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 I’m the host of the Acupuncture Marketing School podcast. And today we’ll be talking about how to use AI to generate content for your marketing so you can save time and just generally make your life easier. And before we dive into the slides, I’d like to thank the American Acupuncture Council for the opportunity to be here with you today.

All right, let’s get started.

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Okay, so let’s talk about using AI for your marketing content creation. How can you use it to be much more efficient? So very quickly, what will we be talking about today? First, why use AI for this? How is it helpful? Is it really helpful? And I also want to talk about this concept of content creation and whether it still matters.

I know everyone is drowning in a sea of content. The answer is yes, but we’ll talk about that in a moment. We’ll also talk about how to use AI and what to use it for. What are the things that you can ask it to do for you? And specifically, when I’m saying AI, I’m referring to the free version of ChatGPT.

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We’ll talk about how to create effective prompts. This is one of the most important things you can learn about ChatGPT. The better prompts you ask, the better your results will be. Hands down. And I’ll give you some examples. Why use AI for content generation? The easiest answer, the simplest answer is that it will cut down the amount of time it takes you to create content by about one fourth, okay?

It is, it will just make the process so much more efficient, and we live in a world where we are expected for marketing. To do a ton of content creation and it can be very overwhelming. It’s a bit of a hamster wheel I’m sure you’re familiar and I personally think that one of the best ways to Retain your sanity in digital marketing is to use chat GPT or other AI to help you either generate content ideas or generate the content itself and to repurpose content, which you can see is the last bullet on this list.

chat GPT can help you with repurposing. Okay, and repurposing content simply means taking something that you’ve already created or written for one platform, like a blog post, and copying and pasting it, making it some tweaks, breaking it down into parts so that you can use it on other platforms, instagram captions or email newsletters. Those are the most common ones that acupuncturists are repurposing content for and Facebook, of course, other social media. But there’s this idea that. To retain your sanity in digital marketing, you do not need to keep writing similar content over and over. You can just repurpose what you’ve already created.

That saves time to begin with. And then, asking ChatGPT to do that for you drastically cuts down on the amount of time that you need. And of course, on top of that, asking AI to write the content or help you with ideas. Cuts down on that time yet again. Okay, so really to make content creation Reasonable and manageable in the world that we live in I think both of those things are essential chat GPT and repurposing content Okay, and sometimes people ask me does content still matter as I said earlier everybody’s drowning in content There’s more articles on the internet than any one person could ever read in their lifetime.

Like why should I contribute to that? Why should I keep adding? So something I want you to think about is Google and the way that it works for a search. So Google’s purpose is to provide the best possible experience for its users. So if you type a query into Google, it wants to give you the most relevant, best answer that it thinks answers your question that you will like.

Because Google wants you to keep using it. Do you remember Ask Jeeves? Yeah, I’m dating myself, right? Ask. No one uses it. It doesn’t even exist anymore. Because other search engines were better, okay? So Google never wants to become irrelevant like that. Its goal is to provide a good user experience. So you can help Google do that by writing content for your website.

So people always ask me, is blogging is old school. It’s dead, isn’t it? So I always say no for two reasons. One, every time you publish a blog post on your website, that’s another page on your website. Google likes websites that are updated regularly because it shows to Google that this business is still active.

And it’s still relevant compared to a business. Maybe the acupuncturist down the street from you who opened their doors 10 years ago, publish their website and has not touched their website in a decade. Clearly Google is going to think that your website where you’re publishing monthly or maybe every two months publishing a blog post, it’s more active.

It’s probably going to be a more relevant, better user experience and answer the person’s question better. than a website that’s been ignored for a decade. Okay, so that’s one reason. And two is that when you are publishing content on your website, whether it’s a blog post or a more formal page on your website, you are naturally including keywords that your ideal patient would be searching for.

So if you specialize in orthopedic acupuncture for runners, for helping them you know, recover from injuries and be able to do marathons, whatever it is, you could write a series of blog posts specific to that. Like I’m a marathon runner thinking about what are the questions that this person would put into Google if they need help, if they’ve got a knee injury, right?

How long after a knee injury can I, or before I start running again? with acupuncture. Think about what are they asking and then write blog posts about those topics so that all of those keywords are on your website and you just become so relevant to Google that it brings you up towards the top of the search because you are answering those questions and you are helping the person writing the query.

You’re the answer to that query. So I’m repeating myself, I’ll move on, but that really is why blogging and content creation is relevant for you as an individual with a brick and mortar local business. Because that’s what Google wants to send your way. But it needs you to help it do that. You have to establish your relevance on your website so that Google can crawl it and understand that relevance.

Yes, blogging and content creation are still important. And just in general creating educational content for your audience. It doesn’t matter if you only have a hundred followers on Instagram, teaching them about what you do and how acupuncture can help them is always going to be relevant. And it just falls under the name of content creation.

So one question that people always ask me about AI is they’re nervous about using it. They don’t know how to use it. They don’t know what its capabilities are, how far reaching it is, these sort of things. So I always tell people to use chat GPT to your comfort level. You could ask it to do brainstorming with you or to write you an outline for a blog post or an email newsletter.

You don’t have to ask it to write the entire content piece. You could ask it to write you the whole blog post, but you don’t have to. So use it to your comfort level. And you could also think about, AI from this perspective. I find this really helpful. And an AI professional that I met last year shared this idea with me that AI is like a really eager, enthusiastic assistant.

Imagine if you had a receptionist in your office who had free time and just loved to write and kept saying, let me help you write Instagram posts. Let me help you write blog content. What? Let me write your email newsletters. You’d have to teach that person a little bit about the tone. You want them to write the concepts that are important to include or things not to say.

And you would expect them to do an enormous amount of research, right? That is what ChatGPT is doing. It’s doing an enormous amount of research to find the answers. And when you write a prompt, that is the same as you explaining to your receptionist how you want them to put this content piece together.

You’re giving them instructions so that they write something that is relevant to your business, your community, your ideal patients, your specialty, etc. Including your tone of voice and all of the details. Okay, so Try to think about chat GPT in this really positive way where it’s a smart, enthusiastic assistant that just wants to lighten your load and make your job easier.

Okay. So what can you ask ChatGPT to help you with? Honestly, the sky’s the limit. Anything that you can think of. I would say that the major things that people tend to ask for are one, brainstorming or idea generation, two, writing outlines for content, or three, writing the content itself. So you could ask ChatGPT to write you a list of maybe Two blog posts.

Basically write me a content calendar outline for this year with two topics per month. Okay, so two blog posts. It’s just an easy place to start. Or two email newsletters per month. And what would their topics be for the whole year? So before you do this, in your prompt, It’s very important that you tell ChatGPT about your business, about your target market, about your specialty, if you have one.

Basically, give it as much information as you can so that it can give you relevant results. And we’ll talk more about things to include in your prompts in a little bit. But It helps enormously the more information you can give it. It could give you an outline for a blog post. Let’s say you really wanted to write that blog post about knee injuries and recovery with acupuncture for marathon runners.

And you just have writer’s block, and you just want to get it done so that you can repurpose it into an email newsletter and send it to your list. You could ask ChatGPT to write you an outline for this blog post, okay? And then you could write it yourself, or once you have that outline you could say, okay, this is great, please don’t include this bullet point, that’s not relevant.

But please write this blog post for me and also make sure you answer the question, how many treatments do I need and why? Okay. And then it will give you the blog post. You can also, of course you can ask it to write social media captions as well. You can also take content that you already wrote, copy and paste it into chat GPT, and then ask it to repurpose that content into other formats.

So if you wrote an email newsletter, you could. put it into chat GPT and say, please repurpose this as a blog post incorporating these important keywords for my website, or please take this email newsletter and break it down into two Instagram captions. Okay. So you can ask it to do. or help you create ideas for just about anything.

You can also talk with ChatGPT. This this class is really for beginners, people who don’t have a ton of experience or maybe you’ve dipped your toe in and you didn’t get great results from ChatGPT, so we’ll talk about how to improve your prompts so you get better results. But I just want you to know, if you don’t have a lot of experience with ChatGPT, you talk to it like a person.

You ask for revisions, you can say, I like this part, but this part’s not relevant, and here’s why. And if you stay signed in, it will remember, okay, most of the things that you’re telling it. Sometimes you have to repeat, but that’s okay. For the most part, it’s going to remember important things.

If you are just dipping your toe in and you’ve never used it before, I would recommend beginning with repurposing content. So find a piece of content that you wrote that really represents your business, your ideal patient, your specialty, and copy and paste it into ChatGPT and ask it to use that as the basis for creating other kinds of content.

So if it was For example, a really great Instagram post caption that got a lot of engagement with your audience, got people asking questions, maybe you got new patients because people were asking you questions about it, and you felt like it really represented you know who you are and what you’re doing in your practice.

That’s a great place to start. So you could put it into chat GPT and say, can you please write up like repurpose this as a blog post and or as an email newsletter or based on this information, can you suggest other Instagram post topics or other topics that I could write about for my blog? So if you are new, Begin with repurposing content.

And I put that little note in the first bullet that says repurposing content can go in any direction because I often talk about starting with a blog post and then breaking that down and repurposing it into email newsletters and multiple Instagram or Facebook posts, et cetera. But you can go in the other direction.

As I just mentioned, if you have a great Instagram post or email newsletter that could become a blog post or a new page on your website. etc. So as I’ve been saying, the way that you ask ChatGPT for something is very important, and that’s called the prompt. So the more descriptive and specific you can be in your request, in your prompt, the better results you’ll need and the fewer revisions you’ll need to ask for.

Now, If you ask ChatGPT to write a whole piece of content for you, a blog post from start to finish, it’s normal to expect that you will need it, you will need it to do some revisions. And, you’ll probably still have to do some tweaks and edits, even after the revision, just to make sure it sounds like you, that it feels authentic, that you think it is really going to resonate with your ideal patients.

And that’s normal. Okay? But the better prompts you write, the less of that you will have to do. So what can you include in a prompt? Let’s go with the blog post example. That’s clearly my favorite. So you can tell first, tell chat GPT about your business, describe your ideal patient and your target market and your specialty, and then tell it.

Why you need this piece of content. What are you going to use it for? What’s its purpose? That’s important for chat GPT to know and then you can ask it to write this piece of content in a specific tone of voice for example warm, but professional or you could say friendly and warm and So let’s say you ask for professional.

Please write this blog post about XYZ in a professional tone of voice, and then you add all the other information about your business, your target market, and the purpose of the piece, and maybe it produces something that is very formal, way too professional, and you realize, oh, this is not the tone that I use on my website.

All you have to say is, actually, this is too formal in tone. Can you please write it in a more warm and friendly tone? Or you might have to use a the, excuse me, thesaurus, to figure out what are the descriptive words that you want to use until you hit on the right tone. Now, let’s say you finally land on tone that feels appropriate, right?

Like you nailed it. Write down those descriptive words that you put in your prompt so that if needed, you can ask for them again in the future. So you get a consistent tone. Okay. And you can also say to ChatGPT anything you definitely want it to include or not, okay? You can tell it how long you want something to be.

If you want an 800 word blog post, then say that. You can Take a piece of content you’ve already written. Let’s say you wrote something about acupuncture for fertility and you feel like it really represents, again, your specialty and your target market. And you can copy and paste that in there, but then give it instructions to write a different piece of content, maybe about acupuncture for PMS, and you can ask it to use that content example as a formatting.

For writing this new piece of content, okay? So that can substitute for giving it all these specific instructions about like tone of voice etc. So that it basically tries to write something like your previous piece. So you have that consistency. You can also give it specific numbers. If you have a blog post and you want Instagram to give you three, sorry if you have a blog post and you want chat GPT to give you three Instagram posts, then say so.

Okay. If you want it to give you six ideas for a subject line for an email, Ask for six. And again, don’t be afraid to ask for revisions because once chat GPT produces something for you, it will typically say, I hope this is what you’re looking for. Let me know if you need changes. And if you want changes, just say so it will do it.

instantly. And if you don’t like the changes, you can always go back and use the initial for further revisions. Okay. And lastly, I’ll say that you can use chat. You can ask chat GPT questions about itself so that you can learn how to use it better. For example, when I first started using chat GPT and I’m using the free version, so I’m not sure if this is possible in the paid version, but I had asked it, if I give you the, Web the hyperlink for a website.

Can you then read the webpage and summarize the page for me and it answered and said, no, I can’t do that from you giving me the link. But if you want to copy and paste the text on the page, then I can give you a summary. Okay? So you can basically ask chat GPT or tell it, here’s what I want, and then ask it.

What information do you need to create this for me? Okay, so you can really engage with it so that basically you’re going to learn to use it more effectively and efficiently so that it takes up less of your time and you get a better result and then you have to spend way less time on your marketing.

That’s our goal. So I really hope all of this is helpful. It’s definitely a crash course in using ChatGPT for marketing and content. I hope it inspires you just to dip your toe in if you’ve never used ChatGPT before. Try repurposing a piece of content and, if you used it in the past and got like weird or mediocre results, really practice.

your prompts and give it a lot more information and play around with it. And I think you’ll see that you get even better results. Okay. So as always, it’s a pleasure to be here with you. If you have questions about marketing, you are more than welcome to send me an email, michelle at michelleGrasek.

com. I clearly love talking about and teaching marketing. So I am more than happy to chat with you. Mhm. Mhm.

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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. I’m an acupuncturist and a marketing strategist and the host of the Acupuncture Marketing And today we’ll be talking about a new way to think about using Instagram that does not require any new content creation. It is specifically using Instagram for business to business networking so that you can build real connections with other local business owners and expand your Visibility in your community.

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And before we get started today, I’d like to thank the American Acupuncture Council for the opportunity to be here with you. All right, let’s get into the slides. Using Instagram for business to business networking. Today we are going to briefly cover why would we do this, why use this approach, why does it work, and then two specific strategies for building these relationships with other local business owners and collaborating with them.

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So why would we take this approach to Instagram? I don’t know about you, but most of the people I know are generally a little burnt out by content creation for social media. As you know, content creation takes time, it takes energy and creativity. And over and over again, that kind of feels like a hamster wheel.

Yes. So if you are feeling kind of worn out by content creation, this is a great strategy. And you have probably noticed in the past year or year and a half that your engagement on your account has gone down. I know that for my own business, Instagram accounts, and for my marketing clients and students, they are reporting that their likes on their posts and their reels has gone way down and so have their views, right?

They are being exposed to way fewer new accounts and even the people who follow them on Instagram are not seeing their posts that often. Okay, so big picture, if you’re experiencing this, you are not alone. It is pretty much across the board. For example, people who were previously getting 50 to 60 likes per reel or post are now kind of struggling to get 5 to 15 likes.

So again, if this is you, you are in good company, but it can be very frustrating to spend time creating content that you feel like No one gets to see, right? Is it effective? So if you need a break from all of that, then this strategy can be a really nice choice. Business to business networking on Instagram is is both a refreshing approach to using Instagram and a refreshing approach to networking.

So why is that? So first of all, it’s a nice approach to Instagram because you can either take a break from content creation or you can scale back the volume of content that you are creating. I know that some of my marketing clients are concerned about stopping content creation altogether for Instagram or any social platform because they’re worried about getting dinged by the algorithm if they don’t create content.

publish new content. So I understand that. If that’s how you feel, it’s all good. You could think about maybe using this strategy and cutting your content creation in half. So if you usually produce two reels a week on Instagram, maybe just do one and then use the time that you would have used to create that other reel for this strategy, for networking, for building connections and collaborations.

So that’s one option. And, or, forgive me. So the other reason that this is a nice approach to using Instagram is that it does leverage all of the content that you’ve created for Instagram in the past. So you’ve probably been creating Posts and Reels for years on your account and when someone lands on your account homepage, they get a really good idea of what your business is about, who you serve, you know, what your values and priorities are, how you can help them just by scrolling through all of your recent posts and reels.

Right? They can get a really good idea of what you’re all about. And so this is really helpful for business to business networking because you are going to engage with other business owners and ask them to collaborate, and they can simply pop over to your account homepage and look through the content you’ve created, and that will give them a great idea of whether you are a good fit to collaborate with them.

Do you match their own values, ideals, and goals, etc. Right? Do they think you’d be good? Partners in this endeavor, whatever it is you’re asking them for, whether it’s an acu yoga collaboration or something totally different. Okay. And this is also a really nice way to think about networking because it’s much lower pressure than traditional networking meetings.

I do find that many, many acupuncturists Of course, not all, but many are introverts, myself included, many of my marketing clients and students are introverts. And for, for the most part, people tend to not like traditional networking meetings where you go and you don’t know anyone and you sort of stand around awkwardly with a drink waiting for someone to talk to you, or you have to insert yourself into a conversation and then introduce yourself.

So, Doing this kind of networking obviously doesn’t require any of that. It simply allows you to build relationships that are genuine at your own pace. So, this is a way to connect with people, potentially in your pajamas from your home. And it’s just much more comfortable for many people, but it’s still equally effective.

And I also like to point out that this approach to networking can be very specific. You get to choose the best business owners or influencers that you’re interested in working with because you’ve, you’ve vetted them and you think a collaboration would be beneficial to both of you. And you can spend your time and energy building a connection with them on Instagram, as opposed to when you go to a traditional networking meeting, you might meet a dozen new people and it could be very varied, right?

Like maybe an insurance salesperson or a real estate agent. And. It’s not that you would never collaborate with those people, but you sort of have to sift through the people that you think would be open to a collaboration and would be a good fit if you’re doing traditional networking, whereas This type of networking is very specific and I think everyone is very busy and if you can fit Instagram networking into your schedule whenever you have a free moment and have it build into Meaningful relationships with a few people instead of superficial relationships with a dozen.

I think most people really appreciate that. So what are these strategies that I keep talking about? It’s actually very simple. Your goal is to connect with real life local business owners. Who you think have an audience who would be a good fit to become your patients. And when I say business owners, I’m also including influencers in this.

It’s sort of interchangeable in some ways. Like some local business owners, they actually have a brick and mortar business. Others are influencers. They might sell something, but really the The main point here is they have a following that you think would be a great fit to eventually become your patients.

They, their following is your target market. Okay. And your goals here are once you’ve made a connection with them to pitch them an idea to collaborate on an event together, or it doesn’t have to be an in person event, whatever ideas you have that are mutually beneficial for the both of you. Or, You can ask someone to come into your office for treatment and do a trade for the treatment and social media exposure.

Okay, so we’ll go more into these strategies, but big picture, this is our goal. And honestly, it works very well. My marketing clients and myself for my practice, we have All countless examples of relationships that we have built with small business owners locally who we never would have met or bumped into in real life, but connected through Instagram and now have these long term, very supportive, collaborative business partnerships or relationships.

Okay, so that’s, that’s what we’re going for here. So I recommend if you don’t have anyone in mind already, and you may, someone that you follow on Instagram, you might say, gosh, I’d love to work with so and so at that yoga studio. We could host this event. It would be fabulous. That’s a great place to start.

Just think about who are the business owners that you admire. Someone where you can genuinely say, I love what you’re doing in the community and I’d love to work together. I think that we have you know, a shared vision or shared goals for our communities and I’d love to work together. If you can say that for real, then you are on the right track and this is probably a good person to try to connect with.

And of course, you also want to make sure that you are choosing people who are local because you want people who can actually come to your clinic, right? So within maybe 45 minutes of your clinic, it’s not that useful to connect with influencers or business owners who are pretty far away because you like, what are the chances that someone who’s five hours away is actually going to come see you for treatment, right?

So that’s not what we’re interested in. We want these people to have followers who are local and who are in your target market. They’d be a great fit to become your patients. Okay. So just thinking about that when you’re trying to decide who are four or five people I’d like to connect with on Instagram.

to build a collaboration. And let’s talk a little bit about influencers. I think we get a bad taste in our mouth when I talk about influencers. I’m talking about nano and micro influencers. So not people with like a million followers. Nano is up to 10, 000 followers. And micro is 10, 000 If you can believe that, they’re still considered micro if they only have 100, 000 followers.

But the idea here is that smaller local accounts, as long as they have an audience who really listens to them, takes their advice, gets good engagement on their account. That’s what you’re looking for, right? And they also are people who would be a great fit to become your patients. So if someone has 6, 000 followers, that’s great, right?

They don’t, they don’t have to have 100, 000. In fact, smaller influencers are more likely to work with you because they have that local connection. And we’ll talk about this in a moment, but I recommend doing a trade for the influencers. Sharing you and your business on their account. Okay. Instead of paying them money to do that.

And again, that’s up to you, but I think that smaller influencers are more likely to accept the gift of a treatment for a trade, than instead of being paid cash, as opposed to like larger influencers are looking for quote brand deals on something much more formal and more money. Okay, so again, you’re just thinking about who would you be proud to work with, whose account would you be proud to be represented on, and who has an audience that is a good fit as your target market.

So some ideas. Who might these people be? Okay, yoga studios are a great fit. I have done some beautiful collaborations with the owner of a low waste specialty shop near me. She only sells things that are plastic free, for example, but she is really into alternative medicine. She’s very supportive of natural health approaches.

So the more you get to know people on Instagram, the Better awareness you have of who’s a great fit to work with and collaborate with, even if they’re not health care providers, right? So don’t limit yourself to just health care providers. Photographers can be fabulous. Photography tends to do really well on Instagram, and so their followers They tend to have a lot of followers and be very engaged.

Lash specialists, artists of all kinds. At my office, we have a wonderful collaboration with a collage artist and some watercolor artists. And then of course you could think about chiropractors, therapists physical therapists, nutritionists, hair salons and estheticians, makeup artists. Those are great choices.

Med spas, they tend to do very well on Instagram. They get a lot of engagement. So try to think outside the box. Again, it’s just, who would you be proud to be associated with? Like who you’d be pleased to be featured on their account and who’s got your target market. So how do you do this? This outreach thing, it’s actually very simple.

There’s two approaches you can take and both, both work well. It sort of depends on your. Maybe your personality and your comfort level with each. So the one approach is what I consider dating before proposing to someone. So I often think of marketing this way that you give your audience the opportunity to get to know you before you say, do you want to buy my stuff?

Right? So in this case, it would look like You know, you would pick a business owner that you’d love to collaborate with, you would follow their account, you would regularly check in on their account for new posts or reels or stories, and you would like all of them and try to comment. So whenever they publish a new reel, for example, you’re liking and you’re commenting.

And I would say try to Ask questions of the business owner in your comments so that you can engage with them right away and they will start noticing if you’re doing this repeatedly. So over time you’ll become pretty familiar to them as someone who enjoys their work and engages with their account and when you’re ready, when you feel comfortable basically, you can shoot them a direct message or private message and then you can more formally introduce yourself and pitch your idea for collaboration like, Hey, my name is Michelle.

I run Ageless Acupuncture in Seneca Falls. I absolutely love what you’re doing and I was wondering if you’d be interested in collaborating. I have a couple ideas. Let me know what you think. I’m so excited to hear from you. Right? So just cheerful, positive. They’re already familiar with you. By and large, people are going to say yes.

And then you can have a conversation and see what sort of collaboration might work well for you. And we’ll talk about collaboration suggestions in just a moment. There’s a million different things you can do. It’s really, the sky’s the limit. It’s up to your creativity. Creativity with this other person.

Okay. And then the other option is just to go right in to their direct messages and introduce yourself and share your pitch. And I have seen this work as well. You know, if your idea is strong enough and beneficial enough for the other business owner, they’re probably going to be interested in answer you because Because it’s interesting, right?

Because they are willing to have a conversation about it. You know, especially if you go about it in a really nice way, where you emphasize how much you, you do enjoy their account and, and the work that they’re doing in the community. And maybe give them some extra reasons why you think working together would, would go well and benefit both of your audiences if you are just diving in with that DM and they don’t know you that well.

But again, I think either of these methods can be very successful. It’s just up to you and your personal preference, how you’d like to connect with them. Regardless of how you go about this, when you are making your pitch for collaborating, make sure you focus your collaboration request on the benefit to the business and their clients or patients and the community that you mutually serve because you’re very likely to have some overlap between the people that you serve, but just angle your collaboration idea from the perspective of all the ways it would be great for them, okay?

For example, you could mention that if you did acu yoga, you would be thrilled to share the class on your, all of your social media and in your email newsletter, so that you’d be exposing them in their business to all of your audience. Naturally, they are going to do the same for you, right? But when you are approaching them, you want to emphasize this aspect of why would this be so great for your business for this reason, or this is one reason.

So really quickly, some collaboration ideas. There’s a lot here. You can take a screenshot if you’d like. Accu Yoga is very, very common. If you wanna collaborate with a yoga studio, you could. Teach a class together, maybe at the community center. You could host a class where they teach something at your office, so you’re giving them a platform to share their expertise with your audience, and they could do the same for you.

You could host a book club together, maybe wellness books, whatever it is that fits for both of your audiences. You could host a pop up event for them or vice versa. I have seen people host weekend wellness retreats because of collaborations that started on Instagram. I mean, some of these ideas make the business owners thousands of dollars because they really get creative and passionate about it and build it out into something so much bigger than they initially imagined.

You could host a fundraiser together for a charity that you mutually support. Themed wellness nights, Valentine’s Day is coming up. It’s a really good opportunity for a themed wellness night. You could do giveaways where you collaborate across both of your Instagram accounts. You could host a networking event together for other wellness people in your area.

The list goes on.

Okay, thank you so much for being here with me today. I hope that you find this Kind of invigorating. Hopefully it is a really refreshing way to look at Instagram and networking. If you have any questions about this, these strategies or marketing in general, you’re always welcome to email me michelle or michelleGrasek.

com. I hope you’ll listen to the podcast, Acupuncture Marketing School, and check out my website for free marketing resources for acupuncturists. Before I go, one last to the American Acupuncture Council. I’m very grateful to be here with all of you today. Thank you.

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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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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, 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

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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 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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