Marketing? Really? Seriously?
No I’m not joking!
There was a time, a few years ago, when I just didn’t get it! I couldn’t grasp the concept. I couldn’t understand the difference between marketing and advertising.
It wasn’t until I was working for The Rollin E Becker Institute (Cranial CPD courses) back in 2010 that the realisation dawned on me.
It was time to learn a thing or two about marketing!
Don’t get me wrong – I’ve been in business for myself for over twenty years, working in niche markets both in London and Athens. BUT whilst I can see now that I was an intuitive marketer, there was a huge amount I needed to learn.
For one thing, whilst I would naturally market myself and my business out in Athens for instance, it was all face to face and referrals. Whilst there I spotted the need for fresh ready meals for the ex-pats fed up with cooking from scratch every day. I made a very nice living from it and I became renowned as ‘The Sausage Lady’ because I invested in a sausage machine and plugged another gap which I had spotted in the market!
But once back in London and promoting online rather than in person, I realised that there were skills I simply did not possess. I saw how adverts for our courses were failing to even pay for themselves. We had some of the best Cranial Osteopaths in the country willing to give up their time (for little recompense) and enthusiastically teach, share and pass on their vast and intricate knowledge to their less experienced colleagues. I was totally in awe of them.
So I was passionate about getting more people on their courses to learn from these highly skilled Practitioners. But it seemed a struggle.
I needed to invest in my marketing skills
Then it dawned on me. There was nothing wrong with the product. Our courses were awesome and our feedback was always close to 100%. There was nothing wrong with the delivery. There was nothing wrong with any of it.
What was wrong was the MARKETING! Getting our message across was inexplicably difficult and failed to the extent that once we even had to cancel what would have been a brilliant day of CPD.
I was gutted. I felt responsible. It was part of my remit to promote the courses but clearly I was failing. And that’s when my real marketing journey began. The world had changed. It had gone online. It was intangible and totally different to the way we had all worked before. And that meant that different strategies had to be deployed. And quickly before the whole thing derailed.
The Osteobiz connection
So I invested in myself. I bought online marketing courses, joined mastermind groups, bought every decent marketing book I could get my hands on and I studied, and studied and studied. I invested thousands of pounds over the years and it was worth every penny.
The more I learned, the more I began sharing knowledge with the Delegates on our courses and encouraged them to try different tactics to draw in more patients. And that’s really how my little Osteobiz world evolved. I simply could not allow a single Osteopath to struggle on alone just because they didn’t know what I now knew.
Now that life is moving ever faster, new ways of doing things frequently appear and the world is a wildly noisy place both online and off, we need to keep up.
If we fail to learn how to market ourselves effectively, we risk sliding into oblivion. And that is doing a great disservice to our neighbours suffering with painful conditions.
And we simply cannot allow that to happen.
Join me on my Osteobiz Whiz course and I promise we’ll get you back on track in just four weeks!
With all my coaching I have payment plans in place so that nobody gets left behind.
