Acupuncture induces body's own painkiller
Researchers are now saying that adenosine, a pain killer that the body naturally produces, plays a role in acupuncture’s pain relieving ability (at least in mice). One interesting note for practitioners is that, according to this study, “the acupuncture needles must be periodically rotated during the treatment for the positive effects to take place. If the needles were just left in the mice for 30 minutes, there would be no pain alleviation.” You can read more about the research here and here.
Acupuncture Pin-up Posters
Here’s a very clever local acupuncture practice promotion from Berlin, Germany. Homemade posters with tear-off tabs are one of the simplest and most practical forms of local acupuncture marketing you can do. Printing your own promotional posters is cheap and when placed in the right locations they are highly visible. Obviously the creative use of push pins is both eye catching and amusing. But also of note here is the minimal amount of text and ample white space surrounding the human figure. Since most self made posters are nothing but text, these would really “pop” even on a busy bulletin board.
Ask Me About Acupuncture
Acupuncture marketing isn’t about advertising, promotion, or lead generation. It’s about building relationships with real human beings, one at a time. And one of the best ways to build a relationship is through conversation. You can create your own marketing opportunities by encouraging people to ask you questions about acupuncture and Oriental medicine. Creating your own t-shirts is one way to get the job done and it’s easy at Cafepress or Zazzle. Don’t forget to always have business cards handy!
Acupuncture Websites & Word of Mouth
Practitioners often think that the primary benefit of an acupuncture practice website will come from random search engine traffic. Not so. The best reason to have an acupuncture website is to reap the full benefit of your word of mouth.
We all know that word of mouth is the core of marketing an acupuncture practice. But how does word of mouth work? Do patients go around handing out business cards? Well yes, sometimes (especially if you encourage them to!). But in most cases they simply mention you. If you can’t be found in Google these mentions will be less likely to turn into real patients. So stop hiding from your potential patients and get your acupuncture website online today!
Acupuncture Advertising from Israel
This amusing Yellow Pages advertisement is from Israel. Billboard advertising is not something most acupuncturists will undertake, but this is a good example of attention grabbing acupuncture advertising from which you can derive inspiration.
Google, Google and, um, Google
Google is by far the most popular search engine in the U.S. Almost 70% of all internet searchers in the U.S. are going to see Google’s results (even though they might not be using Google directly). So Google should be your primary focus when optimizing your acupuncture website.
Other search engines that people use are Yahoo! and Microsoft’s oft renamed search engine, currently known as Bing. A handful of people also use Ask.com, mainly in the South West U.S. And that’s it.
UPDATE: Yahoo now licenses its search results from Bing. That means that Yahoo results will be identical to Bing results.
