This article highlights affordable marketing strategies for a massage business. Key strategies include targeting the right audience, utilizing social media regularly, and creating a professional website. It also suggests offering free educational sessions and donating to local events to boost visibility and build trust with potential clients.
Key Takeaways
- Focus your marketing efforts on venues and platforms that align with your ideal clients.
- Post consistently on social media to build authority and engage potential clients through blogs and vlogs.
- A well-designed website serves as a window into your business and should feature engaging content like promotional videos.
- Hosting informative events at local venues helps establish your expertise and connect with the community.
- Giving away gift certificates or services at charitable events enhances your business’s visibility and goodwill.
5 Cheap & Easy Marketing Strategies
Marketing your massage business does not have to be a hugely costly endeavor. If you are on a limited budget, here are some easy marketing techniques to promote your business.
Remember, you are selling an experience with your marketing efforts. Provide as many visuals as possible with pictures and videos to highlight the experience you offer. Massage is not a thing that can be mass-produced to fill a quota order. Rather, massage therapy is an experience unique to the client’s body. Keep this in mind as you market your massage therapy efforts.
1. Consider Your Target Market
Where does your target market (also called niche market) shop and play? Choose venues where you will find those individuals you feel you serve best. For example, family restaurants and stores geared toward children will be excellent venues at which to offer your massage services if families and mothers are your target market.
2. Use Social Media Wisely
Use social media to post something industry-related daily. The more you do so, the more you will be recognized as an expert in your field. Social media algorithms will work in your favor in this regard. As you continue to post daily, people seeking posts with health and wellness-related information will be exposed to your content more often. Soon enough, you will be regarded as an expert in your field of expertise.
Create blogs, vlogs, articles, and resources for the general public. A blog is a website that publishes articles, resources, and need-to-know information for your audience. Creating a blog will help you present the information you feel will supplement your business and educate the public on what your business performs.
Vlog stands for video log and delivers content in video format. Creating a vlog can help you connect more personally with the general public in ways written words cannot accomplish. Since massage is a deeply personal experience, developing a personal connection is paramount to developing rapport and trust. Vlogs are an excellent approach to achieving this idea.
3. Get Your Site Up
If you are in business, you need a website. Your website is your potential client’s window into your practice. It can be designed to reflect the type of work you do as well as your professional personality, or brand. There are free or inexpensive website options available to massage therapists, through companies such as Wix, Site123, Webador, SquareSpace, Shopify and Web.com. These sites offer the fundamental framework to advertise services.
Create a promotional video and post it to your website and social media. Many people will appreciate a glimpse into your massage treatment facility and treatment room. Walk them through the facility as you present highlights of what you offer there. Show off your treatment room and the various tools and décor offered.
4. Connect with the Public
Offer free, hour-long information sessions at your local public recreation facilities. Usually, the facility room rentals are quite affordable at public recreation facilities. Educating the general public on the benefits of massage will establish you as an expert in your field. These sessions can be as short as an hour and may include a brief hands-on demonstration to show safe, effective touch application.
It may surprise you how little the general public still understands massage therapy. Many people still think of massage as it has been portrayed in TV, movies, and popular media outlets. Do not assume the general public understands massage as you comprehend the work.
Topics involving how massage may aid clinical patients with certain pathologies will be quite enlightening to the average person who still thinks of massage as either a luxury, a sensual experience, or something that “needs to hurt” to be effective.
5. Give—a Little Bit—Away for Free
Donate a gift certificate to local charities, events, and holidays. Especially potent around holiday time frames, the goodwill promotion you offer by donating to a charity at a local event will improve public perception of your business.
Generally, plan on contacting charities and participating businesses and venues about two to three months prior to the event date to ensure your donation can be included in their event.
About the Author
Jimmy Gialelis, LMT, BCTMB, is the owner of Advanced Massage Arts & Education in Tempe, Arizona. He is a National Certification Board for Therapeutic Massage & Bodywork-approved provider of continuing education, and teaches “Gua Sha: Chinese Scraping Method” and many other CE classes.