Do you know what a low hanging fruit is? Of course you do, but I’m referring to it in marketing terms.
Stick with me here for just a minute, because I promise you’ll learn something from this — in fact, you may even get an ‘aha!’ moment. – Here’s what I mean…
When you invest in marketing, most of the marketing is focused on attracting the low hanging fruit. The low hanging fruit is the prospective patient who is actively seeking an acupuncturist ‘now’. She’s been in fact-finding mode for a while, reading articles about her condition, or talking to close friends about her pain, ailments or anxiety.
Her condition may have become an issue three months ago, six months ago, or even a year ago. At one point she went to an MD who prescribed drugs, but the medication made it worse, and she’s now at her wits end willing to try anything.
During the time that she’s been coping with this ailment or disease, she hasn’t thought about – or seriously considered acupuncture. But now she is actively searching on Google, or asking friends if they know a good acupuncturist they can recommend.
We call this prospective patient ‘the low hanging fruit,’ because she is now ripe and ready to pick. In other words, she’s been struggling with this ailment that’s been keeping her awake at night, and this morning after breakfast she grabbed her mobile and searched on Google for ‘acupuncturist near me’.
Do you know what percentage of leads (prospective patients) the low hanging fruit represents? It represent just 5% of potential leads. The real number is closer to 3%. So what happens with the other 97% of potential patients who are out there that are not ready to take action yet, but will be ripe to do so in six days, six weeks or six months from now?
I can tell you this… They are being completely ignored by both you and your colleagues, when instead you could be capturing them in the early stage of their fact finding mode and cause them to stop searching. Do you see where I’m going with this?
By doing this, you are positioning yourself as the authority in your area (the go-to acupuncturist,) so that when they are ready to see an acupuncturist, they know who you are. That’s what content marketing is supposed to do.
So, what is content marketing really? Content marketing is blogging done right. It’s another lead generation tool in your marketing arsenal that is designed to attract the other 97% of leads that everyone else is ignoring. Do you now see the power of this marketing approach?
Blogging is the solution, BUT it’s also the problem because you don’t have the time to write marketing content when you’re focused on treating patients, running a practice, and baby sitting employees? In fact, blogging is the one thing acupuncturists say they’re going to start doing because they know content marketing is important, but they never get around to it – ever.
There’s a lot more to content marketing than hitting the ‘Publish’ button on a blog post and hope they come. Content marketing is not easy, but ACUPowerBlog™ solves that problem so you can focus on what you do best.
Frank Prieto is a marketing strategist helping acupuncturists generate highly qualified leads from the internet and converting more of them into new patients.
