Although most healing practitioners begin their journey with the intent of helping people, they quickly discover that they need business skills in addition to healing knowledge. It doesn’t matter how effectively you can help people if no one knows where to find you.
This is an unfortunate challenge because most skilled healers are not business and marketing people by default. You may not be interested in building and maintaining a business, but this lack of interest limits your ability to help people.
Fortunately, there are a few easy ways to build an audience and get your name and message out there. Social media is one tool almost anyone can use. Plus, it has the added benefit of helping to educate people on the benefits they can get by coming to you.
What Is Social Media?
Marketing, in general, and social media specifically, are ways to connect with other people. It allows you to share your knowledge, healing framework, success stories, and service with friends, family, and strangers. Social media platforms strive to help users connect with things that interest them, so as you add more posts, the platform will help you expand your audience.
Getting started with social media marketing is easy and cost-effective. Even if your only equipment is a cell phone, you can get started.
Why Share on Social Media?
There are many reasons to get started with social media marketing. Here are five:
- Social media is a great way to reach people who might not otherwise find your business, so it’s a good strategy to expand your audience.
- You can build relationships and share offers with people who may be interested in your products and services and then send them right back to your website or blog, where they can learn more, schedule appointments, or make a purchase.
- You can educate your customers and prospects on what you do, how it works, and specific conditions that you can treat.
- People can get to know you before coming in to see you.
- It’s a great place to share success stories, which help prospects understand the potential your services offer.
What Platforms Should You Use?
Social media is a great way to get your business out there, but it can be so overwhelming. Which platforms should you use? How many should you use to start with?
It’s all about knowing what your goals are and how you want your customers to see your brand. If you’re looking to reach the largest possible audience, Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, and YouTube are good places to start. If you want to connect with other business people, LinkedIn might be better. If you have a lot of image or infographic-based content, Pinterest and Tumblr can be great lead sources.
It’s also important to think about who your audience is and where they hang out online. For example: if they’re already on Facebook or Instagram (or both), then starting there makes sense. But if they’re more likely to be on Twitter or Pinterest, those would be better places to start.
Consistency is most important. It’s better to start with one or two platforms and master those. You can always add other social media platforms later; you’ll build faster if you don’t try and go overboard right away.
How To Decide What To Share on Social Media
Regardless of which platform(s) you choose, your social media posts are a way for people to get to know you and understand the services you offer. Each of your posts on social media should fulfill one of the following intents:
- Inform
- Educate
- Entertain
- Engage (as with a question or poll)
- Tell a Story
- Introduce You
- Sell a Product or Service
You can use social media to promote your products and services, but too many promotional posts will seem spammy. The best way to build and maintain your audience’s engagement is to deliver value to your audience with most posts and follow up with a sales pitch here and there.
Create a Social Media Content Plan
Posting consistently is critical for your social media success. A content plan is a helpful tool in making that happen. Basically, you brainstorm post ideas and plot them out on a calendar. This saves you from trying to come up with content on the fly while you are busy with other things – although you are also always welcome to follow your inspiration.
You can start your content plan on a spreadsheet or word document. For ideas, you can check the accounts of other healers in your niche. What works for them? What gets the most engagement?
Obviously, you don’t want to copy what they do exactly. Make it your own. Create posts in your voice that accurately represent who you are and what you offer. However, it helps to have some inspiration.
Other sources for content ideas include:
- Questions clients ask you
- Common misunderstandings about the type of work you do, debunking myths
- Success stories
- Reasons you got into your line of work
- What you love about what you do, and your backstory
- Related stories in the news
- Resources and helpful tips for clients, things they can use to heal at home
A content plan helps keep your social media campaigns focused and relevant. Once you have created your first draft of the plan, make sure it’s flexible enough so that if something comes up during the course of creating your posts, you can make changes.
Once you’ve got a list of posts, assign each post a date. You can either transfer that to a calendar or keep it in your document for reference.
Schedule Your Posts in Advance
Scheduling your posts in advance is a great way to ensure that you keep up with your content calendar and post consistently. It allows you to put aside once or twice a month to get your posts ready and scheduled so that you can focus on your clients and life the rest of the time.
Some platforms let you schedule posts directly from your account. Alternatively, you can use a scheduling tool like MeetEdgar, Hootsuite, Buffer, or Loomly.
Don’t Just Post and Run
In addition to posting consistently, you want to be present and engaging. Don’t just post an image or video and then disappear for months at a time. Like any conversation in real life, social media conversations require your participation. Responding to comments and questions is a critical way to stay engaged.
Conversations with followers on social media can also be an outstanding source of new content. You get a close-up look at how people understand your message and what they need to know.
Measure and Optimize Your Social Media Performance
Social media marketing is a kind of performance art—a way to amass an audience, communicate directly with them and tell stories. But if you want to be successful at it, you need to measure and optimize your social media performance.
Using data allows you to make informed decisions about your social media marketing strategy. You can see what’s working and what isn’t, so you can focus your efforts on the best channels while eliminating those that don’t get results or are too time-consuming.
To measure the effectiveness of your campaigns and content on social platforms, use analytics tools like Google Analytics or HootSuite Analytics. These give insight into how many people are interacting with each post (such as views) as well as demographic information such as age range or gender breakdowns that help you understand your audience.
Social Media Can Be an Incredibly Powerful Marketing Tool for Small Businesses
Did you know that social media accounts for more than half of all internet traffic? And that Facebook alone has over 2 billion monthly active users? If you’re not already using social media to market your business, the first step is creating a profile on one or more of the major platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok.
Social media is a powerful marketing tool for small businesses. You can use it to connect with your customers, engage them in conversation, and get real-time signals about what they think of your business. It’s important to remember that social media is not just another way to blast out generic messages—it’s an opportunity to build relationships with people who care about what you’re doing and want more information from you.
