In this article I want to share with you ten incredibly powerful strategies that will rocket awareness of both who you are and what you can do locally. By implementing these techniques you will increase your profile, brand awareness, client base and more importantly increase your number of paying clients – all at little or no financial cost. If that sounds interesting read on...
1. Drop postcards in the mail to targeted homes within five miles of your facility and create a low barrier, irresistible offer with a deadline to respond by. These can be former clients, neighbours of clients or just delivered to all the residential properties within your surrounding area. If there are no residencies then target business and advertise how you can help with work related problems, absenteeism etc.
2. If you don’t want to spend the money on postcards then actually go out and meet local people – ask them what difficulties they have and problems they would like to have solved. Ask what reasons they would have for visiting you but more importantly what reservations they have that prevents them attending your practice / business. These questions and answers are far more as you can respond there and then, put their mind at rest and give them a specific offer to counteract this perceived difficulty they may have. People have a lot of strange ideas about what you do and these fallacies are preventing them from coming to see you – what better way to resolve these issues than face to face?
Surveying your surrounding area is important as it actually gets you out to meet people and meet the community!
3. Tying with point two, it is important that you meet, greet and network with local business groups and business owners. Create strategic alliances and promote each other's businesses though BNI groups, Chamber of commerce, Rotary groups etc.
4. Once you have met these business groups, local business people and residents collect their details so that you can build an email list of local prospects and offer them free reports, articles and ebooks from your website or blog.
Make sure you send out promotional emails to this email list regularly and often and ensure that these deliver great content, articles, and case studies on a consistent basis so that your list will get to KNOW, LIKE, and TRUST you. These emails need to not only contain valuable information but also contain irresistible, low barrier offers allowing the recipient to continue care, start care or re-establish treatment with you.
5. Continuing the theme of targeting local prospects craft and distribute press releases that tie your business in with local human interest stories or news. Local newspapers are always looking for content that isn’t direct marketing pieces and plugs so it isn’t difficult to get featured if you have something useful or controversial to say. It is also surprisingly easy to start a weekly / fortnightly column with most local papers, again, as long as you have something of interest to say or to comment on.
6. Create 4-6 minute "how to" videos and post them up on YouTube with your keywords and add a link to your site in the description box. With the way electronic prices have fallen you can easily get an excellent camera, tripod and external mike for less than $100 - so money is no longer a barrier. You can even get free software that allows you to turn your computer into a teleprompter so you can read your material directly from the screen to give you even more of a professional appearance!
7. Make referral giving a condition of doing business with you – tell clients from the start that you thrive on word of mouth and you will need the names of two people you can also help once your existing client has seen the power of what you do. Also, once your existing client has said to you how great your services are – commit them to putting it onto paper, in audio or video! Testimonials are one of the greatest and under-utilised forms of business promotion.
8. Call former clients and prospects and make them irresistible, low cost and short term offers to come back.
9. Create a “condition / problem / benefit of the month” board in your office so you can begin to educate your existing clients on what you can deal with. This is also another brilliant way of generating referrals as it lets everybody know just how large your scope of expertise is and increases word of mouth publicity and referrals
10. Finally this goes without saying – make sure you commit to over delivering on results, service, recognition and appreciation.
W.J. Simmons has been involved in complementary health for over 25 years as both practitioner and lecturer. During this time he noticed that there was a wide discrepancy between how successful individual clinics were - a difference which had very little to do with the skill of the practitioner.
Learning from these successful practitioners allowed him to develop a system of easy to implement, ethical ideas for practice growth - the Exponential Practice Growth programme. To get your free 16 step report guaranteed to boost your own client base go to http://www.exponentialpracticegrowth.com/newsletter