🎙️ 5 Tips to Turn More Website Visitors into Acupuncture Patients – Part 2

5 Tips to Turn More Website Visitors into Acupuncture Patients – Part 2

Hey there, welcome back!

Today we’re continuing last episode’s discussion of how to optimize your website to get more acupuncture patients. I put together a list of five things you can do to get better conversions from your website, and last week we actually talked about most of them, tips 1-4, in depth. So if you missed that, definitely go back and listen in, it’s episode number six.

The goal for today is to optimize your marketing message on your website. You want your marketing message to be purposeful. It should provide two things: clarity and direction for your audience.

By clarity I mean, when a person lands on your website, your message should let them know that they’re in the right place immediately. That you can help them specifically.

As for providing direction with your marketing message, this is basically giving people easy-to-follow instructions. Make it super clear for the website visitor: what is the next step they should take to work with you.

In this episode we’ll be talking about:

How to position your marketing message on your website so that it resonates with your ideal patient (which means a higher conversion rate)
A few marketing messages to add to your homepage
A few messages to remove from your homepage (removing clutter)

Most of what I’ll be sharing is based on Donald Miller’s phenomenal marketing book, Building a Story Brand. I definitely recommend it! It’s one of my favorite marketing books and it really changed the way I look at marketing.

Let’s make the most of your website and get you more patients!

🎙️ Tip #5: What to Say on Your Website to Turn More Visitors into Acupuncture Patients:

Show Notes:

Episode #6: Five Ways to Optimize Your Website for More Patients, Part 1
Episode #2: Target Market and Ideal Patient Avatar
Building a Story Brand book by Donald Miller

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Transcript:

Hey there, welcome back! Today we’re continuing last episode’s discussion of how to optimize your website to get more acupuncture patients.

I put together a list of five things you can do to get better conversions from your website, and last week we actually talked about most of them, tips one through four, in depth. So if you missed that, definitely go back and listen in, it’s episode number six.

We’re going to be talking about “conversions” a lot, so as a reminder, conversions on your website are our main goal here. Conversion simply means that a person visits your website and then makes an appointment (so they click the schedule now button or they call you for an appointment), or they give you their email address so that you can continue marketing to them via email. Either of those actions is considered a conversion.

Last episode we talked about how important it is to get people’s email when they visit your website, because honestly, a lot of people who visit your site might not be quite ready to make an appointment immediately. But you don’t want them to just leave. If they’re on your website, that means they’re interested and it’s a huge opportunity. You want to make sure you get their contact info, in this case their email, so that you have the opportunity to build trust with them, establish yourself as an expert, and educate them about how much they need acupuncture, through your email marketing so that they make an appointment later on.

So even if a person doesn’t make an appointment right away after visiting your website, getting their email is a really great conversion. It’s still a fantastic outcome, and we want to capitalize on that.

And again, we discussed various ways to do that in the last episode, along with other tips. And today our big focus, tip #5, is going to be how to optimize the marketing message on your website. In other words, what to say and how to say it to help improve your conversion rates for both making an appointment and people signing up for your email list.

The goal here is for your marketing message on your website to be purposeful. It should provide two things: clarity and direction for your audience.

By clarity I mean, when a person lands on your website, your message should let them know that they’re in the right place immediately. That you can help them specifically.

In order to do this, really in order to write any great marketing copy or message, you have to know your target audience and ideal patient avatar pretty well. What we’re going to do on your website is essentially reflect your ideal patient back to themselves. Because when they land on your website and see themselves or their struggle described on your site, they know they’re in the right place. Okay and we’ll talk about that in a second.

And of course, the most obvious next steps are going to be that they should either click the button to make an appointment, call this number for an appointment, or give you their email. And all of those calls-to-action should be crystal clear and pretty bold on your website.

The big picture of what I want to cover today is: how to position your marketing message on your website so that it resonates with your ideal patient (which means a higher conversion rate), a few marketing messages to add to your homepage, and a few messages to remove.

So, some good news here: your conversion rate is going to have more to do with the way your marketing message than the appearance of your website. This means you don’t necessarily need to do a big overhaul of the tech behind the scenes of your website, to do a lot of fancy updates. Visually your website doesn’t have to look brand spanking new or modern, because the words that you use are actually way more important. Because this is how you’re going to let people know that they’re in the right place and tell them what to do next.

Now, there are different ways that you can accomplish this on your website, like different formats that you can take, or different approaches to storytelling. The way I love to teach it is from Donald Miller’s marketing book, Building a Story Brand.

In the previous episode, I mentioned that I was going to share one of my favorite marketing books of all time with you, and this is it. It’s had a huge impact on how I think about structuring a website and writing a marketing message for a website. I’ll include a link to the book in the show notes.

I highly recommend it if you really want to get serious about restructuring the message on your website and making it super effective. It’s actually a pretty quick read and I think it will change the way you think about marketing overall – so powerful and ultimately, his approach makes marketing easier and more fun. So definitely check out his book.

I want to share with you the big picture and Donald Miller’s book, Building a Story Brand and his approach to websites because I’ve seen these recommendations be super successful on the websites of my acupuncturist coaching clients and other kinds of wellness entrepreneurs as well. I’m in the process of overhauling my own clinic website using this format that he lays out, so I’m very excited to share it with you.

In Building a Story Brand, the big concept is that your ideal patient is considered a character, and they are the hero of their own story. And so we want to make sure we’re reflecting them as the hero and their journey from beginning to end on our website. That’s how they know they’re in the right place and I keep saying that same phrase over and over – we want them to know that your website is the right place for them. This framework from Miller is one way to accomplish that.

Part of Miller’s recommendation is that in our effort to reflect the patient as the hero, this means we are NOT focusing our website message on our business. Because this is what most people do instinctively when we set up a website, right? Our landing page begins to reflect us and our business. We talk about things like how long we’ve been in business and what a privilege it is to serve our community and how we got started, etc. Unfortunately, when we do this on our websites, this means the patient is not centered as the hero of the story, we are, or our business is.

And so one big change we’re going to make to your website using Miller’s framework is to take a look at your website homepage and ask yourself, does the message reflect the patient or my business?

Something else I that I also see very commonly when I land on acupuncturist websites is that they have no meaningful message at all at the top of their homepage. It just says, “Welcome to Seneca Falls Acupuncture,” or something similar. So this clearly doesn’t reflect anyone, including the patient. It’s a missed opportunity to let the person know as soon as they land on your homepage that what you offer is relevant to them. So again, let me emphasize, that the whole purpose of Miller’s format is to help the potential patient see themselves in what you’re saying and the journey you’re proposing on taking them on to achieve wellness.

Okay, so let’s dive into the details. Miller’s book outlines the journey that the character takes like this: A character has a problem who meets a guide and shows them a plan to achieve success and avoid failure.

So the character is your ideal patient, and they have a problem, which is their symptoms or condition, whatever their health struggle is. And they meet a guide, that’s you, who shows them a plan, which will be acupuncture, herbs, etc., to achieve success, this is the elimination of their symptoms, improvement of their quality of life, and avoid failure. So failure would be if they don’t come see you, what happens then – probably nothing changes or their symptoms get worse.

Now I mentioned this earlier, and you’re probably thinking of this already, but to do this, the first thing you need to do is identify your character which is your ideal patient avatar and you really need to get nitty-gritty with the details about this person.

I say this all the time, that your marketing will always be more effective once you get detailed with your target market and ideal patient avatar. In episode two I dive in deep into both of these concepts and talk about why it’s important to know them on an intimate level and also how to do it. Definitely check out that episode if you need help with this, because you need your ideal patient avatar to feel like a real person to you so that you can identify their pain points and the outcome that they want after working with you. And then you can talk about it on your website and reflect your ideal patient.

So the first way to use this is to take a look at the top most part of your website, the above the fold area, and change the language so that it reflects your ideal patient’s symptoms AND the outcome they want. For example, if you want more anxiety and digestion patients, you might say, “Tired of struggling with high stress, overwhelm, bloating or digestive troubles? Take control of your health and feel centered, rested, and comfortable in your body.” And you can alter this basic format to pretty much any set of symptoms or conditions, depending on what your ideal patient avatar, your character, is dealing with and the outcome they want to achieve.

One thing you’ll notice here, and this is something that Donald Miller goes into beautifully in his book, is that we don’t want to only talk about superficial symptoms on our websites. Because that’s never the only reason that people come see us, right? They want elimination of those basic symptoms, of course, but they also want the larger freedoms that symptom elimination will provide for them.

In his book, Miller says, a character has a problem and they want to achieve success and avoid failure. “Success” is not just defined as elimination of symptoms. It’s not only, my ideal patient has digestive issues including bloating and Constipation and they want to achieve success which is no more constipation. Of course that is part of their success, elimination of symptoms, but a big part of his book is about taking it a step further and describing for people the philosophical and emotional implications of achieving success with you.

Let’s take the digestive patient example, because I have celiac which you may know already. So if you help a person regulate their bowels and reduce bloating, what is that going to give them on a grander scale? How would that change their life in a bigger way, philosophically or emotionally? They’re going to feel more comfortable in their body, maybe they’re going to feel more comfortable in their clothing, and have more confidence. Maybe they’re going to feel more cheerful from the freedom of these symptoms. I don’t know about you but if you’ve ever been constipated for a long time, you’re pretty grumpy and you don’t feel good in your clothing, etc.

If you can help this person to feel regular and feel like they’re in control and they know what to do to help themselves, aka getting acupuncture on a regular basis, then you’ve given them this confidence and this freedom. So that is definitely part of the message that you want to reflect on your website. They’re not just going to have an elimination of symptoms, you also want them to feel the freedom of not having to worry about their particular symptoms or struggle anymore.

And on your home page you want to address both sides of that.

Let’s talk about how to communicate this character journey in other sections of text on your landing page. So at the top we have this statement that reflects the symptoms and big picture outcome that our ideal patient is struggling with and wants to achieve.

In Miller’s book he outlines a number of other sections, each with a different marketing message, that he recommends adding to your homepage, and I want to highlight just one of them. I think, of course, following his format to a “T” will get you the best results, but even if you just make these few tweaks, and add this section your homepage, you’ll start to see better results from your website.

And again, I recommend removing sections that are too heavy on your business itself, because that is sort of interesting info but doesn’t necessarily motivate someone to make an appointment with the same effectiveness as reflecting them back to themselves, right? So you can move that info to your “About” page.

Now, Miller does recommend having on your homepage a single section where you introduce yourself OR your business as the guide, but that section would be written with the potential patient in mind – so it’s more about your experience (briefly) that means they can trust you as their guide, and focusing on them and their symptoms. It’s not the place where you list your professional credentials and education, etc.

Okay, so one section or marketing message that is really helpful to add to your homepage is a section that summarizes the character’s next steps in a simple 1-2-3 format.

For a lot of acupuncturists, it’s going to look like, for example: The headline for this section might say, “Ready to regulate your digestion and feel relaxed and balanced? Step 1: Make an appointment and identify the unique imbalances underlying your symptoms. Step 2: Get to the root of the problem and address these imbalances with acupuncture & herbs. Step 3: Restore your digestion and regain control of your health.”

So this sounds pretty obvious, right? Step 1, make an appointment. Step 2, get acupuncture. Step 3, feel better. That’s basically what we’re saying.

But outlining this is actually very effective. Remember that part of our marketing message needs to provide directions, right? Calls to action. This section combines calls to action along with outlining the journey that we, as the guide, are going to take the patient through. And it’s super simple for a reason – we want people to take an action. We don’t want them to get really bogged down in details that they don’t need to understand yet. The whole point is that’s stupid simple – make an appointment, get treated, start feeling better. That actually resonates with people really strongly. So you can tailor this to your ideal patient’s symptoms, of course, but using this general outline is a great place to start for most acupuncturists.

Okay, so one tricky part about designing a website and determining your message is that people don’t actually care that much how we help them.

I know, it’s a weird new way of thinking about things. But if a patient is really struggling with symptoms, they probably don’t care if it’s acupuncture, or chiropractic, or homeopathy or yoga or nutrition that makes them feel better. As long as you make them feel better, you can do that with whatever methods you’ve got in your toolbox. They care about their symptoms and their outcome. Again, this is what we’ve been talking about this entire episode – focus on what the patient is experiencing and where they want to end up.

So this is hard for a lot of acupuncturists because we’re so passionate about acupuncture itself, naturally. But you actually don’t have to give a history of acupuncture on the landing page, or even talk about it that much. Now, don’t get me wrong, I want to be so respectful of how ancient Chinese medicine is and the fact that it’s a comprehensive system of medicine, and it’s very powerful. This is typically the kind of thing I see mentioned on acupuncturist websites if people chose to talk about acupuncture on the homepage. This is also important information, of course, this is why we all do is medicine.

But unfortunately a lot of this info may not feel relevant to your ideal patient avatar right away. First they need to see their symptoms reflected back to them and have a potential outcome described to them and then later on you can talk about, the way I’m going to help you is with acupuncture and here’s a little bit more about it. But it’s almost like you need to hook them first before you dive in deep with a detailed description of TCM on the homepage. Instead, keep the patient at the center of your message on your homepage and then later on you’ll have the opportunity to tell them more detail about how you’re actually going to help them.

I hope that this episode is really helpful! Definitely check out Donald Miller’s book, the link is in my bio. I hope you love it as much as I do! Can’t wait to talk with you in the next episode!

Acupuncture Marketing