It’s time to talk about a really common misconception about marketing: the worry that you’re annoying people with your marketing.

I’ve been teaching marketing to other acupuncturists for almost seven years, and in that time I’ve taught almost 2500 acupuncturists, and I’ve discovered that there’s one thing that unites almost all of us – that we’re often afraid to annoy people by being visible with our marketing, which is holding us back from marketing to the best of our ability.

And this is really a shame, to let this fear prevent you from marketing and getting out there in your community. But it’s a really pervasive mindset, so let’s talk about it!

In this episode we cover:

– Why you’re not actually annoying people with your marketing
– Why you need to keep showing up consistently and repeating your marketing message, and how you are not “too much”
– Why marketing requires repetition to be effective
– And more!

Tune in for a fresh perspective on marketing this week.

Acupuncture is such a powerful medicine that has ability to change lives. It’s time to get out there and share you message, so you can impact more people in your community!

Show Notes:

– ADA Website Compliance for Acupuncturists online course (1 PDA credit pending!)
– Episode #3: Use These Three Rules to Make Your Marketing More Effective
– Website of my business coach, Sarah Morgan: xosarah.com and her 12-week coaching program (which I have now been in for a year, because it’s that good!)

Love the podcast? Help other acupuncturists find the podcast by leaving a review! Leave a review here.

  Episode #9: You Are Not Annoying People with Your Marketing:

Transcript:

Hey there, welcome back. Today I want to talk about a really common misconception about marketing, which is the worry that you’re annoying people with your marketing. I’ve been teaching marketing to other acupuncturists for almost seven years, and in that time I’ve taught almost 2500 acupuncturists, and I’ve discovered that there’s one thing that unites almost all of us – and that is, we’re often afraid to annoy people by being visible with our marketing, and that is holding us back from marketing to the best of our ability.

And this is really a shame, to let this fear prevent you from marketing and getting out there in your community. But it’s a really pervasive mindset, so we need to talk about it.

Before we start, I want to let you know that the new online course I mentioned last episode, ADA Website Compliance for Acupuncturists, is now published! Yay, super exciting. My friend, acupuncturist and website developer Laura Rose Gage, teaches this course. She’s been building websites for wellness practitioners for nine years so this is really her area of expertise. She walks you through how to know if your website is compliant, and what changes to make if it isn’t. She’s a really great teacher and she takes a lot of the fear and worry out of ADA compliance for your website. The link is in the show notes if you want to take a look.

Okay, back to our topic today. Here’s what I see, all too often, with my marketing students. They’re worried that if they show up consistently in their marketing, if they have a bold message to share, if they share too much information, or share their message too often, that it will be perceived as “too much” and they’ll be annoying people. Can you relate to any of that? Do you worry that if you’re too visible, too often, people will start to get tired of you? Or that you’ll start to get negative comments or feedback? If you can relate to ANY of this, then you’re not alone. Like I said earlier, lots of people worry about this.

First I want to repeat that you are NOT annoying people with your marketing. It’s just incredibly unlikely. And I want to add that it’s also very unlikely you’ll get negative feedback if you start showing up more often. Okay, and we’ll talk more about both of these ideas later on in this episode.

Here’s the thing. In marketing, it’s essential to be consistent. This means, whatever marketing avenue you choose, whether it’s email newsletters or Instagram, you need to keep showing up regularly. Why? Part of this is so that your audience learns to trust you. They know you’re going to be in their inbox or on their Instagram feed on a regular basis, teaching them something or making them think or sharing something they can relate to. And over time, they get to know, like, and trust you.

The other reason consistency is essential is the idea that marketing requires repetition of your message to really be effective. This is one of the very first things I teach all of my marketing students, whether it’s inside Acupuncture Marketing School or on a webinar or in a practice management class. It’s a marketing truth that I’ve experienced over and again, that my students have experienced over and over again. People need to hear the same things repeated before they’re ready to purchase. I talk about this in more detail in episode three, so definitely listen to that if you’re unfamiliar with this, but I’ll give you the most important points here.

There’s a concept in marketing called touch points. You’ve probably heard of this before. It applies across all industries. A touchpoint is any reminder about you, your business, or acupuncture. A touch point could be seeing your Facebook post, or your Google ad, or seeing your logo on the town’s little league jerseys. Any reminder.

It’s generally accepted marketing wisdom that most consumers require 5 to 7 touchpoints before they’re ready to purchase something – to make an investment of their time or money. And basically what you’re doing with each touch point is building trust. If you think about it, 5 to 7 touchpoints is kind of a lot, right? And this is a generally accepted average – I’ve seen some marketers say it can take up to 12 touch points. It can depend on different factors.

But the point here is that you need to keep showing up, sharing your message over and over again, in order to get in enough touch points so that a person trusts you enough to make an appointment. And I usually joke with my marketing students that building trust for acupuncture is often a little more work than, say, a pizzeria trying to build enough trust to sell a pizza to a new customer. Because most people know, like and trust pizza already. They’re familiar with it. They don’t need a lot of education on the backend to feel ready to buy a pizza.

Whereas with acupuncture, we’re asking people to trust us enough to put needles in them, using a system of medicine that they may not be familiar with, and we’re asking them to share their sometimes personal health information with us.

So we might have a little more work to do on the trust-building end, right? That makes sense. And of course this depends on where you live and other factors. In some areas, people are much more familiar with acupuncture and may have had it before and trust it already – that’s great. In that case, your marketing is more about building trust in YOU as the practitioner, so they choose to come see you instead of someone else nearby, right? As opposed to doing a lot of pre-patient education about acupuncture, to build trust in acupuncture itself.

My point here is this: that repetition, showing up regularly, and sharing the same set of messages over and over, is not just normal but necessary for marketing to be effective. So if you’re afraid to show up regularly because you’re worried about annoying people, you’re missing out on the true power of marketing to build up trust over time.

Here’s something to think about: my marketing coach, Sarah Morgan from xosarah.com, said to our mastermind group once that if you feel like you’re repeating yourself too much in your marketing, then you’re probably doing it just right.

I have found this to be true over and over again. It may feel to YOU like you say the same five or six things over and over. If you’re a fertility specialist, maybe you feel like you’re constantly sharing posts and stories on Instagram about how many treatments are necessary, and why, and about dietary recommendations for fertility, or other advice. To you, it feels like you’re just repeating yourself.

But keep in mind that not all of your followers heard you say it the first time or the second or even the third. And some of those followers are brand new and have never heard you teach this valuable information at all. And regardless of whether they’re a new or old follower, they probably need to hear you teach it a few times for it to settle into their mind, for it to build trust, or for them to really digest and process the information.

So you’ve got to keep sharing and teaching and showing up. Try to remember that piece of wisdom from Sarah, that if you feel like you’re saying the same thing over and over in your marketing, you’re probably doing it just right. It’s not too much, and you’re not annoying people.

And the other side of this is that, truly, you are not annoying people when you get visible for your clinic. I also tell my marketing students this all the time, that I don’t think I’ve ever seen an advertisement or piece of marketing from an acupuncturist that felt annoying. That felt smarmy or pushy or made me cringe. Is smarmy a word, by the way? I really hope it is.

We imagine that when we show up to teach something on Instagram, that we’re showing up in the same way as, for example, a used car salesman. So, I want you to think of your LEAST favorite local commercial on TV. For me, in this area, and for a lot of people in this area, it’s a car salesman called Fuccillo who used to just stand there and yell about his sales and how they’re were HUUUUUUUGE. If you’re from the Western or Central NY area, you know what I’m talking about. And his commercials have really toned it down a bit in the past decade, to be honest. But for a long time his commercials were just irritating to the max. Like, it was the commercial that people loved to hate, you know what I mean? Think of that commercial in your own town.

Now, I can pretty much guarantee that you’re not showing up that way in your own marketing. Like I said, I think it’s very hard to find an acupuncturist who has a created a pushy or irritating advertisement. But somehow we all imagine that no matter what kind of marketing we create, it’s going to be received by our audience the same way as those terrible commercials.

So I encourage you to take a deep breath and remember that you’re in control of your marketing message and how it comes across. You do not have to do any marketing that feels gross to you. In fact, I don’t recommend it, because how can you expect to be consistent with something that makes you feel awful? That doesn’t feel aligned to you? Instead, focus on marketing that allows you to share your message in a way that feels genuine. Think about it as teaching or sharing information, or building real relationships in your community.

Good marketing is about building trust and teaching people how much acupuncture can help them. It’s about showing up consistently so your audience has a change to get to know you, even just a little, so they can decide, do I trust this person enough to make an appointment? And there are a million different ways that you can do this, and show up regularly, and not do it in a way that feels gross to you OR your audience.

And one last thing I want to mention: We live in an age when people are bombarded by marketing and advertisements. We’re used to it. Especially in the digital world, you can experience a dozen advertisements by just visiting one or two pages on a website. So when most of us see an ad that doesn’t apply to us, if it’s not something we’re interested in or need right now, we just ignore it. We let it flow out of our consciousness. It doesn’t cause anger or irritability. But this is what so many of us are imagining happens when a consumer sees our marketing message! We imagine this worst case scenario of anger or irritation that just doesn’t occur.

Let’s take an example. If I see a Zappos ad, for instance, while I’m trying to read an article online, I don’t get annoyed. I probably think to myself, “Oooh, there are those cute shoes again. Darn. I want them. I can’t have them right now.” Or, “I like them but have no intention of buying them.” I don’t think to myself, “Disgusting, another Zappos ad. These shoe ads are really ruining my day.”

And honestly, that’s how most consumers think about advertising. The regular kind of advertising, not the gross pushy kind like we were talking about earlier. Most people see an ad, and either file the info away for later when they might need it, or they acknowledge it (which is also a touch point!) and let it pass out of their mind. They don’t get enraged and think to themselves, “Gosh, I wish that acupuncturist would just stop talking forever.” If they felt that way, they would never follow you on social media or sign up for your email newsletter in the first place. Okay, but they don’t feel that way.

Here’s another angle to this: that if someone is following you or signed up for your email list, then they WANT to hear from you. They probably wish you’d show up and teach them things that they can use to improve their health and wellness, more often! They opted in for a reason, and that means they’re ASKING to hear your message!

My big message here is that, one: you are not irritating people by showing up consistently and sharing about acupuncture or your business. People are not annoyed by marketing as easily as you think they are. And two, you must show up consistently to get really good results from your marketing, so that people ARE seeing your message over and over. To give them time to digest and process the info you’re sharing. This is normal and necessary in marketing. So don’t let the fear of annoying your audience hold you back anymore.

I hope this helps a ton with the way that you think about marketing so you feel more confident getting visible in your community. Remember, you have so much knowledge about this amazing medicine to share with people. It could really change their lives. So it’s time to get out there are share it!

All right, thanks for hanging out with me today, I love spending time here with you. Don’t forget to check out the new ADA Website Compliance for Acupuncturists course, the link is in the show notes. Bye for now!