A successful massage business depends on the steady flow of new clients or getting repeat clients (regular clients who come every week, 2x a week, every other week or once a month.)  It involves creating relationships with potential clients and getting them to trust you enough so that they will make the call for the appointment.

Finding new clients who will become repeat clients requires that you build trust with people you talk to or with people who read your website.

Approaching doctors, companies or individuals with a sale pitch or offer is like getting an annoying phone call from a company offering home owners insurance when you are a renter or like getting a flier in the mail for childcare services when you don’t have any kids.  It is just annoying and a waste of money on the advertisers part.  Approaching people blindly - not knowing if they even like massage or believe in it can waste a lot of money.

Having people calling you because they know you are the expert at what you do is another story.

To do that you need to let people know what you know about massage and health.  The best way to do that is with a website that is filled with information about what you do and what massage can do.

If your website only is a basic calling card website with only information on your rates, locations and a list of your services, it doesn’t create much of an interest in readers.  If it is just a sales site to offer your services without really taking the time and effort to understand your readers, you are missing out on many opportunities to make readers into regular clients.

Learning to build relationships with people involves providing information to people about what you do,  what your philosophy on healing is and what your beliefs about health and massage are allows you to share your expertise, knowledge and experience with others.   In sharing you develop a relationship that “Pre-sells” the potential client.

I know most massage therapists hate that word “Sell” even if it is preceded with the word ‘pre’.   Sell brings up this fear of having to be a sales person.   All you are really doing is telling people what you do so that they can decide if you would be a match to help them solve their problem.

“Preselling” is a term that was coined by Ken Evoy of Sitesell.com.  Preselling is really just about building relationships and trust between two parties.   When you learn to presell- you won’t have to do any selling.  People will be coming directly to you for the services that you offer.   They will be calling you.  You won’t have to do a thing but be there to take the call and make the appointment.

Online people are looking for information- they aren’t looking for you. They just want to find a trustworthy someone to fill their need.  People are usually in pain, under stress, or both and are looking for help with whatever it is that is a problem for them.

Use your knowledge and experience to give them what they want by writing about what you do.  You don’t have to worry about the writing part.  What you do is just write down what you would say to people if about massage, health and healing if you already had them on your table or if you were talking to your best friend.  Use information to meet their needs.   It creates an open to buy mindset for the reader.

If you don’t have a content rich site - the other option is to advertise and for the most part advertising for massage doesn’t work since massage is such a personal experience.  Unless you have a very large advertising budget like spa’s or massage franchises do, advertising for the small massage business takes a substantial amount of money.

Most people resist sales efforts.  Preselling on the other hand creates relationships and builds credibility.

One of the first steps to preselling is getting inside your potential clients head and shoes.  Who is your ideal client?  What problem do they have that they are looking for a solution for?

Creating a website around that idea takes a little bit of time to research and develop but when you get a regular weekly client who comes for 10+ years like most of my clients do …well you can figure out the value of that kind of regular client ($price of massage x 48 weeks a year x 10 years).

You can learn more about preselling and learning to attract clients by building trust and avoiding sales you can read this free Ebook by Ken Evoy called “Make Your Content Pre-sell”

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 31st, 2008 at 12:23 am and is filed under Uncategorized. 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.