Click here to download the transcript.

Disclaimer: The following is an actual transcript. We do our best to make sure the transcript is as accurate as possible, however, it may contain spelling or grammatical errors.  Due to the unique language of acupuncture, there will be errors, so we suggest you watch the video while reading the transcript.

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.

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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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Disclaimer: The following is an actual transcript. We do our best to make sure the transcript is as accurate as possible, however, it may contain spelling or grammatical errors.  Due to the unique language of acupuncture, there will be errors, so we suggest you watch the video while reading the transcript.

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.

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