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Hi there, my name is Michelle Grasek. I’m an acupuncturist and a marketing strategist and the host of the Acupuncture Marketing And today we’ll be talking about a new way to think about using Instagram that does not require any new content creation. It is specifically using Instagram for business to business networking so that you can build real connections with other local business owners and expand your Visibility in your community.

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And before we get started today, I’d like to thank the American Acupuncture Council for the opportunity to be here with you. All right, let’s get into the slides. Using Instagram for business to business networking. Today we are going to briefly cover why would we do this, why use this approach, why does it work, and then two specific strategies for building these relationships with other local business owners and collaborating with them.

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So why would we take this approach to Instagram? I don’t know about you, but most of the people I know are generally a little burnt out by content creation for social media. As you know, content creation takes time, it takes energy and creativity. And over and over again, that kind of feels like a hamster wheel.

Yes. So if you are feeling kind of worn out by content creation, this is a great strategy. And you have probably noticed in the past year or year and a half that your engagement on your account has gone down. I know that for my own business, Instagram accounts, and for my marketing clients and students, they are reporting that their likes on their posts and their reels has gone way down and so have their views, right?

They are being exposed to way fewer new accounts and even the people who follow them on Instagram are not seeing their posts that often. Okay, so big picture, if you’re experiencing this, you are not alone. It is pretty much across the board. For example, people who were previously getting 50 to 60 likes per reel or post are now kind of struggling to get 5 to 15 likes.

So again, if this is you, you are in good company, but it can be very frustrating to spend time creating content that you feel like No one gets to see, right? Is it effective? So if you need a break from all of that, then this strategy can be a really nice choice. Business to business networking on Instagram is is both a refreshing approach to using Instagram and a refreshing approach to networking.

So why is that? So first of all, it’s a nice approach to Instagram because you can either take a break from content creation or you can scale back the volume of content that you are creating. I know that some of my marketing clients are concerned about stopping content creation altogether for Instagram or any social platform because they’re worried about getting dinged by the algorithm if they don’t create content.

publish new content. So I understand that. If that’s how you feel, it’s all good. You could think about maybe using this strategy and cutting your content creation in half. So if you usually produce two reels a week on Instagram, maybe just do one and then use the time that you would have used to create that other reel for this strategy, for networking, for building connections and collaborations.

So that’s one option. And, or, forgive me. So the other reason that this is a nice approach to using Instagram is that it does leverage all of the content that you’ve created for Instagram in the past. So you’ve probably been creating Posts and Reels for years on your account and when someone lands on your account homepage, they get a really good idea of what your business is about, who you serve, you know, what your values and priorities are, how you can help them just by scrolling through all of your recent posts and reels.

Right? They can get a really good idea of what you’re all about. And so this is really helpful for business to business networking because you are going to engage with other business owners and ask them to collaborate, and they can simply pop over to your account homepage and look through the content you’ve created, and that will give them a great idea of whether you are a good fit to collaborate with them.

Do you match their own values, ideals, and goals, etc. Right? Do they think you’d be good? Partners in this endeavor, whatever it is you’re asking them for, whether it’s an acu yoga collaboration or something totally different. Okay. And this is also a really nice way to think about networking because it’s much lower pressure than traditional networking meetings.

I do find that many, many acupuncturists Of course, not all, but many are introverts, myself included, many of my marketing clients and students are introverts. And for, for the most part, people tend to not like traditional networking meetings where you go and you don’t know anyone and you sort of stand around awkwardly with a drink waiting for someone to talk to you, or you have to insert yourself into a conversation and then introduce yourself.

So, Doing this kind of networking obviously doesn’t require any of that. It simply allows you to build relationships that are genuine at your own pace. So, this is a way to connect with people, potentially in your pajamas from your home. And it’s just much more comfortable for many people, but it’s still equally effective.

And I also like to point out that this approach to networking can be very specific. You get to choose the best business owners or influencers that you’re interested in working with because you’ve, you’ve vetted them and you think a collaboration would be beneficial to both of you. And you can spend your time and energy building a connection with them on Instagram, as opposed to when you go to a traditional networking meeting, you might meet a dozen new people and it could be very varied, right?

Like maybe an insurance salesperson or a real estate agent. And. It’s not that you would never collaborate with those people, but you sort of have to sift through the people that you think would be open to a collaboration and would be a good fit if you’re doing traditional networking, whereas This type of networking is very specific and I think everyone is very busy and if you can fit Instagram networking into your schedule whenever you have a free moment and have it build into Meaningful relationships with a few people instead of superficial relationships with a dozen.

I think most people really appreciate that. So what are these strategies that I keep talking about? It’s actually very simple. Your goal is to connect with real life local business owners. Who you think have an audience who would be a good fit to become your patients. And when I say business owners, I’m also including influencers in this.

It’s sort of interchangeable in some ways. Like some local business owners, they actually have a brick and mortar business. Others are influencers. They might sell something, but really the The main point here is they have a following that you think would be a great fit to eventually become your patients.

They, their following is your target market. Okay. And your goals here are once you’ve made a connection with them to pitch them an idea to collaborate on an event together, or it doesn’t have to be an in person event, whatever ideas you have that are mutually beneficial for the both of you. Or, You can ask someone to come into your office for treatment and do a trade for the treatment and social media exposure.

Okay, so we’ll go more into these strategies, but big picture, this is our goal. And honestly, it works very well. My marketing clients and myself for my practice, we have All countless examples of relationships that we have built with small business owners locally who we never would have met or bumped into in real life, but connected through Instagram and now have these long term, very supportive, collaborative business partnerships or relationships.

Okay, so that’s, that’s what we’re going for here. So I recommend if you don’t have anyone in mind already, and you may, someone that you follow on Instagram, you might say, gosh, I’d love to work with so and so at that yoga studio. We could host this event. It would be fabulous. That’s a great place to start.

Just think about who are the business owners that you admire. Someone where you can genuinely say, I love what you’re doing in the community and I’d love to work together. I think that we have you know, a shared vision or shared goals for our communities and I’d love to work together. If you can say that for real, then you are on the right track and this is probably a good person to try to connect with.

And of course, you also want to make sure that you are choosing people who are local because you want people who can actually come to your clinic, right? So within maybe 45 minutes of your clinic, it’s not that useful to connect with influencers or business owners who are pretty far away because you like, what are the chances that someone who’s five hours away is actually going to come see you for treatment, right?

So that’s not what we’re interested in. We want these people to have followers who are local and who are in your target market. They’d be a great fit to become your patients. Okay. So just thinking about that when you’re trying to decide who are four or five people I’d like to connect with on Instagram.

to build a collaboration. And let’s talk a little bit about influencers. I think we get a bad taste in our mouth when I talk about influencers. I’m talking about nano and micro influencers. So not people with like a million followers. Nano is up to 10, 000 followers. And micro is 10, 000 If you can believe that, they’re still considered micro if they only have 100, 000 followers.

But the idea here is that smaller local accounts, as long as they have an audience who really listens to them, takes their advice, gets good engagement on their account. That’s what you’re looking for, right? And they also are people who would be a great fit to become your patients. So if someone has 6, 000 followers, that’s great, right?

They don’t, they don’t have to have 100, 000. In fact, smaller influencers are more likely to work with you because they have that local connection. And we’ll talk about this in a moment, but I recommend doing a trade for the influencers. Sharing you and your business on their account. Okay. Instead of paying them money to do that.

And again, that’s up to you, but I think that smaller influencers are more likely to accept the gift of a treatment for a trade, than instead of being paid cash, as opposed to like larger influencers are looking for quote brand deals on something much more formal and more money. Okay, so again, you’re just thinking about who would you be proud to work with, whose account would you be proud to be represented on, and who has an audience that is a good fit as your target market.

So some ideas. Who might these people be? Okay, yoga studios are a great fit. I have done some beautiful collaborations with the owner of a low waste specialty shop near me. She only sells things that are plastic free, for example, but she is really into alternative medicine. She’s very supportive of natural health approaches.

So the more you get to know people on Instagram, the Better awareness you have of who’s a great fit to work with and collaborate with, even if they’re not health care providers, right? So don’t limit yourself to just health care providers. Photographers can be fabulous. Photography tends to do really well on Instagram, and so their followers They tend to have a lot of followers and be very engaged.

Lash specialists, artists of all kinds. At my office, we have a wonderful collaboration with a collage artist and some watercolor artists. And then of course you could think about chiropractors, therapists physical therapists, nutritionists, hair salons and estheticians, makeup artists. Those are great choices.

Med spas, they tend to do very well on Instagram. They get a lot of engagement. So try to think outside the box. Again, it’s just, who would you be proud to be associated with? Like who you’d be pleased to be featured on their account and who’s got your target market. So how do you do this? This outreach thing, it’s actually very simple.

There’s two approaches you can take and both, both work well. It sort of depends on your. Maybe your personality and your comfort level with each. So the one approach is what I consider dating before proposing to someone. So I often think of marketing this way that you give your audience the opportunity to get to know you before you say, do you want to buy my stuff?

Right? So in this case, it would look like You know, you would pick a business owner that you’d love to collaborate with, you would follow their account, you would regularly check in on their account for new posts or reels or stories, and you would like all of them and try to comment. So whenever they publish a new reel, for example, you’re liking and you’re commenting.

And I would say try to Ask questions of the business owner in your comments so that you can engage with them right away and they will start noticing if you’re doing this repeatedly. So over time you’ll become pretty familiar to them as someone who enjoys their work and engages with their account and when you’re ready, when you feel comfortable basically, you can shoot them a direct message or private message and then you can more formally introduce yourself and pitch your idea for collaboration like, Hey, my name is Michelle.

I run Ageless Acupuncture in Seneca Falls. I absolutely love what you’re doing and I was wondering if you’d be interested in collaborating. I have a couple ideas. Let me know what you think. I’m so excited to hear from you. Right? So just cheerful, positive. They’re already familiar with you. By and large, people are going to say yes.

And then you can have a conversation and see what sort of collaboration might work well for you. And we’ll talk about collaboration suggestions in just a moment. There’s a million different things you can do. It’s really, the sky’s the limit. It’s up to your creativity. Creativity with this other person.

Okay. And then the other option is just to go right in to their direct messages and introduce yourself and share your pitch. And I have seen this work as well. You know, if your idea is strong enough and beneficial enough for the other business owner, they’re probably going to be interested in answer you because Because it’s interesting, right?

Because they are willing to have a conversation about it. You know, especially if you go about it in a really nice way, where you emphasize how much you, you do enjoy their account and, and the work that they’re doing in the community. And maybe give them some extra reasons why you think working together would, would go well and benefit both of your audiences if you are just diving in with that DM and they don’t know you that well.

But again, I think either of these methods can be very successful. It’s just up to you and your personal preference, how you’d like to connect with them. Regardless of how you go about this, when you are making your pitch for collaborating, make sure you focus your collaboration request on the benefit to the business and their clients or patients and the community that you mutually serve because you’re very likely to have some overlap between the people that you serve, but just angle your collaboration idea from the perspective of all the ways it would be great for them, okay?

For example, you could mention that if you did acu yoga, you would be thrilled to share the class on your, all of your social media and in your email newsletter, so that you’d be exposing them in their business to all of your audience. Naturally, they are going to do the same for you, right? But when you are approaching them, you want to emphasize this aspect of why would this be so great for your business for this reason, or this is one reason.

So really quickly, some collaboration ideas. There’s a lot here. You can take a screenshot if you’d like. Accu Yoga is very, very common. If you wanna collaborate with a yoga studio, you could. Teach a class together, maybe at the community center. You could host a class where they teach something at your office, so you’re giving them a platform to share their expertise with your audience, and they could do the same for you.

You could host a book club together, maybe wellness books, whatever it is that fits for both of your audiences. You could host a pop up event for them or vice versa. I have seen people host weekend wellness retreats because of collaborations that started on Instagram. I mean, some of these ideas make the business owners thousands of dollars because they really get creative and passionate about it and build it out into something so much bigger than they initially imagined.

You could host a fundraiser together for a charity that you mutually support. Themed wellness nights, Valentine’s Day is coming up. It’s a really good opportunity for a themed wellness night. You could do giveaways where you collaborate across both of your Instagram accounts. You could host a networking event together for other wellness people in your area.

The list goes on.

Okay, thank you so much for being here with me today. I hope that you find this Kind of invigorating. Hopefully it is a really refreshing way to look at Instagram and networking. If you have any questions about this, these strategies or marketing in general, you’re always welcome to email me michelle or michelleGrasek.

com. I hope you’ll listen to the podcast, Acupuncture Marketing School, and check out my website for free marketing resources for acupuncturists. Before I go, one last to the American Acupuncture Council. I’m very grateful to be here with all of you today. Thank you.

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