So today what I want to do is I’d like to talk about the state of the union of dress for marketing your practice in 2020. But before I move on, I want to remind you all of something very important.
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Hi there folks. Jeffrey Grossman from Acupuncture Media Works, Acudownloads and Acuperfect websites. I am thrilled to be here in a new year and supporting. The knowledge, the education around growing your practice and marketing and busy building up your business savvy. Thank you AAC. For once again, inviting me back to provide some insights and inspiration for marketing your acupuncture practice.
So today what I want to do is I’d like to talk about the state of the union of dress for marketing your practice in 2020. But before I move on, I want to remind you all of something very important. The world needs you now more than ever. I’ve talked about this before I talk about this. Every time I come on and do a presentation for the AAC, because you are an incredible resource.
You’re professionally trained. You can heal a person’s body, their mind, and their spirit. You are literally. The epitome of what a natural healer is, all about immunity, about natural remedies, you know how to transform illness into vitality. You preach good health through good free flowing, balanced G.
And this. Medicine and you, the work that you do, the work that you provide is powerful, and you do all of this by activating the vital force of every patient. You come into contact with, that’s all natural drug-free solutions. People need you, they need what you’re offering. They’re looking for advice for your help and they need your services.
Many people don’t even know that you exist, let alone, that you can help with just about every element under the sun. But I want to help you change that. You can start to position yourself as the go-to acupuncturist in your community, but you need to understand four fundamental things about what you do.
Fundamental thing. Number one. You wear the hat of a healer. Awesome. You are great at that fundamental thing. Number two, you also wear the hat of an entrepreneur that my friends might not be the best hat that you wear because you weren’t really given the tools that you need to grow your practice when you’re an acupuncture school, but you were given all the tools to be the incredible healer that.
Fundamental thing. Number three, is that you also wear the hat of a superhero in your community and fundamental thing. Number four is that you are. The CEO of your business. And I’m gonna talk about that and prove that to you in a second, you take all the duties, all the responsibilities that any CEO does and you wear all the hats that any CEO does.
So I’m going to ask you a couple of questions. Let’s see how many of these questions actually pertain to you. Mark them on a piece of paper with each one of these. You resonate with, are you responsible for leading your practice and making major decisions for it? Are you the figurehead of your practice when communicating with any type of government entities or any insurance entities or even the general public, do you lead the development of your practices long and short-term strategies?
Do you manage overall operations and make major decisions affecting your practice? Do you manage your practices? Resources? Do you negotiate or approve agreements and contracts for your practice? If you’re like most acupuncturists that I’ve worked with over the years, you’ve probably checked off most, if not all of these traits and these traits, my friends are the traits that CEOs incorporate into their business.
So by that nature alone, I know that you signed up to become an acupuncturist, but you also now are the CEO of your own practice. So congratulations for your. Round of applause. But here’s where you are, right. You own a business, you make money and you have responsibilities. So that’s why it’s really important for you to think about these CEO questions and not to just think about them once a year.
It’s important to reflect on them, monthly, weekly, and even daily. So my hope for you is that you become prepared after today’s talk and you start thinking like a CEO, because you’re so good at thinking and behaving like a healer and that you embrace a new marketing mindset. And of course, That you continue to change this world.
One person, one needle at a time. Okay. So now let’s get into this state of the union address for marketing your practice in 2022. Like I said, a couple minutes. People need you. But the unfortunate part is that many people may not even know what you do, how you can help and even what you actually offer.
Okay. So here’s a little exercise that you can do today. When you get back into your clinic and ask your patients, this one question, patient, this is what you ask them. So if you were at a party and someone asked you what your acupuncturist does for you or what they could help. What would you say? And then sit back and wait for the answer.
You might be very surprised about what kind of answers you get it. If you get something like, I don’t know. I lay on the table, they rub some alcohol on my skin and Pokemon some needles and I leave there feeling. If that’s the answer that you get, you may not be doing enough to properly educate and prepare your patients to send referrals your way.
And the reason I’m illustrating this point is that you’ll know how good your patient education process is. Or are not. And the goal would be to have your patients answer a question like this in a convincing and compelling manner that can stimulate the wow factor with who they’re talking to and ultimately drive referrals into your practice.
Most likely more, your patients will miss this ability to really share what you do and what you offer and how you can help other people. So the thing I want to get across here is that patient education is key to creating a stable and long-term practice. And this is the exact reason why I founded acupuncture.
Media works in 2002. 20 years ago is because patient education is a key and it’s important for creating a foundations of your practice. But today patient education comes in many forms. It comes in email, it comes in tele-health, it comes in brochures. It comes in handouts. It comes in social media, it comes in text messaging and so on.
So every time. You are with your patient every time they step into your clinic, or when they see your profile on Facebook or Instagram, each of those times should be about furthering their knowledge about who you are, what you can treat and what’s in it for them. And this brings me into my first point of this state of the union for marketing, for acupuncturist, which is crafting a clear and concise message for what you do.
Is one of the foundations for your marketing moving forward. And what I mean by this is who are you? What do you offer your community through your work? What benefits will your patients receive? How will their lives be different after seeing you? What is your unique selling position that makes your stand, you stand out from your competition and why should a prospect choose your.
Over another. And these are all important questions to answer. Even though times have drastically changed over the last 24 months. These are still part of the core marketing and business concepts that any successful practice or business needs to connect with. So one of the first things I want to get across to you is that your core message.
It’s going to be the center of all of your marketing activities. And let me ask you this. Do you have answers to the questions that I just rattled off? If not, I suggest that you start thinking about them and filling in the blanks, or you can join me in my upcoming, create your core message workshop, and you can do that by reaching out to me after this at Jeffrey J E F R E Y at acupuncture, media works.com.
If you’re interested in learning more about. Create your core message workshop. And I’ll send you some information about that. So becoming on-point with your message will be the foundation, or rather should be the foundation of all of your marketing strategies moving forward. And if I were wager to bet, I’d have to say that most of you.
I don’t have answers to the questions that I just talked about. And that’s the first thing that needs to happen in this new year is to get clear and concise with crafting your message. And I don’t mean, hello, my name’s Jeffrey M and I’m an acupuncturist and I can help. What you need is something like one of these examples that when you’re talking with you about here’s example, number one, too many people struggle with pain and injuries.
We provide effective treatment that allows you to perform well in the. Sports and work without pills, surgery, and high costs, or this one we offer unique and individualized evaluations to treat injuries with cupping and acupuncture. So they, our that our practice members can go out when their next race and feel great.
Or this one, which is the acupuncture media works one-liner, which is most acupuncturists don’t like marketing and have no idea how to bring in new patients. We offer a riot, a wide range of business marketing and website solutions. Connect with more customers grow their practice and make the world better.
That is, these are clear and concise messaging of four different businesses. And I encourage you to get this done because you need this. You need a core message and the state of your practice depends on. The next thing that I want to get across to you, that’s important to do this year is finding clarity on who your target audience is and who your patient avatar is.
Okay. And in marketing, focusing on defining your target audience and your patient avatar is essential for practice growth yet it’s often a fundamental step in branding that practitioners missed. Although many practitioners wish that they could just help everyone that walks in. And I totally understand that it’s essential to accept that you can’t help everyone.
There’s only so many hours in the day and you may already be on tight, a tie on tied up tight on time. And that’s why identifying your target audience as a practitioner is an incentive step in the development of a successful marketing strategy. Not knowing your target audience can end up costing you a lot of money and time and make, all of your marketing efforts seem really frustrating.
So here are three frequent marketing errors that are made as a result of. Just not having a clear idea on who your target audience is. So when you don’t have your target audience clearly defined, it can result in one of these following problems that you have a marketing plan that speaks to everyone’s linked.
But it really connects with nobody. You could be a practitioner who tries to appeal to everyone, but you end up appealing to nobody. Or you can be a practitioner who spends way over their budget in an attempt to reach everyone, but that you really reach your ideal customer. So getting clear on your target audience refers to a group of potential prospects that you want to provide products and services for.
And in healthcare industry practitioners aim is to bring in more patients and grow their practice. So marketing efforts that simply. To reach anyone anywhere are pretty unlikely to produce repeatable success so carefully and precisely identifying your target audience is essential so quickly. How do you define your target audience?
There’s a couple of different ways to describe and hone in on the target audience. When it comes to defining this audience specifically for health and wellness marketing, there’s four primary categories that you should focus. Geography demographics, psychographics, and behavior, but to be successful and to stand out in an extremely competitive field, it’s essential that you take your marketing a step further than just defining your target audience.
From the areas that we mentioned, that you will also need to define who your patient avatar is. Okay. When it comes to your target audience for your practice, it’s time to come up with also your avatar. In other words, it’s time to imagine who your dream patient is. As I call it who’s your a patient, right?
And this patient avatar is a detailed profile of your dream patient. It focuses on one person and outlines everything about them and goes into great detail in depth. So think of your avatar as. A patient and not just your average patient, for example, your advertiser or someone that you want to be involved in their healing journey.
They’re high spending, they’re loyal, and they often give you great referrals to their friends and family members. Hopefully, some of you can imagine who your eight patients are and begin there with identifying your ideal patient because identifying your ideal patient and your target audience go hand in hand together.
So let me take this one step further and asked you, who do you work? If you specialize, maybe you offer fertility or sports medicine, for instance. Now these are two very different and distinct individuals in these groups. So if you’re dealing with somebody in fertility and dealing with somebody in sports medicine, you’re going to be communicating to them very differently.
Okay. These people are gonna be seeking different outcomes, and they’re going to need to be communicating about their care plan or what to expect or not to expect. And they’re gonna, you’re going to need to talk to them in a different way. So when you get. On how you want your community to perceive your clinic and your brand through your messaging.
You need to get clear on who your ideal patient is and who your ideal customer profile is. When I go through this exercise with my students and my coaching clients, we dig deep into this deep enough for them to actually visualize who their ideal patient is, and even come up with a name for them. But there’s no time for that.
Now I’ve got a bunch more that I want to share with you. So far you have to get your messaging right in this new. So you can attract the right patients and then you also need to come up with who your ideal customer profile is and who your ideal patient is. Okay. So moving on, the next thing is that you need to have an actual plan.
Yes. An actual mapped out real marketing plan and strategy, which is a roadmap to how you’re going to get from point a. To point B, how are you going to go about bringing in new patients? How will you be posting? Where will you be posting? What will you be posting? What will you be networking with? And at the end of today’s training, I’ve got a little special free gift for you that you’ll be able to download and use as part of your posting strategies.
So hang on a minute there. What is the patient process? When a patient comes in from visit one through visit 12 or through visit 20, what is your communication strategies? What do you messaging? Do you want to get across to your patients as they come through your treatment? How will you motivate and encourage your patients to continue care or even refer others?
So you can’t just assume that all of this is going to happen by itself because that’s called hope marketing, right? You’re going to hope that you’re going to get a referral. You’re going to hope that you’re going to get a new patient this week. You’re gonna hope that you’re going to make a bigger profit this year and you can’t spend four or six years learning about this amazing medicine and then opening up your clinic doors.
I hope that your schedule will fill up and that you hope that you’ll have enough money to retire on. So for this year, you need to map out your plan, come up with a strategy and actually implement it. Okay. So I want to get across to the fact that. Last thing once I get across to you is that your online presence is imperative for success.
And this should not be taken lightly as in yeah, I got a website. It’s great. I’m good. So let me ask you this. When someone gives you a referral to go see a doctor or a therapist, what’s the first thing you most likely do when someone refers a good restaurant to you? What’s the first thing you’re most likely to do?
You’re going to go online and Google it and check it out. You’re going to check out their website. You’re going to see how many reviews they got, how many testimonials they have in. Then from that, you’re going to make a judgment call as to whether or not you want to work with them or eat at one restaurant over another.
So having a compelling website that immediately lets that person know exactly what you can do, how you get help them and what their next steps should be. This is important to set up. Don’t do this now, but later on, look at your website and when you land on your website, can people immediately understand.
What you can help with what conditions you can treat. Do they understand how they can get in touch with you? Or is your website compelling enough to make people take action? Is there a clear path that they take when they get on your website? Is there a link to a free download to a report? Can they schedule a with you immediately or can they request a complimentary exam or do you want them to watch this video?
Not this video, but the video on your website, but when someone hits your site, you’ve got just a few questions for them to say, yeah, I don’t want to see Jeffrey. I understand that he could help me. So part of this is that your website needs to be mobile ready and filled with eat content, right?
So eat content stands for expertise or third nativeness and trustworthiness. And this is vital to establish yourself and your brand as a trustworthy, reliable authority in your field. So you’ve gone to create content that positions you in that way, because. Like this eat content provides you with the authority that Google loves, and it helps you with your rankings.
So you can just set up your Google, my business. You need to have testimonials on your site. You need to have several calls to action. You need to have a clear, unique selling proposition that quickly and clearly sets you apart from the competition. Okay? So you are in the perfect position to change lives and this world in order to do that, People need to know that you exist and what you can offer them.
So today I hope that I helped elevate your business savvy and your CEO mindset and help position you for the state of what you need to do this year in order to achieve some of the practice accesses that you want. Make a real. Come up with a strategy that taps into your superpowers, create your message.
And you’ll be able to change the world. One person, one needle at a time. People need you. So I hope that you received Andrews and inspiration that you needed today. And I want to encourage you to reevaluate your plans. And if you need a fresh perspective, let’s start with a free 15 minute mentoring and discovery call.
You can if you’re interested in one of these mentoring calls, just shoot me an email that says, yes, I’m interested in a mentoring and discovery call. 15 minutes. Absolutely no charge. I’m not going to sell you anything. Send me an email, a Jeffrey, J E F R E Y at acupuncturemediaworks.
Also. I’ve got this free gift that I want to share with you. I want to put it up on the screen. It’s in time for the Chinese new year. We’ve put together a token of our appreciation for all. Congratulations. Yes, it’s the crowds that’s cheering for everyone. So we’ve created a social media bundle that you can use to post on Facebook, Instagram, or email, or even uses text messages.
Just go to www.accumedia.us tiger 2022. Then you can grab the free graphics bundle right there. All right. You are awesome. Stay strong, change the world. One person, one needle at a time. We need you. All right. Stay beautiful. Next week, Virginia Doran is going to be here sharing some of her insights and wisdom through the AAC.
And thank you for showing up and being here. Talk to you soon.