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Hi there. My name is Michelle Grasek. I am the host of the Acupuncture Marketing School podcast and the instructor for the online class of the same name, acupuncture Marketing School. And today we’ll be talking about five really common marketing mistakes that I see among my. Marketing clients and my marketing students.
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And luckily, most of these have relatively easy fixes, so you can quickly improve your marketing to get more patients. And before we dive in, I’d like to take a moment to thank the American Acupuncture Council for the opportunity to be here with you today. All right, let’s get into the slides.
So again if you find that you are doing any of these things, please just know that these mistakes are super common. I think that. Most of us had very little or no marketing education in acupuncture school. So we’re just all learning as we go along. And what I wanna provide you with today really are easy ways to improve your marketing so that you can consistently get more patients.
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So a lot of the things we’re going to be talking about will help you build out marketing and. Really build out a stronger brand so that your marketing is working for you in the background so that you can focus on treating your patients and put less energy and effort into your marketing on an everyday basis.
Okay, so basically we want to use these tips to make your marketing more effective and more efficient. So the very first thing that I see is that people are either not collecting emails at all. Some people are still not collecting emails on their websites, or they’re collecting emails and then they’re not doing anything with them.
They’re not sending them. So let’s talk really briefly about the debate on whether you should put more time and energy into your email list or social media. So something to think about is that. You own your list of email subscribers in a way that you will never own your social media followers. We know that social media algorithms change all the time.
The way that our content shows up in front of our audience or doesn’t show up is in many ways out of our control, right? So we don’t really control the delivery of our message to our social media subscribers And social media has crashed in the past, which. Really terrified. A lot of influencers whose primary way of making money was through their followers, right?
So email in contrast to that, you do own your list of email subscribers and you have a lot more control over. How and whether your message gets delivered to those people. Now, you could argue you can’t control whether they open your email, right? But at least you know that 95% of the time it’s landed in their inbox.
Okay? So I always advocate for people to put just as much energy into collecting emails and. Staying in contact with their email list, but sending an email newsletter as they do with building out content for social media and being engaged on social media. So think about these two. Worlds of digital marketing, email and social media, and just try to divide your time and energy evenly between them.
Because I personally think that building an email list is in some ways a better long-term plan than social media. It also depends on, if you love social media, just keep going. But I really always advocate for acupuncturists to lean more into. Collecting emails purposefully and sending at least one email newsletter a month.
Because this is such a low lift way for us to stay top of mind with our audience. And again, then we have more control over our message and whether it’s delivered to our audience. Plus, with email, you don’t have to dance around like you might on TikTok. Something to consider if you love dancing.
Totally. Cool. So I would recommend if you don’t already have a newsletter, opt-in box on your website, please put one in. A lot of people are doing that, so you could upgrade your email opt-in box instead of it just saying, join our newsletter. You might learn tips about like women’s health.
Or whatever it is that you specialize in, you could create a PDF download. It could even be one page that explains something like solves a problem for your audience, or it just gives them information that they find really valuable that they’d be willing to give you their email in exchange for. So a really popular one page.
Lead magnet I that I have found for many people if you like, treating digestion, is to create a PDF that just says how to reduce belly bloating using traditional Chinese medicine because people are very interested in their appearance, right? And belly bloating is uncomfortable and a lot of people.
Would download that because they’re really curious to know how can they naturally reduce belly bloating. Okay, so just one idea. Think about your target market and the things that they are struggling with, and if you could create a one page PDF that you could deliver to them to help them solve a problem, give them a tip they could do at home, and make sure that you include a call to action on that PDF lead magnet.
Where you say, okay, if this worked for you or you found it helpful, the next step for to really help with your problem is for you to get acupuncture. And here’s the link to make an appointment. Okay? So the call to action’s important and if you are collecting emails. Please email your subscribers. I advocate for two emails a month.
I do not think that’s too much. That is a polite number of emails. It helps you stay top of mind and you really only need one reason to send an email. Okay. Like one topic or one message. So it could be as simple as, think about your specialty and answer a frequently asked question. Or if you have updated office hours for the summer, or if you’re going on vacation and you want people to get on your calendar, all of those could be individual emails, right?
But try to email them consistently, at least once a month to stay top of mind so they remember that they intended to make an appointment with you. So the second mistake that I see is people not sharing their face really anywhere, but especially not on social media. So we’re not introducing yourself on social media.
So think about it this way, at its core, part of what we’re trying to do with marketing is to build up enough trust and potential patients that they feel safe and comfortable making a financial investment with us, telling us their. Very personal health history and their story and letting us put needles in them.
So I always like to say that. Marketing for acupuncture is very different for, than marketing for something like a pizza because people already know and trust pizza, whereas not as many people are familiar with acupuncture or prepared to take the plunge and sign up for a series of treatments, make that financial investment.
So we just have to, we have to build up more trust and we’re putting needles in people right. Someone orders a pizza and they know exactly what they’re getting and they know it’s going to be like a. It’s gonna be pure pleasure, right? It’s, they trust that experience is going to be great very much.
Whereas we’re putting needles in people, we’re asking them to talk about difficult health situations. We need to show up in a way that actually helps them build a connection with us and feel like, okay, I feel safe making an appointment with this person. I think I can tell them my story and I trust them to put needles in me.
So for me, part of that, at least what I have seen as a marketing coach in the past 11 years is that when you are willing to share your face, even just occasionally, it helps build that connection and helps people, really helps improve the return on your investment for your marketing making people. Click the book now button more often.
Okay, so on social media, I recommend reintroducing yourself once a month, you’ll probably have new followers and you’ll not all of your previous followers will have seen your introduction post to begin with. And you can always start this post by saying, for all of our new followers, I wanted to introduce myself, or if we haven’t met before, I wanted to introduce myself.
And you can repurpose content that you have. Created in the past. So you could take a snippet from your about page and repurpose it as the caption for an Instagram post. So there’s no need to reinvent the wheel here. If you’ve already written something similar, like maybe you introduced yourself on your email newsletter years ago, dig back and find it and see if you can repurpose it as an introductory post for social media.
You would just be amazed by the number of social media accounts like Instagram accounts for acupuncturists that I visit on a regular basis where they’re, they don’t have their name in their bio and there’s no photos of them at all. And then when I go to their website. On their about page, still no photos.
So nowhere can I easily find a picture of this person who would potentially be taking care of me. And just remember that we’re such social animals. I wanna put my eyeballs on your eyeballs to help me decide if I trust you. Okay, so I also wanted to provide a really quick and easy introductory reel that you could create.
If you have, you could even have a patient that you really like and have a good relationship with. You could have them take this video, so you just sit at your desk in your office. Or maybe at the reception desk, and you just smile and wave at the camera and count to five and have the other person record.
All you’re doing is smiling and waving, and then your caption can be, you’re introducing yourself. If you are savvy, you can put text on the video. On the reel that just says, introducing the acupuncturist or welcoming new followers so that people know what this entire reel is about, what the caption’s gonna be about.
Okay. But it’s super simple. It takes no time to record. And I think you’d be amazed how good the engagement is because it’s a video and because you are in it, people want to see you. You’d be amazed how cheerful they are. Just to say hello to you on Instagram. Okay. So definitely worth your time. Mistake number three is setting up your Google business profile and then pretty much ignoring it.
Google really appreciates and prioritizes. Business profile accounts that are regularly updated that it considers active. So what I recommend is making monthly updates to your Google Business profile. So there’s a lot of ways that you can do this, but some easy ones are each month you can add a new photo.
You could also add A post, so it’s a little confusing ’cause it sounds like social media or it sounds like a blog post, but it’s not. So if you’re familiar with your Google business profile, if you scroll down, you can add a post. Sometimes it’s also referred to as an update, but you can add an image and not a ton of text.
It’s not meant to be long like a blog post. It’s really most meant to be, sorry. It’s really meant to be an update. So 300 words, 200 words, but you can. Share a blog post that you wrote in the past and you could just summarize it, and then you get a link. You get a call to action, click through to read the entire blog post.
But really the idea here is that Google wants to feel confident whenever it provides. A business as the answer to someone’s query. And the way that you help Google feel confident is by regularly updating your Google business profile and your website. But that’s something different. But the reason is Google has more confidence in profiles where they’re active because it looks like your businesses.
Relevant. It looks like it’s open. It looks like it’s legitimate. Remember that Google’s goal is the user experience and answering a search query in the best way possible. And let’s think of a comparison. Let’s say that there’s your profile that you’re updating once a month, and then there’s an acupuncturist down the street who hasn’t updated their profile in three years, and you both treat fertility and someone types in fertility.
Acupuncture near me. Obviously, Google is going to rank you higher because you are active and it. It just gives it a ton more confidence that your business is the most relevant answer because you keep showing up in that way. Okay? So don’t underestimate how important this is. Most people are finding us, like from a search.
They’re finding us through Google, right? It’s huge. You. You just have to remember that the Google Business profile is owned by Google and Google controls all of the search algorithms related to Google. And if you wanna show up at the top of a search engine results page, your Google Business profile needs to be a, is an important part of that.
Okay? Excuse me. Tip number four is, or I’m sorry. Mistake number four is having a really vague messaging on your website. I am a huge advocate for niching down even just a little bit, even if you wanna be a general practitioner, because when you have a really broad message, it doesn’t. Speak to any particular person or group of people, and so instead the message feels really watered down and vague.
It might leave people with more questions than answers. So the example that I always like to give is, that big list of the conditions that the World Health Organization supports the use of acupuncture for. And I know people don’t do this as often as they used to, but when I graduated acupuncture school about 15 years ago, it was very common to just copy and paste that list onto your website and save.
I treat everything. Here’s what the WHO says, acupuncture is good for. Pick your thing off the list. It’s overwhelming for people to see that. It feels broad and vague, and a lot of people will read that list and even if. Let’s say they’re there for carpal tunnel and they see that carpal tunnel’s on the list, they might still have questions like, okay, that’s good that it’s on there, but does it pertain to me and my particular situation or experience with carpal tunnel?
And so it helps a lot to pick. We’ll say three broad categories that you love to treat and feature those on your website. Imagine imagine your landing page and then if you scroll down a little bit, maybe you could have three columns, right? Or three images next to each other. And they could be like pain management, women’s health and cosmetic acupuncture, or whatever the top three things are.
Sorry, I just banged into my desk. Whatever the top three things are that you really like to treat, because if you are just saying on your website, acupuncture for everybody and every situation and every symptom, it isn’t really going to. Peak the interest or grab the attention of any individual people.
So I recommend, even if you’re a general practitioner, just pick three things that you wanna highlight or feature. And you are still going to get plenty of patients who fall outside of those categories. But it just helps give your website some structure and it gives people who visit some. Some guidelines to help them know if they’re in the right place.
And ultimately, you are gonna end up with more of the patients that you are really aligned with and that you love to treat, which I find generally. Leads to better outcomes for patients. Leads to better patient reviews. Leads to more referrals. It’s a cycle. Okay? So I really hope that you will consider getting specific and niching down on your website, even just a little so that you can build a connection with your visitors so that they feel like, oh yes, this sounds like exactly what I need.
Alright. And then the last mistake that I see is just not repurposing content. I talk a lot about creating content, especially if you have a specialty. You want to talk about the frequently asked questions. Who’s a good fit, what’s your experience like? And you do have to talk about the same concepts over and over again, but that does not mean that you have to keep rewriting the same Instagram post of frequently asked questions.
All the time. You can go back and you can copy and paste a caption from seven months ago and give it a new image or a new video, and you can republish it. Okay? You could make some tweaks if you don’t wanna do something identical, but. The definition of repurposing content is taking something that you wrote or created for one platform, we’ll say Instagram, and repurposing it either for the same platform to publish it a second time or for a totally different platform, for example.
An email newsletter, right? So you are just tweaking the text to have it make sense for this other platform. And of course the idea here is that you, it just cuts down the amount of time that it takes to. Create and publish content, and I believe very strongly that the best way to maintain your sanity in the digital marketing world is to repurpose content.
If you’re not repurposing content, you are working way too hard. I encourage you to take a look at the content you’ve created on your website. So frequently asked questions if you have service pages, if you have a specialty, and you. Have a specialty page, like maybe you do orthopedic acupuncture, and you have a whole big long page where you talk about what are the symptoms?
Who’s it for? How many treatments do I need? Do I take insurance? Et cetera, et cetera. All of that is considered evergreen content, meaning it, it doesn’t really, it doesn’t really get stale or go out of style or become irrelevant. It’s always going to be. True and useful to your audience. That’s core content on your website, and that is always great to repurpose for email newsletters, for social media captions, or post inspiration.
And I really recommend if you’ve written blog posts. Again, no matter how old they are, they’re probably still partially evergreen content. Think about repurposing those as well. I bet you’ve already written or created a lot of content that you could repurpose into something else to allow you to stay visible in front of your audience today.
Okay.
And lastly, I’ll just say that you don’t need to make all of these changes today. I recommend maybe pick one thing per month. I work with a lot of acupuncturists and wellness business owners and I know that, having too many assignments leads to often not doing anything right. It’s a bit of overwhelm.
Everyone has lives. So just pick one thing for this month and make a list for things that you wanna update in the future. Okay? It will make a difference in your marketing effectiveness even if you don’t do it today. So if you have questions, you are always welcome to shoot me an email, michelle@michelleGrasek.com.
I love getting your questions clearly. I love talking about marketing and I have a brand new membership for wellness professionals that you are welcome to join. It’s called the Snack Size Marketing Club. It is a low cost marketing membership where once a week I pretty much tell you here’s what to do for your marketing this week.
It’s a five minute audio. Keep it very simple. You can visit my website, Michelle Grasek dot thank you fake.com to check that out. All right. Thank you so much for being here, as always, many thanks to the American Acupuncture Council for the opportunity to be here with you today. Have a good one.