What Marketing to do When, in Your Holistic Business

Clients and prospective clients are at different stages of being ready to work with you. You need to bear this in mind when deciding on your marketing activities.

Practitioners who need to find clients quickly will often focus their marketing efforts in the wrong place, for example on strategies that build awareness like social media. Most marketing strategies take time to mature and deliver results, which will not help if you need to fill your diary now. These long-term strategies are like planting seeds, you must nurture and tend to them, so they grow and blossom into something worthwhile.

Having clients who are ready to work with you now and having people warming up to work with you in the future will build a flow of clients and create a sustainable business.

Cold, Warm and Hot Leads

Remember the children’s game where you hide something, and you assist the person trying to find it by calling out different temperatures? Cold is when they’re nowhere near, and hot is when they’re close.  

This is the same with your prospective clients or leads. When they’re cold, they don’t even know you exist, when they’re warm, they’re getting to know you, and those who are hot are the most likely to work with you.

Here are a few examples of different activities for the different stages of readiness to work with you – some do cross over the different areas but serve different purposes.

Cold Leads

These people don't yet know you exist or how you can help them solve their problems. You must work hard to get noticed and build a relationship ready for these people to book with you.

A great exercise is to start asking new clients how they heard about you. This will give you a good indication of whether your marketing is working or not.

Awareness marketing activities include:

• Social media
• Advertising
• Practice leaflets
• Public relations
• Online directories
• Blogs, podcasts, videos

Warm Leads

At this stage, your marketing is about building relationships, being helpful and demonstrating your expertise. You’re turning strangers you’ve attracted (cold leads) into clients who want to work with you and know you’re the best person to help them.

Engaging marketing activities include:

• Email list
• Social media
• Networking
• Collaborations
• Blogs, podcasts, videos
• Speaking

Hot Leads

These are the people who are looking for help now, and already know like and trust you including your clients, past clients, and enquiries.

These are the relationships you need to nurture - clients who have amazing experiences from working with you, you will then turn them into your best marketers.

Happy clients are willing to share their experiences. Think about the times when you’re looking to buy something. You’ll ask your network for ideas, and check reviews - you want to know we can trust our choice. This trust will help you build your business efficiently.

Nurturing marketing activities include:

• Personal emails
• Referrals
• Handwritten cards
• Phone calls
• Meetings
• Social media
• Referrals

Map Out Your Client Journey

Your client journey is simply the route they take from discovering you, to working with you.  Once you start seeing clients, they already follow a path whether you realise it or not. Having clarity over this will help you focus your marketing efforts.

Keep it simple and determine how you attract and communicate with your clients at each stage of their journey. 

Consider the following:

• How do people discover you in the first place?
• How do you continue to engage with prospective clients?
• How do you keep current and past clients engaged with you and your business?

Reflect on Your Client Journey

From your review, are there any stages that you’re not communicating with prospective and existing clients? Ensure you’re doing something to help and support clients at each stage of their journey to working with you to keep you front of mind.

Finding Clients Fast Masterclass

Whether you’re just starting out or you’re struggling to attract clients to your holistic business, you need to do my masterclass FINDING CLIENTS FAST. In this masterclass, you’ll learn and start to implement the best marketing strategy to find clients, and that doesn’t require anything other than time and a little effort – get the full details here.