As an acupuncturist, keeping your practice competitive requires you to continually educate yourself on the latest developments within your field. The same holds true for your marketing.
As consumer trends are evolving at an even faster rate due to COVID-19, the way you market your chiropractic practice should evolve as well. Here are five simple strategies you can utilize to keep your practice up-to-date on the latest marketing trends so you can maximize your visibility to prospective patients, book more appointments and grow your revenue.
Tip #1: Leverage Social Sharing
For acupuncturists, word of mouth has long been a go-to tactic for attracting new business. However, word of mouth is happening online these days – particularly through social sharing.
Nearly three-quarters (72 percent)1 of U.S. adults are active on social media (with usage spanning all ages from 18 to over 65), and people spend an average of 2 hours and 23 minutes on social media per day.2 Research shows people use those social platforms to aid in their health care decisions.3
With this in mind, social media presents an excellent opportunity to market your practice. Use popular social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and YouTube to share your patients' success stories (assuming they provide their consent, of course). You can post photos and videos celebrating wins that resulted from their treatment, such as "4 weeks without nerve pain" or "Back to playing golf!"
These types of posts are powerful because they feature stories about real-life people with real-life victories, which makes for content that is especially relatable and shareable.
You can also use social media to get creative in how you're sharing important updates about your practice, including how you're preventing the spread of COVID-19. For example, some medical professionals have used TikTok videos4 as a fun way to show off all the PPE they wear or demonstrate how they sterilize their office between patients, turning what could have been a boring post into something more engaging.
For example, one doctor – Dr. Rose Marie Leslie (@drleslie) – uses TikTok videos to keep teens informed about coronavirus with humorous and playful videos that raise awareness about how to stay virus-free.5
Tip #2: Use Responsive Design for a Mobile-Friendly Website
Do you know that roughly 70 percent of the time people spend online is on a mobile device?6 As a result, having a website that does not function well on devices with smaller screens, like smartphones and tablets, can interfere with your ability to attract new patients.
Consider that 53 percent of mobile users will leave a website7 when its pages take more than three seconds to load, and 52 percent of online users say a poor mobile experience will make them less likely to engage with a company.8 Meanwhile, 79 percent say they are more likely to return to or share a mobile website if it's easy to use.9
The best way to make your website mobile-friendly is to ensure it's built with responsive design. This means your website is built to automatically adjust its content to fit the size of smaller screens, making it mobile-friendly. Not only does this help you keep visitors on your site, but it also helps improve your organic rankings in search engines like Google.
Tip #3: Keep a Constant Eye on Your Online Reputation
With the majority of consumers turning to the internet to find local businesses, you can't ignore your online reputation. This refers to what people see when they search for your practice online, including the business information that shows up for your practice on Google, as well as on review sites like Yelp or Healthgrades.
Here are a few common problems acupuncture practices typically face with their online reputation:
The best way to improve your online reputation is to be proactive about monitoring and managing your business listings and reviews. If you haven't done so already, set up profiles for your practice on popular directory and review sites like Google My Business, YP.com, Yelp, etc., and fill them out with information about your practice (phone number, address, business hours, photos, etc.). If a profile already exists that you did not create (which sometimes happens), be sure to claim it.
In terms of attracting more positive reviews, focus on ways you can improve the patient experience in your office (including making them feel comfortable by implementing additional safety protocols in response to COVID-19); and make sure to regularly check your reviews and respond as appropriate.
Tip #4: Become a Local Influencer
Research shows10 that 76 percent of people are more likely to choose one business over another when they feel connected to its brand. You should find ways to become involved in local causes and activities that are important to members of your community and are closely aligned with the values of your practice. Here are a few examples:
The more you rise up as a leader in acupuncture in your local community, the more people will remember and trust your practice, making it easier to earn new business.
Tip #5: Streamline Your Marketing Technology
There are so many marketing tools available for your practice that it can become overwhelming. Trying to manage your website, digital ads, social media presence, online reviews, live chat platform and more can feel like a full-time job, which takes away from your time with patients. (More than 90 percent of businesses use more than five different vendors and tools for their marketing, with the average number used being 12.)11
Additionally, with so many different marketing solutions, your data is spread out across numerous vendors and platforms, making it more challenging to analyze your performance on a broad scale.
To improve your marketing efficiency, consider working with an all-in-one marketing partner who can deliver all the services you need through a single system, allowing you to easily access and analyze your data, and in turn, better manage your business and track your results.
References
Chronic pain afflicts over 20% of the adult population. Sadly, most MDs have essentially no education in treating pain, beyond offering a few toxic medications. Then they tend to steer people with pain away from those health practitioners who are trained. This puts the acupuncture community on the front lines for addressing this epidemic.
When the body is going through a stressful event, the sympathetic system is activated. This activation will help the body with a life-threatening situation. If this state is activated for prolonged periods of time, it starts to consume energy. These traumatic events that generate stressors in the autonomic nervous system (ANS) will eventually become internalized.
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One of the things that makes acupuncture so difficult to measure is that the medicine actually does contain some esoteric aspects. There have been numerous studies that demonstrate the neurochemical reasoning behind why acupuncture points stimulate the autonomic nervous system to enact change However, not all the benefits of TCM can easily be measured by randomized, controlled trials. But does that make them fundamentally and definitively untrue?
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