We’re moving to a better place

I set this blog up just over a month ago. In the middle of the night. I’d come home from seeing some friends and I couldn’t get to sleep, so I thought I’d set this up and see what happened.

In just over a month, I’ve had over 450 hits to this website. That’s not loads in website terms but it was about 430 more hits than I was expecting. I’m incredibly grateful that you read what I write…I sincerely hope it’s useful.

So, given that my little experiment was more successful than I ever thought it would be, I thought I’d move us all over to a fancy pants blog that I got designed and logoed and everything.

It’s called Rocking Chair Marketing – Marketing Advice for Therapists. Why Rocking Chair? Because I once heard this quote and it tickled me – “worrying is like a rocking chair, it’ll give you something to do but it won’t get you anywhere”. In our case, worrying won’t get us anymore clients!

So I’ll be posting over there from now on. Please join me!

www.rockingchairmarketing.co.uk

How one change can radically alter the number of clients wanting your services

This is a blog about marketing for psychotherapists, so I thought I’d run a little marketing experiment…something called a split test (here’s a definition from Sonia Simone who’s a bit of a hero of mine).

Essentially, it’s exactly what it sounds like, you take one marketing idea and split them so that they’re delivered differently. For example,  a cafe might might print 50 flyers with information about a promotion. They print 25 in black type on white paper and they print 25 in pink type on white paper and add a couple of pictures of cake and they monitor which flyer brings in more business.

I ran my split test on two therapy listings sites I’m on. One I kept very traditional and very similar to all the other types of listings ie: it’s all about me and my qualifications and a load of acronynms for governing bodies the general therapy finding public don’t really know about (or care about, in my humble opinion).

The other I made much more client focused. I changed the text entirely, speaking directly to one person, my ideal client. I focused on using the sort of language they might use to describe the pain they are in right now, the pain that’s driven them online to find a therapist. I articulated their need in non-jargon and was explicit about how I could help.

Readers. Pay attention to this part. I changed this text on Sunday night. I got a referral on Monday morning. The client and I are scheduled to meet this week.

Maybe you still don’t think angling your messages towards the client is the right way to go but I’m in no doubt that it works. I know it can be frightening to change things around and take steps that seems quite radical, especially when all your peers and colleagues are doing things the way they’ve always been done.

What are your thoughts and fears about this? Post some ideas in the comments and I’ll answer them personally.

Check out my previous post for more on writing a website and marketing material that’s client focused – No offense but your client’s don’t care about you

The Fear and how to use it to your advantage

I think this is a post we can all relate to by Susan Giurleo – What do when you’re scared sh**tless about building your business

She talks about The Fear. The fear that if we leave our jobs, we’ll fail. The fear that there aren’t enough clients that want to pay us. The feat that we’ll screw it up, fall flat on our faces and everyone will laugh.

I’ve had it, I still get it. I’ve had it right from the beginning. Way back when it finally dawned on me that what I should be doing with my life was practicing psychotherapy, I was afraid I’d never get on a training course. But I did. And what’s more, my intuition was proved right, it was what I was meant to be doing because I took to the training like a duck to water.

Then came the fear that I’d never get a clinical placement…I’d get overlooked for applicants who had better experience or who already came from mental health backgrounds. But I got clinical placements. Then I started to get great feedback from my clients, clients asked if they could work with me once their contract was finished. They wrote me thank-you letters which made me cry. They are among my most treasured possessions because they remind why I do the work I do when The Fear is stalking me.

The Fear also comes along when I hear too many “can’t’s” – other professionals telling me “you can’t run a business that way” or that psychotherapists “can’t have blogs, can’t be on Twitter, can’t engage with social media”. In these situations, I take a step back and try to work out whose fear it really it is and more often than not it’s their fear and not mine. They are afraid of change, they are afraid of or don’t understand new technologies and decide that “I can’t” when in fact they don’t want to, which is so different.

But something I’ve realised is that I’m OK with The Fear…it reminds me that I really care about what I do. I never felt this way when I was a salaried employee, I cared about my work but in a very different way. The difficult decisions where someone else’s responsibility.

What I like most about having the fear is that with a few deep breaths it’s possible to take that energy and turn it into bravery. And I love my new found courage. I’ve dared myself to do things I never would have done when I was on the payroll. I’ve pushed out of my comfort zone and made some great stuff happen, not just for me but for other people too.

What about you? Do you get the fear, what are your strategies for handling it? Post your ideas in the comments below.

Time to rethink that email address

If you’re a therapist in private practice you are a small business owner…you may not have quite come to terms with that yet but you are. You wear two hats – one as clinician and one as someone who has an accountant. That was my defining moment when I really realised I had a business, was when I appointed my accountant. Blessed be the bean counters!

So you’re a business owner, even if you’re still freaking out about this stay with me. If you are a business owner with an email address that ends @googlemail.com or @hotmail.com or @btconnect.co.uk every time you send a professional email relating to your business to a client, you are promoting their business and not yours. You also look like a small time operator, more like someone who has a hobby, rather than a business. If a service provider I engage with doesn’t have their own email address I do always wonder why they couldn’t be bothered…that’s just me. To me it seems like laziness. You might disagree, but I would encourage you to at least think about it if you haven’t before now. If you want a hobby, that’s absolutely fine but if you’re the primary breadwinner in your household and you’re not “you” in your email address, it’s time to think about changing that. Because every time you send an email from Yahoo or Hotmail or BT you are promoting their brand messages and their corporate messages and not yours.

What’s more, you’ll be at the mercy of their servers and security policies. If they decide that an inbound email is spam, they will not deliver it to your inbox. That email could have been a potential new client inquiring about your services, a referral from a colleague…once you start to think about it, it becomes horrifying. But the upshot is that you don’t get the email, so you don’t respond and you look unprofessional without even realising it. So not worth it.

I would encourage you to think about it – which looks more professional tamarisk@hotmail.com or tamarisk@twochairscounselling.co.uk? By the way, the former address isn’t mine so please don’t email whoever has that address! The second is me…email away if you’ve got questions or queries.

Why you need to turn your indicators on

I’m a bike rider, I cycle pretty much everywhere. It’s my no-brainer way of getting some excerise into my day. But every time I hit the road I encounter something that frustrates me (and that’s the polite way of saying it).

I encounter cars. More specifically I encounter cars and drivers who think I’m clairvoyant, psychic or maybe both. For some reason, car drivers in London think it’s perfectly OK to turn left or right without indicating. At best, it’s annoying, at worst it’s literally fatal. I’m not psychic nor and I clairvoyant. I don’t know that you’re turning into that road and if you don’t show me, I can’t get out of the way. So you’ll forgive my fist shaking and unlady-like language because in a collision between bike and car, car will always win.

Now what’s this got to do with marketing you might be wondering. Indicators are as important in your marketing as they are when you’re driving. All your marketing materials and all your marketing efforts need to be geared towards showing your client why they should hire you rather than someone else. Don’t make them guess, they aren’t clairvoyant or psychic either.

When your potential client clicks onto your website or picks up your brochure, they are wondering “can this therapist help with my depression/stress/relationship/anxiety attacks” or whatever problem it is that they’re struggling with right now. Your job in your marketing is to make it simple and straight forward – if your problem is X the solution is Y and I specialise in Y.

So turn your indicators on in your marketing, don’t let potential clients click away or call someone else because you left them wondering whether or not you can help them with their unique issue. And please from this cyclist to all car drivers – indicate on the roads too!

SEO School – let me count the ways I’m glad I bought it

It’s been a couple of weeks now since I bought SEO School and I’m still glad I did. It’s helped me understand things that were totally passing me by before. For instance, I’m really keen on learning more and more on how write better copy, so I read lots of blogs about blogging. Try as they might, there is always going to be some jargon, no matter what. But now that I’ve gone through the ebook, I feel much more confident taking on board all the excellent information that’s out there.

Also…drum roll please, I’m going to relaunching this site, my website and my other blog pretty soon to make them all fancy pants. More on that later! But having read SEO School, the whole process of relauching them has been so much easier. Re-writing my website copy in a focused, targeted way having done my keyword research really made me think much harder about what to say and when to say it (buy the ebook and you’ll understand what I mean a bit more with regards to this!).

I’m also about to start some PR activity around the relaunch of both sites and, once again, I’ll be writing my press releases so that my keywords are optimised. If I hadn’t read the book, I doubt I would have even thought of it, but now I feel more confident that I can write press releases that will generated targeted traffic to my website and both blogs.

Finally, working out your keywords forces you to think about your areas of speciality. Think you can optimise for depression, stress, bereavement, relationships, communication issues, life transitions, gender issues, domestic violence…and and and. Be my guest, but I’m willing to bet you’ll be pulling your hair out by the end of it and you’ll have website that makes no sense!

So once again – SEO School. Totally worth it!

Janet Jackson, marketing and me

I was twisting the dial on the radio in my kitchen on the weekend and managed to get a gazillion north London pirate radio stations. One of them made me stop because it was one of my favourite songs of yore – Janet Jackson’s “What have you done for me lately”. I bopped around the kitchen and then flopped onto the sofa to finally get around to reading Therapy Today (or any non-therapists reading this, it’s the magazine the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy put out for its members).

I enjoy Therapy Today but I noticed on the inside cover that the they state the mission of the organisation. The first one they state is that their mission is to raise the profile of counselling and psychotherapy within the public sphere.

And this is where Miss Janet came in…what, exactly, has the BACP done for me lately? What’s it done for you lately…marketing wise?

When a friend confessed that when he finally admitted to himself he needed the help of a therapist, he had no idea where to turn. He’d never heard of the BACP, and although I found that disappointing, I wasn’t all that surprised. Don’t get me wrong, I am a member and I do think they do a great job in representing us to all sorts of different parties (the public, the government etc). But they can’t do everything, we can’t just kick back and say it’s not my job to make it clear and obvious what I do, how I do it and who I help.

And that’s ultimately the point of marketing. Marketing is just another way of saying “the stuff you do to get people to know what you’re selling and why they should buy it from you and not someone else”. We have to be more proactive, the BACP can’t do the job of marketing everyone’s individual practice.

My feeling is that if we all dedicated a bit more time to marketing our practices, more people would be hearing our messages and more people would be understanding the value of counselling. And guess what? This will become a positive feedback loop – the more people who know about the value of counselling, the more people will seek us out, the more clients we all get. Everyone wins.

What do you guys think? Does marketing still just bamboozle you? Is it scary and something you just don’t want to do or are you excited about it? Leave your thoughts in the comments, esspecially if you want to see more posts here on topics I haven’t been covering.

What John Lewis can teach you about marketing a therapy service

I was at a networking event not so long ago where we got a great talk about how to be more organised. One of the points the speaker raised was that you can be more organised when you limit your choices. She said she shopped at John Lewis for the majority of things she needs because if she just has one store to go to she limits herself to the stuff John Lewis selects to sell to her.

Made sense to me, but what struck me was her choice of store – John Lewis. Not flashy, not cutting edge fashion, not intimidating…it’s trusted. She trusts John Lewis to offer her a decent selection of whatever it is she’s looking for. She trusts their tag line – never knowingly undersold. So even if she found the TV she was looking for cheaper at Debenhams, she trusts that John Lewis will match their price.

Why do people buy things? They buy things because they want them. Why do people not buy things? They don’t buy things when they don’t trust it. People buy from John Lewis because the company spends a huge portion of their time earning the trust of their customers. If customers thought the returns process would be a pain, they wouldn’t trust John Lewis. They wouldn’t trust them if they didn’t live up to their tag line – never knowingly undersold.

So what can we learn from John Lewis? If you are selling something that people want and they trust you, you put yourself in very strong position to turn that casual visitor to your website into a client. Find people who want your service, make them aware that your stuff is worth having and then do everything, everything to get and keep their trust. Don’t set alarm bells off in their heads. If you say you’re going to return appointment booking calls within 24hrs…do it.Offer them useful, usable information on your website about a condition you specialise in – tips for reducing stress for example, or instant claming techniques to stop a panic attack dead in its tracks.

Show people that it’s safe to buy what you’re selling…just like John Lewis does.

Ten Commandments of your Website

1. You shall update your website on a regular basis – don’t get one if you can’t maintain it and don’t buy one off someone who says you don’t need to update it. They’re lying. Or more likely, they don’t care about your search engine ranking (want to know about SEO…scroll down and read my posts below).
2. You shall have a manageable website – I’m not that mean, yes you should update it but I’m not a web developer and probably neither are you. Just keep it simple and straightforward.
3. You shall do your homework – look at the competition’s websites…no need to keep this national either, go international. See what’s out there, analyze what you like, what works, what doesn’t work, what repels you away from a website quicker than you can say “holy cats! that website burns my eyeballs!”
4. You shall only put up well written content – don’t pile in a whole load of fancy pants psychotherapy terms that the average bear doesn’t understand. Unless your niche is “The Therapist’s Therapist” then write simply and clearly. And optmise for your keywords…don’t know how to do that? Well I wrote a post on it, scroll on friend.
5. You shall not make website visitors hunt for information – nothing will make a visitor click away faster. Where do you practice, how much is it, how can I contact you…put this stuff front and centre. Put your contact details on every page, just make it easy.
6. You shall make your font size big enough – many people can not read font size 9.
7. You shall use gender neutral colours, images and themes – in my practice I target women but my website isn’t pink, pink, pink. Mainly because I’d find that patronising and that’s the last feeling I want to engender on my site but if you work with men and women don’t put butterflies and cherry blossom images all over the place.
8. You shall not use wed design that makes your site difficult to use – no splash pages (splash pages are those annoying “click here to enter” pages, they require Flash), no music (you are not a record label, you are a therapist)…these things can take a long time to download if people don’t have super-fast broadband.
9. You shall think carefully before sharing personal information – this goes without saying for therapists but that doesn’t mean you should go to the other end of the scale and come across as unhuman, you can (indeed, must) inject a bit of your you-ness into your website. It’s why I’d pick you rather than the next person I clicked on the BACP Directory, it’s about the chemistry!
10. You shall only use professional photographs on your website – I’ve said this before but it bears repeating. You are a professional, you trained for a long time, you offer something no one else does, you’re an awesome therapist. You must look professional on your website.

Related Post – SEO School

Marketing 101 Workshop, it’s happening!

What I am about to say may not be for you, but it may be for someone you know. So don’t be mean, tell them about this and have them email me.

I’m writing this post to let you know about a course I’m running. Watch out, there’s a catchy title ahead – “Marketing 101 – How to tell people what I do, not be sleazy in how I tell them and get more clients!”

What will we be covering? Great question, well we’ll be looking at the following:

• Figuring out what makes you awesome – your USP is what makes you different and better and cooler than the other guys. It makes potential clients think “Hurray! This therapist/nutritionist/osteopath has the exact solution to my problem…I’m calling them right now!”
• Who’s buying what I’m selling? – Once you know what makes you awesome, you’ll need to find the people who want to buy what you’re selling immediately, if not sooner. If at the moment you’re saying “I’m a massage therapist, I’m looking for people who need massages”…well that’s not quite cutting the mustard. Your target demographic is much more complex than that we I’m going to help you find it.
• What do I say to these people? – here’s a big clue, your potential clients have one question on their mind when they look at your website or brochure. Answer that question and you’re golden.
• Okay. Now how do I do all stuff? – here’s the part where we look at the tools you can use and the strategies you can put in place to market your mojo. Even if you’re an introvert and you hate the phone.

Sound good? I hope so! We’ll try and cover all this in an hour an half…bring a note pad, bring pens.

Who’s this for – anyone working for themselves, anyone without a marketing department, anyone who wants more clients. As you know, I’m a psychotherapist but I spent 10 years in marketing and PR before I retrained (google me…seriously…my name is still on some press releases out there!) and I’ve been putting what I know about marketing to use in developing my own private practice. Who might want this? Yoga teachers, nutritionists, pilates people, cool/creative/freelance-y people…if you’re hustling your services, whatever they are, you need to market them.

How much does it cost? Well, a mere £25 is all. If what you learn brings you in one client it will have more than paid for itself. Plus it counts as continued professional development and that stuff usually costs crazy money!

Spaces are limited, by all means deliberate but don’t miss out! It’s all happening on 5th May at 41 Fitzroy Square, London W1T

Email me to book or if you have any questions