How To Achieve Private Practice Success: Expect Marketing Miracles
John Jansch from Duct Tape Marketing wrote a post recently called, The Power of Positive Expectancy. While there is nothing novel about his post, it is a good reminder of the importance of having a positive attitude about succeeding in your private practice. To quote John:
If you expect your clients to be thrilled with your services - they will.
If you flat out expect your clients to refer business your way - they will.
If you know a direct marketing piece will make the phone ring - it will.
Marketing a practice is hard work and results take time. Even those who are normally extremely confident can become discouraged and allow negative thoughts to influence them.
It’s a pretty obvious, however, that you won’t be able to thrive in your private practice if you don’t believe you can. Of course you still need to know how to develop effective promotional materials and how to market your practice effectively, but without believing that you will attract the clients you want, it is highly unlikely that you will.
When my clients get discouraged I often tell them a story about when I was first building my practice and the times that doubts surfaced for me. I remember that while reading about people who had achieved success, I learned that most of them along the way maintained an attitude that they would be successful. After hearing this several times, something in my brain "clicked’ with my attitude towards my own success. I can clearly recall that moment when I decided that I was going to succeed.
From that point on, everything changed. I simply decided that I was going to do whatever it took to succeed…And I did.
Wondering Why Advertisting Your Practice is Not Attracting Clients?
I have had many helping and healing professionals tell me they have used advertising without success. Their lack of success is frequently due to having unrealistic expectations. They don’t understand how often a person must see an ad before they are likely to take any action on it. If you want your investment in advertising to pay off you have to make the commitment to run it over time (at least 6 months -1 year+) if you don’t want to waste your hard earned cash.
The Diva Marketing Blog has a humurous post on the need for repetition when advertisting. She refers to a piece that was written in 1885 by Thomas Smith:
1. The first time a man looks at an advertisement, he does not see it.
2. The second time, he does not notice it.
3. The third time, he is conscious of its existence.
4. The fourth time, he faintly remembers having seen it before.
5. The fifth time, he reads it.
6. The sixth time, he turns up his nose at it.
7. The seventh time, he reads it through and says, "Oh brother!"
8. The eighth time, he says, "Here’s that confounded thing again!"
9. The ninth time, he wonders if it amounts to anything.
10. The tenth time, he asks his neighbor if he has tried it.
11. The eleventh time, he wonders how the advertiser makes it pay.
12. The twelfth time, he thinks it must be a good thing.
13. The thirteenth time, he thinks perhaps it might be worth something.
14. The fourteenth time, he remembers wanting such a thing a long time.
15. The fifteenth time, he is tantalized because he cannot afford to buy it.
16. The sixteenth time, he thinks he will buy it some day.
17. The seventeenth time, he makes a memorandum to buy it.
18. The eighteenth time, he swears at his poverty.
19. The nineteenth time, he counts his money carefully.
20. The twentieth time he sees the ad, he buys what it is offering.
The Diva notes that she heard this from Eric Hope of Language Services Assoc.
Read: To Advertise or Not To Advertise: How Do You Decide? if your unsure about whether you should use advertisting to market your private practice.
Marketing via Article Writing Pays off
Increasingly over the last few years I have been focusing a lot of my marketing on writing strategies (i.e newsletter, blog and articles) and it’s really paying off. More and more people are contacting me about my services because they have found me on the net, often by reading one of my articles which are increasingly posted on several websites including many article directories.
The other interesting thing that is happening is people are contacting me asking to use my articles in their publications or asking me to write columns for them. Recently the Holistic Business Journal posted one of my articles in their journal and I accepted an offer to write a monthly column for The Meta Arts Magazine a few weeks ago.
Marketing is largely about getting as many people to know about your services as possible and marketing through writing is an extremely effective way of doing this. It is a great example of what marketing guru, Seth Godin, calls viral marketing: your ideas spread like a virus.
Finally, one added bonus of writing for the Internet is that my search engine rankings are improving because of the increasing number of links leading back to my site. This is bringing more traffic to my website.
While it takes some time before you start seeing results of this method of marketing, it is very effective.
For more information on article marketing check out the following links: Writing Articles to Market Your Practice on The Internet and Marketing Your Practice Through Thought Leadership.
