Write Your Massage Marketing Plan
"The ultimate goal should be doing your best and enjoying
it."
—Peggy
Gale Fleming
February is your month to write a rough draft of your strategic marketing
plan.
To chart your direction and goals, you will need to do some background
research.
Your research may produce many ideas. Don’t let it overwhelm
you— the marketing plan will put it into a form you can work with.
When you organize your ideas into goals and objectives, what may seem
daunting can be broken into prioritized action steps that you can easily
follow. Here are some kinds of research tasks that may help:
Who is your competition?
Make a list of your colleagues and where
they promote their services. Note who seems particularly successful.
Contact a few that you have met, or would especially like to meet,
and ask them if they would be willing to share their take on trends
or how they boost their practice when business is slow. Or treat yourself
to their services, and talk to them while you are there.
Who is your target population
Is it elders, pregnant women, people
with repetitive strain injuries, stressed-out government workers? What
do they have in common? What does this group of people need? What do
they find appealing? Where do they go and how can you reach them? Talk
to your existing clients, friends and family members to get opinions.
Who else serves your targeted clientele?
Talk to other kinds of
professionals who work with those you would like to serve, such as
mental health counselors, chiropractors, or yoga and fitness instructors.
Ask them how they reach their clients.
Take a further look around.
Read trade journals, search the web
(look for free marketing newsletters) and dip into books on marketing
for ideas on reaching clients.
Which advice do you want
to follow? Where do you want to try to reach potential clients and
what kind of message do you want to send? This will help you decide
what goals and objectives to list in your plan, and what actions will
help you meet them.
For example, if successful clinical practitioners told you that one
way they receive contacts is through physician referrals, establishing
physician contacts may become one of your major goals. In another example,
perhaps your friends who are pregnant or have small children tell you
they always glance at the coupons in your area’s family news magazine.
So you may want to create a special promotion for that publication,
and fit that into your marketing plan.
Take the goals, objectives and action steps and put them into your
plan—and post them on your calendar. When you take time to do
the research, and then use it to flesh out your plan, your practice
will surely grow!
For more on this topic, read our article
on Getting Organized, Your Strategic Marketing Plan.
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