MV TRAFFIC SUMMIT: Dawn Walton - How I Went Viral on Instagram and TikTok and Drove Traffic to My Therapy Business

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Key Topics & Highlights:

Introduction

• - Introduction of Dawn Walton
• - Background as a trauma therapist
• - Focus on online therapy

Utilizing Social Media

• - Early presence on social media
• - Developing approach to online therapy before the pandemic

Strategies to Reach More People

• - Struggles in reaching more clients due to efficient therapy approach
• - Various strategies adopted over the years, including writing books and doing TED Talks

Utilizing Video on Instagram and TikTok

• - Effectiveness of using social media to drive traffic to the business
• - Instances of getting inquiries after people saw videos on IG and TikTok

Learning from Tony Robbins and Dean Graziosi

• - Insights gained from Tony Robbins' free 5-day program
• - Utilizing Dean Graziosi's concept of finding your dots and customer avatar

Branding and Positioning

• - Branding as a trauma therapist
• - Importance of starting every video with the same introduction

Structure of Social Media Posts

• - Importance of having a clear structure for every social media post
• - Three steps in every social media post: hook, story, call to action

Utilizing Linktree for Call to Action

• - Utilizing Linktree in both TikTok and Instagram to direct viewers to the website or book a call

Insights on TikTok and Instagram Reach

• - Unique features of TikTok in terms of reach and call to action
• - Differences between Instagram and TikTok

MemberVault as an Essential Tool

• - Value of MemberVault in providing free resources and low-cost offers to viewers
• - Integration with Acuity for booking 1-to-1 therapy sessions

Consistent Content Creation

• - Importance of consistent, clear format in content creation
• - Utilizing captions and editing features on TikTok

Multi-Platform Content Sharing

• - Process of sharing the same video across multiple platforms
• - Utilization of the same text and hashtags on different platforms

Importance of Consistency

• - Emphasizing the importance of consistency regardless of immediate results
• - Cumulative effect of reputation and reaching a tipping point

Closing Thoughts

• - Encouragement to share the talk and try the strategies
• - Offer to answer questions and encourage feedback

Connect with Dawn:

https://instagram.com/dawn_thinkitchangeit
Tik Tok @ThinkitChangeit
Podcast "We're all screwed up (and that's OK)"

https://products.thinkitchangeit.com/

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Full Transcript:

Hi, my name is Dawn Walton, and I'm a trauma therapist working exclusively online. And the last 10 years, I've helped over 1400 people aged eight to 88. Today, I want to talk to you about how I use social media, to drive traffic to my business, and to my website.

I have always been quite present on social media, I'm a geek. So I'm very happy to do videos and use whatever the latest technology is. And I started offline, very active on Twitter. When I first qualified as a therapist, my friends on Twitter would say to me, what are showing you don't live closer. And I realized that it was really important for me to be able to meet everybody's needs no matter where in the world they were. So well before the pandemic and everybody was talking about doing online stuff, I developed an approach to doing therapy online, so that I could help people wherever in the world they were.

I've over the years, like many therapists struggle to get enough people to know about me because I have a very efficient approach to helping people. 95% of these 1400 people that I've helped have needed no more than three sessions. This is not a good business model, when you're a therapist, most of us get to keep people for years at a time. So what this means is I need to be able to reach more people. To reach more people, I've come up with various strategies from writing books, to doing TED Talks. And more recently, what I've discovered is how I can use social media to drive traffic to both my website and my business.

In fact, it's so effective what I've done, that these days, I actually get people who mail me and call me and arrange introduction sessions with me, which they can do through their website using the lines, I saw your video on Instagram, I saw your video on Tiktok. A client the other day said, I feel like I'm talking to a celebrity, but you must hear that all the time. So my business is booming because I can reach people wherever in the world they are.

I attribute this change to understanding a clear strategy to being able to deliver information and content to people in a way that they find it easier to consume. So one of the things that I did was a couple of years ago, I signed up for Tony Robbin's free five-day thing that he did, and thing technical. And something up to this, I learned a few really important things about how I present myself on social media.

There's a guy called Dean Graziosi and he talked about finding your dots. Now some of you who have done marketing stuff will be very aware of the concept of a customer avatar. A customer avatar is where you're just dimensioning your whole customer. You know, it's Dawn and she's a 51-year-old therapist saying I'll give my age away. You know, she has one kid and three cats. I don't know how that happened. And we write and then we talk to that person because I think one of the hardest things when we're doing something even like this is Who am I talking to?

So I imagine I'm talking to somebody and he calls it finding your dots. So let's say the example he used let's say you have holistic solutions for hip pain in dogs. Well, your audience is not everybody who has a dog. And your audience is not even everybody who has hip pain in a dog. It's anybody who's looking for an alternative therapy for hip pain in dogs. So you target specifically who you want to talk to.

From that point, I started branding as a trauma therapist, I specialize in working with trauma. I work with all sorts of things, but I'm very good at clearing people's trauma. So every video I do, I now start with Hi, my name is Dawn Walton, and I'm a trauma therapist.

You can imagine my delight when I recently had a video go viral on Instagram. And when I say viral 1.1 million people have viewed this video. It has 1000s of comments and likes. And I was delighted that my video started with Hi my name is Dawn Walton. I'm a trauma therapist because it allows people to find me and move to one-to-one sessions with me.

I currently have a video going viral on TikTok as well. And on TikTok. It's about 400,000 people at the moment and it's the same thing, I started in the same way it's a slightly different video. But I now get comments and emails and phone calls from people who watch my video, they watch one, they watch more of them. And to book a session with me, they first need to go to my website. So they go to my MemberVault website which allows them to book a 30-minute free conversation, at which point they can see whether they want to work with me. And they can go ahead and book on my MemberVault site as well if they decide to go ahead.

So the next thing that was very important for me that I was missing out on a lot when I posted was having somewhere to send them. It's all well and good. Everybody going, Oh, that's amazing. And it's opened my eyes, but they have to go, so what, you have to have a so what.

So the next thing that Dean Graziosi talked about that I changed my strategy based on is he talks about three steps in every social media post.

The first one is the hook, which for me, it's the nodding of the head, I'll say something you go. Yeah, that's me, I can relate to that. The second is a story, which is "This is how we do it, this is how I can help you." And the third is for me, the 'so what?', the call to action, what do I want somebody to do, when they've watched one of my videos, I have a Linktree in both my TikTok on my Instagram with the same links it's the same link tree. What it means is people can watch what I say, engage with what I do, and go straight into my bio, click on my links, go to my website, book my call, or do something like that. So I give them options of 'so what', and I was missing this before. 'So what' is not enough to go check out one of my other videos.

So every time I post, I'm very aware that every single one of these listeners, viewers is an opportunity for somebody to go deeper with me. And I have to provide options for them to go deeper. Those options have to have multiple tiers. So you need to give them something for free, that they don't have to commit to that they can kind of look with. Now, one of the nice things about Facebook is they can do it easier, they can become engaged fans. Instagram is primarily for people who follow you, and then secondarily for everybody else in the world, especially if you do a reel that gets shared. TikTok is first for everybody else in the world. When you go on TikTok, the first thing you see is a for you page, which has a bunch of videos that TikTok thinks you like, based on things that you've liked. And watch before for a few seconds. So you don't get to see your follower's videos first, unlike every other social media platform, which makes it unique in terms of reach.

The other thing that's unique about TikTok is it's just videos. So it's quite tricky to put a call to action in, it's quite tricky to have any sort of structure. So you must have the information in your bio. If you put a hashtag on Instagram, it will tell you how many people have used that hashtag.

So let's put the hashtag mindfulness for example, it might say 3 million people have used that hashtag before on Instagram. If you put the same hashtag on TikTok, it will say 3 billion people have used that hashtag before. So the audience has huge potential but the link through to a call to action is trickier unless you can put a link to somewhere to send them.

And that's where having something like MemberVault is invaluable because it allows me to have free resources that they can browse without signing on, and do their research on me and learn more about me. It also allows me to have low-cost offers that they can consume again without directly engaging and by the way, I have a buy me a coffee on there as one of the low-cost if you liked my videos, buy me a coffee. And quite often people do which is lovely. Then they can go on to purchase an online course. So again, they don't have to work one-on-one with me, but that's supported by me. Or they can book one-to-one therapy sessions and I linked with acuity to allow them to do that and choose a calendar.

So I can do a video. I can reach 300,000 people, of which I might have two or three per day, go to my website, book a call with me whom I then talk to and I have something like 90% plus of the people I talk to will then convert into clients who then go on book the sessions and pay me online. All of that is seamless from just one video.

So it's important to have a consistent clear format to be able to do your hook story, ‘so what?’, make sure you have a call to action to send them to Don't worry about what everybody will think we've all got our space, the space for all of us on there. Just do it, just take action, don't worry about perfection. I often make mistakes when I'm talking and I don't put much effort into fixing all my mistakes because I'm a person and I'm human. And I'm flawed. I will always put captions, I will use the TikTok editing suite to put captions on, which is the best one at the moment. So I record the video once on my mobile phone, I upload it TikTok, I add captions, and I put a little bit of text on TikTok, the text is not very relevant, you don't see it very easily, you just see the video. I add hashtags very relevant to what's on the for you page. And then once I posted it, I downloaded it and re-uploaded it to Instagram.

So I use one video, and upload it on multiple platforms, they will use the same text and the same hashtags on Instagram. And then I will upload it to Facebook, my business Facebook, but without the hashtags. Because business Facebook doesn't do hashtags. So I can spend two minutes recording a video, maybe another minute or two editing the captions. And with a three-minute video, I can then potentially reach 1 million people who will then go because of the links in my bio to my website book or chat or book sessions, or book an online course and I generate the income. And the trick is to do it consistently, repeatedly irrespective of the results. It is not one-to-one, one video does not equal, you know, 10 clients. It's a cumulative effect of reputation, learning that they like books, as I say, reaching a tipping point, and then being able to find me and book with me.

So if you're finding that you'd love to do this, but your head getting in the way, then you probably need to see a therapist. So if you liked this talk, go ahead and share it and let us know you're listening. Let us know what you try. And I'll be happy to answer any questions that you might have.

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