Do you feel uncomfortable with your marketing strategy and think that you should be doing more and doing it differently or that you are not attracting the right clients to you? This can be a real struggle, time consuming and fraught with uncertainty. It can leave you feeling that you are shooting in the dark.
Is your marketing flourishing or failing you?
There are some points that I feel are key to underpinning all aspects of how we market ourselves before we get to putting it into action.
You are your business; understanding your values and your value is at the heart of this. We are our greatest assets and to be authentically ourselves is our key selling point.
This is a more ethereal selling point to get across than say than selling a product but if we embody these things with an inter clarity it becomes a strong foundation to our work and how we are perceived.
Understanding what your value is and what your values are, are the first steps to understanding who your ideal client might be and then how best to reach them. These are the foundation to you marketing strategy. This foundation is the point from which you can then take action and make decisions.
Often when marketing isn’t working one of these is out of place or needs revisiting.
Things to look out for are:
- I put loads into marketing but never get any enquiries back from it.
- I feel really uncomfortable marketing myself.
- I have been doing lots of discounted sessions or freebies but don’t get any clients from them.
- I am not getting any referrals.
Recently I had a reminder of how this has changed for me over the years. I regularly get contacted from people wanting me to get involved in events that they are offering as great marketing opportunity for my business.
One of these was to go into a business giving a Stress Workshop and Treatments to the employees. They wanted this for free but presented it to me as a great way to promote my business.
In my experience theses events don’t work as good marketing, the main reason being that giving away the main service of your business undervalues it. Over the years I have done a lot of free fairs and events and have not found them good ways of generating on-going clients.
The questions I ask myself now when contacted to do events are:
- How does this promote me?
- Is this my target audience?
- What would I expect in return for this outlay of time effort and expense?
Today if I give away free treatments or services this is because it’s a cause or community I want to support rather than it being a marketing exercise.
For me my confidence and understanding in my value and values has grown over the years, this has come from experience, reflection and supervision and is a continual process.
Unsure whether you’re focusing your promotion in the right areas? Supervision can help
If you feel that you are stuck and some face-to-face time might be the best solution for you, give me a shout and we can do a supervision session to get your marketing foundation in place. Check out supervision>
Check that you have the building blocks in place
- What are your values as a person and a therapist?
- What values do you put on your time and your work?
- From this who is your ideal client?
- Where and how best for them to hear about how you could support them?
From this base you can write your promotional material and set your plan and strive forward in a way that you feel comfortable and confident and you will be able to put across the your unique selling point YOU!