I was recently chatting to a therapist who, quite unusually and interestingly enough, had proper marketing training as part of her therapy course. In fact it was an add-on course for an extra whopping £2,000 but nonetheless she had been exposed to the practicalities of marketing her business rather than being wrongly reassured that the phone will start ringing as soon as she qualifies as it happens in many cases.
I decided to write this post once I heard the approach that was taught to her in this expensive course where, instead of focussing specifically on marketing her health care business, they trained her in general marketing using a funnel approach which is usually applied to online marketing for e-books and other information products.
In a few simple words a funnel approach is where you have a combination of marketing tools to reach a large number of unqualified or semi qualified leads which you keep Emailing with information about your business and slowly move down into the funnel until they come out at the bottom as customers. This is great for generic products which can be sold to generic people to address generic issues and across a wide geographical area, ideally the whole world.
I always predicate using blogging and social media to create and maintain a solid presence online which, if adequate in quality and frequency, will be found by search engines and connecting your content to the right audience which eventually can become your clients. When a therapist works in a specific geographical area offering therapy to the local community she/he will soon realise that using a funnel approach to attract clients toward her or their business will be very hard. Main reasons are:
- People are either shopping around for a specific solution to a health problem or they are not; so if the advert appears in front of the second category of people they naturally ignore it
- People will not be looking to share their contact details now and get caught into the funnel expecting to be using a therapy later
While funnel marketing can be used to market and sell products or services which can be progressively pushed toward customers I would not suggest to use this approach to market and promote therapies which are usually requested as remedial treatments rather than preventive actions.