I’m here on behalf of the AAC to provide you with some amazing content and information to help you grow your practice.
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Hi there and thank you for this opportunity to share some practice and marketing insights with you. For those of you that don’t know me, my name is Jeffrey Grossman, and I’m here on behalf of the AAC to provide you with some amazing content and information to help you grow your practice. I’m the founder and owner of acupuncturemedia works, Accudownloads and acupressure websites. And I started my practice in 98 and I had a lot of trials and tribulations and a lot of struggles. And I noticed that I had a problem in not knowing how to market my practice and how to properly communicate with my patients. And all I wanted to do was to treat people and I didn’t want to market or do any of that. Um, so the struggle was real. The struggle is real, and it took me down a path to start my companies, but that’s a longer story, best reserved for another time.
But what I want to do today is to share with you some insights and information about how to incorporate social media into your practice. But before I do that, I want to encourage and inspire you with the fact that you are an incredible resource. You’re natural healers. You know how to get people to feel balanced and healthy. We know how to, um, help people with safe, natural methods. And we change lives every single day and people need your help. They want your help. They need your services, but many people don’t even know that you exist. So I want to help change that. I want to help get you more people on your table. And that’s what these talks with the AAC are all about is to help you be seen, be heard and to ultimately bring people into your practice so that you can make more money and ultimately help more people.
So you are never alone. I want to remind you that, okay, I’m here for you. And at the end of today’s talk, or you feel like you need help getting set up or becoming focused, or if you just need a little motivation to move forward, please reach out. There are a lot of opportunities that, um, I can help you with in supporting your practice and you aren’t alone. I’ve been through this, I’ve worked with other practitioners who have been through this. So, um, use this talk as a resource, use me as a resource and just one or two simple changes, um, and aha moments from today’s talk can make all the difference for you. Okay? So let’s go ahead and get started. I want to talk with you about the top five reasons. You need a social media strategy and how to get started. Now, social media is an online marketing tool that allows you to communicate directly with your audience.
And there has never been a time in history when it’s this easy to connect with your patients. And today, every practice owner knows that it’s essential to have a strong social media presence and engage with your market online, excuse me, but few actually know how to do it effectively and get results. But the key difference between those who succeed and those who fail is simply planning. Okay? So practitioners that use social media successfully do so because they have a solid strategy in place and they take the time to plan this strategy with a big picture view, and then implement it in a systematic way. So your practice can absolutely benefit as well. And the time it takes to develop this strategy more than pays off, once you implement it and start getting closer to your practice goals. So today I would like to talk with you about five reasons, why you need a social media strategy and what you need to do to get started now first is that you have to maximize the effectiveness of your social media presence that allows you to attract the right kind of patient to your practice.
You then have to focus your energy and your time creating this strategy. So you can continue helping more people with your acupuncture treatments, right? So if you want to bring them in, you have to get in front of them consistently. All right? And then you have to know what type of content converts these prospects into paying patients. So you can make sure that your strategies actually working and that you’re reaching more of your marketing goals. And it’s important to find the, uh, the motivation to implement and post content every day. And I’ll show you how to make it a lot easier. And it’s going to be easier than you might think. And finally, you need to know what tools are important to measure your social media success. So you don’t waste your time and money on something. That’s not giving you a positive return. Okay?
Sound good. So many practitioners make the mistake of thinking that social media works like this. You log in, you check out your feed, you post some stuff, you interact with your commenters and you watch your grades gradually rise. Nice. Right? Sounds fair. But not quite. It doesn’t exactly work this way and it can, but it won’t be as effective as it can be. And here’s why if you don’t have a strategy and a plan, you won’t get any results from your social media activities. You may grow some followers by simply being there, interacting with them, but that won’t get you closer to achieving your practice goals. All your activities, including posting on Facebook or Twitter should help you get closer to your goals or it’s a waste of time. So developing a strategy first and foremost helps you link these activities with your goals. For example, if you’re using these platforms to nurture leads by sending them to your free report or your free evaluation, and just getting them to join your list, you’d post different content in a different way than you would, if your goal was to get them on your schedule directly, right?
So goals like raising brand awareness awareness, or building a base of loyal paying patients, motivating your prospects to schedule with you or stimulating more referrals or building your credibility for offers that you pitch all require you to do different things on social media. They all have different outcomes and need a different strategy and plan to get there. The first step is to identify your goals and what part of your activity will play into them. This is a key foundation of your strategy. Action steps would be to one, identify your current practice goals. Are you looking for referrals? Are you looking to double your new patients or simply increase your followers to identify what part of your social media activity plays into achieving these goals? Okay, so let’s move on to the next step. You are focused. If you develop a social media strategy, it streamlined your activities.
So you know, just what to do and you can focus on where you get the best results without the proper focus. You’re taking shots in the dark and hoping that people take the action that you want them to take. So with a strategy in place, your actions will lead them down a path to take a specific action that you want them to. For example, you may post a video and discover that it gets four times as much engagement as your text content. So this means that you need to work on your video into more video into your content mix and sharing a new video each week. So the time that you spend producing your videos will pay you back more than the text content. So one important part of any social media strategy is automation. Automation means letting a software program or app handle certain tasks and aspects of your activities.
They include things like social listening, chatbots, content, curation engagement, and also growing followers. So using software and apps to do these tasks, you, um, saves you time, saves you money, and it can really keep you focused on what you like doing. So an example of a program that you can use, like is like a scheduling software, uh, for your social media, like buffer or Hootsuite. So these are programs that can, you can post on a schedule, you set it up in advance, so you don’t have to do it manually. And it’s great sign time-saver and it it’s a task that you don’t need to do yourself each and every time. But there’s something that you need to consider with this, which is authenticity. So being authentic is the key to good social media marketing. So there are some tasks that you just can’t automate. You have to be there personally interacting with your audience.
So when you get crystal clear on your strategy, you’ve got a real plan for separating what you can and can’t be automated and using for the best results, action steps, number one, create a schedule and content strategy. So that each day, you know, what needs to be done when you sit down and log in, number two, look at social media automation tools such as buffer or promo Republic or hoot suite, and consider which ones might work best to suit your strategies. Okay. So now it’s time for reason, number three, creating content that converts ultimately will, uh, will determine your success with social media. And it’s this content that you, that needs to be engaging in. Interesting. It has to address the pressing questions and the pain points of your audience so that they will want to, like, it they’ll want to comment on it and they’ll want to share it.
So it should frame you as a helpful expert, who has a great deal of value to offer. And part of strategic planning will give you control over the content that you post. So you can decide on topics and formats and content type and create a mix and schedule so that you’re offering a variety of different types of media. And once you start posting, you’ll get feedback instantly to see which content works best. And then you can refine for even better results. And once you start, you need to maintain consistency and maintain a regular posting and marketing schedule. One way to do this is by using a service like tack you downloads, where you can find done for you, blog posts and graphics and newsletters and marketing tools at your fingertips. And it’s a great service to help support you in your strategy. If you don’t know what type of content already that you want to put forth.
Um, so what you’ll need to do is research and create a profile, uh, that will include the interests and of all of your patients, right? So that is part of engaging with your clients is to know what they want. Okay. And to know what type who your ideal patient is. And I teach this in my practice management class, and one of the exercises to map out who your ideal patient is, your avatar, who they are, what they read, what they eat, et cetera. And this becomes your intimate and, um, ideal prospect finder. So you could speak directly to them. And as part of this research, you’ll analyze your competitors and influencers and see what type of content performs best on, on their platforms. And you’ll choose some to follow and you’ll gain insights, following them to help you create your own unique content. So the result is that your content will have further reach, and we’ll be more laser focused when you have your ideal prospect in mind, as opposed to just trying to market to everybody.
You’re focused on who it is that you want to market and communicate to action steps, one identify topics, and the type of format and the content types that you want to share, and then create a posting calendar to get you started. Then this will, uh, you’ll refine this. Once you start implementing it, number two, create an outline of your ideal patient avatar and number three, perform a SWOT analysis on your competition. So you know, where, where they’re falling short, where you could step in. Okay. So this next reason is critical. And one of the best things about having a solid social media content plan is that you have somewhere to go, right? So it’s easy to get into a slump with social media where you’re not sure what to do each day, and you don’t see the results and your motivation starts to lag. But when you have a good strategy in place, you’ll know how to plan for each day.
And your to-do list of important tasks is ready to go. And this takes the work out of interacting with your audience. So you can just have fun and enjoy it. And it won’t feel like work at all, but just hanging out with your people at, you know, and that you love that you want to support in your community. And when you’re enjoying what you’re doing, this will translate to better content and more authenticity, which your audience will enjoy as well. So the best way to create daily task lists is to start big and work your way smaller and smaller. Start with the practice goals that you identify and how social media fits into each of those practice goals. And with that, and your content schedule, you can see the milestones that you have to reach into achieve in each day is a step towards each of those milestones.
You may also want to break up tasks and prioritize them. For example, first priority might be posting new content. Next priority might be replying to comments and re following people who started following you. So with leftover time, you might scroll your feed, looking for content ideas, or content to share, or spend time researching your audience. Excuse me, action steps. One, create a weekly plan for each day of social media activity and finish up each session with a list of things to do for next session to get you started. All right, so now I’ve covered most of the essential reasons why you need a social media strategy in order to get results. And the last thing we’re going to look at is how to measure the results of your strategy. So the question is, how do you know if you’re actually making progress toward your practice goals?
Right? Many practitioners don’t even have practice goals nor do they even know how their progress is moving forward. One of the most important advantages of social media strategies that you can set out a plan for monitoring the results of your actions using objective data, and you do this by setting key performance indicators that you can check regularly. For example, if you want to grow your followers, you can check how many times you’ve got new followers. You can set a goal for new followers each week. If you’re looking for more referrals, what will you do to track that? Okay, so this data will tell you whether your strategy is working and if it’s not working what you need to do to shift it and what you need to do in order to improve it, performance metrics can be tracked using analytic tools or a simple in-house spreadsheet.
And there’s programs that monitor these metrics for you, um, and, and set up and create a report for you, uh, that you could download and take a look at. So, um, your strategy also includes documenting your efforts in this’ll help you refine it and make your marketing for your social media more effective. So you can learn from your success. You can learn from your mistakes. You can learn from what worked and what didn’t work, so you can take, make your strategy better and more refined moving forward into the future. And an important factor in social media success is monitoring the improvement and the metrics of the documentation to help you do this action steps, take your practice goal and decide which metrics would help you determine whether you’re reaching it or not choose the metrics and put them into a timeframe or a spreadsheet. So you can measure and see the results regularly.
And look at these metrics, the tools, and choose which ones to use, start with a free ones or popular ones, and easy to use programs and upgrade with them as you needed. Okay. So I hope you that received some insights today. And if you’re ready to start implementing more practical steps to help you develop a comprehensive, manageable and motivating social media strategy, that delivers results reach out to me. I have a program that I’m launching over the next few weeks. So these are tips are just the starting point for you to help you focus, to get motivated for that. So if you’d like to learn more, um, I’d love to have you reach out to me. My email address is Jeffrey, J E F F R E y@acupuncturemediaworks.com and, uh, just shoot me an email. Let me know that you’re interested in learning more about social media marketing and how to implement strategies into your act, do acupuncture practice. So thank you again so much for the AAC for allowing me to come here yet again, to share some insights and marketing with you and next week, join us when Poney Chiang comes on board and share some insights and some inspirations with you. Take care, stay beautiful. Talk to you soon. Bye. Bye