I have spoken a lot about marketing in the past few months in the most direct way. I've mentioned your target market also and how important it is to know who your clients are. There is one thing that I have not spoken to you about and I think it's time I said it. It's really important and something you must know before I continue giving you good information about marketing tips. Getting to know who your clients are is essential because you can't create an effective marketing message if you don't know who you are marketing too. Okay, that's established. But really, you've got to take a step further. This next step is keeping up to date with who is coming to you and why. You see in order to be successful you must keep the "finger on the pulse" of your massage business. This means you must know what types of people are coming to you, how long they want their treatment for, what they get treated for and if they have successful results. The main reason we have to do this in our practices is because having clients means knowing them. And a huge aspect of that is to actually know how many of them are repeat business, once-offs and casuals to intermediate clients. By dong this simple analysis will show you exactly what type of massage business you have, and gives you the chance to rectify any potential flaws lurking about, such as 40% of your clients you never see again. Wouldn't you like to know if that is actually happening? It sounds funny to think you wouldn't know something as important as this. I'll explain. A client of mine, a very good Therapist who has a thriving practice in a busy inner city suburb and has several staff has been running for 13 years. This lovely guy thought he had it made. (I knew just by looking at him that he was in for some serious talk time by me.) To cut a fairly long story short he realised that a major percentage of his clients were never to be seen. I mean up to 48% never came back. Why? Because he hadn't identified his target market properly, what they really wanted or worked out how to educate them to come back to continue with a treatment 'program'. After our meeting he realised that he had to know who was coming through the door and why, and if he could increase the amount of times they came back. Now you and I both know this isn't an exercise is getting clients to come back if they don't need to, but I'm not talking about clients who are ok. I'm talking about clients with chronic muscular dysfunction that needed to come back but didn't know they needed to. They were not being educated. After our meeting he then implemented a plan (with my help) to increase the number of times they came back, thus getting better results from the massage treatment, and as a consequence, referring more people to him, because they were better educated. They were better educated because he realised there was a gap in his client identification process and once fixed his once-off clients dropped to 20%. And hey, this isn't rocket science, as the saying goes. This is about knowing who's coming, why and how often so you can keep better tabs on your practice and reap the rewards of success, as you deserve. Take time to do this every week, so you don't get behind. Just half an hour to write down who you treated, for how long etc. It will give you better and more effective control over what's happening and be able to make better decisions in the long run. Success will come faster. Good luck! AMY www.massagetherapysuccess.com
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