Marketing Made Easy with
"The Marketing Train"
Marketing your private wellness practice doesn't have to be painful or complicated. Here's the simple, proven method we use to teach ANYONE how to reach more clients and build a thriving practice.
People often ask us what exactly our program is all about. With 14 workbooks and 300+ pages of materials, you'd think that would be a hard question to answer. NOT AT ALL!
That's because marketing is actually a very natural thing - when you learn how to do it right.
At Helping The Helper, we use a simple, but powerful, metaphor to help you FINALLY understand what "this marketing thing" is all about. To know where to put your efforts (and where not to). To understand how to fit together all those confusing "tricks" and "tactics" you keep reading about in business and marketing books. And to do it in a way that matches (not clashes) with your role as a healer and helper.
We call our system "The Marketing Train." This concept encapsulates and clarifies EVERYTHING you'll need to know, do and be in order to successfully (and painlessly!) promote your practice and reach more clients.
To put it very briefly, all you really need to do to achieve a thriving private practice is:
Prepare the foundation
Lay the tracks
Build your train
...then put it all together and GO!
We'll talk about each of these 3 steps here, so you can get a flavor of what we're all about. It seems to make more sense to people if we start at the end (the Train) and work backward, so that's how we present it below.
We hope this article will inspire you to join our membership and become empowered to grow your practice, to believe in your natural abilities as a successful solo-business owner.
Remember, you are ALREADY a "wellness marketer". You want to spread the word about and promote some amazing, life-changing wellness services - YOURS. Take the time to learn how to do it easily and well. Your future clients are depending on it!
Marketing is Easy with "The Marketing Train"
In Module 3 of the HTH program, we show you the powerful, simple 3-part system for proactively marketing your wellness practice. At HTH we call it the "Marketing Train" system, and it really works!
The Marketing Train is the ongoing marketing you'll do with your practice. Briefly, you want to have 3 kinds of marketing going at all times - "active" marketing like speaking to organizations or writing articles; "passive" marketing like creating business cards, brochures and websites; and "follow-up" marketing like sending out regular reminders or newsletters.
Stringing these activities together in an organized way is like putting a train together: Engine, Cars, Caboose. Done. You have a train. In your Marketing Train, the Engine is the active marketing, the Cars are the passive marketing, and the Caboose is the follow-up or "keep in touch" marketing.
The key is to spend most of your time doing ACTIVE rather than passive marketing (most wellness professionals goof this one up!) In other words, stay in the Engine - 'cause that's where all the power is!
The Marketing Train is everything you want from a marketing strategy - an intuitive, systematic, and proven way to promote your practice. Like a real train, once launched, the Marketing Train works almost on autopilot, leaving you free to focus on what you love best - the client work! (See the FREE workbook on the Marketing Train to get all the details on this central piece of our program).
Trains Run On Tracks
But wait a minute - you wouldn't just build a train and start it rolling along on the prairie, would you? It might move forward, with luck, but it will take a LOT of energy and not go far (plus, it will probably crash).
That's what happens when people jump into marketing without a clear FOCUS, a target market and niche (what we call the Who and What) AND a methodology or program (what we call the "How"). Together, these 3 elements compose your specialty marketing message. The Who and What are like the two tracks of your Train, and the How is like the crossties that connect them together.
Most wellness practitioners don't have a specialty message to focus their marketing. Without it, they put a ton of effort into promoting their practice, get exhausted, don't see results, and unfortunately, often BURN OUT on their life's work. What a shame... and one you can avoid by following the HTH system. Module 2 in the HTH Virtual U helps you lay those gleaming tracks ...so you can really get someplace with your practice!
Tracks Need Solid Foundations
But wait! You can't just pick some tracks and lay them just anywhere willy-nilly can you? You have to prepare the path for them! You have to hire the engineers, pick the best route, decide where to lay the tracks, get a crew together, rent the machinery, buy the pickaxes, cut through or bridge obstacles, and grade and smooth the roadbed, right?
The smoothness of the tracks, the efficiency and success of the train, relies on making good preparations for it. It's the same with your practice. You need time, energy and confidence to do all those Engine activities, to create a How or program, to put together a good website. It takes even more to maintain a successful private practice (while still maintaining your Marketing Train). How are you going to do all that? By PREPARING for it!
Ask yourself honestly: If 20 new clients walked in the door right now (or 30 or 55, whatever a "full practice" means to you) - would you be ready for them? Do you have dedicated "client hours" you can schedule them in and streamlined intake, billing, and office procedures? Is your personal and professional life reasonably free of clutter and energy drainers, or do you need to radically simplify your life before you can have room for all these clients you dream of?
To put it in HTH terms, maybe you need to clear the decks so that all this growth you're hoping for can actually happen without overwhelming you! Beyond that, can you TRULY picture yourself as a busy, successful and in-demand professional? Do you talk about your practice from that place, rather than grumbling about not being busy enough at parties or to friends? This is the all-important "success mindset" that we call Professional Posture and it sets apart those who quickly build a thriving practice and those who struggle for years and have unsatisfying clients.
Finally, how clear are you about your decision to build a thriving practice? To make it as a private practitioner, you need a rock-solid, "I'm doing this no matter what" kind of commitment (not a "try it and see" or "I hope this will work out" kind.) Where are you in your belief that you can do it? When those gremlins and doubt dogs come growling at your door, do you know how to kick them out? Plus, do you have a concrete, detailed vision of exactly what you want in your practice? Is it 10 clients 3 days a week with one month off a year working out of your home, or is it something else? You gotta know!
A Note About Patience: Usually at the beginning of your practice (or at the beginning of a new year) you feel fired up and itching to start promoting your practice. But HOLD ON! You want your marketing efforts to be successful and sustainable over the long haul - otherwise you won't do them consistently enough to get results - and you may even burn out and give up your practice altogether.
Answering these all-important foundational questions are the equivalent of shaping the mountainside so your train tracks can run on it. They are the core of your practice and your growth.
Summary
Practitioners who take the time to establish and maintain their foundation, to focus and target their marketing message, and to coordinate their active, passive and follow-up marketing efforts appropriately are the ones who succeed in the long run. It's that simple.
So there you have it folks!
Prepare the path
Lay the tracks
Build your train
... and GO!
Who says marketing and promoting a private wellness practice has to be complicated?! Not us!! And after reading this article, we hope you feel the same.
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Virtual University
