Your Ideal Massage Client
So many massage therapists seem to be going about getting clients in the wrong way - by advertising and trying to ‘find’ clients who want them. This is like searching for a needle in the haystack.
Figuring out who your ideal client is will help you narrow down your focus and start attracting clients that you want.
Ken Evoy in his Ebook “Service Seller’s Masters Course” talks about how to do this more effectively.
“People are searching for information and solutions so success begins with quality, relevant content. Start where your visitors are and then everything falls into place. The process boils down to these essential steps: 1. Consider your service business from your client’s point of view. What niche do you occupy? What problems do you solve?:….Download the Ebook to get the rest if you are interested
You can create a general profile including things like: age, location, athletes, pregnant women, corporate chair massage, events, gender or include other demographics and narrow down a niche.
Just saying that you want to work on everyone, while it may seem like it gives you more opportunities, it also makes it harder to find someone because it is a much wider pool of people to try to market to.
Get inside your potential clients shoes (and head)?
How do people find a massage therapist? Actually go out and try this yourself! It is a great way to get in touch with what your clients have to go through to find someone who is good and that they can trust. First they may ask their friends or family for a referral. They may ask their doctor or other health care provider for a reference. They might look in the phone book, but I would surmise that most look online. People search for ‘massage, your city’ or search blindly ‘find a massage therapist’. People who are looking for you are the best and easiest clients to get.
Trying blindly to find people by sending out mailings or doing other advertising may work but if people don’t need a massage - they won’t really care. Find people who need the massage and the other part of this which I read in a book by Lynn Grodzki called “Build Your Ideal Private Practice” (which is written for psychotherapists) takes it even a step further.
Identify your Ideal Client (exercise). Create a profile of your ideal client and share it conversationally with new clients. It will help them understand your approach and your expectations, and show them how to “get their money’s worth” or increase the value they receive from their time in therapy. This one step can help you think in a more focused way about the direction of your practice. Fill in these sentence stems:
My Ideal Client appreciates
My Ideal Client Values
My ideal client understands
My ideal client agrees to
Creating a vision of your ideal client will help you to focus your marketing and will also help you find people who are nourishing to work on. That way you have a better chance of being successful as well as having a rewarding practice that will last as long as you need it to.
Sometimes just starting out, you don’t know who you really want to work on as far as what group of people. You learn by trying different things and working on different people and noticing how you feel when you work on each one. Notice the contrast in how you feel. Do you feel drained working on that client who all they do is complain about their boss or all they do is complain about their spouse? How do you feel after working on someone in chronic pain who has tried every doctor with no results? Your feelings will tell you if you are working on a client who will help further your career or will working on them take too much of your energy away and leave you feeling drained.
While it isn’t always as easily done as it it said, it is a process of learning to listen to your internal guidance system - your feelings. If you ignore your feelings they will get repressed and will usually turn into emotions that usually are negative or destructive.
This is exactly what building a website using Site Build it! (SBI!)will do for you- By clarifying who your ideal client is, you can convey it in a website and show clients your expertise in massage. People will understand who you are and will be able to make a more informed decision about their healthcare. The SBI! process will take you step by step through the process of identifying your ideal client and will also help you learn about what clients are wanting by what keywords they are finding you through. When you create a SBI! site you are using the law of attraction and helping people who are looking for massage in your area to find someone who can help resolve their problem- pain, stress, injury or whatever. And that person will just happen to be you. When people find a website by searching for the one online by whatever keywords they use and they find your site, they are already impressed and think they have found you and don’t have to worry about people giving a sales pitch. The come in feeling good about themselves by finding you. You then can use the website to create enough content and information that will let them know that you are an expert in what you do. You can set up an email newsletter and blog to keep potential readers interested by giving them more information. You can write some free informational reports on using massage with various diseases and conditions and collect the email address of those who are interested so you can contact them with more information and keep educating them. Since they found you online they must have some interest in health and massage. You have a greater chance of getting this reader to become a regular client - one who comes once or twice a week for years (figure out what that is really worth!)
You won’t have to sell anyone on your massage. They will be calling you and wanting only you. And when you can put this all together into a website, it will also be come clearer in all of your communications with clients. If you are doing yellow pages ads, newspaper ads, brochures, teaching workshops, speaking to special populations, talking with other health care providers - all of these methods of advertising/marketing will be so much more effective when you can follow up with these people and get them to go to your website. Any advertising/marketing done without a website is wasted money!
Got it? or what are your questions still?
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