Social Media, Mobile, and Local Marketing Tips to build a Thriving Massage Therapy Business.
Posted on 09. Jul, 2010 by Patrick Curl in Mobile Advertising, Mobile Marketing, Social Media
Photo credit: Emily Chang
I’m a graduate from Massage Therapy back in the day (2003). I graduated from the Utah College of Massage Therapy aka UCMT. Those were fun days, I loved going to massage school, due to health concerns I eventually was not able to follow up on Massage therapy, so instead I became a social media consultant (which I also love).
I still miss practicing massage on people, and doing energy work like Cranial Sacral, Shiatsu, Acupressure, etc…
As a marketer I often think up ways that “If I was a __fill in the blank____” I’d do this to get more customers or clients.. It’s something that’s fun for me, if a little geeky.
So for this blog post “If I was a ‘practicing’ massage therapist” I would do the following to market my business:
1. Social Shopping Services. Social Shopping services are literally popping up all over the place. By “Social Shopping” I mean sites like LivingSocial and Groupon. The premise is this – a bunch of people each agree to buy the same deal from a company. Because a whole bunch of people are buying the company gets some nice exposure from possible people who might not have been customers otherwise.
Example: Groupon or Living Social runs a campaign for your business. Your customers get a 50% off a massage. Say you charge $60 normally for massages, that means that your customers get a $30 dollar massage. Groupon or LivingSocial would then get a percent of that I believe it runs from 30%-50%.
The benefit is that they have a large user base and can get tons of new customers to try out your services. You’ll generally get a fraction of what you normally do – but to get new people trying out your services its often worth it.
2. Local Directories. There are tons of great local directories out there. I would make sure to list all your services and modalities in each and every single local directory that you can find. Some good ones are: Google Places, Localeze, CitySearch, Yelp, MerchantCircle, ShopCity, Local.com, Yellow Pages, Yahoo local,
Be sure to use lots of graphics, some sites will let you add coupons. Make sure that every little space and form field is filled out with very detailed information about your business.
Also be sure to ask your customers how they found you, and ask them to go back to that site and leave you a review if they have a chance.
Another great Local Marketing tactic is using new Local / Social services to market your business. Make sure your business is listed at Foursquare and Gowalla and suggest to your clients that if they check-in on foursquare they can receive some nice benefits. You could give $5 off for all foursquare users who checkin, and $15 off for the Mayor of your business.
3. Adwords and PPC ads. Pay-Per-Click is a great boon for business. For those non-techy, pay-per-click ads are the ads on google on the side that say ‘sponsored’. Users can bid on keywords and their ad will get shown in the order of their bid. So say you bid $1.00 per click for a keyword and someone else bid $1.10 per click. That means for each click to your website you will pay $1.00. It also means that the $1.10 advertiser will be above you on the page.
Don’t worry about it getting costly because you can set your price, you can pay as little as $.01 per click on some keywords. You can also set a daily budget of $5-10 or more to make sure that you’re not spending hundreds of dollars a month with monetary benefits coming back to your business.
Running adwords campaigns can be costly if competing for high profile keywords. The key to being successful with local adwords campaigns is to target smaller less-searched after keyword phrases. For example instead of ‘Massage Therapy’, I might try Orange County Massage Therapist, or Massage Therapist Chicago, IL; or New York Massage, or New York Shiatsu, ..insert the rest of your modalities. You can do hundreds of keywords and see which ones work the best for you.
The key to PPC is trial and error. Keep trying new keywords and new ad copy to see what works best for you. One additional trick is that you can also choose to only show up on results from people in your area, and you can set the hours of day that you want your ads to run. So you might just want them to run during your normal business hours, to get the maximum benefit and so people can call you right away to setup and appointment.
You can also use other services that may be cheaper and more cost effective that are essentially adword like campaigns but for mobile applications and websites. These are great because the person is already out travelling the neighborhood and new technologies are making it easier and easier to reach people who are with-in a couple city blocks of your business. A couple of good services to look into for this space is Admob, and iAD.
4. Social Media Marketing. Having a good social media marketing strategy is crucial to online success. Your strategy should feature a highly professional Facebook page, an active twitter account with a custom background for your profile, an Active blog that features blog posts about local health related topics.
When blogging its a good idea to mix general health related articles that feature keywords related to massage therapy with articles and blog posts about local businesses, local news, etc. Why? Because you’re a local business which means you need people to see your blog when they google local events and news topics. It’s a small trick that could help you get noticed more. Also make sure to cross-post all your blog posts to your social networks, and vice versa if possible. There are many great plugins available for wordpress that can help you accomplish this.
5. Reach out to Local Influencers. Join and find all the local business networking groups and run a special where each group can run a contest to give away a free massage. You could also do this for local bloggers. You could also give local bloggers a free massage in exchange for a good review of your service – they’re getting something free and would be more than willing to write about your Massage Therapy practice in exchange.
6. Mobile Marketing. SMS text marketing is a great way to connect with your customers, though it could be pricey, if you’re the owner of a massage clinic though it might work great. Basically this is where your customers opt-in to receive promotional messages via their cellphone’s text message capabilities. You could offer a chance to win a free massage every month to get them to stay members of your list.
Mobile coupons are another great mobile marketing tactic to reaching customers on mobile phones.
It’s also important that your website or blog has a mobile version for people who are on mobile phones. This is becoming more and more important as more and more people are using smartphones to navigate the web.
One final word of advice is to setup a google alert for your name, or business name. This way you’ll get emails sent when people review your business, or share it on facebook or twitter, or talk about you in a positive or negative way. This way you can respond to them in kind and thank them, or address their concern and see if you can do something to keep them as a customer.
It used to be that to get noticed you simply paid over $500 per year to get your business listed in the Yellow Pages, and hope people would choose your business over the other guy. Now, a listing in the Yellow Pages doesn’t mean diddly, being tops on google on the other hand will get you tons of foot traffic. To be a leader in your field for your local area you absolutely have to embrace all these new technologies and work hard to get your name out there more often, and on more sites than your competitors. That’s all it really boils down to.
The more content you put out there the more people will visit your blog, and subsequently your brick and mortar business.
About the Author
Patrick Curl Has Written 23 Articles For Us!
Patrick has been in web marketing for 9 years and social media marketing for 3 years. His presence on our marketing team is a real asset to the company.Related posts:
- What I learned about Social media, Local, and Mobile Marketing from my Pizzeria. Before joining Brian at MarketingOC, believe it or not I...
- Local Business Marketing Slider Local is the New Global The Internet does indeed have...
- MarketingOC Goes Mobile. Social. Local. MarketingOC has always been an integrated ad agency, helping our...
- Online Retailers Plan Mobile Advertising Push But What About Your Local Business If you are a local retailer the constant drum beat...
- Drive-in Theater Marketing Case Study. How to make Drive-ins more profitable. How to bring Drive-ins back from the cusp of Extinction....
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
More and more small businesses will have to embrace the very technologies and marketing techniques that you list in your post, particularly social media and mobile.
Very true Ed, its estimated that 85% of internet traffic will be via smartphone and other mobile devices by 2020, I suggest that it might be a lot sooner.