Marketing Within Your Comfort Zone

by Lynn Grodzki, LCSW, MCC  (Private Practice Success Newsletter, May 2010)

______________________________________________________

One problem with a private practice is just how private it can become.

Many therapists, coaches, consultants, and other helping professionals who offer valuable, important services remain an unintended secret to those who could benefit from them most.

Today, many service providers face two market challenges: the recession and competition. In a recessionary or down market, it is essential that you become visible. If you are dealing with competition, you need to stand out from the crowd.

If You Hate Marketing

Marketing may be the most hated word in private practice. Most of my clients tell me that they can’t stand marketing their practices. For them, any marketing is synonymous with push marketing — shameless advertising, overpromising, promoting, or seducing — the direct opposite of the healing relationships they are trying to build. They don’t want any part of it.

But you can leverage your marketing efforts (leverage = learning to do a lot with a little) by applying two steps:

1) Find the need in the market
2) Stay within your comfort zone.

Here’s how:

First, Find the Need

During difficult economic times, people purchase based on need.

Who needs your help? My colleague Ben Dean, founder of MentorCoach suggests the following considerations, amongst others, when assessing your market. (“Niche criteria for a successful coaching practice” by Ben Dean, 2000. Read the full article at: http://www.mentorcoach.com/coaching/niche-criteria.htm)

•    Burning need. If there is an intense, perceived need for the niche in the minds of your prospects, the more quickly will the niche respond to your efforts.
•    Underserved. All things being equal, a practice will grow faster in an underserved industry than in a highly developed one that has many vendors trying to meet the given need.
•    Precedent. Are there already successful businesses operating in this niche? Some of the risk is reduced if you know there are others that are successfully targeting the niche on a local level.
•    Be first. Take a successful concept and narrow it further, to be seen as first in the field.
•    Discretionary income. Can your prospective clients pay for your services out of pocket? Does your niche fall under the list of services that sell, even in a down market? (See chapter 6 of Crisis-Proof Your Practice for a list of services that sell.)
•    Coherent group. If members of your proposed niche feel they belong to a coherent group you’re more likely to have niche members forward your promotional material to others and generate word of mouth marketing.

Stay in Your Comfort Zone

Unlike other business marketing coaches, I never want you out of your comfort zone when you are presenting your practice to others. Being frightened, or any version of a deer caught in the headlights, is not a good look for you when meeting the public.

Instead, do what comes naturally.

I know many may feel that no marketing strategy is natural for them. But after working with thousands of your colleagues, I have seen that if you stay within your normal behaviors and just learn to stretch a little, you, too, can be very successful in becoming more visible and better known within your community.

What do you do naturally to connect with others? If you can talk, write, listen, ask questions — then you can be very successful marketing your practice. In other words, you only need to be yourself as you build more connections with those outside of your office walls.

Small steps really do count.

Here is one simple strategy that has helped others based on a gardening metaphor.

Seed Relationships

Be a gardener of relationships and plant marketing “seeds” in your community that will flower, over time, into a rich diversity of networks, opportunities, and client referrals. Here is how this works:

One psychotherapist moved to a small city 2500 hundred miles from her previous practice and had to start over, rebuilding her practice, knowing no one.

She used the garden model by deciding she would meet a new professional in her community each week for one year, for a total of 50 new contacts.

How to begin this task? She made a list of 50 types of professionals that she wished to add to her rolodex — a careful printer, a wonderful acupuncturist, an experienced massage therapist, a noted financial planner and, by asking around to friends and family, filled in one name for each profession.

Then she made it a point to meet each person on her list, one at a time, by phone, sending a letter, or face-to-face.

She introduced herself, explained that she had heard about the professional’s good reputation, and wanted to build a strong rolodex for future clients who might need additional services or referrals. Each professional was flattered to be added to her rolodex, and by the end of the year she had seeded fifty relationships, who were now part of her new network – and of course many of them wanted to know about her practice as well.

With time, 10% of this group (five) became very good referral sources. This is a good result, to get a 10% return on time and effort for a practice.

More Marketing Strategies

In my new book, Crisis-Proof Your Practice, I show you how many strategies to use in this economy to:
•    Keep your practice visible.
•    Make the value of your services explicit.
•    Convert effectively. All marketing is basically a numbers game: the conversion rate (the difference between the number of potential clients who may hear about your services versus those who will follow through and become actual clients) is at best 5 to 1.

In the new book, I show you exactly how to do this and more! Read the first chapter here.