Is this the reason your natural therapies marketing doesn’t work?

I had a conversation with a naturopath client of mine last week, where she spent considerable time explaining to me her marketing woes, and how nobody really seemed to pay attention to her signage or “special discount” offers.

Rather than spend all day talking about what wasn’t working for her, I simply asked her a question which made all of her frustrations suddenly seem quite understandable and easy to solve.

I’ve shared it with you here so that you can ask it of yourself and your practice: What business are YOU really in?

That sounds like a dumb question, doesn’t it? But do you realise how many practitioners answer that question by stating what natural therapy category they’re in? The naturopath says she’s a naturopath. The osteopath says he’s an osteopath. The massage therapist says she’s a massage therapist.

Please understand, you should NOT be trying to promote the category of business you’re in.

The reason that most practitioners struggle to get new clients is because they do not make an emotional connection with their prospects. Almost every health practitioner likes to talk about the different services they offer, their qualifications, about their state-of-the-art equipment etc.

Quite frankly, this makes very little impact on your potential clients, because these are all features of what you do. The client is really interested in the benefits to them personally.

The real reason people are going to book in with you is simple: it’s for what they get from you that grabs them on an emotional level. (Remember that people make buying decisions emotionally and then justify their decision with logic.)

As a health practitioner, you need to understand and empathise with the real deep-seated reasons why people are going to engage you.

For example, a client doesn’t book in for a massage because you have an impressive list of qualifications or some super-new treatment machine in your clinic. These are just features of your service. They book in because they are feeling stressed or exhausted or in pain, and want some relief from this. These are the benefits they are really seeking out.

Now, the tricky part is that your prospects are not going to verbalise these things. They may not even realise that these are the reasons. In fact, they’re probably going to formulate some logical reasons for hiring you. But these justifications are not the real drivers that get them through your door.

Your real job in marketing your natural health practice is to educate your potential clients on all of the emotional and physical benefits your service will provide them with.

To do this, it is important that you learn a technique that I call “emotional direct response” or “education marketing”.

This style of marketing not only works better for you by attracting many more new clients to your door (and saving you a lot of wasted money on marketing yourself the “old” way), but is also best for your potential clients as they are educated and empowered about whether or not your service can benefit them.

(If you want some proof of that, do a quick survey of non-clients next time you are at a BBQ and ask people what they think your health modality actually does. The range of answers may surprise you!)

If you want to learn more about how to use education marketing in your practice, register for my free online training course coming up soon, where I will teach you how my best clients have employed these techniques to create massive turnaround in their practices.

I look forward to speaking with you on the webinar!

All the best,

Adam

PS. Don’t delay in grabbing your spot on the webinar. In the meantime, here’s a short but enormously powerful exercise which, if answered thoughtfully and applied to your marketing efforts, will be worth a lot of money to you and should provide a happier health outcome for your potential future clients.

Ask yourself: What are my client’s emotional reasons that drive them to book in with me?

Once you figure this out, you can then answer the critically important question that every potential client is asking themselves in their head when considering your services: Why should I spend my money and time with you?