Marketing A Practice - Presentations for Fall, 2005 in Vancouver, BC
Below is a list of presentations I will be offering related to marketing a practice for counsellors, therapists and healing professionals (body workers, massage therapists, homeopathic doctors, etc) in the fall of 2005.
Nuts and Bolts of Marketing: Overcoming Resistance and Achieving Success
While it’s paramount that you as a counsellor acquire knowledge about marketing, it is also essential that you overcome any resistances and misconceptions you have about marketing your services while developing the attitudes and skills that lead to success. This presentation explores erroneous beliefs, unhelpful attitudes, and common resistances counsellors have about marketing and promoting themselves. It further provides the basic knowledge, skills and attitudes of what it takes to be successful at marketing a practice.
Date: Saturday, October 15, 2005
Location: TBA
Time: 9-9:45 am
Facilitated by: Juliet Austin
Note: This presentation is part of a one-day conference entitled, Tuning up Your Private Practice: Insight Into Marketing Solutions and EAP Possibilities offered by The British Columbia Association of Clinical Counsellors (BCACC). Registration is limited to BCACC members in Region 4 only. For more information on the conference or to register contact John Fraser at: 604.602.0890 or johnfsi@telus.net
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Creating Compelling Promotional Materials
The purpose of promotional materials (flyers, brochures, websites, etc.) is to attract the attention of your potential clients. Prospective clients are unlikely to make contact you if you have not shown in your marketing materials that you understand their problems sufficiently and can help alleviate their problems. In order to do this, you must know something about how to write effective marketing copy (text). This presentation will provide you with basic principles for copywriting that gets potential clients to stand up and take notice of your services. You will be given a 5-step formula for writing effective copy that can be used for any of your marketing materials.
Date: Saturday, October 15, 2005
Location: TBA
Time: 9:45 -11:15 am
Facilitated by: Juliet Austin
Note: This presentation is part of a one-day conference entitled, Tuning up Your Private Practice: Insight Into Marketing Solutions and EAP Possibilities offered by The British Columbia Association of Clinical Counsellors (BCACC). Registration is limited to BCACC members in Region 4 only. For more information or to register contact John Fraser at: 604.602.0890 or johnfsi@telus.net
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Mastering Fears of Marketing
When it comes to building a successful healing practice, knowing how to promote your services effectively is essential. However, all the marketing knowledge in the world won’t be of use to you if have resistances that interfere with your ability to marketing your practice effectively. As a healing professional, you likely do not have pre-existing marketing skills and experience –one of the common challenges faced by many alternative and complementary health practitioners that leads to lack of confidence in promoting themselves. To further complicate matters, many healing professionals have only just begun to come to terms with the need to be financially viable and to accept their true potential for success. If you can identify with any or all of these experiences, then join Juliet, marketing coach and consultant for tips on mastering your marketing fears.
Date: Sunday, November 13, 2005
Location: TBA
Time: 10:30am-12:00 pm
Facilitated by: Juliet Austin
To Register: Go to Healers in Business.
Note: This presentation is geared to all complementary and alternative health service providers including naturopaths, chiropractors, homeopathic doctors, body workers, massage therapists, etc.
“The Website Toolkit”: Robert Middleton Has Done it Again!
Robert Middleton, my favorite marketing guru, from Action Plan Marketing has just created yet another absolutely superb marketing product called, "The Website ToolKit."
I purchased it immediately as the price was unbelievable ($39 USD) and, in addition to my constant search for new products to use with my clients, I am in the middle of doing an overhaul on my website.
Like all of Robert’s products–to see a review I wrote on his famous InfoGuru Marketing Manual you can go here.– The quality of the "Toolkit" is excellent and it’s an amazing value.
Most counsellors, coaches and healing professionals’ websites are extremely ineffective as marketing tools. This is due to the fact that the vast majority of designers don’t have a clue about how to design a site from a marketing perspective (my partner and co-blog author of Website Design and Promotion, Nathaniel Richman of nrichmedia, being one of the few exceptions).
Most helping and healing professionals have never studied marketing or copywriting and their websites illustrate this.
Robert’s "Toolkit" walks you through the entire process of developing a website designed to get results, not simply to "look pretty and professional."
The Website ToolKit includes a series of PDF document files, audio files with full transcription, and 50 sample websites. You can either follow the step-by step instructions by yourself or you can work with a marketing professional to assist you with the process.
I assist my clients in writing copy for their websites with a view
towards attracting clients, and, as I wrote to Robert today, from now on
I will be insisting that they purchase the toolkit. It will make it much
easier to understand and utilize the concepts I present to them.
“The Middle Way”: A Buddhist Approach To Marketing Your Practice
I keep being reminded, almost on a daily basis, just how difficult it can be for helping and healing professionals to market their practices. Even though I just wrote a post on this a few days ago, it seems appropriate that I share some recent thoughts I had on this topic.
I was at an event held by the Integrated Medical Association here in Vancouver on the weekend. I was having a conversation with some healing professionals about marketing and how healing professionals in general have difficulty promoting themselves.
We identified some of the obstacles to marketing that coaches, therapists and healing professionals face (many of these were mentioned in my post a few days ago, "Are You Dismissing Marketing Ideas?"). Here are some of them again:
- concerns about marketing being ethical
- concerns about self-promotion
- lack of knowledge about marketing
- erroneously believing they can market effectively without any specific knowledge or training in this area
- not wanting to engage in (or be associated with) manipulative and misleading marketing techniques
I mentioned that one of the most important things that I do with my clients is to help them find the “middle way” –the path between not marketing at all because of their resistances to it, and finding a way to market that is informed, authentic, ethical and that has passion.
"The middle way" is a term that the Buddha used to describe the path to enlightenment. In Buddhism this concept refers to the balance between not engaging in extreme forms of self-indulgence while at the same time not practicing in extreme forms of asceticism.
So if we apply the concept of the ‘middle way” to marketing your private practice we might say that it is unproductive to avoid marketing– and taken to it’s extreme, it can even be hurtful if you can’t pay your bills because you don’t have enough clients.
On the other hand, in order to succeed you must market your practice—but you must do it in a manner that is sincere, respectful, has integrity, and, ultimately, in a manner that brings in more clients.
To read a related article that I wrote on marketing a private practice from a Buddhist perspective go to: 7 Principles of Enlightened Marketing.
Blogging FAQ
For all you new bloggers out there and all you blogger-wanna-bes: Andy Wibbels, one of my favorite blogging guru’s, has posted a listed of Frequently asked Questions about Blogging. To view the list go to EasyBake Weblogs.
Are you Dismissing Marketing Ideas?
How often do you hear or see an idea for marketing your practice and you immediately dismiss it as a viable option?
Or perhaps have tried a specific marketing strategy and because you didn’t get the results you wanted you dismissed it without examining what went wrong and how you could improve upon it?
I have noticed that many coaches as well as helping and healing professionals often dismiss aspects of marketing because:
- They don’t like marketing and are resistant to doing it.
- They erroneously believe they should intuitively know how to market their practice effectively without any training or knowledge in marketing.
- They believe that marketing is inherently unethical or inappropriate.
- They do not understand the principles of marketing and how they can embrace them to market authentically.
- They don’t want to spend the time marketing their practice on a regular basis.
Joe Vitalie, one of the better-known marketing consultants, talks about how we limit ourselves when we dismiss ideas in his new book, "The Attraction Factor:"
Rather than dismissing what is possible so that you can be right, what can you accept so that you can grow? Dismissing is often a way to deflect the messages. It’s a self-defense mechanism. If you dismiss the book, idea, or method offered to you, you get to be right–and stay right where you are.
What aspects of marketing are you dismissing and how is this limiting the success of your private practice?
Eye Movement Research and Your Website Visitors
The Eyetrack III research released by The Poynter Institute, the Estlow Center for Journalism & New Media, and Eyetools reveals the importance of where and how you place information on your web pages.
The study observed the eye movement of readers on websites. Here is a summary of some of their findings and their implications for marketing and selling your services on your website:
- People tend to look at the top left corner of a webpage before going anywhere else. Obviously if you are selling services on the web, you will want to put your most important information in this location. If you have a newsletter –and if you don’t, I suggest you start one—this is an ideal location to put the subscribe box.
- Visitors to your site are more likely to read text that is in small font and they are more likely to scan information in larger font (i.e. headlines). When a headline preceded a ‘blurb’ of text, people tended to read the headlines and skip the text.
- Readers tend to read the first few words of text and then decide if they want to read further. This finding indicates you want to make sure that the first few words of any line of text is interesting and captures your readers attention.
- Short paragraphs were more often read than longer ones. This emphasizes the importance of having lots of white space on your web pages.
- People tend to read text first and then look at photos and graphics. If you are one of the many who think that having a pretty site with all kinds of bells and whistles is going to attract more clients, you better think again.
Many of results of this study support what most copywriters and skilled marketers already know—well written copy (text written from a marketing perspective) can either compel visitors to read the information on your site or turn them away.
To read more about the study go here.
Healers in Business Network Event Launch in Vancouver, BC
I attended a great event on the weekend–the launch event for the newly formed, Healers in Business Network based here in Vancouver, BC (they will be launching other networks in cities across North America in the next year).
As stated on their website, the Healers in Business network is "devoted to ethical business growth and success for complimentary or alternative health practitioners, product suppliers and support services".
I was totally impressed with the event and the vision of the co-founders, Angel La Liberte’ and Bill Cozzens. It was extremely well organized, the physical location and overall ambiance was awesome, speakers were informative, and the food was fantastic! I also met some great people and hope to connect with many of them again soon.
Some interesting statistics:
- 1990 an estimated 60 million Americans used complimentary and alternative medicine at an estimated cost of $13.7 billion USD in 1997 the figure rose to $27 billion USD
- In 1999 nearly three quarters of Canadians reported using complimentary and alternative medicine at some point in their lives.
- Current Canadian spending on CAM is nearly $4 billion and growing by 15% annually.
This is indeed good news for all complimentary and alternative health practitioners/therapists.
This is a long overdue and brilliant move on the part of Angel and Bill. Congratulations to them in the huge success of this event.
The Healers in Business Network has reduced their membership fee by 50% until June 30th in case you want to join.
By the way, I will be speaking at the Healers in Business event in November on Mastering Fears of Marketing. More on this later. In the meantime, you can read more about it at their website.
