How I’m Starting My Acupuncturist’s Instagram From Scratch [Episode 144]

Hello my friends. Welcome back. I'm so happy to have you here in your, where are you? Where are you listening? Where do you listen to podcasts? I usually listen when I'm like out for a walk or doing the dishes, you know, stuff like that. So anyway, I'd love to hear where you're tuning in from. Oh, also something I've been meaning to ask y'all.

I, you know, I do the listener shout outs where it's like, Hey, you know, I'm so and so, and I listen to the holistic marketing simplified podcast. I am looking to have a few more new listener shoutouts, so if you are an avid listener and you wouldn't mind recording it for me, it's super duper simple. Just DM me and I'll tell you how to do it.

It will take you two seconds and I would greatly, greatly appreciate it. I also wanted to remind you before we dive into today's episode about my new or my second cohort of my group coaching program, the content sprint. So I just wrapped a few weeks ago my very first beta cohort of a group coaching program.

A lot of you know that I have an Instagram management agency, but the thing about our agency is it's almost always full. And right now we're rocking a wait list of the last I checked this morning, 48 people. So here's the deal. We love our clients and our agency, and I think we do a hell of a job. But there's something to be said about having somebody physically in your office or, uh, close to you to do or like help you with your Instagram, and that's what this group coaching program is all about.

Now, I will say it's of the beta cohort that I just wrapped up, there were 10 people in it. It was actually split 50 55 were the actual practitioner themselves going through the program just for themselves and for the, their own clinic. And then the other five were like a plus one. It was like a front desk.

I had like some cas I had, oh, one person was vir, like virtual, doing it on their behalf. When you enroll in my content sprint is what the group coaching program is called. You are getting a seat for your whole clinic, not just for like one person. So we actually had one student who had multiple people from their clinic 'cause they had multiple locations.

So what it is, is it is eight weeks live with me, so there's no prerecorded curriculum. Um, I do throw in like some bonus trainings here and there, but for the most part it's, there's no prerecorded curriculum. We meet every Wednesday, starting January 14th to 2026 at noon eastern for an hour. And yes, recordings are available, but I was super fortunate.

The majority of the cohort this last time, everybody got on live every time. And then after we, I literally start at the very beginning of like, if my agency was running your Instagram account, here's where we would start and we walk through this week, by week, by week. It is such a truly like step-by-step handholding process.

And then at the end of each week I give you a homework assignment so that you can implement what you learn. 'cause we all know it's like, I know all of y'all go to like these seminars all the time where you're learning these techniques and it's like, okay, now we actually have to implement it. So yes. So implementation is like the, the key of this.

And then you also get a lot of handholding for me. A lot of attention, like I'm looking and checking everyone's homework and auditing accounts and all of that jazz. So the main difference between the content Sprint and holistic marketing hub is the level of support that you get with me, and you're doing it live in a small group environment versus the hub.

The curriculum is basically the same, but it's all prerecorded and you're kind of going at your own pace. So I would love to have you in, and this week I am running a awesome Black Friday special. And, um, see if you just go to molly cahill.com/sprint, you will see all of the information on that. Uh, maybe at the time this is airing, it might already be full.

I don't know. Last time it sold out before I even officially launched it. I never even sent an email to my list and it sold out. I'm gonna take 10 people again, I have. 13 people on the wait list, I think is the last I checked. Obviously I know all 13 won't, like, you know, some people add their name to the wait list just for funsies, but I do feel confident that this one will sell out again.

So if you've ever wanted to upskill someone in your office, or if you've got a little bit more time on your hands right now and you want to learn how to upskill, uh, and you don't really like prerecorded videos, and this is the way to go. So again, it's molly kay hill.com/sprint. So today's episode actually fits perfectly with talking about the sprint because I am fortunate enough to where I'm going to start doing my own acupuncturist Instagram.

She literally just texted me last week. She is, she has opened a second business that is only cosmetic, and she's not just doing cosmetic acupuncture. She's hired an aesthetician, so she's doing all types of facials, microneedling, all of that jazz. So she wants to start a completely different Instagram just because she eventually kind of wants to be like, move her way out of it.

And, uh, she asked me to do it for her. So since I am local, obviously I'm super excited. I thought it would be a really helpful episode for you to hear exactly how I'm going to approach starting this account from scratch. So that's what we're gonna cover today. Here we go.

Hey, welcome to Holistic Marketing Simplified. This podcast boils down to the fact that we wholeheartedly believe that more humans need to know about holistic health solutions, and you didn't go to school to learn how to be a full-time content creator and show up on Instagram and do all of this marketing stuff all day, every day.

So let's come hanging out while we chat. All things ease in your marketing, and my goal is that you shift your mindset around your marketing from a quote should to a, I get to more dream patients and clients. Yes, please. Hi, I'm Dr. Carly. And I am a mentor for other chiropractors from Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

And I listen to holistic marketing, simplified podcasts. Okay. So starting an Instagram account from scratch. Here is what I am doing for this client. So first off, let me just say that you don't necessarily have to start an account from scratch. Um, she is choosing to because. Like I said in the intro, she is eventually wanting to like not be a part of this business, so she doesn't want it.

She doesn't want it necessarily tied to her main acupuncture account business. She wants this to be a completely separate thing because she's bringing in the aesthetician. I think we could do it either way. I would totally be, it would totally work just to combine it with her other, because I know she's gonna get a lot of crossover.

This is really what she wants is she has like different branding, she has a different website and everything. So we are gonna start from scratch. So what I'm doing is I'm going in next week and I am actually meeting with her husband because she's like, he is the more tech savvy person. And this is gonna be step one.

So step one is we will go onto Instagram and look at all the various options for our handle or username. And all you have to do to do that is literally just type it into the search bar and see if someone else is using it or not. So when picking a handle, um, I've actually just had two holistic marketing hub students who I suggest, and I, I actually very rarely suggest this.

'cause usually if you have an established account, you don't really wanna be messing with changing your handle. But these two students in particular were newer, and so I was like, Hey, you know, if you're open to it, I would consider changing your handle because both of theirs were very, very long. And here's the thing, you know what your handle is supposed to say, but people who have no context, it kind of just looks like word salad sometimes.

I'll give you a perfect example. I follow this awesome account. She actually just changed her handle because someone else had a similar business name and I don't remember. Anyway, she had to change it. It was supposed to be felt sense was the name of her business, and then she's in Winnipeg, Canada. So her handle was felt since WPG.

Well, my brain always read it as fell soup jewel. So my point is, when picking a handle. You wanna try to keep it as short as you can, and then don't be afraid to use like a dot or an underscore. I think a.is easier than an underscore just because like I said, your brain is not gonna see it as word salad because your brain knows what it's supposed to say.

Someone else who doesn't know what it's supposed to say, might just think it's a whole bunch of letters jumbled together. So I'm going to, like I said, look at what handle options are available, and then we'll pick the handle and then we're gonna go ahead and start the account from scratch. She doesn't want it tied.

She's not gonna do a Facebook page for it at all. So, um, I'm not even gonna be worried about like, oh my gosh, y'all, the hardest part of our job, I swear, is getting someone's freaking Facebook page to link properly. Like, you think it'd be easy, but it like never works, right? Anyway, I don't have to worry about that with this 'cause she doesn't want a Facebook page and I don't blame her.

I'm not saying Facebook doesn't work, especially if you're in a smaller town. I know it can be like, get more engagement than Instagram. I just personally hate Facebook. I just feel like maybe I just haven't gotten my algorithm dialed in over there. 'cause I don't ever spend time there. I just feel like every time I open it for a client or something, it's just like doom and gloom and the most angry people and it's just, anyway, like I said, maybe that's just my algorithm 'cause I've got my Instagram algorithm dialed in to stuff that makes me happy.

But I digress. So we will create her new account and then what I'm going to do while I am there that day, I actually just made a list of things. I want to make sure that I get any photos or videos because even though this is a brand new business for her, she's been doing a majority of these services herself just without an aesthetician.

So I'm gonna create a shared Google Drive with her to get a lot of her, 'cause she doesn't have, if she had an iPhone, I would just create an iPhone, a shared iPhone album. But she doesn't have an iPhone album. I mean, she doesn't have an iPhone, she has a Android, and so I could just do like a Google Photos album.

Typically I just prefer to use drive because it makes it easier to, uh, store the edited videos. So I'm gonna create a shared Google Drive with her and ask for any photos or videos she has of her, you know, performing these services in the past. I am also going to see if she knows the name of her, uh, fonts that are used on her new website because this is a question I get asked all the time.

It's about brand fonts. People ask me, I've literally just in the last two weeks gotten questions about fonts. So typically you don't need to be like going into Canva and figuring out all new fonts for your Instagram. You want it to be cohesive with your website. Now, if your website is super outta date.

Not on brand. I mean, sure that's a different story, but typically you wanna just be using the same, like if you go look at any of my graphics that were made in Canva, like sometimes, a lot of times I just make my graphics right on Instagram, but if I've made a graphic in Canva, it is the same exact fonts that are on my website and the same exact colors you really want consistent.

You don't want your Instagram to just be willy-nilly, all these random, different fonts and random colors. It needs to be cohesive because that establishes a subconscious signal of trust when people, when the branding is cohesive throughout. One perfect example of this is we've got like local elections coming up for school board and um, city council and all that.

And there's signs everywhere, right? Like wouldn't it be weird if I was, say I was running for city council and like every single one of my signs looked different, like. That's not how marketing works. So take a little audit of your Instagram right now. And I'm not saying you, you can go look at mine. You can see that it's not like perfectly hook, cohesive.

You know, the way everything looks on Instagram doesn't matter as much as it used to. But if you are going to be using Canva to make graphics, don't use a different font every time and a different color every time. 'cause that is silly. That's a silly sausage thing to do. You want it to be cohesive. So, um, what I'm gonna find out is what if she knows the names of her fonts and the hexa decimal values for her colors, which is just that little six digit, you know, like certain pink is like, uh, like six letters or numbers of that, that pink, and that way I can match it right in Canva.

But the good news is if she doesn't know either of those things, so maybe you're not in touch with your website developer or something like that anymore. There is a website called, um, you can just Google like. What font is on my website, basically, and there's a website like Font Finder or something like that, and you can literally just take a screenshot or plug in the URL of your website and it will tell you what fonts are being used.

So if you only have one font being used on your website, then you can als, you can always pull in like a, a second one for Canva and Instagram graphics if you want. But that's where I will start with that. And like I said, same with her colors. Um, there's a feature in Canva. If you take a screenshot of your website, you can go into Canva and use the little color like eyedropper tool and it will match that color.

It's probably not gonna be like, I mean, I've never seen it look anything other than exact. I'm sure it's not exactly exact, but it's close enough. So that's how you can match the colors if you do not have access to knowing exactly what colors were used on your website. Okay. So that will be, what I do is set up, like I said in my, I'm just gonna use my own Canva for her.

Um, instead of asking her, most our clients have their own, well, I guess I'll ask her. No, like usually if it's, if I was doing this as a normal client setup through our agency, it'd be a little more official because. My team would be handling all of this, but we're actually doing this for trade, so I'm doing things a little differently, which I just thought y'all would like to hear.

If she does have a Canva Pro account, a paid Canva account, I will just ask for her login and password. I do not like to do a team thing. I don't like adding someone to your team on Canva. So message me if you know if this has changed, because maybe it has. The reason we just p prefer to log right into our, our client's Canva is because if you just added us as a team member, we don't have access to any past designs you've done.

And that's kind of like defeats the whole purpose. Like we, we wanna see, like for example, this was gonna be, this is my next bullet point of one of the things I'm gonna ask for her, if she had little brochures made of all of her services, well, I need the electronic copy of that, so. I don't know if it's in Canva.

I don't know where if she had them made, but I need the electronic copy. If it's in her Canva and like then I have access to it, right. But if it was just they just added me as like a team member on Canva, then I wouldn't have access to any of the old designs. So that's what we do. Maybe that's changed in the last couple years and I have no idea.

And that's just how we've been rolling this whole time. So lemme know if you know any differently. So, yeah. Moving on to the next thing I'm gonna do, like I said, was get her brochure of services, get a digital copy because the first thing I'm gonna prioritize for her Instagram are her three pinned posts.

And in order to create those pinned posts, I need a menu of her services. So obviously I'm not gonna have a photo of every single service, 'cause I just looked at it and it's like 15 different services. But I'll just like, you know, list it out on the pin post slides. I did a whole entire podcast episode on pinned posts.

You can just search, and I also have free Canva templates that you can download for your own pin posts. If you just go to molly cahill.com/pinned, you will get the instructions, uh, what goes on your pin posts, as well as those free Canva templates. Those have been like bananas, y'all. This been my most.

Downloaded free resource ever. It was actually first time I actually went viral was with those pin post templates. So make sure to grab 'em if you haven't. I need to update my own pin posts. Maybe we need to all schedule a coworking time to do it together. Okay. So like I said, that'll be the, um, what I prioritize, but also, just to go back a step while I'm there, she's not gonna have any clients in that day, but I'm gonna use that time to film some B roll of the actual inside of the clinic.

So. The products, the chair, the front desk. I will film from the parking lot, what it's like to almost like park, get out of the car, walk into the door, open the door and walk in. Um, I'll also take like a regular photo of what the front of the office looks like, just so people can orient. 'cause it's inside of like a, like a office complex.

So it's not really obvious from the road that that's where it is. Now she is hiring a professional photographer, and I know I talked about this a couple weeks ago. This is just so important because it is fluorescent lighting in there and so it's really hard to capture photos and fluorescent lighting in my opinion.

I just think it's really great to have a professional who knows what they're doing. So, uh, like I said, I am gonna be taking some B-roll video in there, but I'm gonna leave the actual, like, photos to the professional. But if you're someone who's like, you don't have to wait on the photos, like, I'm gonna take all of those videos first.

So, like I said, I will probably take enough photos just to try with my, my iPhone just to try to get something for like the background for their pen posts. But because my pen post templates are, uh, like a static post, like a carousel. You also could do your pin post as like a reel as well. So I'll probably play around with a few different options of how I do her pin post.

I might do like one is a reel and two is carousel, or something like that. Okay. So this clearly is not the full content plan of everything I'm going to be doing, but I wanted to at least give you a like first step. Like this is like, like in practicality, this is what I'm going to be doing first in terms of.

Like next steps with content. Basically, I'm just gonna spend a lot of time with her services. It's gonna be a little different because they're so specific. So, like I said, I, I've already been thinking about this from a marketing standpoint. It's a little different from typical like chiropractors or acupuncture because I feel like it's a service.

You have to, I don't wanna say convince people less, but it kind of. I don't know, like people are more willing to spend money on beauty, I feel like. So like I said, I'm, I'm gonna approach things a little differently than I would for like my typical chiropractor or like acupuncture clients, and I'm also going to keyword the heck out of her reels with specific services.

Let me give you an example. So she does microneedling. So I will literally have a reel of like, you know, panning over a client's face that she's doing microneedling and say like, literally over the screen, like microneedling in Cincinnati, Ohio. And then I'll probably add like a few bullet points of like the benefits, like, you know, reduces fine lines and smaller pore size, blah, blah, blah.

Because Instagrams, they can actually read the text over reels. So when someone Googles microneedling in Cincinnati, you have the chance to come up. I'm not saying that this won't work for broader search, I would say, I don't know this for a fact. I would guess chiropractic might have more searches in acupuncture.

I'm not sure. Y'all tell me if I'm wrong. But like chiropractic in Cincinnati is just not as specific as microneedling in Cincinnati. You see the difference. Like I said, you can certainly try it. I just don't think that that would actually be, it's probably too broad of a key word to compete on Google, but what we are seeing with Google now is when you, when you do pair something super niche, like red light therapy, Cincinnati, like you actually have the chance to come up in search, which is really exciting.

I'm also gonna do a lot of content that's like. Botox alternative natural Botox, um, which I know it's not technically natural Botox, but you get what I'm saying. Holiday, like I said, with the holidays coming up, you know, focusing on people's pain points of like holiday looking good for the holidays and gift cards.

It was gonna be another thing, like I said, with the holidays coming up. And then in terms of trying to grow the page locally a little more quickly. I'm going to ask her some of her favorite local businesses, um, even if they're not necessarily referral partners, but just, you know, like coffee shops or, you know, gyms or, you know, other people who might, you know, own a small business that refer her business.

And do collaboration posts with them. I've done whole episodes on collab posts. If you wanna go back, um, anytime you're looking for a specific topic from me, I'm sure you knew this, but you could just type it into Google. Just type in like Molly Cahill collaboration posts, and it'll pop right to the episode.

You don't have to. Usually we try to put it in the show notes, but just know it's really easy to find stuff that way. Um, and then from a behind the scenes standpoint, well, I'm sorry, one more thing that's not behind the scenes. I'm going to be texting her every, uh, weekend to ask what her availability looks like for the next week.

And we're gonna be posting that on stories. So like, you know, new cosmetic acupuncture patient available Wednesday at two, stuff like that. We'll be posting on her stories. And then, like I said, the more. This isn't necessarily all behind the scenes, but some stuff that we'll be doing is with that list of local businesses that, and like I said, it might not even be people she does business with.

Luckily I live here, so I know, like I know a lot of the local businesses too. Um, I'll be commenting on their Instagrams from her account. I will be sharing, um, you know, like things to do in Cincinnati the holidays, like sharing that to her stories, really just doubling down on that local feel. So, like I said, this is not the full, like I said, the full plan, but I thought this episode obviously went longer than I meant for it to, but I thought you'd find it interesting to see kind of how I was approaching this from, uh, scratch.

So anyway, I hope you found this helpful and. Don't forget, like I said in the intro, I'm looking for more listener shout outs. If you're interested, all you have to do is DM me on Instagram and I'll tell you what to do. I appreciate you being here so much, and we'll chat next week. Thank you for listening to Holistic Marketing Simplified, and hey, you know how every podcaster at the very end of their episode asks you to rate and review their podcast.

Well that's because it's super important. These podcasts take a lot of time and heart and effort to produce, to bring you free information. So in order for me to be able to continue doing that, we need more people to find out about the show. So if you could please just take like two minutes out of your very busy day.

To leave me a rating and share this on your Instagram stories and tag at Molly a Cahill, that's C-A-H-I-L-L. I would greatly, greatly appreciate your support. I know your time is valuable and I can't wait to see you in the next episode.