And today I want to shed some light on a few simple ways that you could be doing that building your practice was something that many of us were not taught in acupuncture school, but seldom did we receive the foundations of building a successful practice and keep patients coming in.
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Hi there. Jeffrey Grossman here. Thank you. The American Acupuncture Council. Once again, for this opportunity to share some business and marketing insights with you, I’m really glad to be here today. Today’s a special day for me. June is a special month for me and things are changing. COVID is in the rear view mirror. People are getting outdoors life.
Wow. I have no idea what that was.
Um, so, um, life is assembling back to normalcy. And so what does this mean to you? Well, people are looking for your help. People will need to understand the value that you offer. Um, that is well beyond just treating painful conditions. Most patients, most prospects, most strangers really understand that acupuncture is helpful for pain, but as you and I know acupuncture goes well beyond just treating painful conditions. And today I want to shed some light on a few simple ways that you could be doing that building your practice was something that many of us were not taught in acupuncture school, but seldom did we receive the foundations of building a successful practice and keep patients coming in. You’ve got all the know-how, you’re an amazing pulse diagnostician and herbalist, a Needler, or cupper all of those things make you amazing with the medicine. But many of us don’t have the tools that are needed to consistently attract new patients and to systematically keep them in the care and keep yourself in top of mind awareness.
So all of that won’t be much help if you don’t have some of this information limiting sharing with you today. And that’s why I’m excited to be hosting this web class about the only three things that you should be doing online. Uh, so I want to share a few simple ideas that can help you get more patients on your treatment table. Keep you in top of mind awareness with your existing patient base and help you get found more easily online. So welcome for those of you that don’t know me. My name is Jeffrey Grossman. I’m the founder of acupunctureMediaWorks and acupuncture websites, and Accu downloads. And I started my practice back in 1998 and I had tons of trials and tribulations and struggles in my practice. And basically I was scared and broke back in the day because I had no business acumen and I was not savvy at all in any form of marketing.
And I had to start from scratch and I continue to, you know, struggle for many, many years of my practice, but I noticed that I had a problem. And the part of the problem was I wasn’t really figuring out how to properly communicate with my patients and how to consistently show up in their inbox or on their social media feed. Um, so the struggle took me down a path to start my companies. Um, so I can, you know, so I needed to create those marketing materials for myself. And then therefore I now have them available for practitioners. So that’s a longer story. And maybe we’ll talk about that at some other time, but I want to remind you that you are an incredible resource. You’re an amazing resource to change lives every single day. And I want to help you become more noticed. I want to help your community to be able to find you more, to tap into your skill set.
So you could help change lives. One needle, one person at a time. But unfortunately, a lot of people don’t even know we exist, right? They let alone knowing the vast conditions that we can treat, but I want to help you change that. I want to help you get more people on your table. And I want to talk about how to help you be seen and be heard and to ultimately bring people into your practice so you can make more money and to help more people. So at the end of today’s talk, if you feel like you need some help getting set up or becoming focused, or if you just need a little motivation or some clarity, feel free to reach out to me, I’ll have my I’ll let you know, my email address is, or you could ping me here on the social media channels.
I’m here to help give you a fresh perspective. And there are more opportunities now than ever to help people and help them understand what it is that you can do for them. So, um, I put together a 15 page resource that I think that you’ll find invaluable. And again, I’ll share the link for you today at the end of today’s talk, and you could use this, uh, this resource and this talk today to help reset your practice. And just one thing from today’s talk or form that from that resource ebook that I put together for you, one or two simple changes that you make can make the difference in your practice moving forward. Okay? So, but what I wanted to do is I wanted to really talk today about simplifying, um, today’s talk and reviewing what I think the only three things are that you should be consistently doing online.
And consistency is key here. Having a plan is key here and actually initiating your plan is the real key here. So time is scarce and chances are that you don’t know what to do next, right? So I’m going to make it easy and let’s start here. The first thing is to become find-able okay. So your website is the hub of all of your marketing opportunities, but simply having a website is no longer enough. All your competitors are vying for the same new patients on the internet. They have websites too, right? So let me ask you this. When was the last time you did a Google search and clicked over to the second or third pages that appeared in the search, right? My guess is not too often. And your patients are no different. And for your website to be found by someone searching for an acupuncturist, your site must appear on the first page of search results, right?
So optimally, it should really appear in one of the top three positions and these places, um, received the lion’s share of traffic and clicks and, um, you know, and, and all of this leads to what new patients, new prospects, people coming in and checking you out, which means your website must be seen as reliable and authoritative and trusted by Google and optimized to perform better in the search engines, then your other neighborhood acupuncturist, because Google and other search engines, aren’t willing to risk their reputation on, you know, a website that isn’t, uh, SEO properly, or it might not be up to par based upon some of their requirements. So what do I mean by that? There’s two things. First, your practice website must be optimized for search terms and new patients. You know, that that new patients would be using to fight an acupuncturist. And second, the design, the navigation and the user experience must invite visitors to stick around and to explore your site because you only have a few seconds to attract attention and to get people to take the next steps.
And because everything that you do and everything, everyone that you meet, all of the marketing, that materials that you’ve put out there, all do what, right? They point back to your website, anytime anyone mentions you and your practice, what’s going to happen. They’re going to go check you out on your website. And even your social media channels, your website is the hub that people visit before they step a literal foot inside your door. And all of this, um, this, this hub is all of your marketing activities is the first place people go to search for you. So it’s where your first impression it’s where your, your prospects make their first impressions. Okay. So what are the only three things that you should be doing online? Well, glad you asked. Okay. So I know there’s so many other things that you could be doing to market and to grow your practice and to get your website SEO, and to use meta-tags and title tags and the right search terms and all that.
But I want to talk about three things that I’m pretty confident that you should be doing consistently in your practice, which are generating leads, communicating with your current patients and creating and distributing great and shareable content. And I didn’t say mediocre content. I said, great and shareable. And there’s a difference. And let me talk about that. Briefly, many of you are not doing this, and many of you don’t even know that this is a thing, right? So generating traffic to your acupuncture website and converting those visitors into new patients is a f’ing and it separates successful practices from struggling ones, right? So what is traffic generation? And simply put it’s in marketing lead generation is the initiation of customer interest or inquiry into the products and the services that you offer and leads could be created for the purpose, such as building an email list or, um, an E newsletter list or in our case to get more patients on your treatment table and lead generations, the process of attracting and converting strangers and prospects into paying patients that ultimately pay, stay and refer.
So here’s a few types of traffic generation techniques that you should be doing. And hopefully you are doing these. And if you aren’t doing any of these that I’m going to reviewing here on this list, I implore you to figure out how you can get that done, whether or not you’re going to hire it out, whether or not you’re going to learn how to do it, whether or not you’re going to, you know, check out YouTube and search some videos to make it happen for yourself. But you should be doing at least three or five of these, if not all of these types of chap, traffic generation techniques. So Facebook ads, right? No brainer. You can easily target locally in your community and your zip code. Google. My business should be absolutely 100% set up for your practice website and online and Facebook reviews. These are important.
How many times have you checked out the reviews of a restaurant or even another practitioner before you chose to make them, you know, the food of choice or your practitioner also lead generation through community relationship, building and connecting out, um, into different resource groups and to work with other organizations and other, other meetup groups that are out there. Professional networking is a great way to generate leads into your practice. Social media, obviously that is a powerful way to generate leads into your practice and your website, and make sure that on your website, you’ve got specific calls to action. You’ve got benefit focused, lead magnets, your you’ve got your scheduling set up. You’ve got online classes that lead to generation, and you’ve got condition specific self-care classes and videos. All of those things that I just mentioned are about generating traffic from the internet and the outside world into your practice.
So everything that you do is meant to stimulate curiosity and move people along that path to becoming a new patient, right? The good news is that you’re driving traffic all the time, right? You just may not be intentional about it and getting the conversions that you’d like, which is AKA transforming a stranger or a prospect into a new patient that is a conversion. So here are a couple of questions that you should ask yourself. What am I consistently doing to stay in top of mind awareness with my patients? How can I improve my website ranking and appear in one of the top three spots is my site Google ready? Are my reviews going to be enough to drive interest when people hit your site? Is there a clear marketing message? What’s the journey a prospect goes through when they hit my site, what do you want your prospects to do?
What are their next steps? Can they schedule, can they download something? Can they grab, uh, can you grab their email? Um, and from giving away something cool, like a free report. And do you have relevant content that speaks to your customer’s specific problems? And this is huge. A lot of times we put out content, but we don’t have a clear marketing message or even a clear idea of who our actual real patient is. So we’re putting out information that might not pertain to them. So that’s important that to have relevant content that speaks to your customer’s specific problems. So the goal with generating leads is to always have a stream of new prospects flowing into your practice, whether it’s scheduling a visit, giving you a call, downloading your benefit focus report, or even walking in your door, right, new prospects, they are the lifeblood of every practice.
And if you’re not consistently working on lead generation, you’re probably going to be fighting an uphill battle. All right. So the next thing you need to be doing is communicating with your current patients on a routine and regular basis. Okay. Routine and regular basis. That means you need to have systems set up in a rhythmic way that you are doing it regularly for your patients, right. You can’t just throw out some social media and, you know, one month and six months later come back and do it. You’ve got to have a system and a plan in place. Okay. So let’s talk about this. It’s great to have your website, you know, that’s working fantastic that your site is generating leads for you. And I hope that you have at least some of the things I just mentioned a second ago. Um, now the question is how are you communicating to your strangers and your prospects and your patients, right?
So your new prospects, your active patients and your inactive patients, how do you keep the communication channels open? Okay. How often are you getting in front of your patient base and sharing pertinent and timely information? How often are you adding and updating a blog post? How often do you send off an email or a newsletter or a simple postcard to nurture your existing patients? How often are you sharing new and relevant research with them and how many videos do you post on a regular basis? So all of this is extremely important in order to keep your patient base engaged and involved so that they don’t fall out of care so quickly. And the truth is that technology makes it so easy for you to do all of this, right? There’s even software and companies that do it all for you. So I’m going to talk briefly about some ideas, some of you, which, you know, you may know about these already.
So for blog posts, there’s no shortage of topics, right? You can talk about seasonal topics, dietary suggestions for healing or particular ailment, acupressure for coming conditions, tight chief or back health. There’s so much opportunity for you as an acupuncturist to write about and for emails. Well, for starters, you should have a new patient welcome series and existing patient nurture campaign, and a few emails that go out to remind patients of their appointments. And even a few emails that go out to get your inactive patients back in at minimum, those are the four different email campaigns you should have in place. If you don’t, you really need to evaluate that for research content. Well, what’s the latest research that you came across about acupuncture. Are there any new studies that you, that if you shared with your patients that they would say, wow, I had no idea that acupuncture was so good for that problem.
Okay. So that’s just a couple ideas again, we could spend a long time just talking about that specifically, but now the question is how often do you post, how often should you be communicating with your patients? Uh, well, the answer may not be what you want to hear and the answer is often. Okay. So I’d say that the rule of thumb for a patient communications should be at minimum one time a week for an email three times a week for social media, like Facebook and Instagram, two to four new posts added to your website each month and maybe one or two newsletters going out on a monthly basis. Okay. And for those of you that are adventurous, and I know that some of you are adventurous out there. Um, video content is extremely important. Okay. And here’s why Google, Google, Google, right? And of course, expert authority, positioning video gives you a boost in rankings and it allows more people to see your website, which means more people will take action and take you up on your offers or download your benefit, focus, lead magnet, or even schedule with you.
And also videos are going well, great way to position you as an expert. Okay. So that’s a brief lowdown about communicating with your patients. And now the final step is creating and distributing your great content to practice members, to build trust and rapport. And it’s that simple find a time in your schedule to consistently share your content. A rule of thumb is that I teach my students is that you should set aside at least two to four hours a week minimum for your marketing content distribution activities. And one of the cool things that many people don’t think about is that you can repurpose your content, right? So you create a video, you have it transcribed, and then it can be used as an email or a newsletter or a blog post. When you create a newsletter, you can use that on your website, on your social media pages and send it as an email.
This is repurposing your content, create it once and then disseminate it through other channels. And it’s important to get your priorities straight and to use your time wisely here. Um, I know that one, I say that many of your thinking, um, that I’m referring to treating patients, but no I’m talking about your marketing and communication strategies. So take this seriously. You can be the best practitioner, the most adept herbalists and precision pulse taker. But all of that means nothing. If you don’t have a steady flow of new leads, that continually community, that, that, that continually come in. So you, that you continually communicate with, um, with you class a content, so hope that this was a timely reminder, and I hope that you received some answers and inspiration and insight for what you needed today. And I want to encourage you to reevaluate your plans and to take and make actual strategies, right?
So if you want a fresh perspective, if you need help, you can reach out with me. We can set up a free, no cost, 15 minute mentoring and discovery call. If you’re interested in that, just shoot me an email at Jeffrey, J E F F R E Y at acupuncture, media works.com and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible. So Jeffrey, J E F F R E Y at acupuncture, media works.com and I’ll get back to, so remember, you’re an incredible resource. You change lives day in and day out, and you know, all about natural healing. You all know all about life-changing ways to support a person’s health and wellbeing. People are looking for you. COVID is getting in the rear view mirror and they want your help. They need your help. So how are you going to show up in the next 30, 60, and 90 days to change the lives of people that are around you?
So if you’re looking for this hope, if you’re looking for encouragement, if you’re looking for strategies, please do not hesitate to reach out. Shoot me an email. Also, thanks for sticking around. And the URL for downloading that ebook that he mentioned is Accu media, a C U N E D I a dot U S slash reset 2021. And you’ll be able to grab that 15 page report. And again, that’s Accu media, ACU, N E D I a slash reset 2021 and get that report. So be well, stay strong, continue to change lives. One person, one needle at a time next week, feel free to join us here. The AAC we’ll be having Sam Collins coming on board. You’re awesome. And the world needs you. So reach out if you need some support, if you need some love, if you need some help, I’m here for you. Take care, stay beautiful. Talk to you soon. Bye. Bye.