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Hi there, my name is Michelle Grasek and today we will be talking about building a brand for your acupuncture practice. If we have not met before, I am a practicing acupuncturist. And marketing strategist and the host of the Acupuncture Marketing School podcast. Excuse me. And before we dive in, I’d like to thank the American Acupuncture Council for the opportunity to teach you these concepts about marketing.
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I love teaching marketing and I believe really strongly that excellent marketing, really helps us reach new patients and have a bigger impact in our community. So I’m looking forward to talking with you about branding today. So let’s jump into the slides.
Let me just test out my slides. There we go. We got it. A quick overview of what we’ll be talking about today. First, we’re going to talk about why branding matters. I am the kind of person where if you give me instructions, I like to know why I’m being asked to follow them. It makes me much more likely to follow through.
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And if you are also one of those people, I think this section will be helpful for making you really commit to doing that. creating a cohesive brand for your practice. And then we’re going to talk a little bit about the psychology behind branding, which I think you’ll find a little bit fascinating.
And then we will get into some of the nitty gritty about how to actually construct a brand for your practice that brings in the kind of people who have the symptoms that you really want to treat, right? Like your ideal patients.
And let me see here. I’m having a little trouble with my arrows. So let’s start out with what is branding. Sometimes it’s called building a brand. Sometimes it’s called building a brand identity. Branding is Really, all of the visual pieces that make your business stand out from the acupuncturists down the road.
So that if they saw your brand they would know that it is your business and immediately and not the other acupuncturists down the road. For example, if they saw a flyer in a coffee shop for a Qigong class, they would know that it’s you who’s teaching the class. Okay, so it makes your business distinct, it makes you easily and quickly identifiable to your customers, and really it includes anything that represents your business visually.
So that’s usually things like your brand colors, your logo maybe the fonts that you use, the images that you use all of this comes together to make your brand recognizable. And something that we don’t talk about a lot with branding is the idea that branding also represents your business’s personality and allows you to share your values and to really connect with the people who resonate with that personality and those values.
And this is actually the Part of branding that makes it the most effective. It’s the part of branding that makes your audience or the people in your community feel like they can relate to you and your brand and take an action. And. Pretty much whenever I talk about taking an action in marketing, we’re talking about calling you to make an appointment or emailing you with questions or clicking on your schedule now button.
So when people feel like they can relate to your business, they are much more likely to take those actions. And so that’s, that piece of branding is essential and we don’t want to leave that out and only focus on the visual. Okay, so let’s talk a little bit about why branding matters. So when branding is done well and it’s consistent it looks very intentional because it is intentional, right?
Having a consistent appearance for your business across all of your social media platforms, across your website in all of your print materials that people might find at your office, like your brochure and your business card, all of that is intentional and takes Effort and energy, right? And whether people process that consciously or unconsciously, they are processing it.
And it comes across as extremely professional, which builds credibility and which builds trust. So if you think about marketing as an opportunity to build trust with your audience, having consistent branding. Everywhere that people might run into you is very trust building. Okay, again, I can’t overemphasize how professional it makes your business look, and then people are going to extrapolate that to the kind of business that you run, the kind of acupuncturist that you are, and we’ll talk about that in a little bit.
But this is a really important reason why branding is worth the effort. And then of course, branding will hopefully grab the attention of your ideal patients. So if you think about the symptoms and conditions that you really love treating, the types of patients that you love to treat, whenever you’re creating marketing, you are always focused on their perspective and how can you position your marketing.
in a way that attracts their attention, that appeals to them. And this could be visually in a brand, choosing colors and logo and even font that you think might come together in a way that is appealing to your ideal patient. And it could also be, the way that you talk about your business and acupuncture on your website.
All of that comes together to create your brand. in an effort to attract the type of patient that you’re looking for. Okay. And then as I mentioned, branding makes your business recognizable compared to other businesses or other acupuncturists that are in your community so that if they see a brochure of yours around town, they know that it’s yours, right?
And it, the reason that matters is that now they are thinking of you and maybe they don’t recognize the brand from the person down the road because They never put a brand together, right? Maybe they’re the images and the visuals that they’re using are not consistent. And so they’re not recognizable, but if you are, it really gives you a leg up because it puts your business into the mind of your audience right away.
Okay. Now they’re thinking about your practice and not the other person’s practice. And then branding, as I mentioned, There’s this really important piece where it’s not just the visuals, but it’s also about helping people understand what you stand for as a healthcare provider and how you’re going to approach taking care of them, how you approach health and wellness and this medicine.
And that is what’s going to allow them to perk up and say, That’s what I’m looking for. I feel the same way about XYZ, whatever it is that you shared, or I’m looking for a healthcare provider who will listen to me in this way. Okay. So, branding is also the opportunity to share that personality and your values like we discussed earlier.
And again, that’s what makes people deeply connect to your business and be more likely to take action and call you for an appointment. Okay. And so I keep repeating this, but it’s so important that branding is not just about the visuals. You have these two pieces, you have the appearance of your brand, and then you also have how it makes people feel.
And of course, that is the part where you’re connecting with them deeply and you’re sharing your values. And then again, this just helps build connection and trust. It makes people take action more quickly. Another reason that branding really matters is that as humans, we are hardwired to make immediate judgments based on appearances.
And so I’ll acknowledge right away, this is frustrating for most of my marketing clients and my marketing students. I totally get it, but it is built into who we are as humans and how we’ve evolved, right? So if you imagine back many years ago, if you were living outside in a forest and you had something approach you, whether it is another person or an animal, you needed to be able to assess very quickly.
Is this a threat? Is it safe? If it’s a threat, how much of a risk is it? Basically fight or flight. Should I run or can I stay? And so That is based largely on. visual appearances. And we haven’t really lost that as humans, but now we’re not necessarily assessing, is this pterodactyl going to attack me or not?
We are using that instantaneous judgment mechanism for things in our everyday life, and that includes deciding Whether or not a business is trustworthy and whether we feel safe giving them our money or if we feel safe sharing our personal health information with them. So I want to share with you this really fascinating study that was done by Stanford called the Stanford Credibility Study.
You can Google it. Basically what they did is they wanted to know how much is, design impacting whether people trust a business. So they had a lot of volunteers comb through different websites and give them a rating based on its appearance and attractiveness, its ease of use, et cetera. And, also give a rating for how well they thought the business was going to follow through on their promises as a result of just visiting their website, clicking through the different pages.
And so what they found was that good design that the individuals found attractive meant that people trusted the business. Much more, right? Like statistically significant that if someone found a website attractive and easy to navigate, they scored that business as being much higher on the scale of going to keep their promises, going to follow through and basically like worth Feeling safe investing in whatever this business offered.
Okay, so In a nutshell, I mean i’m reducing this incredible study that Stanford did into just a couple sentences, but the bottom line here is that fortunately or unfortunately People are judging your business by its appearance, and in the world, in the digital world, that really is your brand. What does your website look like?
What is your social media presence like? Is it cohesive across all of these platforms? And again, I think this is certainly unconscious in most cases, but if people are looking at your website and they decide oh, this is attractive, it’s not. They are also extrapolating that to the kind of acupuncturist that you are, right?
And we talked earlier about how good branding looks intentional, which people associate with professionalism, right? So it’s like they can tell you’re making an effort in your brand. And so that means, consciously or unconsciously to them, you are going to make an effort with them as your patient.
In some ways this is really unfair, imagine if you have a website that hasn’t been updated in a long time or it’s hard to navigate, that would mean, the opposite is that they are assuming less of your abilities as an acupuncturist or a business owner. Let’s acknowledge that’s no fun, right?
Judging a book by its cover is always cruddy, we are taught not to do that. But in this case, the best we can do with this information is to use this deeply ingrained concept to our advantage, which means creating a cohesive, attractive brand, specifically attractive to our ideal patients, so that they just have more trust in us.
from the moment that they meet our brand. Okay. So that we are not only attracting them to us, but we’re connecting with them deeply and making them more likely to take the action of setting up an appointment with us. So how do you do that? It’s, it’s not as simple as it sounds, right? Or maybe it doesn’t sound simple, but I I’m gonna break some things down for you to get you started.
So we have talked about how branding is by and large these two different pieces. You have the visual piece and then you have the the personality and the values piece that connects with people deeply. So Today, just to keep things simple and get you started, we’re going to discuss the visuals, okay? So if you don’t really have a brand, or you have one and you don’t feel confident about it, or you’re not sure it’s really attracting the right patients, or you want to rebrand, then this is a great place to start, okay?
So we’ll begin with the visuals, and before we even get into things like colors and fonts and logo, The most important thing here is that you feel like you know your ideal patient deeply. And last month I gave a presentation about target market and ideal patient and how to identify those and why it matters.
So if you missed that, I definitely recommend checking it out. It will help you understand how to define your ideal patient and then also how to use it practically in your marketing. Once you know your ideal patient really well, you’ve made them feel real to you, like you could have a conversation with this person, then you can ask yourself, what what visuals would appeal to them?
What would grab their attention? Okay, and one way that you can start this process is to ask yourself, how do you want your brand to make your ideal patient feel? So a couple different ways you could approach this. You could also ask yourself, when a patient visits my office, how do I want them to feel?
Or, what do I want the experience of interacting with my business to feel like? Whether they’re interacting with it on the phone, or on your online schedule, or if they’re like really in person in your office, what do you want that experience to feel like? So I recommend choosing three descriptive words and you can take your time with this.
I always tell people there’s no need to rush through the branding process. And, if you construct a brand and in six months you feel like, I’m not really sure I hit, hit the nail on the head. You can always go back and adjust. Okay. Your brand does not have to be permanent. It can be flexible.
The same way that your practice is flexible. I think most of us, As we mature as practitioners, the patients that we like to treat kind of shifts and changes and the way we approach the medicine changes. That’s normal. And so your brand can also shift and change with you. Okay? So take your time and come up with three descriptive words.
Maybe the words you choose are how do you want people to feel after they leave your office? Calm, refreshed, happy, something like that, right? It could be anything, okay? And so you’re going to use those words to help you pick the visuals. Okay, and so here are the visuals that I’m going to ask you to identify.
So the first thing you want to start out with is your color palette. So typically, I recommend choosing two bold colors and two dark colors. Softer or light colors. If you think about this in terms of building a website, your bold colors would be for things like headings and buttons, and then the softer colors would be for backgrounds and for layering text on top of.
So one thing you don’t want to do is have a very dark background, And then layer like white or light colored text over it. That can be hard for people with visual disabilities to read. It can be hard for older people to read, like the elderly. It can just be hard to read on a computer screen in general.
So that’s why I really recommend making sure you have some pale light colors. that still fit in with your bold colors, right? But something that you can easily put text on top of and have it be very just easy to read, right? Because there’s no point in building a beautiful brand if people cannot, Read the words, okay?
And I acknowledge that sounds very obvious, but I have seen some truly beautiful brands that people spent a lot of time and energy and money creating only to have it be actually difficult for their ideal clients. or their ideal patients to process. Okay. And one thing I would add is that in the bold colors, let’s say that you chose for your color scheme, think of like a mountain theme.
Forests at dusk, so like slate and dark purple and dark green, but then you need some lighter colors. So maybe like light blue, that sort of thing. You want to have a contrasting color for your calls to action. So in most cases, the calls to action on your website, for example, are going to be buttons. So you could choose a contrasting color of like bright green, or you could pick any The idea here is that it is literally contrasting with the bold colors that you chose, because those buttons are what you really want to draw people’s attention to, right?
The button that says, schedule now, you want to make that obvious. So on my clinic website, my brand is Red, pink, yellow. I know it sounds crazy, but part of the words that I use to describe how I want people to feel one of them was fun, right? I wanted it to feel interesting and different. And so the contrasting color that I choose for my buttons is the bright yellow.
Okay, so just to give you an idea. And of course, this is something you can play around with, right? You don’t have to be married to anything. You can install colors on your website, and then you can change them if you like. And think about, Through all of this, we are always thinking about what would appeal to our ideal patient, okay?
So same thing for the fonts. You want one bold or interesting font that you would use in headings and a logo, and then one very simple font like Times New Roman or Montserrat, Sans Serif for The text, okay? And for your bold or interesting font, don’t choose something too interesting. Again, it has to be legible in a very small version, if it was printed on something, and large, okay?
So Interesting is relative, right? Just compared to very basic text. And then of course you would use your colors and the fonts that you chose to create a logo, whether you do that on your own in Canva or you pay someone to create it for you, you can now provide them the color palette and the font that you want.
And then when you are building out the visuals for your brand, you also want to think about the images. If you are using your office photos, what are the colors that you have in your office? Those might end up being the color palette that you go with, right? Because if you are, if you have a blue treatment room and a green treatment room, those photos are going to be all over your website.
And so you might as well, Surround center your brand around those colors, okay, because they are going to be a huge part of your brand, the photos, okay? You can also get photos for free from a website like Pexels. com or Unsplash, that you could use on your website, or that you could just use as part of your brand identity to guide you.
And so let me give you an example of pulling this all together in one place so that you can assess if you have created the visual feeling that you intended. Okay. So this is called a branding style sheet where you can see we’ve brought together The logo, the fonts, the colors, and some images that represent the colors and also the feel that you want to generate for your patients.
Okay, so again, This is the very beginning of building a brand, and we’ve really only touched a little bit on that idea of connecting with people through your brand’s personality, but it’s a very good start, okay? So I recommend spending some time with this, creating something like this, like your Sorry, there we go.
Your brand sheet and then presenting it to some people that you consider to be your ideal patients and just getting their feedback. Okay? So this is a lot. Putting together a brand is a lot. I hope you have fun with it. It can be a really fun exercise, something to do if in, in all of your free time, it’s something that you can percolate on.
And of course, if you have any questions at all about ChiroSecure, Branding about marketing your practice. I am more than happy to chat with you. You can send me an email at michelle at michelleGrasek. com My website is michelleGrasek. com. I have lots of free marketing worksheets and some free PDA classes and before I go i’d like to thank the American Acupuncture Council one more time for the opportunity to be here with you today Talking about these concepts.
So I really hope they help you get more patients in your practice and I’ll see you in the next video.