The #1 Acupuncture Marketing Mistake
If you are an acupuncturist looking for ways to grow your private practice, I encourage you to do a little market research and see what other acupuncturists are doing to market themselves. If you surf the web or look at various display ads, you’ll probably notice rather quickly that most acupuncture marketing pretty much looks the same way, has the same phrases, and conveys the same impression. The problem is that the conventional ‘website as brochure’ or ‘ad as brochure’ type of marketing has the same end result: It simply does not work and is a poor return on investment.
Most acupuncturists make one massive error in the way they approach marketing, one that could profoundly undermine their ability to generate new leads and qualified patients for their practice. The most common mistake is that pracittioners talk about themselves intstead of their patients. Just about all of the ads and websites I have researched are guilty of this marketing blunder. The ad will say something like, ‘Balance Acupuncture, In practice 10 years, specializing in allergies, located in downtown Denver’, with a picture of the business logo or some other fancy graphic.
The problem with this is that nobody cares who you are until you show them that you can help them. Now, I want you to read that sentence again. If you fullly grasp it, you are on your way toward revolutionizing how you market your practice. Don’t even bother talking about who you are or what you treat until you’ve reach out to that prospective patient and said, ‘Hey, I understand what you’re going through– and I can help. Here’s how.’ If you don’t do this, you will lose about 95% of your prospective audience. This is why typical display ads don’t work and why your website may not be generating as much business as you’d like.
What we are talking about here is basic copywriting and sales skills. Amazingly, even most large companies pulling in millions of dollars in revenue don’t get this right either. They still focus on their product rather than the solution it provides. As a business owner, you are a problem solver for people. If you can show them that you have the solution they have been looking for, they will consider your services even if it is foreign to them as acupuncture so often is. If you can speak to your customer’s needs and engage in a benefit oriented conversation with them, you will gain an enourmous competitive advantage in your local community. As you create or review your promotional materials, please keep this in mind. People don’t want to be sold to. Maybe in previous generations this worked very well. Many of us are still caught in ‘old school’ marketing like this, where we go out and try to find prospects to sell our services to. In this day and age, people want to be educated first so they can make their buying decisions in a relaxed, non-pressure based manner.
Honestly, there is a very elaborate methodology to this process that is beyond the scope of this article. I encourage you to keep studying these principles as it will be necessary to ensure the longevity of your practice.