search function. ’cause it’s giving them location, it’s giving them

Molly: specialty.

Exactly. Um, we’ve even been toying around and I don’t have the results of this like quote test that we’ve been doing. Exactly what you said about reaching a broader audience of people who know they want a solution for their problem, but they don’t know that acupuncture is the solution yet. We’ve tried toying around with hooks that are like POV, you’ve been looking for, uh, migraine relief, and then, you know, you find this natural solution versus, and then you find acupuncture.

Um, we’re just kind of curious if that reach is a different. Audience.

Michelle: Oh, I like that so much. I’m gonna write that down to use it.

Molly: Because people might scroll right past if they see acupuncture. ’cause they might be like, eh, no. But maybe they’re looking for a natural solution and don’t realize that acupuncture is a natural solution.

Yeah, it’s like I said, it’s, it’s pretty crazy. Another thing we’ll do too is if we can’t fit the city and state into, or city name or whatever. Into the hook on the screen. We’ll just put it down like, you know, kind of like in the bottom left corner, just like Seneca Falls New York with like a little location emoji, you know?

Okay.

Michelle: I hope everyone feels inspired to get back into Instagram. I know from speaking to a lot of my audience that they also feel similarly about all of the changes Instagram’s been through in the past five-ish years. Although some people really have embraced reels, and I mean, their creativity is incredible, right?

And their consistency is incredible. But I think for the rest of us, um, mortals, the shift back towards like less curated, less polished, I think is refreshing as a user and as a content creator, right? Like as a business owner. Well, thank you so much for being here today. I cannot wait to pick your brain again, come at you with even more questions.

Where can everyone find you? How can I get in touch with you? Take a look at the holistic marketing hub, all the things.

Molly: So I am always in my dms on Instagram and I love chatting with you. And that is not a, uh, empty platitude. Is that the right way of saying she really does answer? Yeah. I really do enjoy chatting with you.

I’m at Molly a Cahill, and that’s C-A-H-I-L-L. So send me a dm. I’d love to chat with you. Let me know that you’ve listened to this. And a lot of your people did the last time. They’re amazing. The hub stuff can be found in the show notes or on my um, my website, which is just smell like cahill.com. So Michelle also has a discount code that is just a MS and that will save you $200 off the pay in full option or the payment plan.

And it’s super affordable. Yeah, it’s a super affordable program.

Michelle: And is your website, molly cahill.com.

Molly: Yes, Uhhuh, just molly k com. Perfect.

Michelle: So I’ll put, and it’s, it’s on there. I’ll put all those links in the show notes so everyone can find them easily. Thank you again. Yeah.

Molly: But if you have questions, just DM me.

I’m here. Perfect.