Thank you for taking the time to stop by and say hello and spend a few minutes with me to learn about how to grow your practice. So today we’re going to talk about an acupuncturist formula to growing your practice online. And the main thing that we’re going to be talking about is how to get found.
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Hi folks, Jeffrey Grossman here from Acupuncture, MediaWorks, Accu Downloads, and Accu Perfect Websites. Thank you yet again for the American Acupuncture Council for inviting me here to share with you more information and insights on building your practice, bringing in new patients and all things relating to marketing and growing and building more sustainability.
For your acupuncture practice. Thank you for taking the time to stop by and say hello and spend a few minutes with me to learn about how to grow your practice. So today we’re going to talk about an acupuncturist formula to growing your practice online. And the main thing that we’re going to be talking about is how to get found.
How to be seen and how to promote your website. So for those of you that don’t know me again, my name is Jeffrey Grossman. I’ve been helping acupunctures market their practice for two decades now. And I’ve been helping thousands of practitioners over the years to tap into marketing and business skills.
I started multiple companies. I started multiple practices and I’m I’ve taught at a bunch of acupuncture schools. So I’ve got some information that I’ve learned over the years that I’m here to share with you today. First thing that’s really important when I teach my practice management class to the students is to really learn to identify who your ideal patient is.
And this is an important piece that is often overlooked in marketing, but most companies, especially larger companies really take a lot of time by identify who their ideal patient. Or customer is, and it’s important as an acupuncturist to really get clear with this. And I know your guys might be thinking, I should know why, I’m treating everybody and, I’m I’m a general practitioner and everybody is my ideal patient while that is true.
It’s also not so true because when you have a communication strategy, That is focused on a particular type of person. Then you can focus your messaging. You can focus your marketing, you can focus your, the way your website is built and all of your marketing collateral, like your brochures on what it is that you’re trying to communicate to that specific person.
So let’s say for instance, you are. You treat a lot of fertility or a lot of migraine, or even do some sports acupuncture. Now your ideal patient is going to be different across each of those different topics. You’re going to be communicating differently to somebody who is looking to start a family or become more fertile versus somebody who is looking to when their next.
So identifying your ideal patient is an important part of how you develop your communication and marketing strategies. So that allows you to identify what blog posts you put out there, or what videos you create or what kind of lead magnets that you’ll be putting out there to attract your ideal client.
And. The important things to know are who are they? What values do they have in common? What groups do they move in? Where, what clubs are they part of? What books do they read? What do they do in their spare time? Where do they go? Where do they hang out? And what, this all gives you insights into where you can reach that ideal patient of yours.
And one of the places to start. Identifying potentially what your specialty might be. And when you, once you do that, it’s identifying who those. Ideal patients that you’re currently working wish with in that specialty, like your AA patients is what I like to call them. And your eight patients are the patients that you love.
And when you see them on your schedule, your energy raises and you feel really good and really excited to, to see them and you have a good rapport and a good resonance with them. And that’s an important piece of that relationship as opposed to. See patients which when you see them on your schedule, your energy goes down a little bit and you feel a little challenged that you’re like, oh gosh, okay.
I can muster up the energy to go through this. So once you identify who your a patient is, and if you have a particular specialty, that is where you start wrapping your head around. Identifying those concepts for that and identifying your ideal patient flows into this next part of creating your core message.
Now, a couple of weeks ago, I held a an extensive weekend workshop on creating your core message, because I feel like this is a. Incredibly important piece for acupuncturists to properly communicate to their audience, to the community, to their prospects, to their patients. And also once you identify your core message, that becomes part of all of your website, all of your literature, all of your marketing tools and strategy.
When there’s three steps to identifying and getting clear on what your core message is. Okay. And your core message. The first thing is what problems do your patients experience? Okay. So what are they coming to see you for? And also what problems do they have that. Keeping them awake at night, maybe fit, physically and litter too, literally, but also emotionally.
Okay. What are what problems do your patients experience am? What can you. Offer them that is unique to you and your practice. And then the third part of this is what will their life look like afterwards? Okay. So I know this might sound a little a little simplistic, but once you identify who, what, what your core message is, it becomes part of all of your communication strategies.
So if I were to ask you right now, what problems do you solve and how do you solve them and what do your patients’ lives look like afterwards? What are they able to do that they weren’t able to do? What would you tell. What would you say? And, I’d love to know that if you’re watching this video, if you do have a core message as to what problems you help with and how your unique practice helps them overcome them and what their life looks like afterwards, please put it in the chat box.
I’d love to see that I’ll respond to some of those answers and give you some thoughts about that. So here’s a couple ideas that you might want to work. So the main problem is that too many people struggle with pain and injuries. And we provide effective treatment that always allows you to perform well in life sports and work with elbow pills, surgery, and high costs.
So the first part of that is identifying the problem, which is too many people struggle with. And injuries, right? What’s unique about your practice is that you offer effective treatment that allows people to perform well in life sports and work, and their life looks different afterwards because they can do it without pills, surgery, and high costs.
Now, this is a generic core message that any acupuncturist can use, but it’s succinct it’s to the point it is. Similar to what your elevator pitch should be and sound like. Here’s another example we offer unique and individualized evaluations and treat injuries. That’s the problem you treat injuries by with TuiNa cupping and acupuncture so that your practice members CA so that our practice members can go out when their next race and feel great.
Okay. So the problem is that people come in there with injuries and what is unique? Quote unquote, about this particular practice about this particular core message is that they offer unique and individualized evaluations using Trina cupping and acupuncture. The way that their life is going to look up afterwards is that they’re going to go out.
They’re going to feel better. They’re going to win their next race. And that is one other example of a core message. And here’s one more. So this is a core message that we help that, that we’ve developed here for acupuncture. Media works most acupuncturists don’t like marketing and have no idea how to bring in new patients.
That’s a huge problem. Don’t like marketing don’t know how to bring in new patients problem. So what we do, what is unique about our company is that we offer a wide range of business marketing and website solutions. Okay. That’s what we do. That’s what we offer. And the and the way your lives will look afterwards, meaning acupuncturist that you can connect with more.
Grow your practice and make the world better. Okay. That’s what your life will look like afterwards. So just to read it one way through most acupuncturists, don’t like marketing and have no idea how to bring in new patients. So we offer a wide range of business marketing and website solutions so they can connect with more customers, grow their practice and make the world better.
Okay. So identifying what your core message is really overcoming. What problems. As your patient experience, what are they coming to see you for? And what can you offer them that is unique to your practice? Even though there might be, you might just be an acupuncturist that does acupuncture between on cupping still.
How can you make that? See. Unique and different from the other practitioner down the street. And then what will their lives look like after they come see you? Okay. So there’s a great book out there by Donald Miller called story brand. And and it talks about identifying your core message. There’s also a really good video on YouTube.
If you were to Google, Donald Miller StoryBrand there’s like a 30 minute video on there that talks about poor messages. And I would encourage you to do that once we’re done watching today. Okay. So the next part about growing your practice is to develop a functional website. Okay. These days, Your website is the place where people go to see you, right?
That’s what, any type of marketing that you do, any type of Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, video, blog, messages, communications, anytime someone gets a referral or hears about you. The first place they go to is your website. Your website is the. Of all of your marketing strategies and all of your marketing communications, because that’s where everybody goes once they hit you.
So it’s important to incorporate a few of these things that I’ll be talking about and including your core message into what what your into your website. So let me just show you these three websites here. So you’re looking at these websites here. You can notice that they are what they’re doing, right?
This website on the bottom, you can tell immediately when you hit this website, that this practitioner is helping for fertility, this website with the runners in their running shoes, you can tell. Maybe that’s about sports. Maybe that’s about getting better. Maybe that’s about, helping with sports injuries and this other website here you will, maybe that’s about helping improve your golf game, improving any type of pain or structural imbalances like that.
When we get off here, take a look at your own website and tell me when you hit your website, you within three to five seconds, can you identify, can somebody identify what it is that you do and how you help? If not, you need to absolutely get this fixed because when people hit your website, you want them to have a really clear understanding of how you can help almost immediately.
You don’t want a website like this because you hit these websites and you have no idea what’s going on. There. They look good, but there’s nothing particular about these websites that shows you that you can help with fertility or back pain or allergies or migraines or whatever that is.
Okay. So you need to have clarity. In your messaging on your website. And again, going back to creating your core message, going back to identifying your ideal patient will help you create who, the person that you’re going to be attracting because on this, over here, this website here, You can see your core message is going to be about sports and medicine and helping people who are athletes, same, different communications and who you’re going to hit over here with people who you’re trying to attract for fertility.
Okay. So it’s really important to get clear on that. And one thing too. And I’ve talked about this before. I maybe here, I’m not sure, but it’s important to make sure that you don’t use images like this. Even though we love these images as acupuncturists and, look at all that shot that’s happening with the cups.
Cool, great. Patients number one, objection is needles. And when they hit this, they see needles, they see fire, they see these really dark gross marks going on in the body. And they’re like, oh, I am not interested in that. These pictures and pictures on your website. Need to show what an outcome is, what their life can look like after they experienced your care.
Going back to these, you’ve got a baby in your arms. You’re running a race, you’re playing golf. Okay. You don’t want to have website, pictures like this. You want to have pictures of that. Happier. So that the depict, more people who are happier, more grounded so that they, when they hit their weird website, they’re not turned off or frightened about what it is that you’re offering them.
Another thing that whenever I do any website evaluations, I noticed. Is missing on most websites are calls to action. In fact, most practitioners don’t even incorporate calls to action in a lot of their marketing collateral, which is a big mistake. So on your website, you need to have something that is going to motivate people to take action.
So if they don’t schedule with you right away, if they don’t call you right away, what can you offer them? That will motivate them to click a button and schedule an evaluation with you or choose to take an, a special offer for you. Okay. So these are important pieces of helping to grow your practice online.
Other things that you should be using that are offline, that push people to online would be types of calls to action. Like we have here of offering stress reduction treatments, or evaluations and or certificates. And these are important parts of your marketing plan and your marketing strategy.
All right. The next thing to do is to make sure that you’re always staying on top of mind awareness and that you’re nurturing all of your relationships all the time with your patients. And this is important. Again, all of this stuff. Flows back to the functionality of your website. Okay. All of your marketing now goes back to this and Toma means top of mind awareness.
One of the things that I found when I was in practice was that my inactive patient file was much larger than my active patient file. And that might be the same for many of you. So by staying in Toma, you can maintain patients in care more than on your shelf in your in your inactive patients file.
So how do you do that? You can make personal calls. You can send emails, you can send personal messages, you can send out general communications online communications. You can offer some teaching opportunities. You can engage socially with clinic events and obviously to have compelling calls to action on your website to get people to take action.
Another thing that’s important is to sign up, to receive news. If people hit your website and they don’t take you up on an offer, you want to capture their email address and their name by offering them some type of booklet where they would then download, they would download the ebook lit and then they would be sent some emails on the backend that would communicate to them about what you do and give you free content and, talk about the videos about acupressure and things like that.
So you’re offering this value on the front end and of course, each of those has a call to action to get people to schedule with. Okay. So a couple of things we’re thinking about when you’re drafting emails is that you have your personal message to communicate through and to them that every email has an offer of something that you’re offering up.
Call to action. And that there’s an expiration date for your call to action. And if there, and then also that if somebody is interested, they have a way to request an appointment immediately. These are five aspects of creating, any on the anatomy of any email that goes out to your patients.
Shouldn’t have these things. Okay. Types of communications that you could be doing could be emails, newsletters, appointment confirmations. Absolutely. Discounts, promotions come in for a checkup or a tune-up or here’s a new blog that you put out and birthday emails came. So staying in communication with your patients, it’s really important.
And those are different ways of staying in Toma. Okay. Gathering your stories. That’s one other aspect. And P these are patients’ stories. This is a workshop that I did a while ago. Stories do all the hard marketing for you, and they make your prospects remember and care. And they because our brains are already wired.
Fo to remember stories because it goes back to our ancient DNA. That stories of keep, we remember stories more than we, that then if that, then we remember something that’s written. So a story when we, when people hear a story, they unconsciously. Put themselves in the place of that person. And they can imagine those benefits that were received and and and that they can incorporate that into their own lives.
That’s pretty much it for today. W just some insight and tidbits on the things that will help you be found online and it’s important. Again, core message getting that clear. Jennifer find your ideal patient and making sure that when somebody hits your website, they know exactly what it is that you do within three to five seconds when they hit your website.
One thing that you could do is ask your patients, ask your friends and your family members to look at your website and say, Hey, when you land on my website, do you know what I can do and how I can help you and why I’m even in this industry. And then also ask them, what would you be doing next? Motivate you to do next and move through this funnel, so to speak through the website.
And that would give you a lot of insight into that. So again, thank you guys so much for showing up today. I really appreciate that. Join us next. When Lorne Brown is going to be sharing some more insights from the American Acupuncture Council. Again, thank you so much. Stay beautiful. Change the world. One person, one needle at a time you guys are awesome.
Everybody needs acupuncture and go out there and make it happen. Be well, take care.