Set It and Forget It – Bad, Expensive Idea

Last week I was contacted by an out of state “firm” who had trawled Meetup groups for clinicians seeking marketing help and wanted me to recommend their services to “my constituents.”

In checking out their glitzy website, I discovered that their offer included an onsite assessment from “secret” patients (as if my practice were a clothing store or restaurant), a report replete with statistics on demographics, psychographics, and growth goals, and a strategic business plan – all for only $5000.

Further checking showed their minimum recommended level of budgeting for marketing was $5000 a year, and included items such as promotional incentives and gifts to get new clients – common practices in some industries. This firm could apparently accomplish everything for me short of driving new clients to their appointments.

Hmmm. When you’re a one person show, it’s very tempting to want to outsource all the thinking and planning and implementing of business operations and client attraction work. An offer like this appeals to our desire for set it and forget it marketing.

I can remember the time when I too wished I could hire a promoter to get clients lined up at my door. It would have been a great solution to the anxiety and insecurity I felt about having to talk about the benefits of counseling in a way that would convince people they needed it, and that would persuade them that they should hire me.

What this approach to marketing your private practice fails to consider is that tactics that work in retail, or for large impersonal clinics with multiple clinicians and admin staff don’t work for counselors and coaches with a solo practice.

Our distinguishing feature is in the quality of relationship we build and sustain with prospective, current and former clients. That takes constant personal attention. It can’t be wholly outsourced.

No slick advertising or website / brochure produced by an out of state consulting firm can successfully capture your unique personality and healing presence.

Phew – you’ve just saved yourself several thousand dollars.

Coaching questions:
When you feel resistant to marketing your solo practice, what anxieties and insecurities are under that resistance?

What do you need when feeling those anxieties and insecurities?

How can you feel them, and not let them stop you from extending your warmth and humor and genuine personality when connecting with potential clients?

3 Things You Want Your Blog to Do

Do you think of your blog as a staff member of the marketing department of your business? It really is.

Here are three things you want that employee to do for you on a daily basis.


1. Provide useful information and tips to prospective ideal clients

If your blogs are random rambling musings, you are missing the marketing potential of doing a blog. And you're wasting your time in blogging as a marketing tactic. Instead, imagine a specific individual has asked you a question, and let your blog post provide a direct, immediately applicable solution to that question.


2. Develop rapport and likability between you and your niche market

A blog works best when it is a little online slice of your personality. Write like you speak. Be irreverent, if that's you. Exaggerate the absurd, if you do so in person. This is how your breathe your life-force energy into a flat, "impersonal" piece of writing. Being who you are AND speaking to your audience about their problems and easily applied solutions to their problems increases the sense of trustworthiness that blog readers need to become clients.


3. Establish you as a generous, helpful, knowledgeable, solution expert for your target market's problem

Blogs function best when they are endless sources of quick bits of education and help. Few people have time or patience to take courses or read books anymore, but we all need simple answers to our complex problems. As clinicians we know that real healing and lasting change is more complex than this. But the blog is not the clinician -- it's not supposed to provide enduring transformation, just enough help at the hungriest moment to make you the go-to solution expert for your target market niche.


Coaching question ---

To start thinking of your blog as a valued employee in your business's marketing department, what specific job description will it have? What measurable goals will you hold it accountable to achieving for you?