How To Develop A Marketing Plan

A marketing plan contains the steps you plan to take to get the word out about your services. It also contains the dates you plan to do those activities.

1. Know what you are marketing and to whom. You are not marketing you. You are marketing your services. Actually, you are marketing services to help reduce your ideal client's pain. You must understand your ideal client and the pain they wish reduced. When you know this, you can develop an effective plan to let them know you are available to help reduce their pain.

2. Once you know your ideal client, you can ask yourself "Where would they hang out?" and "Who else would service them?"

For example, if you ideal client is a woman business owner, she may go to meetings for business owners. If you do a talk at one of those meetings, you will be speaking to an entire audience of prospects. If your ideal client is a mother of a toddler, you can identity others that would service her. (Pediatricians or day care providers.) You can then begin to develop relationships with those professionals.

3. In the Be A Wealthy Therapist! program we talk about several kinds of marketing activities.

Extroverted activities are activities where the prospect gets an experience of you or gets a referral from someone who has interacted with you. These activities would include but are not limited to giving a talk and networking with potential referral sources. The extroverted activities are the ones that will bring in the most clients! I recommend that you spend most of your marketing time performing extroverted activities.

Introverted marketing activities include creating your business card, a tip sheet or a recording. The introverted activities give the prospects a chance to see something you've created but they don't get a chance to interact with you. While the introverted strategies are important and necessary, the extroverted strategies, as I said, are the ones that usually bring in clients.

The third type of marketing activities are the Keep In Touch activities. These can include handwritten notes, newsletters, cards on unique holidays or phone calls. You want to keep in touch with prospects and referral sources. The activities you choose would be different depending on which group you want to keep in touch with. For example, you may want to write a "nice to meet you" note to someone you met at a networking meeting. You may want to have an electronic newsletter with tips and articles for prospects. This is the area that therapists tend to forget. They will do a talk or meet a referral source and then never connect with them again. Identify ways to stay in touch on a regular basis.

4.) Once you have identified the activities that will work best with your personality and in your community, schedule them on your marketing calendar. Here is what mine looks like: