You will suddenly grab the attention of this group, and if it is a good headline, you are a close to a new client. All because you limited who you were trying to talk to, and started providing valuable problem solving marketing.
There are many specific methods you will learn later for maximizing your newspaper ads.
But for now, realize that if you try to market to everyone in your massage therapy business, you will be much less effective than if you have a target market.
The next best thing is to be able to spend your marketing dollars only reaching people who want your service or specific benefit. In the newspaper, you still are paying to market to everyone, even though your advertisement may be going after a targeted market. It is better to only pay to reach that target market.
Consider the yellow pages. People who are looking up massage in the yellow pages, want massage. They are ready to make a next step. The problem with the yellow pages is that all of your competition is in the same place. But fortunately for you, they are almost all using Sell Themselves Advertising. You can carefully design a targeted marketing ad using Client Problem Solving Marketing, and get a great return from it. In fact, your competition will even help you. They will make you look great, because your marketing is so helpful as compared to theirs. But this must be done right. You can really waste your money on yellow pages if you don't have a set of benefits that make you stand out to your targeted market very clearly.
Target Market Rule #2 Don't make your target market too small. The way that many therapists do this is that instead of using marketing to target a specific group, they narrow their business services to only serve a small targeted group.
This is known as specializing. Now don't get me wrong. Specializing your massage therapy business is great idea. It can allow you to uniquely help specific groups better than anyone else, setting you apart in a competitive market.
But it can limit your market too much. Let's say you decide to focus your business on fibromyalgia clients. What has just happened is that you have reduced the 21% of people who get massage down to a very small percentage of that. It may be very hard to get enough business from such a small group of people, depending on your location and connections.
Better, is to go ahead and develop specialized skills for this targeted group. But then, become an expert in three or four other areas also. And don't exclude the most popular ways that most people use massage.
The best way to add services to your massage therapy business, is to make sure there is a market for them before you get the training. You do this by listening to your clients, and identifying a group of people who all want a specific benefit.
Remember, you are a business owner. And the primary service of your business is not massage, it is solving people's problems. You may really want to learn a new modality for yourself, but make sure there is a good market for it. You want your special training to be a money making investment for your massage therapy business, not a debt.
For instance, you hear a number of your clients say they have physical problems from playing golf. You talk with some of them, and learn, hey, lots of their friends have this issue also. You look around and don't see anyone else in your area addressing this, so you get some special training in this area.
Now, once you have developed new services, then you use targeted marketing for these groups. And then watch your massage therapy business thrive.
But don't think you have to specialize to be able to use targeted marketing. Massage therapy has so many different problems that it can help. You may decide to just target groups of people with back pain. Or people with chronic computer/desk pains. Remember, your marketing does the targeting.
The number of target market groups is vast for a massage therapy business.
Just be careful about limiting your potential client base too much.
Now we are starting to get somewhere. In previous pages you learned the difference between Selling Yourself Marking vs. Client Problem Solving Marketing. You have learned about focusing on client benefits, instead of massage. And you now see that you will do much better using targeted marketing to a defined benefit group, than marketing to everyone.
What's next? Where is the best place to put your marketing dollars and effort? Imagine if you could find a targeted market list, and every single person on that list not only gets massage, but likes you. It's easy. Learn how to - Grow Your Massage Business Easy
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