3 Critical Success Factors To Grow Your Acupuncture Practice Now

Hi folks. Welcome. Thank you for joining me here today. And thank you again for the American Acupuncture Council for inviting me back for yet another Wednesday training for you guys. I really enjoy doing this and showing up and sharing this information with you, especially since many of us have not had much marketing and business tools to help us build a solid business.

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Disclaimer: The following is an actual transcript. We do our best to make sure the transcript is as accurate as possible, however, it may contain spelling or grammatical errors.  Due to the unique language of acupuncture, there will be errors, so we suggest you watch the video while reading the transcript.

So before I go further, I want to ask you a couple of questions and you can put your answers to the questions below. Where are you currently in your practice? Where are you going in your practice and what kind of roadblocks are you facing in your practice? Currently, I’ll check back at the comments towards the end. I’ll respond back to you, but I just kind of want to get a sense of where everyone is and what your concerns are. So today we’re going to talk about three success factors to grow your acupuncture practice now next month and beyond.

So the thing is, is that you, as an acupuncturist have so much expertise and the world absolutely needs you right now, probably more than ever before people are suffering and they’re looking for what you have to offer, but most likely people don’t actually know that you can help them with all of these amazing things that you can help them with. So I’m sure you would agree with me that acupuncture and most patients understand that you could help them with pain, right? This is the most widely known use of the medicine to help people alleviate pain. But what about everything else that we could do on noon, support, allergies, support, improving sleep, helping families make, you know, make babies up, reducing stress, alleviate all of those things that people are looking for, but maybe they don’t know that you could do that. So most people are looking for these kinds of solutions, but they don’t even know that you could be the go-to practitioner to help them with what you can.

So how do you make more people aware of what you do and how you, what you could help with? And part of this challenge is that you need to put on your business person cap and get out there and do the work of marketing your practice, especially in these times, especially in slow times, because if you’re not out there marketing and staying in top of mind, awareness with your patients and your prospects, someone else is. So it’s really important for you to figure out how to remain and maintain and get out there and be in top of mind awareness. When people think about allergies, they think about you. When they think about immunity, they think of B, they think about you and what we’ve been sharing all of this time, all of these weeks for the AAC are the different tools and tips and strategies to give you options and marketing strategies to grow and build your practice.

Um, but before we go any further, um, before we, you know, get into marketing, you need to know that your practice, your business needs to be rooted in a solid foundation of proper messaging, business modeling, service offerings, pricing, fees, and systems. And when you have all these things in place, you’ll stand out from the friendly neighborhood competition and position yourself as the go-to acupuncturist in your community. And that’s my assumption of what you want is to be the go-to practitioner in your community. So when people think about all of these things that, um, that are going wrong with them, you come to top of mind. So today what I want to do, I want to dip into some of the waters and talk about the three success factors to help you create a solid foundation to grow your practice. And these successful, these three success factors are clarity, focus and decisions.

Okay? And these are really important pieces to help support all aspects of your marketing, all aspects of your patient communication, all aspects of you being the business entrepreneurial acupuncturist that you are. I know you did not go to school to become a business person or an entrepreneur, but you are since you’re in private practice and you own a business and you are a business person, so you’ve got to embrace these ideas. Okay. And that’s what we’re here to share with you today. So clarity, okay. Clarity is getting really clear okay. On you, your practice and how you stand out, what makes you and your practice different? Okay. So you need to ask yourself these two questions. Who are you and what do you offer? And with that, what kind of transfer w can you cause to happen with a person’s health in their life, in, in the change that you are able to offer them in what you offer in your practice and why is what you offer different smarter, better than any competing clinic.

Okay. So that the first part of really identifying who you are is really understanding, getting clear on what makes you different. Okay. Now I hope that many of you have an idea of like, what makes you different from the practitioner down the street? If not, you need to get really clear on that, that this, this, this clarity portion really will allow you to identify this little piece of marketing wisdom, this little piece of practice knowledge that allows you to differentiate yourself from the next person down the street. So my question to you would be this, if you were to think about the acupuncturist down the street or the chiropractor that has an acupuncturist on board or the chiropractor that does acupuncture, how are you different? Do you offer a different specialty? Do you offer a pain-free technique? Do you offer pain-free acupuncture? Is your clinic beautifully inviting and Zen, like, and people just walk in there and they melt because of the atmosphere and the function way.

What is it that makes you and your practice different? Okay. So who are you and what do you offer as far as transformation so that you can cause in people’s lives and in their health. Okay. That is the first part of, one of these success factors is wrapping your head around this idea. The next idea is focused, right? The idea is to get laser focused on exactly who you serve and what problems you solve. Okay. I know many of us were trained to be general practitioners, and that’s amazing because we could help with so many different conditions. And that’s, what’s so beautiful about this medicine, but you’ve got to figure out who you serve and what’s unique about you and also what, what will resonate with your clients. Okay. So with this, you’ve got to really, you know, like in, come up with the idea of getting clear on the type of person that you want to work with by getting into the mind of your perfect client and find out what resonates with them.

So for instance, if you are a fertility clinic, what would resonate with those clients that you to attract, get it? How can you get into their mind to understand what they need, what their pain points are? What, what, what, what kind of transformation they are looking for? So you can offer that and that could be unique to what you offer in your clinic. Okay. So getting focused is really coming up with who do you serve? And I know that you want to serve everybody, but here’s the same. If you serve everybody is just like taking a big net and casting out over the waters of the population and hoping that you’re going to pull everyone in. But you know, you might pull a few people in, but what you want to do is you want to get really clear, really laser focus on the specific type of person you want to work with.

Okay. And, um, and then when you do that, you can, you can focus your marketing message. You can focus your communications, you can focus your website, you can focus your branding and all of that towards that. What’s unique about you and what resonates with your clients. And the other part of getting focused is what problems do you solve? Okay. And the key to understanding what problems you solve is to understand what your patients are thinking. Right? So they’re thinking w I F T okay. So they want to know what’s in it for them or for me as a patient. Okay. And they want to know what’s in it for them. Like, like, like if they come see you, what are they getting out of it? What kind of transformation is going to be happening? So part of your, um, expertise as a business entrepreneurial acupuncturist is really getting clear around the problems that you self.

Okay. And really being able to tell someone that in 30 seconds or less, like if you were trapped in the elevator, how can you communicate who you serve? What you, you know, uh, what problems you solve and who you are and what you offer, right? Those are the three things that are super important for you to begin this process of getting really clear on growing, you know, creating the solid foundation for your practice. Let’s say, so you have clarity, you have focused. And now the next thing to really come up with is decisions, right? And meaning what marketing tools do you use, where do you find your best prospects and your new patients, and how do you build your following? Okay. These are decisions that you’re going to be making. If you’re not making them already, or if you don’t make them, when are you going to make them, right?

When are you going to start embracing this idea that you’ve got to market your practice? You need to have a deep understanding of what your patients want. You need to have an understanding of what they need and what they value. Okay. You also need to develop content and communication strategies that address the things that keep them up at night. So for instance, let’s handle, let’s go back to that fertility issue. What keeps those families up at night that are looking to make a family and make babies, right? Maybe they am I going to get pregnant and am I going to be a good parent? Um, is birth going to be easy? Um, am I going to be, you know, am I going to keep, you know, keep the baby, uh, for full term, okay. Those are things that keep them up at night. And when you can come up with those ideas, when you can, you know, get into the mind of them and figure out what it is that resonates with them, right.

Um, in the sense of, um, uh, what’s on their mind, then you can talk to that with them. Then you can share that with them, even if they’re not expressing those problems and those things that keep them up at night. Okay. You need to ask yourself a couple of questions. How can you add value before money changes, hands and, um, with your patients? Okay. So how is it that you can add more value to your clients now to your prospects and your inactive patients now, before they come in and schedule them before they come in and, um, and, and, and, and, and become a paying patient with you. And that’s important because people want to see people that like stack on all of like, like, it’s like you, over-deliver right. How can you over-deliver for your patients in that way? You know, um, how can you make it so that your marketing, your efforts, your communication strategies leave them better off than when they first came to see you.

Um, and when you are teaching them, when you’re doing a webinar or a training or anything like that, how are you teaching and giving them actionable things to make their life better? Okay. You’ve got so many tools in your arsenal of, uh, of teaching ideas and potential that you should have no lab of what you could be sharing, how you could teach and give them actionable things to make their lives better. Acupressure techniques, breathing techniques, moving technique, different seasonal recipes and things of that nature. So part of the decision making is really coming clear as to, you know, understanding what your patients want, what they need and what they value. And talking to that for them coming up with ideas on how you can communicate to that, to them. So a couple, you know, like straight up marketing tools that you, that are hyper-relevant for, um, for, for what you, what you can be doing for your patients are to make sure that you have a really strong call to action to motivate your audience.

Okay. If you’re a fertility expert, what would make someone who’s looking to start a family, raise their hand and come into your clinic. If you are a pain specialist, what can you offer them that would make them raise their hand, to motivate them to come into your clinic? Every single communication you have, every single marketing you do. Every single event needs to have a really clear, strong call to action at the end, that gets people to raise their hands said, yes, you are the practitioner for me, because you resonate with me because you know what I want, because you’ve already done the work that we’re talking about here today. So that is one of the biggest and most important things about your marketing is making sure that you have a really good, clear, and solid call to action. And a few ways to find prospects are internally and externally, right?

And online. So internally you could be doing referral drives. Uh, you could make sure that your patient education strategies are really solid and, uh, make sure that you have a plan to keep, to nurture your patients. So they would fall out of care less. And if they do fall out of care, you need to have a plan to get them back into care. So that is, you know, a few really important internal marketing strategies that you need to tap into referral drives having a communication plan and having a patient reactivation plan three really important pieces of your internal marketing, external marketing content is King these days. And you need to be out there doing social media, doing video marketing is really important. And even these days direct mail marketing is actually gaining more traction because people, no one’s doing it anymore. Once everything’s online email and newsletters, everything is online, but when you can do direct mail marketing or send a letter or postcard in the mail, it’s actually touched, they open it up, they look at it.

So it’s actually been showing that, um, that, uh, that, that direct mail marketing is actually making a little bit of a comeback in some instances. Um, so with external marketing, make sure that you have a content calendar set up, that you can be out there and in front of your audience regularly, again, talking to them about what resonates them, talking to them in, in explaining, you know, through your content and your communications, what’s in it for them. Okay. So you can really get clear and focused on your communication patterns with them and online, make sure that, um, all of, you know, all leads are gonna be pointing to your website. So make sure that your website is really dialed in. And, uh, you know, when you come up with your clarity and your focus, you need to add all of that to your website. You need to make sure that you have a really strong call to action on there that, that, that, uh, communicates with what you’re, what you’re offering in there.

And when people hit your website, they to know exactly what you do and what you offer and what is what’s in it for them within the first few seconds of landing on that page. So your website needs to be checked out and audited. And, um, and if any of you are interested in audit, um, you know, check, uh, put some, put some, um, information below the video over here. And, um, I will reach out to you and, uh, you know, just let me know that you want a website audit and I will reach out to you and we’ll get something set up for you. So, um, you know, without clarity, without focus, without decisions, your marketing strategy is always changing. Your marketing tactics are scattered, and it’s going to be exhausting because you’re going to try something. It’s not going to work. Um, you’re going to, um, you know, you’re going to get disenchanted because you’ve done marketing.

You’ve put some efforts out there and you’re not getting the type of return on that investment. Um, and your results might be inconsistent and subpar. So focusing in on these foundations of clarity, focus and decisions will help you create a better strategy, you know, more effective tactics and, and give you some consistent, reliable, um, techniques that you could be using to pull patients into your practice. So decide who you are, who your practice is not for, which is important, because if you can identify who you, you know, who you don’t want in your practice, um, then you can really focus on, you want to focus on in your practice, who you want to fill your practice up. And then, you know, when you can, you can focus on their behaviors and their traits and their likes and dislikes. And you can pull in the type of people that you really resonate with, that you want to fill your practice of. And also the last thing I want to talk about is to really simplify what you do. So

Figure out what, what, what you offer, like

Really simplify what you offer as an acupuncturist. And also come up with an idea of when you’re asked at like a cocktail party or some type of event or a networking event, or if you’re doing anything online, you know, w w you know, how you help people, you need to get really clear on your message. You need to have some laser clarity on your mission, on who you serve and why people should choose you, and what’s in it for them. And lastly, I want you to think about these four questions that you can just go away with, um, and just ponder on. Um, and if you have any questions you can reach out to me, um, at, uh, Jeffrey, jeffrey@acupuncturemediaworks.com. Um, or you can put some comments below, uh, some comments below here, and now I’ll ask, ask them, but how do you stand out from the noise and get attention?

Okay, what makes you stand out? How do you leverage the season and create marketing campaigns to result in new patients, and how do you continue to grow your audience and deepen your relationships with them, and what creative ways can you use content to get clients? Okay. So those are just four things that you should be thinking about on a regular basis. These are questions that, um, CEOs ask themselves often. And I would want you to ask this of yourself because you are essentially a CEO of your own business. So I want to remind you that you’re never alone. I am here for you. If you’ve got any questions, please reach out. Thank you again for joining me. Thank you again for the AAC for hosting me once again, so I can share some insights and wisdom and some knowledge with you. Please let me know what your thoughts are. I talked to you guys soon. Take care. Be well. Bye. Bye.

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