Stop Reactive Marketing

I help therapists and healers who have private practices to add a second part to their business models. I show you how to create a niched and outcome based program that you can offer to people all over the world. Learn more and get on the waitlist at https://rebeltherapist.me/create. I would love to see your name on that list. You’ll get informed as soon as enrollment opens next month. I’m gonna talk about my houseplants for a moment, but this episode is really about how to create effective marketing practices. I had a moment of freak out with my houseplants the other day. I looked up and saw that a group of my plants under the skylight by my home office were very sad and thirsty. One of them looked like it had been receiving too much sun for a few days. I grabbed my watering can immediately, watered them, and moved the over-sunned plant to a different spot. Phew! I’d solved the immediate and obvious problems. That’s reactive plant care. Of course sometimes it’s necessary to get reactive, just to keep my plants alive. It’s just not joyful or sustainable for me or the plants to be in this mode most of the time. If that were the only kind of care I was giving my plants, I wouldn’t want to have plants, and they wouldn’t really want me either. You see, I really enjoy taking care of my houseplants. I enjoy learning what they need and tuning into them. I spend some time just about every week hanging out with my plants, watering them, fertilizing them, trimming them, cleaning off their leaves, turning them so that different sides of them get light, moving their location if they’re getting too much or too little light, repotting the ones that need it, adding new soil to some of them, spotting and removing pests, and on and on. Before this recording, I looked at my fern. She’s lovely. Her new growth looks so green and happy. I felt inspired to take her into the shower and give her a really good spray. I also peeked at my fiddle leaf fig. She’s a bit dusty right now. Later I’ll give her leaves a nice wipe down because I know she’ll enjoy a bit more light when she’s clean. When I do this stuff, I’m present and relaxed. My plants thrive when I’m doing this and I kind of do too. When at least 90% of my houseplant care happens in this relaxed way, we’re all thriving. I’m describing reactive plant care vs. relaxed plant care. I believe it works the same way with the marketing in my business. And in your business. Here’s how reactive marketing looks You have a moment of anxiety, and you think: “I need to do something RIGHT NOW to get people to buy my offer!” The trigger of this thought could be that you aren’t hitting your revenue goal. Or your group isn’t filling. Or you realize you haven’t gotten any new referrals for a while. Or you see another entrepreneur on Instagram and it looks like they are having more success than you, so you think “I need to do what they’re doing, like now.” Or maybe you’re just having a hard day. Doing something quickly in your marketing because you’re anxious or afraid or feeling scarcity is reactive marketing. Maybe you quickly email your list after over a month away. Maybe you create a social media post. Maybe you sign up for a course on some aspect of marketing that you think you should be doing. Whatever you do, you’re feeling pretty anxious while you do it. If you’re doing a lot of reactive marketing, that’s not gonna go well for you or your business. I understand why you get reactive. The things you’re anxious about matter. You need to pay your bills. It matters that people find your work. Your identity as a business owner matters. So does just getting to do enough of the thing you want to do. But the reactivity that capitalism encourages in us is not what we want to let guide us. Here’s why reactive marketing doesn’t work In reactive marketing, you’re in scarcity, panic and self doubt. The actions you take from that place won’t be the actions to make your business thrive. When you’re doing reactive marketing, you don’t do your most creative, interesting or attuned work, so it doesn’t speak to your future participant very well. It’s not fun or sustainable for you so you’ll be more likely to burn out. Also, there’s just not much you can do in one day or one moment to see significant results in your business. For all of these reasons, If you’re spending more than 10% of your marketing time in reactive mode, it’s way too much. Here’s what you CAN’T do when you’re in reactive mode You aren’t in your safe and relaxed nervous system, so you can’t feel your love, attunement or empathy for the people you serve. You can’t feel your confidence and love of your offering. You can’t figure out a creative and sound overall marketing strategy. Here’s what an effective marketing system looks like Marketing is everything you do to bring people to your work. I break marketing down into 3 parts: grow, nurture and sell. Grow means bringing new people to your work who are not yet aware of it. Nurture means showing people who are aware of your work how you can help. Sell means making a clear offer so they can decide whether to sign up to work with you. Doing all of those things effectively doesn’t happen when you’re in reactive mode. You need a set of marketing practices that allow you to do all 3 of those things somewhat regularly. Think of yourself as a marketing team, because you are. If anyone has ever hired you, then your business is already doing some kind of marketing. Your business has a marketing team. Perhaps you are that whole team. Great. You’ve got a marketing team of one. You want your marketing team to be creative, strategic, and calm. You want them to have a sense of what they’re doing each week to grow, nurture and sell. You’d prefer that the team has access to creativity, care about your clients and feel excited about your offer. You wouldn’t want to start meetings with your marketing team each week by saying “React to this problem! I have no plan! Just do something! Do it today! What’s wrong with you?!” I doubt you’d EVER treat a team member (other than you) that way. You’d like that team to be working in a relaxed way at least 90% of the time so that they could feel good and do their best work. The alternative to reactive marketing is relaxed marketing. Relaxed marketing might look like this: Perhaps set aside 3 hours each week, or maybe it’s 8 hours every other week. You choose an amount and a rhythm that works with your body and life. You set aside and then honor that time on your calendar. Think of that time as a relaxed marketing session with your team of one. During your relaxed marketing sessions: You spend time planning what you’ll do to grow, nurture and sell. You make sure your plan is realistic to do in the amount of time you’ve got. You pick a few activities to do pretty well rather than trying to do everything you see others doing. You start tracking what’s already working so that you can do more of those things. When it’s time to reach out to a potential referral partner, you do it in a kind, respectful and generous way. When it’s time to create content like an email, article, social media post, video or a podcast episode, you encourage your idea generation to flow by asking yourself questions like: What is my right fit person struggling with right now around my topic? What do they need to know in order to be ready to make a decision about working with me? What do they not know about this topic that they need to know? What do I wish I could say about this topic, but I couldn’t dare? (You probably should!) Whenever you have an idea about content you might create or an activity you’d like to try in your marketing, you jot it down so that when your relaxed marketing session comes, you’ve got new ideas handy. Either during your relaxed marketing sessions or outside of them, you read or listen to people who inspire you and percolate on what you’re learning. All of that is relaxed marketing. Ah, that feels so much better. So what about those times when you’re anxious and feeling scarcity and you’re tempted to do some reactive marketing? Here’s what I try to do: I take a moment to feel my feelings. I make room for my fear or anxiety. Then I reach out to an entrepreneur friend and talk about how I’m feeling. I immediately feel less alone and less stressed. Then when I’m ready, I get curious about what I might want to do differently. I bring that strategic and creative thinking to my next relaxed marketing session. But is it OK to DO the reactive thing? Sure! As long as it takes up just 10% or less of your marketing activities, you can go ahead and do the reactive thing if you want to. It might help and it probably won’t hurt. It’s no big deal either way. If you do that thing, observe how it feels and whether it works. If it works well, you can bring that action into your future relaxed marketing sessions. Want to work with me to create a valuable, niched, outcome-based program beyond your private practice that you can offer to people all over the world and get known for? Get on the waitlist for Create Your Program. Enrollment opens up next month and I would love to support you. You’ll walk through a step-by-step process together with me and a small group of smart and kind therapists and healers. You’ll be launching your program by the end of our time together. Go to https://rebeltherapist.me/create to get your name on the list so you’re informed as soon as enrollment opens. Show notes at https://rebeltherapist.me/podcast/229