Educating Clients is one of the easiest and most effective ways of marketing your massage therapy business.

But what does it really mean to educate clients?

The biggest thing you can do is to learn to talk about anatomy and physiology as if you were talking to a kid. So often I hear massage therapist talking to clients and saying the names of the muscles or talking in very technical terms with clients. Some people may know general names of muscles but people know very little about how muscles really work. Some of the most common questions I get from people is “Is that a knot?” or “Is that a bone?” or “how does that feel to you - is that really tight?”

When you are talking to people and trying to get them to become a client one of the best things you can do is to put the benefits of massage into their perspective - what will it do for them specifically.

For instance; I started in a health club a long time ago and would constantly talk to a guy who was a runner about getting massage. He always said he would someday but never did. I finally asked him about his running goals and saw how important running was to him and said something like “massage can help your running” and he signed up right then and there for a massage and became a regular client.

When educating clients about the benefits of massage you have to talk from the aspect of “What solution you will provide for them”. This comes directly from the Service Sellers Masters Course from Sitebuildit!

Some other simple things you can do to educate clients;

• when creating your website include as much information as you can about the way the body works and how massage works - yes all the details but in easy to understand language. It is really just writing about the things you talk about with clients everyday.
• Create handouts on specific conditions that you work with like fibromyalgia, stress, headaches, sports massage.
• Create or buy stretching handouts
• Get clients involved in the process of figuring out what they need to do for themselves. Read ‘Interviewing for Solutions‘ by Peter De Jong and Insoo Kim which is a book about Solutions focused Brief Therapy. As the name suggests,, it is about being brief and focusing on solutions rather than on the problem
• Solve problems as a team and get the client involved.
• Engage clients in the massage rather than just having massage be something that you do to them

Resources:

How to talk about what you do.

Client Education - Improve Client communication with specific activities based on multiple intelligences - Cherie Sohnen-Moe

This entry was posted on Monday, January 22nd, 2007 at 11:20 pm and is filed under Building Your Practice, Massage Marketing, Peer Supervision, Recommended Reading, Starting Your Practice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.