Advertising can work, but you need to have a decent budget and plan to run more than one ad.

We have got these $40 ads in our local newspaper. A whole page is full of business card size ads. Whenever a massage practitioner was not to be deterred from using them, the results were disappointing. There was hardly any response.

However, it was possible to receive an editorial with it if you booked a certain number of ads. That worked and kept bringing clients in for weeks after it ran. More about editorials later, today something about ads.

• Include an active call to action
• Entice readers by offering something valuable
• Create urgency by putting a time limit on your offer
• Go for the biggest ads you can afford
• Make the ad look like similar to editorial
• Repeat the ads regularly (at least 7 times)
• Measure your results
• Negotiate an editorial while you place your advertising

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It is Christmas Eve.

Wishing you the most wonderful days with your family. Enjoy the time off and create a great vision for 2008.

I wanted to leave you with a few massage marketing tips:

1. Spend a few minutes each day, reviewing your vision.
   It acts like a beacon for you to keep on track. It is so easy to lose sight of it in the daily tasks.

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Just a quick post for those who are interested in using the Internet to reach new clients. Massage therapy marketing on the Internet can be highly profitable, but most websites never see any visitors apart from friends that you sent there yourself.

There are two general ways to go about creating websites that really work for you.

I introduced one of them in my post about Marketing Massage and Other Natural Health Modalities. You put up a website (instead of a flyer) and send people to it through business cards.

It is ideal if you use a network of affiliated businesses that serve your target market. That way you get a lot more out and you already come “recommended”. (more…)

Flyers are outdated. They are expensive, inflexible and hard to distribute. Most of them are thrown away without being read properly. But they still seem to be the most used promotional tool in massage marketing.

If you have the budget to produce professional flyers, go for a website instead. It gives the flexibility to update details, and it has the possibility to draw the right clients to you through search engines (if done properly, but I have to leave that for another time).

But there are some times when flyers are useful. You might have read yesterday that we did in fact produce some flyers. Why? Because Caroline needed to give something to a mothers’ group she meets tomorrow and her business cards are not ready. (more…)

After my last post, I received a few questions regarding the business cards:

1. Why did you use the picture?
2. Was there an offer on the back?
3. Did you really produce no other marketing materials?

Massage Business Cards with Photos

Using a picture on business cards (especially massage business cards) is a great way to make people remember you. When I proposed the picture to Caroline, her reply was: “Car sales people and Real Estate people use them. I think that is too tacky”. (more…)

I want to share the next step in Caroline’s story. She is not marketing massage, but her postnatal exercise classes. Still, what she has done applies to all other modalities as well.

There are 4 simple steps… (and I learned something new in the process as well).

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Have you ever received a call from your hairdresser or your dentist, reminding you that it might be time to come back?

How did that make you feel? Did you feel special? I certainly do.

Two of the participants of the postnatal exercise class that my wife is running did not make it last week. So I said: Why don’t you give them a call and ask whether everything is alright and they are OK? (more…)

Serge is a naturopath who came to a small Australian country town. He has a strong French accent, maybe that added to his appeal, but he managed to fill his practice in 3 months with no advertising.

He offered a very simple formula: first session was $40 for 1 hour, second and third session was $30 for half an hour. If any more sessions were necessary, they were free.

What does that translate to?

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