To really grow your massage practice and ensure that your marketing strategies are actually achieving their intended ends, you need to understand your clients more intimately. There’s no two ways about it.

If you create blog content and circulate newsletters with great promotions and updates about upcoming services that you’re going to unveil in coming months, you could actually be doing yourself a disservice.

How? By potentially not taking into account where your clients get their information, the scalability of your marketing, or losing that personal touch. Everything in marketing in centered around the client, and in massage it’s especially important not to lose touch with that.

Marketing 101: Understand Your Clients

To find out what works and what doesn’t and to avoid squandering time, energy and money on promotions and referral programs that don’t have an obvious payoff, it’s important to get in closer contact with clients to your massage practice.

You want to find out the values, behavioral patterns and even personality quirks of all of your clients to ensure that referral programs and targeted promotions actually payoff and lead to higher monthly revenue for your massage practice.

Sometimes the connection between listening to clients and implementing new programs can be tangential.

For instance, if you notice that through networking and referrals from other professionals are ballooning the amount of clients that you see every month, then it may be time to incorporate a systematic referral program into your website’s design.

It’s really about paying attention to what works and what doesn’t, and retaining the former while discarding the latter.

If you notice that bundled deals through your website are leading to more buzz around your practice, then you might want to retain that practice and let more people know about similar discounts through social media, newsletters and your blog.

Value Propositions and Anticipating Needs

A value proposition is simply a promise of value between you and your clients. It helps to fully understand upfront the kinds of benefits the client hopes to glean from interacting with your practice. Do your clients want extended hours? Free hot wraps? These are questions to ask yourself and anticipate to provide higher value to clients.

You should also try to foresee the kinds of discounts and services that customers are really on the lookout for.

Make sure to put clients in contact with promotions if you notice that their current recurring weekly massage corresponds to a loyal client discount. Also, you could tell clients about similar massages. This all enhances trust and value from the client’s perspective.

Streamline Decision Making and Exchanges

Understanding how your clients learn more about your practice and how they make the decision to pursue your services is critical to anticipating any concerns or questions that they could have and fostering a closer relationship with your clients.

Try incorporating a suggestion or forum section into your massage practice’s website to allow clients more of a voice when it comes to the services and the value that your practice can offer them. Do they want more discounts? Different types of massages? Create an open-ended dialogue with clients to find out.

Gauge Each Action and Measure ROI

Return on investment (ROI) simply relates to how well your investment in various marketing endeavors increases your profits, or leads to a higher return on your initial investment.

A lot of websites today that host your massage practice’s essentials have built-in tools to calculate how well social media marketing, referral programs and bundled deals improve your business from one month to the next. Take advantage of these tools.

Be realistic about how you measure ROI, though. Some discounts take time to materialize while others should be evaluated immediately and retained, enhanced or scrapped depending on their long-term viability to your practice.

Understanding Your Client’s Tendencies

If your communication with clients is slackening, you need to analyze every phase of the client’s decision making and their interaction with your practice to plug up the leaks and turn lukewarm clients into satisfied ones.

Anticipating your clients needs and offering services that are tailored to their previous requests, expectations and personality is a great way to engage clients and offer more value.

You also want to measure ROI on all aspects of your marketing – everything from social media integration to how well your newsletters are reaching clients – and set realistic expectations moving forward with your practice.

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