How to Promote a Service or Product without Being Annoying
Do you worry about annoying people when you market or promote your services? Worse, do you feel you will be seen as “salesy” or sleazy if you promote yourself too much or too often?
These are important considerations when you are selling a service that helps others. No one wants to work with the “used care salesman” of mental health services! And I know you don’t want to be that person.
Luckily, there is a great, helpful, useful way you can market yourself or your stuff and be seen as a great person at the same time!
It’s called content marketing and it allows you to actually help people as you let them know about your great services.
Content marketing consists of you providing lots of useful information for people to access for free. The content (information) can be provided via articles, audios, videos, blog posts, live workshops. Any time you share information you are creating content.
The way to make content marketing successful and draw clients to your work is to product high quality content consistently and give it away for free. Yes, free. Good stuff for free. Great, useful content will draw people to your blog, website, newsetter and allow you to build a list of followers. Seth Godin calls these Tribes
A tribe is a group of people interested in one particular topic,say, parenting kids with ADHD or therapists looking to build a practice (my two tribes).
A tribe will see you as an expert, listen and learn from what you have to say, and when you have something to offer them to purchase, whether it be a therapy session or a self-help product, many of them will choose to buy from you because you offered them such great content that they know, like and trust you.
There is no hard and fast rule, but many highly competent content marketers say they use a 90-10 split in offering great, free content (90%) and asking for a sale (10%). An example might be for every 10 posts I place on BizSavvytherapist.com, 9 are informational, and just one asks you to consider purchasing a workshop or product.
Most people would agree that 90% free, helpful info is worth looking at 10% of promotions. In fact, most of those in your tribe will like your stuff so much, they will WELCOME the promotion and look forward for a chance to work with you on a more intensive level.
Content marketing is an ideal model for therapists and other helping professionals. We have a lot of useful information to share.
Don’t think you have anything to write or talk about?
How about a list of ways for teens to manage stress, a short article on how to argue productively with a spouse, or an audio on ways to enjoy summer vacation with your kids? Just pick a topic you discussed today with a client. Now remove all the personal information from that conversation and jot down the bullet points of the factual information. For instance, talking to a widow about his grief could become a short article on how to manage grief after the death of a spouse.
The truth is, people are looking for this information online all day, every day. Why not learn from you and become a member of your tribe?
And you’re never annoying. you’re helpful! And you will never been seen as saley or sleazy because you are not constantly asking for a sale. You’re constantly offering support and occasionally asking for a sale (and you do need to once-in-awhile ask for a sale or you are giving away a lot of stuff for no profit, which is going to quickly put you out of business).
I see some of therapists out there starting to market and that is great! But some of it is not content based. I hate to say it, but it can be annoying. When I see someone posting on a bunch of networking sites saying, “Hey, I wrote a book! You should read it,” over and over again, I get turned off. I know that is not the desired outcome.
So, how about posting a free chapter of the book, or do a series of blog posts based on the book, then ask me if I want to buy it. If I liked the free content, chances are I’d pay to read the whole book. The same plan works for workshops, retreats or any treatment services you offer.
In my opinion content marketing is the way to go for any helping professional looking to promote a service or product. What do you think?
i think that’s a great idea, susan! again, you’ve reminded me to be specific when marketing. i agree, people will give you maybe .05 second to make a decision if they want to do business with you.
thanks for the tip!!
I agree- a brief, one hour brown bag lunch on a topic you know a lot about provides other professions with useful information and a chance to meet for a social lunch.