I am really looking forward to talking with you about a really simple way to evaluate your own marketing called the Four Quadrants.
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Hi there, I am Michelle Grasek, the host of the Acupuncture Marketing School podcast, and today I am really looking forward to talking with you about a really simple way to evaluate your own marketing called the Four Quadrants. And before we dive in, I want to thank the American Acupuncture Council for the opportunity to speak with you today.
I absolutely love marketing, and I really believe that marketing is a great tool to help us. help more people. So it’s always nice to see you here, and thank you again to the AAC, and let’s go to the slides. So as I mentioned, we are going to take a bird’s eye view of your marketing through the lens of the four quadrants.
And this is a really nice, simple way to assess your marketing and make sure that it is balanced, and also hopefully give you some ideas for areas where your marketing might need a little work or where you’re doing well already. So let’s get right into it. The four marketing quadrants that I like to use when I’m working with marketing students and clients are searchability, Referrals and internal and external marketing.
And I originally learned the idea of creating a marketing map like this or having marketing quadrants from a friend of mine, another marketing strategist. Her name is Kate Matheson. She’s super. But the way that I approach it is a little bit different and I find that this works well for us as acupuncturists.
So what do each of these sections mean? So searchability is really about your digital searchability. How easy is it to find your business? How easy is it to connect with you and to make an appointment? And then referrals is pretty straightforward. I find that people need the least help with referrals.
That’s usually where most people’s patients are coming from. And of course, this can be from professional relationships or from current or past patients. And then there’s internal marketing, which is everything that you are doing to nurture and retain the patients that you have, as well as the methods that you’re taking to reactivate previous patients.
And then external marketing is really what most people think about when we talk about marketing. So these are. Action steps that you take to get visible in front of your ideal patients. And you really want to think about this as showing up where your patients spend time. And this could be in the real world or in the digital world.
From a TCM standpoint, a lot of people like to think about external marketing as yang, so it requires energy and activity and action, and you’re, you’re putting yourself out there, you’re trying to get visible, whereas your internal marketing you could think of as yin, It’s internal just yin, right?
It’s very nurturing and it helps you maintain what you have already built. So sometimes that helps people think about these concepts. And what I’m going to ask you to do today is to use this map to do a sort of casual self assessment of where you are putting your marketing energy already. where you think most of your patients are coming from and any quadrants that could maybe use some more energy and attention.
Okay? The goal is to have your efforts be balanced across all four quadrants and that way you can have patients coming in from multiple sources. Let’s take a look at each of these quadrants. The first is searchability, and what I’ve done in each quadrant is I’ve given you some items that you can mentally check off, okay?
And that will give you a, at least a broad idea of, quote, how you’re doing in each quadrant. And some of these activities are ongoing, whereas others might be something that you haven’t. Get established, it’s in place, and you’re happy with it, and it doesn’t need to be changed. For example, your website.
Maybe you have your website, it looks great you could just check it off, right? It doesn’t need to be ongoing with updates or anything like that, okay? So something to think about as we’re going through each quadrant is mentally checking off the different areas to give you an idea of what needs work and what you’re doing well with already.
So searchability, again, is digital searchability. So this really has two parts. One is assessing your brand presence, and the other is assessing how well you rank in a Google search. How high you come up towards the top of a Google search. So if you were to type your name or your business name into Google, probably what would pop up is any listings you have in local directories for your business, your website, of course, your Google business profile, your social media, and any ads that you might be running like Google ads, for example.
And so all of that gives you a snapshot of your brand and what it might look like to someone who is searching for you on Google. And you just want to do a quick assessment about whether you feel like this snapshot of your brand represents your business the way you would like it to. Okay. So that’s one piece of searchability.
And then the other piece is, if you Google acupuncture near me, how close to the top are you in that list? Okay. And I have a couple quick tips for you to improve your searchability. So let me skip forward here. So the first before we get into this, let’s talk about how Google works.
Google’s goal is to provide the most accurate and most relevant answer to any query that is typed in. So when someone asks a question, Google wants to be able to give the best possible answers in response so that people continue using Google. Do you remember Ask Jeeves? That was a long time ago.
With some of the old school search engines, you might type in a question, and the responses that came back might be a little odd. You were like, okay that’s not really what I was asking. Whereas, Google, as a search engine, wants to always be number one. And to do that, it has to always give the person who asks the question, the best possible answers that they find relevant.
And so everything you’re doing in the searchability quadrant is really about helping Google help you, okay? Providing Google with enough information that it knows when you are, your business is a really good answer to a question that’s been asked, okay? And one of the ways you can do that is by making sure all of your listings in the directories are identical.
And that means identical address. Phone, business name, website, and hours. And really the things that tend to, over time, not be identical are address and hours. Because we set up our listings, and then a couple years later we have totally different hours. Maybe we’ve moved. And they just don’t match up anymore.
And Google is actually very specific about your address. You can’t say that you’re in suite two on like yelp. com and then not say suite two in other listings. And I know this is quite nitpicky, but it is very easy to fix. Go into all of your listings, make sure your address and your hours are identical.
And this helps Google to know that your business is active and the consistency helps Google to know that you are active. Your business is a good response to a search query, okay? As opposed to someone whose information is random all across the web, it’s not going to have as much confidence.
returning that business as the answer to a query. Okay. And then the other thing you can do to help your searchability is to completely flesh out your Google business profile. And one section that people often ignore that can be very helpful is the Q& A section. So you can ask and answer questions on your Google business profile as the business owner, but it doesn’t show that you are the person asking and answering, because that would look cheesy, right?
It’s anonymous. I recommend asking and answering all the frequently asked questions that people normally ask or might be thinking of when they are deciding whether or not to come to you as their acupuncturist if they’re trying to decide between a couple people. And some of these questions are basic.
What is parking like? Do you take my insurance? Answer those questions, of course. And then if you have a specialty, make sure to ask a question relevant to the specialty. So if your specialty is working with kids with ADHD, for example, really specific, you could have a question be, do you do acupuncture for kids with ADHD?
And then you would answer it and say, yes, absolutely. I have this extra training. These are some approaches I like to take, etc. Because then if someone puts into Google Acupuncture for children with neurodivergence or ADHD, etc. Google’s going to say, I know the answer. I know the most perfect business.
That is the answer to this question. Okay. And then it’s going to bump you up to the top. Okay. So those two things are pretty simple, but it can be very helpful in terms of your searchability. So referrals, we’re not going to spend too much time here. As I mentioned, most people feel pretty comfortable and confident that most of their new patients are from referrals.
So I want you to think of think of it this way, this quadrant. Can you answer yes to these questions? So do your professional contacts and your patients know that you’re accepting new patients? Is that something you ever Talk about either verbally, is it written anywhere? Have you ever had that conversation with them?
And do you ever ask for referrals? And again, this could be verbally or it could be written somewhere. It could be posted in your office. The thing with marketing is we are often trying to insert an idea into people’s mind to give them a little light bulb moment later on. It’s easy to assume I run a business.
Of course, people know I’m accepting new patients. Maybe they don’t. Honestly, people are probably thinking their own stuff, right? Are they gonna make? tacos for dinner or spaghetti. They’re not thinking about sending you referrals, but if you make it a point to tell them that you’re accepting new patients, you’re looking for referrals, that process is going to be ongoing in their brain for when they have an opportunity to help you.
Okay? So I think it’s helpful to have a basic it’s a two or three sentence script that you can say verbally and the script is really unique to you, right? It’s so that it rolls off your tongue. So for example, if you love treating knee pain and you are You know, you have a patient who you just treated them for knee pain and maybe they’re only going to come back if something’s bothering them.
You could say it was really great working with you. I love treating knee pain patients. If you have any friends or family in the future who are experiencing the same thing, let me know. Please think of me. I would love to help them. And then give them a card. Okay, so you’re putting the idea in their head.
And then you can also make sure you have a sign in your office and put in your email signature that you’re accepting new patients. I’m sure you’ve seen some signs. They say things like, the getting a referral is like the highest honor from a current patient. Any way you want to phrase that is super, just so it’s very clear.
Okay, internal marketing. And I know I’m going fast. This is a lot of concepts in a short amount of time, but I really think it’s going to be helpful. Internal marketing, again, is everything that you are doing. To retain and nurture the patients you have and to reactivate old patients, because research shows it’s seven to eight times easier to reactivate a previous patient than to get a new patient.
So this is low hanging fruit, right? Keep the people you have and then reactivate the old ones. So one of the ways that you can think about internal marketing is to It’s creating a really great experience for your patients from the moment that they initially contact you all the way through their treatment and then being discharged.
So as a baseline, what I recommend is go through the new patient process yourself and see if anything feels clunky, if anything is duplicated, just try to streamline it. And then this sounds corny, but it’s really helpful if you haven’t done it in a long time. Sit in the places where your patient would sit, right?
Like at checkout, sit in the seat where they are usually. Sit in their spot in the treatment room, give yourself a treatment on the table, right? Just make sure everything’s comfy as a baseline and then ask yourself, How can I elevate this experience in a way that would be valuable or meaningful to my ideal patients?
Because if you think about the last time you were at a business or an event, and it felt really special, you were like, wow, this is great. What did you do? You probably took a picture. You put it on Instagram or you went home and you texted a friend and said, Hey, I went to this place today and it was so great.
I think you’d really like it. Or you’re talking to a family member and saying, I just had the, I went to this awesome place. Let me tell you about it. The point of this is when we say everything is marketing is that a really nice This kind of special experience makes people talk about your business, right?
They’re sharing it on social media. They’re talking about it in real life. They’re more likely to refer to you. Okay. So if this quadrant interests you, I recommend going that route and seeing how you can elevate the experience at your office slightly in ways that would, again, be meaningful to your ideal patients.
And then, just make sure you have a system for reactivating previous patients. This is actually, it doesn’t have to be fancy. The system is just blocking out time on your calendar every, I’ll say, 8 weeks. And then, going back and saying, Okay, are there any patients in the past 8 weeks who dropped off the calendar?
Maybe they got sick, they said they would reschedule, but they didn’t. And then reach out to them in the method that they like to be contacted. So if they always text you or call for an appointment, that’s how you reach out to them because that’s what makes them comfortable and they’re more likely to answer you that way, okay?
And you could be very direct and simply say, I noticed you haven’t been on the calendar in a while, I was wondering if you’d like to get back on the schedule. Or you could offer a little bit of value. And you could say, I recently read this article or this book. It made me think of you, or I thought you’d find it really useful.
Here’s the link. And then that can naturally start a conversation about whether they want to come back in. Okay. So just some things to think about for your internal marketing. And then this last section, unfortunately we don’t have enough time to go through all of these. I’ll highlight a couple, but.
The external marketing, again, is your young marketing. It is the effort that you make to get in front of your ideal patients. So we are thinking about where your ideal patients hang out, both in real life and the digital world. And so there’s many ways that you could get in front of them. And this might, what you choose might depend on your personality and your strengths, what you like doing.
If you’re more extroverted, then networking is a great choice. If you prefer writing, then content creation could be a great choice. So let’s run through these really quickly. Collaborations and educational workshops are wonderful because Hey! All you have to do is email other business owners locally that you would like to work with and just tell them that you’re open to collaboration.
And you don’t have to have an idea for how you might work together right away. Maybe you do, maybe you want to do an acu yoga class at the local yoga studio, right? But maybe there is like a florist or a garden center, and you want to work with them, you can just let them know I’m open for collaboration, I would love to brainstorm how we could work together, and usually people will say yes, because it’s a win, right?
They know that Whatever event you guys host together, you’re both going to be advertising it. So they are going to get in front of your audience, your email subscribers, your social media followers, and then you are going to get exposed to their audience. Okay. So again, it’s a win and I think it’s a really nice way to get in front of an interested local audience, people who might really become your patients.
Okay, and then other options include, as I mentioned, content creation. So this could be blogging, YouTube videos social media counts as content creation, of course, podcasting. Whenever you’re creating content, especially blogging, YouTube, and podcasting, think about it as a You are curating a library of content that showcases your approach to the medicine and potential patients could binge that library and in the process get a really good idea if you are a great fit to be their acupuncturist.
Okay, so that’s one way to think about it. Of course, there’s email newsletters, there’s leaving postcards or brochures at local businesses. I think Most people have the best luck leaving postcards at nonprofits and community organizations areas where people are looking for referrals, right? Like they often need some help and if they can refer someone out, then that relieves a little bit of the burden on them.
It’s it takes a village idea. So they’re usually happy to have your info at their location. And then there’s Classic networking, there’s getting interviewed on local media social media of course, and running ads all allow you to get visible wherever your potential patients spend time.
Think about all of these things and if if you are like mentally checking things off. You might have other marketing that you’re doing that falls under this category that’s not listed, but that’s okay. Just mentally add it and give it a check mark, right? Because there are dozens and dozens of creative ways that you can get visible in front of your ideal patients.
So if you are doing other things, not on this list, give yourself credit for those. Okay, so now you can think about each of the quadrants where what areas need a little more energy and attention. What are you doing well already? And remember that, if marketing ever makes you feel uncomfortable or you worry about coming across as pushy or sleazy, keep in mind that marketing is just a tool that allows you to reach more people and help them.
Okay. It’s, that’s all it is. And I always encourage my marketing students to first of all, know that you don’t have to do marketing that you don’t like. And, try different things until you hit on something you do because marketing requires consistency over time, and it’s pretty hard to do marketing.
consistently if you don’t enjoy it. So focus on what you like so that you can continue and you don’t feel burnt out and you can feel good about your marketing. Okay? So I hope you find this really helpful. Always. If you have questions, I would love to chat with you. I love talking about marketing clearly.
You can send me an email at michelle at michellegrasek. com