#26. Systems Series Part 5: Practical Marketing Tips & Strategies for Busy SLPs
Episode Shownotes:
Are you feeling overwhelmed by the thought of marketing your SLP private practice? You're not alone! In this episode, the final part of our five-part series, I share my practical, time-saving tips and tricks that make marketing less daunting and more consistent.
Most of the SLPs I work with say they don't like marketing because they went to school for speech pathology, not business ownership. I get it! Believe it or not, though, marketing can be fun, exciting, and easy.
In today's episode, you will learn:
how to determine your ideal client(s)
how to identify your referral partners
what marketing information to keep track of
the 4 pillars of "marketing time"
how to overcome your fear of marketing
how to modify any system to keep it new and exciting (for my fellow ADHD'ers out there!)
Be sure to listen to the end where I share a special invitation to join me and marketing expert Becki Fellin for a deeper look into how to create a simple marketing plan that works for you.
Are you sick and tired of feeling overwhelmed by all the things? I can help. Schedule a free consult today to learn about how I can help you take back control of your time.
Come join the FB Group SLP Support Group for more tips and tricks!
Follow me on Instagram! @theresamharp
Learn more about Theresa Harp Coaching here.
Take control of your time. Book a free consult here.
Episode Transcript*:
This is Your Speech Path: Mindful Time Management for the Busy SLP. My name is Theresa Harp and, as a mom and speech pathologist turned productivity coach, I know a thing or two about how hectic life can be. If you're an SLP who's overworked, burnt out and feeling like you're constantly falling short as a therapist and a mom, then this is the podcast for you. I cover time management and mindset strategies so you can learn to love your work and your home life at the same time. Let's dive in.
Hello SLPs, welcome to episode 26. This is the final episode of the five part system series and today I'm diving into a simple system for marketing and it's actually a great piggyback episode to the episode that I recorded last week where I interviewed marketing expert Becky Fellen. That's episode 25. And if you have not listened to that one, you definitely want to check it out because it's a great companion to what I'm going to talk about today. But in today's episode I'm going to sort of build off of what Becky and I covered in terms of how to create a system for marketing your private practice, whether it's a new private practice and you're just starting out, or it's a practice that you have owned for a while, that you've built up quite a bit, where you've got maybe a number of locations, or you have a number of members that are working for you, whether they are contractors or employees, admin, whatever that looks like for you. There's definitely going to be something for everyone here in this episode, so this one is for you, okay. I want to acknowledge a couple of things, though, before I get started. The first thing is and I think this is obvious if you've listened to the podcast before you probably know I am an SLP, I'm a time management coach. I'm not a marketing expert and I don't pretend to be so, while I did not go to school for marketing and I don't have a degree in marketing, I certainly have learned a bit through trial and error. As I've built my own private practice in years past and then now, as a time management coach, building my coaching practice as well, I've learned a few things about marketing. I definitely know way more now than I knew before, and what I want to do in today's episode is really tackle this through the lens of a fellow SLP that would be me, I'm the SLP and really through the lens of time management and efficiency as well, and this when I was just a little backstory, when I was kind of outlining podcast episodes and specifically focusing on what topics I wanted to cover in the system series. The marketing system was the last idea that I had. I knew I wanted to do five episodes. For whatever reason that number was in my head. I had four obvious ideas of facets or components of your private practice that need a system, but the fifth one was I had a couple of ideas. I wasn't really sure which direction to go until I was coaching a fellow SLP who was working on. I guess the best way to describe it is we were focusing on how to create or really take time, how to take time to work on sort of those things in your business that you kind of have as like ideas or projects but you're not necessarily doing them consistently, you're not doing them systematically, you're not doing them to run your business in the day in, day out, kind of. You know hustle and bustle and what you need to do to have a business up and running. We were coaching more on how to take and make the time for the things that you don't necessarily have to do in order to function but that you want to do in order to function optimally as a business and these were things that were sort of floating around on her to-do list in her CRM, her customer relations oh my gosh, what does CRM stand for? Client Relationship Management Tool I'm having a total brain fart right now but also in her workflow. This was something that she wanted to have included in her workflow but it just never really happened right, and she shared that when we were sort of coaching on this. She shared that she struggled to budget the time for this because there were always other things that felt more important and it was really difficult to initiate the marketing tasks because they felt overwhelming. Like, for example, I need to figure out who I'm going to visit, I need to figure out what marketing materials I'm going to bring, and can I just show up and hand them out, or do I need to make an appointment ahead of time, right? So these were sort of the thoughts that were circling through her brain Any time the idea came up of oh, I really should market, I should market, I should market, I need to do this, I need to do that right. And I think the sort of the key takeaways from that are the importance of keeping things simple, keeping things automated as much as possible and keeping things consistent. And consistent does not mean constant. This is funny, actually, the other day I think it was my daughter Mackenzie we were talking about that word consistent. She had some sort of like a cut or something and she needed oh I know what it was. It was dry skin and she her hands were just so raw from drying or from washing her hands so much. And we talked about how we really needed to start using some sort of like, you know, hand cream, aqua four or something more consistently. She wanted to do it like one time, and thought that then everything would be fine. And I explained to her no, no, you actually have to do this consistently. And she said consistently, like constantly. I laughed a little bit because it's something that was so innocent in her brain and yet it's something that so many adults, who many of whom I coach, will say that the that word consistent really trips them up. That's a podcast episode Like. That's a topic for an entire different episode, right, but I guess it's just. You know where my my mind is going today. I'm all over the place. So, apologies, I'm going to rain it in. Okay, so we are focusing on marketing. I've already told you I'm not a marketing marketing expert. I don't pretend to be. I also want to just share just another acknowledgement and I'm going to mention this a couple of more times throughout the episode that those of you who are listening, who are neuro divergent, especially those of you who have ADD, adhd we have a love hate relationship with systems. Okay, so many of you who are listening, who might have ADD or suspect that you have ADD, might find yourself thinking that, well, whenever I create a system, I just want to rebel against it, like from the get go. If you talk to me about systems, I'm already running in the other direction. Okay, I hear you, I see you, I acknowledge you. Please don't run in the other direction. Stay with me, because I'm going to give you a couple of tips to address this. And also, those of you with ADD may feel like you get on board with the system. Right, some of you might be like, okay, fine, I'm on board. Teresa, I really think that this is exciting and fun and new and, yes, okay, I can do this. Let's go, let's create this system and then eventually, whether it's like a couple of weeks or a couple of months, that system loses its luster. It's like the shiny new object is no longer shiny or new and we're back at square one and I hear you and I see you and I want to acknowledge you totally get it. I actually have experienced this quite a bit and as I learned, as I have learned and continue to learn more about ADD ADHD, it makes total sense for those of you who do have ADD ADHD. I just thought everyone was like that, but apparently there are some people that like systems and they like systems to remain the same forever and ever, and that is fantastic. Then this episode is great for you. But for those of you who are listening that are like no, no, either systems scare me or systems are only fun in the beginning, and then I just lose interest, stay with me, because we're going to talk about what to do for that. Okay. So couple of steps when it comes to creating your system. Okay, if you haven't listened to any of the other system series episodes, please know that when I say system, I'm just talking about something that is incredibly simple, routine and easy to replicate. It does not have to be fancy. In fact, most of the systems that I use, most of the systems that my coaching clients have used are pretty simple and I don't think there's any need to make it any more complicated than that. Okay, so just know that when you hear me talking today, most of the things I'm talking about are super simple. All right, so step one in creating your marketing system is to do the prep work. That's what I'm calling the prep work. Okay, so for those of you who are just starting out in your private practice, this is going to look like determining who your ideal client is, who are the ideal families or adults that you want to treat in your practice. Okay, and I would say, if you are a pediatric private practice owner, this it would. It would be who of you? It would sorry, that was just the word that was like floating at the top of my brain and I felt compelled to say it, but it would really serve you to think about not only who the child, the ideal child is, but also the ideal caregivers, the ideal ideal family. Now, if you're listening to this and you're getting turned off by this, you know terminology of the ideal client. Check in with yourself about why that might be. I would invite you to just like examine that a little bit, because I bet there's something there, but I don't want you to get hung up on the semantics, okay. So, really, what I'm saying is you want to know, like, who's your dream client? Who are the families or the clients that you want to serve? What are their diagnoses? Right? For me, it was hearing loss. I knew I wanted to serve children with hearing loss. That was my ideal client. However, you really need to go deeper. Once you figure out who that ideal client or ideal clients are, I would encourage you to look deeper than that. Okay, well, for example, the hearing loss right. So hearing loss is a really broad. It's specialized, for sure, but within that specialty there's a lot of variability. It's a broad population. Like I tell my grad students, I always say, it is a very heterogeneous population. So what are the ages or the age ranges, what are the communication modalities? What are the technologies that they use? So kids with hearing loss might use cochlear implants, they might use hearing aids, they might use a Baja or a bone anchor to bone conduction hearing aid, right. So looking at those factors is really helpful. Don't do this to pigeonhole yourself. Don't do this to send yourself down a rabbit hole. Just do this to get really specific on who you want to serve right. For me, the ideal clients were family centered. It was families who were willing and able to participate in their services, families who were interested in learning about their child's diagnosis and what they could do. For me, I knew the ideal client was not a family that wanted to drop their child off for a therapy session and then pick their child up quote unquote fixed right. Not like fix my kid, you're the expert. I wanted to work with families that were going to partner with me, that were going to roll up their sleeves and get in the session, get in the activities and do the carryover work right. And this is not to say that one is better than the other. This is really just to say you need to know who you want to work with and get to know them, get to know what they are like. Where are they? Are they in Facebook groups? Are they in certain schools? Are they in certain I don't know towns, or maybe there's certain? Did I say Facebook groups already? Maybe they're in certain Facebook groups? Right, you really want to get to know your ideal client. That way, when you market to them, you're marketing to the people that you can serve best. Okay, we all know what it's like when you get phone calls from clients who are not an ideal fit, or what it's like when you take those clients on. Okay, I've coached a number of SLPs who have found themselves in situations when their caseload is filled with clients that make them want to pull their hair out, and I'm sorry if that sounds really Rude or harsh, it's not meant to, it's just that it's. They're not the right fit. Right, they're not the right fit, and so that's doing yourself a disservice and that's doing a disservice to the families or the clients that you're taking on and the ones that you are missing out on because you're not marketing to those people. Whoo and rant. Okay, so we're still on prep work, but you've determined your ideal client or ideal clients. Okay, that's step one of prep work. The next step of the prep work is and this is for both new private practice owners and Established private practice owners you need to identify your referral partners. Who are the people that can refer to you. Most of the people, most of the SLPs that I see Chattering in the Facebook groups and posting in the SLP Facebook groups, are talking about marketing to pediatricians. Okay, that's great, we can do that for sure. But think bigger than that, think I don't know, think broader than that, think outside the box. There are lots of other referral partners that you probably haven't considered, okay, besides pediatricians. But let me, let me start with those kind of medical providers, okay. So yes, there's pediatricians. There's also audiologists, and this is important, even if you don't work with kids with hearing loss, right, many of you who have private practices that are pediatric based, we know that we always recommend standard recommendation is a hearing test whenever there's a concern about a speech or language delay. So audiologists would be great referral partners, fantastic referral partners, even if you're not serving kids with hearing loss. Also, ents, otolaryngologists, right, your nose and throat doctors, um, other referral partners outside of the medical parameter. I mean there's probably lots of other medical professionals, like I don't know neurologists, I don't even know. I'd have to really think about it because, quite frankly, I didn't invest a whole lot of time and money into those, that category of referral partners. But other referral partners, the biggest one for me when I had my private practice was other SLPs Hands down, it was other SLPs in the area I connected with other practice private practice owners. I let them know about my specialty, about my practice, where it was located, and I learned about their practices as well. Who were their ideal clients, who do they serve best? Because, as someone who's specialized in hearing loss, I got lots of phone calls for people From families that did not have a hearing loss. That's a whole other topic about maybe changes that you need to make to marketing. There are probably some things that could or should have done differently, but in terms of those families that were were calling, I wanted to give them a place to go, right. So it wasn't just about me Finding SLPs in the area that could refer to me, but also me finding SLPs in the area that I could refer to. Okay, there's also other referral partners, right, think about who are the people, who are the other people that work with your ideal client. So we already talked about the medical professionals, but what about um directors of special services, right? Or school districts, so connecting with school districts who maybe need some consultative services within their district? Also, um, local child psychologists, child therapists, social workers, right, that was a big one for me. Um, other referral partners were pts, ot's they were big ones as well. So think about who are your referral partners and I would encourage you to continue to revisit this as your practice grows, as your practice evolves, because the referral partners that you have right now May not be the same referral partners that you have a number of years down the road. Okay, the next piece of the prep work and this is again for both new and established private practice owners is determining your marketing goals. What is it that you are looking to accomplish in your marketing? Do you want to build awareness? You want people to just know that you exist, right, that's kind of like the step one Of marketing is like just people being aware that you exist. Do you want to grow in terms of the number of clients? And if so, do you want to grow more of the same? So, for me, do I want to grow? When I was, when I had my practice, did I want to get more children with hearing loss, or did I want to grow in terms of new clients with different backgrounds? Maybe I wanted to tap into children, just with with I shouldn't say just children with language delay, right? So Do you want to get more of the same, or do you want to get more of different, and or both? And you want to know this because it's going to impact who you market to and what your marketing looks like, what you're going to say, how you're going to talk to them, what information you're going to provide. That type of stuff, right? So you need to determine what your marketing goals are, and I would offer that this could be Objective and this could be subjective. So, for those of you with really big practices, maybe your marketing goals are More objective. Maybe they're more like okay, we want to Increase revenue by x number of dollars, you know, at the end of this month. Or we want to increase the number of scheduled sessions, we want to increase the number of families, like, whatever that looks like for you, right? I would also offer that there are subjective marketing goals that you could consider, and this is more of from, like, the coaching perspective. But maybe you just want to change the way that you think and the way that you feel about marketing. Maybe you want to set a goal about how often you are marketing. Maybe you want to set a goal about what kind of marketing you're doing, right? So think outside the box of what this can look like, but give yourself some sort of parameter so that you've got a target. It doesn't mean you have to hit that target, but you have some sort of target or vision, so you're not just kind of throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks. Okay, and then, last but not least, in terms of prep work, if needed, create marketing materials. And I put this last because I think it's very easy for slps To get caught up in the marketing materials. I think this is where our brain tends to go. We're like okay, I got to create business cards, I got to make brochures, I got to make flyers, and we get really caught up in in the materials Not therapy materials, the marketing materials and and making them look pretty and like, you know, the logo and the branding and the coloring, and I think all of that is fantastic. It has its place, for sure, but I think it's really easy to use that as a distraction To keep you from doing the real sort of quote-unquote boots on the ground type marketing, where you're actually getting yourself out there and you are making connections and you're establishing that no like and trust factor. That's the stuff that really matters most. Okay, so don't get stuck in the marketing materials If you're someone that tends to go down rabbit holes or tends to sort of obsess over that. I would say do this as simply as possible. Try to rebel against the system here, against your system in your brain, and do it messy, do it simple, do it unfinished right, whatever, who cares? Isn't that as big a deal as we tend to make it All right? So that's the prep work for your marketing system. Okay, the second step of Creating your marketing system is to create your trackers. Okay, so step number one was all the prep work. Step number two Is track, track, track, track. This can look Very simple. It could also be incredibly complex, and you get to decide how you want it to look and what information you want to pay attention to, what information you want to track. I think it's really important that this is individualized, but on a very basic level. Create something Something could be very simple, like Google Sheets, to track these three things. These three things, these are what I want you to track. Number one referral partners. Number two, what I'm going to call hot leads. And number three, warm leads. And you know what? Let's throw in a fourth thing. The fourth thing to track would be the results of your marketing efforts. Okay, again, this can also be really simple. So you're tracking your referral partners. You're tracking your leads and that's going to be your hot leads and your warm leads I'll talk about that in a minute and you're tracking the fruits of your labor. You're tracking the outcomes of your marketing efforts. So if you are sort of the initial or the I would say, the SLP who's starting out as a private practice owner, simple will be your friend. Create a Google Sheet. This is what I did when I had my private practice. I created a Google Sheet and the bottom of the Google Sheet I had a tab for referral partners, I had a tab for hot leads, I had a tab for warm leads and then I would create a tab for marketing efforts. Okay, now referral partners. We covered in step number one in your prep work. Okay, hot leads and warm leads. This is what I mean. Hot leads are the people that and this is not set in stone, you can kind of decide how to define this for yourself I would say hot leads are the people that are calling you looking for therapy. They're calling you up, they're sending you an email, they're leaving a voicemail, they're sending a Facebook message, whatever it may be, and they're saying my daughter needs speech therapy. We have such and such insurance. Do you have any openings? What do we need to do to get started? Those are hot leads, okay, warm leads I think you could probably figure this out intuitively. But warm leads are more of, I would say, the people that maybe reach out to you with a question. They're not like, hey, I need speech therapy and I need it yesterday. They're more of like oh, you know, I was just wondering what insurance you take. It's like a generic, vague kind of outreach, or it's like someone who maybe posts or comments on your social media posts. So if you have a Facebook page or an Instagram page where I don't even know what you call it on Instagram, is it a page? Is it a profile? This is terrible. I told you I'm not a marketing expert, but I don't do Instagram that well or that often. But whatever it's called on Instagram, right? These are the people that are sort of like commenting and maybe even like peeking at your content, right? So those are your warm leads. Track those, and then you're going to remember. Tab four of your tracker sheet is tracking your marketing efforts. This can be as simple as date, like a column for date, a column for action and then a column for result and then you're going to input the date under action. You're going to describe what it is that you did for marketing and then result you're going to write, go back and fill in whatever the outcome is of that action. Now let me just give you a couple of caveats here. Two things. Number one keep in mind that marketing is a long game, so you're not going to get these immediate results of your marketing efforts. Okay, funny story this weekend my children, my twins, decided that they wanted to start a mother's helper business. Really, they wanted to start a babysitting service. I reminded them that they are eight years old. This probably would not be a good business model and I said let's maybe switch it to mother's helper. So they created flyers. They drove, drove, they rode around the neighborhood on their bike and scooter and they hand delivered these flyers, put them in mailboxes. They we had. My aunt and uncle came by. They are new grandparents, so they handed out flyers to my aunt and uncle. So they handed out these flyers and I think they probably delivered them Sunday morning at like I don't know 1130. And then, by about 1215, they were harassing me, wanting to know if anyone had called yet for their mother's helper services Bless their hearts. So I tried to explain to them that in business you have to build that know, like and trust factor and that marketing is a bit of a long game. You're not going to see an immediate result. It takes time, blah, blah, blah. So keep my twins in mind. If you are an eager new private practice owner, you're not a spoiler or I hate to say it but the exception to the rule is that your like phone is blowing off the hook and you've got emails coming in and text messages coming in and people lining up outside your door ready to sign up for speech. That's the exception to the rule. The rule is more like it takes time. It's a slow burn. You have to build and build and build your relationships, your networking efforts all of that before you're really gaining steady traction. So that's the first caveat is that when you create this tracker and you go to fill in the outcome of your efforts, don't expect that you're going to take action on a Tuesday and then on Wednesday you're filling in the outcome column. If you do that, your outcome column will be pretty bleak. And then the second caveat here is that you want to make sure that you're not wasting your time, and that is I told you we were looking at this marketing episode through the lens of a speech pathologist and a time management coach. I don't want you to waste time on a tracker. That is busy work. So use it if it's effective for you. Use it if it helps you keep on track no, but intended. Use it if it's serving you, but don't use it if you are finding yourself wasting time going back and updating and formatting, and all of that you have to be the judge of that. You have to be able to check yourself and to know if you are using your time wisely. So that is step number two in creating your marketing process, your simple marketing system. You've got your trackers. Step number three is to set up the system itself. Now, again, don't let the word system scare you. So what I would encourage you to do and this is what we do with the coaching clients that I have worked with, where we've coached on spending time on marketing we establish what are the major pillars of your marketing efforts. So most of the time, this has looked like the following Number one, social media marketing. Number two, networking or relationship building. Number three, direct outreach. And number four follow up. So these are the four pillars of marketing, as I am calling them, the four pillars of marketing from a time management slash marketing system perspective. So there's many different ways you can do this. This is what I have done. This is what I did in my own practice. This is what we often do in coaching. So if this resonates with you, great. If you have a better way or different ideas, that's great too. Totally fine, okay. But if you're just starting out or you're feeling pretty lost when it comes to marketing, this could be a really good place to start. So, social media marketing where are you going to post most often? What are you going to post about? How are you going to create simple posts and do it in a way that's going to keep your time and energy investment low, but keep the value high? Okay, you don't need to be in all the places. I told you earlier I'm not big on Instagram at all. I focus my efforts on Facebook. So if you need to sort of put blinders on and just buckle down and focus on one platform, that's totally fine, but you need to be showing up on social media. Yes, there are private practices who don't. I'm laughing because I have worked with a couple of them and that's fine, that's great. They figured something out. But I would say that is such a simple, cost-effective way to market and you can leverage it to your advantage and to the advantage of the families and clients who need your services. Okay, so you're going to be scheduling time for your social media marketing. Second category, or second pillar, is the networking and relationship building. So you're scheduling time to nurture your relationships, whether this is with other private practice owners or with other community members, whatever that looks like. Daycares that's another great referral partner. Just thought of that one. I mean, there's tons, right, but you want to establish those connections and maintain. The maintain piece is, in my opinion, the piece where people fall off, and myself included, I've always have said that I am really good, relatively speaking. I feel confident in my ability to make connections, but I don't feel as confident in my ability to follow up and maintain those connections, and I think the maintain piece, the maintenance, is really where the magic's at, because I mean, you talk to a person one time and then they're probably gonna forget about you. Quite frankly, they're gonna forget about you. Think about all the people that you have connected with that you've forgotten about, right, but you want to be top of mind for those people. So stay connected and do this in a way that's like human and not a way that's slimy or salesy we're gonna talk about that in a few minutes, but do that in a way that feels fun. We, as SLPs I think this is like the thought that I've been building and working on lately I think we are absolutely the perfect people for marketing, because marketing is about communicating. Marketing is about building relationships, and building relationships is centered on communication. We are communication experts, so this should be easy for us, this should be fun for us. Who can you connect with? How can you cultivate those relationships? That needs to be time. That's outlined and protected in your calendar okay, all right. And then the third pillar is direct outreach. So this is stuff like going to doctor's offices and sharing flyers, making baskets with goodies or whatever. Direct outreach would be also like if you're doing a networking event like an expo or a health fair, right, scheduling that, looking for those opportunities and scheduling them. And then the fourth one is the follow-up. So this is piggybacking off of what I was saying earlier about the networking and relationship building pillar, but you have a pillar for follow-up. This is critical. Okay, this is critical. Now I wanna share. I know this is a long one, guys, so hopefully you're still with me. I wanna share a little story, a personal story here that I think illustrates the importance of the follow-up. Okay, my daughter needs speech therapy. She was working with a fabulous speech pathologist. We could not continue with her any longer because of scheduling issues. So we were searching for a new SLP, right, and I, on my own, figured out a way. I didn't wanna go through the district. She's in private school. I didn't wanna go through. You know all of that. I knew she wouldn't qualify, but I still felt strongly that she needed services. So went out and searched for local SLPs who I knew could service her in her school. And my goal because this is when my husband was deployed my goal was to try and get services set up privately. I would pay privately, she would get speech at school. Okay, found someone who could do it, was really excited and I reached out, got their information, shared my information and we basically, she, basically the SLP, basically said okay, so just let me know. Here's the day and time that I have open. Just let me know how you make out with getting approval in your school to have me come there and do services. Well, long story short, I didn't get the approval that I wanted for those services to take place at school. Okay, fine, whatever, that's okay, we're moving on. However, my point of the story is I never heard from that SLP again. Granted, it was in the ball, was in my court, right. The expectation was that I was gonna follow up with her once I got the approval I needed and she would go ahead and get started with services, okay. However, I never followed up with her because I knew it was a dead end. Right, I got the. I did not get the approval that I needed for services to happen at school. But I have to be honest and this is I do not. I'm not trying to knock this SLP at all. I'm sure she's fabulous, but I was a little bit disappointed that I never heard back from her. And the reason why I'm sharing this is because I think that one of the challenges that we as SLPs face is that we don't wanna be pushy, we don't wanna be salesy, we don't wanna be needy, we don't wanna harass people and I'm not suggesting that that's what this SLP should have done, but I would really. I firmly believe that just a simple email or a text message from that SLP following up like hey, I never heard from you, I just wanted to check in would have gone a long way and I didn't get it and I've it just sort of, you know, like it was a missed. It could have been a missed opportunity for them. Maybe they were incredibly busy, maybe they didn't need the business, maybe they didn't want the business and that's fine too. But if you are listening to this and you have people that have reached out and said that they were gonna maybe look into their insurance coverage or look into their schedule and get back to you, but you're not, that you haven't heard from them and you're not getting back to them, this is the sign from the universe that you need to reach back out. Reach out to them and you can do it from a place of service, not a place of being salesy. Okay, it's just a simple you know, reach out like hey. I just wanted to check in and make sure everything you know you have everything you need and see if you needed anything else from me or if I can answer any questions from you. You know, answer any questions for you. And you know, just like something simple, like that People are busy, people forget where they found you, they forget where to find you again, they lose track of your contact information. And I'm an SLP and I'm telling you I'd have to go digging to find that person's contact information now and it's probably not gonna be hard to do, but it's like an added obstacle for me, it's like an added barrier. Now, of course I don't need to do it because we're not able to have services in school, but if we were, I know I would've dragged my feet in following up with her because I would've had to go back and find her contact information and it just would've been like a little, a little obstacle that would've kept me stuck. And I'm just sharing that for you, in case you're on the other end of it and you might be hesitating to reach back out. Okay, all right, so you've got your four pillars of your marketing time and now you get to decide how often you're going to schedule this marketing. Okay, how often do you wanna do it? Do you wanna do this once a month? Do you wanna do this once a week? And you plug it into your calendar and you set it and forget it. So I personally follow. I would create time for those four pillars. So I would have social media marketing on my calendar, I would have networking on my calendar, I would have direct outreach on my calendar and I would have follow-up on my calendar. I would have each of those pillars showing up on my calendar as a repeatable. Is that the word Repetitive event? It's a repeating event. It is something that I'm setting and it's happening every. You know, maybe every. For social media marketing, maybe it's once a week and I'm going in and I'm creating the posts and scheduling them. If it's direct outreach, maybe that's once a month. If that's network and relationship building, maybe that's once every two weeks, maybe that's once a month. You get to decide. You have to keep in mind what your goals are and what your style is, what your personality is right. But you get to decide how often you get to do those things and it's probably gonna be different for each of those pillars. Okay, but plugging it into your calendar, having it show up it's blocked off and treat it like you would a client. You wouldn't cancel a session with a client unless you had a really good reason, right? So treat it like that, treat it like that. Okay, so that is your marketing system. Now I want to address, last but not least, the piece that I think is one of the most important pieces and it is probably one of the under acknowledged pieces. It's this piece that everybody overlooks and it is about the mindset. Okay, if you feel tension, if you feel resistance, if you feel hesitation, if you feel overwhelmed when it comes to spending your time on marketing, identify the thought, or even the micro thought, the smallest thought floating through your brain that's keeping you stuck, and address that thought, because otherwise, this system that we just talked about, it's not gonna work because you're not gonna do it. So what is the thought or what are the thoughts that are keeping you from marketing? Here are a few of the ones that I hear most often from the clients that I coach I don't wanna be pushy, I don't wanna be salesy, I don't have time for marketing, I don't have money for marketing, I don't have a budget for marketing, I don't know what to say, I don't know who to contact, I don't know what to give them in terms of marketing materials. Also, there's a thought of well, I don't need to market right now because my practice is full. Well, if you listened to last week's episode in the interview with Becky Fallon, then you probably heard, and hopefully remember, her saying that you actually want to be marketing when you are busy, not when you are slow. Market when you're busy so that you aren't slow, because remember, remember what we said earlier about that long game of marketing. The results that you're seeing now, the people that you're calling, or the people that are calling you and looking for services, the people that are reaching out, those are likely a result of marketing efforts that you made months ago. So you want to and you need to schedule this marketing time consistently and regularly, and even in times where you feel really busy, and then that can be the challenge. Because you're so swamped with a busy practice or with clients or whatever it looks like for you, it can be incredibly easy to say I don't have the time to market and I don't want to hear that excuse. This is the tough love, right? I don't want to hear that. If you want to grow your business, if you have goals, then you need to take the time. You need to actually take the time to market or you need to hire someone that's going to do it for you. But if you're comfortable staying where you're at, that's fine too, right. Then maybe the marketing isn't a primary area of focus, and that's okay. But remember there will come a time when you get slower and you're going to be scrambling for clients and you're not going to have them because the marketing takes time. Right, the results of the marketing takes time, okay. Last but not least, one last piece to overcome I said I was going to talk about this earlier and I want to address it is those of you who are neurodivergent, those of you with a diagnosis of ADD or suspected ADD, adhd. I want to acknowledge you here, okay, because you might have heard this system and everything that I've said today and you might be thinking, no, no, no, no, no, no, I can't do that, I won't do that. Oh, that sounds horrible. You might also be thinking, ooh, okay, yeah, I could do that, only to try it for a week or two and quickly lose interest. Okay, ask me how. I know, been there, done that. So what I would offer to you would be how can you make marketing fun? How can you make it exciting? How can you make it enticing? How can you mix it up so that it doesn't become boring or lose its luster. That's when you really have to look at shaking things up and trying something different. So maybe that means you are going and working. It could be as simple as going and working at a different location. I'm going to take my computer and I'm going to go to Starbucks or to Dunkin' Donuts or a local coffee shop and I'm going to do my marketing, my marketing time, there. Okay, maybe it's. Oh, I want to meet a new person or look for a new marketing event. So then you can look for a new marketing event that's going to keep things a little bit fresh and exciting. Maybe it's something like well, how can I change up the information that I'm giving or sharing, or how can I change up the stuff that I'm going to be bringing and giving to, let's say, doctor's offices? I don't know. So maybe you usually do, I don't know. I never actually brought marketing like real marketing materials. I handed out like donuts and business cards and stuff like that. But I know some people do special cookies or special bubbles with their marketing materials on it, their logo on it, or hand sanitizer. So maybe it's something like as simple as coming up with a new idea of materials that you want to use. Do what you need to do to keep it fresh and exciting, but be careful that you're not getting lost in the things that aren't going to move the needle right, like. Be careful that then you're not going down a rabbit hole of finding the perfect air quotes item or items to hand out to ENTs and pediatricians. Right, you have to be able to gauge what you're doing and what you're not doing to make sure that it's staying in alignment with what those marketing goals are. And if this is something that you struggle with or maybe it's not something you struggle with but you're really interested in and you want to work on your marketing then I want to invite you to come join the SLP support group on Facebook, where we're going to be doing a Facebook Live this Wednesday, december 20th. If you're listening to this podcast episode as it's released, Wednesday December 20th, at 10 am Eastern, I'm going to be hosting a live event with marketing strategy expert Becky Fallon. She was on the show last week, episode 25, but she's been gracious enough to give her time to all of the Facebook members where she's going to be talking about how to create a simple marketing plan and y'all. She is the expert. She's got so much good information, oh my gosh. So, even if you're catching this episode after the live event has ended, come on over to the Facebook group because you know you can catch the replay. Okay, it will be there. There's going to be lots of good stuff in there. You don't want to miss it. December 20th, 10 am, eastern Facebook Live. Be there live or catch the replay and enjoy all the nuggets of wisdom that Becki is sharing. All right, y'all. This was awesome. Sorry, I tacked your ear off Apparently. I really like talking about marketing. I hope you enjoyed it and I will see you all next week. Bye.
*Please note that this transcript was generated by AI and may contain errors.