Leslie Nolen: Welcome, everyone. Let's start by sharing the kind of wellness business you have? And how do you usually get clients/patients?

Bart: I'm a marketing manager for a rehab center. We're not basic PT - we do advanced rehab and pain management with in-house PM&R doctors, medical massage, medical acupuncture, and get referrals from doctors and NPs.

Jackie: I provide fitness classes to organizations in Chicago.

Yogapeace: I manage two yoga therapy businesses, one in NYC and the other in Boston. Most of what I've read about on web marketing seems more like it's for big companies.

Leslie Nolen: Right, a lot of it is more about what retailers should do versus businesses that need to build close personal relationships. Do you folks work face-to-face versus online workshops, telephone consults, that kind of thing?

Yogapeace: Oh, it's all face-to-face.

Bart: We're thinking about promoting health fairs on our site, but not sure if it'll really work. What have you seen?

Leslie Nolen: Bart, the big question I would have is why health fairs? It seems like most people that go to health fairs wouldn't be likely to need what y'all do.

Bart: You may be right. We did health fairs before and didn't really see many new patients from them.

Leslie Nolen: Yeah, if it didn't work before...right? My thoughts: there are lots of folks out there with chronic pain, ongoing rehab issues, etc. They probably don't even realize resources like your practice exist. What about offering free educational seminars to the public?

Bart: Not sure I follow. Seminars on what?

Leslie Nolen: Bart, something like "Painfree Yardwork!" or, you know, overcoming chronic back pain, etc. The idea is to zero in on a problem that lots of potential clients would say "YES! That's me! Finally, a possible answer!" Then, you do the free seminar, share a few stories about people who overcame this problem, and establish yourself as the authoritative resource when they're ready to fix it for themselves. Check the advertising/promo and PR articles towards the bottom of the page Sales and Marketing.

Leslie Nolen: Yogapeace, in addition to optimizing your website so potential clients are likelier to "stumble" across it, I think you have to promote your business offline (not via the web), too. What are y'all doing along those lines?

Yogapeace: Mostly word-of-mouth is what we do for marketing, right now.

Leslie Nolen: Yogapeace, I worry about unstructured word-of-mouth marketing, because it's so accidental. I would suggest that you develop a specific plan to start reaching out to related businesses for referrals and/or start some free educational workshops like the ones we talked about with Bart a minute ago. Here's an article on how to promote your wellness business locally.

Yogapeace: Leslie, what about sending a mailing? Not email, but through the post office.

Leslie Nolen: Yogapeace, direct mail can be very effective and if you use postcards, pretty cheap, too. The main thing is not to just send a single postcard and then that's it. You want to do a series of communications. So, maybe send a postcard that gets them to sign up for a workshop. Then, at the workshop, get them to sign up for your newsletter. Then, send the newsletter every month, etc.

Yogapeace: OK, I was just thinking of sending an ad.

Leslie Nolen: You probably will get a very limited (or even no) response if they don't know anything about you yet. You have to figure most of the recipients probably never have heard of yoga therapy, right? So, you have to demonstrate that you are a trusted, capable resource, plus educate them a bit on what yoga therapy is...then they'll be more willing to do business with you.

Leslie Nolen: All - if you've got questions we didn't get to, just drop me an email.