With people becoming more health-conscious, they are increasingly looking for alternative methods for health and wellness and acupuncture is one of the best options. With many acupuncture services out there, if you do not adopt the right acupuncture marketing methods to grow your business, then you will start witnessing a decline in your customer base due to ever-increasing competition. To tackle the marketing challenges faced by an acupuncture business, we present here some of the most effective acupuncture marketing ideas to get more patients and revenue.
1) Customer-Focused Website
The first and foremost requirement for getting started with the online marketing of your acupuncture clinic is having a well-designed customer-focused website. There are many basic things that you must ensure for your website to be effective in converting visitors into clients. These things are:
A) Check the loading speed of your website and ensure that its loading time is fast because there is enough data available which proves that many people do tend to leave a website if it doesn’t load quick enough.
B) Ascertain that all key elements that instill trust in a visitor are readily present on the home page of your website. These elements include certification, license, awards, recognition, testimonials, media coverage, etc.
C) Embed a direct appointment booking form on your website so as to allow patients/clients to book their seats conveniently.
D) A distinctly visible and call to action button for phone number.
E) Embed a professional video to create better engagement of the visitor with your site.
2) Right Organic Positioning in Google
If you type the keyword “acupuncture clinic in [your location city]” in Google, do you see your website listed on the first page of Google? If not, then you are seriously missing some of the most active leads that your business can get. To position your acupuncture website on the first page of Google, adopt the right site optimization techniques either by learning it or by getting it done through any professional SEO agency.
3) Right Local Listing Positioning in Google
Search for keywords like “acupuncture clinic in [your location city]” in Google and see if your site pops up on Google local listing pack (the 3 sites pack which contain business name, phone number, address and reviews). If it doesn’t happen, then it simply means that Google considers other acupuncture businesses more trustworthy than yours and you are missing many clients due to poor visibility online. To insert your business details in this local pack, a slightly different optimization approach is required which requires taking care of many factors like reviews, citations, data consistency, etc. You can leave the operational aspect of optimization to any internet marketing agency.
4) Social Network Marketing
Social networks present you with a big opportunity to connect locally. The right approach for social media marketing for an acupuncture clinic is to start slowly but consistently with informative and interesting content till your audience grows to a big size. Businesses that join a social network with a quick promotion mindset don’t see good results as people don’t expect outright marketing in a social network. You can increase the marketing pitch gradually with growth in your follower base. Utilizing social networks to get acupuncture clients is a slow and steady marketing strategy.
5) Getting Acupuncture Leads Using Ads
A powerful and quick way to generate leads for acupuncture online is by using the power of paid ads on popular platforms. When it comes to paid advertising platforms, nothing beats Google ads because people searching in Google are actively looking for a solution. The second best choice is Facebook ads. You can start slow initially with a less daily budget on these platforms and can increase your spending limit once you start seeing good results. There are many online tutorials that teach the intricacies and tips related to running ads on these platforms.
6) Distributing Press Releases
Press releases are an evergreen marketing medium used by companies of all sizes owing to the plethora of benefits associated with it. First, it allows your content to get attention very quickly. Second, it publishes your content on 100’s of sites which gives a positive boost to your business brand image. Third, it provides valuable backlinks from many authority sites which helps your website in a big way. So don’t ignore the power of press releases when it comes to advertising your acupuncture business online.
7) Informational Video Marketing
If we look at the conversions that one gets from different forms of content, nothing beats video content due to it being highly engaging. You can create videos about the use of acupuncture to treat different kinds of problems and can post them on Youtube so that your business can be perceived as a brand name apart from the benefit of getting leads from such videos. You can also post such videos on your social network and website to enlarge the distribution and results achieved by it.
8) Email Marketing
Many people don’t take decisions instantly, they take some time to sort and select the best option. So this means that a major chunk of your website visitors are not going to call you or visit your clinic during the first interaction with your website. To better utilize such visitors, you can provide a free e-book related to acupuncture to them in exchange for their email addresses. Once you have their email address, you will have much more time to convince and interact with them which means that you will gain more out of your website visitors. This simply means that email marketing for acupuncture can enable you to get more revenue for your acupuncture practice.
9) Seminar Marketing
People might have many doubts and concerns related to acupuncture therapy and its benefits. By holding free seminars, you can not only clear doubts of people (and can have more clients) but can also showcase your expertise in the subject which will position your business to a different class than the rest.
10) Right Content Marketing
People type various search terms/keywords in Google to find their desired solution. There are many low-traffic potential keywords out there that are not paid any attention by many big sites and agencies. You can create an opportunity out of it by focusing on creating content around low competition keywords related to your acupuncture niche. Once you publish a significant amount of content catering to such keywords, you will start seeing traffic flowing to your website passively which will translate to more bookings. You can get the content marketing task either by yourself or by any agency.
11) Guest Posts
Getting traffic, links and recognition to your website by utilizing the brand power of big websites can be successfully achieved with the help of a well-laid guest post marketing plan. The only downside of marketing your acupuncture services through guest posts is that it takes some time in creating a list of sites to contact followed by getting your guest posts proposal accepted by them. But the results achieved by guest posts for ranking your site are long-lasting.
12) Newspaper/News site Marketing
People tend to perceive newspapers and news sites to be more genuine as compared to non-news sites. You can use this public perception to your advantage by getting content on newspaper and news portals. It may take some time initially to contact and convince editors of newspapers and news sites but approaching them with high-quality content related to your subject of expertise will boost the chances of your content being accepted and published. Once you get a handful of such sites and papers to publish your content, the brand perception of your acupuncture business will tremendously benefit from it.
13) Targeting Your Competitors
You can create content strategically to benefit from the brand name of your competing acupuncture businesses. Suppose a person types “ABC acupuncture Houston”, you can create content on the topic “ABC acupuncture Houston” to stand chances of your blog content to show up in Google due to which you can gain some of the visitors looking for your competing business. This process can be repeated with many business names of your niche. Also, you can implement this strategy much better through Google Ads by putting competitor business names as your target keywords.
14) Text Marketing
Nowadays there are many companies online that do text marketing to people from locations specified by their customers. Since an average text message gets much better “open” and “read” rates than an email, therefore text marketing for an acupuncture business can be a quick way to broadcast your message to local people.
15) Free Checkup Camp
Free checkup camps are a great way to assemble a crowd and to get more acupuncture customers. Once you host a free checkup camp (either by yourself or in partnership), you will get many potential clients who may be interested in taking acupuncture therapy. You can collect the name, email and mobile numbers of all the people attending your check-up camp so that you can send them acupuncture-related offers or content regularly and can increase the overall revenue of your business.
16) Promotion Through Influencers
By using influencer marketing for your acupuncture therapy/practice, your promotional message can spread to thousands of followers of the respective influencers. You can select local influencers in categories like health, lifestyle, etc. and can collaborate with them to spread the word out about your acupuncture clinic. You can also give a few free sessions to some of the local influencers so that they can give a much more detailed review of your service. There are influencer searching platforms like upfluence that can be used to access a ready list of thousands of influencers along with their main category/niche, charges, reviews, etc.
17) Referrals
Many businesses and services that do get customers of a similar profile are the best potential partners for marketing your acupuncture business/service. Beauty salons, physicians, chiropractors, chemists, etc are some of the good potential partners. You can either pay them commissions per referral or can make any other mutual beneficial deal for them to be incentivized to send you referrals. You can also give them some custom printed merchandise like carry bags, prescription papers, etc so that this merchandise will serve as your business promotion strategy.
18) Offline Marketing
You can regularly give ads in newspapers regarding the benefits of acupuncture treatment so as to generate awareness and leads for your business. The same can also be done by using other offline marketing methods for acupuncture business like pamphlets, billboards, flyers, etc. You can also set up booths near big hospitals, clinics and medical stores so as to make people aware of your services. Though the cost involved in offline marketing is mostly bigger than online marketing, anything that generates revenue for your business is worth implementing.
19) Review Generation and Management
People have more choices now for each and every type of service out there and this is why you must pay attention to reviews of your services else people wouldn’t hesitate to move on to any other acupuncture service. To boost good reviews, you must actively ask people to do so along with effectively tackling average or negative reviews. Serve the best possible services and ask your customers to rate them online. There are many pieces of research out now that strongly relate to the effect of reviews on a business/service.
20) Local Events
Putting booths in local events and making people aware of the benefits of acupuncture therapy is a good way to grow your business. You can also host or sponsor some events in your locality to spread awareness of your acupuncture services. You can hold free health-related seminars so that more people would join in and you can utilize such opportunities to promote your acupuncture services. If you find it difficult to do this yourself, you can hire any employee to look after your offline and face-to-face interaction with people.
21) Directories
While it is good to aim to rank your own website in Google, it is much better to advertise your acupuncture business across many other platforms that rank well in Google. For this, sites like Yelp, Homeadvisor, etc are a boon for opening a new source of traffic. You just have to make a list of all such sites ranking on the front page of Google and select those websites that allow adding your business details. By doing this for a variety of keywords related to your niche, you will get many other additional marketing channels.
22) E-Book Marketing
Write an ebook or get an ebook written on the subject of acupuncture therapy. Now you can give away this ebook for free to all those people who leave their email addresses on your website so that you can collect leads to remain in touch with potential customers. You can use an ebook as a reward for collecting leads followed by sending them offers and discounts to try your acupuncture services.
This winds up our recommendation on some of the best marketing ideas for an acupuncture business. To follow up on discussions related to acupuncture marketing, we welcome you to use the comments below.
