“…you’ve got to figure out ways to consistently attract new patients and systematically, keep them in care and to have them really understand what you do and what you offer and how you could help benefit and support their life and wellbeing.”
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Hi folks, Jeffrey Grossman here, and thanks to the American Acupuncture Council, once again for inviting me here to share with you some insights about marketing and growing your practice. Our main focus when we are an acupuncture school is to learn about the theories, to learn about the points, to learn about the cupping and the GWAS shop. And we hardly get the foundations of what we really need in order to build a successful and thriving practice. And it doesn’t matter if you are the best diagnostician or the pulse finder or the most amazing wash Shaw giver. But, you know, you’ve got to figure out ways to consistently attract new patients and systematically, keep them in care and to have them really understand what you do and what you offer and how you could help benefit and support their life and wellbeing. And this is the reason why I’m excited to be hosting this web class today, which is called the five step checklist to simplify your marketing.
So welcome. My name is Jeffrey Grossman. For those of you that haven’t met me before doing videos. I’m the founder of acupuncture media works and Acu perfect websites. We’ve been creating patient education and marketing materials for acupuncturists since 2002 building websites for acupuncturists since 2010. And I started my practice in 98 and I had incredible struggles and trials and tribulations like many of you have had and may be having right now. And I had no business savvy or no marketing knowledge. I had to start from scratch. So there was a big problem. I realized that I wasn’t given the tools to really properly educate, communicate, overcome objectives, market my practice, close the sale and, and all those things aren’t involved with creating a really successful business these days. So I decided to start the companies that I have now to help other practitioners build their businesses and to help you understand what it takes to actually create a successful acupuncture practice.
We are healers. We change lives. People need us every single day, especially now, but many people don’t really know about our services let alone that you even exist, right? So I want to help you change all that I want to help you get more people on your table. I want to help you be seen and be heard and to ultimately to bring people into your practice so you can make more money, help more people, and even have more free time in your life. So I want to remind you that you’re never alone. Then I’m here for you. My team is here for you. And at the end of today’s talk. If you feel like that, you need help getting set up or becoming focused. You need a little more motivation. Please feel free to reach out to me. Uh, I reach out into the comments below this video.
I will respond to those comments or you can reach me at Jeffrey, J E F F R E Y at acupuncture, media works.com. Um, and one last thing is, um, I put together a detailed report for what’s working now with the recommendations and how you can make it work for you for your practice to get more people on your treatment table. It’s a 15 page resource that you’ll find invaluable. And I’m going to give you the link at the end of today’s training, because if I give it to you, now I’ll lose your attention. You’ll go get it. And that’s it. So just one or two things from this ebook that I put together that you put into practice can actually change your practice and make all the difference. So let’s just jump in right now to the five step checklist to simplify your marketing.
And the first thing I want to get across to you is that no matter how large your business is no matter how great their product is, it can always fail these days. It’s not enough that you just have a great product or a huge business. What truly matters is that you have a consistent way to attract and convert prospects into patients, right? So tell me if this sounds familiar, you hang your shingle and you hope that patients pour in, nothing happens. You offer great services and you hope patients continue care. They fall out of care. You help people, you help them get well. And you hope that they refer others and no referrals happen. And unfortunately, many practitioners think that their service and their care and their clinic can simply magically sell itself. And that’s not true in order to be successful these days, you need to have a, what is called an effective funnel, right?
And this is set up with three different stages for building patient relations. And that’s what you’ve got to do in your marketing is to build these relationships. The first stage is curiosity. The second stage is enlightenment and the third stage is commitment. And I’m going to briefly review those before we jump into the checklist with you. And it’s important to understand this process because the goal of any funnel, the goal of any sales process is to walk patients through each of these phases, to peak their curiosity about you, to enlighten them. So they want to learn more about you and then to get them to take the next step and make a commitment to begin care with you. So let’s just dive into that real fast, um, stage one, the curious curiosity stage, and this begins with a subconscious process that identifies whether or not, um, you know, P you are able to enhance a prospect’s life.
It’s basically a snap decision that Selah makes about a product or a service or a brand, and how people, how you, your services are viewed to help people survive and thrive. Right? This is the stage where people are making one of two choices, right? They want to learn more about you to take the next steps, or they’re going to ignore you and walk over wet way. It’s like sorting through your mail, right? You scan through thousands of collateral every day in your mailbox, in your inbox. And the majority of that gets discarded, right? And these, and some materials go into the key file. Some materials go into let’s review this for later on. So you either keep what appeals to you or you discard what doesn’t. And for us, the goal is to get people to want to learn more about you, as opposed to just walk away, right?
When it comes to marketing, there’s a number of ways that you can peak people’s interest and entice them to want to learn more about you. And when it comes to marketing, it’s your headline on your website? It’s the subject line of your email? It’s the title of your lead magnet? It’s your elevator pitch and a thousand other things that you need to express how you can help people immediately. They want to know what’s in it for me. So, you know, they want to know, um, you know, um, what’s in it for them in order to take the next steps in starting and building this relationship with you. And the point is that if you don’t tell someone how you can help them survive and thrive and overcome their problems right off the bat, on your headline, your email, your subject line, whatever that is, they’re going to discard you and walk away.
So curiosity is what gets a person to start to notice you, and to begin to pay attention with what you have to offer. And this can be a one-liner on your website, titles of your posts, titles of, of, of your email address of your emails and things like that. So this is where people get their, you get their attention. And then the next step is to get them to learn more about you, which is the enlightenment stage. And curiosity. Again, people are paying attention to you. Enlightenment invites them into a relationship. And this is where you begin to build trust. This is where people begin to take you up on your offer. This is when they realize that you have the solution for them and think about this, right? How do, how does what you offer solve? The problem that your prospects and patients have?
You can sell a treatment to resolve stress, but how does it work? You can sell a cure for menopausal symptoms, but how this is when you enlighten them as to how, what you do works and can help them alleviate their biggest problem, which is the reason why they come and seek you out for care. When you enlighten people, you help them to see clearly how you and your services can help solve their problems. So there’s a number of ways that you can enlighten your prospects. You could have enlightened them through a lead magnet or a live or online event, or a trading, a long form sales letter, or landing pages and email secrets, or even in video. Okay. So ask yourself is your marketing campaign, piquing, your prospects, curiosity, right? Getting them curious about you, and then in lightening them as to how you can solve their problems, right?
And how you can help them thrive and improve their lives. So now that you’ve built the trusted relationship by stimulating curiosity, and then lightening them, you then have to ask for their commitment and getting patients to commit to care. This is the Holy grail, right? And it’s relatively easy to get patients in, but it’s a whole different story when it comes to getting them to commit to care plans. And there’s two reasons why prospects may not commit to care and why they fall out of care too easily. One is that you may have asked for their commitment to early in the relationship, right? This happens when it’s clearly too early. When, you know, before you’ve really laid the other foundations out there before you’ve gone through the curiosity and enlightenment stages. And we’re all guilty of asking our patients to pay us for care before we get them to recognize and interest us with their care.
It’s like asking someone to get married after you meet them once or twice, right. It takes time to properly cultivate the relationship before you are all in. And second reason why patients don’t commit is simple. You just don’t ask for the sale, right? And this is all too common in my friends asking for the sale feels too smarmy for many of us introverted types, right? But the sale will never happen if you don’t ask for it. And I’m very familiar with this scenario from working with hundreds of practitioners over the years, the majority of them felt uncomfortable asking for the sale, asking patients to commit to long-term care. And I get it. I did the same thing. It was hard for me to ask for this LTU because I didn’t want to get rejected. I didn’t want to come off as, as salesy and pushy.
And I understand where you’re coming from. If that’s relates to you, but peaking our prospect’s curiosity and gradually enlightening them to, uh, to them greatly increases the chance that they will commit to care with you. So you have to invite them to commit at the pace that feels natural for any healthy relationship in order for it to form properly. So people don’t want to be enlightened about something until they’re curious about it. And until they are enlightened about how you can help them survive and thrive and overcome their problems, they will never commit. So you’ve got to progress them through each stage in the correct order. And here’s a couple of examples of getting, um, uh, commitment. Okay. So one, you can ask people, you meet at a health screening to come in for stress reduction treatment, or having a schedule now button on your website, or a call now button on your website or asking for their commitment straight.
When you deliver your patient’s report of findings to them, sales, email campaigns. And even there are specific conversion tactics that you can employ to get people to commit to care all this information. It can be found in a really great book that I came across, uh, by Donald Miller called marketing made simple. It’s a great book. If you haven’t seen this book or came across this book, check it out. Um, it can really enlighten you, um, about different stages of growing your practice and different aspects of moving patients through these, this, this curiosity, enlightenment and, um, and commitment phase. Okay. So as we move forward, there’s four things that I want you to keep in mind. Okay. And these, if you don’t get anything out of today’s training, just ask yourself these questions. Does your website or your emails or your conversation with patients peak their curiosity.
Okay. Are you earning your prospects and patients trust by enlightening them about how you solve their problems and how you help them thrive? Not somebody else down the street, how you can do that. And are you inviting prospects to take the next steps to schedule a call with you? Okay. So keep those in mind. I think I said there were four of them. There’s actually three of those. So if you know, hopefully you have answers for those three questions. I just put out to you. If you don’t feel free to reach out, I’d love to help you formulate some answers and some conclusions about that. So let’s talk about the, um, the, the five pieces of your, uh, your, the five checklist to help simplify your marketing. But this should really be called the five pieces of your marketing funnel. And I knew that if I called it a funnel, many of you don’t even know what a funnel is, except something that you could use for baking or cooking or pouring liquids into things.
But, um, I want to enlighten you about this because there’s five parts of, of, of, of, of a simple marketing funnel. And they all incorporate that curiosity, that enlightenment and that commitment phase. So, um, the five components that I’m going to briefly talk about here are a one-liner part of your website, lead magnets, nurture email campaigns, and sale email campaigns, and all of these elements work together to guide that potential prospect through the relationship phases that we just talked about. So your one-liner is what starts to build curiosity, right? And then you move that potential prospect through this enlightenment phase, um, onto your website, your lead magnet, or your nurture mails. And finally, you’ll ask them for a commitment using a sales and email sequence. So checklist number one is to create your one-liner okay. And there’s a couple of parts to creating your one-liner.
And this is a concise statement that clearly explains what you offer. And this is a powerful tool that you can use to make potential prospects curious about your practice. And it’s composed of three parts it’s composed of the problem, your solution, and the result. So part one is the problem, right? You always have to start by describing the problem that your product or service solves a clearly stated problem creates curiosity in what you have to offer. And it’s what helps potential prospects decide whether or not that you could help them survive and thrive and overcome their problems. So, for instance, the problem is that people are in pain, or they want to start a family, or they are wanting to get be less stressed or have a more robust immune system. And these are problems that your prospects may be contemplating and dealing with. And the first thing that you need to do is to identify the main problems that your prospects may be suffering from and are seeking relief for.
And this is usually done when you develop your ideal patient profile. So what kind of problems can you solve to help alleviate the pain points that your patients are feeling and experiencing? Okay. Part two is the solution. Once you define the problem, you’ve got to connect the problem with your solution. For instance, if you’re going after people who are looking to get out of pain, what is the solution that you offer to get them out of pain that somebody else does not right? Is it the special lasers that you use? Is it a Dr. Tan treatment that you offer? Or can it be the herbs or the poultices or the topicals that you use? What is your solution to help them achieve the solution that they are looking for? Okay. And your solution needs to be different and distinct from the acupuncturist down the street, right?
This is your unique selling proposition. This is what sets you apart from your competition. Okay. Part three is the result, right? This is where you have to explain the benefit or the outcome that your prospects will receive during using your services. Right? You need to get crystal clear on how the prospect’s life will be improved when they use your solution. When they choose you, when they choose your services, right? Will they be able to pick up their child? Pain-free um, you know, because there are no longer, they no longer hurt, right? Will they ever be able to avoid COVID or the common cold, because they’re receiving special immune boosting treatments from you, will they be able to finish their next triathlon because they’re need no longer hurts? What result will you be offering? Can you provide that? Another practitioner can not. Okay. So together part one through three that we just talked about, help you define your one-liner.
And here’s a couple of quick examples. Um, most couples trying to have a child are stressed. When you think about fertility treatment at Joe’s acupuncture, fertility clinic, our fun and welcoming clinic puts at ease. So they aren’t stressed, enjoy their treatments and create happy and stress-free families. And another example is many practitioners feel overwhelmed when starting or growing their practice. Acupuncture media works. We dispense hopeful advice, proven tactics and successful marketing strategies. So you can confidently take action to move your practice forward. So once you refine your one-liner use it everywhere, put it on your business card, um, front and center on your website, uh, as your email signature printed on your wall of your clinic, you know, use it in your profile descriptions on your social media accounts, anywhere you come up with, put your one-liner okay. Check list. Number two is to wireframe your website.
Once a prospect is curious about your solution, they need an opportunity to learn more about you, right? So these, these days, the best place for people to do that is your website, right? If you’re lucky enough to have a landing pages on your website, which are powerful tools, could, that could be used to enlighten prospects on how you can help them. So this is, is when you enlighten them, how you solve their most pressing problems, right? This is where that enlightenment part comes in. This is where that, that light of, Oh, I see how Jeffrey can help me with my headaches clicks on and patients. And they begin moving down that path towards trust, towards commitment, because you enlighten them a little more. So there’s, um, there’s a couple areas on, uh, you know, aside from this one liner at the top of, you know, your website and everywhere else that you could put it, it’s gotta be highly visible.
There’s no set order for these sections. And, um, uh, you, you know, but you’ve got to just make sure that you express them somewhere when somebody hits your website, that they can see that, okay, check list, number three, build a lead magnet. And most people that visit your website are unlikely to return if they don’t take an action step right away. So a lot of them will quickly forget about your practice and when you have to offer. So it’s essential that you have a mechanism for capturing contact information and prospects. Most visitors don’t want to share their email address. So you’ve got to come up with like a strong incentive or a bribe that we call it in the industry. Something, um, you know, that will get them to, if they’re not ready to schedule or call right away, that, that it take, gets them to take action in a free guide or a PDF or a video series about acupressure or some product samples are really good.
The magnets. Okay. So a couple ideas around lead magnets are like five mistakes. People make trying to boost their immune system, seven things to get right before you start your fertility treatments, learn the three most powerful acupressure points to eliminate headaches for good, et cetera. So those are some ideas, um, the different types of lead magnets that you could start employing in your practice. And once you create a lead magnet and you need to start promoting it, okay. So consider creating an advertising budget on Facebook and just driving traffic there. Checklist number four, four is to create a nurture campaign and this nurture campaign nurture all the leads and all your prospects that have opted into your funnel, right? It delivers continuous value and fosters a deep relationship with your prospects over time, right? Maybe they’re not ready to schedule right away, but, uh, but they are reading your emails or they’re aware that you can help with this condition and that condition because you send them an email or content around that.
So, um, you know, so that’s important to have a specific email nurture campaign in place that helps stimulate awareness and the talks about the depth and the breadth as to what you can do and how you can help your prospects. Okay. And checklist number five is to make sure that you have a plug in sales camp and a sales campaign basically closes the deal, right? So you, you, you, you, it’s what you, the nurture campaign adds value as content builds trust, but a sales campaign is focused on getting people to schedule. Okay. And that’s all it really is. It’s simply about getting clear on your product or your services that you’re trying to sell and creating a campaign and emails, literally emails around that, that go out that are asking to get people to commit to care or asking them to actually literally come in, are actually asking them to call you.
So, the first thing to do is to set up your lead magnet. So you can start attracting, interested, interested prospects, write out your nurture campaign to nurture them on the backend, and then keep continuing with them ways to add value and insight and inspiration, and then wrap it up with a good, um, good sales emails that really speak to them in the language that you’ve been talking to them about. Um, and, um, and can help solve their problems. So, um, couple of things, before I go is keep this in mind. Right? What problems do you solve for your prospects and patients, right? What will your prospect’s life look like after they come see you? How would their life be different? How are their life be better? What will their, um, you know, what will their life look like if they didn’t come see you? And what does somebody need to do next in order to take the next steps with you, right.
Schedule or call and so on. So those four questions are really important to consider. Okay. So thanks for joining me. Thank you, AAC for inviting me back here. If you guys, hopefully you guys received some inspiration, some insights today, uh, courage you to reevaluate your plans and make some actual strategies and yeah. And get out there and make marketing happen. Okay. The world needs more practitioners like you. And if you’re interested in sending up like free 15 minute mentoring and discovery, call shoot an email at Jeffrey, J E F F R E Y at acupuncture, media works.com and say, you know, free mentoring discovery call. I’ll get back to you as soon as possible. Um, and for those of you that are interested in the ebook that I put together called the, um, resetting your practice for 2021 and how to get more patients on your table, you can go to Acumedia, A C U M E D I A.US/reset2021.
So it’s www.Acumedia.US/reset2021. I will take that link and put that below here. And you guys are awesome. You know, the world needs you. And I just want to leave you with this one, thought that on the tip of every single insertion you do, and every single needle you do, there’s an angel. So you are changing lives for the better with those angels on the tips of your needles. And that was something that one of my teachers said to me back in the day and still resonates with me. So stay beautiful. You guys are awesome. And thank you so much for the AAC for inviting me back here to discuss yet some more marketing materials with you.