Money, Marketing and Soul for Massagepreneurs
Social Media Marketing
Customize LinkedIn
Mar 28th
When we think of marketing, we often think of the headlines, the advertising, the offers – the Big Campaigns. But marketing isn’t always about the Big Campaign but all the little opportunities to promote your massage practice and share your message.
One marketing opportunity you’ve likely overlooked is your LinkedIn website listings. Most people leave them as “My Website” or “My Blog”. By customizing them, you can give a quick overview of what your website(s) have to offer every time someone views your LinkedIn profile.
I made you a five-minute video explaining how to customize your LinkedIn websites, add your Twitter handle and customize your Linkedin profile, watch it here.
Tweet for Business
Mar 21st
This week I wanted to talk to you about a simple yet effective way to spread your promotional messages to thousands of new prospects…Twitter!
In case you havenʼt heard about Twitter or donʼt know much about it yet, Twitter is a microblogging site that allows you to send short messages of 140 characters to less out to everyone who follows you.
On Twitter, you follow people of interest to you and they follow you. If you are going to use Twitter to gain business, I suggest you follow people in your area — start with clients but then move on from there to other local businesses.
Think of Twitter as a party. You donʼt show up at a party and only talk about yourself or your business, right? No, you engage in conversation. Ask leading questions to find out what people are doing. You also give information – a book your read or are reading, an article, a blog post your wrote or read, etc. that can help the person you are talking to with their problem. Same thing with Twitter.
Then mixed in with that line of conversation, you promote your business: post last minute cancelations, promotions/specials, blog posts, classes, etc.
Just to give you an example on how I have used Twitter — one week, I had several openings, so on Monday morning I posted this: “Openings this week: Tues at 5, Wed at 2 & Thurs at 10, need a massage call 703-851-6922, email or DM me.” I did all that in 103 characters and I was completely booked by the end of Monday.
So get tweetinʼ! If you havenʼt started a Twitter account yet, this video walks you through the steps.
Get Yelped!
Jan 29th
Get Yelped? What in the heck are you talking about?
Just in case you haven’t heard of Yelp, let me give you a quick history…
What is Yelp
Yelp was founded by Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons in 2004. These two 20 somethings wanted to make it easier for people to find good businesses and avoid the not-so-good ones.
Yelp allows people to write reviews (good or bad) about businesses that they have done business with even if you didn’t add the page yourself.
If you want to take the initiative, you can add a page for your business. Here is an example of a page from one of my students.
How Yelp Can Help (or Hurt) Your Business
Reviews (at least good ones) can help you boost your business by 10% according to one business. Another business was able to stop advertising in the Yellow Pages because she was being found on Yelp.
Love or hate the reviews that customers write, you must know how to handle the bad reviews. Take a proactive approach in getting your customers to give you good reviews (particularly since Google is talking about buying Yelp, which will have even greater impact on local search for your business).
Inc. Magazine did an article called You’ve Been Yelped. This article goes into detail about how they work and tells what not to do if you get a review you don’t like. You can read the article here.
If you have friends who own businesses, do them a favor and give them a review. Then ask them to do the same for you. If you don’t have a Yelp account, set one up by going to Yelp.com. While you are there, invite me to be one of your Yelp friends so I can see what you are reviewing. The link to my profile is here.
Yelp is not another social networking site like Facebook or Twitter that will consume a lot of your time.
It is, however, a site to be reckoned with if you own a small business and you need to be on
top of what people are saying about you and your business.
Yelp offers fantastic marketing opportunities when used properly. I’ll cover that in more detail in future posts.
What do you think? How do you use Yelp? Has using Yelp helped your business? Post your ideas, suggestions and comments below.
