In order for your wellness business to thrive you need clients or customers. But the digital world is a busy place. If you are not marketing yourself in some way you will not likely attract the steady stream of potential clients and customers that make your business successful. For this you need a marketing system. A marketing system is one of the key business systems you’ll need to run your business.
What are marketing systems?
Marketing is creating awareness of your business and the services that you offer. The system that you use to create awareness is your marketing system. Your marketing system can have several aspects to it:
Email marketing
Once you get people on your email list you can send emails that help them to get to know you and you can provide awareness of your products and services. But email marketing doesn’t occur until you have people on your email list so you’ll need to use a different form of marketing first.
Social media marketing
Another way to market in the online world is through social media. You can use social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and newer platforms like TikTok and Clubhouse for your marketing efforts. People might see you posting on social media and sign up for your email list where they become part of your email marketing efforts.
Content marketing
When you provide content, usually free, to an audience you are using content marketing. This can be a blog post, a podcast or a YouTube channel. I’ve discussed the benefits of content marketing in this blog post.
Search engine marketing
Closely tied in with content marketing is search engine marketing. This especially applies to written and video content where you are often at the mercy of Google. Search engine marketing involves making your content more appealing to search engines like Google, YouTube and Pinterest. This involves doing keyword research, making sure your written content is easy to read, and that your titles are appealing.
(Note that I’m grouping Pinterest in with search engines because from a marketing perspective it behaves more like a search engine than social media)
Paid advertising
You can use paid advertising either with social media, or with search engines like Google. Both options can be expensive if you don't know what you are doing. I suggest you try other marketing methods before paid advertising.
Conversational marketing
One of the best ways that you can use social media is with conversational marketing. This works especially well for coaches because people want to get to know you before they commit to working with you. You can use DM messages or use a Facebook group to have conversations with potential clients.
What Tech Do You Need?
To start and grow your wellness business
Collaboration
If you don’t have a big email list or social media following then collaboration is a great option for your marketing. With collaboration you are getting in front of someone else's audience. You can do collaboration in several different ways. Guest blog posting, being a podcast guest, doing a freebie exchange or even being part of a bundle or a summit are forms of collaboration. You can get benefits from participating or from hosting . You can also collaborate with someone who offers complimentary services. Seek out ways to collaborate with other coaches.
Event marketing
This can tie in with collaboration to some extent. A summit is a type of event that you can use to bring awareness to what you do. Events could also be in person talks or online workshops. You are using the large audience of the event to get more eyes on your stuff. You can collect email addresses of the people attending your events (with permission of course). Or you can use events as another stage in your journey to help people get to know you even more.
Conventional marketing
Most of the ideas I’ve discussed fall into the digital marketing realm. But don’t discount traditional marketing techniques completely. Conventional marketing techniques include things like advertising, cold calling and distributing flyers. If you are hosting in person events, then you will likely want to use some aspects of conventional marketing. Maybe placing posters about the talk in neighboring coffee shops or asking the venue to distribute a single page flyer.
Word of mouth
If you have success with one client, they are likely to tell their friends and other people with similar problems about you. This can be one of the most valuable forms of marketing.
These parts can be separate in your business or they can work together as a complete system. For example you can use social media marketing and paid advertising to get people to sign up for your email list, then use email marketing to provide more awareness of who you are and what you do.
Why you should use a marketing system in your wellness business
All these ideas are great ways to market your business, but having a system around it will really help. Here are some of the things that should be included in your system
- A customer journey map showing where your clients (or potential clients) enter your world and how they progress.
- Tracking at each point in the journey. How are people entering your journey and at what points?
- Identify areas for more focus and areas for improvement
Summary
It’s never too early to establish a marketing system for your business.
If you haven’t started using any of these ways for marketing, pick one and start using it. Many of these will take a while to show results so don’t wait until you really need new clients to start.
You’ll want to map out a customer journey to determine which aspects of marketing is missing from your marketing system then start to create a system that creates and grows awareness of your products and solutions.
References
marketingevolution.com/marketing-essentials/what-is-a-digital-marketing-platform-marketing-evolution
