Cost Effective Marketing Tips for Hypnotherapists

Hypnotherapy marketing, finding new clients and expanding your hypnotherapy practice doesn’t have to be frustrating and costly. Although not all promotion requires an investment, many hypnotherapists think that they would have to spend thousands to promote their private hypnotherapy practice effectively. Don’t worry, I will not talk about the importance of business cards, flyers, print ads, banners or tv appearance etc. Actually I believe they are not as effective as the ideas presented in this article. Hypnotherapy marketing is easy. You should always remember to take full advantage of your free or inexpensive sources of promotion first. Many hypnotherapists tend to either ignore the core actions needed to be taken in order to increase the number of clients they see per week or they really don’t know where to start from. Some of them either don’t know exactly what to do to expand their business or attempt to do the things which are costly but actually ineffective such as flyers and brochures. And some of them do nothing at all but wait for clients to discover them even though they do their best to hide themselves. If you implement the actions described in this article to your marketing strategies, you will boost your hypnotherapy practice immediately. And the best thing is that these tactics will cost you almost nothing but a little effort.

Top Hypnotherapy Marketing Tactics You Can Use to Boost Business

These hypnotherapy marketing tactics you can use to boost business are effective and affordable. Obviously it is advisable for any hypnotherapist to have an online through which they can market their services and act as a contact platform for their clients. However I observed that most of our colleagues who are struggling about finding new clients are not using internet effectively (or not using at all) but depending on yellow pages and word of mouth only, which usually takes more time to attract sufficient amount of clients to establish a satisfactory income. There are different ways to promote your hypnotherapy practice but mostly, this is done with the help of an effective marketing strategy. I mean a “really effective” one. And “really effective” doesn’t mean “really expensive”!

Technology advancement has made the online marketing an easy, effective and affordable. As a HMI College of Hypnotherapy graduate hypnotherapist seeing 20-25 clients per week, I wanted to write this article to give you an insight about how to develop your hypnotherapy practice rapidly with almost no cost by using only cost-effective online strategies like I did.

There are some core strategies which most successful hypnotherapists use. Although the outcome of a strategy sometimes depends on the area (country or city) the hypnotherapist is located at, there are some core actions to be taken by every hypnotherapist, to increase the number of clients they see. Trust me, these are proven methods to increase clients.

Even though it is not so hard to determine the best strategy suitable for your area and which one would fit your needs, there are some fundamental things required to do.

Before You Go For These Tactics, Make Sure That You Have a Good Website!

I mean not “just a website” but a “really good website”. Your website connects you to the world! Don’t forget that your website is your showcase. You have to take it seriously. A  cliché website full of generic information about hypnosis and full of generic “bla bla” will not serve you much. It will even destroy your reputation if you have a poor website. Rather than having a website which looks and feels amateur, don’t have a website at all. (Remember the one upmanship principle in a hypnosis practice).

Internet Marketing

The internet marketing mainly takes place on the website. In this case, each of the hypnotherapists should have a really good website on which they post materials regarding their services. In this case, one can post articles, videos and audio files on their website for the web visitors to read, view and listen respectively. Let’s go deeper now:

“Your website is for your target audience.”  Stop and read that sentence again. You have to do what works for your target audience. It is much easier to design for conversion than it is to satisfy personal tastes. Take away the hassle of trying to choose a color palette, font or background texture that will please you. Whew! What a relief. So what’s left? Your goals! Your primary goal is to make that visitor want to pick up the phone and call you. To build trust. To engage the visitor with your content and convert him to a client.  Just make sure that what you use in your design is tied to your overall objective…

1. Bring visitors
2. Engage visitors
3. Convert visitors

You might be going to many organizations to give a speech about hypnosis, however even if you give hundreds of business cards to your audience, most of them will still need to visit your website to get more information about their personal issues and yourself. As they will definitely want to visit your website address written on your business card, if your website is a simple 3-5 page website with a boring design and insufficient content, you’ll probably lose those clients forever. Even though you are the person who introduced Hypnosis to them, they will tend to search more hypnotherapists in internet and make their own research about hypnosis, visit some other hypnotherapists websites as well, and probably prefer to go to another hypnotherapist who has a more informative/impressive website if you don’t present yourself properly both online and offline. On the other hand, most of the potential clients who are searching for a hypnotherapist are expecting to find the best one to help them solve their issues. So they already have an idea about what hypnosis is after your speech but they don’t know which hypnotherapist to go. They will tend to search to see their options. After your speech, they will know what hypnosis is and how it helps people in general however they will probably still don’t know how YOU will help them overcome that SPECIFIC issue they have. It is a good idea to assume that they already know things about hypnosis so don’t think that a cliché website containing generic information about what hypnosis is would be enough to convince that potential client to pick up the phone and take an appointment. They need to feel that they will get the best hypnotherapy service arround. You need to build rapport through your website at the first place.

Your website MUST be attractive as well as informative. It has to be unique and full of lots of quality information addressing different hypnotherapy topics. For example rather that writing a paragraph about “fears and phobias” in general, it is a better idea to write more specific articles about specific fears and phobias separately, describing how you can help them with hypnosis. For example you can write different articles for fear of cats, fear of flying, fear of dogs, agoraphobia, etc etc rather than a generic article with a title “Fears and Phobias”. Convince the reader that you’re talking about the exact issue the reader is suffering from and you know what you’re talking about, rather than delivering generic information. As a hypnotherapist, you already know the importance of building rapport so you have to build rapport with the reader to make him want to contact you, starting from the first contact location, which is your personal website. The first step of building rapport starts from your website. Your website is your showcase. Have a wonderful, attractive website. A good and classy design. Make sure it is easy to navigate. This is very important. And guess what:

Having a good website doesn’t mean you have to spend a lot of money to own one!

You might think that it would be very costly to have a good website but it is not! There are many web designers which provide a good design with reasonable prices as low as $100 to $500. Of course you can pay 1500-3000$ if you prefer so but believe me you can get that same $3000 website for $100 if you search and find the right designer. This kind of an investment is actually not a big investment comparing to your fees you’ll take from your sessions. I’ve seen people investing $15.000 per year for advertising, yellow pages, flyers etc and saying that they had seen only 10-15 clients within the last 10 months, in total. These guidelines I’m suggesting here would not cost you even $1000 in total and almost all of them are no-cost activities you can execute immediately to attract lots of clients in a reasonable time period. So it s worth to make such a small investment for having at least an attractive and classy website. Promoting it is relatively easier and a no-cost process. You will be amazed with the dramatic increase in the number of your clients if you apply these principles.

The most important thing about a website is the “content”, which you are the one to provide the developer for him to deliver you an attractive website. Developer can only provide you a good design. Not the content. So prepare your content upfront, plan your website navigation etc before you talk to a designer so that you can describe him exactly what sections you want in your website. You should start searching for an affordable website designer only after you make your unique content ready. Don’t forget that even if you give you business card to a potential client, he’ll visit your website first, then he’ll decide if he wants to make an appointment with you or not. When planning your website content, here are some important points to consider:

1. Offer solutions

People look for things that they need. Sometimes they have their problem defined, other times they are not sure what they are looking for. Either way, a good strategy is to offer solutions. Your hypnotherapy services need to be described in terms of benefits and results and has to consist of solid information. The wording has to be intimate rather than a cold, formal wording.

2. Use stories

While it’s very important to describe your services and provide scientific data to back them up, that’s usually not enough to get people’s attention. Emotions play a big role in it, so a good way to get a potential client interested and invested is by using stories. Actually you already know this as a hypnotherapist but I just wanted to remind. 😉 You can use case studies and success stories to engage a potential client. Reading a story is convincing. Testimonials are another good way of presenting stories to market your services.

3. Show your expertise

It’s important to let the client know they will be receiving the best service from the best hypnotherapist arround. You need to present your services in a professional manner. Put a nice and professional but a warm picture of you in the “about me” section of your website.  It’s important to give a clear description of your services and I advice you NOT to expose your fees in your website. Let them contact you to ask about it so that you can deliver more information to the potential client other than your rates only. Use your skills to build rapport on phone, even when replying an email. As you know why, you need to present that you have the necessary credentials and knowledge to inspire confidence. So it is always a good idea to add articles and blog posts about some hypnotherapy topics and your services to the site and you have to add regular articles to your website. This is also important to increase your rank in the search engines. There are many ways to increase the rank of a website in the search engines. You don’t need to be an expert about search engine optimization (SEO) techniques but there are still things you can do easily to help your website rank increase by knowing the basic principles:

Google likes websites which are alive rather than inert. It  has a very intelligent system which detects if a website is being updated regularly or not. So if a website is being updated regularly by adding new articles, Google and actually all search engines take the website to higher ranks in their search engines because they want to present quality content to their users. If you update your website regularly, your website can be found easier when visitors search for a specific keyword related to your content. Don’t forget; Google is watching you! 😉 Being in the higher ranks provides you more clicks, thus more clients. You have to look after your website and write articles in new topics regularly. The optimum rate is once a week but it is good to talk about various subjects in your website at least once a month. The more frequent you update your website, the better your global rank will be. Don’t forget that Google is very intelligent and doesn’t like to be fooled. So your website has to have unique content rather than “copy-paste” paragraphs taken from other websites. Google will understand and detect whether you are writing copy-paste contents in your website or are your contents original. If you write original content in your website, your website’s rank will increase dramatically in a reasonable time period. Just keep updating your website even if you think no one is reading your articles. Believe me you will think different next year and appreciate your efforts. 😉

4. Use different resources

There are a lot of different resources at your disposal to better market your services. There are more traditional ways that can still be helpful, such as word of mouth and the yellow pages but I do not recommend yellow pages or expensive ads in magazines or newspapers etc. These are very important im some part of the world and doesn’t bring any clients at all in some other countries. But digital marketing activities described here is the most effective and affordable way of attracting new clients and introducing your services to your target audience. Other resources are also helpful but not that necessary if you don’t have huge amounts of income from your hypnotherapy services which you can afford to throw away some part of it. You have to have a good hypnotherapy website, a blog in it and social media accounts that can help you advertise your services, as well as accounts at various hypnotherapy related internet platforms where you can write articles and also promote your services too. A professional presentation and the use of different sites such as this website (hypnozine.com) can increase the number of clients who can learn about you and engage your services.

I am thinking of writing a different article soon, about how to own a website with an affordable cost if you don’t have any knowledge to build your website yourself. I built my websites myself because I’m familiar with internet technologies. But still, you can have your own website built with a very reasonable price by finding affordable website designers offering their service through internet.

So, here are top online marketing tactics for hypnotherapists who want to boost their business.  This is how I boosted my clients in a short time after my graduation from HMI College of Hypnotherapy, using internet as my primary marketing tool. These strategies are written according to my own experiences and observations.

Email Marketing

Email has become one of the most common form of communication with the individuals as well as organizations having email addresses. This is one of the top marketing strategies that the hypnotherapists can use to make their businesses known hence boosting them. In this case, the hypnotherapists can prepare files with the vital details about their hypnotherapy services and sending them into the email accounts of internet users but make sure that you’re not sending spam emails. The best way to have an effective email database is to create a “Mailchimp” account (mailchimp.com) and implement the “Join Newsletter” form to your website sidebar. (Easy to do). People who are interested in your services and announcements will definitely subscribe to your email list even if they don’t have any issues at the moment to overcome by hypnotherapy. But a time will come and they will definitely think of contacting you if you engage their interest in your hypnotherapy services. This can be done by sending bulk emails about various subjects once or twice a month. Make sure that you’re not sending these emails too often because that would cause your subscribers to unsubscribe from your email list. This kind of an email marketing strategy will make your hypnotherapy services known to a multitude of people because you’ll be reminding yourself to them periodically. Don’t forget that they will also forward your email to their friends which they think your services would be beneficial to. So those people will also visit your website. That is another reason to have an attractive website. Your website has to impress those newcomers, build rapport, trust, and make them want to benefit your hypnotherapy services.

Social Media Marketing

The hypnotherapists can boost their businesses by making use of social media marketing. In order to make this successful, the hypnotherapist should have accounts with all the social media platforms such as the Facebook and Twitter. Then, the therapists should be active in participating in conversations while forming groups of followers that help in spreading the details about their hypnotherapy services. You can also share your articles you wrote in various platforms such as Hypnozine.com or even your articles in your personal practice website. Don’t forget that people share those articles in their Facebook profiles, which creates more awareness about your services and boosts your online presence. This strategy makes the tens of thousands users of the social media to know about the services being offered by the hypnotherapist. Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have millions of followers. In this case, the hypnotherapist should have social media account through which they actively engage in the conversations in which they provide information about the hypnotherapy to the users hence increasing the awareness hence great publicity that leads to more clients.

YouTube Video Marketing

The hypnotherapists can make use of YouTube to market and boost their services. YouTube offers an opportunity for the hypnotherapists to post videos with detailed contents about their services that can be downloaded or viewed online. You know this because you already watch YouTube videos right? So why don’t you make a video for example about EFT or Smoking Cessation or maybe about your Weight Loss program?

Why Video Is One Of The Best Marketing Tactic for Hypnotherapists?

Have you ever wondered why video is the best marketing tactic for hypnotherapy? Well, you are not alone as many hypnotherapists are continuously searching for ways to market their services. Marketing this type of therapy becomes challenging as there are no tangible products used such that one can display the products while providing the description for them. However, the video is an ideal tactic of marketing this kind of a therapy hence making the hypnotherapists known far and wide hence increased clients. Here are the reasons as to why you should consider video as a marketing tactic.

• Provides illustrated adverts

Making use of video as a marketing tactic for hypnotherapists provides illustrated adverts. The video can be recorded capturing the hypnotherapist talking about many subjects or showing a small section of the therapy to a client in their office (Of course, written consent should be obtained from the clients featured in the interview to avoid legal issues). In addition, the video can consist of client testimonials or any topic related to hypnotherapy. The videos can later be posted in the internet for web visitors to view the video. This makes the therapists known by a multitude of people.

• Easy to record powerful interviews

Video as a marketing tactic for the hypnotherapists makes it easy to market some of the powerful interviews. This becomes the best way to inform others about the benefits of the therapy while revealing your hypnotherapy skills. After obtaining the consent from the client, the hypnotherapist can interview the client who should explain their state of mind before the therapy and their current status. This helps others to become aware of the existence of the therapy, how to get the hypnotherapist featured and the benefits to them as they identify positively with the client captured in the interview. Recording live interviews about the therapy can help the hypnotherapists to get more clients. This is effective for those with good online presence through their websites and other internet platforms as they can post these live interviews to create awareness to a multitude of internet users. This creates publicity of the therapy hence more clients.

• Accessed by many

A recorded video file for marketing the hypnotherapist and his/her skills are accessed by many regardless of their individual differences. This is because the video file created has multiple stimulants such as audial, visual and even the transcribed text of the same can be implemented if required.

Site Linking

The hypnotherapists can market their services by linking their websites with other SEO enhanced sites such as this website. This makes the web visitors frequenting the liked sites to become aware of the existence of their sites with links through which they can access the therapists’ sites. However, the chosen sites to link with should have high Google rank. You can check any websites popularity (as well as yours) by visiting “alexa.com” website. Just write a website name in the “Enter A Site” box in the right top corner and it will give you the global rank of the website. A global rank up to 2.500.000 can be considered as a good global rank. You can now check your website to see if your website is een in the top 30 million range. If there is no number indicated when you check your website’s rank, this means that the website isn’t even in the top 30 million websites, which is not good. Our aim should be to get you in the first 2,5 million (worldwide), even better. I will write another article about how to do that but even these tips in this article are important to boost your website’s global rank. The higher your global rank is, the easier people will find you in search engines. If your rank is low, that means you are almost invisible in the internet which is truly the most important platform to attract more clients.  You need to have a solid presence in internet. Most hypnotherapists tend to underestimate that. Don NOT underestimate the power of “online presence”!.. You will witness a dramatic increase in the number of clients you attract, in a short time if you apply the steps described in this article.

Writing E-books

Distributing e-books is one of the most effective hypnotherapy marketing tool. You can write e-books about various topics and they don’t have to be a hundred pages. Even 15-20 page e-books can be very informative and easy to read for the reader. For example you can write an e-book about “E&P Attraction” or “Mental Bank”, giving information about relationships or the mental bank concept. Or even any other subject like which you think you can write about… E-books are very attractive for the readers, especially if they are free of charge. It can easily lead them to set up an appointment with you about some other issues of them as well. You can distribute that e-book free of charge through your website or put it on “google play” platform or you can distribute it by making it available to people who subscribe your Email newsletter. Offering your free e-book on your website would also help you collect contact emails of the potential clients, for your email marketing. Your subscribes can get an automatic email including the download link of your e-book. Believe me they will definitely remember you when they need a hypnotherapist in the future. Because you’re the one who introduced them with those subjects. They will send that e-book to their friends too. And they will read it and see your website address in the e-book and visit your website to search for more info and they will see your other services too. So they will get familiar with your services as they navigate through your website. Meanwhile, even if they were not thinking of quitting smoking, plenty of them will think of deciding to quit smoking with hypnosis. And guess whom they will call to make an appointment?

Guest Authoring

I believe guest authoring is the single most important strategy for growing your online presence and clientele base. There are three main reasons why guest authoring is such a key strategy for every hypnotherapist to build their online influence. There is a large percentage of conversations are happening on the Internet, especially on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. An article you post in a good hypnosis related website such as hypnozine.com can be tremendously influential and help you attract more visitors to your own personal website. Which helps you get more clients. The host website includes a link to your website in the post somewhere. (we have it at the end of each post, in hypnozine.com). Over time, these back links will raise the value of your own website to search engines, making your personal hypnotherapy practice website easier to find via Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other search engines. Guest posting introduces you to new people. Don’t depend on your personal website only. Add value. Help people. Be patient. And over time, you’ll win!

When you write an article in a different website, do the following:

• Link to the post from your website.
• Promote it on Facebook, Twitter and any other social media accounts you have.
• Stick around and respond to comments on the post.

While not everyone does this, it’s a very good idea to write in other hypnosis related websites as a Hypnotherapist. This will extremely increase your online presence and help you reach potential clients and convert them to actual clients. According to search engine gurus, when it comes to search engine optimization, guest authoring on other sites is five times as valuable as creating new content on your own website. (as long as you get the backlink directing to your website.) The point is that this is an excellent strategy for extending your reach and boosting your reputation online. If you aren’t satisfied with your website traffic but aren’t posting on other hypnosis websites such as hypnozine.com, you don’t have much to complain about. Start guest posting today, and see your influence grow!

Right about now, you’re probably saying “OK, Burak. I believe you, but now how do I do it?”

Don’t worry, I’ve got your back. Just click the “Become An Author” link at the very top left of this page to register as an author in hypnozine.com and create your author profile, fill in your contact information to be published under your articles and then you can start posting articles immediately. Your profile page with your contact information will be also listed in the “Authors Directory”.

Conclusion

These tips can help any hypnotherapist market their services with almost no cost and increase their clients dramatically in a short time, especially if they are new in the business.  The online hypnotherapy marketing strategies listed here are all supporting each other in someway so don’t foret that each component is as important as the other. However I can say that the most important one is to have a good website and to improve online presence by writing articles in different internet platforms besides your own website, to attract visitors to your website from other internet websites as well as your personal website. That’s why I also encourage you to register as an author in this website and start publishing some articles in this platform and some other platforms as well. Since your contact information and website address, biography etc are published at the end of each article you submit, writing articles in Hypnozine.com will also contribute your online presence.

What you are doing right now is reading an article written by me right? Think this way; I don’t know how you dropped in this article. Maybe you clicked this link by seeing a link in Facebook or maybe another platform and just clicked it because the topic was something you were interested in. So you being in this website right now and reading this article is a demonstration of how an article can help someone introduce himself to a new person through an online platform. So let me introduce myself:

“I am a hypnotherapist located in Istanbul/Turkey and by clicking my author profile below, you can reach to my profile page where you can find all my contact information and my personal hypnotherapy practice website address which is www.hypnotistanbul.com .”

If you were a potential client rather than a hypnotherapist which visited my personal hypnotherapy practice website, then you would browse my website and probably write an email asking a question about your issue which you were thinking to overcome through hypnotherapy or maybe you would call me and request information about my session rates etc or probably just call me to make an appointment if my personal hypnotherapy practice website content had convinced you that I could help you with my hypnotherapy skills. So here’s another reason why having a good website is important, rather than having a simple cliché website.

The online marketing and free publicity methods listed above are the core strategies to boost your hypnotherapy business! Of course we can expand these topics and go deeper into each topic however the article would be too long for an article so I tried to keep it short and simple. And it is not necessary to overload you at the moment right? 😉 These methods can be utilized by any hypnotherapist to gain maximum exposure.  I can say that there are very cost-effective resources which provide many side services contributing the online strategies listed above. For example your website should have a nice logo right? And you’re not a graphic designer. What if I told you that you can have a wonderful, unique and custom logo designed for your private practice for $5 only? Internet is a great resource to get any service online with the best price. I know some websites full of talented logo designers who are offering custom logo designs according to needs for $5. Don’t forget that corporate image is as important as your image and skills as a hypnotherapist.

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions. Please comment under this post if you have any other marketing suggestions according to your experience.