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A lot of massage therapists finish their initial studies and enter the massage therapist workforce full of enthusiasm, looking to put into practice their new found skills and to get paid doing work they love. Reality tends to bite fairly hard and fairly quickly for many of these therapists. For some reason there is not an instant queue of clients clambering to get onto their table and to experience the healing powers in the hands. Unfortunately marketing is an essential skill that massage therapists have to work at if they are to succeed in their business.
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From my own personal point of view, marketing has been a challenge. It has taken five years and I am still not where I want to be with respect to workload, number of new clients and repeat business (albeit I’m close and comfortable with the income my massage business brings in). I have tried many different tips and techniques for increasing my own business, most of them have failed. For me, success came with using the internet through this website and my sister company www.innerwestmassage.com.au coupled with a blinding flash of the obvious:
There is no point wasting marketing resources advertising to people who are not looking for you.
Letterbox drops, networking at breakfast business groups, offering incentives, etc just do not work, in my experience. Targeting to more specific markets may offer greater potential returns of the marketing dollar (although I am not convinced). Your marketing dollar needs to be spent advertising your services directly to people who are looking for someone like you.
In that respect, the power of the internet is profound as every day there are numerous people searching for you, some more actively than others but searching none-the-less. I have used information contained within Make-your-site-sell to develop an understanding of how to make my website succeed. There are some people offering instant massage websites such as
Eric Brown ----
Or Site Sell which offers….
These are probably a good way to begin to develop an internet presence to market your business, particularly for those short of time or underconfident about their computer skills. Personally I preferred to use the information available in the Make-your-site-sell and other such web resources to build my own sites. Understanding what works and what doesn’t work is important for me to improving the return on my marketing dollar. For example, when I started using Google Adwords, I used a scattergun approach happy to attract any visitor to my site. When the costs began to blow out I again returned to
There is no point wasting marketing resources advertising to people who are not looking for you.
to tailor my Adwords program and eliminate clicks from people who were never going to be potential clients (eg. disable the Content search – having my ad on other unrelated websites is not a profitable use of a marketing budget)
My experiences are obviously not relevant to every other massage therapist. Others will succeed by treading a different path
Below are some of the marketing massage resources available on the web. There are many more out there. Whilst all of these offer some merit, this is not a direct recommendation for any of them in particular. Each has their own strengths and weaknesses. One skill for the marketing massage therapist is to draw from all resource what is pertinent to their own business, personality, strengths, weaknesses, environment and competition.
The Fill Your Practice
email course from Bodyworkbiz sends a daily email lesson to you. A lot of the focus is on overcome pshchological blocks to marketing as well as assessing the health of your existing business. There is a lot of other useful information on Eric Brown’s site and the regular free email tips are worth subscribing to.
Amy Robert's "How To Get All The Clients You Need In Your Massage Therapy Business, And, Keep Them Coming Back!" is a good resource for any therapist just beginning their journey into the world of business.
Massage Marketing Tips by Galen Piehl provides a lot of free, unbiased and useful information, relevant for all massage therapists. He also provides a consulting service to assist you with your marketing issues eg an analysis of your website – a service I have used and would recommend. He provides friendly, pertinent and relevant advice in extremely timely fashion.
Any information, advice, recommendations, statements or otherwise contained herein, or in any other communication made by or attributed to Eastern Suburbs Massage and its representatives, whether oral or in writing, is not intended to replace or to be a substitute for medical advice trained by a trained physician or healthcare practitioner.
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