And that is part of what I wanted to talk about today, is not just why is Target Market worth your time, but how you can use the information from a Target Market worksheet or activity and apply it to your marketing in a very practical way.
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Hi there, my name is Michelle Grasek. I am really excited to be here with you today to talk about some core concepts in marketing if we haven’t met before. I am the host of the Acupuncture Marketing School podcast and I’m a practicing acupuncturist. In upstate New York, and I’ve been teaching marketing in our industry for about nine years.
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And today we’re going to talk about how to apply the concepts of target market to make your marketing more effective. 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, talking about marketing. I really believe that Effective, excellent marketing is a really important way that we can reach more patients and have a much bigger impact in our communities.
So let’s dive into this topic. Let’s go to the slides.
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So the reason that I wanted to start with a discussion of target market there are several reasons. The first is that whenever I teach marketing, I like to do it in a very linear fashion, right? Each piece for really effective and holistic marketing. builds on the piece before it, right? And so Target Market and a concept called Ideal Patient Avatar, which we’ll talk about in a moment, are the first steps in really good marketing.
Okay. So I wanted to start at the beginning with this core concept. And I also wanted to talk about Target Market because I understand It’s a very unsexy topic that really doesn’t get a lot of love. Most of my marketing students and marketing clients let me know that they feel like target market is a purely theoretical exercise and they’ll do a target market worksheet, but then they have no idea how to actually apply it when they go to put together their marketing.
And that is part of what I wanted to talk about today, is not just why is Target Market worth your time, but how you can use the information from a Target Market worksheet or activity and apply it to your marketing in a very practical way. Okay, so that is where we are going today. Again, a quick overview.
We’ll talk about some target market basics. So we’re all on the same page. We’ll discuss why it’s so important and why you should spend some time on it, even if it seems like a kind of dry theoretical exercise. And then I will share pretty quickly. Basically my number one practical tip for actually being able to use what you discover in a target market exercise in your marketing to make your marketing so much more effective.
So let’s cover some definitions. You might already be familiar with this, but again, just to make sure we’re all on the same page, target market, of course, is a Big picture description of a population of people that you would really love to treat, right? These are the people you want to become your patients and Target Market is generally very broad.
It’s typically a lot of demographic information age, sometimes gender, location, etc. And we’ll talk about some of the details of that later on. But the most important thing is Target Market is it’s a very broad description of a group of people. Whereas Ideal Patient Avatar, which sometimes I’ll refer to it as IPA just to save some words, is a very detailed description, like nitty gritty details of a single person who fits into any The bigger picture of your target market, right?
It’s one person who is within your target market population. And this could be a real person, it could be imagined or some combination of both, but this is again, just a very detailed description of this person. Okay? So just, So that we have both of those concepts in mind. So let’s talk about why target market matters, even though it can feel just like a dry exercise that’s theoretical, right?
Like, why is it not just theoretical? When you do it right, target market should really determine the direction of all of your marketing, right? Once you’ve identified the people that you’re speaking to, then you know what images to use. What messages to share with them, what tone of voice to use, sometimes even what vocabulary is going to resonate with them.
And so it’s really helping you make all of your marketing decisions. So in that way, it should certainly make your marketing easier, right? If you are sitting in front of your computer screen and you don’t know what to type for an Instagram post, knowing your target market is certainly going to help with that as well as many other types of marketing.
And. Target market also makes your marketing so much more efficient and effective because you are going to be speaking directly to the people who you want to be your patients in a way that gets them to sit up and take notice because you understand them and their needs. And so that will make people take action at a higher rate.
And so as a result, Your marketing should be more effective overall, and it’s more efficient because that means you have to spend less time doing marketing because the marketing that you’ve already created is working harder for you. And Target Market also helps you create really beautiful, authentic marketing because once really once you know your ideal patient avatar, you can get into the head of your ideal patient. Then you understand their goals and their values, the outcomes that they would like from treatment, and you can really speak to them on this deeper level in your marketing. And help them understand, what can you do for them that’s going to bring them towards their goals?
And that is going to really, oops, sorry about that. That’s really going to connect with them deeply. Okay? And that connection, again, is what makes people sit up and take notice and makes them take action. much more quickly than responding to a broader, more vague message, okay? And when I say take action, I’m almost always talking about either clicking your Schedule Now button, or calling your office, or setting up a free consult.
Whatever it is that’s the first step in working with you. And there’s this concept in marketing where we always say if you’re speaking to everyone, you’re not really speaking to anyone. So what does this mean? It’s just referring to the idea that if you have a really broad, vague marketing message, something that’s very watered down, then it’s not catching the attention of any particular person or group of people.
And As a result, people might not know if what you’re saying actually applies to them. So a big example could be saying that, having marketing about pain management. Now there’s nothing wrong with that, right? But it’s very vague. We know that there’s so many different.
Conditions, and symptoms, and specialties within pain management. And what’s more effective, for example, is if you talked, we’ll say, you’re creating an Instagram post. If you discussed carpal tunnel, or knee pain, or runner’s shin splints, right? Then you’re getting much more specific, and the person who has runner’s shin splints is going to sit up and say, Wow, I had no idea that acupuncture could help with that.
That’s what I need, right? So it’s resonating with them deeply. Whereas if you just say you write a post about pain management, they might not connect that to their specific symptom or experience. Okay? So if you’re speaking to everyone, you’re not really speaking to anyone because your message
And I have a friend who is a marketing copywriter, excuse me, in Australia, and she always phrases it like this. She’d rather be someone’s piña colada than everyone’s cup of tea. And she’s assuming that everyone likes tea. I think, I guess they drink a lot of tea in Australia. But the idea here is that it’s better to attract a specific person, right?
Cause not everybody likes piña coladas. It’s a specific group of people. Then to just blast out a broad message that doesn’t really make anyone pay attention. And again, the result of all of this is that it helps the people that you really love to treat, the ones who have the symptoms and conditions that you’re passionate about, it makes them feel seen and heard and understood.
And this creates that connection and builds trust. And a huge part of what we’re doing with our marketing is trying to get our audience to trust us enough to Let us put needles in them, and to make a financial investment in acupuncture. Okay, so this trust is really what makes people more likely to take that action, right?
Make an appointment, give your office a call. So all of this is how Target Market and your ideal patient avatar come together to make your marketing more effective and more efficient. So that is really why it is worth your time and your energy. Okay. And so typically first, when you are doing these exercises, you would define your target market.
It’s very broad. And then you would decide on an ideal patient who would be your avatar. Okay. And you would typically give them a name and your goal is to make them real to you. Okay, so some concepts that I’m sure everyone is pretty familiar with. Target market is mostly demographic information, right?
You’re describing a population of people. And I would add to this, at the bottom, I would add symptoms or condition as well. Okay. Because that kind of helps make this exercise less sometimes students tell me defining their target market feels very kind of cold. They’re just listing this demographic information.
Try to think about what do all these people have in common? It’s probably the symptoms and conditions that you’re passionate about treating, right? So make sure you put that on there. And then get into the nitty gritty and define your Ideal patient avatar. So this is the most perfect patient you can imagine for your practice.
They are they listen to your advice. Maybe they’re curious about Chinese medicine. They feel better when you give them a treatment. They come back for their wellness visits. They’re willing to invest in their health. They’re willing to make the financial investment in you, as well as to make the personal investment in themself to follow your instructions so they can actually feel better.
Whatever it is that is the perfect patient for you you’re imagining and describing that person. Okay? So if 40 patients for you would be full time in your week, imagine 40 of this person, that’s who you’re trying to describe. And of course this person could be real or imagined. I find that most of my Marketing students come up with some combination of a real patient who has these extra imagined characteristics that really make them perfect.
So you’re getting into the nitty gritty and making this person feel real to you and if you look up Ideal Patient Avatar or sometimes it’s called an ICA, an Ideal Client Avatar. If you look up those workbooks online, they’re going to ask you very specific things like, What does this person like to read?
How do they spend their disposable income? Do they have pets? What are their pets names? What charities do they donate to? What do they do in their free time? Et cetera, et cetera. Go really quite detailed. And the reason that we’re doing this is because you want to give this person life inside your mind, right?
Your ideal patient avatar is the person that you are speaking directly to in all of your marketing. Okay? So whenever you sit down to For example, write a paragraph for your website, or write an Instagram post, or put together a reel, whatever it might be. You are holding an image of this ideal patient avatar in your mind, and you are answering their questions in the way that you would answer them in real life.
You are thinking about, what are the questions that this person would have? What are the Doubts and barriers that prevent them from making an appointment and how could I address them to specifically motivate this person to make an appointment and sometimes when I discuss this with my marketing clients their question is Won’t that only attract a very narrow segment of the population or just this one person?
And the answer is, the beauty of this whole exercise is no. What happens is you end up attracting anyone who shares the values, the goals and the outcomes that they want from treatment as your ideal patient avatar, right? Anyone who has the same symptoms or condition and really resonates with the the ideals of your avatar is going to hear that in your marketing.
Okay. So I hope this is making sense. You are. Thinking about your marketing in terms of answering questions and writing text, creating marketing that resonates with this ideal patient, this single person, but it’s actually going to resonate broadly with anyone who has anything in common with your avatar.
Okay. And so that really makes your marketing effective. I can’t I can’t Emphasize that enough that is really what shifts your marketing from being like good or really pretty good to being Excellent. To being very effective. That’s what shifts it from from, it makes it that you have to do less marketing overall, which is what we talked about in the beginning, right?
So the marketing that you’ve created in the past continues working hard for you. because it has this specificity, right? Because you are really connecting with your target audience connecting with their values, with the outcomes that they want from treatment, et cetera. Okay. And so the most important practical tip that I want to share with you today is how do you use your Ideal patient avatar that you just spent all this time creating and making real in your mind.
So what do you do with that information? Because often I’ll tell people like, oh, use, imagine your IPA and use that to write your website. And people are like, that’s great. I don’t know how to do that in real life. What does that mean? So I have an exercise with you and it’s It sounds silly.
I promise it is effective. It works so well. So the exercise is simple. Make sure that you’ve named your ideal patient avatar. I find that is helpful for most people. So let’s say that your avatar’s name is Sam. You and let’s say you are writing the Frequently Asked Questions page on your website, and you’re struggling with some writer’s block, you don’t know what to say so what you’re going to do is you are going to imagine in your mind this fully fleshed out ideal patient avatar, Sam, as if they were sitting in front of you.
Try to really sink into not only like yourself and you’re listening to Sam, right? If they’re sitting across from you, but put yourself in that person’s shoes and think about what are the questions that Sam would ask you based on, the symptoms and conditions that, Sam has, and their, again, their values their goals for their life, their the outcomes from treatment that they would like.
Based on that, what would Sam ask me about acupuncture? What would be the barriers that are preventing Sam from getting acupuncture? What might be their doubts or their worries? And then how would I answer Sam in a way that is compelling specifically to them to help them understand how acupuncture can be effective?
is worth their time and their energy, right? Like why should Sam specifically get acupuncture for XYZ condition? Okay. And when you do this exercise, as goofy as it sounds, what’s going to happen is you are going to write marketing copy that is incredibly compelling just for Sam, right? But it’s going to resonate with Sam.
Anyone who shares SAM’s values and goals, and it’s gonna speak really deeply to them, okay? And again, that’s what gets them to take action. Okay, so I only wanted to share this one tip with you today because honestly, the whole exercise of Target Market and Ideal Patient Avatar and putting it into practice with this tip, it is a little bit of a project.
And so I think it’s best to spend time focusing just on this for now and you’ll get a ton of value out of your Target Market exercises with just this one exercise.
Thank you so much for being here with me today. You are always welcome to send me questions about your marketing. My email is michelle at michelleGrasek. com and if you’d like you can check out my website. I have some free PDA classes as well as lots of free worksheets on marketing. My website is michelleGrasek.
com and you can also check out my podcast, which is Acupuncture Marketing School. So thank you again to the American Acupuncture Council for the opportunity to be here with you. Have a great day.