Best Practices for New Patient Acquisition at Your Acupuncture Practice
As a holistic billing company, we focus on integrative health and billing insurance for holistic providers, but we are often asked by our clients for recommendations on how to promote their practice. In our experience, your acupuncture practice can gain new customers and strengthen your current client base with the right marketing.
Learn more about how your holistic practice can develop the most effective acupuncture marketing strategy for overall enhanced revenue cycle management!
Why Marketing Your Acupuncture Process Helps You Stay Competitive and Drive Additional Income
The importance of successfully marketing your acupuncture practice cannot be understated. Even if you have some of the best delivery of care to your patients, your new patient acquisition will be low if you can’t get your name out there! With the right marketing strategy, your acupuncture practice can stay competitive and continually bring in new clients—which means more revenue.
Staying competitive is crucial to driving additional income in an increasingly saturated holistic market. More people than ever before are turning to holistic medicine to maintain and restore their health. The global complementary and alternative medicine market is predicted to have an over 22% growth rate from 2021 to 2028 – eventually reaching over $ 400 billion by 2028. As more and more people turn to holistic medicine, your acupuncture practice must adopt competitive marketing techniques to stand out from the crowd.
Developing a marketing strategy for your holistic practice starts at the basics: delivering the right message. Since more people are turning to holistic medicine to alleviate their back pain and other ailments, cultivating your unique treatment approach that is both authentic to your practice and helps answer the questions clients are looking for will also gain you not only new patient acquisition, but committed clients who keep returning for more.
Acupuncture Marketing Best Practices
In such a growing market saturated with competitors, it may seem difficult to stand out from the crowd. By adopting these best practices, your acupuncture practice can better market to new patients as well as maintain existing relationships with your current client base.
Develop Your Brand
Part of what will set your acupuncture practice apart from the competition is developing your acupuncture clinic’s unique brand. This includes your message style and overall mission statement. You’ll have to address what kind of approach you’ll take to market your practice to the public and what tools you’ll use.
All of this will influence your message tone. For instance, if you’re marketing acupuncture to the elderly, you will use a different tone, style, and content than if you were attracting a millennial client base. Or, let’s say you’re focusing on delivering acupuncture services as an opioid alternative for patients recovering from addiction or surgery. You would use a much different tone of voice in your marketing that speaks to their specific needs than if you were trying to attract a more generic audience.
Grow Your Online Presence
In today’s digital age, building an online presence for your acupuncture practice is a must. This includes an optimized acupuncture website so your business can be easily accessible to those online. A successful website is one where you have the basics, such as your location, contact information, and a bit about who you are and your practice. However, you can add increased value to your website by including what makes your acupuncture practice unique – such as your treatment philosophy, team bios, and FAQs about acupuncture itself.
You also have to make your holistic practice easy to find online as well. Claim your Google business profile so local customers can help locate you in the “acupuncture practice near me” search results. Consider also adding your practice to review sites, such as Google Reviews and Yelp, for customer feedback. Since prospective patients like reading online customer reviews, these can be valuable platforms to highlight your holistic practice.
Utilize A Wide Variety of Digital Marketing Tools
Mastering omnichannel acupuncture marketing is key to reaching a variety of audiences. There are so many options out there now for reaching new customers that you don’t want to just stick to one digital marketing tool!
What digital channels you choose to market on should reflect on the audience you’re trying to reach, as well as the voice of your practice. Some digital marketing tools for your acupuncture practice can include:
- Social media marketing, including using Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
- Content marketing, such as providing useful content like blogging on your website.
- Email marketing to stay in touch with established patients.
Regardless of what digital marketing channels you use, or how many of them, the messaging on all platforms should remain consistent. This helps deliver the authentic image and message you want about your acupuncture practice to potential new clients and established ones.
How to Create a Google AdWords Campaign to Drive New Patient Acquisition in Less Than One Hour!
A Google AdWords campaign is by far the fastest and most cost-effective way to get your site to appear at the top of Google search results. Google‘s AdWords is a pay-per-click system where you pay only when a prospective patient clicks on your ad. When rolled out effectively, Google AdWords campaigns are a great way to drive new patients to your website, and ultimately help you generate more new patients.
By following these six easy steps, you can have a killer Google AdWords campaign for your practice in less than one hour!
Step 1: Set Up a Google AdWords Account
Go to www.google.com/adwords. Setting up your account can be completed in a few minutes.
Step 2: Create Your Campaign
Once you have set up and logged in to your account, you will want to create a new advertising campaign. Campaigns should be organized by the various services you want to advertise (such as chronic pain, cupping, and manual therapy). You will later create “Ad Groups” under each campaign to target specific services.
- Set the campaign name. If you want to promote “accepting insurance,” set your campaign name accordingly. Tying your campaign name to services you want to market will keep you organized and help you identify appropriate keywords and ad groups.
- Specify a geographical location for your ads to appear in. By clicking the “Let me choose” option, you can specify the city, region, or zip code so your ads only appear to your targeted audience. Limit your locations to keep your budget manageable.
- Set your daily budget. Depending on the keywords you choose, a single click can range from 20 cents to $14 or more and will vary by location. To determine your daily budget, decide how much you are willing to spend on a campaign each month and divide it by the number of days in the month.
Step 3: Create Ad Groups
Ad groups are a collection of ads under a campaign that corresponds to a group of related keywords. Creating ad groups enables you to further segment your campaign to focus on specific products or services you want to promote.
Step 4 Generate Ad Text
After you create ad groups, you will need to set the headlines, descriptions, and URLs.
- Headline (25 characters): Write a brief statement that includes the related keywords. For example, a good headline might read “Acupuncturist Accepting Insurance.”
- Description: Next, create a two-lined description (35 characters or less) that emphasizes the benefits of your practice and includes a clear “call to action” to encourage potential patients to click, call, or contact your practice.
- Add URLs: You will add your display URL (your web address) and the destination URL (the page a patient will be sent to after clicking your ad). The destination URL should lead to a page on your website that describes your services to help prospects quickly access information on the topic for which they searched. An example could be:
Headline: Acupuncturist Accepting Insurance
Description Line 1: Acupuncture treatments for back pain.
Description Line 2: Call for your free consultation!
Display URL: http://www.acupractice.com
Destination URL: http://www.acupractice.com/services
Step 5: Choose Relevant Keywords
Choose keywords that relate to your ad group title. When brainstorming keywords, make sure you use terms and phrases that people might search for on Google to find your practice. We recommend you use the AdWords keyword tool to help you build your keyword list.
Step 6: Add Corresponding Text into Your Website
If you are advertising a special offer or particular treatment, make sure your ad links to a page on your website that displays this information to help prospective patients immediately find what they are seeking. Edit your webpage to include your keywords, the title of your ad group, and the title of your campaign.
Remember, Google is the search engine for 87% of all web queries. By creating an effective Google AdWords campaign, you can drive immediate visitors to your website and convert these online search users into new patients.
Drive Revenue to Your Acupuncture Practice With HBS!
At Holistic Billing Services, we deal exclusively with holistic healthcare practices providing acupuncture, massage therapy, and chiropractic treatments. Whether you have questions on acupuncture insurance billing or other methods to enhance your revenue cycle management, feel free to contact our team today and let us know how we can help your acupuncture practice.