Your biggest loss of money in a business is the money you never made because you didn’t implement the correct procedures to get the money. To get money into your massage business, you need to get clients into your office. To get clients into your office, you need to tell them what you can do for them. You do this by marketing and promoting.
Did you ever want to send an advertisement to prospects, but you didn’t know what to say? Here is a simple answer to that question.
Whenever you’re doing a promotional mailing, you should first make sure that what you’re promoting will get the attention of and be interesting to the person you are mailing it to. Make it a simple message to people.
If done this way, then the most difficult part of your promotion is now complete, because you know what topics of interest the prospects in your community want to know about. And even better yet, you now know how they want to hear about your advertising message.
One of the best ways to get the correct marketing message to your prospects is to ask your current clients one question: “What benefit did you expect to receive when you came in for ‘________’?” In this blank, you insert the name of a product you sold them or a service you provided already.
For example, “What benefit did you expect to receive when you came in for the massage you received?”
The client then says, “Well, I wanted to be able to do my work without feeling sore.”
Whatever the client says, write down her exact answers. Keep a tally of the most popular answers. Use these exact words and put them into your marketing and promotion message when you send it to prospects in your community.
Let’s say the above answer was the most popular answer. So, your ad would ask, “Do you want to be able to do your work without feeling sore?” The response from your current clients is repeated in an advertisement to a prospective client as a question!
Here, a prospect doesn’t necessarily want to have smooth, relaxed muscles or maybe even a full range of motion of her neck—but she wants to be able to do her work without feeling sore. This is what is really important to people.
These original client answers explain what is desired by most people. These exact words are the words that are in the prospect’s head or mind. These are the exact words they use to have a conversation about their body problem. They are trying to figure out a solution to this problem, and these words are the answer. Therefore, when they see an advertisement that has the same words as the answer in their head or mind, there is an indication they should make a decision to go to your office to get the problem corrected.
These prospects will show up in your office and be quite happy to go through your entire protocol of care because they know they’re in the right place.
Now if you mistakenly didn’t do this exercise to find out what was going on inside the prospect’s head or mind, you might have thought she came to you because she was feeling old and crippled. Actually, she hates feeling old and crippled, and as a result, she doesn’t want to put any attention whatsoever on feeling old and crippled. So if send something in the mail with that faulty message, she would find it repulsive and throw it in the garbage without paying any more attention to it.
So you will do much better sending out a promotional piece, perhaps with a picture of working people and the most popular response, in the form of a question, surveyed from your current client base.
What I outlined above is just an example, and your survey responses may be very different. After you get the message that applies to your client base and a picture that complements the message, put in some other information, such as your contact information and what you might do for such a person in your office. Then you’re ready to take your ideas and designs to print up a letter or postcard to mail to your prospects.
Get a list of people around your area that you think would be interested in your services, and mail to those people.
With today’s advertising clutter, it is sometimes necessary to send a mailing to a person six or seven times before she consciously sees it and acts on it to call you for an appointment.
According to current marketing surveys, the best frequency to mail to a person is every 21 days. On this time schedule, the prospect is reminded enough of your services, but does not feel overburdened by the messages in your mailings.
Once you are satisfied with a mailing people respond to successfully, never change it in any way. Just keep sending it out over the years to get new clients in the door to see you.
Dr. Brian Dawson was educated at Purdue University and Palmer College of Chiropractic. His interest in finance began when he found the business and administrative side of running health clinics to be a frustrating and inexact science. Now, as COO of Money Management Solutions, Dr. Dawson is involved in helping chiropractors and other health professionals from all around the country achieve success and get on the road to wealth and financial freedom. Money Management Solutions specializes in helping health professionals with all of their financial and marketing needs-including Internet marketing and Web sites. For more information about the company’s services, contact Dr. Brian Dawson, D.C., at (866) 755-1213 or e-mail him at COO@MoneyMgmtSolutions.com. You can also visit www.MoneyMgmtSolutions.com for further details.
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